Ah, Ben Shapiro. The intellectual cool kid of the American Right. The fast-speaking, numbers-spouting, logic-churning, college-kid-destroying public figure whose high-pitched tone makes us all more comfortable with hearing our own voices on record. Though that might sound like a mean way of describing him, my views on Shapiro’s takes are mixed. Being fiscally conservative, he’s got a thing or two to say about economics, though I think his diagnosis of poverty in America is somewhat oversimplistic; on the other hand, he has his fair share of utterly dim-witted takes, whether it be his nonchalant attitude towards climate change, his bellicose views on the Israel-Gaza war, or, as expressed most recently, his positions on multiculturalism and immigration.  

A new video’s been released on his “Facts” channel, titled “We need to close our borders: here’s why” – or at least, that’s what it was called when it was initially released. It’s now been changed to “The Monster Attacking America”. Much of what I wrote in the article was based on that initial title, but I don’t see that as a massive inconvenience. The video’s attitude towards immigration remains unchanged, and the fact that this was the original title shows that border restrictions are the policy position Ben is attempting to corroborate. 

Anyway, the video quickly garnered my attention and angry scratchings at a notepad. In the space of 8 minutes, he tries his best to ultimately justify restricting immigration, as the initial title implied. But he doesn’t: Ben argues that multiculturalism has been a failure in the West – that’s very different from wanting to close your borders in their entirety and let in not a single immigrant? 

Ben’s analysis immediately begins with a serious mistake – conflating multiculturalism with cultural relativism: 

multiculturalists have long suggested that all cultures are equally worthy of respect and inclusion and the best society is the most diverse

Multiculturalists don’t argue that some cultural practises are morally worse or better than others. Nor do they say that there is some inherent moral good in diversity. What they say is that the economic benefits of assimilating people are massive and will outweigh the disadvantages brought by social conflict. Clearly, Ben doesn’t understand this premise. I’d say most analyses of immigration fail to understand this, as the costs of immigration are rarely contextualised within the gains societies enjoy from them.

After quite a bit of waffling after that, Ben finally gets onto more concrete arguments. There are between 11 and 22 million illegal immigrants in the US, he tells us, which has resulted in all kinds of problems:

the first is breakdown of civic bonds. Every society has baseline propositions to which all members must pledge loyalty. In the West, for example, most countries rely on social agreement to the rule of law and equal justice before the law, freedom of speech, freedom of religious practice, respect for private property among other general principles 

Ok, hold up – illegal immigrants, who constitute between 3 and 7 percent of the US population, are responsible for the breakdown of civic bonds? Ben’s assessment that a functioning society requires a common acceptance of liberal principles is right – but there’s little evidence that immigrants jeopardise those principles. Recall my other article on immigration; a large study from Sweden found that immigrants align with our views much more than we think, given the weakest correlation of any nationality was 0.46. The correlation for immigrants as a whole stood at 0.78. 

I think Ben’s cultural worries about immigration arise from a profound error: equating a nationality’s broad ‘views’ with its governments activities. This becomes most evident when he talks about some cultures having a “tribal relationship” to the rule of law. By “tribal”, I assume he means a propensity to use state institutions to target particular groups and ethnicities. Here he’s basically suggesting that we can deem a culture to have a hostility to the rule of law if such an attitude animates its government’s behaviour. But since many of these governments obtain power through force and can only sustain themselves through dictatorships, this inference is clearly hard to make. Before violent revolutions, many Middle Eastern countries were relatively liberal, and women enjoyed basic civil rights. 

Ben then proceeds to make the typical argument that mass migration brings crime and disorder:

as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, from 2009 to 2021, some 3 million immigrants have come to Europe mostly from the Middle East and Africa. 2/3 were male, 80% were under the age of 35. Unsurprisingly, during that same period sexual coercion has become far more commonplace; in 2017 in Germany, for example, sexual coercion and rape jumped 41%.

These statistics alone don’t prove much, as they’re simply correlative. After delving deeper into the numbers, I found greater evidence to support Ben’s point – 4 in 10 sexual assaults in Germany are perpetrated by predominantly Muslim foreigners. Truly shocking. But does that endorse the policy which is the premise of Ben’s video, that “we need to close our borders”? No, for two reasons. (1) the presence of certain bad actors within a group doesn’t enable you to subject the entire group to collective punishment, like by increasing border restrictions or casting ‘multiculturalism’ itself a failure. The statistics Ben uses basically prove this. 3 million foreigners entered Germany – is one to imply that even a statically visible minority of them have committed acts of sexual assault, or that this minority should allow the German government to reduce the entry of foreigners? In the US, crime is disproportionately committed by African Americans. Would Ben have the guts to argue that the existence of Black people in the United States has been harmful to public welfare, or that we ought to develop policies targeting Black people to reduce crime? That is what “closing borders” and rejecting multiculturalism, on the grounds that some immigrants commit crime, is ethically akin to. (2) outlawing immigrants based on criminality seriously ignores what Bryan Caplan calls ‘keyhole solutions’ to the problem. Since the overwhelming majority of migrants will have nothing to do with crime, immigration bans are thus inefficient solutions to the issue – instead, we should look at policies to specifically target crime: drug legalisation, reforming the prison system, improving police efficiency, etc. 

Ben repeats this fallacy of holding an entire culture responsible for a handful of bad actors. He reports that foreigners are disproportionately responsible for anti-Semitic offenses in France. Would it have been just to restrict the mobility rights of the entire white population during the Jim Crow era, because whites were overwhelmingly responsible for anti-Black offenses? Would it be right to apply similar laws to men, who are overwhelmingly responsible for rape offenses? That’s what Ben’s logic equates to when he advocates border restrictions on these grounds. 

At last, Ben concludes the cultural argument, and moves onto the economic case against mass migration:

in a vast welfare state immigration simply cannot be open. In 2014, the anti-illegal immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated social and government services to illegal aliens cost the state of California $25.3 billion per year.

And he presents further numbers showing illegal immigrants disproportionately consume state resources. This appears true, especially at a national level, as illegal immigrants cost the US $150 billion a year, according to one analysis. The issue with these big scary numbers is that you need to look at them in economic context. That may sound like a lot of money, but is it really a big problem for the US? No – it only represents around 0.9% of US GDP, a miniscule fraction. This begs the question, then, do the economic benefits of illegal immigration exceed 0.9% of GDP? Unequivocally, the answer is ‘yes’. Edwards and Ortega estimate it’s as much as 3% annually.  

Ben then proceeds to quickly revert to a diatribe about cultural values and criminality. He tells us that 

radical Muslim migration into Europe brings with it an attended increase in terrorism.

But a quick look at the numbers discredits this. From 2010 to 2021, the three most common types of terrorist attacks in the EU were perpetrated by ethnonationalists/separatists, left-wing anarchists, and those which can’t be placed in specific categories. Jihadi terrorism was less common than all of them. Would Ben be alright with European countries restricting the entry of white Republican-leaning Americans, Afrikaner South Africans, Nordics, or Eastern Europeans? After all, a statistical correlation between ethnicity/cultural background and propensity to terrorism permits the government to regulate entry, right Ben? But he continues his case, claiming that Muslims show strong support for acts of terror:

a poll in February 2015 found widespread sympathy for radical views among British Muslims: 27% said they had some sympathy for the motives behind the terrorist attack on French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo; according to a 2023 poll from Cygnal, 58% of American Muslims said that Hamas was justified in attacking Israel after Hamas’s genocidal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023.

These statistics are shocking. For anyone to express sympathy for a group which engaged in the butchery, rape, capture, and torture of women and children is despicable. But as Ben himself has said, support for Hamas is a product of one of two-things: ignorance or Jew-hatred. I agree with this entirely. So, this begs the question: is support for Hamas among American Muslims rooted in ignorance or anti-Semitism? The very same poll from Cygnal tells us it’s probably ignorance. If American Muslims supported Hamas out of anti-Semitic bigotry, we wouldn’t expect two things: (1) Muslim disapproval of Israel to be relatively milk-toast. 37% of American Muslims have a negative attitude towards Israel, while 34% have a positive one. This is all while Hamas has a stated desire for the destruction of Israel. Can we really say that Muslims express an alignment to Hamas while even remotely aware of its aims? (2) while most disapprove of the invasion of Gaza, a majority of Muslims agree that Israel has a right to defend itself. Is this really a position an anti-Semite would adopt? 

What this therefore suggests is that Muslim support for Hamas, shocking as it is, is rooted in ignorance of the organisation’s aims and atrocities, along with a blind endorsement of anyone associated with the anti-Zionist movement, as opposed to anti-Semitism, as Ben fears. We can say the same of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Despite the harsh intro I gave, Ben Shapiro is a respectable person in many senses – well-spoken, extremely bright, and lawyer-like in debates. But many of his positions I think are just deliberately inflammatory, something the situation in the Middle East has exposed. Anyone would be correct to have concerns about multiculturalism; but if only Shapiro applied his legal mind to the matter, I think he’d see that one is obliged to think in terms of cost and benefits, and the wider implications of stances in the debate over multiculturalism. For all these reasons, we don’t need to close our borders, Ben.