Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 11th of February, 2026. Title, Political Backflow from Europe. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com.
The European discourse can be, for lack of a better term, America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions. Why shouldn't the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US and looms large in the American imagination.
Why shouldn't we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don't make sense in the American context? In my post on baby boomers, I argued against claims that America keeps raising taxes on the young so it can award larger pensions to the old.
In fact, social security payouts per person have become less generous over time, not more, although total subsidies to the elderly are rising because of increasing longevity and health insurance costs. Several European readers wrote in to say that whether or not this is happening in America, it definitely happens in Europe.
Here's Sokal, quote, The anti-boomer take has been imported in part from the EU and the UK, where the pension system is not the same. And here's a link to the Pensions Act 2007 section of the Wikipedia article on the state pension in the United Kingdom. There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.
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Chapter 2: What does 'America-brained' European discourse mean?
And from The Fall, quote, Scott writes, So maybe this is one example of European issues leaking to a less appropriate American context. Are there any others? In Understanding America's New Right, Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs. He answers that their ideology centers around the idea of Western civilization, which is kind of him.
A more paranoid analyst might make a similar argument around white identitarianism. Since Europe is the home of Western civilization, it's especially galling for it to be ravaged by immigration or whatever. This may be true, but I propose a simpler explanation.
The American conservative narrative on immigration is mostly true in Europe, mostly false in America, and it is more pleasant to think about the places where your narrative is mostly true. The conservative narrative on immigration is, to put it uncomfortably bluntly, that immigrants are often parasites and criminals. As our news sources love to remind us, this is untrue in the American context.
The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen. This is a vague, high-level claim. The answer can shift depending on details of how you ask the question, and it's certainly not true of all immigrant or native subgroups.
Still, taken as a vague, high-level claim, the news sources are right and the conservative narrative is wrong. In Europe, the situation is more complicated. There are still some ways of asking the questions where you find immigrants collecting fewer benefits than natives, for example because immigrants are young, natives are old, and pensions are a benefit.
But there are also more options for asking the question in ways where, yes, immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. the European link between immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the conservatives are allowed to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries.
This makes it tempting for US right-wingers to center their discussion of immigration around stories, narratives, and images from Europe. No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, Sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
For example, in my research on Scott Adams, I came across the following Dilbert strip, which is apparently supposed to take place in the US. Here's a cartoon showing Dilbert Reborn. It's from January 25, 2024. It shows the pointy-haired boss saying, what's the casualty report for today?
And the animal replies, three employees were stabbed by Elbonian asylum seekers on the way to work, and one was clubbed to death in a cubicle. The boss sips from coffee and says, any other issues? Police are running low on chalk.
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Chapter 3: How do European social issues influence American perspectives?
Footnote, these statistics are hard to find and I am mixing the rate for all Afghan Americans with the rate for specifically foreign-born Venezuelans and Chinese. I assume that most Afghan Americans are first- or second-generation immigrants, and this shouldn't affect numbers much. Back to the text.
These statistics may be biased downward by some immigrants being too new to have gotten incarcerated, but this probably can't explain the whole effect. Footnote. See paragraph below for further discussion of this. In one analysis, this approximately doubled the immigrant-to-native criminality ratio, although this estimate will depend a lot on how new immigration from the relevant country is.
Various other biases. Sometimes criminal immigrants are deported instead of being incarcerated. Sometimes immigrants are incarcerated for immigration-related offenses. I don't think any of these, or all of them together, are enough to let us dismiss the effect. Back to the text. More likely, it's selection.
The Afghans are mostly translators and local guides getting persecuted by the Taliban for helping American occupation forces. The Chinese and Venezuelans are mostly well-off people fleeing communism. What about the very poorest groups from the most dysfunctional countries? Taken literally, the numbers suggest that Somalis and Haitians both have lower incarceration rates than US natives.
Matthew Lilly and Robert Verbruggen make the newness objection. The very newest immigrants have had less time to commit crimes, and here it has more teeth given the smaller gaps. When you adjust for it, Somalis commit crimes at about two times native rates, and Haitians at about one times.
Although nobody has actually done this adjustment with the Haitian statistics, and this number is eyeballed only. Footnote. Eyeballing technique. Somalis appeared to have about one times the native crime rate, but after Lilly slash Verbruggen's adjustment, they had about two times. So the adjustment seems to double the raw numbers.
Haitians started with 0.6 times native crime rate, so this would double to 1.2 times. But Haitians have been in the US longer than Somalis on average, so we should expect this effect to be smaller, so I round it down to one times. Back to the text. So the only group where I can find clear evidence for a higher than native crime rate is in Somalis.
Footnote, there is unclear suggestive evidence for Hondurans, although this doesn't extend even to other Central American groups. Back to the text. Who mostly didn't enter as asylum seekers, but through a different refugee resettlement pathway. In some sense, this is a boring difference. Who cares exactly which legal pathway immigrants from failed states use to get into the country?
But in another sense, it's exactly what I'm arguing. Despite there being no relevant difference between these terms, we're using the incorrect European ones, because we're having the European debate. So US asylum seekers as a category probably have a lower crime rate than natives.
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Chapter 4: What examples illustrate European ideas affecting America?
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