Do Free-Staters Matter for Migration?
The Story of How Immigrants Can, or Can’t, Swamp Domestic Politics
Okay, I’m pumped for this post, because I just think it’s so fun. Why do I think it’s fun? Because I’m gonna write about libertarians, and I think libertarians are kind of adorable. So the fact that 20,000 of them are self-deporting to the frozen boulder-field of New Hampshire to go be adorable together sounds great to me. But even better, today’s post will explore a nearly perfect case study in so many different migration and politics questions that I don’t know where to start. What am I writing about today? Well, the Free State Project of course!
So what is the Free State Project? Well, you’re clearly not educated in Liberty, so let me tell you. It’s a plan, begun in 2004, for 20,000 committed libertarians to move to New Hampshire and transform it into a libertarian political stronghold.
The Libertarian Swamp
Swamping, or Swamp Foxing?
Why New Hampshire? Well, for one thing, there’s the state’s motto: “Live Free or Die.” I mean, seriously. You can’t have that motto and not be attractive to libertarians. Plus, New Hampshire is fairly small, just about 1.3 million people. Add in the fact that population growth is low or negative too, so domestic inflows are unlikely to be offset by other growth. Finally, New Hampshire’s state legislature, the “General Court,” has 400 seats in the lower house from 204 districts, and 24 in the upper house. You will not find many (any?) state legislative houses with a lower constituent-to-representative ratio than that, which means it’s easier for niche groups that are geographically concentrated to get their foot in the door. In other words, New Hampshire is an easy state to “swamp.”
Let’s discuss that verb, “swamp.” It comes up in lots of migration debates, with the worry that new migrants will “swamp” native political preferences. And by the way, something like this, as well as some related foreign policy risks, is, I think, the most compelling argument against open borders: that outsiders will come in and radically alter the existing political balance and the institutions of republican governance. Even if new migrants have similar ideological beliefs as natives, if they have different turnout trends correlated with ideology, or radically different partisanship, it can lead to a rapid de-stabilization of the native political balance, which can then fuel the rise of radical or sectional politics, which can then lead to, well, Donald Trump.
But hold on. The Free State Project (FSP) aims to bring in 20,000 libertarians. New Hampshire has 1.3 million people. So the libertarian migrants can’t swamp New Hampshire by sheer force of numbers. But here’s the rub. The classic response to the swamping concern is that the math doesn’t work out; actual swamping by immigrants is really hard. But that neglects a key fact: you don’t need actual swamping to have the effect of swamping. And New Hampshire is an example. At least 11 FSPers have been elected to New Hampshire’s general court, despite less than 3,000 having moved to New Hampshire thus far. So more than 1 of every 300 FSPers thus far has been elected. Why?
Because they’re motivated. Because they have a dense community of interest and activism. Because they work hard to participate in and co-opt existing political factions (most FSPers will run as Republicans at the state level). Because they arrive in their new home hoping to make it live up to their dreams. Much like immigrants to the United States on all counts, except that FSPers (1) are more ideologically motivated so likely to represent an extreme and (2) immediately have full voting rights so are likely to show a high-speed version of political swamping.
Okay, so here we go then: the case of FSP represents an example of what a fairly small group of determined and politically enfranchised immigrants can do. They are likely to exemplify both an accelerated case due to their immediate enfranchisement, and an extreme case due to their ideological selection. But the core dynamics, meaning the tendency of groups to mobilize on behalf of their interests, and the tendency of immigrant groups to have interests that are not identically distributed compared to natives, are more-or-less the same.
So let’s look and see what swamping could look like in New Hampshire.
Free Staters In a Migratory Context
Who Are These People?
So let’s take a second to get our numbers clear. The Free State Project expects 20,000 Free Staters to move to New Hampshire by 2020. They claim that as of February 2016, at least 2000 already have. Let’s say 2,000 have for simplicitly. So in 2016–2020, 18,000 Free Staters should move to New Hampshire. For simplicitly again, let’s annualize this, and assume that 500 arrived in 2014, 1500 in 2015, 5000 will arrive in 2016, 5000 more in 2017, 4000 in 2018, 2000 in 2019, and 2000 in 2020. It doesn’t matter much how you annualize it, but I need some numbers, just for the sake of argument.
We also know something about the demographics of libertarians generally. Let’s assume that the Free Staters are typical libertarians, so 68% male, 94% non-Hispanic white, 25% under 30, 37% 30–50, and 38% over 50. Let’s also assume that all of those Under 30s are over 18: that is, assume all Free Staters are adults. This may not be true; some may move as families. But that seems somewhat less likely.
Now I need to come up with hypothetical future New Hampshire migration. But all I need is inflows — let’s assume no Free Staters leave (or, if they do, they get replaced). ACS provides detailed information on inflows into New Hampshire from 2005–2014. But I need 2015–2020. So let’s go ahead and just do a straight-line extrapolation for simplicity, and assume that non-Free-State inflows stay pretty much steady, while non-Free State population continues current growth trends.
It turns out that Free Stater inflows are not nearly as large as non-Free-Stater inflows. 20,000 over 7 years versus what I forecast to be about 250,000 other migrants.
Thus while the Free Staters do boost inflows, it’s not a huge boost. Non-Free State inflows remain far higher. Now, of course, Non-Free State inflows tend to come from economic, educational, or familial connections, which can also drive outflows, so the net effect of higher inflows is ambiguous in the long run: higher inflows may just lead to higher outflows later. But the net effect of Free Staters is presumably unambiguous: they’re here to stay and to swamp. So it’s likely that even as their gross role is not huge compared to the total, the net effect may be significant.
In addition, we can get a sense of what share of each age group Free Staters are likely to compose come 2020. With Free Staters composing about 7.3% of all domestic inflows from 2014–2020, they will end up composing around 1.7% of the total population, and 3% (or just over) of 18–30 and 30–50 year-olds, but only around half a percent of those over 50.
Let’s ask ourselves whether that’s significant or not. Does it matter that 1.7% of the population are recently arrived, ideologically unique, political activists? Certainly some in New Hampshire think so — Free Staters were identified as a possible domestic terror thread in the city of Concord’s request to DHS to buy some special military gear.
On the one hand, it’s not really that big a share. On the other hand, it’s huge. I mean, when was the last time migration moved the electoral needle 1–2% in, say, 7 years? It’s hard to pinpoint, but certainly it’s rare, and usually accidental. Indeed, past research has shown that people tend to migrate toward areas of similar politics, so migration usually helps majority parties retain their majorities. The Free State Project’s politically insurgent migration is a different beast in many regards. Of course, many Free Staters reject electoral politics, so that may offset some of the activists. On the other hand, if even 10,000 of them vote, that’s significant, because Presidential elections in New Hampshire generally get just over 700,000 total votes. The margin of victory was under 10,000 votes when George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004. In off-year congressional races, each of New Hampshire’s 2 districts regularly have under 250,000 votes cast, and victory margins have been within 10,000 votes on several occasions.
So if the Free State Project creates 10,000 to 15,000 politically engaged libertarians, that could be between 1.3% and 3.2% of the electorate. If they concentrate themselves in just a few areas, they could command even more weight locally.
Plus, the arrival of Free Staters could boost New Hampshire’s population in the short term, but reduce its growth rate. I couldn’t find reliable data on the fertility and mortality of libertarians (sadly; and by the way, did you know there are some very dark corners of the internet?). But as a generally younger group, they’d probably boost fertility and reduce mortality. But as a group less likely to wed, that fertility effect is likely weaker.
And of course the real kicker comes down to sex. No, not how much or little of it libertarians have, but biological sex. Libertarians are disproportionately male. I assume Free Staters are too. The result is that by 2020, I expect Free Staters to compose about 2% of New Hampshire’s male population, but just 1% of the female population. Men die more and younger, while only women have babies, so the sex ratio of libertarians makes them a sub-optimal population in terms of population growth (can you sense how much fun I’m having here?). This effect is probably very small, but broadly speaking the more libertarian a state gets due to migration of libertarians nationally, probably the lower its rate of natural growth will be. Unless, of course, libertarian females are somehow enticed by the favorable ratio and density of libertarian males in New Hampshire. I’m agnostic on the likelihood of that occurring.
Then, of course, we have race. Libertarians are very white. As in, whiter-than-New-Hampshire-white, which is, by the way, not easy. I won’t bore you with the stats, but basically 20,000 Free Staters would boost the non-Hispanic white population share in New Hampshire by about a percentage point.
What To Make of the Free Staters
Utah for Libertarians?
So here’s the question. Are the Free Staters bad for New Hampshire? On one level, this is a subjective question. If you think libertarianism is great, you probably think the Free Staters are, by and large, a pretty good thing, and vice versa.
But there’s another way to look at it. Libertarians are a political minority without access to representation in mainstream politics. Their views are decidedly unpopular with large chunks of the population, and a viable libertarian political coalition does not operate in today’s American politics. Furthermore, all you have to do is look at the Koch Brothers or the discourse surrounding Ayn Rand’s books to see that dislike of libertarians isn’t just about disagreeing with their politics, it’s fundamentally about viewing libertarianism as a kind of dangerous threat to democracy.
Many American groups have been viewed that way, and vastly worse, throughout our history. I’m thinking here of Utopian communities, from New Harmony to Salt Lake City. And migration has been the key tool used by minority political or religious movements, or extreme utopians, to find a place for themselves in America.
And the result, by the way, has been fantastic. Libertarianism isn’t the same as religious movements, but any migratory group with a shared sense of purpose, community, and meaning will tend to form communal institutions that promote civilizing behavior. Even libertarians. Many of the libertarian acts of civil disobedience in New Hampshire have amounted to having too many cookouts, paying other peoples’ parking tickets, and violating eccentric laws with little safety purpose. These aren’t exactly the bedrock of the republic.
But that’s not the fantastic result of wild-eyed crazy (and violent) minorities wandering off to find an area where they can claim political hegemony I had in mind. I meant the Mormons. Utah is easily one of the best-run states in the union, and, if the statistics are to be believed, one of the most desirable places to live as well. And that’s largely due to the influence of the Mormon community. Now part of that is specific to Mormon doctrines. But look, we know from lots of research that virtually every social or political institution works better when constituents have a sense of common purpose or identity to rally around, when being from somewhere actually means something to people.
Maybe, just maybe, New Hampshire could become the libertarian Utah. Sure, that would involve swamping the preferences of natives and hanging them out to dry (as the Mormons did in Utah as well, but rather more literally). And sure, that could cause enormous disruption for the lives of Granite Staters. And sure, it could serve as a case study used to stoke anti-immigrant fears by demonstrating that even small migrant groups can radically alter politics. But hey. If the result is Galt’s Gulch, it’s worth it, right? Right?
For a post explaining how Star Wars relates to immigrant swamping, click here.
For a post about immigration and assimilation, click here.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
