Conservative Nativists Live Under the Cosmopolitanism They Claim To Despise
Revealed preferences help us understand the value of diversity.
The Supreme Court’s upholding of birthright citizenship – the policy by which anyone born on U.S. soil will be conferred American citizenship – has caused a firestorm amongst conservative nativist intellectuals.
Seeing judges appointed by George W. Bush and Donald Trump side with preserving the 168-year policy has been a betrayal to these pundits, who were hoping that under the second Trump administration they could finally rid America of a policy they see as devaluing American citizenship.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh warned that the ruling will “directly lead to tens of millions of more foreigners flooding into this country,” and that “most of them will not even attempt to assimilate.” He went on to complain about the Mexican American population of California and the Somali American residents of Minnesota. Jesse Kelly, a syndicated radio host, warned that importing “barbarians” is the Democratic Party’s electoral strategy.
Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief at The Federalist, described the ruling as apocalyptic. Sean Davis, the CEO of that media organization, went further – suggesting that sterilizing foreigners or denying entry to women altogether should be on the table to prevent birthright citizenship.
Contempt for women seemed to be a theme from the nativists. Joel Webbon, a far right Christian nationalist pundit, warned that “your children don’t get to have a country because 4 women sit on the Supreme Court.”
Given the extent of the rhetoric, you’d think the country was about to fundamentally change. Yes, there are legitimate issues to be discussed, like the practice of birth tourism, where wealthy foreigners pay to travel to the United States and have their kids here solely for the purpose of establishing citizenship. But you don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater; immigration and tax policy could be used to deal with edge cases like that.
But all the courts did was uphold a precedent that has been in place for more than a century and a half. Is it really so terrifying that the United States – like almost all New World countries – has birthright citizenship? Are white people really going to be replaced en masse, with the United States turned into a “third world” country?
I would propose that these far-right pundits are more comfortable with living in a diverse country than they let on.
In economics, there is a concept called revealed preferences. Consumers will tell you what they really like by their actual behavior. What they want is what they buy.
The pundits I discussed above all argue as if they feel that America will be doomed when it becomes majority minority. “Import the third world, become the third world,” has become their slogan de jure. If we have a country full of people from Mexican, Indian, or Haitian ancestral origin, we will transform into those countries and bring all their sociological and economic problems.
But through their revealed preferences, we can see that they may not be so confident in this thesis after all.
Walsh, for instance, lives in the thriving metropolis of Nashville, Tennessee. According to the local chamber of commerce, “over 35% of Nashville’s net in-migration from 2024 to 2025 was due to international migration”; around a third of downtown businesses are owned by minorities. While Walsh has been ranting about Somalis in Minneapolis, he would probably enjoy this Somali-owned tea shop in his city (I visited the last time I drove up). In a moment of clarity, Walsh admitted he loves Indian food.
Hemingway and Davis, meanwhile, are denizens of Metro Washington, D.C. A quarter of Northern Virginia’s residents are foreign-born. Kelly lives in and broadcasts from Houston, which was ranked by one measure as America’s fifth-most diverse city and second-most diverse large city (the top three most diverse cities were all in Maryland, also bordering D.C.). Webbon is in Austin, a very liberal and diverse city. Nick Fuentes, the charismatic racist streamer, lives in predominantly Hispanic suburb of Chicago. Brandon Gill, one of the most vociferous nativists in Congress who wants to stop even legal immigration, is married to an Indian American woman.
Speaking of marriage, it’s ironic that the nativists are led by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump is married to an immigrant and the grandson of one himself. Vance is not only married to an Indian American woman, but he goes out of his way in his memoir to praise her family for its strong bonds.
My goal here is not to shame any of these people for enjoying the very cosmopolitanism and diversity they now decry. But I think what’s happening on the nativist right is what once happened on the woke left. Pundits and influencers are trying to one-up each other for attention and clicks, driving themselves into ideological ghettoes that are fundamentally indefensible.
While there are plenty of valid critiques of our immigration system, the idea that the United States will crumble because the court upheld the traditional meaning of the 14th Amendment is just a fantasy – and deep down, these pundits can realize it by just acknowledging that diversity has been a success for the country.