Down the Democratic Drain: Justin Gest on How Migration Is Unintentionally Strengthening Authoritarianism Around the World

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Thursday, 06/25/2026. I'm just back from a tour of Eastern Europe, Poland, Austria. One of the people I talked to was a very distinguished Polish journalist, Bartosz Wieliński, ran the interview a couple of days ago, and he makes the argument that a fundamental division in the twenty first century in terms of ideology, in political terms at least, is between those people who believe in democracy and those that don't. That's replaced the old left, right, maybe free market communist divisions of the 20 century. My guest today, I think, might share that vision. Justin Gest, an old friend of the show. He was back on in 2022, talking about a previous book. His new book is called Democratic Drain, Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy. Justin is joining us from Budapest where he's teaching at the Central European University this week, old friends of mine there. Justin, congratulations on the new book. Do you share Wieliński's argument that really there are two types of people these days in the world, those who believe in democracy and those that don't?

00:01:47 Justin Gest: I think there are other divisions, other fault lines. I think that's a good one. I think the other one are the beneficiaries of globalization and, the people who are globalization's losers. And I think that, those are fundamental divisions as well, and I think they often overlap.

00:02:04 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I was just gonna ask, that they definitely overlap. Would it be fair to say that, again, in generalized terms doesn't work for everyone, that people who tend to be beneficiaries of globalization are more sympathetic to democracy that than those that aren't?

00:02:21 Justin Gest: Yeah. I think that it doesn't have to be that way. I think that democracy can come in many different colors, and shades, but, I think that's that's where we are right now.

00:02:32 Andrew Keen: What does that say then, Justin, about those people who believe in democracy? They tend to in The US, of course, they're on the coasts, California where I am, the East Coast where you are. Normally, at least, you're based in Washington, DC. You teach at George Mason University. Does that suggest that democracy is, to misquote Marx, the central committee of the ruling class?

00:03:02 Justin Gest: Yeah. I don't I don't think that's what democracy has to be. I think that when you have a large country, and a representative democracy, I think, it's an easy accusation to make, because, you know, direct democracy at the most local levels, you know, deliberative democracy in an idealist kind of Greek sense is logistically practically impossible. And so there's always going to be, some technocrats, some, distance between, you know, the individual, the voter, and the state. And so that's always going to be a vulnerability, a key vulnerability of democracy and something that its detractors are going to be able to use. But, I also think that, you know, democracies have overseen, the proliferation of globalization, in the late twentieth century. And so democracies are getting blamed, for its excesses, and for its drawbacks. And so it's it's natural, that they're gonna, you know, be accountable for those things. And it's a matter of how democracies and Democrats and Democratic leaders navigate that.

00:04:09 Andrew Keen: Is there a paradox, Justin, maybe even a degree of hypocrisy in the fact that it's these elites, these beneficiaries of, of globalization who tend to believe in democracy, who benefit from democracy, and who dress up their belief in democracy in the language of justice and fairness?

00:04:39 Justin Gest: Is it hypocrisy that they say that they dress it up? I

00:04:42 Andrew Keen: Said paradox. Some people might see it as hypocrisy. Others would just simply think of it in paradoxical terms.

00:04:54 Justin Gest: No. I don't I don't I don't think it is. You know, I think that there's going to be abuses of the democracy. The democracy is gonna fail. You're gonna have poor leaders, bad candidates, you know, parties and interests, that, went out over, the public interest. Democracies are flawed, and they're never going to be perfect. But I don't necessarily think it's paradoxical. I think that, you know, democracies are necessarily messy. There's going to be swings of the pendulum and public opinion, popular sentiment that they're gonna have to be responsive to. That's going to be exploited in the short run. But in the long run, you know, democracies are going to be your most when they are state when they're transparent, when they're accountable, when there's rule of law checks and balances, you know, they're going to be, this most, you know, direct path to stability and prosperity.

00:05:54 Andrew Keen: Justin, few years ago, you wrote a book called The White Working Class, What Everyone Needs to Know. We know too much perhaps now about the white working class. Before, we never used to write about them. And when we talk about the white working class, it's an underclass, often unemployed or half employed, this new precariat or proletariat, whatever you wanna describe them. Marx might call them a, worse than a proletariat, a lumpenproletariat. These are the people the people mostly, would it be fair to say, who are indifferent or perhaps even hostile to democracy, Is this underclass? They're not always white, although in Western societies, they tend to be white in The US and Western Europe. Is that a fair observation that in this new bifurcation between those who do and don't believe in democracy, that the skeptics, the people who are illiberal or drawn to illiberal characters like Donald Trump or Orban in Hungary, maybe Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Netanyahu tend to be part of an underclass?

00:07:13 Justin Gest: I think that what's happening here and before that book in 2018, I wrote a research book, on white working class politics called the New Minority, and, it came out in 2016. So, it in many ways anticipated, the Trump and Brexit era, because it came out right at the time of those elections. And, so I feel like I had my finger on the pulse, of what these swing voters ultimately, did in their respective democracies. And what I'll say is two things. One is that, in many cases, they weren't necessarily voting for illiberalism. They were voting for change. Their votes were protest votes, and I think that remains true today. Many people want to see the system burn. They want to shake the system, and they in many cases to its core. And they see, populists, and illiberals, as the only candidates that are willing to speak truth about the failures of their democracies. And if they weaken them in the process, they'll these voters will tolerate that, in the interest that, of eventually building something better, you know, from the ashes, I think is the view that many of them take. You know, is there some nihilism? Maybe. Is there real authoritarianism? For sure. But I think that, you know, there's a gradient here, and it's worth acknowledging. I think the other thing the second thing that I'd mentioned as well is that, immigration is really the sine qua non of far right populist politics in the contemporary era, and it has been for the last fifteen to

00:08:52 Andrew Keen: Twenty years.

00:08:52 Justin Gest: And when immigrants are viewed as a as an existential threat, to the future of a society, the future of a nation as it's often, you know, phrased, then people are willing to make short run compromises to the integrity of the democracy in order to do that. And we've seen that over and over again. And so I think that voters are strategic. They're often transactional, and they're not the irrational masses, that people want to paint them to be. They have legitimate, or maybe from some people's perspective, illegitimate grievances, and they're voting accordingly.

00:09:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So, maybe Hillary Clinton was being a little insensitive when she described them as being deplorables. This issue of, immigration, of course, is key. It's key in Poland where the rise of illiberalism in Poland was very much associated with the fear of immigration from the wars in The Middle East. And it's also central in your new book, Democratic Drain, Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy. Although your argument is the reverse. You suggest that it's the coastal elites, the beneficiaries of globalization who in places like Turkey, Hungary, maybe even The United States, are packing up when the illiberals come to power. Is that the core argument in democratic drain?

00:10:27 Justin Gest: It's it's not necessarily pointing the finger, at the coastal elite.

00:10:35 Andrew Keen: In

00:10:38 Justin Gest: Many cases, the elite, you know, will lead in The United States, are leaving places like Turkey or Hungary here, Serbia, India, Israel. Yes. In some cases, it's these elite sick, dissident behavior, and we've seen that, you know, among exiles and also just people who are political activists. But democratic drain is about actually a real a mass phenomenon. It's not just the sort of, you know, elite phenomenon. It's really paired with the phenomenon where people average people who are leaving their countries of origin to pursue, their, their loved ones, to join them abroad, to are pursuing economic opportunities for a new job, or pursuing education abroad. They're leaving for nonpolitical reasons. Right, Andrew? And that's millions of people every year. 45,000,000 people, moved from a less democratic place to a more democratic place, over the last five years observed. And so when they go, what I find is that they that interest in departing their country of origin is correlated with liberal and democratic values that they hold. So they're not leaving for political reasons, but when they go, they are depleting their countries of their democratic values anyway. Either way, it's an indirect effect. They're not deliberately taking their politics with them. They just so happen to be on their way out, and holding these views.

00:12:25 Andrew Keen: Is that because and rather than using with The US or Poland or Hungary, let's use Central America. People from Honduras or El Salvador wanna come or Mexico wanna come to The United States. They're coming mostly, although they won't always acknowledge it for legal reasons, but they're coming as economic migrants. They're coming to benefit themselves and their family, to give themselves more chances, to make more money, more opportunity. Is it coincidental then that belief is tied to what you call this democratic drain? That the people leaving Honduras and El Salvador are depleting democratic communities in their countries, which is only compounding, authoritarianism and liberalism.

00:13:21 Justin Gest: They are. I let's talk about the profile of your average migrant, your average prospective migrant because that's who pollsters talk to. This book benefits from nearly, from data from nearly a million respondents worldwide across a 149 countries. And, what we find what I find is that, immigrants, prospective immigrants tend to be younger than the people who want to stay behind. They tend to be middle educated, middle income, in their socioeconomic background. So they're not the poorest or the least educated, but they're certainly not the richest and most educated. They tend to be more entrepreneurial, more willing to take risks. They tend to be more open minded, and they tend to score lower on authoritarian personality tests. So they you know, these are people who are intrepid and bold. They also happen to hold more liberal democratic views, And that's gonna be, you know, strongly correlated with some of those other, attributes that I mentioned. But this is the package that you're that you're getting when you have when you look at this sort of, cohort of likely immigrants. Now does that mean that they are, you know, liberals, you know, like a Michael Bloomberg, you know, Democrats, in the in the sort of American sense or British sense? Not necessarily. They're just more liberal and democratic than the average person who wants to stay behind in their home country of El Salvador or Honduras.

00:14:53 Andrew Keen: And then what about the, shall we say, the left critique of this, which might suggest that, sure, these people believe in open markets, liberal values because they wanna make money. And when they come to places like America, they only compound all the inequalities, which is why some people on the left are actually ambivalent and sometimes even opposed to immigration.

00:15:17 Justin Gest: Yeah. I'd say that's rarer these days. You know, and there's lots of data that show that they don't compound inequality. They fill critical labor shortages in most cases, and their youth is an immense, immense advantage, for the destination countries, many of which are aging, demographically quite severely. So, you know, is the general consensus from economists is that there is labor market competition at the very bottom of the of the labor market. So entry level positions, maybe, you know, that's where they're observing labor market competition. But anything above entry level, you know, immigrants tend to be fitting in where there are otherwise gaps.

00:15:59 Andrew Keen: Is this a zero sum game, Justin? You wrote a piece in foreign affairs called how migration helps authoritarians. So maybe it helps the authoritarians in places like El Salvador or Honduras or Turkey when they leave democratically minded people. But it benefits the societies that they arrive in. So why does it help authoritarians? You'd

00:16:23 Justin Gest: Like to think so. You know, if, you know, it stands to reason that if you are moving people with liberal democratic political values from developing countries to high income democracies, then you are building those political values, you know, gaining those political values in the destination state. Unfortunately, there's two big reasons why this doesn't always work out, in the way you might imagine. The first is the one we've already talked about. The fact that immigration has been shown by social scientists for the last twenty years to trigger authoritarian responses to this purported existential threat to the nation. And that really offsets, any kind of gain, in liberal democratic values that may arrive with them. And then the second reason is that immigrants who come over to a destination country who are in their first generation, if you think about it, they're trying to adjust. They're trying to learn the new language. They're trying to find that job, keep that job, enroll their kids into schools, find stable housing, build friendship groups, and adapt to a new society. They're not your classicly positioned activist. They don't have a lot of time to advocate for democracy in their country of origin, let alone democracy in the country that they just arrived in. Further, that many in most cases, they don't have voting rights in the destination state. And in and in and in many cases, many of them don't feel comfortable advocating in those destination states. The first generation, immigrant immigration scholars have long observed, the first generations feels a sense of indebtedness to the country of, of destination. Thanks for letting me in and my family, and thanks for saving me or granting me this wonderful opportunity. It's the second generation, their children, that feels not indebted, but entitled, to actually advocate for what they really want. And so there's a lag in the liberal democratic, activism that you might come to see from immigrants' arrival.

00:18:17 Andrew Keen: Justin, you know as well as anyone that Americans now are leaving The United States in record numbers. The journal just ran a big piece. Some of those Americans are coastal elites, intellectuals like Timothy Snyder, who, I mean, last year when Trump came back to power very publicly with his wife, Marci Shore, left The United States. There are some people who are rather ambivalent about that. George Packer, another old friend of the show, argued in The Atlantic that, people like Snyder made a mistake that to be a real patriot, means that you should stay and fight for democracy. What's your take? Are you in the Snyder camp or the Packer camp when it comes to Americans, especially left progressives like Snyder who picked up, because he, for one reason or another, was rather fearful of Trump too?

00:19:15 Justin Gest: I'm very much in the Packer camp. I wrote an essay recently in the Guardian, noting, the data from that Wall Street Journal article, and many other sources of data that show that many Americans are on their way out right now, in record numbers.

00:19:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And that piece was back in, a couple of weeks ago on the June 14. One reason US democracy is in trouble, its supporters are moving elsewhere.

00:19:46 Justin Gest: You're way ahead of me. Exactly. And I think that's a it's a bad sign. Now look, hundreds of thousands of Americans moving to places like Dublin or Madrid or Berlin, that's a rounding error in a country that has 330,000,000,000 people. [as spoken — likely "330 million"] But all trends begin as rounding errors, and this is certainly a trend with an upward trajectory. And I think it's important that Americans recognize that you're not going to save US democracy when you leave it. That's not the way it works. Quite the opposite, you are depleting, The United States of precisely the very people best positioned, to fight for the integrity of its institutions, to fight for rule of law, checks and balances, public accountability, transparency, all the key tenets, and attributes of a successful democracy. You know, when you go, not only is your voice not heard as well, in many cases, you're discredited and you're so consumed by your life in the destination state, it's very hard to really be effective from abroad.

00:20:53 Andrew Keen: That's easy to say. And I take your argument, Justin, in which you make in democratic drain. But does that mean that even in really nasty authoritarian, even totalitarian states, that people should just stay? I mean, the third Reich, of course, comes to mind. Soviet Union, current societies where authoritarianism is really out of control, maybe China. Is it always should people sacrifice their lives, their opportunities of their kids No. Certainly not. For democracy or the promise of democracy?

00:21:31 Justin Gest: No. Certainly not. It's worth ex it's worth, distinguishing between people who are endangered by staying in their country of origin, and people who have an opportunity to leave voluntarily. If you're in danger, you need to go. You need to get out. And that's what we call refugees. This is what, humanitarian migration is all about. People whose lives are in danger because they are subject to persecution and oppression on the basis of their political beliefs, their race, their ethnicity, their sexuality. These are reasons to go, and you should go. And then there are voluntary migrants. These are people who could stay, who are not necessarily in danger, who may be discomforted, who may be inconvenienced, by, the politics and political developments, but who do not necessarily need to go. And, of course, there's a gradient of pressure on individuals in between those things. But to be clear, this is not to shame anybody, for leaving. Migration is a is an enormous, you know, a phenomenal decision, for someone to make. I've chosen to leave The United States before, as a as a student migrant because I was I was I got my PhD in London. And that was a big decision even for someone who knew he could come back, to, you know, what I thought would be a stable democracy and a prosperous society. And that was a really big decision for me. It's even bigger when the future is much more uncertain. And I and I don't think that decision should be taken lightly, and I don't think that we should stand in the way, of human mobility. People should chase their dreams. They should chase opportunities, and they should enrich the countries that they go to. It's a global mobility is, is I think a beautiful thing, broadly speaking. And so this is not to shame the people who make that, phenomenal choice, but it is to acknowledge that there are consequences when those choices are made, in a global trend, and when large numbers of people are making those choices. And they're, in many cases, politically selected, self selecting. Only certain types of people go, and that means that there's going to be a sorting effect.

00:23:43 Andrew Keen: You're a man of the left, Justin.

00:23:47 Justin Gest: No one said that before. Thank you.

00:23:49 Andrew Keen: Well, progressive. Certainly, more on the left than on the right. The fact you thanking me means you're you are one. No. It's,

00:23:58 Justin Gest: I, I really think of myself as politically neutral. You know? I'm a social scientist, Andrew. But, being politically, implacable is a is a wonderful advantage. I love that.

00:24:11 Andrew Keen: You know you know as well as I do, there's no such thing as social science, but that's another conversation, another question, another

00:24:17 Justin Gest: That's definitely another episode between us.

00:24:19 Andrew Keen: But, coming back, you did an interesting interview with the TNR, about how Democrats can defeat Trump's identity politics. It's not just in The US. It's in The UK. You said you studied I know you got your PhD at LSE. The UK is in its perpetual political crisis, all of it connected with immigration, the rise of reform party, and post Brexit Britain. The same is true in France, Poland, Hungary, where you are. All this fear of immigration, particularly people of different color skins and religions from The Middle East, especially. What in your view should progressives do when it comes to immigration? You're clearly not against the idea of it. I mean, you've just written a book about it, and you idealize immigrants. You think they bring enormous values, and you're disappointed that they would leave those values, in their home countries. But what should the left do when it comes to immigration? They're clearly losing the argument. I mean, Trump's only strength these days seems to be on immigration. In The UK, the labor is in retreat because of the immigrant issue. Same is true in France and Italy. Can there be a progressive skepticism towards immigration?

00:25:46 Justin Gest: Absolutely. I would ghost, and this is where I might lose my progressive credentials, in your eyes.

00:25:52 Andrew Keen: Be careful. I'll throw you off the show.

00:25:54 Justin Gest: Yeah. That's that's right. I've become, politically homeless. I, I think that the progressive movement has lost on immigration. This is rock bottom, Andrew. I mean, it could be worse. That might you know, we might find new Nadir's, to find.

00:26:13 Andrew Keen: I'm sure we will. Whenever you don't think it gets worse, it will do. That's a guarantee.

00:26:18 Justin Gest: But if you're if you're an advocate, for the benefits, and the enrichment that comes from global mobility, this is rock bottom. This is what failure looks like and feels like. And so it's worth looking, you know, for left center, and centrist politicians and advocates, it's worth looking yourself in the mirror right now and saying, where have we strayed? And I think that much of this actually relates to the loss of any credibility, in terms of border control, and public order. I think that, you cannot expect a society to want to open its doors if there is no way to close them. You cannot expect a society to open its gates, if there is no gate, you know, to open. And so you have to have, not only the semblance, but practical order, when it comes to migration. And people need to have the confidence that when immigrants are admitted into a country, it is because they have been selected, discriminated, selected because they are going to benefit the national interest. I wrote a piece for the Washington Post about four years ago, right around the time I was on your show last. And it was it was about the case for nationalism on the left. It is absolutely incredible that the left believes that it was okay to seed nationalism as a as a tool that only the right can use, as if there isn't a nationalist case for things like immigration, for things like climate change, policy. It is really inexcusable, especially because the national interests, that are served by global mobility, by the arrival of immigrants who are carefully selected to enter a country are plain to see. And I think that if we can turn, that debate, into one about the national interest and demonstrate, that immigrants are making their countries younger, filling critical labor shortages, innovating, creating jobs, all of which is true, and it always nice to have the benefit of facts on your side, then I think it the debate changes.

00:28:36 Andrew Keen: That piece was called how the left can embrace nationalism while maintaining its values. It was from March 2022 in the Washington Post. Could an internationalist argue Could an internationalist be is one of the implications, perhaps, Justin, of your book, Democratic Drain, is that if you are an internationalist rather than some patriot of a specific country, that you'd be against immigration or emigration because it actually undermines democracy around the world. So you can be an enlightened anti immigrant.

00:29:15 Justin Gest: I suppose it's possible to be against it because you're not only depleting, countries of origin of their liberal democrats, or any semblance of them, but you're also depleting those home countries, those countries of origin, of, you know, precious economic capital too. That's brain drain. Right? That's that's the phenomenon that democratic drain is actually a corollary of. You know, I think that's possible, but I think that would be foolish. It's it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You know, what we really need to be doing is not worrying about, you know, moving democratic political capital from south to north, or returning it back north to south. What we need to be doing is growing the democratic political movement, justifying, and demonstrating the power of democracy, and its virtues, and the dangers, the perils of authoritarianism and illiberalism. I think that this goes, you know, full circle to the where we started in our conversation today. That, you know, the future of democracy will lie in its ability, to persuade, voters and people around the world, of its, persisting, vitality and, and uses.

00:30:32 Andrew Keen: It's ironic. I think one of the challenges I mean, I take your point on how the left can embrace nationalism while maintaining its values. But, really, perhaps, the challenge of people who support democracy is making the democratic movement or the people who committed to democ democracy more I'm gonna say egalitarian, but certainly more comprehensive in terms of the community. If it just comes you talked about this earlier. If it just comes from the elites, then democracy is gonna be continually associated with those elites and will alienate, especially our friends of the white working class. Finally, Justin, you came on the show back in 2022, more than four years ago. This was in Biden years, and we called the conversation how to avoid a civil war in America by creating a post racial civic identity.

00:31:37 Justin Gest: I didn't realize spam was one of your, sponsors, Andrew.

00:31:41 Andrew Keen: Well, that was, LitHub. So I and it's not me.

00:31:45 Justin Gest: It's Okay. Just curious.

00:31:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You gotta be careful with spats. But that's the meet spam. It's not email spam. Although, of course, email spam was borrowed from the meet spam. Final question, Justin. Do you still believe in a post racial civic identity? You wrote your that book about, you wrote the book, majority minority back then, which is what our conversation was based on. Since then, you've written Democratic Drain. It's just out this week. Do you still believe in the idea of a, a post racial civic identity? Or perhaps to really strengthen democracy, we should be thinking about civic identity that recognizes racial, gendered, and other cultural identities.

00:32:38 Justin Gest: Yeah. You know, post racial civic identity were not my words. I'm I'm positive they were not in my book, but, you know, those are those are your words. But Well,

00:32:47 Andrew Keen: They were LitHub's words. I can blame we can blame LitHub for both Saddam and the headline.

00:32:52 Justin Gest: That's fine. Yeah. Down with down with them. Yeah. It that's, look. It's fine. People project onto your work what they what they want to hear, and that's okay. I do believe that a civic identity is not just, you know, a good idea, but critical, to the to the governance of demographic change. If we want people to be comfortable, with global mobility, with the arrival of foreigners, not necessarily, again, the mass arrival, the uncontrolled arrival of foreigners, but the selection and admission of foreigners, to serve the national interest, it is critical, that we that we transform, reconstitute, our identity into one with civic roots, rather than ethno religious roots. And I think that, you know, in many ways, you know, as we, you know, divide, the world on those fault lines that we talked about, you know, the winners and losers of globalization, Democrats and authoritarians, I think a third fault line, Andrew, is going to be, people who believe their countries, are grounded in ideas and civic institutions, and interdependency and a devotion to each other while we evolve to co evolve together. And those, who believe that the nation is derived, from ethno religious roots that are static over time, and unchanging. And I think that these are imaginaries. They are constructions of how we understand our country, both of them. And the question is which wins?

00:34:27 Andrew Keen: Good final question. Maybe a subject for another book, but Justin Gest's new book, Democratic Drain, Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy is an intriguing take on whether one should or shouldn't leave one's country. He's a patriot, although perhaps a progressive patriot. Congratulations, Justin, on the new book, and love to get you back on the show. Hope it won't be another four years till we see you again. Thank you so much.

00:34:53 Justin Gest: Anytime, Andrew. Thanks for having me on.