Philippa Kaur

Two years after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building, the conspiracy theories about a malign group controlling the country have not gone away. This continues to corrode US democracy, fuelling stark polarisation that is deepening distrust and political violence.

Many in the mob on January 6 2021 believed that there was a “deep state” in control of their country, which had taken over powerful positions and were making decisions.

Some used this term to describe the people and institutions who they claimed had stopped their “rightful” president, Donald Trump, being re-elected and thwarted what they considered to be their righteous path, something Trump himself claims to believe. Other people have since argued that the attack was a hoax created by similar deep state actors.

Some of the elements of what is described as the deep state definitely exist, such as agencies acting covertly, and sometimes without direct oversight from accountable politicians. Running well placed and therefore vulnerable informants could be an example where direct political oversight is inappropriate.

Some people remain convinced these activities represent a take-over by unelected officials and reason enough to take up arms, while others see them as a function of a modern state.

For those who travelled to Washington DC on January 6 and proceeded to break in to the building and put the lives of elected representatives at risk, an alleged deep state had orchestrated the “theft” of the presidential election.

But belief in a deep state working against Trump isn’t confined to a fringe minority. A poll conducted by NPR/Ipsos after the 2020 election found 39% of Americans believe the deep state worked to undermine Trump. Some also believe the deep state has used or even started or faked the pandemic to curtail their rights.

Some on the left of US politics also have their own version of a deep state, driven by military and economic leadership, which generates wars and crises to perpetuate their interests. This force – they say – has persecuted and even assassinated those who stand in their way.

Much of what some describe as the deep state has legitimate government function. The intelligence services, law enforcement and the media are all underpinned by laws, regulations, courts or other forms of oversight.

But the now-popular concept of a deep state gets dangerously close to conspiracy theory precisely because it is founded on kernels of truth. There are intelligence agencies operating covertly. The media is a values-and-opinions-led industry run by billionaire owners. Business and lobby groups do influence politics to shape laws and regulations in their favour. That all of these things are true does not mean there is a deep state in the way those using the term mean.

Why did this take hold?

A key problem in US politics is that all sides are fatigued by polarisation and do not trust their political opponents. They assume their opponents have co-opted a section of government, and media and use this influence to brief aggressively against them.

The former academic and now filmmaker Adam Curtis is among those who argue that many powerful people deliberately sow confusion to undermine trust in political institutions (“hypernormalisation)”, and that this can destabilise the public’s understanding of what is real and what is fiction.

In the US (and increasingly in other countries too) people on all sides have come to believe that money, and particularly foreign money, is skewing politics away from the interests of the people. These beliefs have a radicalising effect on some people.

There are similar emerging narratives and movements in the UK, Germany and other parts of Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. In the UK, those who advocated for the campaign to leave the EU still refer to a mythical pro-European deep state preventing the benefits of Brexit being realised.

The QAnon movement, originally based on a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was fighting paedophilic, Satan-worshipping elites trying to control politics, has grown to include conspiracy theories about COVID and even 5G telephone masts. The QAnon phenomenon’s extension to Germany is poorly understood but has driven the advance of far-right groups.

QAnon activists believe in a wide range of conspiracies about the so-called deep state.
Zuma/Alamy

While the US has always been curiously susceptible to conspiracy theories, (think the Kennedy assassination or the moon landings), the more recent conspiracies and QAnon activism has been enabled by the ubiquity of the internet. Real world threats – such as those of those of January 6 in the US and the so called Reichsbürger coup plot in Germany in December 2022 – have been encouraged by narratives that begin on the dark web (part of the internet used for completely anonymous communication).

Read more:
What is the Reichsbürger movement accused of trying to overthrow the German government?

Another contributor is the distribution of self-published ebooks through mainstream platforms like Amazon and Scribd. Before the internet era finding such a large audience would have been expensive and logistically difficult for purveyors of these conspiracy theories.

One of the great ironies of those evoking the idea of the deep state is that they have themselves have behaved like a deep or parallel state. They have acted in secret, with their own command-and-control structures, message management and military-style coordination of their actions.

What can be done to mitigate the harm of uninformed beliefs, and conspiracies? This movement has parallels with the debates around the deradicalisation of jihadists in the 2000s. As was found then the more involvement there is from government officials and agencies, the greater the push-back and reinforcement of the radicalising narratives.

The conclusion from the experiences around jihadist radicalisation is that prevention is more effective than cure. But the work on prevention and disruption needs to be well funded and is politically and socially difficult.

The continued prevalence of narratives around the deep state mean that the January 2021 attack are unlikely to be the last attempted. A prosecution of Trump for incitement of the January 6 mob action might satisfy the needs of those who were victims of the attack but may also stoke the conspiracy theories that just aren’t going away. More

Politicians around the world tout immigration restrictions as a way to fight wage stagnation and boost the job prospects of low-paid or unemployed locals.

The Trump administration pushed the message aggressively, at one stage calling a proposal to halve migration numbers the RAISE Act (standing for Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy), saying it would raise workers’ wages and help struggling families enter the middle class.

Whether or not cutting low-skilled migration would lift working class wages remains a highly contentious question.

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My research examines the question in a broader way. Its findings – looking back at an extraordinary time of change in US history, from the 1880s on – suggest that while restricting immigration might at first help low-income workers, over time it hurts those local workers. This is due to what I call the “honeypot effect”, in which wage hikes for poor jobs keep people in poor jobs.

The problem is that there are very few real-world immigration restrictions to examine. Immigration to the global West has been rising steadily since the 1960s.

The COVID pandemic essentially eliminated immigration for a short time, but it is as good as impossible to isolate the effects of that from the effects of everything else that was going on at the same time.

America’s first exclusion: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Up until 1882, the US had an open-border policy with virtually no restrictions on entry. The Chinese Exclusion Act – introduced that year in response to the widespread belief that low-skilled Chinese immigrants were responsible for depressed wages and unemployment – was a first.

It was also long-lasting. It completely prohibited the immigration of Chinese labourers for more than fifty years.

It represents an ideal so-called “natural experiment”. Because Chinese immigration had been very heavily concentrated in certain locations, its impact was isolated to those locations, allowing what happened where it did restrict immigration to be compared to what happened where it did not.

And I discovered there was data. The US Government fully discloses Census data after 72 years. This allowed me to link individuals across US censuses to track the employment situation of millions of Americans over the entirety of their working lives.

A significant, negative, long-term effect

What I found was surprising. The Chinese Exclusion Act had a significant, negative long-term effect on American workers. My estimate is that workers in locations exposed to the Act earned on average 6-15% less over their working lives than their counterparts in other locations

The negative effects were strongest for low-skilled and unemployed workers.

The exclusion of Chinese immigrants not only failed to improve conditions for working-class Americans, but made them substantially worse off in the long run.

The honeypot and the occupational ladder

Then I set out to examine this seemingly counter-intuitive result: why shortages of low-skilled labour had led to worse long-term outcomes for low-skilled workers.

The answer appears to lie in a “honeypot” effect.

Higher low-skilled wages are attractive.

A closer look suggests the Chinese Exclusion Act was initially successful in boosting low-skilled wages and the employment of Americans in low-skilled jobs in the regions it had an effect.

This created a “honeypot” – American workers in those locations increasingly took and remained in low-skilled jobs. They became significantly less likely to become educated, meaning they fell behind their counterparts in other locations on the occupational ladder.

And their initial wage gains were short-lived, with increased arrivals from other countries and other parts of the US eventually filling the labour shortages.

This left the workers who had opted to stay in low-skilled jobs stuck with low pay, depressing their lifetime earnings compared to their counterparts in regions unaffected by the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Underlying the honeypot effect is the reality that most workers progress up an occupation ladder over their working lives, often as a result of education and training.

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Legal work-related immigration has fallen by a third since 2020, contributing to US labor shortages

But education involves trade-offs. It can require giving up immediate income to earn more down the track.

Immediate income which is higher is harder to give up.

And there might be another mechanism at play. When low-skilled workers are in short supply, there might be fewer high-skilled jobs on offer because high-skilled jobs need low-skilled jobs to complement them.

Implications for today

The economy of 1882 bears little resemblance to today’s economy and we should take care in drawing general conclusions.

However, studies of modern immigration inflows into the United States and Europe also find they boost the education and occupational status of native workers, suggesting the processes underlying the honeypot effect are present in modern economies.

Immigration restrictions are too blunt an instrument and their effects are too complex to be used to boost wages and employment.

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My findings suggest that even if restrictions are successful in creating wage gains for some in the short run, they are just as likely to lead to negative outcomes for locals in the long run.

This is not to say that increasing low-skilled wages is a bad thing. But immigration restrictions can only create temporary, unsustainable wage increases.

There are better, more sustainable ways to help low-skilled workers, backed by stronger evidence.

Attempts to help low-skilled workers should promote – or at the very least not discourage – education and occupational upgrading. That way they would help the low-skilled workers and the economy as a whole. More