Friedrich August von Hayek, The Politics of Race and Immigration

Published as a letter to the editor of The Times on February 11, 1978, and republished in the supplied 2022 version, Hayek’s intervention defends Margaret Thatcher’s warning about immigration through recollections of Vienna and a distinction between liberal ideals and their immediate political feasibility. The accompanying editorial note identifies the occasion as Thatcher’s statement that people feared Britain might be “swamped” by people of a different culture. Hayek’s central contention is that rapid immigration can revive nationalist hostility and undermine progress toward equal treatment. He presents restriction as a precaution against that reversal, while retaining free movement as an ultimate ideal.

The letter moves from autobiographical testimony to a general argument about the limits of social acceptance. Hayek recalls established Jewish families in prewar Vienna as respected and increasingly integrated, with anti-Jewish outbursts condemned by “all decent people.” He nevertheless remembers nationalist agitation against Czech newcomers, particularly their establishment of separate schools. He then identifies the wartime arrival of Galician and Polish Jewish refugees as the turning point in attitudes toward Jews:

They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed in what was still a fairly homogeneous population.

This sentence locates the difficulty in newcomers’ perceived difference and the receiving population’s capacity for absorption. Hayek’s account contrasts gradual integration with sudden arrival, treating the pace and visibility of immigration as politically decisive. His subsequent recollection of Vienna in the early 1930s describes formerly disapproving acquaintances—including people of Jewish descent—accepting Hitler’s antisemitic policies while professing to detest him. He qualifies this recollection by observing that those policies had not yet disclosed their most dreadful forms. The episode supplies a warning about how quickly norms against prejudice can deteriorate. It is retrospective testimony, however, rather than a demonstrated explanation of the rise of Nazism; the letter does not examine competing causes or substantiate its causal inference beyond personal observation.

Hayek next repeats an earlier formulation, identified by the editorial note as appearing in The Mirage of Social Justice. This passage states the conceptual basis of his intervention:

“While I look forward, as an ultimate ideal, to a state of affairs in which national boundaries have ceased to be obstacles to the free movement of men, I believe that within any period with which we can now be concerned, any attempt to realise it would lead to a revival of strong nationalist sentiments and a retreat from positions already achieved.

“However far modern man accepts in principle the ideal that the same rules should apply to all men, in fact he does concede it only to those whom he regards as similar to himself, and only slowly learns to extend the range of those he does accept as his likes. There is little legislation can do to speed up this process and much it may do to reverse it by re-awakening sentiments that are already on the wane”.

The distinction is between universal rules as a professed principle and the narrower circle within which people actually recognize equality. Hayek treats enlargement of that circle as gradual and only weakly susceptible to legislation. His warning is therefore about unintended consequences: an attempt to realize liberal openness immediately may strengthen the nationalism it seeks to overcome. The letter’s relevance lies in this tension between a universal liberal aspiration and a political judgment grounded in perceived cultural similarity.

The conclusion asks readers to recognize past “mistakes” before deciding future policy, without specifying remedies or explaining whether earlier decisions can be reversed. Its force is cautionary rather than programmatic. Hayek offers neither immigration thresholds nor institutional proposals; he uses the memory of antisemitic reaction to support restraint. The unresolved issue is whether that restraint protects expanding equality or instead allows existing prejudice to determine its limits.