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Breaking Down Myths About Immigration with Alex Nowrasteh
121 Plays1 year ago
We sat down with Alex Nowrasteh, an American analyst of immigration policy currently working at the Cato Institute to get to the truth around many of the questions Americans have about immigration.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everyone welcome to the latest episode of the project liberal show. I'm your host Joshua Eckle joined by Our co-host in recovery Jonathan. I know you just got out of a surgery last week. I hope you're feeling well yourself a lot better Sorry, I missed the episode last week with Daniel, but I'm here so I'm doing it I'm glad to hear the recovery is going well, and you're sitting up I know that you've dealt with like a lot of back craziness, and I hope you're on the way out and
00:00:25
Speaker
But today we're joined by one of my favorite people in the movement, Alex Novrasta. Hopefully I didn't strip your name there, Alex, your last name. Alex is the Vice President of Economic and Social Policy at Cato. He is a loud advocate of immigration. He considers himself a globalist, elitist, and cosmopolitan. According to his Twitter profile, you've probably seen his videos on our socials and across the world.
00:00:48
Speaker
With him, he did a debate with Tucker Carlson a couple years ago. He's been often in the halls of Congress advocating for immigration reform. And he is, again, a great voice in the movement. Alex, thank you for taking time to meet with us and talk to us.
00:01:02
Speaker
Hey, thanks for having me. And you didn't butcher my name too badly. So well done to you. Congrats. OK. I will try to keep that in mind. I have also a weird last name. Everyone says equal rather than echol. It's phonetically equal, but apparently my ancestors say echol. So I've dealt with some serious challenges. What is the accurate pronunciation, Alex? Just to make sure we all get it right.
00:01:25
Speaker
So I say Narasta. It's a Persian last name but from generations ago and it is definitely not pronounced that way in Iran as far as I know. So I'm just not sensitive about it. Like there are people sensitive about mispronunciations of the last name and I just don't understand how you can live.
00:01:47
Speaker
with a weird last name like mine that's poorly spelled and not phonetic and be sensitive about it because I think you just curl up into a ball and die after a while if you were sensitive. I was testifying once in front of Congress six months ago and somebody came up with an anagram of my last name. They called me Mr. Wensworth.
00:02:09
Speaker
That's definitely the worst mispronunciation I've ever had, but also it's kind of funny and life would be easier if my last name were Winsworth, but I don't, you know, it doesn't really bother me. I don't care. You might get less hateful Twitter messages like, yeah, understood.
00:02:25
Speaker
I once I've had like in my life I've had one or two people ever ask me how to spell my last name Casey like that is about as generic and as simple as you can get so I have the exact opposite issue where my wife was so glad to change her name to mine simply because it's like nobody ever asked me how to spell it basic
00:02:44
Speaker
Good thing all right well let's let's jump into it alex i wanted to just to kick off the conversation our hope was to dispel a lot of myths that we hear on social media around immigration so we have around six major myths these are the myths that we run into all the time i hear members of congress spouting these myths i hear the former president spending these myths on a regular basis and
00:03:07
Speaker
I wanted, as somebody who spent their career researching this, I wanted to kind of tee you up to maybe help us get to the truth of some of these narratives that we hear online nowadays.
Debunking Welfare and Economic Burdens Myths
00:03:18
Speaker
So the first one that we wanted to kick off was the one we hear the most, which is immigrants are coming to the United States and they're a drain on the welfare state. And I wanted to just ask you about that myth. How do you navigate it? Do you feel like there's any truth to it? And what does the research show?
00:03:35
Speaker
So it's an empirical claim. If immigrants are a drain in the welfare state or on a public FISC, then we should be able to measure that. And so when we take a look at this, when we take a look at welfare consumption for immigrants and compare them to native born Americans, what we find is that immigrants consume about 27% less welfare per capita than native born Americans. Now that's just welfare.
00:04:02
Speaker
That includes the welfare state, you know, means tested and entitlement programs, but separately it's about the same if you separate those out. So they consume less in welfare than native born Americans. The second component though is that's only half of it. So there's the taxes that you pay and then there's the welfare that you get. So if immigrants consume less welfare but they pay like zero taxes, right, they would be.
00:04:26
Speaker
So what we do is and what economists do is they do these net fiscal impact studies and there's numerous different ways to do this where you take a look at the taxes that are paid by immigrants and you compare them to the benefits they receive and you do it over a period of time because age is one of the best determinants of how much
00:04:47
Speaker
how many government benefits you consume, right? Like young people consume a lot when they're in public schools, a lot of welfare is for children. You don't consume that much like in middle age from like the age of 20 to say 65, you don't consume that much on average. And then you consume a lot when you're old, you know, Social Security and Medicare.
00:05:07
Speaker
And so if immigrants are on average, so you have to compare like age to age because otherwise you're going to get a biased sample. Like if you're comparing immigrants, let's say like hypothetically, their average age is like 18. I'm just making this up. But if it's like 18, then yeah, they're going to have higher consumption on average than natives whose average age is like 38.
00:05:28
Speaker
So what you need to do is compare like, okay, like 18 year old immigrants to 18 year old natives, you have to compare. And then you do this type of like very detailed analysis, which is very difficult and time consuming to do. And what you find is that immigrants are much more likely to pay more in taxes than to receive in benefits than native born Americans. And there's several different reasons for this. One, immigrants are less likely to consume welfare.
00:05:56
Speaker
the native-born Americans on average, and that's partly because of self-selection. They're much more likely to work. They're more likely to be in the labor force, etc. A little bit more other selection effects going on. The other thing is there are legal barriers to consuming welfare in the United States if you are an immigrant.
00:06:18
Speaker
In federal welfare, you are barred from means-tested welfare programs and entitlement benefits with very few exceptions. Exceptions being like school lunch programs, the women's infant and children program, and some emergency Medicaid. Stuff where emergency Medicaid, by the way, is less than 1% of all Medicaid spending.
00:06:41
Speaker
So you're talking about like very small things that they do have access to, but it's very limited. And so they consume a lot less and they're more likely to work. And then the other way to think about it is like, I'm a native born American. I'm with the public school. So I started from like age zero.
00:06:59
Speaker
When I was born, I had eligibility for benefits. As far as I know, my parents didn't consume any, then I went to public school. And so by the time I had a public school at age 18, I've incurred like several hundred thousand dollars of cost in a taxpayer. Meanwhile, an immigrant who comes at age 18, they're at zero, and then they start working. So you compare it in that way.
00:07:22
Speaker
it should be pretty obvious why immigrants are a more positive effect on government finances than native born Americans. And I think, so I know Cato put out a study on this that really put the numbers out there, and we'll try to link that for the sake of our audience so they can dig into those findings. I think the most stark thing that I took away from it was, and I think you touched on this a second ago, is the fact that not only are immigrants not a drain on the welfare state,
00:07:49
Speaker
But they are less they added the welfare state and native-born Americans are significantly more of an economic, you know, pose significantly more of an economic cost.
00:08:00
Speaker
I wanted to ... The number on that, by the way, is Medicare Part A, which is your basic hospital insurance for Medicare for the elderly in the welfare state. Immigrants pay about $14 billion a year more in taxes than they take out in benefits. Native-born Americans, in the other hand, take out $31 billion a year more than they pay in.
00:08:23
Speaker
So like immigration is not going to fix this system, but it's certainly making it less negative. So hilariously, it's not that you can't have free immigration in a welfare state. It's that you probably can't sustain fiscally a welfare state without a healthy amount of immigration. That's exactly where I was going to go with this. So you're saying, you know, a lot of the narrative you hear is like, well, these illegals are coming in, they're gaining all their, they're being written free. I'm hearing this all over the place. They're being, they're being,
00:08:52
Speaker
They're being flown all over the country to wherever they want to go. They get thousands of dollars of checks. They get a cell phone.
00:09:01
Speaker
Where is this narrative coming from? Is it true? What do we actually see out there?
Local vs. Federal Immigration Issues
00:09:06
Speaker
So there's some aspects of it that have been true over the last couple of years, such as like in New York City, you've probably seen news reports about some migrants who are in shelters provided by the city. It's a relatively recent phenomenon. That's a New York program now. That's a program in New York City. It is the result of an old court case from over 40 years ago.
00:09:26
Speaker
against homelessness. And for some reason the city has eased rules to allow migrants into the shelters. That is a problem that they can fix tomorrow. That should never have been a problem. Migrants should not have access to that. But that is a local New York problem that they created themselves for no good reason. So some of that is true. And there's some flights
00:09:50
Speaker
that have been organized for people already in the United States, but very few. The biggest source of this is actually states like Texas and Florida paying buses to ship migrants to blue cities as a way to like own the libs about this type of stuff. So there's some of that going on. But in terms of like federal flying, people around, no, like very limited, almost nothing about that. There was a recent report put out by this guy, Todd Bensman at the Center for Immigration Studies.
00:10:16
Speaker
where he said the Biden administration has conducted like 400,000 secret flights into the United States. It's absolute rubbish. What that is, is people who got sponsored by Americans lawfully to come into the United States and pay for their own flights.
00:10:32
Speaker
and came in, and he framed it as a government program, and it's not. It's like a total scandal. This guy is a liar. He's lied about this consistently. It's all on the government websites. It's not secretive, but he claims, oh, because we don't know where they landed at any given time, it's like this secret program. And I'm like, dude, I don't know when you fly and land. That doesn't mean that you're part of some secret government program to fly people around, because you pay for your ticket, just like these other people did. So there's just a lot of nonsense out there, and frankly, this honesty.
00:11:01
Speaker
about the flights and about what's going on. Almost all of them are people themselves who are flying into the United States on tickets that they bought because they're sponsored by Americans. I saw somebody on Twitter. They were filming themselves in an airplane. Look at all these illegals in line for the airplane. This is horrific that the government is doing this. And I'm thinking,
00:11:22
Speaker
How do you know that they're illegal and how do you know that the government is paying for them? Because all I saw was what I see in Texas every single day. A bunch of Hispanic people doing the thing that all other Americans do. This mindset is kind of wild and I got kind of exposed to it in a Twitter spaces.
00:11:40
Speaker
when I was debating somebody about immigration, and some people came on and started talking about these NGOs flying people in, how they're going to build this highway, this express highway over the Dorian Gap, which if anybody knows their geography, that is a massive multi-billion dollar operation to try
Conspiracy Theories and Legal Immigration Challenges
00:11:58
Speaker
to do that. But they're going to build this highway over this thing all the way straight to the United States to bus in all these people.
00:12:05
Speaker
What is going on? Why has this this conspiratorial mindset about immigration just taken over, especially like it started in 20, like before Trump, obviously, it's been around for a long time. Trump kind of fed into it. But boy, over the past year or two, it feels like it's just exploded. Why are we seeing this?
00:12:22
Speaker
I think it's partly exploded because of the chaos like so the thing that nobody can deny is there was a lot of chaos at the southern border the number of apprehensions is our record highs people from around the world coming and being apprehended some asking for asylum some trying to
00:12:38
Speaker
And I think in any environment, frankly, where you have an enormous amount of chaos, you're going to have a lot of conspiracy theories. And I totally understand why people are upset about the chaos. Like, I don't like chaos either. Maybe that's my conservative side coming out. But I don't like disorder. The difference is I know the disorder comes from the fact that it's impossible.
00:13:01
Speaker
Legally for the vast majority of these people to enter the United States lawfully and they're attracted to the enormous economic opportunities in the United States Americans want to hire them Americans want to sell them goods and services that we want to rent them Real estate, but they are not and they want to come but we are not allowed legally to engage in that kind of mutually beneficial voluntary exchange
00:13:27
Speaker
And so the result is chaos and black markets. So my answer as a libertarian is to deregulate and get the government out as much as possible. I think most people's reaction is, well, there must be something nefarious going on and the government needs to really step in to stop it.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, so that was one of the myths that I did want to jump into is a lot of people have this idea that immigrants don't want to come into the country legally. I hear this all the time, you know. Why don't they come illegally? Yeah, they want to skip ahead in line. And obviously, I think and I think you would agree that it's a system of incentives and economic incentives that are driving what would be considered illegal immigration.
00:14:04
Speaker
But can we speak a little bit more to that about the system? I know that Cato has done a lot of studies around how hard it is to get into the United States legally. And can you maybe speak to what that experience looks like for somebody who's trying to go through the appropriate rules and procedures to get in here?
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, immigration is not a conspiracy theory. It's people moving to opportunity. And the number one thing that we've noticed is that people, most Americans think it's very easy to immigrate to this country legally, and it's not. The immigration laws are the second most complex portion of American law after the income tax code.
00:14:46
Speaker
Of all the people who want to come to the United States every year, somewhere around 1% are able to do so lawfully. The vast majority don't even try.
00:14:58
Speaker
So we've got like this incredible, these incredible amount of restrictions in place. And people say, well, the US allows in about a million legal immigrants a year. That's more than any other country. It's like, yeah, sure. We're also the third biggest country in the world. As a percentage of our population, we let in almost nobody. It's equal to about 0.3% of the US population annually we allow in. By comparison,
00:15:21
Speaker
You know, Canada and Australia allow immigrants equal to about 2% of their country's population every year. They're about six times more open than the United States is in terms of like that kind of measurement controlling for the population of the destination country. So the United States is incredibly restrictive and incredibly desirable and as a result we have enormous black markets.
00:15:43
Speaker
So as a result, and so like if you're a low skilled worker overseas who doesn't have a lot of education, doesn't have any family in the United States, there's basically no way for you to get a green card.
00:15:54
Speaker
like it just doesn't exist. So if you apply the current legal immigration system that we have backwards in time, virtually none of us would be here because virtually none of our ancestors would have been able to fit through these incredibly complex regulations to be able to come to the United States lawfully. So here we are. We're in this situation where lots of people want to come here, lots of Americans want to hire them, but they can't do it. Like the saddest part of my job is having to tell people that Ellis Island closed down over a century ago.
00:16:23
Speaker
And they just don't know. It blows their mind. Yeah, that's interesting. I calculated out that if you had the same level of immigration, the view of justice that Ellis Island did in some of its busiest years, and you applied it to today, it'd be 4.7 million people a year legally coming into this country. Right now, what is the number on legal immigration? About a million people legally? Yeah, it's about a million or so. So we would have nearly five times, if we had a legal system like Ellis Island, we could accommodate five times as many people, if we were having the same rate.
00:16:52
Speaker
you know, per our population. Yeah, I mean, I've done the calculation at different times and I get, you know, a similar number, somewhere between three and five million people coming in per year, which is substantially more open than the current system. Yeah.
00:17:10
Speaker
All right, let's go to let's go to another myth. I am saddened by how often I hear this, but I think Elon Musk posted about this yesterday that immigrants are effectively invaders. There's military age males coming in. I hear this phrase all the time that
00:17:27
Speaker
Oh, you know, if they had guns, it's basically an invasion. They're coming through the border and now the Democrats want to give them legal firearms and et cetera, et cetera. I hear the military-aged males quote a lot. So what does the facts say on the demographic makeup of who is coming over the border or who at least is immigrating here overall? And do you have any commentary on that specific one?
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, so immigrants tend to be a little bit younger than native-born Americans They are a little bit more likely to be men a little they're they're healthier on average and native-born Americans not as many degenerative or other Health problems, but when I hear military age male, I think that's just another way of saying prime age worker Somebody who's young and in the workforce like getting started. Okay. What's the problem with that? Like if they're all elderly people
00:18:20
Speaker
who are coming here that they'd all
00:18:24
Speaker
you know, they'd be much less likely to work and that'd be bad. And then we get hit with the criticism that they're all coming here to retire and get on Medicare and social security. So it's like, you can't win in these types of arguments, right? You say one argument and you shut it down and then they switch to another and you shut that down and you switch to another and then they come back to the original one or they contradict themselves. I mean, it's just goofy. I mean, on the point about like, yeah, it's like, they find something to complain about that.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, it's totally, it's very frustrating, but in the American welfare state, to go back to that also point for a second, the American welfare state primarily helps three groups of people, and that's sick elderly women. Sick is Medicare and Medicaid, elderly is Social Security and Medicare, and then women is, in two ways, most of the means-tested welfare programs are designed for single mothers and their children.
00:19:15
Speaker
And then also women live longer than men because men behave stupidly. And so they get more social security and Medicare for longer because they live longer. But immigrants are mostly healthy young men. So there's just this fundamental disconnect between who the intended beneficiaries of the welfare state are and who the immigrants are. But when I hear the term invasion, invasion means military.
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah. It means a conquest, right? Like if you take a look at a picture of Germans going to Paris in May of 1940 at the head of an army and compare that to like German immigrants coming to the United States to work, I mean, those pictures are different. What they are doing is different. It is not an invasion.
00:19:58
Speaker
but under any normal definition or any definition of the word that people can use. So I hear all these nativists talk to me about how immigrants need to learn English and blah, blah, blah, and then they misuse the English language in incredibly sloppy and frankly silly absurd ways in order to try to score rhetorical points. But the point is also, it's not just rhetoric necessarily, but it's also legal. So if it is an invasion,
00:20:24
Speaker
If it really is, and the laws say it is, and the courts say it is, and that means you can shoot them. Because if it's an invasion, you can shoot people. That's part of it. We'd be all for that. Hey, Chinese army's coming across the border. Yeah, let's shoot them. That would be fine, right?
00:20:42
Speaker
Well, if it's legally. In many cases by the Republican Party now, or at least by the presidential nominees, he actually called to shoot people. But I do think that if that actually started happening, if we saw dead bodies put on the ground by American troops, I would damn well hope that the American people would say something about that and oppose them. Oh, absolutely. Which says that their rhetoric is not matching up with their actions because they wouldn't support shooting people on the border. Absolutely.
00:21:07
Speaker
You know, like, Greg Abbott has said some, like, pretty poorly thought-out things about this, saying, like, we've done everything except, you know, try to stop the migrants except shooting them, and if we did, we'd probably be charged with murder. He said, like, something like that, and that way, and I'm like, okay, that's a pretty crazy way to say it, but I also don't think he wants to do that, right? And I don't think anybody really thinks it's an invasion, because if they did, then the implications are, well, then why aren't you shooting people who come across the border?
00:21:34
Speaker
Like we would if it were invading army, but obviously it's not and nobody or very few people are seriously calling for that So it's just like sloppy rhetoric And a half-hearted way to get like more government powers Texas is gonna lose all these lawsuits where it talks about invasion They'd recently lost one where the judge basically mocked them like mercilessly
00:21:59
Speaker
for this invasion matter because it's not invasion in any way. So it's just silly. You know, it's just like rhetorical escalation. You can't argue against immigration. You've used up all the scary words while we got to get another scary word to gen people up. So I'm curious like what the next scary word is going to be after invasion. Well, immigration is one of those
00:22:21
Speaker
one of those topics that I really think that Republicans and Democrats, they want to use immigration as a way to gain support. Republicans want to use it as a fear tax. Democrats kind of say, we'll try to fix it. But in reality, they don't really seem to move things forward in a meaningful way. We had the Senate bill that got shut down because Trump essentially told Mike Johnson, this chair of the
00:22:49
Speaker
Speaker of the Speaker of the House. No, don't do that. It needs to be fixed during my administration, which fixed is going to be an interesting way to describe whatever Trump would end up doing. But I really think that immigrants have become a political pawn and they've been bounced into a political football and bounced around back and forth. How do we get past that? And maybe I'm skipping ahead in the conversation, but I think how do we get past this? How do we actually have meaningful reform on immigration when we have everyone on both sides using
00:23:17
Speaker
you know, combative language and nobody's really sitting down going, OK, here's some real practical solutions to move this issue in a good way. Because, yes, you said you mentioned chaos at the border. I have friends of mine. They're completely for an Ellis Island style immigration. But even they say the chaos at the border is unacceptable.
00:23:33
Speaker
So I think that is the reason why we're not going to have any kind of resolution anytime soon on this in Congress is because the chaos scares the heck out of people. And I understand that. I understand that. It really is chaotic and out of control. I call it the immigration catch-22. You know, in order to get immigration reform,
00:23:51
Speaker
You have to have the border under control and people think that the U.S. government is in control so that they will be comfortable liberalizing it. But you can't get the border under control without a liberalization because it's like this huge black market. So there's just like enormous catch-22. And so what we need is the president has an enormous amount of power in this area.
00:24:13
Speaker
So the president is going to have to use some of his executive authority to basically regularize and increase lawful pathways of people. And President Biden, to his credit, did that with folks from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti, where the number of people who are able to fly in lawfully on a parole program and not cross the border illegally
00:24:38
Speaker
has increased substantially. And as a result of that, people from those countries crossing the border illegally has diminished quite a bit. So he needs to expand those programs to other countries, expand those ways to come in. If we do that, then maybe we can get a handle on the chaos and people can come together to try to liberalize. But it's not, I mean, it's just not going to happen as long as we have this chaos.
00:25:01
Speaker
Interesting. So let's let's do another one. You actually I think had a viral clip a couple of years ago. And correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was Chip Roy in a congressional hearing that had effectively a meltdown with you when you gave him the facts about terrorism and immigrant, you know, and how illegal immigrants maybe play a role in domestic terrorism.
00:25:24
Speaker
For the sake of our audience, we will probably insert that clip here. But I do want to ask you, are terrorists coming over the southern border, Alex? And if so, what kind of a threat do we have here?
Security Concerns and Assimilation Success
00:25:38
Speaker
So, since 1975, which is as far back as we have data on this, zero Americans have been murdered in a terrorist attack on US soil committed by somebody who came in as an illegal immigrant. Zero have been injured in such attacks.
00:25:59
Speaker
So historically, it hasn't been a problem. There are arrests of people on the terrorism screening database, which is basically just the terrorist watch list along the border. As far as we can tell, a large portion, maybe half of those people, are from Colombia, former members of the FARC and other guerrilla groups.
00:26:23
Speaker
who have never targeted or threatened the United States, by the way. So these are people who are on a list because of the expansive terrorism list put together by the US government. There has, as far as I can tell, never been a prosecution of any one of these people for any terrorism-related defense when they are captured on the border, and there's been a few hundred during the Biden administration, because there's no indication that any of them have been planning an attack.
00:26:53
Speaker
Most recently, like earlier this week or on the weekend, this fellow from Lebanon was arrested crossing the border and he said in a health screening that he was won a member of Hezbollah. He trained with Hezbollah for years. He joined Hezbollah because it's his duty to kill non-Muslims. He wants to go to New York to plant a bomb, but he left Lebanon because he doesn't want to kill people and he's afraid of Hamas.
00:27:23
Speaker
This was in a health interview. So clearly this person is insane. Like this is the first time in history when somebody like had
00:27:33
Speaker
like stall that box in a forum that says, are you a terrorist and checked it? Right. And the story doesn't make any sense. And even like the normal sort of nativist, I know in the media who report this stuff breathlessly, we're kind of like, Oh, this is kind of weird. Like this guy clearly is a screw loose. So that's the type of stuff that you see happen a lot of the time. I not quite that extreme. Yeah.
00:27:57
Speaker
because that was extremely weird. But those are like the types of threats that are coming across. The annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack on US soil committed by a foreigner is about one in 4.4 million per year going back to 1975. Zero of those people have been killed by a terrorist who entered the United States as an illegal immigrant. The terrorists who have come in from overseas to attack the United States have come in mostly on tourist visas.
00:28:25
Speaker
A handful of student visas and a handful of other visas. Not unlawfully, not illegally. So there absolutely is a risk. There's always a risk for anything. It's above zero and a legal immigrant could cross the border and commit a terrorist attack. But I think it's a very small chance.
00:28:46
Speaker
very remote chance and even if it happens once or twice, it will not be a source of a lot of terrorism in the United States. So it could happen.
00:29:01
Speaker
think it probably won't happen, but even if it does happen, it'll be extremely rare and it will be not that damaging. If you looked at the amount of time that a lot of the people in this kind of nativist strain spend talking about terrorist illegal immigration threat, you would think it's like
00:29:21
Speaker
the biggest driver, like it's a major subset of immigration. So I appreciate you dispelling that because it is obscene. It's how disproportionate the coverage is on that. And I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier around the fear. I mean, they benefit from fear. Both sides benefit from fear in many ways. Well, one thing I was going to say is that I believe, if I remember correctly, one or several of the 9-11 attackers had expired visas. So they were technically illegal immigrants, right? Is that correct or no? They came in pretty different.
00:29:52
Speaker
So a couple of them did have expired agreements. They didn't enter the country illegally, but they had an expired agreement so people can say, oh, they were illegal immigrants right at the time. So they use that as an excuse to say, oh, illegal immigrant, use this. And in reality, they're talking about two entirely different scenarios.
00:30:11
Speaker
So a lot of them, some of them had expired visas, but a lot of them, their visas had expired, but they had not become illegal immigrants yet because there's a visa renewal period. And many of them actually like embarrassingly. So after 9-11, when the government reorganized and created the Department of Homeland Security, initially President Bush did not want to get rid of the old INS.
00:30:35
Speaker
even though he thought they had messed up. However, one of the 9-11 terrorists whose visa had expired got a visa renewal after the attack, like months later. And Bush was like, all right, that's it. Get rid of him. At that point, it went politically, yeah. So that's what a lot of those cases are. And that's also just a problem with the US immigration system. Is somebody an illegal immigrant can oftentimes be in a very difficult question to answer.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah. Because visas go in and out. They expire. People change visas. That's all legal to do. You have grace periods, extenuating circumstances, all types of stuff, extensions. It happens. So is somebody illegal at different times? It's very difficult to answer. So under different interpretations, none of those terrorists were illegal immigrants.
00:31:30
Speaker
at the time under different interpretations that I think are actually kind of more reasonable interpretations of the law. Some of them probably were illegally present and under other ones like, you know, the vast majority of legal immigrants in the US have been illegal at one time or another. So it's just, it's a mess. I went to college here in Dallas at a community college. And one of the things I knew many people who were there simply, or who were in college, but they were wondering, when college ended, they were on student visas and like,
00:31:59
Speaker
These people have lived their entire life.
00:32:01
Speaker
in America, except for a few months, maybe years at the very beginning of their lives, and they had lived outside. So that meant that they were, as long as they were a student, they could remain. But as soon as that ended, they didn't really know what their options were. I mean, imagine that. Imagine living your entire life in a place, but having an end date to when you had to leave where you'd grown up, where you were born. Or not even born, but where you had lived your entire life, made your home. I can't imagine it.
00:32:31
Speaker
it's an enormous amount of government power over people's lives and you know i'm a libertarian but there are definitely times when the government should have power
00:32:40
Speaker
or people you know it's protect individual rights individual liberties people aggressive against each other etcetera but there is no good justification for this enormous amount of power and control which uh... is why it's so frustrating to see people who call themselves libertarians uh... occasionally defended and i think it partly comes from the fact that most of them probably aren't actually libertarians are just like populist
00:33:06
Speaker
who like the rhetoric occasionally, which, okay, fine. Or they're really just conservatives who like to smoke pot sometimes, and it's like, okay, fine, that doesn't make you a libertarian, dude. And then other times, I think it comes from a place of ignorance and confusion. So if the laws were such that basically anybody who isn't a violent or property criminal or a terrorist threat or had a serious disease who come to the United States legally to live and work,
00:33:36
Speaker
If that were the law, but there are all these like large number of illegal immigrants, I would be concerned about them. Cause I'd be like, what are you doing? Like, why are you here illegally? Like, what are you hiding? And what I think is a lot of these libertarians honestly think that we have like an Ellis Island immigration system where anybody can come here legally. In which case, if I thought that were true, like that idea is like understandable. If you're totally ignorant and don't know anything, it's totally reasonable opinion to have.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, and in reality, if we got if we return to an LSI island type situation, the chaos of the border, in many cases would be resolved and a lot of the we wouldn't even be or many instances having these conversations about these challenges and these myths. So, okay, let's do two more. We've got about 15 or so more minutes before we need to close the show.
00:34:23
Speaker
Immigrants aren't integrating into American society. I want to talk just a big picture about what is assimilation look like? What do you think best practices are in that regard? Do you feel like that's a true statement that immigrants are coming over the border and not integrating? And the other thing I'd like to add to this too is the conversation also about European immigration, because I think there's a difference between
00:34:43
Speaker
How immigrants integrate in the US and how they don't or do in European Union because it's an interesting contrast between cultures because I'd be very curious as your thoughts on that aspect as well. Sure, so I'll start with the United States. First we gotta say like what do we mean by assimilation?
00:35:02
Speaker
And when you take a look at features of language, religiosity, like how often you attend religious services, are you a believer? Civic participation, like voting, joining the military, volunteering, family size, income, and education. You know, economist Jacob Vidor at the University of Washington found that by the third generation, which is the grandkids of the immigrants, there's no statistically significant difference between them and Americans who have been here for a longer period of time.
00:35:32
Speaker
So it takes a little time, but on average it looks pretty well. Now it's a little bit different for different groups. High-skilled immigrants, it's very quickly. It's usually during their generation or their kids where they're integrated and assimilated. Lower-skilled immigrants, sometimes they can take three or four generations, depending because they just have further to go.
00:35:50
Speaker
But it's really going pretty well, and one of the ways in which this gets confused is people will look at, say, Hispanics in the United States, and they will say, well, you know, Hispanics at the second to third generation, you don't see much improvement in terms of education, in terms of income, what's going on there. And that's part of a phenomenon called ethnic attrition, where you have longer settled groups of an ethnic minority like Hispanics,
00:36:17
Speaker
Each generation is much less likely to identify as Hispanic. So why would that matter in terms of undercounting assimilation? It matters because people who are more upwardly mobile get more education, have higher incomes, etc. are much more likely to marry outside of their ethnic group. As a result, their kids are much less likely to identify as Hispanic.
00:36:40
Speaker
So when you correct for this and track all the descendants of Hispanic immigrants, they look about the same as all other native born Americans by the third generation in terms of education and income. So it's going pretty well. And it's been going pretty well as long as we have data. Hispanic immigrants today look a lot like Italians 100 years ago in terms of their rate of assimilation.
00:37:08
Speaker
Europe is a little different or some different things going on in Europe. I think that a couple differences is one, the problems in Europe are vastly overblown. A lot of Middle Eastern and African immigrants are doing quite well in Europe and their kids are doing well. I have lots of family members in Europe who immigrated there from the Middle East who are like second and third generation.
00:37:36
Speaker
you know they're not muslims and they consider themselves french and they've got all the annoying french things they're basically like a bunch of european secular people who like french food and do all the french stuff that french people do and they consider themselves french but you do have some groups of people in some pockets where it's not going so well and to the extent that it's not going well one we always hear about the problems we never hear about the successes two
00:38:01
Speaker
A lot of the problems are exacerbated by bad European welfare and economic policy that, one, make it difficult to get a job, especially if you're low-skilled because of labor market rules and regulations. And then secondly, basically pay you not to work by keeping you in public housing. And the effect of this is, one, to slow assimilation of the people who are there, and then two, to a select for a different group of people. You're selecting for people from the Middle East and North Africa,
00:38:32
Speaker
who are less ambitious and less willing to work. You're instead selecting people who want to come for benefits. And one of the great things about immigration, at least in the United States, where you have less access to these programs, is that it selects for people who are more ambitious and want to work hard and succeed. And that's very difficult to measure.
00:38:51
Speaker
surveys or through some kind of exact objective data but we know that it's there. Europe does a pretty poor job of selecting for people like that instead they select more for people who want government benefits and safety and so that's just like a different type of mindset so not all the problems are due to that but a lot of the problems are due to that so if you want to really like reduce that golf
00:39:14
Speaker
And the way you know this is you take a look at Middle East and North African immigrants to the United States and they actually have higher education and income levels than white native born Americans.
The American Dream and Job Creation
00:39:24
Speaker
So it's just vastly different and it's because of selection effects. The people who decide to come to the United States and who are able to do so are more ambitious and better off and do better, work harder, and are more upwardly mobile than people who decide to go to a large welfare state.
00:39:41
Speaker
I think that has a lot to do with America's global cultural kind of place. And I think that just anecdotally, in the international travel that I've done, it almost feels to me like the American dream is more alive and well in the form of foreigners' minds when they think about America than it is in native born Americans in some cases. This is not always true for everyone. But it's almost, I think that this concept of America as a land of opportunity is something that
00:40:09
Speaker
A lot of Americans have stopped believing in the last decade, but I go overseas and I talk to people. It does not seem to have waned, right? It seems like that's that cultural truth is still something. You're still the beacon on a hill. Immigrants believe in the in the United States and the American dream more than native born Americans do. It feels like. Because native born Americans don't have the experience of living overseas in a poor country where they don't have political freedom or
00:40:39
Speaker
civic freedoms or all the other individual rights that we take for granted. So it's easy for us to be pessimistic, right? I'm a libertarian who works as a think tank in Washington, D.C., because I see all these problems in the United States that I want to fix, right? So I'm guilty of this sometimes too. But the problems we have here are much better than the problems that people have in other countries, but they don't even have that modicum of freedom. And Americans don't realize this.
00:41:04
Speaker
Oftentimes that our ancestors came here from other countries because it was better here and it is still better here We just forgot and immigrants are voting with their feet every single day They come to this country desperate to come here legally or illegally and every other way and that should tell us something
00:41:24
Speaker
That should tell us a lot more than frankly a rant by a left-wing journalist on TV about how racist we are or whatever kind of nonsense he wants to talk about. Or right-wingers who think the socialists are about to take over and destroy this country and woke this or whatever is going to destroy America. These people are way too pessimistic.
00:41:43
Speaker
about the United States, about how free it is, and about how we really do have something great here. The rest of the world can see it. I think we need to see it more often, frankly. We need to be a little bit more optimistic about our civilization.
00:42:13
Speaker
an entire line of my history. So I go all the way back to the Mayflower. I've had, the name Casey came over in the 1700s. I've had immigrants all through every, almost every generation in American history. I've got an immigrant coming over. So I have connections with everyone. I think the latest one was my great grandfather coming over from England back in like right around 1900 or so. What's your immigrant story? Like where you said you had a Persian West name. What's your immigration story to the US?
00:42:42
Speaker
So this is kind of a funny conversation. Let me start talking about the question before I answer the question, if you don't mind. I went to grad school in London, and then half of my flatmates were European or Asian, the other half were American. And it's just common when Americans meet each other and are becoming friends or acquaintances, you ask like, hey, where are your ancestors from, right? It's common. I've done that throughout my entire life. And so we did that in this flat, right?
00:43:12
Speaker
with the Americans and all these Europeans and Asians are watching us, like have this conversation. And they were just like so weirded out. They're like, what do you mean? Like, what do you mean like where you came from? Like, what are you talking about? And we had to explain like, yeah, it's just like America is not a country tied together by like ethnicity or race or whatever. It's not a group like that. It's a civic identification of people who came from lots of different places.
00:43:41
Speaker
And that was just like, boom, like you see their brain, like in that bad meme of like, like, it's just so radically different from how most other people in most other countries think about their, you know, what it means to be a member or a citizen of those countries. So, so I'll say this, like, I don't have like an interesting immigration story. I think we all do, like you said, my paternal grandparents came from Iran in the 1940s.
00:44:08
Speaker
My mother's side going back to the 1600s different family members from all over Western Europe Germans a lot of Germans a lot of Scots from the McDonald clan a lot of English and some French Jews and if you fled like in the late 19th century, so
00:44:29
Speaker
It's pretty like, I'm a mutt, you know? I just need my kids to marry somebody from Central to South America and somebody from East Asia. And like, I'm golden. You've got the entire globe diverse represented there, that's awesome.
00:44:43
Speaker
Um, mine's a lot more boring too. I think I'm the same as Jonathan. They all came in from Prussia in like the, uh, the early 18th century. And, uh, on both sides of my family is either Prussia or German, but I digress. Let's do one more myth, Alex, before we break, if that's okay with you. Um, the last one, which is also when we hear a lot, immigrants are stealing jobs. We touched on a little bit of this, but let's talk about demand and how immigrants contribute to the economy. Or if they don't, are they stealing jobs from Americans? What does that look like?
00:45:12
Speaker
Yeah, so the thing to remember is it's supply and demand, not just supply. So more workers come in, supply of workers increases.
00:45:24
Speaker
Immigrants are people, though. They buy things. As a result of this, demand goes up. The net effect is wages are about the same as they were before, or even a little bit higher is what we find. There are other more complicated economic things going on. But interestingly, immigrants actually compete with other immigrant workers far more than they compete with native born Americans.
00:45:46
Speaker
because they have similar skills to other immigrants, whereas they have different skills from us. Immigrants are more likely to be either incredibly highly educated or have a very low level of education, Americans are mostly in the middle. So there's just like not that much labor market competition.
00:46:03
Speaker
Immigrants create more jobs than they take, than they occupy, I guess, working in the US economy. They are twice as likely to be entrepreneurs and to start businesses as Native-born Americans, so they end up employing.
00:46:17
Speaker
a large number of people and you know the way that markets work is you know it's called a lump of labor fallacy is what you talked about the idea like there's a set number of jobs there's a fixed pie if an immigrant comes in he takes something away from somebody else I mean that's a very like pre-capitalist mode of thinking
00:46:35
Speaker
about how supply and demand, how the economy works. And immigrants come in, they create more resources than they consume. That's why we have this glorious civilization, as most of us do that anyway, maybe not criminals in prison and some other people. But, you know, we produce more than we consume.
00:46:52
Speaker
And immigrants do not take on that. They make on that. This is not a fixed pie. And by the way, every economic argument against immigration is also an argument against having children. I was about to say.
00:47:08
Speaker
Everyone. Oh, well, they're not part of our culture. It's like, yeah, I have three little kids at home. None of them speak English. They haven't assimilated yet. They don't understand our classical liberal norms in the US. Yeah, no kidding. My kids punch each other all the time. They don't understand that kind of stuff. They don't like sharing. Oh, not sharing, I guess, a bad one. But they don't respect prior property or each other's bodily autonomy. Give me a break.
00:47:33
Speaker
Oh, they're a drain on the welfare state. Yeah, I got some kids who go to school. They're a bunch of welfare bums. And guess what? They don't have jobs either. They don't pay taxes. They're living at my house rent free. What's going on here? And they're going to be workers eventually taking somebody's job.
00:47:51
Speaker
You know, it's the same thing that we hear about it all the time. Oh, and young people are more likely to be criminals, too. Like, okay, fine. Like, so if that's really what you believe, that's really what you think, then the worst thing that can happen is when people give birth, too, and have more humans. But I am of the opinion, like Julian Simon, like other economists, like people who have studied this, like I think normal people would tell you that more people are good.
00:48:16
Speaker
people are a blessing, and we should have more of them, whether it's from births and procreation, or if it's from immigration. Not only is the economic argument for more immigration the same as for having more children, it's also the same for individual rights and individual liberty. Because every application against, where you use the state against an immigrant, it means that they can use the state against you, because they are one and the same.
00:48:43
Speaker
There is no difference between the two as far as the individual liberty goes. Now, I understand there's rights for citizenship, right? Or we call them rights, but they're really citizen responsibilities that we may not hand out to every single immigrant that comes in. That there needs to be some citizenship test, et cetera, et cetera. That's fine. But as far as individual liberty goes, as far as property rights, as far as their right to bear arms, their right to free speech, every single one of them, if you restrict their rights based on where they are born, whether or not government says they're an illegal or not,
00:49:12
Speaker
That means that they will define illegal however they want to if they want to take their rights away. And that's absolutely what we see now. So many rules and regulations that started out as immigration restrictions are now rules and regulations that apply to everybody. So I don't know if you recall, but the last time you started a job, you had to fill out a form, a government form, called an I-9.
00:49:37
Speaker
That I-9 form is part of immigration enforcement to make sure that you're not unlawfully working in the United States. If you got a job at many employers, they will check your identity through a government system called E-Verify, which was created to make sure that workplaces don't employ people who are ineligible to work because they're illegal immigrants in the United States. There are so many of these rules across the board that all people have to follow in the United States, otherwise they don't make any sense.
00:50:05
Speaker
that are founded and created specifically for immigration enforcement. And people need to realize that every rule against immigration is a rule against Americans. Also in the fact that if the government says you can't, immigrants can't come here, that also means that I can't deal with them in a way I want to.
00:50:25
Speaker
Freedom of association is a two-way street, right? The government telling you you're not allowed to associate with people. You know, a lot of libertarians talk about, oh, I should have the freedom of association and not be able to associate with somebody of a certain skin tone or whatever it is. They love to be bold about that messaging. But when government says, no, you're not allowed to associate with people because they were born below a certain line on a map that was drawn 100 years ago, then these people, they clam up and they don't want to talk about it.
00:50:55
Speaker
But that is the exact same freedom of association. It goes both ways. Absolutely, it goes both ways. And legally, Americans should, I think, be able to choose who they want to associate with, both domestically in the example that you gave, but also people born in other countries.
00:51:15
Speaker
Like you said, freedom of association works both ways and if we believe in it, we need to apply it consistently. Even when we may be skeptical. Especially when we may be skeptical. As long as they're peaceful people, there should be no restrictions on it.
00:51:39
Speaker
Let's end it there since we're about at time. Alex, first of all, thank you for your time. Thank you for all the advocacy that you've done both in Congress and in your personal life. I greatly appreciate that. I do want to ask if there's anything that you'd like to maybe give a shout out to our audience or anything you'd like to plug. I mean, the floor is yours.
00:52:00
Speaker
Well, please check out our work at the Cato Institute on immigration. We do quite a lot of original research on this topic. We're in the media all the time writing popular pieces and detailed research on immigration and other topics from the libertarian perspective. So please check us out at CATO.org. I want to echo what Josh said about appreciating your work. And I told you this a month or two ago when we met at David Bowes
00:52:29
Speaker
birthday party, I just appreciate the hard work that you put into. Immigration is one of those topics that's always been close to my heart and my soul, and it's one of the reasons why I've gotten into this space just to talk about these issues, because I think they are important, not only because a restriction on immigration is a restriction on ourselves, but also because these are people desperate for freedom. They want freedom. Why are we keeping it from them? And it's mutually beneficial for everyone. So, no, well said, Jonathan. Alex, thank you again for your time.
00:52:57
Speaker
It's been a pleasure. For our audience's sake, if you want to learn more about Project Liberal, we're a nonpartisan pack dedicated to promoting the values of liberalism in American politics. You can learn more at our website at projectliberal.org and sign up. I would encourage you if you're interested in meeting the community to join our Discord at projectliberal.org slash Discord. We have hundreds, I think we just crossed 500 members in there of young people from every corner of the globe that are passionate about liberal values, so it's a great community to get plugged into.
00:53:23
Speaker
But we will see you guys probably within the next two weeks with another episode. Thank you again