 All right, welcome everybody. I think we'll get started. Hello. I'm so excited to see such a big crowd here today. My name is Rick Vandenberg, and I'm a professor in the Grossman School of Business and the faculty director of the UVM Janice Forum. So before we begin, I want to take a moment to tell you a bit about the Janice Forum. The Janice Forum is dedicated to this idea that we will all benefit from constructive debate. About how to resolve important social issues. Our aim is to explore problems and examine the efficacy of both decentralized solutions versus centralized solutions. So we encourage an open and constructive examination of alternative solutions into avoid rancorous and emotional discourse, which we sometimes see. So today, we are really excited to be holding this timely event on US immigration policy. The Janice Forum is run by a group of faculty from all across the campus, who I'd like to thank for their work. So just to say thank you to Caroline Beer and the Political Science Department, Jan Kearney from Medicine, Chris Kaliba from Community Development and Applied Economics, Dom Loeb from Philosophy, Kurt Ventress from the Rubenstein School of Natural Resources, Art Wolfe from Economics. And I also want to welcome Aaron Kinsvatter from the College of Education and Social Services. And he is the newest member of the faculty group. So thank you guys very much. So while we first launched the Janice Forum in 2008, this is our first event since 2012. Several people in this room included have made it possible for us to relaunch the Janice Forum and to hold this event today. First, we are very grateful to the Pizza Galley family and the Hilton family for their generosity. Their support has made it possible to sustain the Janice Forum into the future. So we're very excited about that. Second, many thanks to the John Templeton Foundation that provided a grant through the Institute of Humane Studies at George Mason University to help support today's event on immigration policy. So please join me in thanking these important sponsors of the Janice Forum. I also want to thank President Sullivan as well as Rich Bundy and Lisa Townsend from the UVM Foundation for their support of the Janice Forum. And finally, an event like this just doesn't happen without a lot of hard work behind the scenes. So please let me thank Linda Krueger, Ellen Deorsi, Nick Gingro, and John Turner from the Grossman School of Business, as well as Amanda Waite and John Riedel from UVM Communications. Thank you very much for your guys' hard work. So before we begin, I have three final comments. First, when you came in, you noticed there was a survey on your chair. This is from the Institute of Humane Studies. And they really like you to, and I would like you to as well, fill out this survey at the end of the event. And you'll notice there was a gold box at the back of the room. If you could put the survey at the end of the event, fill it out and put it in the gold box, that would be great. Or if you want, you can give the survey to me or to Art or anyone else around. Well, no, that's not true. Not anyone else around. Put it in the gold box and give it to me. Second, there's going to be a reception at the end of the debate. I hope you'll join us for the reception. And third, and finally, it is my pleasure to introduce Emerson Lin. Emerson is the publisher and editor of the St. Albans Messenger. And he has served as a moderator of past Janus Forum events. And we are excited to have him serve as a moderator today. So Emerson, welcome. He will introduce our speakers and discuss the format of the debate. Emerson, thank you. Thanks for the introduction, Rick. And welcome to another of the Janus debate series. A welcome effort by the University of Vermont to bring us a world-class talent to discuss pressing issues of the day. As has been acknowledged, the subject of today's debate is immigration. And as we saw in last night's presidential debate, there are a few issues more divisive or more compelling to the American public. Lori Clinton is inviting Donald Trump would build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. That's what we'll be exploring for the next 90 minutes. Our two speakers have highly distinguished academic records on the subject. Stephen Camarada serves as the director of research for the Center of Immigration Studies, which is a Washington DC research institute that studies the effects of legal and illegal immigration on the United States. And this is Steve. Ethan Lewis' ride to this event was a bit closer. He's an associate of economics at ARNAB and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Both of our speakers have been published extensively, are called upon routinely as experts on the issue, and have impeccable academic credentials on today's topic. The list of their accomplishments would take the rest of the afternoon just to list. The format for the debate will be as follows. And first, just to clear up any misperceptions as to how the debate will run, it will be very unlike anything you saw in last night's presidential debate. Or the one before, or the one before that. While one speaks, the other will refrain from shouting appetites, or saying, you're a puppet, or the other one saying, you're a bigger puppet. No, I'm not. Yes, you are. We hope to get just a little deeper. So here are the rules. Each speaker will have 15 minutes to present his case. After both gentlemen have made their cases, 10 minutes will be allotted each to respond. Same rules of conduct apply. But afterwards, it's your turn. We'll spend the remaining 30 to 40 minutes taking questions from the audience. And for those who would like to ask questions, we'd ask that you step up to the microphone provided. And we're going to do that right in the middle stretch here, the middle aisle. So if you want to ask a question, please just come to the middle aisle and then stand in line. We'll hand you the microphone. And then you just pass it to the person behind you. Both gentlemen have taken the other thing to remember, this is a time for questions, not a time to render your 10 minutes or your dissertation on the subject. It's a question for them. They've taken a lot of time from their schedules to arrive and to come here. And we'd like to glean as much wisdom from them as we possibly can. So that said, let's have the debate begin. And as was decided earlier, Mr. Lewis will begin with you. Thank you for that kind introduction and for having me out today. As he said, immigration has been in the news a lot lately. And there's a lot of strong claims out there about how immigration harms the US. And those strong claims, unfortunately, are often based on myths and misconceptions. And indeed, those strong claims are often refuted by a large body of evidence in economics. And finally, those myths and misconceptions often lead, unfortunately, to exactly the wrong policy conclusions about immigration. So I want to thank you guys for having this forum because I think forums like this are very important for combating those kinds of very common misconceptions. And I think I believe that both Stephen and I are going to shed a lot of light on this subject, as opposed to the heat that's been coming out of the political rhetoric of late. So I hope that's true and I'm looking forward to my talk. All right. So I entitled my talk to spelling myths about immigration to kind of get it at this contrast. So immigration is obviously a big subject and it's going to be hard to cover everything about immigration in 15 minutes. But let me give you a kind of quick overview of what the research says versus the myths. So the first myth is that immigration is harmful to US workers. So it turns out that's not true. There's a large body of evidence showing that the vast majority of native-born workers are better off, not worse off, because of immigration. And this, by the way, applies specifically to low-skill workers. And I'll try to explain that in more detail. Another myth is that immigration is a big burden on US taxpayers. This is a commonly cited reason for why we don't want immigrants. Turns out that's not true as well, although that conclusion is a little more complicated. So at the federal level, immigration is not a burden. That's where most of the discussion is, but it's not a burden at the federal level. At the state and local level it is. But in the long run, it kind of gets paid back. The literature on this is a bit flawed, in my opinion, though. So it's got some big conceptual issues. I don't know if I'll have time to talk about that, though. Another myth is that immigration raises crime rates. You look at Donald Trump, what he's really saying. And for the sake of science, I've read a lot of what Donald Trump has to say. And it's mostly about crime. And this is the one that befuddles economists the most, because this one is completely unambiguous. Immigration is lowering crime rates. Immigrants have very low propensity to commit crimes. And the reason is simple, they're here to work, basically. And so crime is not what they're after. One thing you probably have heard, which is not a myth, is that immigration is associated with a lot of things that I'll call inputs to economic growth. Entrepreneurship, patenting, high-tech sector. Those things are true. Now, I'm an academic, and so I don't want to overstate the case. I don't feel comfortable doing that. And so I should say that while all these things are true, they're also all fairly small effects. So the wage impacts, the wage gains from immigration are on the order of 1%. But there is one big winner from immigration, and I bet you can guess who that is. It's the immigrants themselves. And I might say more about that. Anyway, so I can't go into detail about all these things. That's going to take too long. So I'll just, I'll talk about one of them, and maybe I'll have some time in my response to talk about some of the other ones, but. So why do people think immigration harms workers? I think the myth usually begins with a focus on the large number of immigrants. That's kind of like, you know, that you see an eight-digit number like 42 million, and you think, oh, well, that's got to have some big impact, right? It turns out the focus on absolute numbers is wrong. I'll try to argue that why it is. But let's just go with this logic. And specifically, the way it's often presented is in comparison to another large number, which is the number of unemployed. You say, it's very common as the headlines like this, more immigrants than unemployed, right? So here's an example of this. You see it all the time. And it's, you notice that there's no causal argument here. There's not even a correlation. It's just two large numbers. And it's all by insinuation, typically. But we know what they're saying, right? We're saying, if we just sent all those pesky immigrants home, there'd be all these new jobs for native-born workers, right? They're kind of displacing native-born workers. Is that really true, though? Well, no. And why do we think that? So we think that if there's a fixed number of jobs, right? So that's where the logic of that comes from. But there's not a fixed number of jobs. Maybe a key insight from economics is there's not a fixed pie, right? The logic of the fixed number of jobs always falls through it. And I want to point out that economists have been arguing against this for the past 125 years. We've completely failed, obviously, right? So David Schloss in 1892 came out with this term, the lump of labor fallacy. And he was talking about this. He wasn't talking about immigration, but that's what he was talking about. It's just this wacky idea that refuses to die. So let me start by showing you that there's not a fixed number of jobs in the US. The number of jobs in the US has more than doubled in the past 50 years. And you can see that the past decade, in particular, up there in the corner, hasn't been great. And it is these times of slow growth that tends to bring out the feeling that life is zero sum. It isn't, but it tends to bring out that feeling. More to the point, though, there's a very large literature in economics that asks this question specifically. That is, for every immigrant who comes in and gets a job, how many natives lose their job? And the answer is zero. Indeed, it turns out, for every immigrant who comes in and gets a job, for every immigrant who comes in, there's slightly more than one job created. Let me not just assert that. Let me explain how that could happen. So the first key reason for that is immigrants aren't just here sucking money out of the economy. By virtue of being here, they demand all the things you need to live. They demand housing, food, entertainment, et cetera. And that consumer demand generates a need for workers. By the way, that's a key difference from international trade. It often gets compared to outsourcing, but a key difference is that they're here demanding things. And then there's other channels as well. Immigrants create new products that otherwise wouldn't have existed in because there's no one who has those skills, et cetera. And it turns out that this all adds up to more than one job being created for every immigrant. And so again, if we took those earlier logic too seriously, we would come to exactly the wrong policy conclusion. Sending all the immigrants home wouldn't create jobs. Most likely, it would destroy jobs. There would be fewer jobs for natives. And native unemployment would go up. OK, so maybe the fixed number of jobs idea is wacky when you think about it. But what about supply and demand? We all know more workers lower wages, right? That's kind of like econ 101. It turns out that's a myth too. And it's a little more complicated to explain. But that assumption that more workers means lower wages, that only is true if the stock of capital is fixed. So what do I mean by that? So the capital is like anything else besides workers that productively makes the economy go, like computers, buildings, this lovely auditorium, et cetera. Right, and so the idea of that immigration has to lower wages comes from the idea that when immigrants come in, the capital stock is fixed. And so each worker ends up with less capital to work with. So I have to share my machine with the new immigrant and I. So I can't work as well, right? So I'm less productive and my wages go down. And the other side of it is in this story, this is kind of like this 20-year-old labor economics, is that owners of capital win. So yeah, it's a nice theory, but it's too simple. In practice, it doesn't really happen this way. Let me explain that. So first of all, higher returns to capital induces new investment. There's a kind of enormous gain from building new computers, new buildings, et cetera, when there's more workers. And we've always known that. But the other thing about it is the story always was, oh, but that takes time. And so in the short run, workers are hurt. But in practice, immigrants, in contrast to the big numbers that I put you up at the beginning, immigration trickles in very slowly. Immigration adds less than 1,200th to the workforce each year. That's a tiny amount. By the way, it's less than native-born population growth. So the capital markets have plenty of time to adjust to kind of such small changes in workforce. So in practice, the capital per worker never gets substantially diluted. And if you don't believe me, just look at capital per worker. It's kind of not been diluted by the past 20 years of immigrant, 20, 30 years of immigration, capital per worker. It's been basically on a linear trend for a very long time. All right. So when does immigration affect wages? It's not that it never affects wages. It's just that you have to be very particular about how you understand the labor market impact of immigration. So immigration affects wages when it affects the relative numbers of different kinds of workers. Doesn't that make a little more sense? If you add low-skill workers to the economy, that's not going to push down high-skill wages. It's going to push down low-skill wages. You compete with similar workers. So immigration affects workers when it affects the ratio of different types of workers. So let me put this in simple terms. Imagine there's two types of workers, unskilled and skilled. And if that sounds over-simplified, it is. But actually, it's not a terrible approximation. So the US workforce seems like it divides into basically college-educated jobs and non-college-educated jobs. That's a pretty good approximation of the US labor market. And so then you have a pretty good simple formula for how, when immigration affects the labor market. It affects labor market when it affects this ratio of unskilled to skilled. And the formula for it is you take the ratio of unskilled immigrants to unskilled natives and subtract off the same ratio for skilled immigrants and natives. So if all immigrants were unskilled, this ratio would be big. The second one would be zero. And that makes sense, right? Push up the unskilled-skilled ratio. All immigrants are unskilled. But let's think about another case. What if this ratio was about the same as this ratio, right? So what if there were a lot of unskilled immigrants but there were also a lot of skilled immigrants? Then these two things would balance out. Basically, immigration wouldn't affect the scale ratios in the economy. It would just affect the size of the economy. And what I'm trying to argue is that the US economy is pretty good at scaling up in that way. So in general, you'd multiply this by the slope of a relative demand curve. So that's where supply and demand actually comes in. It's just a more complicated model. So let's look at this in practice. So here it is for two different decades. The number of unskilled immigrants to unskilled natives, darker bars, the number of unskilled immigrants to unskilled immigrants to skilled native, lighter bars. So what do we see? Immigration added 6% to the unskilled workforce, then 4% in the 2000s. Central American immigration's gone down. And if that's all that was going on, yeah, that would push down unskilled wages. But that's not all that's going on. That's balanced out by an inflow of highly skilled immigrants, which is roughly equal in magnitude. So the net effect is that immigration can't have much impact on the wage structure. Another way to put this is most of the public discussions are about the absolute height of these bars, but really what's relevant is the difference in the height of these bars, and that's small. One more thing. So a lot of the proposals about immigration are something of the form, let's get rid of just the unskilled ones. We don't like those guys, right? That's the typical proposal. Let's go back to the 1924 immigration law, more Europeans, right? Notice that that would not reduce labor market competition. If we got rid of the unskilled immigration, that would intensify the competition from immigration. It would dramatically increase the wage harm from immigration because we wouldn't have the unskilled unskilled balancing each other out like this. One other thing here. So that was oversimplified. There's not just two skill groups. And immigrants differ in other ways, even compared to natives with the same education level. And a key difference is English language skills. So immigrants, only about half of them are fluent in English. And as a result of this reduced English language ability, they tend to specialize in jobs where English is less important. And natives tend to specialize in jobs where English is more important. Turns out those jobs are higher paying. So the net effect when you add in that plus the fact that skills are balanced, is that most native born workers' wages go up as a result of immigration. Now someone has to pay the competition cost from immigration. And who is it? It's the immigrants and spells, especially those with low English ability. And I don't want to minimize that. So that's a kind of very vulnerable low income group. But it's useful to put it in context, which is it's in the context of the very large wage gains they get from coming to the US on the order of doubling for many developing countries. So, and kind of starting to wrap up here about my, these gains are orders of magnitude larger than any of the other things involved in the economics of immigration. The big winners from immigration are the immigrants themselves. And maybe we should think about that a little bit in our immigration policy. What I've argued today is that you don't have to, you don't need that. The US benefits from immigration. And there's reasons to argue for that. I don't need those arguments. Instead, I'll just finish by saying we're better off with immigration in a wide variety of areas. And continuing to allow immigration makes the US more dynamic, more high income and better in many ways. So I hope we continue to do so. Thanks. Well, I wanna thank the University of Vermont and the Grossman School of Business for inviting me to discuss my favorite topic. And I will try not to go too long. I love to go long. I'm reminded of an old joke that a politician, you young folks never heard of named Hubert Humphrey, once asked about a speech he gave that was really long. People came up and said it's a good speech, Hubert, but it was really long. And he said, really, I enjoyed every word of it. And when I speak, I feel that way, but somehow the audience doesn't always. So keeping that in mind, I will try to keep my talk not too long. And I've got my watch set. So I wanna give you guys a quick overview. I know you have different levels of knowledge here and maybe I'll take this off so that I can have it like this. So very briefly, the US immigration, we have about one million green cards. That's permanent immigration a year, about 66% family, some as employment, some as humanitarian people we bring in because they face a fear of persecution. We let's stay because of that. And about 5% is a visa lottery. You essentially mail your name in and we pull your name out of a hat. Then we have about two million long-term non-immigrants they're called. This is the guest workers, H1B, H2A, H2B. So that's a big number. It's about half a million people coming in a year. A lot of churn because people are coming and going. It also would include foreign students plus their family. So we have permanent immigration and then this long-term temporary immigration. And then of course we have tourists and business travelers, people who stay for a short period of time. And then finally we have illegal immigration. Usually reckoned to be 11 to 12 million people overall. We've had about 2.7 million new illegal immigrants arrive since 2010. But like the temporary population I mentioned before, a lot of churn in that population. Several hundred thousand people go home every year. Several hundred thousand people on top of that are being deported. So people are going home being deported. Some get legal status about 100,000 a year. And there are about 50,000 deaths among the illegal population. Has a low death rate. It was a relatively young population. But the number coming in until very recently looked to be roughly balanced with the number going home since about 2009. So it dropped after 2008. Then it sort of stabilized for a while. But there's evidence, but we're not sure maybe going back up. But even when it's stabilized, about 350,000, 400,000 people are coming in every year. Other important characteristics of the illegal population is that we think it has about a 10th grade education on average. So that's important because it helps explain what kind of jobs they have. They tend, but not entirely, to be at the bottom end of the labor market. They tend to use a fair amount in public services, particularly on behalf of their US-born children. And they tend to have low incomes, mainly reflecting their education levels, but also partly their illegal status. But it's mainly a function of their education levels. So illegal immigrants, some are quite skilled. But the vast majority either have only a high school education or less than a high school education. There's a pretty high degree of consensus on that. OK. Just very briefly, I just kind of like this chart. This is sort of what's been happening in US immigration recently. Remember I said there's some evidence that the level of immigration is going back up and that illegal immigration is going back up as well. These color codes just show different regions of the world. One of the interesting things you'll see down here at the bottom, this is Mexico. You can see how many fewer people are coming in. This last number is 2014, 2015. That's the way the data is grouped by the Census Bureau. So the number of people from Mexico may be rebounding a little bit, but it's still nothing like it was. But what has gone way up is countries in Latin America other than Mexico, particularly Central America and the Caribbean. If I can get this to work, then look. Can you see that up there? It doesn't seem to show up. What's that? Yeah, OK. So I'll just have to point. No problem. So this is Latin America other than Mexico. That's way up. A significant component of that is illegal. These are, again, new arrivals. Just to be clear, this goes back to 1998 to 1999, and then all the way up to the most recent data we have. So it looks like the number of people is getting back to about 3 million new arrivals every two years, which is where it was back here. But here, a big chunk of this is new arrivals of long-term temporary foreign students, guest workers, and it looks to be somewhat illegal as well. So that's what's been going on in US immigration. So where is immigration taking us? So this is maybe something to think about. This shows the history of US immigration since 1990 through 2010. So the way you would read this, this shows the number in millions living in the United States. The US immigration law was changed significantly in the 1960s and subsequent changes to the law were part, but not the only reason for a very significant increase in the flow of new people. And what this shows is the share of the US population. So in 1970, 4.7% of the US population were immigrants. That's foreign born. That's legal and illegal, not a big illegal component in there. These are people who are not US citizens at birth. That's the foreign born. Here we're going to call them immigrants. Today, if we had put the number in for 2015, it's about 43, 44 million in Census Bureau data. This shows where we're headed in US immigration. So in about eight years, we're going to hit a new record. We've never had a situation where 4.8% of the US population was foreign born. It's going to top the two previous records, which one was in 1910 and one was in 1890. And then it just keeps going up and up from there. Now, since immigration is accelerating, it might be the case that these projections are a little too low, but no one knows what the future is going to be. But it is fair to say that apps and a change in US policy, we are headed into uncharted territory, a place we've never been before as a nation. So let's talk a little bit about maybe one important impact on the United States. And here I've just taken the Census Bureau projections. They are the ones in red. This shows in millions. We have about 321 million people in the United States. And assuming their baseline immigration, which is about 50 million people over the next 35 years, that's how many they expect to come, we'd reach about 398 million. If you increased it by 50%, as some people want to do, then you'd get about 433 million people in the United States total. And if you wanted to cut immigration, it too would have a big impact on the future size. So you can decide whether size matters or not. But some people might say, well, bigger population means more opportunities for businesses and consumers. Other people worry about the environment and the impact on congestion and pollution and sprawl. What you can't do is say, taking all these folks in has no impact. That's what it does. It's not really disputed. The other interesting thing is you can look at how much younger it makes us as a population. One argument for immigration is that we're an aging society, certainly true. And you can see this here, 65.9% of the US population is of working age, 16 to 65 right now. And that is going to decline quite a bit. But if you vary the immigration assumption, doesn't make that much difference. Immigrants aren't that much younger than the average American. And their families are not that much bigger. And of course, they age like everyone else over time. So immigration can increase the share of the population that's of working age. But even if you were to bump up immigration dramatically, it wouldn't have that big effect. It's not going to help us that much deal with this aging society. Now this is an important point. I want to show you what's been happening in the US labor market. And in some ways, this is the kind of thing that may be more important politically than anything else. Maybe what explains Donald Trump's popularity, despite what you could argue is a kind of ham-fisted approach to a lot of issues. If you look here, you'll see this shows here the number of people 16 to 65 holding a job. So back in 2000, it was 131.9 million today. And this is through the first part of 2016. So I updated this for you, be 142.6 million. Now the top shows the actual size of the working age population. And what it shows is there's been this kind of real problem in the US labor market that we're not creating enough jobs to absorb all the immigrants for letting in plus natural population growth. That doesn't mean that immigration somehow caused this. What is true, however, is we are having trouble generating enough jobs, though the last two years has been better. If we could have another five or six years of job growth like that, we might be able to get back. But no one disputes this number. We now have a situation where about 66 million people of working age, 16 to 65, so we're not including older folks, are not working. And it's near a record. And this is an underlying problem. Let me show you what's happened when we look at this by educational attainment. This shows the fraction of each educational group. And here we're looking at just the native-born population. We're not including immigrants. We're looking at the first quarter of each year. And this shows the fraction who actually have a job. So among high school dropouts, dramatic decline in work. Only 42% of working age, and here we're looking at 18 to 65, high school dropouts actually have a job. You can see, though, the college graduates not so bad. They're not doing so badly. But the less educated, the kind of people who Donald Trump seems to be attracting the support of, everybody agrees that their rates of work, the fraction holding a job, shows a massive decline. And everybody agrees this is not a good thing. Why is that important? Well, like the previous slide, one argument you hear, particularly from the business community, for immigration is we just don't have enough workers. But when we actually look at government data, we can find no evidence of that. Here I've been showing you employment rates. But if I showed you wages over the last, well, really 30 years, but even in the last 16 years, there's been very little wage growth for anybody. And everybody knows in economics, if you have something's in short supply, you would expect wages to increase. We can't find it. Virtually for any set of workers, it's set people at the top and some specific professions. But overall, rates of work are way down. The number of people not working is way up, and wages have stagnated. It is very hard to justify immigration on the ground that we have a shortage of workers. Now, I'd like to revisit something Ethan talked about on this question of how we might wanna think about immigrants in the labor market. And as he suggested, there's some unevenness, but he looked at it by education. Where you really see the unevenness and the potential large impact of immigration is when you do it by occupation. So for example, the way you read this of maids, hotel maids in the United States, 49% are immigrants. So a lot are immigrants, but most are still native born. And there's about a million of them who are native born. Construction laborers. There's about two million native born construction laborers. And it's about 35% are immigrant. Butcher's about 33%. Physicians is a good example of a high skilled occupation that is heavily affected by immigration. And then over here, we can see some occupations that are not still affected. So if you're a lawyer, if you are a farmer, and in here is also ranchers, farmers and ranchers, and if you're a journalist or a reporter, the impact of immigration is likely to be very small. And that probably helps explain the politics of immigration too. Because these are some very influential parts of our society and they face very little competition. And from here, where the people who face the most competition are generally the least educated, the poorest and politically the least consequential. When you look at immigration this way, you can get a better sense of why someone like Trump's message might resonate, even if he's careless to be kind. Okay, here's another issue on immigration. So I think Ethan and I really disagree on this point. And I'll summarize some other literature very briefly. There's a pretty high degree of consensus that right now immigrants create a pretty good sized fiscal drain. If you take all the taxes they pay and all the services they use, they don't cover their consumption of public services. And that's not because they don't work. Most immigrants, as Ethan correctly said, come to work, but such a large fraction of immigrants have relatively little education that they often work at the bottom end of the labor market and make very low wages as a result, often pay very little in taxes, but often use a fair amount in public services. And that's what you see here. This is the fraction of immigrant headed households using one of the major welfare programs based on census bureau data from 2012. So the way you would read this is 51% of immigrant households use one or more welfare programs. And you can see how it's high for Medicaid, high for food, somewhat high for cash, and housing is about the same. So very briefly, I'm trying to get through this quick. There was an important National Academy of Sciences study that just was released like two weeks ago in the interest of full disclosure, I was asked by the Academy to be an outside reviewer for that study. I recommended to you, it's very technical, very long, hundreds of pages. I'll briefly summarize the results. One is that immigrant progress has slowed over time. Immigrants just don't close the gap with natives the way they used to in terms of income and language acquisition. Immigrant families create a fiscal benefit. They ran a fiscal drain. Oh, what did I say there? Immigrant families create a net fiscal burden? Yes, okay. The highest estimate they came up with for the Academy was 300 billion, but they ran lots of different scenarios. They ran eight different scenarios. But no matter what assumptions you make about immigrants and their kids, they are currently a large fiscal drain. They disagreed with Ethan's position that immigration, they did not take the position that it didn't reduce wages for anyone. They said that high school dropouts seemed to be taking it on the chin. Significantly, the poorest 10% of American workers. And also, as he did indicate, immigrants earlier waves of immigrants, but one of the lower wages does benefit owners of capital. So the conclusion, the immigrant population is large and growing fast, absent a change of policy. We are headed into uncharted territory. Legal immigration is large. And remember, it's much bigger than illegal immigration. As I said, about 44 million immigrants in the US, only about 11 or 12 million are illegal. It makes our population much bigger, but only slightly younger. We really have struggled to create enough jobs since 2000, both for the immigrants and for our native born population. The winners from immigration, well, Ethan and I really agree, immigrants themselves. The other winner seems to be owners of capital and you have to decide how you think about that. The losers from immigration tend to be American taxpayers and less educated native born. And the key conclusion when thinking about immigration is some people win and some lose. Sometimes people imagine we have policies where everybody wins, but the truth of it is, like most public policies, there are winners and losers and immigration is no different. Thank you. Thank you. So Stephen said a bunch of things that are true when some that aren't, but again, I think we're still doing better than the public policy debate that we typically have. So let me go specifically to talk about some of these other things in more detail. I do appreciate you conceding the point that immigration didn't cause the high unemployment rate because that's the only relevant metric for whether we should care about high unemployment when it comes to immigration and the rest of that was a distraction. But let's talk about the fiscal burden. All right, so on the fiscal burden, it's useful to have a little history here. So this idea that immigrants are a big drain on the public fisk is a pretty old idea. So it's as far back as 1882, the kind of immigration act that was passed that year, barred from entry anyone who was so-called libel to be a public charge. And back then they had in mind pregnant women, I think basically, that's where they were trying to keep out. But it's worth putting up that this is still on the books and this is not like some archaic law like the law that makes it illegal to carry a bathtub across the Boston Common that's still on the books. This is regularly put into immigration bills in modern times. And it's worth pointing out, this was long before the era of public expenditures on for the poor and that sort of thing is kind of, it's just this idea that goes around that immigrants are a big drain. But are they really such a burden on taxpayers? My answer is no, that's the short answer. The longer answer is at the federal level, no. The state level, local level, it's yes. But in the long run it's no. So let's look at this a little more closely. So conceptually, I think where we're after is what is the causal effect of immigration on the amount of taxes each native born worker has to pay? That's what we wanna actually know, right? So that's basically unanswerable. It's, I'll say what we try to do. But there's kind of a fundamental problem of causal inference. We don't observe the US without immigrants. So what's the next best thing that people have come up with? They come up with a so-called accounting approach. And right away you're into this territory where you're thinking zero sum, right? Like you're saying, oh, add it up one way or the other and you get the cause. So the burden in this calculation is government services consumed minus taxes paid, right? That's the idea. Notice there's some issues with this right away. First of all, it assumes a static world. So there's no, in this way of doing things, there's no channel for immigration to affect growth. There's no channel for anybody to respond. We just take people as we observe them in cross-section and say that's what the effect is. On top of that, there's a major flaw. There's many, but a key one is a lot of government spending is not tied to the individual, right? So the leading example that people usually do is defense spending, but there's other categories as well. So let me break down the federal budget for you a little bit. So defense spending is about 16% of the budget and then you can throw in other categories that are like it, like embassies and such. And that adds up to about a quarter of the budget. And are immigrants generating costs as a result of their presence in the US? I mean, really ask yourself that. Like how much more does it cost to defend a country of 320 million than 280 million? My answer is zero, but maybe you can make a case for something else. Interest on the national debt, same kind of thing, right? Like that's, you know, if anything, dividing it over a larger population, so there's benefits from a larger population on the fiscal side is helpful, right? There's a case to be made for some kinds of infrastructure spending, right? Like there's kind of use costs, like higher maintenance of roads and bridges and sort of things. So maybe immigrants would contribute to that. Now, what about things that can be tied to the individual? Well, the biggest part of the federal budget is Social Security and Medicare. That's 38% of the budget. And do immigrants disproportionately use Social Security and Medicare? No, so in fact, they pay payroll taxes and a lot of them don't stick around to collect the benefits. Either they're not eligible or they go home before they can collect the benefits. Medicaid, yes. So Medicaid is something that the immigrants disproportionately use. By the way, the last column comes largely from the National Academy of Sciences report that Steven also referred to. What about income support programs? Well, what about cash assistance? That's the old bugbear of the immigration debates, isn't it, right? Is there some context, right? That's 1.4% of the budget. Food assistance, 3.2% of the budget. Now, immigrants are disproportionate users of that. They're not disproportionate users of cash assistance. They're simply not eligible. Housing assistance, same thing. They're kind of, they have lower eligibility for housing assistance. So when you add all this up, I can quote the National Academy of Sciences report that there's a lot, and it's not just them. There's a larger literature that's looked at this accounting approach and basically adds up and says, immigrants are not a fiscal drain at the federal level. So how do you come to the conclusion that it is a fiscal drain at the federal level? So basically what you have to do is make immigrants responsible for a per capita share of those categories that I said were not sensitive to the size of the population, right? So like you say, oh, because the immigrants here, they owe us like $10,000 in defense spending or whatever. I don't find that compelling, right? To me, it's not clear that adding an immigrant means defense spending has to go up by $10,000 per immigrant. But maybe you think differently. And all of the kind of scenarios that he referred to of the National Academy of Sciences, you that have a kind of fiscal burden of immigration rely on that implausible assumption. By the way, it leads to this perverse conclusion as well that native-born workers are also a fiscal drain. So we all don't pay enough taxes relative to the amount we spend at the federal level. There's a budget deficit every year and so we're all fiscal drains, right? So there is, however, a burden at the state and local level. So where does that come from? Well, all of the major fiscal cost immigration basically come through programs for children, right? That's why Medicaid use is higher among immigrants. That's why food stamp use is higher among immigrants. That's where the eligibility comes. The biggest expense by far is not at the federal level. This kind of the cash assistance, that's all like a red herring. The biggest thing is the public education system. But that, when you think about it that way, then it kind of like, why are we doing this cost accounting, right? So that we don't say, oh, education's expensive. We should just get rid of the public school system. Why don't we say that? I think we know why we don't say that because we think there's a return, right? We think we're better off as a society by having an educated population. Individuals are better off by being more educated. Indeed, this is not how you do policy evaluation. Policy evaluation, you've got to look at the benefits side as well, right? You can't just look at the cost, you've got to look at the benefits. And those benefits are clear, right? There's a literature on this specifically for immigrants that the kind of costs of educating them gets paid back. Now, I'm gonna be clear, that it doesn't necessarily get paid back to the state where they got educated, right? So it is a fiscal burden on states that never gets paid back. But that's a problem of education in general, right? People are free to move out of the state where they were born. It's not a specific problem of immigration. Indeed, and on top of this, even those public income support programs, there's a new body of work that basically says a lot of those programs have long run benefits that justify the cost of those programs. So food stamps is associated with higher human capital and earnings. There was a brief period in which we took away food stamps from immigrant families. And basically a lot of that got turned back into costs on Medicaid, right? The kind of kids' health went down in that cohort of immigrants. And as a result, we just had to spend the money on Medicaid. Medicaid, there's a nice paper by Amanda Kowalski and some co-authors, which looked at the expansion of Medicaid in the 80s and 90s. And what she found is this led to a higher adult earnings and ultimately tax payments. And if you project out the higher tax payments as a result of this kind of improved long run human capital health, et cetera, it pays back to the Treasury. So that's kind of a new literature and a lot of it hasn't looked specifically at immigrants, but it's just worth pointing out that this whole cost accounting framework leaves this kind of thing out. All right, I think I'll stop there, but thank you. No problem. Well, let's talk a little about this fiscal question, but I think Ethan has left you with a very mistaken impression of what the National Academy said. Actually what it said is on average, immigrants in the first generation are mostly are more costly to governments, mainly at the state and local level, than their native-born generations. So the fiscal deficit could be as high as $300 billion a year. Now that's looking at what they actually knew, not theorizing about how their children's children might do. Actually they did that too. They protected out 75 years. And what they said was, well, it depends on what assumptions we make. And that gets to another important point. Ethan said that immigrants are only a fiscal drain if you count defense, that's wrong. The National Academy explicitly excluded defense. It excluded things like that. And spending on the interest for the national debt and still found that immigrants were net fiscal drain. And they were net fiscal drain. For some of the reasons I've touched on, on average about 25% of immigrants don't have a high school education. The corresponding figure for the native-born is about eight or 6%, depending how you calculate it. Immigrants have somewhat lower incomes and they have higher use of public services. So they make somewhat smaller tax payments and they use a host of public services at higher rates than the native-born do. That's what the National Academy found. Now that doesn't mean, and I don't wanna be interpreting, that we should somehow cut off welfare benefits to immigrants. And that gets to another point, a mistake I think Ethan makes. He says, look, they're not eligible for these things. But if you look at it, the answer is much more complicated like everything in Washington. So for example, we passed a law in 96 that said, look, you can't use these programs until you've been here for 10 years. Okay, well that would seem to sort of settle it, at least for the legal immigrants, right? But if you're a child, yes you can. Well, then they went back and said, well, if you become disabled, yes you can. Then they went back and created something called the indigent immigrant. If the immigrant becomes poor, then he can use it too. In other words, we entirely gut those provisions. So although we still have on the books this notion of what's called a public charge, this idea that if you become dependent on welfare services will kick you out. I wanna see a show of hands where people might estimate how many people have actually been investigated for immigrants, despite reasonably high welfare use rates, have actually been investigated in the last decade as a public charge. Now enforcing that provision that Ian Ethan correctly said goes back over 100 years. Would you guess it was 10,000, 20,000? The answer is one. And they dropped the investigation. In other words, it's entirely meaningless. And that's what you have to understand about policy. Maybe if you take nothing else away from this talk, just because something's on the books doesn't mean it has any impact. Just because we have a law for something doesn't mean. And what we know is immigrants are using these services at significantly higher rates and it's not because they don't work, it's because they have lower income in these programs. They're supposed to use these programs. But if you wanna avoid those costs, then you'd need a different immigration policy. You can't bring poor people in the country and not expect this outcome. And as they say, a much larger fraction of immigrants have modest levels of education and that's what creates the fiscal drain and that's what everybody finds. Now, that doesn't mean we should run out there and cut immigrants off from welfare. But it does mean that you should be honest with the public. Don't sell them a bill of good saying this is gonna be some great deal for the public fist. Because they're gonna react to that when they can see with their own eyes, there's something going on. I have a sister-in-law. She's not someone who follows public policy. She has very little education. She just works at a target store. And as she said to me, well, I tell you, everybody with those BEBT cards seems to be people with an accent here in my community. And that's how the public sees it. And the data supports the general observation that immigrants are making significant use of these programs and that is the source of their fiscal drain. As I said, the National Academy ran eight different scenarios excluding things like defense, excluding things like interest on the national debt, these pure public goods. And they still found that immigrants were significant fiscal drain overall. They projected out into the future and they did eight different scenarios there. Four of those were negative. Four of those were positive. But it depends on what assumptions you make. On the question of whether the next generation will pay things back. I think there, there's reasons to be very hopeful and reasons not to be. Let me tell you the hopeful reason. When we look at the people who are the children of immigrants today, we find that for the most part, there are exceptional groups. Unfortunately, Mexican Americans are one exception, which I'll talk about in a second. But for the most part, immigrants have closed a lot of the gap that existed in their parents' generation. That's the good news. The bad news is today's immigrants, as I said, as a national county, are not closing the gap as fast as they did. So when we look at someone who's 35 and see what their income and education level is, who is the child of an immigrant, their parents entered 50 years ago. Then they eventually had them and now that child has grown to adulthood. When we look at immigrants who've arrived in the last 35 years, we do not find the same progress that those immigrants had made who entered 50 or 60 years ago. Now there's always limitations in the data and you can always look at it different ways, but there's a pretty high degree of consensus and that's what the National Academy pointed out, is that today's immigrants are not doing as well as previous generation's immigrants. So to assume that the second generation will then suddenly close that gap is to say the least, very, very optimistic. We know that their parents are not doing as well as the previous wave. So that's what's really important, but we don't know. No one knows what spending will be in 10 years, let alone 30 years. So projections out into the future and assumptions about the future are largely speculation. However, what we can say is when we look at the actual taxes immigrant families pay and the actual services they're using, no matter what assumption they make, you get a large negative drain and that is the reality of immigration and that I think is one of the things that sours the public. I don't think the solution to that is somehow try to cut immigrants off from the programs. We've tried it, it fails. They have citizen children and there's all these pressure groups that will come in and rewrite the regulations as I've explained to. I could give you some other examples. So it's not gonna be possible to stop that from happening. If you want immigrants who are likely to be self-sufficient, you would have to move to a different immigration system that's much more selective. As I said at the outset, our immigration system mostly brings in folks based on their family relationships, not their educational attainment, not their likelihood of being self-sufficient. Now, let me just add or conclude. I agree with my co-panelist that the big beneficiaries of immigration are the immigrants themselves and that can be used as a perfectly reasonable justification for immigration, it seems to me it can. But don't pretend that these huge costs don't exist, be honest with the public and say, look, yes, there's a very large fiscal cost but we're doing this because these folks will eventually, they're gonna make a lot more money by coming here and hopefully over the generations, they and their children and their children's children will close the gap with natives and it's they who are benefiting from this process but don't sell the public a bill of goods on it. Thank you. Okay, at this point, we'll take questions from the audience and as I said earlier, what I'd like you to do is just stand up and come to the center aisle and we will pass the microphone to you but we need people to stand up and ask the question. Gentleman right here, Rick, let's start with him. And could you also direct your question to one or the other or both? Okay, hello, okay, awesome. So hi, my name's Nick. I have a question for both of you and so you've both talked about and I believe, pregnant if I'm wrong, but you both agree that the fiscal burden that we see is true at the state and local level and I imagine that part of that is because or part of the issue is that immigrants tend to come into certain areas of the country and not to other areas of the country with different frequencies. So like for example, Montana probably experiences less immigration than say Texas. So do you think that in a theoretical scenario if immigrants came more evenly spread across the country and entered into many different areas rather than just say the Southern states and major port cities, would that, would that fiscal burden not be as bad if it were spread out among many different areas and if all Americans saw that local burden a little bit more evenly rather than disproportionately in areas where immigrants tend to congregate? The National Academy pretty much ran it for every state. At every state, it was pretty much a burden everywhere. So there wasn't something special. You'd think like Texas, which doesn't have an income tax and doesn't do as much for its citizens really. It's a much more low spending state. You'd think there wouldn't be much as much fiscal burden there, but it turned out the fiscal burden there was not as large as California and New York with their much more generous governments, but it was pretty much a fiscal burden everywhere. But you're certainly right. So for example, the net fiscal drain in California was 19 billion. It was five billion in Texas. So if they were spread out through the country, it wouldn't just be the Texas or the California taxpayer who has to deal with that burden. But remember, immigrants are human beings. They get to live where they want. So our ability to move them around the country is pretty limited. They're gonna go where they think their families are and jobs are. There's probably not much we can do. They're gonna generally go based on the economy and existing patterns of settlement. Yeah, the National Academy of Sciences report and that there was an earlier one as well looked at what drives the state and local burden. And there's two key things. One is the number of immigrants. And so it's like California have a lot and they have high fertility immigrants. And then the other is how much they spend on public education since that's the major fiscal cost. And so some of it's driven by education costs. And again though, you come back to the issue of, that's half the story, right? Like so if a state spends more on education, maybe that has a higher return as well, right? So there's a benefit side that's not in there. So all this kind of fiscal burden question is a little more complicated. I wanna say one other thing, which is coming back to my point about the kind of the size of the gains to immigrants themselves. So these gains were enormous remember? So even if I just say, oh, okay, you're right Steven, that's, it's a big fiscal cost. Why would we take that and say, let's not have immigration anymore? When I look at those big gains to immigrants, I think gains from trade, right? So the right policy response, even if you thought that there was some harm to the FISC, which I don't, but you would charge a visa fee or something and get that back, right? You wouldn't cut off immigration and give up all the other benefits that are associated with it. All right, thank you both of you. Hi, I have a question for both candidates and it might be misunderstood by me, but I just wanted to make a point that billions and billions of US dollars are sent home from illegal immigrants to their families back home. Do you consider that an important negative factor when discussing the topic of immigration since it does affect our economy? Like wouldn't that contribute to economic inflation since the more money you print, the less it's worth? So yeah, remittances are important to developing countries. I think, I don't know if the latest numbers are consistent with this, but at one point at least remittances to Mexico were larger than FDI. So that it's a kind of very important development tool in Mexico, but compared to the size of the US economy, it's quite small. And there's a separate question that's been asked about this is money leaving the economy, isn't this hurt us? That wasn't your question, obviously, but so there's a study of this by Will Olney at Williams College and he looked at how much does this cost us? And what he found was that remittances cost US wages on the order of 0.01% lower wages as a result of remittances. So it's important for the developing world, not so much for us. So it's again, this kind of gains from trade. Well, obviously since the US economy is like $18 trillion and if remittances are 50 billion, right, you're at one third of 1% or one quarter of 1% of GDP. So relative to the size of the US economy, it's not gonna make a difference. The concern over remittances is that it's heavily concentrated and it's money flowing out of some of the poorest communities in the United States. And that's the concern. So that's $50 billion that isn't being spent and generating income tax or $50 billion, it isn't generating sales tax or isn't generating jobs in communities that are often some of the poorest in the United States. That's the big concern. So it's a kind of an outflow from areas that are already in the American context, struggling with issues of raising enough money to educate children and so forth and where wages and poverty are, wages are low and poverty is common. So to the overall US economy, like so many things in an $18 trillion economy, it's not likely to make much difference. For some parts of the country it is and it is a problem. But again, immigrants are people, they're gonna do what they want with their money. So I don't, I mean, you could tax some of that. People have talked about doing that. You could try to regulate it more and generate some more income and that might be a solution. At least then you could use that money in the local community to a larger extent. Thank you. So I was curious about both of you guys talked about the burden on local, like local, like local taxpayers. My question was, is it a reasonable solution to just readdress the tax code which in local places tends to be more regressive? Like don't you get the benefits of having more immigrants in your nation and decreasing like regressive taxation? I guess I'm just, I'd love to know more about like why local areas are more impacted than federal areas. It's just because of the demographics of the immigrant population. They have a lot of kids. And we don't have a, the school's tax system that we have is not, you don't pay extra if you have kids. It's like a general taxation. And so that's where the fiscal burden comes from. The other big burden that immigrants create is on Medicaid, right? That's a thing that states pay between half, between half and a third of the cost come from states. So you could try to argue that, well, if we collected tax differently, but I think where, and maybe we should have said this at the outset, Ethan, I disagree, I disagree with him. I don't think there is some large benefit for the native born. I think in general immigration makes the poor poor and hurts American taxpayers, though the immigrants themselves want to benefit, do benefit a lot. And I can see that point readily. So I think we disagree, just sort of fundamentally on what the literature shows. You can show, for example, with a basic economic or what we call a textbook model, that immigration, for example, redistributes about $400 billion of income between workers in competition with immigrants, two owners of capital, and there's an immigrant surplus involved with that of about 50 billion. That's the net gain to natives who own capital. So that could be a justification for immigration, but the fiscal drain looks bigger and you've already now just redistributed income away often from the poorest workers and you still have this fiscal problem. Now you could fix some of that with a different immigration system. So I guess my position would be if the argument for immigration, which I do agree is unassailable, at least as a factual matter, that immigration benefits the immigrants, then let's tell the American people that. The reason we're letting a million people in a year and hundreds of thousands of long-term temporary folks and the reason we might let the illegal immigrants stay is they'll benefit from it. Let's just be honest. But the advocates of immigration seldom make that argument, though in private they make it to me all the time. And I think that's one of the disconnects. Sort of like Hillary Clinton, you can have a public position and a private position. Well, the public position is, well, we think it's a benefit to the United States, the research is mixed, but we think that's the case, but the private position is none of that matters. What matters is the benefit to the immigrants. And if that's the argument, let's go with that. Let's tell the public that. But unfortunately, advocates don't generally do that, though if you do, but the vast majority do know such thing. Hi. Can you stand up? I've heard a theory specifically regarding Mexican immigration to the US that if you made the border easier to pass, I kind of made a free passage to and from that you'd see a net migration back to Mexico of Mexican immigrants going back into Mexico. So my question is, if you made a system where people could come into any country, but specifically with Mexicans coming into the US, if you allow them to come in and work for five, 10, 15 years and go back and forth as they pleased, would that be beneficial to our economy and their economy? Would that, like what sort of ramifications would that system have of a free border where people could go back in and come back in and work and send money back? Well, as I indicated, Mexican immigration seems to be way down and lots of people do go back. So we don't know what the future holds with regard to Mexican immigration, but if current trends continue, Mexican immigration will be less of a contentious issue because it's just gonna be much less than it was. 150,000, 180,000 people is different than what it was 450, 500,000 people a decade ago. So that's something to keep in mind. The thing you're, I think you wanna get us, look, what about a guest worker program, right? Employers want all these workers and these workers wanna come so they could come and work for a few years. Look, we're not gonna give them welfare, right? That's the idea. And then they would go home after a few years. And there's no doubt that some of that would go on, but I would caution you. Every country that has tried to have a guest worker program from a poor country to a rich country, whether it's Pakistanis in Britain, whether it's North Africans in France, whether it's Turks in Germany, or America's prior experience with the Bracero program is that over time it always resulted in large-scale long-term settlement. Now, lots of people did come and go just as you suggest, but over time people settle down. Life is much better in the receiving country. Countries like the United States have something called birthright citizenship. So once you have a child here, you have a US citizen. The problem with a guest worker program is sort of two-fold and they're related. One is that it thinks of immigrants as widgets, as things, as mere factors in production, not as the human beings that they are, which means that they are going to have a wide-range impact on your society and lots of them are gonna stay. The second issue is it's kind of deceptive to the public. The reason that populations in so many Western countries are reacting negatively to immigration, partly even before the current wave, say in New York or the United States, is that they were told a lot of it was supposed to be temporary, but everybody knew that wasn't gonna be the case. So if you're gonna have a guest worker program, it might be helpful, again, to get back to that honesty principle of saying, but we think a lot of them are gonna stay permanently and you're gonna have to deal with that. Do you still support it? I think that's the point. You have to be honest with the public. Guest worker programs. Now, as my presentation suggests, the biggest problem I have with a guest worker program is in a situation where real wages have declined for the less educated and there's a record number not working. And we disagree on what the research shows, so we'll just have to leave it at that, that I think immigration is playing a role in reducing wages at the bottom end of the labor market, but putting that aside, it's almost impossible to find any evidence of a labor shortage in the United States, whether you look at employment rates, labor force participation, or wages. The only evidence of a labor shortage is testimonials from owners of businesses that wanna bring in more workers. That's it. Every other piece of evidence. So I'm a skeptic of guest worker programs because I know what's happened in the past and I don't think we need at least an unskilled immigration and any foreign workers right now based on all the data. I'll try to stick to mostly to answering the question as it was originally posed. There's something, I don't know where the person who asked, oh yeah. There is something to what you're saying. So a large fraction of immigrants actually are not intending on staying here permanently. They're here to make some money and go home. So Dean Yang is at Michigan has written about this. They kind of make a certain amount of money and then they go back, essentially. And the kind of theory you're talking about, that's Doug Massey's theory. It's a sociologist at Princeton. And basically he has been arguing that the result, we've kind of militarized the border over the past 30 years, like made it more and more hard to just go across. And his argument is for those immigrants who are just kind of going back and forth like that. Now we've got this wall or like a higher enforcement levels that makes the incentive to stay in the U.S. larger. Because if you go back, it becomes harder to come again. So that's the argument he makes. You can take it as you will. I don't know if it's true or not. That's his argument, though. But so there's something to what you're saying. Stephen has said a lot of things and I attempted to just let a lot of them go. To me, it seems like his knowledge of the literature is just a little bit out of date. So in particular, the part about the transfers to capital owners of 50 billion, that's based on a 30-year-old model in labor economics where, as I said, you gotta assume the stock of capital is fixed. That's what generates that so-called surplus for capital owners. And that's also, by the way, what generates a lot of the supposed big wage impacts is that idea that just more workers means lower wages. Once you take that out, there really isn't much there, even in the most negative estimates of immigration's impact on the workforce. I think we're just gonna have to agree to disagree. I would urge you to look at the National Academy's new study. It has all the top economists on there. It starts out with some basic principles, some of which I've covered here, and it does conclude that immigration almost certainly is making wages lower at the bottom end of the labor market. So I think we disagree. They cite like 18 studies, 16 of which show negative outcomes with the less educated. So I think we're just gonna have to agree to disagree on the literature on this one. Assuming you let former students ask questions as well as the current ones, just to have a comment or a question really, I'd like to ask the presenters. There's a lot of desirable countries to live in the world besides the United States, and they don't build walls around them, and they still control immigrants. Because I think immigration, even Stephen would agree that it's a good thing in some number. So the question is this. The way immigration is controlled, and I'll use Switzerland as an example, is with a national identity card that solves all kinds of problems. And why can't we get that in the United States? Never heard of it? Well, that's how it's controlled around the world in most countries. And what that does is it forces people to be legal because you can't get any services, you can't get a driver's license, you can't get hospitalization, you can't get education without a national identity card. And if you're here and you're legal, no problem. And if you're here and you're not legal, it's a big problem. In Vermont, we give driver's licenses to illegals up front, which of course, that's another issue that's wrong. But there's gotta be an answer why we don't have it. Well, I mean, obviously the answer is a political one, right? I mean, you could make a reasonable argument. For example, with social security, you could make an argument against having social security, but it's kind of hard to make an argument against having a really sloppily administered one like we have where lots of people work and then they find out when they retire that they didn't get credit and have to go back. So the reason we don't have one is that in the Republican party, sort of ideological libertarians object on kind of freedom grounds in the democratic part of the ACLU and civil libertarians object there. So that coalition, which does a lot to prevent any immigration enforcement, also makes sure that we don't have a national ID card. But the idea is, certainly has merit, people have talked about it and proposed it, it would greatly help with immigration enforcement. But I'd certainly look at it hard. I don't know that I would, but we do have kind of one already. So the driver's license is we could make them basically more tamper resistant, better in terms of the breeder documents and make it, you know, state your citizenship on it. We could do a lot of things with what we already have, but we've chosen, it's a policy decision, it's a political decision not to have it. And then you're right, it makes immigration enforcement much more complicated. But a lot of the people who object to the card also object to immigration enforcement. So you have sort of the ideological libertarians on one side and the ACLU on the other, both agree that we don't want to do much to enforce our laws. And so in that area, they kind of work together and they have other objections that are principled and aren't unreasonable. So, but it's a political choice. So not having one makes enforcement a lot more difficult. I don't have a position on a national ID card, but let me speak to illegal immigration a little bit so that hasn't come up much. So there is an issue with illegal immigration. We have about 11 million undocumented and this is particularly bad for them. And it's not great to have a population that has limited status living within your borders. It's at this point, as Steven pointed out, is mostly a stock issue. It's, you know, there's 11 million here, what are we gonna do? And I think the thing to ask yourself is what is the best policy option to address it? So there's a bit of a literature on enforcement and that tends to find that the return on enforcement is not high and that kind of is consistent with what the kind of the descriptive facts that illegal immigration went up throughout the period of high growth and enforcement. So then that we're facing a bunch of other options. One that's been raised in this campaign is deportation. Turns out that tends to be quite expensive. And another option is legalization, which turns out to have tremendous benefits for them. So it's kind of the same thing. We don't, there actually isn't that much research on the consequences for the US, except for one finding, which is that it lowers the crime rates a bit. So there's a bit of a reduction in property crimes associated with legalization programs. And we know this from both legalizations that have happened in Europe and in a big amnesty that occurred in the 80s in the US in the mid 80s. So there's some benefits to the US from legalization as well. But the research on this is very slender unfortunately. So we don't know exactly what the best policy option is. This question is for both of you. Will the burden on US taxpayers continue to increase with current US immigration policies? And if it does, what are the benefits to taxpayers when the burden it does increase? What is, and if it does, if the burden on taxpayers does continue to increase, what are the benefits to taxpayers? So it's got two parts. Will the burden on US taxpayers continue to increase with current US immigration policies? And if it does, what are the benefits to taxpayers when the burden does increase? I think it's, I guess, so it's a loaded question. I'm not sure how I should respond to a loaded question exactly. Well, it depends. So one of the things that comes out of the simulations you do, and that's what they are of the long run fiscal burden of immigration, is that the results are very sensitive to the state of the economy, what you assume about budget deficits, what the mix of immigrants that come in is, and that worries me a little bit about the whole approach, right? Because if these simulations are so sensitive to things that have nothing to do with changes in the level of immigration, that tells you they're not getting at the causal effect of immigration on a fiscal burden. So that's, you know, so, and the other issue is that, you know, as I said, there's a kind of benefit side to policy and there needs to be more research on that, but the kind of research we have says that spending on public programs seems to pay back. Now it has the, you gotta pay it right up front and maybe in the short run, you don't wanna do that, but that's what I'll say about that, I guess. Well maybe this is an area of agreement. Projections into the future tell us almost nothing. They just really reflect an assumption. If you use the CBO's assumptions, you can do one thing. If you don't, you can get a different estimate. If you make certain assumptions about how immigrant skills will change, you get one estimate, you get another, and that's why when the National Academy recently did it, it had eight different scenarios projected out 75 years, and I say again, 75 years, and four of them came out negative and four of them came out positive. But maybe a more pertinent question is or relevant is, what about illegal immigrants? He thinks kind of danced around this. There is an absolute consensus, I would argue. Now he's free to disagree that people who don't have a lot of education are a very large fiscal drain regardless of legal status, and people with a lot of education are a very large fiscal benefit regardless of legal status, so there aren't that many unskilled illegals. Illegal immigrants, that's a subset, that is not all immigrants by any means, are overwhelmingly unskilled. If you let them stay, the fiscal burden they create will stay, and over time, they'll become eligible for many more programs. Now having said that, they themselves might do better. Their children might do better, and that can be an argument, but letting illegal immigrants stay is costly. Giving them legal status will make them unskilled legal immigrants, and there's no group of people who cost the public more money than unskilled legal immigrants. They're eligible, and they're low income, for the most part, not always. So if you just look at illegal immigrants, and that, again, is not the whole immigrant population, there's just no question. There's no possibility that they're able to pay enough to cover their consumption of public services, and legalization only permanently anchors them in the United States, and intensifies that. And the way advocates, who are honest, get around it is, they say, yes, but it'll benefit the immigrants, and that is an argument. But no serious research ever shows that the less educated are a fiscal benefit. It doesn't, that doesn't make them bad. It's not a moral defect. Let's make one other point. In 1900, expenditures by federal, state, and local government were only 5% of GDP. Today they're like 35% of GDP. So you could bring in a lot of poor people in 1900. It doesn't really make much difference to the public fisk. It makes an enormous difference now if you bring in less educated folks who end up poor. I think I've always said advocates for immigration often feel strongly about the benefit to the immigrants themselves, but they don't lead with that argument. I didn't say Ethan. And he and I both put up in our presentations one of the key beneficiaries is the immigrants themselves. So that's what I'm saying, advocates for immigration. I don't even know if Ethan is. I guess he is. I wasn't really thinking of him. I'm thinking of the people I debate in Washington all the time who feel very strongly, personally, morally that that's the reason to have immigration, but that's not what they say mostly in public. And that is true. I think if you talk to people in Washington, especially off the record, you would find that that is a common situation. It's okay. I'm a big boy. I'm hoping that I'm presenting what I understand to be the latest academic research and its findings. And there is a danger of overstating the case. And I don't want to be a part of that any more than I want to be a part of overstating the case against immigration. It is a policy choice, and it does depend on your values in part, right? That as with any policy choice, I should point out one thing. A majority of Americans think that the level of immigration that it currently has, that we currently have or higher is just fine. This is a pretty typical result in Gallup surveys, that sort of thing. And the ones who are opposed don't typically cite economics for their opposition to immigration. And that seems consistent with the findings of the literature. It's not really the economic burden of immigration that's leading to opposition. It's other things. And there's some research on that in economics as well. One last thing, which is that not all findings are created equal in academia. And so you have to have a sense of the plausibility of the assumptions that go in. And that's how you make a decision about how much to weight it in your assessment of the evidence. That's it. So this is a question for Dr. Camarota. So you talked about how immigrants have a large fiscal burden on like how much the government's giving out instead of taking in. And I was wondering if you could tell how much this actually averaged from Americans that weren't immigrants and like actually what the difference was and how you personally would deal with this resolving this burden. Well, if you want the number you could take, say in California, right? There are 40 million people in California, say 30 million of them live in native households or actually maybe a little less. And then you could divide that by 19 billion so you get a household number or you could take the individual and divide it. As you can say, that's the individual burden, whatever it is, it's a few hundred dollars, maybe it's a thousand dollars a year. So you have to decide how you feel about that. Is that a big effect? You might say, well, look, I think immigration is so good that I'm willing to pay that. And that would be a perfectly reasonable argument. But if you want to avoid it in the future, I don't think we're gonna stop educating children from immigrant families. We're not gonna cut them off of welfare or disability or any of those things. You would have to select immigrants who are self-sufficient, who were more educated and paid a lot in taxes and didn't use a lot in public services. Previous efforts to bar immigrants from welfare programs doesn't work. We're not that kind of society. We're not, we're not gonna, it's in the same way we're not gonna stop giving people emergency medical care when they show up at an emergency room. We don't wanna be that kind of society. So either you select immigrants who won't need to use these services very much, you accept the services, you accept the cost. That's what I would say. I think one thing you need to think about with fiscal costs of low-skill immigration is there's a cost of letting them stay. There's also a cost of sending them home. And so a proper policy evaluation would consider both. And on top of that, let's remember another thing. There's not really a free lunch out there because if you got rid of all the low-skill immigrants, that would lead to larger labor market impacts because we'd lose the balance of skill mix on immigration. So that's something to consider as well. So policy evaluation is a complicated thing. You have to consider a lot of things in order to make a proper judgment. All right, well, that was great. I wanna say many thanks to Emerson, Steve, and Ethan for participating in today's debate. As a token of our appreciation, we'd like to present all of you with a gift for participating today. So Linda is coming down. Thank you very much. These are gifts for Steve and Ethan. Little taste of Vermont. Little taste of Vermont. And we also have a gift for Emerson as well, and it's making its way down. So while Linda's bringing that down, thank you, Linda. Let me just remind you that there is a reception, so please stay around and have a chance to chat. Reception's just outside. And also don't forget to fill out those surveys and put the surveys in the gold box, which is by the back of the room. And so thank you very much for attending today.