 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies. Recording today's episode live from the 2014 International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C., our guest today is Alex Narasta, the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. The format for today's episode is a little different from usual, because instead of Trevor and me asking most of the questions, it's going to be you, the audience. But that said, I'll start with the first question for Alex, which is a rather broad one and probably the most important one for a room full of people who have come to listen to this talk, which is, why should libertarians care about immigration? Thank you. I think it's good to begin with the most important question. The freedom to move and the freedom to move without government restriction is one of the most important ones in existence. When the French liberals were arguing in the 17th century, 18th century about capitalism and free markets and how to reform the system, they came up with the phrase, laissez-faire to describe that. Now you've all probably heard laissez-faire. The second part of that phrase that's not repeated often is laissez-passeur, which means basically a freedom to move as well, because part of the pre-capitalist restrictions at the time were that they restricted the trade in goods and services across borders, restricted the flow of capital, but also restricted the flow of people. And back then they understood how an important part that is for individual liberty as well as free markets. Since the end of World War II, we've seen a liberalization of a lot of things in the international economy. It's easier to trade across borders than it was 70 years ago. It's easier to invest in other countries than it used to be. It's easier to move your patents and intellectual property across borders. But something that's still very restricted in very much an early 20th century way is the freedom to move across borders, to work in other countries for employers voluntarily, to sell your product, to sell your labor, which is for most people in the world throughout history the most valuable thing that they have, to try to find somebody in another country who will buy that, still heavily restricted, vastly restricted by the government and a huge impediment to human freedom. Now I talk about this in the American context mainly, but these problems are sometimes mainly worse in other countries. But it's important, I think, to get a notion of just how restricted this is. As most of us in here are Americans, we understand, you know, we have this proud tradition of like Ellis Island, of, you know, open borders that many of our ancestors came in on. And basically if you weren't a criminal, if you weren't obviously covered in prison tattoos, if you weren't coughing up your lung and tuberculosis, if you weren't obviously sick, you could come into this country up until about 1921 if you were from Europe without many restrictions. But now that system has been replaced by something that looks like this. This is put together by a bunch of immigration attorneys at a law firm I believe in California. This is the 30,000 foot view of it. If you are not a highly skilled, foreign educated person who doesn't immediately have a job offer in the United States, and there are only 140,000 of you a year, then you can probably get a green card. If you're directly and immediately related to an American citizen or sometimes a green card holder, you can get a green card. If you are a refugee, some of you are allowed to get a green card and there's 50,000 green cards set aside a year for a diversity visa for a lottery. With the exception of that, there is no lawful way for you to come to this country and get a green card. There is no category for a low skilled immigrant, which is how almost all of our ancestors came to this country with less than a high school degree or even while being illiterate. So the notion that people can come here lawfully is just wrong. Now if nobody wanted to come here, this wouldn't matter. This would just be something that exists on paper. But because the wages across countries differ so vastly for the same work, it matters a lot. We have this concept called a place premium. It's how much more you would earn in the United States compared to what you would earn in your home country for the identical work. So it's identical amount of years of experience, identical types of education. So a Mexican who moves the United States with a high school degree can expect to earn four times more than he does in Mexico. Guatemala and four times more Indian seven Vietnamese nine Haitian 16 fold. The average is seven times increase from developed countries to the United States. So this enormous pressure, this enormous economic pressure to come here lawfully is constrained by a legal system that looks like that. There is no way for most of these people who want to be able to come here to fit through that legal system to come here right now. Now most of you are young. You haven't been competing yet in the national labor market for jobs. I would bet that almost all of you would be willing to move across the United States for a 30% higher increase in your pay. Maybe definitely for a 50% increase. Are there other good restaurants there though? Yeah, are there good restaurants, that's a good question. Concerts. But these people are facing an amount of wage pressure far more than any of us will ever face in our lifetime probably. But there is no lawful way for them to move. So that's the basic. But this also would help us out too, right? I mean, generally having more people makes more prosperity. If not, then you could make the exact same arguments against immigration that you would make against newborn children, right? Yeah, so one of the problems I think with the immigration debate from the pro-immigration side is we talk about it in terms of what's good for the immigrants. Now everybody knows that immigration, almost everybody knows that immigration is good for the immigrants. You talked to Tom Tancredo, a Republican in Colorado who despises immigration. And he will admit, yeah, immigration is good for the immigrants. The problem is, is it bad for us? Is it bad for the Americans, for the natives who are here right now? And what we find generally is the same thing that Julie and Simon found back in the day, which is more people, people are the ultimate resource. You know, people create jobs that they then occupy. They're entrepreneurs. They're consumers. They're inventors. They create a lot of the wealth and circumstances that improve themselves. Having more people here means you can have a greater division of labor. It means that we can have people who are more specialized. And what's more interesting is immigrants come here because there are jobs that are offered to them. We saw after the wake of the Great Recession when the housing market crashed recently, we saw immigration from Mexico drop off to a net zero. Mexicans primarily worked in, not primarily, but a large number of them worked in the housing sector. They worked in housing construction or in supporting that. When those jobs evaporated in the wake of the housing collapse, we saw immigration from Mexico drop off because there was no opportunity for them to come here. And that's the same pattern we see throughout American history. When immigrants come here, they're attracted to jobs and opportunity. When they come here, they make us more prosperous by adding their money to our economy, by buying the goods and services, by starting new firms, and by adding to the specialization of the U.S. economy. So, first of all, if anyone has a question, you can start lining up and we'll just call on you. The mic right here, you see. Sure. The incentive for a worker to immigrate depends on the price, the place premium, and also depends on what type of labor they are. I'm wondering what the place premium is for low-skilled labor in particular. So, this place premium right here is for people with a high school degree. So, it's not the most skilled labor, it's also not the most unskilled labor. I can't tell you off the top of my head what those numbers are, but most of the workers in these countries who would come over would be very low-skilled compared to most Americans, and it's somewhere in the order of similar to this. Do they stay low-skilled once they come over, or do their skill levels go up, or either within their own lifetime or intergenerationally? So, it depends quite a bit on the immigrants themselves and how long they want to stay in the United States. A lot of immigrants are what are called sojourners, which are temporary. They come here for, you know, five or ten years or they have a goal of money they want to save up and then they want to go back home to their home country. They don't usually invest very much in their own education. They're here to work, they work very hard, they save their money and they go back home at the end of it. For immigrants who are more longer term, we see about half of them in the course of their lifetime become fluent in English, fully fluent, conversationally fluent in English. Most of them come here without English fluency, so that's a big improvement. We also see sort of a general increase in their education. A lot of them earn their GEDs while they're here, as well as go to community college and take advantage of that, but you don't see a huge increase. You don't see a whole lot of people who come here with less than a high school degree and end up being PhDs. So, you see a relative increase, but that's only for legal immigrants in the United States. You don't see much of an increase for illegal immigrants or unlawful immigrants, and the reason why that is is if you're unauthorized and the government could arrest you at, you know, any time and deport you, so it's irrational for you to invest in country-specific skills like learning English if you could be shipped away at any time and lose that entire investment. So, what we see is after the last amnesty, the Reagan amnesty in 1986, we saw an increase in education by those legalized illegal immigrants who try to increase their wages over time. So, one of the more interesting things is if you want to increase the rate of education, sort of assimilation in the United States, increase the rate of education amongst illegal immigrants who are here, one of the best things you can do is to legalize them and remove the fear of having them arrested. Now, how does the retention rate, the language acculturation rate compared to past, there's a lot of people here who say, oh, they're not speaking English. No one's learning English anymore. How does it compare to everyone who came here before? So, according to the best data we have compared to previous immigrant waves, this immigrant wave is learning English faster than almost any group in American history, with the exception, of course, of people who came here learning English. So, what we see is with current immigrants about half become fluent in their lifetimes while here. With their children, you have somewhere between a 97% and 100% English fluency rate. And that's the second generation, the children of immigrants born here are second generation. Third generation, it's 100% English fluency. You basically have another third generation of Hispanics who are here in the United States. 77% of them are English only and 23% claim to be bilingual. Now, if you mean bilingual, my father claims to be bilingual and he speaks Farsi as if he was four years old. So, like almost all Americans, we don't speak other languages and that seems to be reflected in immigrant assimilation over the long term. Next question. How did these restrictions on immigration came up and what are the 21st century paths to deregulate it and are there concrete measures that have been taken in the past few years? Great question. So, I'll talk about in the American context. The first immigration law passed in the United States was in 1790, it was called the Naturalization Act of 1790, it was an open borders law. There were no restrictions on anybody who could come here. It was a restriction, it said that you had to live here for two years, be of good moral character. Unfortunately, you had to be white too, but in order to do that, then you could become a citizen after living here for two years. Now, the thing that the racial classification is pretty embarrassing, I think, by our standards, especially today, a horrible thing that was rectified later with the 14th Amendment. But compared to the time, there was no gender restriction on becoming a citizen, there was no wealth restriction, there was no skill restriction, there was no religious test. That's different from every other country in the world at that time. So it was a pretty open law, and it was a law that basically restricted who could be part of the political system, not who could come here. The first immigration restrictions in terms of restricting who could come here were passed in 1875. They were restricting people who could come here as indentured servants who were basically hired to come here for a temporary period of time. It was targeted against Chinese immigrants who were overwhelmingly thought to be prostitutes who were coming over here. After that, you had the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which restricted immigration from China entirely. That was the first sort of nationwide ban. After that, in 1907, you had a gentleman's agreement between Japan and the United States where the Japanese said, we will not create any exit visas for Japanese citizens. And the Americans said, well, if none of them have an exit visa, then we're not gonna let them in. So it was sort of an agreement not to let any more Japanese immigrants in. 1917, you had the Literacy Act, which restricted immigration to only people who were literate. They could be literate in any language. It had to read a few sentences from the Constitution, but in any language from wherever they came from. And then the first national origin quote as a 1921 were put in place, which restricted European immigration. From that point onward, we've dealt with a very restricted immigration system or very few people who are able to come here who want to actually come here. We reformed it and opened it slightly since the 1920s. We allow more people in from East Asia, for instance, it's now possible to immigrate as an East Asian and a South Asian lawfully and to become a citizen. Thank goodness. You're able to immigrate lawfully from Central and South America. But in terms of the reforms that could be done going forward that are being at least contemplated, one idea is a large scale guest worker visa program, which would allow people to work temporarily in the United States and then go back home. That's something that's been adopted here in the past with good results and another places. Another idea would be an auction system, which would be to issue a certain number of green cards and auction them off to the highest bidder. Another system, which would be a point system, which would be, you get a certain number of points if you're this educated, certain number of points if you speak English, certain number of points if you have an employer who really wants you, a certain number of points for all these other different classifications. If you get X number of points, then you get to come here and live here. That's something that Canada and Australia has as a system. It favors high skilled immigrants. Another system could be a tariff. So you basically say we're gonna charge $25,000 or some amount for a green card. You pay that, you get a green card. So these are all different ways that are being at least talked about or contemplated to open up immigration. Next question. Is there data on how much money is being sent home from immigrants? And if so, how much and where does that money go? Excellent question, I think it's a lot. Yes, it is quite a bit. The World Bank came out with a study about a year and a half ago. It measures about $600 billion globally in remittances across the world. They primarily go to countries like Mexico and Central America, as well as a lot of Central Asian countries where there are immigrants working in Asia and other places around the world. What we see is that money is primarily used for day-to-day expenses in these home countries when they're sent back. So a lot of food, soap, things like that. But after that, the second most common thing they spend it on is investments in businesses and education for their children. So what you see is a lot of places like certain states in Mexico like Michoacan and Zacatecas, which have sent a lot of immigrants, is you see a huge thriving small business sector in these states sort of grow up, funded by the capital that's sent away by Americans and other immigrants. And this is something that we've seen historically in places like Italy when Italy was a poor country. So it's quite a lot of money and it's a lot more than foreign aid that's sent across the world. And it's a lot more effective because it's actually put in the hands of the people who know what they're doing rather than managed by international aid bureaucracies that pretend to know what poor people want. Yeah, good point. Next question. How do U.S. immigration restrictions compare to other OECD countries and their immigration restrictions? And as a corollary to that, what sort of opportunity costs does the U.S. face by restricting immigration relative to other countries? Wow, those are two fantastic questions. If you compare the United States to other OECD countries, we're one of the more restrictive countries. We're, depends how you measure it of course, but in terms of the annual inflow of immigrants relative to American population, we let in about a million people a year lawfully on green cards compared to our population of about 310 million people. So it's about three-tenths of 1% inflow per year that were added by immigration. By comparison, a country like Switzerland has about 1.5%. So they have enough immigrants that adds to their population of about 1.5% per year just from immigration. So they have a flow that's about five times bigger as a proportion to their population. The percentage of Americans today who are foreign born is about 13%, which is still below the high that it was in the late 19th and early 20th century. It peaked at about 15% as people who were foreign born. So we're actually below that high. But a country like Switzerland has 27% foreign born living within its borders. Canada has about 20%, Australia has about 21%. So these are all countries that have more immigrants as a percentage of their population. These other countries also let in more workers as a percentage of their populations, mostly high-skilled workers. Only about 20% of Americans of immigrants to the US are workers. In terms of they're hired by American firms. The rest are mostly family reunification. So other countries it's reversed. Usually about 20% of other countries they have a family reunification. The rest are workers. So compared to others, we're pretty restrictive nowadays. Where we're very, what we're very good at is sort of the cultural and economic and civic assimilation. So we have birthright citizenship in this country. People who are born here, even if their parents are unlawful immigrants or illegal immigrants, get automatic birthright citizenship. They're not living in a legal black market if you're born in this country. That compares to places like in Germany or in South Korea or in Japan where you have generations of people born there who are not citizens. You see a lot of problems with that. But here we very quickly and very rapidly assimilate people. So that's sort of one of the big differences. Next question. Yes, obviously due to government interference there's a problem for low-skilled workers already in the United States to get jobs. And I was wondering if increasing immigration, allowing immigration to increase would mean that those low-skilled workers that already exist in the U.S. would have to compete more with immigrants. And if increasing immigration should wait until after some of the other problems with overpricing labor and so on and so forth is taken care of. Great question. Thank you very much. What we've seen is from 1990 to 2006 there were about 30 million immigrants who came to the United States. And the most negative study you can find in the peer-reviewed economic literature finds that that decreased the wages of Americans with less than a high school degree by about 4.5% over that time period. So you saw immigration that was equal to about 10% of the U.S. population lower the wages for low-skilled Americans by about 4.5%. Now the reason why that is is because most immigrants are either lower skilled than the average American or higher skilled than average American. Most Americans are in the middle. We have some college or a college education. So most of us are just not competing with most immigrants who come in who are much more likely about third of immigrants have less than a high school degree, about 20% have a college degree or more. So there's not much competition with directly with Americans. But what you see is when you dig into the data you actually see, and that's the most negative study that I mentioned, you dig into the data, you look at other studies, what you see is because immigrants are still different from other Americans and the number one most, the biggest difference between immigrants and Americans is anybody, anybody? Language, language. So we all know we're all Americans. I bet very few of us are bilingual. In order to do well economically in the United States you need to be able to speak English. If you're a low-skilled immigrant and you come and you don't speak English you are relegated to different sectors of the labor market that other poor Americans are not working in because they have a skill that's very valuable. So to give you an example they form parallel labor markets in different sectors of the economy so they're not competing directly. So to give you an example about a restaurant low-skilled immigrants who work in restaurants don't work as waiters or waitresses or hostesses or managers. They work as bus boys or janitors or line cooks so that they work in those areas. What that does is it allows restaurants, owners to open up more restaurants as a result of having more low-skilled labor. It also pushes up low-skilled Americans who have the ability to speak English into higher-skilled professions like waiter, waitress, hostess, manager, et cetera. And that's what we've seen across the labor markets in the United States. So most studies like the ones by Giovanni and Perry find that because immigrants are still different from Americans what economists call compliments to them and not substitutes you see a general rise in wages in every urban area where immigrants go as a result of more immigration. So they compliment rather than substitute with Americans and that's what we see pretty much across time with this. Next question. Are there any restrictions or barriers for immigrants trying to open businesses or get licenses to work in the United States? A lot of that stuff is local. So in a place like in Georgia, for instance, they passed immigration enforcement law in 2011 and in order to get any kind of license in the state like a registered nurse, you had to prove that you're an American citizen or lawfully in the United States. Of course this caused so many problems because so many Americans can't prove that. About 25 million Americans actually don't have the paperwork to prove that they're American citizens. They had to delay that because otherwise they were gonna like kick out about a third of nurses in Georgia and get rid of their licenses. So they delayed that pretty much indefinitely. There is a law in Arizona right now called the Legal Arizona Workers Act which became law on January 1st, 2008. And if you are an American, if you have a business and you knowingly or intentionally hire an illegal immigrant on your second offense, they take away all your business licenses which essentially kills your business. It's called the business debt penalty and it's called that by its supporters who think that they're getting tough on business for hiring people. But in terms of like business licenses, it's very much state by state but most states do not restrict that. What it does do however is it's difficult to get a loan if you don't have a social security number. It's difficult to get a loan if you don't have evidence that you're here lawfully. So you do see restrictions in that but there are a lot of businesses owned by unlawful immigrants. Most of them in service sectors or they're contractors of different types. It seems like just being unlawful too in terms of being averse to banking and being averse to anything that would get you involved with the government which would be running a business one way or another. Yes and it also restricts you geographically. So there are some states that are very strict on immigration enforcement like Arizona and some states that aren't like California which passed a trust act recently to restrict their state level of enforcement and cooperation with enforcing immigration laws. So it really sort of pushes you in the areas that you might otherwise not want to be or start a business. Next question. I'm curious what you make of the sort of special ire you've inspired in the American populist right like famously with your Twitter argument with Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller but also David Fromm or even like Peter Brimelowsvdare.com and what you think your sort of prospects are of convincing them. This is a great question. This is an interesting question. I think my prospects of convincing them is near zero. I argue with them to try to convince people who are watching the arguments. So it's sort of like the difference between asymmetric warfare and symmetric warfare. So it's like fighting a guerrilla war. Like I don't, when you fight a guerrilla war you don't intend to go after and kill all the guerrillas. What you intend to do is convince the population that you're there to protect them and to convince them to be on your side. So that's the way that I view media relations is to try to convince you all and other people who are sort of in the middle or mildly opposed to see it from my point of view and to see it more reasonably. So I don't think I'm ever gonna convince David Fromm that he should like immigrants even though he's an immigrant himself from Canada and he made it in easily enough to the United States. But what I can do is push back against their arguments because a lot of their arguments, although they're made sort of in a nasty way are things that common people think about. They think about, well, are these immigrants different from previous waves? Are they not gonna culturally assimilate? Are they gonna take our jobs? Are they gonna make us poorer? So if I address those arguments head-on when they're made in sort of the most brutal way and nasty way and I can do it in a way that's somewhat convincing the people in the middle, I think I've done my job as well as I can. Next question. Okay, so I know one of the objections to opening borders or removing restrictions on immigration is the access that legal and illegal immigrants have to benefits that are essentially, some people believe should be reserved for only tax-paying citizens or, I mean, some people object to them entirely, like welfare and all those kinds of things coming from California. Well, yeah, coming from California, I know you can get Medi-Cal, you know. So that's a major objection that a lot of people have. I was wondering if you had kind of like a rebuttal to that or your thoughts on it. Thank you. And it's nice to meet a fellow Californian. I grew up in Burbank in Camarillo in Southern California too. And I remember being a kid and watching the California Republican Party commit suicide by blaming immigrants for every problem in the state. And they haven't recovered from it yet. And they haven't recovered from it yet. And they're not gonna anytime soon. Yeah, it's an interesting question. So I'm one of those libertarians who opposes the welfare state and for everybody all the time. But I think it's important to put it in perspective, like how much welfare do immigrants use in the United States? Unauthorized immigrants right now are ineligible for virtually every single welfare program in virtually every single state. The main exception everywhere is emergency medical care and emergency Medicaid. So if you show up at a hospital room and you're injured, you can get on the spot medical services according to the Imtala Act. Everybody can, though including, and you don't have to show any ID or anything like that. So including unlawful immigrants can do that. And that's one of the main sort of costs. If you're a lawful immigrant to the US on a green card, you don't have recourse to public benefits for the first five years that you're here lawfully. There are some small exceptions to that, but that generally holds for Medicaid and other benefits like that. But even when immigrants have access to these welfare benefits, especially poor immigrants, you see that they use them at a lower rate and when they do have access and use them, the dollar value of their benefits is lower than what poor Americans get. So if you compare apples to apples. In fact, it's so much lower that if poor Americans used Medicaid at the rate that poor immigrants do and their benefits were as small as legal immigrants do, poor immigrants do, Medicaid would be 42% smaller in terms of its benefits. So we're talking about a population that doesn't really use much. In terms of the entitlement programs like Medicare, I hate to, you guys probably all know this because you're smart and well-informed, but Medicare Part A is going to go bankrupt. It's on its way. It's supposed to go bankrupt in 2024 if everything goes well. So probably like in 2021 or 22. Right now, native-born Americans take out $31 billion a year more from that system, Medicare Part A, than they put into it through taxes. So they've got a $31 billion deficit for them. But immigrants put in $14 billion more in taxes than they take out. And that reason why it is, because they're younger, they're more likely to work, they're less likely to take out benefits because they're generally a healthier population even when they're older. So that's, they don't give some perspective on it. If you really want, and another thing about the American welfare state, it's designed to help, if you think about the different programs and the amount of money we spend on it, it's designed to help sick elderly women. So sick and elderly, sick, Medicare and Medicaid, elderly, Social Security, Medicare, women, tan, food stamps, WIC, all these different programs are designed to help single mothers who have children and don't have another bread earner in the household. Immigrants, however, are mostly healthy young men. So there's just a fundamental disconnect between who these programs are designed to help and who immigrants are in the United States. But if you really want to do something about it, I recommend building a wall around the welfare state instead of around the country. I wrote a pretty detailed policy analysis with a lawyer about this. And it's pretty easy to do lawfully. It's constitutional to restrict non-citizen access to welfare benefits within the power of every state to do. It's popular to do if you actually poll it, who to thought. And it's much more humane to do that and to remove that criticism of immigration than I think it is to close the border to try to get around immigration using welfare that way. Our last question. Thank you. So an argumentative move, I think many pro-immigration figures like to make is to separate immigration from naturalization. So Brian Kaplan talks about, for example, like let's just talk about free movement and letting people take jobs and set the question of naturalization and citizenship on one side, on the other side. And I'm wondering if this might create long-term challenges in two forms. First, the problem, as Alex mentioned, of non-citizen residents is creating sort of a second class group of Americans over the long term. And second, this sort of tradition we have in America of like birthright citizenship that the natural progression of immigration here is towards citizenship and whether that would require a certain shift in our thinking about immigration as a country. Great question. If you are here on a green card right now, there's no reason why you ever have to naturalize and become an American citizen. You could live here on a green card forever. My friend Ivan's been on a green card here for 40 years and I don't think he's gonna naturalize anytime soon. He doesn't have to. Interesting enough, of the three million or so people who were legalized under the 1986 Reagan Amnesty, only about 45% of them have so far become citizens. So a majority of them are pretty happy with their green card because they can live on it, they can work, they don't have to be molested. They don't care that much about voting and the other things that being a citizen allows you to do. So I think allowing the green card stuff and making it more difficult, let's say, to naturalize if you're an American, to become an American citizen if you're an immigrant is a decent compromise if we can get that. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I mean, to naturalize means you wanna be a part of the political system, you wanna participate in that amongst some other things. I think that's less important than letting people leave here, live here forever. However, birthright citizenship is something worth preserving for as long as we possibly can and fortunately it would take a constitutional amendment to overturn and the one reason I mentioned before and I'll go into greater detail about it is our great ability to assimilate people here, making it so that people born here are not in a legal second class. It's something if you come from another country and you get a green card and you're legally allowed here to work here forever. It's a different thing if you're born here and this is the only place you've ever known in your entire life and you're not allowed to participate in the political system or in the judicial system, you're not allowed to own a gun, vast difference. People who are born into places like Germany and Japan, three and four generations now, Turks and Japanese who are non-citizens really despise the place that they live in. They don't feel like they're part of it. They don't feel like they're German or Japanese or they don't feel like they're welcome. They don't have open access to these systems and I think if we wanna make sure that people assimilate and feel like they're home here, which we do want people to feel like they're home here, we should definitely allow at least the people who are born here to automatically become citizens. There are a lot of silly complaints we hear about what do they call anchor babies and things like that, people who come here and give birth immediately so that their kids become, can become citizens but that doesn't make it easier for their parents to become legal or anything like that. But that is a far, far smaller problem in every way no matter how you measure it than dealing with millions of people born here who are not allowed to become citizens. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.