 to today's event, the 10th in a series of debates hosted by the Foundation for Economic Education and sponsored by the Arthur N. Rook Foundation. My name's Jason Riddle. I'm the college programs manager here at FI. And I'd like to welcome all the students here in the audience at Grand Rapids, as well as all of those watching this live streaming debate from around the world. Today's discussion is based on the topic of immigration. Unfortunately, Jim Carafano from the Heritage Foundation was unable to make it today due to some last-minute flight complications, but the show must go on. We're still gonna have a fun discussion with Dr. Ben Powell and moderated by Scott Bollier. Dr. Bollier, he is the director at Troy University's Center for Political Economy, so I'm gonna turn things over now to Dr. Bollier, who will introduce Dr. Powell and explain how we're going to proceed this morning. Thank you guys. Thank you, Jason, and thank you all for tuning in and thank you to the audience who's here too. It's a pleasure to be here and to trying to fill in for James a little bit. So the format is going to be, Dr. Powell presents his point of view on immigration. I will present a point of view that perhaps is in the general ballpark of James, this point of view, and then we'll just go back and forth with a bit of discussion between us and then hopefully a lot of audience questions as well. Before we get to that, just a quick explanation of what the specific resolution for this debate is. The question that we're trying to focus on is whether or not a free market and labor makes both the data of population richer and reduces poverty worldwide. So we're gonna really try to focus on the economics of this and a number of other things as well that come into the immigration issue. Before we get to actual content, it's a real great pleasure to introduce a friend and one of the real stars in the free enterprise movement, Benjamin Powell. Ben is the director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and a visiting professor in the Rawls College of Business. He's the North American editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, past president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and a senior fellow with the Independent Institute. He earned his BS in economics and finance from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and his MA and PhD in economics from George Mason University. He and I were classmates, so it's great to be on the stage with him. Professor Powell is the author of Out of Poverty, Sweatshops in the Global Economy, Editor of Making Poor Nations Rich, which has a really great chapter on Botswana by someone, and the author of more than 50 scholarly articles and policy studies. His primary fields of research are economic development, Austrian economics and public choice. Dr. Powell's research findings have been reported in more than 100 popular press outlets including the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times. He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including CNN, MSNBC Showtime, CNBC, and he was a regular guest commentator on Fox Business's Freedom Watch. His Sandra at Texas Tech is one that we all are really excited about and watching, and it's just really wonderful to have him here with us this morning, so welcome. All right, thank you, Scotty. I was very excited to be here today to debate in front of all of you and all of you out there, someone from Heritage on this very important issue. Unfortunately, that's not happening now, but I get to kind of debate my old grad school buddy, Scott, so it's a lot like what we did 14 years ago just with less whiskey. So let me begin by defining what I'm gonna defend here today of open borders for the United States and other wealthier countries. I'm doing it for today's purposes within the context of our existing nation states that we have, so by open borders I don't have to necessarily mean that you can jump willy-nilly across the Rio Grande whenever you want. We have border checkpoints right now. I think open borders in this context simply means that we're not going to put quantitative restrictions on a number of immigrants coming from any country at any skill level from around the world. You can still have your known terrorist watch list, a list of known violent international criminals that at the checkpoints you can do your best to exclude or for that matter, if someone has contagious diseases that you're worried about an epidemic or something. It just means no restrictions on immigration other than that, a free market in labor. As long as people can come here and support themselves or find somebody willing to support them, they should be free to do so. That is a radical position, at least in the context of contemporary America and for that matter, the rest of the wealthy nations in the world. Most of the people in America disagree with me on this, perhaps many of you in the audience do. So let me start with something that's much less radical, at least less radical among economists. And that's the case for free trade that's been well-established since Adam Smith and based on the theory of comparative advantage since the mid-19th century. And what that theory says is whoever can produce products at lowest cost should produce them while somebody else produces different products at lowest cost and then they swap. So everybody has a comparative advantage in something and we should all specialize in that that we do best and trade with everybody else. And as a result, the economic pie is gonna be bigger for everybody. There's more total wealth to go around and we're all better off over the long run on this. Put into concrete terms, you could grow bananas in Alaska but it would require a lot of energy and a lot of greenhouses and they grow much more easily in Honduras. You should let them grow down in Honduras and send them up to Alaska and you can grow, I suppose you could grow Alaskan stone crab in Honduras if you've created the right aquarium but that would be a tremendously costly way to do that. Instead, let the Alaskans fish those and send them down to Honduras in exchange for bananas and there'll be more crab and more bananas total to go around. Both parties are better off. Well, there's a problem with some goods and services. You can't ship them across borders like this. I can't outsource my lawn care to Mexico and Indian call center cannot be the nanny for my child. These services have to be provided onsite but the case for trading these services based on comparative advantages is the exact same as it is for the goods that we can ship across borders. So, restricting migrants from coming here who could do our lawn care, babysit our children, drive our cars makes no more sense than restrictions stopping bananas from going to Alaska. It forces us to produce these services for ourselves inefficently. We have inefficently too little low skill immigrant labor in the United States and as a result, we are producing things like childcare and other services at too higher cost and could be better off if we let more of it in. And don't for a minute think that this means that we're somehow unjustly exploiting these workers by letting them come here and paying them less than what we could do for services now. These people who are coming here a Mexican who leaves Mexico and comes to the United States nothing else changes about them, just this location. People are in 150% of what he could have earned in Mexico. A Nigerian, 1,000%. They see their incomes explode. In fact, this is the way to get rid of extreme poverty in the poorer parts of the world. The relative poverty that they might be in near us is vastly better than that extreme poverty of where they are, which is why they come here in the first place. So, how big would the gains to the world be if we adopted, if we and other wealthy countries adopted a more open borders policy? Massive is the answer. Labor is our most valuable resource and it's locked up in unproductive areas of the world where we can't make the best use of it. Economists have done many estimates of what freeing the market and labor would do for the world economy. Consensus is somewhere around doubling world income. $70 trillion. Every year would produce $70 trillion more in goods and services than we do now. The estimates vary, but from a low of about $50 trillion to a high of about a little over $100 trillion. These are just massive, massive numbers in terms of the increase in wealth. Even if they're widely off, the numbers are still going to be huge and it's because we have such pervasive restrictions on this labor and the labor is so valuable when it can be put to good use. So, what we'd be seeing really is what we see going on in India and China today, which is a massive rural to urban migration and this would be just writ large around the world with many of them relocating to the United States and other wealthy nations. It doesn't mean that it's bad news for those countries that it leaves behind. So, there's little evidence that when immigrants leave a country they impoverish the place that they're leaving and in fact remittances dominate in terms of flows to poorer countries compared to foreign aid flows and they're more effective would see a big increase in remittances to those people and I suspect although there's less good evidence on this that would also see more pressure on their governments to reform policy as they're losing their productive people to the richer countries around the world. So, I think a response that many of you have in your mind is well that's all well and good for them but what about us? Now remember, back to free trade and comparative advantage both parties benefit from this trade and that's exactly what economists find when they study immigration too. So, we can look at current levels of immigration and economists all agree that it brings net benefits net economic benefits to the United States. It's small as in relation to our overall economy but positive. Even a guy, George Borjas is probably the most prominent economist critical of greater immigration. He puts the number right around $40 billion per year that we get as the native born population as a benefit of the immigrants being here. Other estimates might get you into the hundreds of billions but they're still relatively modest as a percent of a $14 trillion economy but there's a reason they're relatively modest we massively restrict the number that can come in and we relegate many of them to illegal status where they can't make the best use of their labor. If we allowed more in the gains for the natives would be much larger. Some would fear that this destroys American jobs there's absolutely no evidence for this. What we have is a classic problem of the scene and the unseen that Bastiat talked about. When the immigrants come in and perform services and you see Americans who used to do that service no longer employed, you say the immigrants stolen their jobs but what we're not seeing is the many jobs that are created precisely because immigrants are here. Statistically they're created but you can't always identify one to one that's where it came from. But if it was true that if we added more people we took away jobs on that. Think of what the American labor force should look like right now. What should our unemployment rate be? We've more than doubled the size of the civilian labor force since the 1960s. Yet there's no long-term increase in structural unemployment. What we did is we created more jobs when we got more workers because we have virtually limitless desires for goods and services. So what about the wages? Well, the wages or the wealth overall of Americans is going to go up but there's some concern about whose wages will be affected when economists study this. If they're gonna find a negative effect they have to look at low-skill Americans namely high school dropouts and there the estimates vary from slightly positive effect even on their wages to at most negative 8%, that's a George Bauhrhaus estimate from current levels of immigration coming into the United States. So it's a relatively modest wage decline oh and it tends to be temporary. Over time wages recover even for those least skilled. But also keep in mind that those people some of them own houses, some of them have a retirement fund which means they're in part capitalist. Both of those things go up in value as you have greater immigration. But either way it's just a small segment of the US labor market overall. Also we have to keep in mind we're consumers of these immigrant services. That's the major benefit that we get from them. There's no economic policy that we could adapt that would do more to increase overall world production or to reduce global poverty than opening our borders to poorer people who are trapped by accident of birth in countries where they can not make best use of their skills. The upshot is it'll make us wealthier although not wildly but a little bit better off by letting them come here too. This stuff that I've been talking about is fairly uncontroversial among most economists although widely misconceived in the general public. If Jim was here or James was here I expect what he would do is probably start giving he'd probably tell me there's a difference between a human being and a banana and that when you move a banana I can't do anything else but get eaten but when you move a human being it brings a lot of baggage with it that can cause other problems and start listing other problems for you. My answer would be well we'll talk about some of those other problems whether they're real problems in the first place but even if you believe they are we're talking about doubling world productivity. It has to be a pretty massive problem to swamp that. The question is could you use some of that 70 trillion dollars to fix whatever problems that he might mention. So with that I'll turn it over to my neocon friend Scott Bullier. Okay, I cannot wait. I've had 10 minutes to prepare for this. I'm not going to respond to anything Ben just said because I'll do that in the rebuttal. I'm just going to talk about the argument for open immigration broadly and say that it's too optimistic. Sounds a little too good to be true and also if you think about, I mean many of the economic arguments being made sound pretty good but there are a few things that we ought to think about particularly in the way that Ben framed the issue. We're talking about open immigration within the context of a nation state still. We're allowing people to move and we might monitor them for disease at the border and I want to talk as someone representing an alternative point of view about what is the role of the nation state in protecting our interests as citizens of a nation. Okay, one of them seems like there should be a premium to those of us who are here and also get into a couple of arguments that are very important and maybe secondary effects of this idea that yeah, sure, someone benefits if they can win the lottery and get into America. Yes, you're better off unambiguously. This does follow from David Ricardo's arguments about free trade and comparative advantage. It's a win-win principle that we talked about in my first lecture here, the notion that both parties gain if you can essentially engage in exchange but there are a whole bunch of things that maybe actually are really big and maybe big enough that it cuts into the doubling of world output. So here I go talking about why we shouldn't embrace open immigration. One of the big ones in my mind is that immigrants come here illegally. They generally don't contribute to the tax base. Often they're flying under the radar, okay? Even if we just allow them to come, there's a lot of evidence that their total contribution, okay, their total contribution to the public is less than the resources that they consume from the public. So immigrants tend to have more kids. Those kids go to our public schools. It makes it more costly to service them in public schools because they're usually speaking a different language. Okay, so sometimes you need conduits between English and Spanish or English and Chinese. And this is very costly for our schools to be supporting this. They use our roads, they use our healthcare. By the way, in the hospitals, there actually is a code that if someone shows up you treat them and ask questions later. I think this is a really good thing, okay? We want to save people. And immigrants can use that to their advantage to abuse the medical system as well. So the costs, while there's benefits to immigration in the sense that they gain, producers gain, consumers gain, there's these falling prices and all kinds of desirable effects from immigration, there's a huge public cost on us all. They're net takers from the system. So our taxes could very well end up going up by a lot. And I think one of the roles of the nation, okay, the United States government is to protect us against that possible outcome. So the economics of this aren't completely clear cut. There's this big spillover problem that I think needs to be addressed. A few other things that I worry about when thinking about open immigration. America's a great place, okay? It's, I still live here. I've been demonstrating with my feet that it's like the best place in the world to be. Its foundations rest on some core principles of economic freedom, the rule of law, okay? The right to private property. People from other countries who come here are coming from places where those ideas are less respected. Corruption is something that is common and they've learned how to operate in systems that are very corrupt. There's gray areas where you typically, if you got pulled over by a police officer, might say, okay, you got me. I was driving 90 in a 55. I deserve a ticket. They might get pulled over and say, can I pay you some money to just keep going? So culturally, they're gonna slowly, and police officers might begin taking bribes. Culturally, they're going to erode what makes America great. The fact that we are kind of law abiding citizens. The fact that we sometimes vote for policies that keep us one of the freest places in the world. So I'm a little worried about that, okay? And maybe America's so big that we can absorb a whole bunch of people, but if you expand the logic of this open immigration argument to some small countries, what's making a small country free right now could evaporate like that. Okay, so here's an example. I've gone to the Czech Republic several times. Czech Republic's a small country, wonderful country, has a lot of culture that is distinctly Czech. If the Czechs just said, anyone come, anyone invest, anyone do anything in our country, it could quickly become mini-Germany and you would lose Czech beer. You would lose Czech music. You would lose all kinds of things that are amazing, okay? So culturally, this could be really kind of scary for us. And I'm an economist who actually tries to bring a lot of this stuff all into, this is just economic. So this cultural issue, if there are costs to be considered on the cultural dimension, then it's just a cost that should be accounted for in the immigration argument. A couple others that I think are worth considering. The possible, yes, you can monitor people at the border, but are they really in any way effective in what they're doing and monitoring right now our security? So you're gonna have a lot more people coming, some of them with really bad intentions and we're just even engaging in worse, more, you're engaging in an embrace of, hey, we can't simply handle the caseload, there's gonna be more risk of terrorism. There's possibly gonna be risks of drug lords coming into our country and putting more drugs into our schools, crime could go up. In some places, imagine what open borders would mean and not open borders, like as Ben defined it, not open borders, just anyone anywhere. Imagine if Israel became very embracing of anyone can come. Think of what might happen in the Middle East if we just embraced that there, okay? So this is a trickier argument than it's not just about costs and money. And yes, you could improve human lives, but it may come at a cost to us Americans, like a really big cost. Wages in America, just to go back to economics for a second, wages in America have been stagnant since the 1970s. In fact, net worth has fallen by about $20,000 per household in the last five years. More competition, which is indeed what happens when you have more people come, isn't going to help us. Many of you are in your 20s. You've heard about just how weak the economy is for you. Ask yourselves, does immigration make you feel any more secure about your prospects? One final one. We have open immigration here in the United States. People are migrating out of California in droves. They're moving out of Illinois, which is a total basket case state in droves. And there's no evidence to me that those states are actually getting it together and doing any better. People are leaving and taxes are going up in Illinois, in California, they just keep on regulating and saying, this is actually closer to what the people remaining want. So the ones who get frustrated with the regulation leave and everyone else there is like, yeah, we like all of this in your business regulation. So it's not clear to me that policies are going to improve. So I kind of worry about the people left behind. Who's gonna get out of Mexico? People with a little bit of mobility. Those who are left behind, it could be Illinois to like the 10th degree, like really scary in terms of what their lives might be like. So there's a lot of directions you can go in being against immigration. I've tried to spell out a few of them why we should at least act with much greater caution and conservatism, because that's what's made America great. All right, thank you, Scott. So I'll start with the wages part first. So just to be clear, they've done tons of work on this. You have to directly compete with the immigrant labor to have a negative effect on your wages. That's why it's limited to people without high school degrees in the United States who feel a negative wage effect and it's fairly small. For the rest of us, immigrants are compliments, not substitutes, so they don't push our wages down. They increase our purchasing power by giving us more goods and services at lower prices. The fiscal effect, there's tons of studies out there. If you're watching this online, Google tax impact of immigrants. You're gonna see tons of stuff, but there's tons of junk science out there. And most of the junk science on the fiscal impact of immigration counts up the fiscal cost now of a new immigrant or that immigrant's children when they come here. And that's all it does. In fact, Heritage published a study like this a couple years ago of the fiscal cost of amnesty. And what it didn't do was account for the dynamic effects in our economy of having immigration. The Heritage study essentially said these immigrants have certain tax servicing that they get, but there's no other effect of these immigrants in our economy. So if having the immigrant here increases production and makes a business more profitable, that business pays more in taxes. That has to be counted as part of the fiscal impact, like any decent scholarly study looks at your economy-wide effects of immigration. And it does another thing too. It looks at taxes not just at a moment in time but over an immigrant's life. If we just thought about this for a second and considered adding new people to our economy, birthing them, all our net tax drains when they're birthed. And probably for 18 to, in some cases, probably 26 years, maybe longer. That looks really bad if you just look at the upfront taxes instead you have to look at the taxes over their lifetime. And once you start doing that, the scholarly studies that basically look at the dynamic effect throughout your economy and account for the life cycle of being a net tax consumer at the beginning, a tax producer in the middle, a tax consumer at the end. What they find, it varies, some are slightly positive, some are slightly negative, but they're all small, they're all cluster around zero. Basically, fiscal reasons aren't a real thing, aren't a real reason to have a concern about immigration. You can find individual school districts or hospitals that are burdened, definitely true, but when we look at the macro all around, it's just not there. And even if it were, we control fiscal policy. If we're doing something that could double world income, could we change our fiscal policy to reallocate some of that to make it a win? In fact, the first point Scott brought up of America as a nation, shouldn't we get a premium for being here? Shouldn't America just be looking out to maximize for us? If your answer to that is yes, you should definitely support increased immigration because if it makes the overall pie bigger, you could use things, and I don't personally advocate this, but you could redistribute some of that pie to native-born Americans. If immigrants from Nigeria are gonna see their income go up by 1,000% by coming here, you could tax them on 999% of that increase and it would still be a good deal for them to come here and then reallocate that to native-born Americans, perhaps the low-skill workers who directly compete with them and would still have more left over for both parties. I don't particularly favor that, but if that's your concern, fiscal policies within your hands, and if it's just them draining on the welfare state or something, as my friend and colleague Alex Narastas said one time, build a wall around the welfare state, not a wall around the country. I think the freedom and corruption one is the best objection and this is the one I've spent the most time thinking about for more open immigration because the gains from trade are stacked. It's a one-time jump out in your standard of living. It's not about your annual growth rate and our underlying institutions, private property, economic freedom, rule of law, that's what gives us, that's the kind of underlying fundamental cause of long-term development. If immigrants came in and distorted that rule of law, economic freedom, property rights respect and it took down our long-term growth rate that could easily make up for the giant gains that you'd get in a one-shot move. But I don't think there's very good evidence for it. Most immigrants who come here are fleeing bad places coming to America because they want to be in a place where they can be more productive. They don't run away from Cuba and say, I want Cuba's institutions in the United States, that's a bit weird. So actually I've done some real recent work, people want to find, actually I think it's on Cato's website as a working paper with Alex Narasta and a few other colleagues. What we did is we looked at immigrant stocks and flows, not just in the United States, but in countries, actually all countries for which we could get data from 1990 to present. And we looked at the economic freedom of the world and that's which is our best empirical measure of respect for property rights and economic freedoms that we have. And we said does the high immigrant stock or high immigrant flow over this time period impact the economic freedom? What we found was yes, but only slightly and it's slightly in the positive direction. Countries that had a higher stock of immigrants 20 years later had a little bit higher economic freedom and some countries that had a bigger flow over that 20 year period had a little bit higher economic freedom. And I think one reason is, and there's been other work done on this, is the reaction to immigrants by native born. People don't like subsidizing people who don't look like themselves, so they end up voting to contract the welfare state when there's more of the immigrants coming in. I think border security, they do a bad job of it now, they do a bad job under that, but if people wanna get in, the government's not gonna have any harder time under that new regime than what they do now. But I think that was some of the main ones that you asked. I think the freedom one's the most important fundamental one of it. Now I'm seeing movement, I'm not sure if we're going to questions now or if you want further rebuttal from me. Okay, questions now for anyone interested in continuing. As you all get ready with your questions, one thing I think that's also worth bringing up in Ben's rebuttal just a moment ago, is this argument that these are complementary goods. Immigrants are compliments to what you currently see. Technology is a compliment to labor as well. And if you look at Tyler Cowan's work, isn't it the case that technology interacting with labor is actually leading to this massive divergence where you have about 15% of people doing really well, 85% basically living kind of on a flat line level of income. Their well-being will get better because of technological advance, but inequality's gonna explode under your... But their absolute standard still went out. The wage stagnation stuff is just BS because we know that wages are a horrible way to measure the standard of living because their benefits have gone up during this time. But when I look around and people in, quote, poverty in the United States have a smartphone, technology's been making their standard of living higher even if we don't measure it in their wages. Questions? Yes? I guess my question is the question posed was if every developed country opens their borders, what would happen if one or just some open their borders would they be at a disadvantage advantage or so on? I think it wouldn't be as economically advantageous the whole world opening up, but it would still bring net gains both to the immigrants who come in the country who receives them. I think some of your cultural problems would get worse and as Scott points out for some small countries, that's going to be a greater challenge, especially if they're the only one in the world that have that. Country as large as the United States, I'm not particularly worried about it. There's been various estimates of this too of how many people would actually come. There's actually a global survey of how many people want to live outside of their country of birth. I think the United States, I think it's about 600 million total who want to move right now and the United States population would roughly double in a fairly short time frame. But it doesn't happen by the way overnight because the way the disporers work is like a few people come then spread word back and a few more come and builds over time. Initially our flow would predominantly be from Latin America. Although by the way the net migration from Mexico has basically stopped right now and that's largely for economic and demographic reasons not border enforcement reasons. Since the recession Mexico's economic growth compared to the United States has improved. That's taken away some of the pressure but basically their fertility rates now are back down towards what US levels are. So that gets around the big reason that so many people were coming. All countries but all of our times during the 19th century where we had open immigration and we got a big surge, it was from countries going through this fertility change. Basically we're sanitation and healthcare improved enough that more of your children live but yet people still have children at the rate that they used to when lots of children died. You get a population bomb, a lot of them migrate but then as people get used to the fact that children aren't dying fertility rates fall. That was the natural cycle of our 19th century immigration waves that we had. Mexico's just hit that one. Okay so Scott said that the greatest thing about America is that it's full of law abiding citizens. I think really that the greatest thing about America is the diversity. Nobody in this room would be here if immigrants hadn't come to this country. And it happened for hundreds and hundreds of years completely uncontrolled. So I suppose my question is why was it okay for hundreds of years but not now? Oh, this is where it gets hard to be over in this chair. I'm sympathetic to your argument. I think that one thing that, one tension throughout the history of American immigration has been that indeed it's a benefit but there's just a tremendous amount of change and complexity that comes with it. If you look at the great wave of immigration in the late 1880s until about World War I, it's what I would call as an economist a really good thing, a huge engine for productivity in the United States but it has these deeply unsettling aspects to it that create a lot of anxiety and maybe it should have been pursued more cautiously, disease ramped up during that period, you had people living in Manhattan slums. It's just not as, yes, we are all here because of immigration but just allowing a massive wave in may not be the best way to do it. Maybe we need to manage it more carefully, have some just high skilled immigrants come. To follow up on that, I think actually part of the answer too would be the argument would be a two-fold part. We didn't have a welfare state then. We assimilated them better then and technology's changed now, so travel's cheaper and word spreads faster so it would be a bigger wave than what we had before, I guess would be the kind of three that I'd think about. I'd say the evidence on assimilation though is, and Jake Bigdor's done really good work at that, he's an economist from Duke, in terms of English language, intermarrying, things like that, the late 19th century immigrants and immigrants over the last 20 years look a lot alike and more recent immigrants actually are assimilating faster in terms of language ability which also makes sense for in a more globalized world now, they know more about America before they ever leave to come here. So I think the case is as strong as ever and I think the relationship between welfare state and immigration is no accident that the US got most of its big welfare state in the period where we had the most restriction on immigration. Dr. Powell, in your rebuttal, you didn't have time to address this idea of losing cultural heritage and I was wondering if nations, so with the example of the Czech Republic, nations that depend on tourism as part of their economy would, cultural degradation, would that cause an economic loss in the long run? I don't, what you can't get is a net economic loss out of this. That could, so there are cost and benefits, so when you trade with foreign goods across borders, industries contract in one country to country grow in another and you switch what you're doing, the tourist industry may contract because people, but think about what this means too though. Should we lock the world into these little cultural baskets so like us wealthy first-worlders can jump around a plane and go visit places like it's the zoo? Or should we allow people the freedom to move around here to mix and improve their lives? And if they all choose things because there's something in human nature that makes us all look more alike, I'd say that's cultural flourishing with freedom and just getting rent of little pockets that those people didn't deem best to hold on to. And I'd say just real briefly that we need to be careful. You could make mistakes that are irreversible in embracing waves of tourism and all of a sudden you lose elephants and you lose this nice old way of doing things. I'm not talking about free migration for elephants. You never know what could happen to something that was historically really special if you just have hotel after hotel just outside of the touristy area. You can vote with your dollars on these things. But you can't go back to the way it was before. I've seen plenty of buildings restored. All right, this is a question for both of you. Regarding the debate of open immigration or having restrictions, the argument that moving to an open border system would create a, you could touch on culture if you want a primarily economic shock, positive or negative, what is your opinion and do you think that that's a strong enough argument to institute a gradual transition from one policy to the other or just to flip a switch and have it happen overnight? I think even flipping a switch, you're gonna have bottleneck, so it's not gonna be instantiation. You have the spore dynamics, which is why we draw from Latin America more first and Asia more first, probably not very much from Africa, at least for the United States to begin with. But if you're concerned, so when I think about the shop costs, you've got a bunch of Americans who are used to a particular mode of production, so particularly low-skill Americans who provide services that would compete with immigrants. If that's really your concern, there's a better solution than restricting immigration or only phasing it in slowly. Charge every immigrant an extra 10% on their income taxes. They're still way ahead compared to if they were trapped in the poverty in their home country. Use that money and give it to the newly unemployed low-skill Americans to complete their education to do whatever. If you don't like 10%, make it 20%. There's lots of room to grow here when we're talking about doubling world income. Yeah, as the token critic on this, I have no answer. You've been doing good being a neocondom. Dr. Powell, so if you think this is a net gain for society and the world, how do you propose creating political change so politicians would wanna favor this and create this legislation to allow this? No, it's not happening. Well, how can you change it? That's what, how can you create the political change? I think politicians are just trying to guess what public sentiment is. I think public sentiment doesn't understand the economics of immigration and has a general skepticism of foreigners, whether trading goods and services or in migration. Perhaps that it's an evolved skepticism from when we didn't have gains from trade over large areas and people who didn't look like you were dangerous. Given that, I think it's a huge obstacle to overcome. I think what we need to do is make people better understand how it works and politics would follow from there, but I don't think there's a political solution. Dr. Bolier, you mentioned the risk of, the greater risk of terrorism. And my question is if the US government were to take resources that it's using to try to regulate the labor market would they be able to better protect the national security? Sure, I mean, if the United States could focus on what it really should be doing, which is basically protecting, if there is an important role for the United States protecting each other, protecting individuals from each other and from other outside entities as well, you could, I mean, if you could deregulate and cut spending elsewhere, you would be able to assure security more. I think that the immigration position that if we could have greater integration that suddenly a lot of these things are just gonna magically take care of themselves is one that's a little naive. Leading into World War I, we were as integrated as we ever have been, at least in Europe, until maybe the recent moment with the EU integration and it was no defense against complete annihilation and two world wars essentially. Yes, my question is with a country with failing states like ours, do we have the infrastructure to hold all these immigrants and just maintain the order? I'm sorry, with failing states like ours? Yeah, with like California where there's these mass exodus? Oh, productivity increases, some because we inefficently provide some goods to the government today, some of those might be stressed and put pressure on for more reform. Immigration's not gonna solve all of our problems. I don't think poor infrastructure in California though undermines the gains that immigrants can bring. I mean, in terms of thinking about their impact on a public good provision in the United States, if it's truly a public good, it's non-rival which means when you add more taxpayers to the basic, it's cheaper per taxpayer. The problem is government provides tons of things that don't fit that definition. We are gonna move to closing remarks. Mine's gonna be very short and then we're gonna give Ben the last word. So I think that the message from those who are concerned about just embracing more open immigration is that the process should be somewhat cautious, it should be controlled. We might wanna keep an eye on the quality of immigrant we're bringing in and just go slowly and see what kinds of unintended consequences pop up, each step that we take down the immigration path. I think that the notion that all of this is going to be clean and work just really well and the bottom line is is that the gains are going to offset all of these things while it may be true. Those who stand to lose or be hurt in some way from immigration, it's really going to hurt and there's no true biote that occurs when someone is disserviced by immigration so it could breed a lot of hostility and be somewhat counterproductive to the broader open immigration cause. So I think the message is there are a lot of reasons to just be skeptical and to go slow at most. There's no claim that this would be smooth and have no complications and no adjustment costs and people wouldn't have adjust. Any economic shift of magnitude that doubles world GDP is obviously gonna have dislocation effects and transition costs but we're still doubling it. That's a massive increase in wealth. So economics is a science of means and ends and what it says is the case for free trade and labor is no different than the case for free trade and goods and services would lead to a massive increase in wealth. We should be concerned in making sure that they don't undermine our political institutions that give us economic freedom and the ability to have good long run growth but there's not good evidence for that yet. If I don't see good evidence for that, that tells me this is a massive increase in wealth that can deal with these other problems. So economics is a science of means and ends. It tells you it's gonna massively increase productivity. That doesn't tell you whether it's good or bad. We need moral theories to do that. So let's consult some of the major ones here and see how this fits in. Utilitarian case for open borders. Clean cut, massive increase in utility for people in the poorer parts of the world moving here that's gonna compare it to the extreme poverty that they're in. That's going to dominate any utility losses to the native born who just don't like, who feel uncomfortable because now the poverty is not anonymous abroad but they see relative poverty nearer them. Efficiency, well the whole point of immigration restrictions is to stop things that would be efficient from moving across borders. The massive dollar gains tell you that it's a win there. Egalitarian, clearly if you care about the poor, this is something that you can do to help them, probably the best thing that you can do to help the world's real poor. And within that framework fits the Rawlsian framework of maximizing the welfare of the least well off as well because all of the people who are losers in the native born country are all much better off than these least well off people moving. The libertarian rights one. Right now immigration restrictions prevent capitalist acts between consenting adults. You can't sell your home for someone to be a permanent resident in if they don't happen to be one of the 300 million people who are RNA in the United States. You can't choose to employ a foreigner. These are capitalist acts among consenting adults that should not be prohibited if we're just in rights theory. Even if you're native centric, meaning all I care about is the welfare of the US, if these foreigners could gain so much by coming here, redistribute it to the people and some of it into the people in America and the native is positioned on this also has to be pro-immigration. This is a case where I think we have most of your major contending moral theories all point in the same direction if you believe the cause and effect that economics is telling you on this. And the theory that that's based off is core comparative advantage, non-controversial part of economics. The resource at stake is the most productive that we have in the world, human labor and its creativity. And there are major barriers to that right now. And that's why we find these massive games. So I think open immigration is a radical policy but it's only radical because the status quo is radically unjust and inefficient. And we should go about changing that. Thank you all for watching. Thank you all in the audience for tuning in as well. And that's it. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Scott.