 Hello and welcome to today's debate on Open Borders made possible by the Foundation for Economic Education and the Arthur N. Roop Foundation. My name is Jason Riddle. I'm the college programs manager at FEE where our mission is to inspire, educate and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical and legal principles of a free society. We're hosting this debate as part of our summer debate series where you can learn more about this debate as well as other debates in the series at FEE.org. I want to welcome all the students here in our live audience in Golden Colorado as well as everybody watching from around the world on our live streaming site FEE.org backslash open borders, or borders debate, excuse me. To start things off I'm going to introduce the resolution we're going to be debating. I'm going to introduce today's participants and finally I'm going to explain the format of how we are going to proceed today. The resolution we're going to be debating is territorial borders should be open and unrestricted allowing for the free movement of people. Dr. Jason Brennan will be supporting the resolution and David and Sarah will be opposing. Now let me introduce our debate participants. Dr. Jason Brennan is an assistant professor of strategy, economics, ethics and public policy at Georgetown University where he is also governing fellow of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. He is the author of several books including Why Not Capitalism, Compulsory Voting, Foreign Against with Lisa Hill, Libertarianism, What Everyone Needs to Know, The Ethics of Voting and a Brief History of Liberty with David Schmidt. He's currently writing Markets Without Limits and Against Politics. Dr. Brennan writes and teaches about moral foundations of a free society, the intersections of politics, philosophy and economics and he has appeared on Fox Business, C-SPAN, NPR, Al Jazeer and CTV Canada. David and Sarah is a research associate for Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at Heritage Foundation's Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy. In addition to co-authoring research paper, David contributes post on national security to Heritage's blog, The Foundry. He specializes in cyber and homeland security policy including protection of critical infrastructure. David and Sarah joined Heritage in 2012 and holds a degree in government and economics from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He and his wife Kayla currently reside in Arlington, Virginia. The order with which we're going to pursue today's debate as follows. Each debate participant will deliver eight minutes for opening statements starting with the affirmative position, Dr. Brennan will follow with four minutes of rebuttal from each side then we'll have 15 minutes of questions from students in the audience. Finally we'll conclude with closing statements starting with David. And the resolution we're going to be debating today is territorial borders should be open and unrestricted allowing for the free movement of people. Dr. Jason Brennan, you have eight minutes for opening remarks. Thank you. So should we open borders? Yes, I mean we should, absolutely. Open borders are the economically efficient, egalitarian, libertarian and utilitarian way to double world product. Opening borders is not simply a moral imperative but it's actually in our self-interest. So I want to start by saying that open borders are a form of economic protectionism. You've all taken microeconomics and at some point you probably had to dry supply and demand curves and talk about the economic deadweight loss of having tariffs and import quotas. Labor restrictions are just import quotas on labor. Labor is a resource and just as in your microeconomics classes you probably did more problems where you're measuring the deadweight loss from having tariffs. You can measure the deadweight loss from having restrictions on immigration. So surprisingly there's a number of papers that have been written on this and published in peer-reviewed academic journals and the median estimate of the deadweight loss from closed borders is 100% of world GDP. Low estimates are about 70%, high estimates are about 150%. What do I mean by that? There's a nice review article you should read by Michael Clements called Trillion Dollar Bills in the Sidewalk that was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reviews all the papers that have been published on this. The typical, that means that world product right now should be about $150 trillion but because the nations of the world have a closed borders regime it's only about $75 trillion. We've destroyed an entire earth's worth of production by closing borders. So cost benefit analysis says any bad stuff that comes from open immigration, any bad stuff that comes from open borders had better be worth $75 trillion. It better be the evils of immigration should be more than $75 trillion or you should be in favor of it. So already we're talking about a $75 trillion problem by closing borders. Okay, but what about the moral aspect of this? So I'm going to borrow here a thought experiment from the philosopher Michael Humor at just down the street actually in Boulder, Colorado. He has a paper he says, imagine there's a guy named Starving Marvin. Marvin is starving and he is about to go to the market in order to sell something that will prevent him from starving. He has something that someone at the market would like to buy and he just manages to get there to the market. He'll sell it and become and he'll stop starving. And as he's about to get there you show up with your friends and you have some guns and you put him away and say, we don't want you coming to our market, we don't like people like you. There's something wrong with you on your market. So you push him away and then he goes and starves. He starves to death. In the second version of this thought experiment Marvin is just really, really poor and if you can get to the market he'll sell something that will make him 10 to 20 times richer. But once again you intervene and stop him from selling something. So as a result he stays poor. So Michael Humor says, in this case his blood is on your hands. It's not your fault that he was starving in the first place and it's not your fault that he was poor in the first place. That's just bad luck. But you actively intervene to prevent him from making a life saving or a life changing trade. It's not like if you're walking around Washington DC and you see a homeless person and you fail to give him $5, you haven't made him any worse off. This is more like you see a homeless person who's watching someone else's car and then you intervene and scare them both away so he doesn't get the money. So you're actively intervening to cause harm. You're actively intervening to prevent somebody from making a trade with a willing stranger. That's what closed borders are. It's the imposition of violence against people who would like to make trades with one another. Now, so on its face Humor says closed borders look kind of evil. They're just kind of evil. But maybe it's just a prima facie case against them. Maybe when we look at the costs of open borders maybe we'll find out that this apparently evil thing is justified. Maybe we'll find out and make sense to restrict immigration. So what are the main arguments that people give in favor of restricting borders, in favor of restrict immigration? These are what they are. It's that immigrants will cause crime. Immigrants will lower our wages. Immigrants will sully our culture. Immigrants will consume too many welfare services or that they'll vote the wrong way. Now, one thing I want you to notice is that there's kind of an asymmetry in how people think about this. One thing that economists like to do when they think about economic protectionism is if you're talking to the typical person in America who is an economic protectionist, that person will say there should be tariffs between Canada and the United States. And the economist who will be in favor of free trade will say, well, if you're in favor of having, if these are your reasons for favoring tariffs between Canada and the United States, why shouldn't we also have tariffs between Virginia and Maryland or between Colorado and Arizona? In fact, why don't we have tariffs between Denver and Boulder? And why don't we have restrictions between neighborhoods inside of Boulder and inside of Golden Colorado? Whatever the argument is for having import restrictions between countries should also imply restrictions inside of countries, shouldn't it? There's no obvious reason to have it stick to countries. So we could say similar things about immigration. I live in Fairfax County, Virginia. It's one of the most affluent parts of the country. Median household income is $110,000. In my neighborhood, it's $135,000. Crime is basically nothing that we have basically in every demographic factor. We're really good, like really good in education. Our schools are great. Our parks are great. Everything's great. We have an open border with places that are much poorer. Right now, anyone from Buffalo County, South Dakota, median income is $6,000 per person, could move there. Why don't we stop them from coming in? Why don't we just restrict them? Why don't we restrict people from Harlem County, Kentucky, from coming into Fairfax, Virginia? Whatever argument you want to give for restricting trade of labor or labor mobility between countries should also apply to labor mobility within countries. So with that, let me move to the arguments that people give. Crime, immigrants cause crime. Seems plausible. After all, places with a lot of immigrants are places of high crime. But does that mean the immigrants are causing crime? Turns out no. Turns out the reason there are a lot of immigrants in high crime places is because immigrants tend to be poor. They move to places that are cheap and places that are cheaper high crime. How do we know this? We study it. Sociologist Robert Samson found that Mexican immigrants are only half as likely to commit crime as third generation or greater Americans of any nationality. Economist Christian Butcher and Ann Peele found that immigrants are incarcerated one-fifth the rate of the native born. Milo Bianchi and his colleagues got similar results for Italy. And every single paper I've read that tries to study immigrant crime rates finds that they're less likely to commit crime than domestic people. So the stereotypical white Southern guy that goes, er, stealing our jobs is something like three times more likely to commit any kind of crime than the people he's complaining about. So it just turns out to be mistaken. What about wages? That's a sensible worry. It's a sensible worry that if you have a flood of immigrants, they're going to depress wages. Because what you're doing there is you're thinking of the economy as a stagnant thing and immigrants are just people who consume jobs. But a better way of thinking about it is that labor is a resource. And having a flood of labor is a flood of a new resource. So do they depress wages? Once again, the only way to know this is to study it. So economists almost uniformly find that immigration increases domestic wages for everybody except one group, uneducated people who have a high school diploma or less and work at unskilled labor jobs. But even the most pessimistic economists out there I know about this guy named Borjas at Harvard, he thinks even then we're talking about a 5% loss to the worst-off workers in the US for a few years and then after that they'll probably be better off too. So what do we do about that? Well, if I could wave a magic wand that would make everyone in this room a million dollars richer and one person $50,000 poorer, it's not technically afraid to efficient, that person's worse off. But we could just pay that person off. The rest of us who have these massive gains could just pay off that person and she'll be happy too. So that's what we can do with open borders. Most people will be winners, most people have their wages go up according to the economic studies. So let's do it and pay off the losers and then they'll be happy as well. When it comes to culture, I would just very quickly say that high-culture areas are places with a lot of culture, places with a lot of immigrants. Our cultural lands are places without immigrants. And finally on welfare, here's the thing, right now we're not paying poor Haitians welfare. We're sticking them in Haiti and not allowing them to come here where they can get a better life and we're not paying them welfare. If we can't afford to pay people welfare, fine, don't pay them welfare, but let them come in, let them come to the US where they'll make more money and be better off and still don't pay them welfare. Either way, you're not paying them anything out of the welfare state, but in one case they're much better off and in the other case they're not. Thank you, Dr. Brennan. David and Sarah, you have eight minutes for your opening statement. Thank you, Jason. When we start with a few things that we all agree on, we all agree that the current immigration system is broken. It's broken, it's overwhelmed, it's unworkable. Central questions are how do we fix this problem? There are some other areas where we agree. We can currently agree that there's a humanitarian crisis going on at the border, just a few hundred miles or less than that, south of us now. Right now, children are being encouraged across our borders, often by themselves. This year it's estimated that 90,000, 90,000 unaccompanied children will cross our borders. Many of these children are from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras, where I was just two days ago. We must reunite these children with their families and keep these families together in their home countries rather than risk the health and safety of these children in their dangerous march northward. We can also agree that the United States would benefit greatly from attracting high skilled workers. There's no debate about this, we all agree. This is where the economic benefits of immigration reform can be found. Benefits like small business creation, improved productivity, and job growth. This is why the European Union, China, South Korea, all the other nations of the world are competing with us and with all the other nations in the world to attract high skilled workers. We need to have a simple and effective system to allow high skilled workers to come, work, and live here. Now there are some areas of sharp disagreement as you can tell. Some advocate for a one-size-fits-all solution, solutions like open borders. This is Professor Brennan's view. He has called open borders a moral imperative and has said that they are the most efficient and best policy outcome. Respectfully, I disagree. Such an action would be a disastrous mistake, a colossal blunder that would be irreparably harm this country. Open borders would encourage millions of people to come here, overwhelming our ability to pay and provide for social services, assimilate newcomers, and protect our citizens. Open borders have powerful and dangerous consequences. This goes beyond theory and guesses. We would be inviting the entire world here and we can't afford to be wrong about this. For example, most nations in the world cannot afford the level of government services and benefits that they currently provide. Adding millions of poor immigrants to the roles of already unsustainable government programs would only drive nations further into debt, strangling their economies with debt and taxes. A report by the Heritage Foundation looked at the cost of honesty for 12 million unlawful immigrants and discovered that over the course of their lifetimes, taxpayers would likely pay more than $6 trillion in fiscal costs, likely erasing whatever economic benefits might come from these lower skilled workers. And that's just the cost for 12 million folks. 6.3 trillion would be a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions in debt that would accumulate as hundreds of millions come to the US and other nations as a result of open borders. I know some people don't like these conclusions, but we have to follow these facts where they lead us. I have strong confidence in the study and I would encourage you to look it up on Heritage's website and read it for yourself. It's called the physical cost of honesty. Be a smart consumer of the information you're hearing. Often critics offer justification for open borders by citing dead weight. That is the uncreated wealth that occurs because poor people remain in poverty around the globe. I agree that coming to an economically advanced country gives the poor around the world better opportunities. But we also know that generous welfare and entitlement systems discourage hard work, marriage, success. We don't have to look any further than our own inner cities to see the welfare trap in full swing, pulling down many of the people who want to escape it. And so while I agree that many, most people from around the world would have a better life by coming to an advanced economy, many would get that better life on the backs of current taxpayers. As Milton Freeman, the famous libertarian economist said, it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs, it is another to have free immigration to welfare and you cannot have both. And so, many who are for open borders also argue that we could refuse services and benefits to immigrants to guarantee against taxpayer loss. But these actions would detonate an intense and divisive debate with hundreds of millions of people attracted to our countries and then left out. If you think we have a crisis now, wait until we tell immigrants that they can't access social services or qualify for benefits. We would be creating a two-tiered, unequal, yet legal system of rights and benefits for millions of immigrants. I also want to talk about the national security concerns that come with open borders. I know Professor Brennan probably shares my worries here and open border is an open invitation to criminals, especially those who have been attempting to extend their lawlessness across our southern border. We need to work with Mexico and the rest of Latin America to continue their efforts to contain and eliminate the violence of drug cartels and other criminal organizations. We cannot have this lawlessness spill across our borders. We cannot turn San Diego, El Paso, Dallas, Albuquerque, or even Denver into war zones. And that is no exaggeration. These cartels are looking for more profit, fighting for control of territory and ruthlessly expanding whenever possible. To these organizations, an open border would be a further encouragement, an irresistible temptation, an enticing business opportunity for the extension of their empire and eventually an undefendable capitulation by the US. Some would say, well, we'll keep these bad guys out. Well, how? How can we determine who is bad and stop them without some system to restrict who comes across our borders? We need a system to protect our borders and ports of entry from dangerous people. And by definition, this is not an open and unrestricted border. We cannot have it both ways at once. I've spoken about criminality, drug cartels. My background is in homeland security. And I believe that an open border would also allow terrorists to come to this country without any chance of screening or stopping them. Look at what has happened to other countries that can't control their borders. Countries like Yemen, Pakistan, or Somalia, they have become havens for terrorists. The same would happen here if we adopted open borders. Terrorists would come here to incubate, swarm, and multiply using our own freedoms against us. We are their target. Let's not fool ourselves here. So we place the citizens of our country in grave jeopardy with open borders. The immigration debate is a tangled web of complex, often contradictory, emotional, and challenging policies. But we can untangle this web. We can do this by stepping back from the headlines, the posturing, the demagoguery, and focus separately on each part of the immigration problem. We can do more to open our borders to high skilled immigrants, to create temporary worker programs for seasonal occupations, and make a legal immigration system that's simple and easy to use. We should do this. We should build a system that harnesses the power of the free movement of individuals and labor across borders, but is bounded by fiscal and security realities. Doing so will allow us to build a more rational, free, secure, and workable system. Thank you. Thank you, David. Dr. Brennan, you now have four minutes to respond. Okay, great, thanks. So let's start with the stuff about danger. You know, if we open, you guys know there's like a Kors brewery down the street. Did you see the big gang fight between Kors and Anheuser-Busch last night, where they were shooting each other, right? No, there wasn't. The purpose of the drug war, Milton Friedman said, is to enrich drug cartels. Like the reason that we have violence in cartels is because we make something that people want illegal, and then it's still supplied, and it's supplied illegally on the black market by violent people. We used to have that with the provision of alcohol in the 1920s. We don't anymore because we legalized it. It's pretty clear. It's basically every economist agrees with this at this point that the drug war creates more violence, doesn't get rid of drugs, and creates more crime. That's just what the studies show. That's what the evidence shows. So I feel like it's like, we're doing something really dumb, which is having the war on drugs. And then we don't want that like, and then because we have the war on drugs, it's just creating violence all over the world. And here, should we then restrict borders for that reason? I don't think so. So get rid of the war on drugs too. I say similar things about terrorism. There's a reason that we are the target of terrorism is because we're not very nice to other countries. It's because we abuse them and hurt them. As far as the welfare restrictions, we already have a two-tiered system here. It's just rather than having a two-tiered system of people living in the country, and being better off, they have a two-tiered system where we force them to stay in their own countries and are worse off. We already have that. So why not let them come in? As far as like the loss to the welfare system, I'm gonna cite some papers. I'll see the Glazer and Sasser Dotae in 2001, Guy Lenz in 1999. There's a guy from BGMU named Gawkin or there was a paper coming out recently. It shows that when you have high immigration, welfare benefits tend to go down because people don't really want to pay welfare benefits to people that are not ethnically similar to them. So what would the government do? It would probably reduce welfare benefits if we had high immigration. It would have to. We can't actually afford to pay that. So when you look at the papers or in peer-reviewed journals, they don't say that it's gonna be a welfare disaster. And if it were, it's like you just can't, literally can't afford to pay welfare benefits to the entire world. So don't, that's the solution. But you can improve everybody's welfare by allowing them in. If we are really worried about, and also like economists, they say like the value of labor here, of having open borders, is not to get high-skilled labor. It's to get low-skilled labor. Low-skilled labor is really useful and valuable. It makes stuff like your water bottles and this, this pen. It's a useful resource. We want that too. It's not just high-skilled workers that we want. Will a million people or a billion people move here overnight if we open borders? Again, I want you to think about why is it that not everyone from Harlan County, Kentucky is moving to Fairfax County, Virginia, when they could have their income go by a factor of six? There's already market forces at work that explain why they don't move. Things about cultural differences, things about the cost of housing, things about whether they can get a job and so on. These sorts of informal mechanisms regulate the flow of labor. They would regulate the flow of labor when it comes to trade or labor between countries as well. So again, if we're worried about these problems, and these are reasons to keep all people from Honduras, I just want to say, why aren't there reasons to just get rid of a bunch of Americans? Let's take the criminal Americans and deport them. Let's take the people who consume welfare and put them in Mississippi and then make Mississippi no longer a state. If these are reasons to forbid people from coming in, there are also reasons for kicking people out. If certain people from the third world are in danger to us and certain people who are already here are in danger to us, let's get rid of them. Why is there an asymmetry? I don't know where that's coming from. Thank you. I'd like to remind the audience that we'll be fielding your questions after David's response. So be thinking about what you might want to ask our participants. David, you have four minutes for rebuttal. Thank you. Professor Brennan spoke of fairness and justice. These are good words and important goals, but he asks us to imagine being born in a different place or a different time. He encourages us to share our wealth and our nation with the world. But I think we should also consider a different aspect of justice, which is the justice and fairness of for taxpayers who are here now to have to pay for those fiscal costs. There are some studies out there, but like I said, he mentioned that's gonna be, we don't, because we don't want to pay them benefits. When there's millions of people who are here who are want to be citizens, they want to get benefits, it's gonna cause quite a debate when we continually tell them no, no, no, and their population continues to grow over time. We also want to talk about justice and protection in terms of, for protection for our citizens. I don't think that it's just because of the United States policies around the world that we, that terrorists want to come here and hurt us. They fundamentally disagree with everything we stand for. They hate liberty, they hate everything that we hold near and dear. Right now, the most, arguably the most open border in the United, in the world is between Iraq and Syria. Do we want to replicate that here? Have any of those freedom fighters who freely move between those two countries to allow them to come here just as easily? The war in Syria has almost nothing to do with us. We told, we told them we had a red line, then we ignored that red line. So what exactly is our intervention in Syria that's making those fighters want to come here and kill us? Well, that we know that they are trying to do so. They're working with the best bond maker in the world right now to plan a tax against us. But right now we have security at our embassies overseas. That's why you may have heard about that restriction on extra security that was beefed up at airports abroad a couple of weeks ago because they heard rumors and they had chatter that this was going on. So this security threat isn't just some America's bad and these people want to come hurt us because they fundamentally disagree with us and they want to come here to kill us. Regarding drug cartels and trafficking, well, I would agree to a certain extent that perhaps the drug issue is part of it, but they'll traffic in anything. It's not just illicit drugs. Unless we're willing to say all drugs are now legal, every single drug, which I don't think some people would say yes, some people would probably say no to all drugs, but let's say it's not drugs. They'll traffic weapons, they'll traffic human organs, they'll traffic people for slavery, sexual slavery, or for manual labor slavery. They will use their existing networks to traffic any material that we consider to be illicit and wrong and they will use those networks to bring these people and to do us harm. So the criminality argument though, clearly the drug angle could possibly resolve by legalizing all drugs, that doesn't solve the problem still. They still will wanna bring in people and weapons and other things which are dangerous to the United States. Well, thank you both very much. We're now gonna move into a period of Q and A taking audience questions. First question please. This is for Dr. Brennan. If you live by the border, you have certain people that really want to harm you for your things. And so I was just curious how in open borders, how's that gonna fix this problem? I guess, I live by the border, you're thinking that a bunch of Mexicans will come in and steal my stuff, literally steal it. Yeah. Yeah, I used to live by the border. I don't think that was the case. I don't know where you're getting that claim. Do you have any evidence for that claim? No, I do know it's not safe to go in the mountains, very much. I mean, I used to live in Tucson and I know about the stuff that's happening there. There's a lot of violence that occurs and a lot it has to do with the fact that borders are closed. You have people who, they call them coyotes, they traffic in getting people across the border and they don't want to get caught because they'll get arrested and so on. So if you make it legal, you get rid of, you no longer have criminals who are doing the shipping. So I think a lot of the violence is coming from that. But the average person from Mexico, first of all, right now there's no net migration from Mexico, by the way, because they're gotten so rich that it's not worth for them to move here. But if you wanna take care of the problem, you're causing the problem by making it illegal in the first place, and there's no more violence. Thank you. Next question. Mr. Brennan, I wish we lived in a world where this was possible to have no tariffs or anything, but different countries have such different governments, different laws, different politics, different political leaders. How do you think this could ever be feasible to implement? Yeah, it's probably not feasible to implement. Here's my reason for thinking that. The argument for open borders is simply the argument that Adam Smith is making in the wealth of nations against protectionism. It's that it's to our benefit, it's our self-interest to do it, it enriches us to do it, and then just applying that consistently. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 against an economic philosophy he dubbed mercantilism. We know from surveys the average American is a mercantilist, so he's convinced the economist and no one else. So I think people are ignorant about economics, they don't look at the facts, they don't read the studies, they don't understand how it works, and they're ethnocentric. So I think it's highly unlikely that we'll ever actually do this, to be frank. Hi, this question is for David and Sarah. The humanitarian crisis at the border with kids crossing into America, many people say it's a cause of a loophole in a law that protects kids. And so if we had open borders, then children wouldn't be crossing by themselves, they'd be coming with their parents. So isn't that an argument for open borders? I would say that we would certainly increase the safety of children if they were crossing with their parents and not through these illegal means. That's certainly true. However, as I've mentioned, just because there are good people who are wanting to cross the borders, that doesn't mean that there are also people who would want to do us harm. There are people like these drug cartels that are going to get rid of the drug angle. There's always going to be something that they want to bring to the United States that's illegal and illicit. And if we open up the borders to lots of good people who they may want to just work, there's going to be people who sneak in who are going to want to hurt us. And I would also just say that, come back to that welfare argument, which is that if we allow these folks to gain access to our welfare systems, they are going to end up costing us lots of money in the long run. So yes, it would decrease the humanitarian, the violence aspect if we allow for open borders. But at the same time, I think we would be harming ourselves and bringing violence here to the United States. Thank you. Next question, please. This question is for Dr. Brennan. And it is a bit of a lengthy question, so I apologize. You told the story of starving Marvin, or in the second case, poor Marvin. And the impression I got from that story, and I may be incorrect in this, was that anybody who doesn't support open and unrestricted borders must be someone who wants to close down the borders completely and shut down immigration entirely. And I feel like that's ignoring a considerable chunk of the population. I personally believe, and I'm sure there are people who agree with me, that we should allow immigrants in, but they should go through the process of becoming a legal citizen, or at least obtain a visa, as they would have to in any other country, or we would have to in any other country. And if starvation or poverty is a problem in that process, then maybe we should focus on reforming and the process for becoming a citizen or obtaining a visa. What do you say to that? If you're talking about making it much easier to get in, then I'm all in favor of that. Right now it's really difficult to move to the United States. You need to either have certain kinds of skills, your engineering degrees and things like that, or you have to have certain kinds of relatives here, or otherwise you just have to basically win a lottery. So the poorest people in the world who don't have a lot of skills, they're not allowed to move here unless they win that lottery, and most of them are going to fail. So that's why they come illegally, because they know that there's no, like the chances of them getting in and becoming a citizen through legal means right now are vanishingly small. I won the lottery. It happened to have been more American, but they lost that lottery. So the serving Martin thought experiment, the purpose that was just to point out that like when you intervene, you are intervening, you aren't simply failing to help, but you're causing that. So what a closed border system is, is the following, it's I want to pay someone from Honduras to clean my house and you guys won't let me. You're using guns to stop me. That's what humor is pointing out and I agree with him. It's the imposition of violence from some subset of society against the other rest of society to restrict them from making trades. That's the purpose of that thought experiment. It's not meant to be directly on just discussing like exactly how we have passed the citizenship created. Thank you. I just want to jump in a little bit here and just say that talking about ways to make the border more open. As I mentioned at the end of my remarks, I'm all four ways in which we can make the legal immigration easier and simpler to use and we need to make it so that there are more legal opportunities to come here. I would say we focus on high-skill labor. That doesn't mean we eliminate low-skill labor, certainly not. We have, right now we give out about 14% of our green cards every year for employment-based reasons. We give out 66% for family-based reasons. All I'm saying is we should have more people coming here for employment-based reasons because of their skill because they want to work here, not for family-based reasons. So certainly let's open up the system, make it easier and let's just target it in ways in which we can gain more economic benefit. And for folks who are low-skill, temporary worker programs are great ways to bring in those laborers. It harnesses the power of the free movement of borders. Someone from Honduras can come to the United States, work for a certain amount of period of time and then go back home. They can earn good money by the same time. It doesn't impose the same security or fiscal costs on the United States. Dr. Brennan, I think that the argument you make is an empathetic one, but we know that in the United States, empirically, it is difficult to scale back welfare, both for existing citizens, immigrants, anything. So that said, maybe it would be theoretically easier when you have this huge change in precedent that immigration open borders would allow. However, there are other externalities, so consider public transportation or parks, something that you can exclude from immigrants even if you don't give them direct welfare benefits. So how do you respond to that, that normal taxpayers will be on the hook for maintaining those services, that they would now be sharing? Yeah, I haven't read the Heritage Institute, or Heritage Foundation study, so I don't know what they say there, but I don't, so here's what I think about this. There have been a lot of studies about the tax implications of immigration and most of them find that the immigrants are net tax payers rather than net tax consumers. You have young people coming in, they people come because they want to work, especially if you don't make it easy for them to get welfare benefits. They come because they want to work, they get a job, they pay taxes, we already have a problem now where the country is getting to be too old, we have too many old people, they're gonna be collecting social security, and one way to solve that because we don't have a high birth rate is by allowing young immigrants in. So I disagree with the analysis here, I think that it's actually to our benefit from a fiscal perspective to allow more immigrants. Now, with any of these things, if you have a lot of people flooding into a particular city, it can strain the services that are being provided there, and that's a problem, but the good thing about it is that people are not dumb, people will make choices in light of what's happening. If a certain area gets flooded with too many labors, wages will go down, they'll go somewhere else. If a certain area gets flooded with too many labors, the cost of housing will go up and that place becomes less attractive and people will go somewhere else. If the public parks get to be overused, that place becomes less attractive, the compensating differential of living there is lower so people will move somewhere else. You have these informal market mechanisms that coordinate behavior and you don't need to have a restriction, you can just let people see this is becoming less of a good bargain because people have already moved over here and moved to a different place. So I think it's actually to our benefit from a fiscal perspective to allow in more immigration. I mean, you can't do this while having a rule that everyone has to make $36,000 a year period. We're gonna guarantee that and if you don't make that, we'll pay it. That won't work, but as long as you have lower welfare benefits, then it will. And what will we do? We literally cannot afford to pay the whole world American level of welfare benefits, so we won't. We know we won't because we just can't. It's not even an option on the table. We're not going to pay $7 trillion in welfare because we just literally can't afford it. So we'll pay less. I'll just quickly say that I agree that if we have, if we had, we want to do more to, libertarian conservative here, we both would agree that the welfare state, the entitlement systems are broken. We need to fix them, reform them absolutely. And if we were able to bring truly reform those systems, you pointed out the difficulty of doing. So if we were able to do that, then some of these other fiscal worries wouldn't melt away. However, we need to fix those systems first before we can then jump to just saying, well, welcome to everyone who wants to come. This question is directed to David and Sarah. David, you talk about the fiscal cost of amnesty for immigrants coming in through the borders, but wouldn't the solution be then to cut off the amnesty, get rid of the incentive for these illegal immigrants to come to this country illegally? It seems like you want to have your cake, but you also want to eat it too. Could you elaborate on that and explain your position? Could you explain that question just a little bit? Yeah, yeah, so would it cutting off the incentive for illegal immigrants to come in to the country would be to cut off the amnesty? So you're saying that if we don't do amnesty, then people will not want to come here? Is that what you're trying to say? Well, for the benefits. For the benefits. Because you talk about the fiscal cost of it. So I mean, if I'm understanding correctly, I would definitely say that if we, I would say let's not do amnesty, because the amnesty is creating incentive for people to come here illegally. And then that is just costing us money. Different studies have looked at the cost right now that right now, unlawful immigrants are net tax consumers. They consume more than they receive benefits. Education is a huge item that states have to pay for. Certain healthcare benefits, they don't gain access to all the welfare benefits, but even as illegal immigrants, they're on average they're net tax consumers. So certainly I would agree that if we do away with this talk of amnesty, that would certainly, and enforce our laws more appropriately, that would certainly contribute to less illegal immigration and less fiscal costs right now and in the future. Next question please. So hi, I wanted to ask, why do you think that immigrants are more dangerous than USN citizens? Like mostly all of the time, they're like Central American citizens that comes over here. And they're just moving here because they want a better opportunity, right? Mostly all of them. So if we think about terrorism, mostly they're not Central Americans or Mexicans, for example, doing those stuff is other places. So I wanted to know like, why don't you consider that they're dangerous if they're just working like the law skills jobs that they have over here? So I wanted to know like, why do you think that? Sure, so I would say that when we try to make this clear, I don't think that most immigrants are dangerous. I don't, I actually don't buy the necessary argument that all immigrants in immigration general causes crime. I'm talking about the cartels and other organizations and the terrorists and those organizations that have explicit purposes that are designed to harm people, to exploit laws, to break laws, these types of organizations. These people are harmful. We know that I was just in Honduras, it's got the highest murder rate in the world. There's estimates there that the drug cartels, the gangs in Honduras outnumber the military. I mean, that's a stark reality there. And to say we're gonna have open borders, okay, not all of them are gonna move to the United States, but if they see a completely new market, even if we legalize drugs, call them marketing sex slaves or weapons, that's a serious problem. If 40,000 folks just from Honduras decide that they're gonna expand to the United States. So no, not all, I definitely don't agree. Most immigrants are hard workers and they want to come here and better themselves. And many studies have actually indicated that initially they're actually less involved in crime. Yeah, because mostly all of the people that is dying in Central America, like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, it's because the drug passes through by our countries, but they come over here. So it doesn't make sense coming over here and distribute the drug if they're doing it that way. So most of the people are dying in Central American countries. So I think that it's a good thing of open borders. People just want a good opportunity of a better living and living safe. So basically that, thank you. Okay, so we have time for one more question. Okay, this question goes to Jason Brennan. In your opening remarks, you talked about that productivity in the world would double. And I looked up a study by the Global Center for Global Development, which has research that says GDP would double if we open borders. Can you explain why it would double? How does that work and why would it double? In 30 seconds? In 30 seconds. Yeah. That, that's the answer. It looks like that. No, I can't do in 30 seconds. Read the Clemens article and it'll explain how they measure dead weight loss. That's like, we'd have to, I'd have to teach you supply and demand curves and then go over dead weight loss and how we estimate the fallout. And it would take, it would be two days of class. So sorry about that. But you can read those articles and explain it. All right, well thank you very much and thank you to the audience for the questions. We're now gonna move into a period of closing statements, three minutes of closing statements starting with David and Sarah. So the current debate that we're having right here and in general across our country on immigration really offers us an opportunity to address this really complex issue. And we have to get this right. Whatever decisions we make will have ripple effects and huge consequences in the decades to come. It's no exaggeration to say that the system and incentives that we construct in the current debate we're having now will be felt worldwide. If we want wealth creation, economic progress, we must put in place a system that makes it easier for people to come here. High school workers, a temporary worker program to provide businesses with the labor they need and by doing so without imposing fiscal costs on our nation. If we want to address the humanitarian crisis on our boards, we must do more to work with Central American countries and to return children to their families as soon as possible. And then focus on combating the crime and corruption which we just talked about which is driving people to flee these countries. If we wanna multiply our problems and establish a vast fiscal burden for taxpayers, we would open our borders. If we want to threaten our national security from terrorism and increase the criminality of drug cartels in this country, we would open our borders. We can develop and implement a sensible, rational, clear, consistent and coherent immigration policy. And we don't have to do this by playing politics and demonizing the opposition, becoming emotional or pandering to people who are caught in this web. We need to utilize forms like this to develop a consensus around a workable, practical and enforceable set of policies that prudently protect everyone in the United States. And again, I wanna thank you all for being here today. Thank you very much, Dr. Brennan, your closing thoughts. Great, thank you. You know, I think the worries that David's brought up are sensible worries, but I think that they're the worries that come about from having other bad policies. Even if he's right about everything, he's not $75 trillion, right? The economic consensus is that we could have $75 trillion more made per year by having open borders regimes. We should do that, because even these costs, they're not that expensive. It would be a net gain to the world rather than a loss if we were to do it. Things about, that some other worries that people have about security. Well, you can have open borders and security. Screen everybody if they're not a terrorist you're in for any other reason. You're not a terrorist, you get to come in, okay? The cartels, we can make them weaker the way we made the mafia weaker. The mafia used to do a lot of stuff. They used to provide alcohol for everybody and they had a lot of money and they were very violent when we started making alcohol legal again in the United States. They still sell some things illegally and they're still violence associated with the mafia but they're much less of a big deal and that's what would happen with the cartels as well if we were to legalize drugs. But anyways, they're already here. It doesn't matter. They're already here. They're already doing things. The only reason we don't have more cartels in the US already is because they're fighting against the illegal drug gangs and so on that are in the US that are supplying drugs. We already have these problems. The closed borders doesn't solve them. It creates them in the first place. We have a system in which everything can be globalized except for poor labor. The world's poor are therefore sitting ducks for exploitation. If you imagine a system in which only poor people sold water and they're not allowed to move from where they're standing to go sell it and only rich people buy water and they're allowed to go anywhere they want to buy the water, that's a system under which the price of water will be very low because the poor people can't compete for a better deal whereas the rich people can always walk away for a better deal. That's exactly what we have around the world right now and so the poor low wages that you see in the third world are not the result of a free market. They result of massive protectionism, like a huge amount of protectionism. So if you don't like sweatshops, if you don't like what you see in the third world, you have to realize that this is a result of first world policies. Even the violence in Honduras is largely the result of drugs being illegal in the United States. It's our fault that this is happening over there. Immigration restrictions impose suffering pain and death upon some of the most vulnerable people in the world. So there's very good humanitarian reasons to do it but there's also selfish reasons to do it. The peer reviewed studies that I've read and I've read them all, the peer reviewed studies say that it would be a net benefit to the United States to have open borders. Some people will be losers, most people will be winners, the winners will win much more than the losers and we can just pay off the losers so that they become winners as well. So we should do it for selfish reasons, not simply for humanitarian reasons. I think no matter what perspective you take, libertarian, egalitarian, humanitarian, utilitarian, you just care what economic efficiency. You have an overwhelming case in favor of open borders. I think the facts be clearly to that as well as the moral principles. Well that concludes today's debate. Thank you both very much. Let's give our participants a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. And if you'd like to watch this debate or the other nine debates that are part of the Summer Arena KO Series, just visit fee.org. Thank you all again very much. David, thank you. Thank you.