 We're just going to open it up because we've got about 20 minutes of Q&A, so I will call on people and then you direct your question to the parties that you would like to address it to any of the panelists. So, Hans, Solomon? Yeah, I guess this question of origin is about the scope of the book, so since you said the frame is being very much, oh, you won't be good, come here, just check it, just talk up. Okay, so you framed the book very much in being in this sort of contemporary global justice literature. Do you think it has anything to say to maybe people who have a slightly, you know, more classical, like, you know, maybe communitarian view of what justice is? I'm thinking, you know, there's the discussion in Book Two of the Republic, right, of the just state, and the interesting thing, of course, is he begins by saying, well, the just state is a bunch of people living happily in community and God kind of objects. Okay, that's a city of pigs. He says, ah, you don't want a just state, you want a luxurious state. And if you have that view of justice, do you have anything to say about that or would they object that maybe you're just talking about the merely global luxurious state? Good question. As far as I'm concerned, bigger the audience the better, communitarians, nine-year-olds doing what we're about, and they're very hard to speak for, you know, who might find this of some interest, but it doesn't presuppose a certain party line. I hope it doesn't. At some places, we say, look, we can't argue back the first principles on everything, but sure, I think the communitarians are worth talking to. Thank you. If I can exercise my prerogative here, I have a question. When have you not? It goes to all three of you, actually, but so, but what if the, if the empirical evidence cut a different way, how would that impact your argument in here? So let's say that, you know, the way even, so Michael was giving a very telling illustration, right? But what if the consequences of the migration patterns were devastating to the other group here? Would that change the argument or not? The reason why I asked that is because sometimes people make an argument about migration going that way, and it does appear to be, allow a debate over, you know, what happens with the cultural, say that you're debating with the Bohosts or something, right? And so it's not an issue of rights in that sense, it's a sense of the consequences of what happens with the migration patterns, I'd say. So how would you deal with that if leaving people alone ended up with consequences that didn't cut in the way that we want them to? How did that for you? Unless you'd like to. So one thing that I didn't mention, which to me was one of 50 fascinating things in the book, is that it is not a case for open borders in the sense of completely unregulated movement of people. In particular, they express serious concern about the potential for entrance to commit violent acts. And they argued that it is legitimate and just to restrict people who, on an individual basis, are suspected to be a violent threat, and not just that, but that the standard that is applied should be lower than the conservative court standard of innocent until proven guilty, that the justice allows some latitude for individual exclusion on that margin. So that's the one thing I wanted to clarify. And whenever one is talking about this issue, the slippery slope to God knows what disaster always comes up. And as I was reading Scott versus Sanford, 1857, preparing for this, I found this delicious passage in which the writer of the majority opinion is talking about the slippery slope of what would happen if we gave citizenship to all of these people of African descent, quote, it would give to persons of the Negro race the right to enter every state whenever they pleased, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased, the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens may speak, to hold public meetings in political affairs and to keep and bear arms wherever they want. Obviously, a horrifying scenario that pretty much describes what we have today. And statements like that, thousands of statements like that make me suspicious of the slippery slopes of the world. Whenever a person in Great Britain talks to me about what might happen to their culture if people move there, I ask them if they can read Beowulf in the original, which I can't. It was written in the ninth century. I can make out about a word per page, but I can read Chaucer about five, four or five hundred years later. And the only reason I can do that is because the language has been hopelessly corrupted by French by that time, giving us a language I can understand, giving us Shakespeare, etc., I'm not sure how it is logically coherent for somebody who is such a beneficiary of cultural bastardization to be so suspicious of it. And perhaps we should be suspicious of those who assert that cultural change brings disaster. Just to push back on that, just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm basically an open-border person, that's where my commitments are. But I'm also interested in this empirical issue. And there probably are people who care about preserving a culture, which I think is fool's errand. But then there are people I think, Thomas Sowell is someone who, without his opinion, I'm not sure. But there are cultural qualities that are conducive to the maintenance of liberal institutions. And so could there be a rate, an extent of migration of people with non-liberal values that could overwhelm and undermine the broader picture of liberty that I think you want to maintain? So not so much. When the French came in, they enslaved the locals. They killed a lot of them. They took their land and they established feudalism. And it was really bad for a lot of people for several hundred years. So not so much that the language changed or that the literature changed, but that there was real suffering by real individuals for a period of time. So can you comment, maybe, from that point of view? This is in the book, so if you'd like to say this exact issue. I wouldn't think that the Norman invasion is a paradigm of libertarian politics and operation. But let me bring it a little bit closer to today. Change of culture is, I think, pretty innocuous, frankly. Because culture changes kind of, you know, I'm pissed off that I can't use any of the apps my students use. That culture has left me behind. Sometimes, you know, sometimes they tell me they'll show me how to take selfies, but then I see what it looks like and I think better left alone. But you were talking about not just change of coat, but bad stuff happening. And of course, we were all titillated by the news that one of the eight murderers who granted the carnage in Paris was a pseudo-refugee from Syria, big news. And so our candidates pontificated about the much more interesting factor is what? Seven and one. Seven and one. Yeah, but these are people who were settled in part of the... And yet, they made even William the Conqueror's boys save gentlemen comparison. I think there's some real issue here, these conditions for maintaining civility. Not reading Beyl Wolf, although I used to do when I was a nine-year-old doing book reports. But in terms of the conditions in which we can appease a blade, as far as I can tell, well, Pete's going to tell me that economists have worked out the model for this, but this seems to me to be one of the great unsolved problems. We keep working on it. Sometimes I think, you know, make progress, but I've taken off a lot of regress, too, especially every four years. Michael? Unless you want to say something. Just briefly, you know, the uniquely horrifying thing about HIV is that it attacks the very cells, which make a immune response. So there's something especially pernicious about it. And I can imagine hypothetically legitimate migration restrictions in order for a liberal order to prevent its own destruction. But given that it is an extreme understatement to say that that case has been argued for countless groups, including a group that Thomas Sowell belongs to in the past. Economist? Yes, actually. They're already inside the gate. In many departments, in certain disciplines, yes. And at least one other group, and maybe more, we should really place the burden of proof on, you know, the way that this has escaped in Paul Collier's book Exodus is that he just says, well, you know, migration is irreversible, so we should stop it right now just in case that happens. That is, just giving up the entire tradition of marginal analysis in economics and saying, well, if there might be a margin someday on which it happens. And I think that's insufficient given the many, many, many, many, many times that inside groups have cried wolf. And we should wait until there's substantial evidence that our institutions are going away. The court in Sanford, in Scott versus Sanford was certain that the very institutions that underpin American society would be erased by allowing even a limited number of people of African descent to participate in it. And that's so bizarre that we should demand much, much more than the kind of vacuous fear-mongering that Collier and others engage in. Actually, I think it's on the same line, but it's a question in clarification. I think there's a starting point in this distinction, or maybe there's a lack of a distinction between economic migrants and refugees, right? So it's not very clear what was your argument there. And I'm asking you this question because years ago I had taken a class with you on lifeboat ethics about Green University, 20 years or so ago. Now, that lifeboat ethics class was exactly about profiles and typologies, and there it uses in various moral and political circumstances, creating lists, creating priorities, and setting up criteria that might be operational in different circumstances. So I'm not very sure how your thought has evolved from that initial lifeboat ethics approach to this, I'm not very sure, lack of distinction between economic migrants and refugees, including the moral and political implications of those lack of distinctions. Yeah, I'm not sure how well you did in that class, so I'm going to test you. Just what was my position 20 years ago? Okay, let me test you on that then. No, I'm testing you on that. That's your question in clarification. Is he playing fair? Oh, you're an economist now. Go ahead. Oh, that's it. I'm not sure what I might have said under the pressure of very clever students in that class. So I'm going to punt on that, but I'll tell you what I think now. I think that in my understanding of how the world could be, the case for economic migrants is actually much stronger than refugees. And it's much stronger because economic migration involves voluntary transactions among people who want to work or study or rent places with others who want to do that, et cetera, et cetera. The case, though, with refugees is, of course, that typically if you're running away from Assad or ISIS or you're in a condition of desperation, you may be a drain on the resources of others rather than contributing to them. Nonetheless, of course, I think you'd have to either be very heartless or have taken a lot of economics courses not to feel sympathy for those who are fleeing for their lives and such. I would be entirely comfortable with support for refugees and the like being protested. I think there are enough decent people who would be willing to support others. Everything deep was done through so much of the history of this country and other places that accepted people coming in. I don't know if that suits you. Is that what I said 20 years ago? Actually, 20 years ago, I think that your position was clear in terms of the criteria that we have to use in such circumstances. Who's the way? When you say way, I think way is the most tricky word in philosophical policy. Well, let's say for the sake of this conversation, the two of us. The two of us. Private citizens. Me and you. So 20 years ago, the idea was that in such circumstances that we have limited resources, which is the lifeboat, yes. And we have a population that is larger than the carrying capacity of the lifeboat. We have to make tough decisions. And in order to make those decisions, right, we have to build up a set of criteria in order to build up. Those criteria should be consistent. So in other words, when I'm creating two classes, economic migrants and refugees, I have to use, right, a consistent set of criteria in order to make a decision on a lifeboat situation. So now you may say that we are not in the lifeboat situation, and then you continue conversation from there. But if we use the extreme case of the lifeboat situation, we'll be helping us to focus better the conversation. Now, in your reply, I'm not very sure if I got the point, right? You said that there are two types of criteria. One of the set of criteria is operating for the economic migrants. And the other set of criteria is operating for the refugees, the people that are running from war. And I agree with that. We could have a conversation in that direction if you want. But that was not the point, right? The point was to have a sort of unitary set of criteria for an extreme situation that would be helping us to get a better sense. What is the set of moral principles or political principles or institutional design principles that we are using when discussing a very conflict and the plight issue like war and migration? Good. A, I don't think a lifeboat metaphor is helpful in this. I think it's positively misleading. Second, I'm going to guess it was Ray Fryd, my colleague at Bowling Green, who actually gave that course. Because I don't recall saying what you said. But third, that's one criteria. The primary one is non-interference. If you want to hire somebody to walk your children or mow your grass or manage your stock portfolio, I don't think anybody else is entitled to intervene. You know, borrowing. We can all do the negative externalities, stars. I mean, you're an economist. You can figure out ways to tax height for goodness sake. That was a new one today. Thank God it isn't taxing weight, right? But of course, in the case of refugees, it goes beyond that. It goes beyond simply non-interference, but positively helping. Should we do it? Yeah, but that's a further step. And I think that's probably all I have to say. Alex? So a question for Michael and maybe Lauren wants to follow up. Is that justice at a distance seems to, could be worked better in some societies than in others. So it seems that one of the problems with some of the European economies with immigrants coming in is that they have such constrained labor markets and perhaps also invidious discrimination to a greater extent than elsewhere that you manage to, in one society, have people cut off from the majority in that society. And so develop an external worldview while being within this society. And that's where a lot of these problems come from. So the question is what kind of institutions do we need when not at a distance in order to best take advantage of and best integrate and best make justice at a distance possible? You mean with regard to individual mobility across borders? So if we have a lot of people coming in, that means in order to live with that we're going to have to change internal institutions. What kind of internal institutions are going to best allow us to achieve justice at a distance? I think that was clear. So there's a fascinating part of the book that relates to this where they discuss the welfare state and does the welfare state exacerbate nativism by giving people all kinds of reasons to exclude because they create a necessary link between inclusion and expropriation. And as I mentioned, I think you could discuss all kinds of policy remedies, but there is this core question of whether certain domestic institutions allow mobility or don't. An analogy I often make is there were coercive institutions to prevent female labor force entry. Not many people have ever heard the term marriage bar. I had never heard of it before a few months ago, but Claudia Golden documents that in the 1920s and 30s many white collar firms and school districts had explicit, often written policies of either not hiring or firing married women. And you could imagine that the entry of women into the labor force caused some non-zero harms. You could probably find a workplace rape that occurred only because women were allowed to work that wouldn't have happened otherwise. I hope nobody in this room would think that's a reason to coerce women not to work. You might think it's a reason for education about sexual harassment or education about self-defense or many other norms and institutions that would allow mobility into the labor force rather than using that as a pretext to ban it. And I think it's very clear that the development of those institutions made that particular kind of mobility possible. What I don't know and what I would like to know from Lauren is if this bears on the question of justice. Because the question of the book is what do we owe to people who are poor in distance? Is it actually unjust to... So a couple of fascinating papers by Leonard in the Journal of Economic Perspectives argues that the minimum wage was in part created as an exclusionary mechanism for migrants. Do we owe it to the distant poor of the world to dismantle institutions like that to the extent that they block mobility? I don't have an answer to that, but I'll bet that Lauren does. Well, I'm not sure I qualified until two minutes ago. The marriage bar was where spouses went when they needed a drink after, you know what? So this is... See, I told you that I'd benefit more when I come here than I provide. But my first answer on this and several other questions is the default position should be non-interference. If you're suggesting that Europe involved far more interference in labor markets specifically and other stuff too than the U.S., I think that's right. Germany has done brilliantly in this regard by sagaciously managing to get its population growth rate down to 1.5 or 1.6 per one so that there are plenty of room for bringing in... I'm being sarcastic. I realize one shouldn't rely on humor in a room of economists. But basically leaving people alone ought to be the first thing. And I think we agreed on that. Like minimum wage. Who here really likes minimum wage? Going to go along, bring it up to 50, like... She's not president yet. Candidate Clinton. Well, you know, where I'm afraid something of a minority. Is that going to harm lots of people who can least stand time? Yeah, it will. Is it alive or to happen? Sure it will. I can tell you a story about expressive voting, but I've taken too much time talking already. Okay, we're actually, unfortunately, we're out of time here. I want to thank each of the panelists and Lauren for coming here today and sharing their ideas. I'm sure that we have a lot of additional questions to ask. I would love to talk to Jesse about Rwanda and Bosnia and other kinds of things like that and what that entails in terms of when, for example, Roosevelt sent back people into Holocaust Europe, rather than accepting them into the United States and what's the moral lesson from that as it relates to where we are today. And all these kind of questions, so I hope that we continue this kind of conversation. But please join me in thanking our panelists.