 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds, one reason. What's the ideal immigration policy? Just Asking Questions. I'm Zach Weismuller, Senior Producer for Reason, joined by my co-host, Reason Associate Editor, and author of the Must Read Reason Roundup Every Morning, Liz Wolff. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. Right now, immigration ranks as the second most important issue among registered U.S. voters, and the top issue for Republican voters. Perhaps that's because of the 3.2 million border encounters documented by Border Control in 2023. That's a new record high that's so far being outpaced this year. Crossings have been skyrocketing throughout the Biden years. Perhaps the issue salience is heightened by the fight put up by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who continues to erect razor wire fencing at the border, despite the Supreme Court ruling that prohibited Texas from stopping federal agents from cutting through the barriers. Even politicians in blue cities like New York are calling the influx of problem, with Mayor Eric Adams saying that the arrival of 110,000 asylum seekers over about a year and a half would destroy New York City as the shelters became overwhelmed. So what do libertarians traditionally in favor of permissive immigration laws have to say about this? Truth is there's a divide, so we've invited two great thinkers on either side of that divide to lay out what they each think is the ideal immigration policy. Dave Smith is a comedian and host of the Part of the Problem podcast. On the Liberty Lockdown podcast last month, he said this on the topic. If you believe in open borders right now under current situation, under current circumstances, you're an insane person and you're as bad as a communist. I'm just like not even interested in talking to you anymore. This is like too crazy. And so like the answer is take our fucking entire military and put them on our border and secure our border. That sparked the social media firestorm, which included exchanges between Smith and our other guest, Chris Freiman, a professor of philosophy at the College of William and Mary, and a libertarian meme maker extraordinaire and author of several notable papers about the ethics of immigration. Thank you both for being here. Dave, we'll go to you first. You'll have up to five minutes uninterrupted. What's the ideal immigration policy? Well, let me say thank you for having me, guys. And thank you for picking that clip instead of like one of the clips with me and Bob Murphy talking or where I sound like a reasonable person or whatever. But seriously, thanks. Thank you, Chris. And thank you guys for having me. It's good to be back. Well, look, I'm an ANCAP. So if you ask me what the ideal immigration policy would be, it would be that we wouldn't have an immigration policy. And, you know, that's my ideal foreign policy is that we wouldn't have foreign policy. And my ideal economic policy is that we wouldn't have economic policy. I think that if we lived in an anarcho capitalist society and every plot of land was either unowned or privately owned, then essentially immigration doesn't exist and people can move to where they are invited and or they can homestead unowned land or something like that. So that would be my ideal. I think the more relevant question for libertarians is under this current very not libertarian order where all of us are trying to move to a free society or at least a freer society than we have. How should we think about immigration while there is this gigantic state, the biggest state in the history of the world that we're living under? And my position on that has been that I believe libertarians should reject open borders. That is not something that is deduced from libertarian principles. I think basically what it comes down to is a question of government property. Now obviously in the border, particularly in Texas, there are parts of the border that are privately owned where the land owner, the property owners, are explicitly asking the government to serve their one legitimate function, which is the protection of property. And so in that case, I think it's very easy for a libertarian to say that, yes, they have every right to stop people from trespassing on their property. And if government is to exist at all, that is their only legitimate function. And so I think it's very easy for a libertarian to say, yes, the government should assist them in protecting their property. But more largely with the question of how to handle government property, I think many libertarians treat it almost as a given that there are kind of ought to not be restrictions on government property. Now I know that's not exactly Chris's position, but I think that when arguing against libertarians who don't support open borders, many open borders proponents still almost act as if that is the libertarian given, which I just think it is not. Government property is created and maintained by taxpayers. They are forced at the threat of violence to give over their money in order to maintain this government property. And I don't think that it follows from that that it's unowned or that it is owned by everyone equally. And I essentially would say that if you were to believe that, then you would get taken in some very strange directions. So libertarians believe, say, for example, that people have a right to do heroin. You own your body, you can put in it whatever you want to. It doesn't necessarily follow from that, that I believe you ought to be allowed to do heroin right outside of a public school or maybe even enter the public school and do it in the girls bathroom if you feel like doing it there. The government and government property is less than ideal by the nature that it exists. But as long as it does exist, I think libertarians can support reasonable restrictions. And I think that the influx of 7 million undocumented illegal aliens during Joe Biden's administration is way beyond the level of reasonable. I would point out that this is it's very hard to get good polling on open borders because it's so unpopular that no one even asks it in any of the surveys. I saw one recent poll that said it was something like 7% of people believe there should be less immigration restrictions. Whatever the percentage of that that actually believes in zero restrictions, I'd imagine is a small percentage of that set. The point is basically that overwhelmingly the people in this country who have been forced at the threat of violence to fund this government do not want open borders. And the government is intentionally allowing millions of people to flood into this country. And I do not believe that the libertarian position is to cheer on the government doing something to the people with their money that they do not want done. So that would be I guess how I would open this. Okay, Chris. Yeah, thanks and thanks to you all for for bringing this together. Thanks Dave for debating. As bad as a communist was that the as bad as a kind of maybe I can convince you otherwise I don't know. But yeah, I mean I think that on many of these points we actually agree. I think is probably will come out during this discussion really the crux of the disagreement is what counts as reasonable restrictions. But before I get to that I'll just sort of lay out a little bit about why I'm an open borders person and here again I suspect that Dave isn't going to disagree with with what I'm saying up to a point at least. So I think there is this presumption from a libertarian point of view in favor of open borders. So the idea is something like this. You know, you own your property, you have freedom of association. And so just as I someone who's living in West Virginia, I am free to invite someone from say Pennsylvania to come into West Virginia to say, you know, I don't know, I don't have a kind of Super Bowl party at my house. It seems like I have the right to do that why I have the freedom of association I have private property rights. And so if I'm hosting someone in my house. It seems like we shouldn't have a problem, a problem with that from a libertarian perspective. Similarly, if I own a business in West Virginia, and I want to hire someone who currently lives in Pennsylvania, they can cross the state border they can come work for me if I have housing that I want to sell in West Virginia to someone who currently lives in Pennsylvania they can move to West Virginia and they can buy that housing. So this seems all perfectly acceptable from a libertarian perspective. And so in terms of what an open borders policy it would look like. I think it's probably not too far off from what the current sort of open border policy between individual United States States is. So like I said if you live in one state you're free to move to different states now there are some restrictions on free movement that I think everybody's going to accept. So if somebody, you know, committed a murder in Pennsylvania, and get stopped in West Virginia, then I think everybody's going to say well okay it's perfectly legitimate to restrict their freedom of movement, you know put them in prison and so on. But aside from those sorts of cases, you're more or less permitted to move freely across state borders. And so the open borders position is basically take that model, and then apply it to national borders. So if somebody from Canada wants to buy housing for me or work for them, they should be allowed to do that. And as far as the justification for that goes like I said it seems like your rights of private property entitle you to do that. Your rights of freedom of association entitle you to do that. And also just you know reflecting on the situations in my own life when I have moved. You know you might move for a different job or you might move to be close to friends and family. You might move because you like the political structures in one state rather than another. These are all equally good reasons to move across national borders. And so the again the sort of basic picture of open borders is take the current model that we have for movement between states and then apply it to national borders and I suspect we'll get into this more sort of in the back and forth. But I mean I agree with Dave that this the idea that there should be no restrictions whatsoever on the use of public property is not a good position so that there have to be some restrictions. And so really the debate is what sort of restrictions are going to be justified in which ones aren't. And my main objection to arguments against open borders that rely on this appeal to public property is that in many cases they would have sort of unlibertarian objection or I'm sorry unlibertarian implications. So here again I think you know both Dave and I agree no restrictions is probably not the correct position, saying that the state can do whatever it wants in terms of restrictions is also probably not the right position. And so then the question is okay what sorts of restrictions are justified. And I think you know we don't need a full blown libertarian theory of public property to differentiate between good and bad reasons for restricting someone's access to the use of public property. So for example you say okay we got we got public roads. What's a what's a good reason to restrict someone's access to a to a public road might say well if they're dangerous. So if they've been drinking. If they're you know speeding excessively you say okay, you might say no longer should they have the right to access the public road because they're dangerous to other people. So we can also come up with bad reasons to restrict someone's access to public property so you might say like, I don't know like if the government says if you are caught listening to, I don't know punk music I don't know I don't like punk music. But like if you're caught listening to punk music in your car, we're going to deny you access to a public road like well that's that's a bad reason. I don't think we would, we would accept that as a good reason. But then the question really becomes are the sorts of reasons that non open borders libertarians give in favor of restricting people's access to public property. Good ones. And I'm inclined to think not. And so I'll just I'll give one case and then I think we could probably move on. But so like one argument is that, you know, we need to restrict access to things like public roads, because if we have high levels of immigration, this will lead to an increased tax burden for citizens or something like that. And there's there's an empirical question about whether or not that that claim is true. But more generally it just seems like we can't deny people access to a public road on the grounds that they're they might use that road to do something that will increase a taxpayers burden. For example, I think most libertarians would say you should be allowed to, you know, ride a motorcycle without a helmet on a public road. But that increases the odds that you're going to get into like an accident that that, you know, requires the use of like publicly funded health facilities to fix. And so if the principle or the reason is something like we can restrict someone's access to a public road, when we think their use of the public road will increase taxpayers burdens, that's going to have very non libertarian implications in a lot of cases that have nothing to do with immigration. So I'll leave it at that. But I'm happy to go into more depth later. Okay, Dave, you have up to 10 minutes to respond to any of that. Okay, so I, I agree with a lot of what Chris said, I do think that it's this is one of the things that I've been critical of libertarians about on this issue, I think that sometimes we're living too much in theory, and not marrying that theory with the real world. So when Chris says the example of like, or whatever your example is, but hey, if I have a cousin who lives in Italy, and I invite my cousin over to my house and say, Hey, I want you to come over here and a government agent gets in the way of that. Well, yeah, clearly that's not libertarian. Like I invited him over and this is my property. Who has a right to tell me that I can't invite who I want to onto my property. But however, here in the real world, what's happening is that uninvited people are flooding in by the millions. They were not invited by anybody. We have caravans and the tens of thousands coming regularly of people who nobody invited. And in fact, every state government is arguing over who can ship them over to the other state and dump them on them, and nobody wants them. And to me, this kind of gets at the court, like this is the other side of the argument is that, yes, it is true that from the libertarian position, if you are invited, you should have a right to go onto that person's property. But it's also true from the libertarian position that you have absolutely no right to enter property that you don't own uninvited. That is what we would call trespassing, which is what's going on in a very, so you have a libertarian error on both sides of this equation. And then the question becomes, well, how exactly, with the existence of a government, do we best work this out? And Hans Hermann Hoppe, who is very demonized, I think, by libertarians who support open borders, despite the fact that I really think the guy is worth reading and not just isolating like his most, you know, for, you know, most controversial passages. But his proposal was that we should just, libertarians should support a sponsorship system where invited people can come so long as someone invites them and vouches for them that they won't be a burden on the taxpayer and they'll be responsible for them. And uninvited people can't come. Now that would require securing the border. But I think that, to me, that's probably the best way to simulate a libertarian situation in a status paradigm. So I would say that that's the main thing that people should focus on is that the real world problem is uninvited people coming, not invited people coming. And I'll probably grant Chris and agree with him that the amount of red tape and regulation for legal immigration is insane. And that's part of the reason it incentivizes people to not wait in line because it's so difficult to actually go through the process. But the major crisis, the reason why this is the number two or in some polls, the number one issue for voters in 2024 is because we have massive waves of uninvited illegal immigrants coming into this country. And then, of course, they're also just being put right on the dole as soon as they get here. In terms of the comparison between moving back and forth between states and moving back and forth between, say, South America or the rest of the world in here. I mean, look, the glaring difference is that we don't have a massive problem of uninvited people moving back and forth between states. You don't see just like 100,000 people marching from Georgia into South Carolina. And if you did, we'd start having a real problem and Georgia would start thinking about and just expecting government services when they got there. And if that were the case, yeah, there'd be a real political issue in South Carolina of how to deal with this. So I will say that I'm glad we can kind of concede that zero restrictions doesn't work and that there are restrictions that could be bad. So I think that that in itself kind of destroys Chris's point by saying that there could be bad implications of restrictions because we've already acknowledged that, yes, there could be bad implications of restrictions. There also could be bad implications of a lack of restrictions. If you're asking where exactly we say the reasonable restrictions land, well, I would say that if you have the overwhelming majority, and I'm not, I mean, like, you cannot find an issue that Americans are more united on than opposing open borders. Good luck finding opposing pedophiles, maybe. I don't know what would top the 90 plus percent of Americans who are all against open borders. But if you have a situation where you know that that the overwhelming majority 90 plus percent of property owners do are not inviting these people are explicitly saying we do not want these people to come here. We have too many problems. We cannot deal with this also. And we as libertarians know that. And then I would also argue we can get into this later that the government is intentionally allowing this to happen against the will of all the property owners. I think that more than meets the threshold of reasonable to be on the side of restrictions in that case. Okay. And we're going to let Chris do an uninterrupted response and then Liz and I are going to jump into this conversation and have a little bit more of an unstructured conversation between all of us. So Chris, go ahead and reply to anything of note that you think Dave has brought up in his rebuttal or introduction. Yeah, sure. So I mean, I think you were sort of alluding to this point towards the end of your comments there. But here again, we might be in a that if we had a system where it was much easier to move to the United States legally, then something like a sponsorship or some sort of invitation program would probably function a lot better. And I mean, but the thing is like that might get us pretty close to functionally open borders. So for example, if it were very easy for employers to, you know, post advertisements for jobs that immigrants could apply for and then if they got the job that could be sponsored by their employees. I mean, I think that would have that would result in considerably more immigration than we actually have. Would it get us to open borders maybe not but I think it would get us a lot closer than the status quo. And also there are other sorts of what economists sometimes call keyhole solutions to some of these problems. So if the worry is immigrants, you know, taxing public infrastructure and so on. And so, you know, being that tax consumers or something like that. Well, one option might be something like an entrance fee for prospective immigrants. So, you know, you move here but you know, whatever it is that we think is going to be consumed in taxes, they have to pay up front, or maybe the government can garnish their salaries, something like that. I'm not. So I still think pure open borders is better than that but I also think that sort of middle ground position is much better than the status quo. So here again, if we're worried about the fiscal burden created by immigrants, which again, like I said, I'm not convinced that the empirical evidence bears that out. But if it is the case, you could just say, okay, maybe you have to pay a special entrance fee in terms of the invitation. I don't know. Like, I think that like maybe people in Texas don't like when people from California move there. I don't know. But like I could imagine people in Texas being like, look, like all these Californians are moving to Texas, and we didn't invite them. Well, okay, but I still think it's permissible for them to use roads in Texas and to buy housing from Texas property owners and to work for Texas employers, even if they're not explicitly invited, I think they still would have the right to use those roads. And then on the point about it being very unpopular, I mean, it is unpopular, but like most of what libertarians say is unpopular. So if we're going to let people decide what is and is not permissible, that's not so good for libertarians in general, like forget immigration. You know, you said we want to have a heroin on the shelves of 711. Like that's not very popular either. And so like I'm just very wary of appealing to popular opinion in the case of a policy like this, because I think that might lead to a lot of So just to take another case, if it turned out that, you know, 90% of Americans, which this makes me plausible, are against, you know, legalizing certain sorts of drugs. I'm not convinced that would still be a moral justification for restricting the transportation of those drugs on on a public road. Or if, you know, 90% of my neighbors don't want me to sell my house to someone, because they said, well, we didn't invite this person, we don't have this person here. I would say, well, yeah, I mean, you might not like it, but nevertheless, my property right entitles me to sell my house to this person, whether or not you approve of it. And so I think the same principle holds in the case of immigration. So if I want to sell my house to someone who's coming from another country, if 90% of my neighbors don't like it, I say too bad. In the same way there's 90% of my neighbors say, you know, I don't want you to marry that person or I don't want that, you know, to associate with that person in your house in our neighborhood. That's it too bad. It's not, it's not up for majority vote. So I want to jump in here and, you know, sort of open it up to questions, you know, basically that anybody can sort of take a swing at but first I did want to pose a question specifically to Dave. So obviously words are not violence, but I will possibly use some slightly violent words and direct them at you, Dave, because you mentioned this distinction between how we deal with illegal immigration, which I think we'll spend the majority of the conversation talking about. And you bring up a lot of really relevant practical issues there, but there's also this question of what we do on the legal immigration front. And I hate to say it, but when you talk about red tape, and all of the hurdles that exist for people to legally immigrate to the US, you sound a little bit like a Kato scholar dude. What does that look like in reality to you? What is that? Like if you could articulate your vision of what legal immigration gets transformed into in the United States, what would that, what would that be like to you? Well, I mean, yeah, I'd sound a little bit like a Kato guy because I'm a libertarian and they pretend to be. They might snatch you up and hire you after this podcast episode. I'm not sure you're right about that. We'll see. There would be a mutiny in the streets. All the Dave followers would flip out. Yeah, I don't think David Poe has given me any job offers anytime soon. Look, I think that again, let me maybe this will be an opportunity to answer your question and kind of talk about what Chris mentioned at the end there. Because again, when you say like, what is the ideal like legal immigration answer, it's kind of look to the libertarian. This is kind of like saying, what is the ideal amount of grain or wheat or steel for a nation to produce? And the answer is just what the market decides. It's not a question of their being like, and so this is what I was getting at with the invitation system. And I think what Chris is perhaps misunderstanding that I'm saying is that I'm not making the argument that because something is unpopular, libertarians shouldn't stand for it. And so yes, that's right. Legalizing heroin is unpopular. And if you want to marry someone and that's unpopular amongst the people who cares because that's your right. It's yours. The point I'm making is that this is a situation where under pure libertarian circumstances, the choice would be for property owners. And so since the government is coming in and getting in the middle of that, in this case libertarians ought to care what property owners want and what they don't want. And so that's why I think the Hapa invitation system makes sense. There should be a bunch of government red tape. If you are invited and sponsored by someone in the country, then I think you should be allowed entry. Now, if Chris says that that'll get us closer to open borders, I don't agree. That would not be my prediction. But I'm willing to roll the dice and say, hey, if it's such a great investment and some of these Kato studies are right and immigrants are such a net benefit to the economy that it's totally worth it for these firms to sponsor them, then okay, let's do that. My guess is it would make immigration look nothing like what it looks like today. Well, so how do you square that with the fact that I totally get what you're saying. And I really like the Hapa example. I think that's an interesting area for us to focus on. But one thing that I'm curious about is what do you make up the current system today where there are lots of employers seemingly who want to extend invites almost in the Hapa type manner to employees that they want to hire. And yet they're frequently stymied by quotas that are in place that prevent them from getting the number of high skilled or low skilled workers that they need. What do you make of that? And I think that's the best possible manifestation in reality that currently exists of what we're talking about should theoretically exist. Sure. So I'll just mention this, which I mentioned on Bob Murphy's podcast, which you might have heard me said on the Mises Human Action podcast that so I was having a conversation one time with one of the Mises caucus guys. And this is like one of my or it was a group of them, like three of them. These are like my guys. These are the guys who wanted me to run for president who are like all on board with the takeover. But they were open borders guys and they didn't like that. I was talking this way about immigration restrictions and I was doing their podcast and one of them said to me was talking about it was like, well, look, we used to have like a family farm. And we would hire like immigrants as day workers and like they were great guys. They did great job and like, you know, so what what's wrong with that? Why can't we, you know, we want to be able to keep doing that. And I said to him, I was like, okay, well, how about the Hapa proposal where you could take these guys and you would just have to sponsor them. You'd have to say that their health care can't be, you know, serviced by emergency room taxpayers, you know, basically are funnels down to all of us that they, you know, that you have to pay for their schooling. They can't just go to public school and then rely on the taxpayers for all of that and all that. And he said to me, he goes, yeah, but if that was the case, then we never could have made it work. We never could have afforded to hire them. And I was like, exactly. So basically the point I'm making on that is that according to Hapa, those corporations aren't really inviting them in a true sense. It's not a true invitation because basically the invitation is contingent upon the fact that you have all of these services that for years and years and years, the domestic population has been forced at the threat of imprisonment to fund against their will. And my position is that the libertarian take is not that we believe taxation is theft. That doesn't mean if someone mugs you and takes your wallet, that wallet is now unowned property that is there for the world to homestead. The correct answer is that that's still yours. And it ought to be returned to you. And short of it being returned to you, you have a better claim over what should be done with that wallet than someone else does. And what you have right now all around the country, which by the way, if you want to know what open borders actually leads to in the real world and not just like in the economic calculations of someone at the Cato Institute. Well, we've got a little taste of it right now. Here's what it leads to colleagues, Dave. Well, yes, I don't mean to disparage my newly found colleagues, but well, here's what it leads to at least Donald Trump dominating in all of the polls. That's what it leads to under a democracy with a giant government. This is what we're actually going to be looking at. And so the point is that you have a system where there are all throughout the country. I mean, look in New York City, people are freaking out and the numbers aren't even that crazy. Forget these like border states. You have people who have been living in a town. They've been paying property taxes for the local public school for three generations. And they don't have the economic means to afford private school on top of the property taxes they have to pay for the public school. And now their public school is being flooded with kids who have just been on the most traumatic experience of their life making this journey to America on foot. In many cases, kids who have been abused at horrifically high rates along this journey and don't speak English. And the question is, now it's very easy when people are just kind of virtue signaling on social media or something like that to be like, oh, what are you a bigot or something like that? Or what do you not care about these people who came over here? But I don't know. We all got kids. I don't know if you have kids, Chris, but the other three of us, we all have kids here. Like, I don't know. My kids are not going to be in getting going to school with a bunch of kids who just went through this traumatic situation. I'd die before I let that happen. And it's not because I don't like have sympathy for those kids. Anyway, the point I'm making is I think the libertarian position is that no, actually the people who have been paying in forcibly, they ought to get the say in this. Not what some tiny progressive elite decided is what they want to do to the country. Can I just clarify? Hold on. Can I I want to make sure that I'm understanding the argument that you're putting forth? You're basically like the public school argument specifically is, hey, look, this is going to create a huge externality. This is going to create extraordinary levels of chaos in a public school classroom. Once you reach a certain critical mass of influx of students who definitely don't speak the language and definitely are on totally uneven footing than the kids that are currently there. And that really does it. Does everybody at disfavor? Is that sort of the argument that you're making? Not exactly. I mean, I wouldn't say it does everybody a disfavor. It probably is better for the immigrants who come here. Native born kids, all of our kids who've been in that system, I just want to make sure I'm understanding it. I think we're already there. I think it's already a disaster and it's only going to get worse and worse. What is it, New York City? I think I had to spend 500 million extra dollars last year for Spanish speaking teachers because they couldn't hire enough people who can speak to these kids now who, of course, have to be admitted into government schools. I think, yes, I think it's going to be a disaster all around. I think the disaster is already all around us. We can kind of all see it. And I think the idea of like, I just don't understand almost how anyone could think if we opened the borders tomorrow, this would not be an absolute catastrophe for our country. But I will say that the libertarian position is not just a purely like in the same way that like if five homeless people showed up at my doorstep right now and went, hey, you know, like, can we please stay here? We have nowhere to go. And I have room in my house for them. But the answer would be no, because this is my house and this is for my family. And the libertarian position is not, well, what would be best for everyone involved or what would be like the charitable thing to do. The libertarian position is that it's my choice because it's my house. And that's not perfect when a government exists. But it's better that the taxpayers should have some say in it than just the ruling elite. Let me ask Chris a question. And I do want to return to the question of welfare and public services and these much maligned Cato studies. I pulled some of the actual data that we can look at and analyze in a little bit. But first I wanted to ask Chris, it seems like Dave is laying out his second best solution second or third best solutions. He's putting aside the question of what is the ideal libertarian or anarcho capitalist immigration system and saying given the reality we have. This is what I propose a sponsorship based system which seems kind of like visas but like way beefed up where you have much more responsibility for whoever you're sponsoring. Do you have any second best or third best policy ideas, given that we're not living in the Libertopia where the federal government only exists as a security apparatus to like protect property rights or something like that. Given that that's not the situation we're in. Do you have, you know, some specific policy solutions short of abolish borders that you think would, you know, be a positive outcome from a libertarian perspective. I do actually although let me actually just say a few things about Dave comments so first day. So here again I think sort of my main worry about a lot of the objections to open borders is that they end up having very non libertarian implications in other contexts. So for example like I agree if somebody knocks on your door and they say hey can I can I stay here you're under no obligation to let them stay here, stay in your house. I mean, you have much stronger rights to control what happens in your house and the government has to control what happens within its borders so like if somebody wants to come into my house and distribute communist pamphlets in my kitchen I could say oh you can't do that. But you know if some or like you know wave communist signs in my kitchen, somebody wants to like wave a communist sign in a public park I think they should be permitted to do that. I just think like the house nation analogy has some problems. And then to the point about so the point about collective property or public property is is well taken so it's, you know as you said it's not just that people dislike open borders. The idea is that like in some sense they have property rights over roads etc. So so like we could maybe speak loosely of taxpayers as like the owners of the roads and so on and so you say well if you own this thing then you are the person who has the say over what happens on this thing. But here again I kind of worried that that would have on libertarian implications. So just to take like a hypothetical. If a majority of Americans said look, we don't want libertarian literature being transported on public roads. I think you should still nevertheless be permitted to distribute or to transport libertarian literature on public roads. So like the mere fact that a majority of taxpayers want public roads to be used for a particular purpose or not used for a particular purpose isn't enough to show that that's that that's the correct policy because you can imagine all sorts of really bad policies coming about as a result of that. And then now to the second best solution. I mean so if the justification of the rationale for the sponsorship idea is is like look. I'm really worried about the fiscal burden imposed on citizens if we have a lot of immigration here again I'll just I'll bracket off the the empirical question. Here again, you know, there's this issue about there are citizens who do things which increased the fiscal burden on other citizens. And so for the sake of consistency would we restrict those sorts of things so here again. Should we not allow people to ride on a public road without a helmet because they could get really injured and need publicly funded health care to the school point, you could imagine somebody having a kid, and they don't pay enough in taxes to cover the costs. It's not clear to me that the libertarian solution there is to restrict their right to have a kid in fact I would say no they should have the right to have a kid, even if it does turn out to be sort of a net fiscal burden on taxpayers. And so here again it's like, you know, the reasons that are typically given in defense of immigration restriction also lead to other conclusions of libertarians aren't going to want. And so when it comes to the second best solution, I would go back to the sort of keyhole point. So it seems like for all of these objections, they can be accommodated without significant immigration restriction. So again, if the worry is something like the fiscal burden of immigrants, you could say okay pay like an entry fee, or, you know, maybe the idea is that the government garnishes the, you know, their salaries while they're here to pay for whatever sort of extra government services they consume and so on. Again, that's not my ideal, and I'm not convinced it's needed in the real world, but I think something like that would be much better than just saying you're not permitted to come into the United States entirely. Can I just respond to a couple of those points, because I do think that there's like, we're kind of getting it kind of at the core of this a little bit here. So, well, first of all, I don't think the example of like not allowing people to have kids or something like that doesn't exactly hold, because that's a violation of natural rights that's kind of on a different level that libertarians can reject offhand. I do think your example of, say, if the overwhelming majority of the public didn't want libertarian literature in public spaces or something is a good analogy. By the way, just to the point about having kids like, being told you can't come into property that you don't own isn't a violation of your natural rights, whereas being told you can't have children is. So there's a distinction from the libertarian perspective there. But I think like, look, we kind of got at this already. Yes, you can reductoab absurdum this in either direction. And so, of course, there can be standards on government property that wouldn't be good. I'm not saying that like what the people want is a perfect libertarian standard. You know, you mentioned being consistent here. The point I'm making is that the only consistent approach is anarcho-capitalism. And me and Zach and Liz kind of talked about this a bit last time I was on the show. And I think even Zach conceded at one point, or Zach's a minarchist, but you did concede that like, yeah, there's an inconsistency in not being an anarchist if you're a libertarian. You're saying, hey, look, I don't like monopoly. I don't like monopolies, but I will kind of want one monopoly on all of the most important things. And maybe that's correct. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong. And it would be a disaster if we didn't have that. But the point is that once government is involved, there's always these inconsistencies. After all, government is an appropriating self-defense force. Dave, Zach is like three months away from being an anarchist once you talk to him. And he's about three months away from being a Catholic, which is what I want. Right? Like we're both working our conversion angle with Zach over there. We're going to have you. We're going to have you a Catholic and cap. You're going to be Tom Woods by the end of the show. We just have to be really patient in the meantime. But look, so the point is that there are these inconsistencies that you're always going to have. And so, yes, you're right. This could lead to very bad outcomes. But again, the idea of treating government property as something that I'll not have restrictions or something that is like you can reductive absurdum at the other direction also. And so, yes, you're right. We could probably all agree that if you were to say you cannot bring drugs on any public road in the trunk of your car, you kind of de facto have the war on drugs again. Even if you are saying that drugs are legal, we're kind of right back to that same place. However, that doesn't mean that in the middle of a courtroom, you can just pull out a needle and shoot up heroin and they can't be like, hey, get the hell out of here. You can't do that here. So like, again, we're back to like reasonable. What is reasonable? And I would say that the current situation, again, look, for example, and this is one of the things that really turned Murray Rothbard around, who was once an open borders advocate and changed his mind later in life. But it came out after the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians were flooding ethnic Russians into their satellite countries. And by the way, this is one of the major reasons why there is the conflict in Ukraine to this day, because there's a mix of ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. And why are the ethnic Russians there? Because Stalin sent them in to break up the national sovereignty of the country. So would a libertarian sit here and say that the correct answer is, yep, gotta let that happen. Or maybe even we should cheer it on. We should cheer. Oh, he's just enriching them with diversity. It's like, no, there has to be some point, and you could, again, to the reducto absurdum thing, if there were, theoretically speaking, and I know this is a crazy hypothetical, but like if, you know, Pakistan threatened to nuke India and then 500 million Indians all fled and they all wanted to go to some nearby country. Is it the case that libertarians believe that the people of that country have no, that's it. They just have to give up their way of life. They have to give up their culture. They have to give up their nation because, hey, you can't have anything short of open borders. I don't think that's correct. And so there are absurdities on both ends of this spectrum. I've got a question for Dave about his framework, but I do want Chris to answer that question that he posed about, you know, the security risks of an extremely permissive immigration system. I was looking in preparation for this, I was looking at a House Committee on Foreign Affairs report, and they reported 1.7 million known gotaways last year. So that's people who, you know, they saw them come to the border and then they just, they just got into the country. And encounters at the border in fiscal year 2023 increased over 40% since 2021. And some person, you know, once you start getting so many people coming to the border, then inevitably you're the government is going to lose track of more and more people because they're either letting them in on awaiting asylum claims on parole, whatever. So I mean, should we be concerned from a security perspective that the government as is just cannot handle something approximating like open borders? Was that a question for me? That was for you, Chris. And then I have another question back to Dave after this, but I wanted to address the kind of point that he was raising and buttress it with a little bit of like the real world data. Yeah. Well, so first, in terms of the security risk, I mean, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than Americans. So like I'm not particularly worried about crime as a result of immigration. But I do think, you know, like I said at the outset, to say that you're open borders doesn't mean that there are no legitimate reasons for restricting access. So if somebody is, you know, a wanted violent criminal, I think that's a perfectly fine reason to restrict their movement. But here again, that doesn't really have anything to do with the national border. So if, you know, a known wanted criminal is walking down the street in front of my house, it's perfectly permissible for the cops to restrict their freedom of movement by putting them in prison. So that's not a national borders thing. It's just sort of a general moral principle thing. But hold on just one second because beyond just, you know, a known criminal Dave is bringing up this situation of kind of, you know, and then almost an intentional, you know, flooding of undesirables into a into a country you could imagine, you know, a foreign regime kind of forcefully pushing either their problems or people who they want to make problems into the country. How would a libertarian immigration system cope with that sort of thing. I mean, it depends on the particular. So if the idea is that, you know, the immigrants will come into a country and they'll practice different customs and different religions and speak a different language, like, who cares? I don't like that's that's not a problem. If we're talking about something like, again, like violent crime or, you know, whatever, that's a different story. But I think it's a little bit different than that, right? Like it's just like, for example, like, I don't know, China has a lot of people, right, a little bit of an adversary to the U.S. If the TikTok banners have their way, you know, in their telling, China is definitely an adversary, which is, you know, a take that I very much agree with. Like what would happen theoretically speaking if the U.S. opened its borders tomorrow and we have, you know, more than 300 million people. Okay, but say say just hypothetically speaking, like 300 million Chinese nationals just like flooded across the border, like surely that would have an impact. Right. Are you like, how do you look at that, Chris? So yeah, so I mean, so right, we can imagine fantastic scenarios under which open borders would have bad consequences. But you could imagine the same for anarcho capitalism. So suppose you have super strong absolute property rights, and a meteor is about to destroy the earth. And the only person with the weapon to destroy the meteor refuses to use it. Does that mean that it's so like, can we violate that person's property rights? Well, you might say maybe I mean, if you're super consistent and or you're, you know, you think property rights are really absolute, you say no, we just have to let the earth be destroyed. Like, I think that's sort of a crazy position. And so you might say, in really wild scenarios, you can make exceptions to rules that generally work pretty well. So you might say like, okay, I can make an exception to the to the private property rights stuff in the in the meteor scenario, because it's like, yeah, like it's it's prevent a catastrophe. If we're like, oh, you know, you can imagine a billion people coming to the United States tomorrow with the intention of sabotaging the United States government, I say, okay, then I'll make exceptions. But then like, I'm still sort of on a par with anybody else who has to make an exception to their view in really wild scenarios. But I'll also say, like here again, you could, I mean, the TikTok thing I think is actually a really interesting case. So suppose you have a foreign government that, you know, is printing, you know, socialist literature, or not even like printing socialist literature that you know they're posting it on the internet and stuff like that. And suppose this is changing the minds of many Americans for socialism, would that justify restricting Americans rights to consume that media. So it's the same sort of dilemma. I mean, maybe you say yes. But but if you if you say no in that scenario, then I think you should also say no in the case of immigration restrictions as well. Dave, I want to linger on this point for just a second because the Russia Ukraine example that you brought up is I think a really good. It's a really good point. The thing that I'm curious about it with it, though, is, I mean, first of all, there's a whole bunch of reasons why the war in Ukraine is happening. I think that the fact that the sort of former Soviets have such fractured, weird national identity where there's a lot of sort of mixed allegiances and even families where, you know, it's very much like ethnically half Russian, half Ukrainian, different cultures coming together. I mean, the fact that the Soviet Union was broken up so recently, you know, all things considered leads to this type of story being repeated all over like the Balkans, for example. I mean, you have like Moldovans who are like a little Moldovan, a little bit Romanian. Actually, there's something else all together. And it's like this is a very common tale. So this challenge with figuring out what their actual national identity is, is pretty much never very clear cut there. But the thing that just came into my mind as you were talking about that and the Russians flooding into Ukraine was this question of, well, how many Russians escaped a pretty terrible fate in their native country and were able to have their lives improved? And, you know, obviously you can try to weigh that question of, well, how many lives were improved versus, you know, how do you weigh that moral good against the fact that perhaps you can attribute Ukraine's destabilization to that influx, right? Like that's a very, and now their lives are going to be, you know, made shit essentially as a result of this war effort. But like how do you take into account the fact that, yes, this migration just has huge costs and huge benefits? The lives of those individual Russians who flooded into Ukraine were made a lot better for a lot of decades. Well, I don't know about that. Maybe not anymore, right? Ukraine is one of the biggest losers of the 20th and 21st century. I mean, you can't go too many years without another disaster there. Better than life under Stalin, no? Well, they were still under him. They were still under him. Yeah, they were. There was still a complete… There was still a complete… I mean… Yeah, Ukraine had it pretty rough under the Soviets. Yeah, but what do you make of this question of like, well, but there's winter assemblers in these things? Well, there's no question about that. So, and by the way, I was not at all suggesting that this was like the only factor that led to the war that broke out in 2022. I've spoken at length about what I think the major factors were. I'm just saying that this is one of the major factors why like you had this territory particularly in the eastern portion of the country and Crimea and the Donbas region and all these parts where there's large groups of ethnic Russians. This is why they're there. And anyway, there certainly are winners in like open borders or de facto open borders or whatever you want to call the numbers that Zag was just reading off from the last few years. And I would say that for the most part, a lot of the people coming are winners for getting out of the country they were in and coming here. I mean, I think it's certainly true that they're going to… If they're allowed to work, they'll be more economically productive here than they would have been in their home country. Now, I don't know, you know, a lot of them go through hell to get here. So I don't know if it's as clear cut, but there's no question there are winners. I think that the Democratic Party is banking on the fact that they're going to be winners politically ultimately from this. They used to before there was this thing. I'm not even interested in the question of like how this affects voting outcome like electoral outcomes. That's pretty relevant to the conversation. I mean, if you're asking who the winners and losers are, this is one group that is banking. They were openly saying this for years until they decided it was called the great replacement theory and you weren't allowed to talk about it. But I'm old enough to remember when everybody on MSNBC was bragging about the browning of America and how this would be the end of Republicans ever winning national office. It is worth noting that we've seen the shift among Latino voters to start. No, listen, I'm saying they were betting on this almost kind of racialist plan. I'm not saying that it's necessarily going to come true. What I'm saying though, so here's what I'm saying. Not in that we shouldn't ever talk about this or engage with this or care about it at all. I think A, it's a way for these conversations to very frequently get derailed. But B, the other thing is like it's a little bit of a mixed bag to attempt to project out how exactly a theoretical influx of immigrants under our proposed ideal immigration system would ultimately affect electoral outcomes. Because especially we have the massive sort of Republican Latino pivot underway right now. And so there's a little bit of this liberal pundit misfire here in terms of are these future Democratic Party voters maybe not so much. I agree. Can we put that question to Chris though because I'm curious, you know this is something you hear a lot is that you hear it a lot from Republicans sometimes you hear it from libertarians that certain demographics of immigrants tend to vote for big government. And so it's like the self inflicted wound if you're implementing a policy where you're allowing people who are going to where we're in a democracy and you're just allowing the numbers to be stacked against liberty. This is a dumb policy. What is your response to that line of argumentation. So I mean here again there's an empirical question. I mean Alex narasta has written about this where it's it's not at all clear that increased immigration actually leads to bigger government that in fact it might even be the opposite. But but I'll hear again I'll bracket that off and like talk about you know sort of the principle of the thing. So really the question is can we restrict people's freedom to promote an electoral outcome that you like and I think generally speaking the answer is no. Just to give another sort of case. So suppose you're worried that a lot of immigration will lead to Democrats winning elections whatever the case may be. And we say okay well then you know we're going to restrict immigrants access to public roads because we don't want Democrats to win the election. That also is an argument for not allowing Democrats to drive other Democrats on a public road to a polling place on election day because if you let him do that then that's going to increase the odds of a Democrat getting elected. And here again I don't think any libertarian is going to say Democrats should not be allowed to drive other Democrats to vote on the grounds that we want to stop Democrats from getting elected. So I don't see why the immigration case is different. Okay can I just can I respond to a couple of these things just real quick because I was at I was at a LP event a couple years ago where Alex gave a presentation and he was he was remote. I was there speaking live but he like gave a remote like by zoom presentation and this argument that that there's no empirical evidence that immigration has led to bigger government is just flat wrong. And the way he gets there is he argues that the he uses the government spending as a percentage of GDP and then tries to line it up to when there were the biggest waves of immigration. And the major problem there is that measuring government spending as a percentage of GDP is stupid and completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with anything. The only question that libertarian should care about is if the government is getting bigger if the government got bigger but the economy also got bigger that doesn't mean the government isn't getting bigger. It's kind of like if I was making $100,000 a year and I had an alarm system and two guns and then I got a big raise now I'm making $600,000 a year. So I bought four more guns and I went I have less guns now as a percentage of my income. It's like, yeah, but you have more guns. So it's just not true. According to Cato themselves, the three states with the highest native born populations are New York, New Jersey and California. According to Cato, the three least free states in the union. So I think it is a question, an empirical question. And I think the answer is that mass migration does not lead to smaller government does not lead to an increase in freedom. Now, this again, your next point, Chris, about like, yes, if we could, if we could not have mass immigration, let's just say hypothetically, and I'm not even saying this is the case. Let's just say hypothetically, they were all going to come in and vote for socialist policies. And you're saying, yeah, but being logically consistent, if we were to just stop people on the streets from voting for somebody that would also stop them from voting for socialist policies. Again, this is where I think libertarians are way too married to theory and way too divorced from the real world. The fact is that stopping people on the streets and guessing who they're going to vote for and then shutting down their right to move or something like that would basically make us a totalitarian nightmare. Having border restrictions would make us like every single other country in the history of the world. And it's almost like this is just marriage to pure theory and not marrying it to the world around us. It's different. I'm not saying in an ideal and cap society, it would be different, but it is under our current situations. One more point I would make is that Chris said a little while ago, there was this thing about when we were asking about the hypothetical, which I understand your point about like, look, these hypotheticals are very unlikely. But you have kind of relied a lot in this debate on, well, if you're saying this, then it implies this. And if you're saying that we could stop people on public property for this, then it could imply that we could do it for this other bad reason. And you kind of mentioned when there was this idea of if hundreds of millions of people were going to come into the country or whatever, what's really the issue if they have different cultures, if they have different practices, who cares about that? And I think this is where libertarians sometimes add in this kind of extra libertarian cosmopolitan worldview and kind of insert their own preferences in there. Because when you ask the question who cares about this, well, the answer is lots and lots of people. Lots of people do care about this. In fact, way more people than care about libertarianism, unfortunately. I wish that wasn't the case. Well, I'm just saying, drastically changing the culture of a country is something that a lot of people really do care about. And that's something that libertarians have to grapple with. And the libertarian position is not that they have the right to impose that on other people. But if it's being imposed on them and it's something they care about, I do think that's something libertarians should recognize. In other words, just for example, if you think of like the Amish or something like that, I don't particularly like the idea of living like that. I'm from New York City. I like lots of different people and lots of different cool restaurants and lots of different people from different backgrounds. But from the libertarian perspective, they have their right to maintain their culture if they want to. Let me just clear up, clean up one thing though here, which is we referenced a study from Alex Narasta of the Cato Institute, which I don't have on hand, but we will link that in the show notes so that people can dig into that and decide for themselves. We will also, in just a moment, get to some of the empirical data, but Chris, go ahead and respond. And then I have a question for Dave about kind of the framework that he's set up to justify immigration restrictions. But go ahead, Chris. Yeah, so just a couple of thoughts. So right. So I mean, you could imagine very bad consequences coming about as a result of like cops stopping people on the street and asking them to vote for a socialist or whatever. But I mean, there are certainly practical things that could be done on the margins to restrict votes. So he's like, you know, there's, you know, an area that has lots of registered socialist voters. And you like put up roadblocks or something like that on election day like on the margin that would have its public property and on the margin that could reduce the likelihood of a socialist leader getting elected. I don't think that that's justified even from a libertarian perspective. And in terms of the culture point, I mean, here again, people can have whatever. Can I just ask why not? I'm just, as you just mentioned, why wouldn't that be justified? You're just asking questions in fact. That's all. Oh, well, from the libertarian perspective, why would that not be justified? Could they do it in regions with lots of libertarian voters? Yeah, that wouldn't be good. I just don't I kind of reject this idea that from the libertarian perspective, that's kind of like equally the same like me voting for everyone to be free or someone voting to take away the freedoms of everybody. Why is that equal? So I'm not so I'm not saying it's equal in terms of outcome. I'm saying it's equal in terms of your right to do it. I disagree. I don't think voting rights are a natural right at all. And I think if you're trying to vote to take away the rights of everybody else screw you, man, I don't care what was done. I mean, I don't the idea of putting up roadblocks has other problems involved in it. You know what I mean? Like someone's trying to get their kids to school or something like that. But I'm just saying like in this abstract theory, like I don't believe that like if I'm if I'm voting for everyone to have their freedom and someone else is voting for everyone to be a slave that like, well, we all have our equal right to do that. I'd be for any policy that reasonably could stop them from doing that. Forget voting. Should we restrict the importation of socialist literature? No, that's different. Why? Why? Because because socialist literature is reading a book voting for socialism. Yeah, forget voting. Take voting off the table. That's where I took issue with it. It's not a right and you're trying to enslave everyone. Well, let's brag of that. But but so no, so so but so you agree that people should be permitted to transport socialist literature on public roads, even though that can increase the odds of socialist political outcomes. Yes. Okay. So then why why can't immigrants travel on those roads? Even if they might again, you know, I'm not endorsing this view. But if the objection is we should restrict the use of public roads when we think that restriction will lead to better political outcomes that has all sorts of non libertarian implications. That's sure. But that's not the argument I'm making. So the clear difference there is that they're goods versus people. And so if you were if you're transporting goods, I mean, at least in theory, there's somebody who sent it and there's somebody who wants to receive it. It was a voluntary transaction. Now I agree. I may not like that literature very much, but at the same time, I've read a ton of socialist literature myself. Lots of people read socialist literature and don't become socialists. So the difference between goods and people is that again, going back to what I said in the beginning, when you have this massive influx of immigration, these are people who were uninvited. It's not like somebody in the country who has some legitimate claim over any of the property said they wanted these people to come in and in fact, almost all of them are saying they don't. So that's the difference. Okay, the point that Chris is raising here kind of gets to the question I wanted to ask if you Dave, which, you know, I heard you lay this out in great detail on Bob Murphy's show. And you've laid it out a little bit here. The idea that if you know we live in this world where we have public property, we have the commons with government owned property. And that does not mean that anything goes on government property. I think we all agree. Chris seems to agree with that idea that, you know, there's no heroin in the little kids. No heroin in the little girls room. That's good. We're going to public schools at all. At least no heroin in the bathroom near the five. You guys are all more reasonable than some of the libertarians I was arguing with on Twitter. So I appreciate that. The question then becomes, you know, this question of, you know, what is reasonable and like what is the analogy like you can imagine like, okay, government can run, you can imagine how a private company would run a bookstore and that's how the government might run a library. When you're talking about a nation state, one way to think about it, which is kind of the way I hear you talking about it is it's run almost like this giant country club and you've got, you know, the people who live here are members of the club and they get some sort of say I guess through this sponsorship scheme of who gets to come here and who's not allowed in. Another way to think about it is that basically the federal government is just a giant security force that is there to protect our property. And so they don't really have much in that way of thinking about it. They have much say in who is allowed to come in or not beyond is this person a threat to your person or property. Why should I think about it as a libertarian in this more expansive way, instead of in that more narrow way where border control is really just about protecting our country against you know dangerous people. Well, I mean, again, it's, it's all in how narrowly you want to even define the terms that you just used, you know, I mean like it from a libertarian strict point of view you could argue the guy doing heroin in the kids bathroom at an elementary school is like he's not doing anything violent. He's injecting something into his own body and that's that but we would kind of reasonably say yeah but this is a space for children and we can't really take the risk that you're going to be violent or something like that. I think that look, even in the way that you kind of set up that question, I think I've kind of already succeeded in essentially what I'm trying what I've been trying to argue with libertarians about this over the past really over the past few years but specifically more recently on podcasts and stuff is that as soon as you concede that like, all right, we kind of all go, you can't have some restrictions. There can't be zero restrictions. We don't want there to be crazy unreasonable restrictions. And now we're kind of in the middle game like, you know, it's the old with would you sleep with me for $10 million. Yes, we just sleep with me for a dollar. Who do you think I am? And it's like we've already established who you are now we're just negotiating. Okay, so there's now we're just in the process of negotiating what restrictions on people are permissible on government property. And with the example of a heroin addict going into an elementary school, we've already established that no it's not just a person who's aggressing against other people. It could also be someone who's just going where they're not supposed to do. It could also just be something that we think might lead to disaster. But once I've got you here, I think I'm all I'm saying is that libertarians, you can abandon this idea that we're married to open borders now. It's not like what Chris was saying before, we can abandon the idea that we think heroin ought to be legal. That's a pure libertarian philosophical belief. But we can at this point say that we don't have to marry ourselves to this wildly unpopular idea that very clearly will result in a disaster that there ought to be zero restrictions on immigration controls. And if I can get libertarians there for now, then I think I've done my job. So to me, the likelihood of harm is really material here. Part of the reason why I'm not super down with somebody shooting up heroin in the bathroom of an elementary school is because that person seems like high risk of doing things that are sort of untoward around children in a way that all of us find to be impermissible and unreasonable and totally absurd to tolerate, as well as the fact that then you'd have a needle sort of laying around and possibly being improperly disposed of, the point being the harm, the risk factors into our assessment of the situation. One thing I think about a fair amount with immigrants that are flooding in, whatever you think of the manner in which they are doing so is, well, what are the harms actually posed by them. And I think actually sort of drilling down into the data here is very useful. I mean, we have high profile cases like the murder of Lake and Riley, that nursing student who was recently killed by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. And so, you know, there are these high profile examples of illegal immigrants, occasionally committing horrifying violent crimes. And it really bothers me that those cases are then sort of blown. I don't want to say blown out of proportion because any sort of individual tragedy is a huge deal, I mean, to the person who is affected into that community. But at the same time, like that is not necessarily representative of all other illegal immigrants from Venezuela. And I think it's actually important to be pretty specific and precise about what is the actual harm, what is the actual risk posed when we let people in. Part of the problem here is that we're not necessarily being very cogent of who we let in and who we do not write like there's an issue where people are just getting in, no matter what the Biden administration does, essentially. But I do want to go off of what you were saying, Dave, and pose this question to Chris, because this has long actually been a huge pet peeve of mine. Why do you use the terminology open borders? What does open borders actually mean? Because at least for me, it doesn't feel like that term represents the thing that I believe. The thing that I believe, you know, I think it's pretty reasonable, but it's basically drastically upping the number of high skilled and low skilled workers that we let in. I mean, at least in the short term, continuing to keep quotas in place, just really, really trying to make sure we are upping them massively and trying to sort through these backlogs so people aren't kept in this legal limbo for a super long time. For me, there's not a clear term that best describes that position and I get frustrated by the open borders people because I think they leave a certain fear in the hearts of a lot of normies and, you know, even just sort of more normal libertarians, because it's like, well, wait a second, you want to let literally anybody in and it's like, well, the thing that I am advocating for specifically is like, I don't want people dealing with 10 year long backlogs and wait times in order to have their claim process if they have an employer to hire them here. So what do you make of that? How do you defend the term open borders to those of us like me who are like almost on your side but not quite? Yeah, no, that's a good question. I haven't given deep thought to the term, frankly, I've just sort of adopted it because that's that's sort of the going term. I mean, I don't know, scaring. I'm a philosopher, so I don't have to worry about scaring normies like that's my job already scared normies every single day. But no, I mean, your point your point is well taken. So I think what I would say in defense of the term is look, so I mean, open borders sometimes gets conflated with with no borders, but which is not the case. So again, to continue with the analogy that I've given there's there's a border between West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania and West Virginia are distinct political entities. So there's this border there, but it's open like it's very easy to move across it. Now here again, like you could imagine reasons for restricting that that sort of movement, but like there's a border and it's like pretty much open. But if you know if you want to replace the term with something like, you know, freedom of movement, you know, I think that's fine. And I'm certainly open to hearing suggestions for a better term because you know, kidding aside, like, you know, I would like to be an effective advocate for this position. So if there's something better than open borders, I'm all ears. So the thing that I'm curious about is like, what exactly so so when people show up to cross a border, what does that system look like? Yeah, so I mean, I think we're so I as I mean, I'm open to sort of increasing this list, but I really think there are there are two main reasons to restrict movement. And here again, they're not really unique to national borders. They're just sort of general reasons why you could restrict anyone's movement is if they're sort of like wanted violent criminals. So criminal background check is probably fair game. And then also maybe if there's like an extremely contagious deadly disease. And like so here again, that really doesn't have anything to do with the national border because I know I know I don't want to open up this can of worms. But but so here again, it's like open borders and COVID passports for everyone. But in principle, in principle, like again, I don't I don't want to open that doesn't have enough vaccinations to work at the Cato Institute. That's what I just remember. I have to work remote. But so in principle, you know, abstracting away from the particulars of any specific case, you know, like this is this, like, I don't know. Imagine just to take a science fiction example, it's like a like a zombie movie or something like that. But you can like quarantine the zombie, like I am like I'm fine with quarantine the zombie. But here again, that's not like anything to do with national borders. It's just like, look, in that case, if there's like this horrible contagious disease. And so to circle back to your point, I think those are basically the two things or the two sorts of reasons why you might restrict a person's access. Can I can I just ask Chris a quick question because you've said several times that like, if there's someone who's like wanted for a crime or something like that, and I get your point there. That would require an apparatus where people aren't just flooding in, you have to check people in order to know. But why just wanted for a crime? What if someone's just got it, say they've served their time. They're not wanted anymore, but they've they've been convicted of rape three times and stabbed people five times and they've served their time. They're done, but they just have a vicious violent criminal record and nobody in this country has invited them in. They just show up to our country and go, I'd like to come in. Should we turn them away or let them in? Well, so so I take it that what you're getting I say, well, in that case, it actually seems like even though the person has saved their time or served their time, they're like a legitimate risk to inhabitants of a country. So that's so that's like the principle. It's not it's not being a wanted criminal in particular. But you could say something like if this person has a sufficiently high probability of harming people in their personal property, etc. And we could, you know, fill in the details of that. OK, no, but I really just ask because it does it does kind of walk back the standard just one more layer. So it's not just if they're wanted for a crime, but now it's if there's a probability that maybe they could be a problem in the country, they can be excluded. So I mean, again, I just I would say I don't I don't I don't think that's open borders anymore. Once you get to that point, it might be minimal restrictions, but it's not exactly a lack. It's not an absence of restrictions. The other thing that comes to mind is this question of like, I think we would probably all here agree that authorities restricted freedom of movement quite aggressively during over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a manner that I felt I felt as though, and I was very clear about this in my writing and TV hits that the threat posed by that specific virus in no way rose to the level of requiring this type of really obscene and horrifying government response. And so I've been left with this sense of like, OK, like I don't want massive polio epidemics, but like I don't really particularly trust any sort of government authorities to know what that level is the appropriate. Like if they overreacted to the degree that they did with COVID-19, who is to say that they would actually be able to sufficiently contain diseases and viral threats, given that they have a horrifying track record of doing a really bad job with that? How do you what do you make of that, Chris? Like, what would happen? Like, are you like, what would happen if there were sort of a COVID round two type case? I mean, I think that's friendly to my position, isn't it? But if the idea is if you're worried that if so I take it the worry is something like if you give the state an inch, it'll take a mile and we don't want it to take a mile. I'm with you. Like I'm with you. But so here again, so we might distinguish. How do we trust them to decide what a reasonable contagion is that necessitates the closing of borders, the restricting of the flow of people because they already sort of demonstrated how horrible they are at actually making that call. So so here's what I would say if you don't trust them to do that, then there's no particular reason reason to trust them to screen out immigration for any other reason. And so I think that brings to my mind, you know, the comment that we played from Dave at the beginning about bring the troops home and put them on the border. It's just like it really ramped up immigration enforcement necessitates a, you know, a militarized border and this necessitates the growth of the an empowerment of the security state in the same way that we saw the so called you know, rise to power during the COVID pandemic. If we suddenly have a, you know, reaction to the migrants quote unquote crisis, then you end up with the same thing you're feeding state power. Is that a concern that lingers in your mind, Dave? Oh, yeah, 100%. But you know, like what I snuck in there is take the entire military and so I ended the empire in one fell swoop. So that was. I like it looks so easy. Yeah, there's so you know, so it's not a lot of toys that they developed over there. No, it's not in my news on us now. Let's be real. Look, I did say on Bob Murphy's podcast that like, yeah, look, if I had my way that also be discharged and then like rehired as border security or something like that. But yes, I mean, it wouldn't be necessarily an increase in the size of the factually wouldn't be an increase in the size of government. It would be the same, but they would all be concentrated here. And look, I mean, there's no question about this. Kind of less worried about like the size and more like, where are the guns pointed? Yeah, I know you're more comfortable with them pointed at Iraqi children than pointed at Americans either. But no, I understand. No, listen, I'm not even like, I don't even say that it a judgmental way. I get it. It's like, yeah, it's scarier when it comes home than when it's being done abroad. But at the same time, I don't think it's anymore. Zach's point though, because Zach is a pretty consistent anti-war voice. No, no, no, I'm just I'm just saying that he's concerned about the military being over here. But then if you're an anti-war voice, then okay, but you also get them not being over there at the same point. No, look, there's no question. And I think this is something for every libertarian who is not in support of open borders. We should all keep very much in the front of our minds that look, if you ask the government to do anything, it's a guarantee they're going to mess it up. And it's a guarantee that rights are going to be violated in the process. At the same time, we wouldn't necessarily conclude, even and caps like myself wouldn't conclude that under current circumstances, government should stop prosecuting murder. But by the way, the same thing applies to that. There's going to be people falsely accused of murder. There's going to be people who fit in identity and then got shot when they were fleeing the scene of something, even though it was the wrong guy. You see these problems all the time. And so in addition to like kind of everything we're talking about in this conversation, there probably is a lot of agreement between all four of us on government policies that could make the situation much, much better. And the one at the absolute top of the list to me is to end the war on drugs. The war on drugs has so much to do with so much of the problems that are coming over the border. So much of the violence, so much of the the fentanyl that's being shipped over. The only reason why there's even a market for it is because it's all the drugs are kept in the black market and the 100,000 ODS plus debts a year. It's all because people are getting cocaine and Percocet on the black market and they don't realize there's fentanyl in it and they're killing themselves. And of course, also this is the funding mechanism for all of the violent gangs. And so I think you would cut down on the violence and cut down on a lot of these problems by ending the war on drugs, ending intervention in Central and South America. I'd imagine all four of us agree on that stuff. But to your point, I agree with you. Anytime the government does anything, there's going to be a lot of problems. I just think that as somebody who's an ANCAP, the idea of abolishing government borders, or as Chris said, not abolishing government borders, but abolishing the control over them to a large degree, would probably be the absolute last thing that would be abolished in as far as governments go. That's the most fundamental thing in some senses that governments do, is that's how you know where they are and what geographic territory they have control over. And there's got to be some type of order of operation to that. There are a bunch of other marginal solutions in the vein of what you were talking about, Dave. For example, I think 10xing the quota for H1B visas would probably be a relatively uncontroversial policy proposal, in part because those people are high-skilled workers. And I would imagine most frequently could find employers who are willing to hire them. I mean, I'm specifically talking about H1B visas. I'm just pulling up the visas issued from 2014 through 2023. I don't issue that many of them all things considered compared to the size of the population as a whole. But I think H1B visa holders are in particular an interesting category, and there are a few other that fall into this category. I mean, they're just not really likely to rely on welfare. And I also think that there's some interesting solutions offered by folks like Brian Kaplan, which are basically like, hey, what would happen if we let a whole bunch of people in, but really capped their access to welfare to a really significant degree? And of course, that doesn't fully negate the problems that you raised with emergency room usage and public school usage that you brought up earlier, Dave. But it would, I think, play a pretty significant role. Like my point being, we could do an awful lot by simply letting in immigrants who we deem most likely to be able to really take care of themselves and have a decent shot of not being these charges of the state and not being sort of leeches on the welfare state in the future. And that's sort of where I wish more of the conversation would sometimes focus. Of course, a lot of the people who are currently flooding the border are not those very same people. Right. Right. But that's, there's a lot of overlap there to the point of Hapa's invitation sponsorship system is that you're going to incentivize people now to essentially have to make a bet that this person isn't going to be someone who, you know, ends up on welfare. This isn't going to be a violent criminal. And then you at least get a, you get a different type of person and the different people who are coming for different reasons. And that's not what we're getting right now. So I want to, I want to raise the question. Hold on, Liz. Well, Liz, hold on just a second, just because we're, since we're talking about the welfare issue now, I think we should talk a little bit about, you know, the actual empirical data around that. And I know that you've criticized some of these Kato studies, Dave, but on this is one of you can, you're free to criticize this one as well as you want. This is one of the recent ones, the fiscal impact of immigration in the United States, I believe, published last year by three Kato economists. And basically what they find is this is one of the figures. Each of these lines, they're the dark line is the first is first generation immigrants. The light gray is second generation. The orange is third generation over their lifetime. This red line, when they're below the red line, basically they're kind of taking more government benefits. And when they're above the red line, they're contributing more in, you know, tax receipts than they are taking. I'm sorry. And the bottom axis there is that those, those are their ages. I'm sorry. Those are their ages. Yes. So the predictable pattern here is when you're young using K through 12 school and don't have a job, you are a net, you know, consumer. And then once you start to hit working age, you become a net contributor. And then when you retire, you become a net consumer again. And this is. I just, I haven't looked at this study before is this this is measuring immigrants of the past, or is this a projection for the future. This is immigrants of the past where we'll get to the future in a second. This is drawing from Census Bureau data. And this here is ratio of tax receipts to outlays. So it's showing, again, the red line, anything underneath the red line, basically you're kind of like a net. You're not a net contributor. This is over time. This is not by age. This is like back in the 90s, you can see first generation immigrants tended to be net contributors that went a little negative and then kind of got to like neutral by 2017-2018. Second and third generation kind of stay below the red line. So that data is looking good for Dave, his case. But then another thing Kato did here was they added in capital income as a fiscal impact. So basically, you know, once immigrants come to work here, they start working for companies and they start creating value for the companies. And so you also capture that in tax revenues. And so they added that in. And when they did that, they found that immigrants, particularly more recent immigrants after for particular more recent immigrants are more productive economically, even then the native population. And the reason that Kato concludes that the most recent immigrants are particularly productive. One, the demographics, they tend to be closer to working age when they're coming in. And secondly, there's been some kind of tightening of welfare on the federal, state and local levels. By recent, they mean the past five years. And this one Dave is projecting forward. So that's like there. So like my conclusion just from looking at the Kato studies and some of the other stuff is basically immigrants are probably a net contributor at worst neutral and almost certainly not any more of a, you know, suck on the welfare teeth than the native born. So if, first of all, do you do you agree that that's more or less the case? And if so, why would that justify? Why would that justify immigration restrictions? If, you know, every new baby born is kind of in the same situation as an immigrant. Well, okay, so let me say like this. Number one, I would say that I just take with a grain of salt any model based projections. They're just it's the worst type of science across the board in every single scientific field, whether it's climate science, or whether it was the projections as Sweden's going to have 100,000 COVID deaths by summer. It's all it's just very, very difficult to account for every single variable. Scientists and intellectuals often think they are much better at predicting the future than they are. And there's there's just way too many different variables to ever really say this stuff with any certainty. So I in as far as the projections into the future, I just take that with a grain of salt. As far as there's stuff from the past, I'm not going to dispute the numbers. I don't exactly know. I've looked into a few Kato studies where I've seen some pretty glaring holes in them. I haven't looked into this one. So I'd have to read the whole thing to give you like my opinion. It will be linked. I also think that look, there's a little bit of this kind of libertarian catch 22 that immigrants find themselves in through no fault of their own. But you're either in a situation where, and this is just because this is the nature of government, right? Is that you're either in a situation where you're taking government services, which are provided by the taxpayer, in which case the taxpayer is kind of getting ripped off if they're forced to fund you when they don't want to. Or you're in a situation where you're paying money in taxes, which isn't really a solution for libertarians either because you're just kind of funding the apparatus who we don't really like very much. And it's not as if they're then returning that money to the taxpayers who subsidized you in those early years. They're just spending it on some other project to make their own cronies wealthy. Now there is a point to what you're saying that they're being productive. If they have a job, they're contributing to the economy. The stuff outside of the state, I think is what libertarians would probably appreciate. But I think that, look, the question becomes, if you think about it in real life, again, you have a situation where the domestic population has been taxed for generations to build infrastructure all around them, whether it's roads and firehouses and hospitals and schools and police forces and all of these things. And the immigrant who comes in day one gets access to all of those things. You get access to all of the things that the taxpayer has been forced to pay for. And my point is just that from the libertarian point of view, the people who have been forced to pay for that all along ought to have a say as to whether or not they want to share what they were forced at the point of the threat of violence to fund, rather than just somebody who wasn't a part of that. Now, if you want to say that also applies to new babies who are born in America. I mean, sure, that's true for some of them, probably not our kids, but that's true for some kids who are going to be like, you know, we're going to be reliant on the system. The difference is there's just no way to parse that out within our society. Whereas it's very clear that people not coming from our country were not a part of the domestic population. There would be a way to parse it out to see who, you know, over the average lifetime is is the average American, do they contribute more or take more as a taxpayer? I guess my question to simplify it is, like, do you have you seen evidence that leads you to believe that immigrants, you know, take more welfare than the native born over a lifetime? Oh, I mean, I think that if you so unlike currently what's going on is all of the immigrants who are coming here are immediately taking a bunch of government assistance. And that's true all throughout the country. What what will happen over their lifetime? I don't know. I don't. The data I was showing before shows that if they come around working age, they tend to contribute. No, it shows that no, it shows that that's what's happened in the past. And that does not necessarily mean that that's what's going to happen in the future. Do you think that the current composition of immigrant, like, do you think that there's something about the current composition of immigrants that would lead to this historic trend changing? Well, I mean, it depends on how far we're going back. I mean, you know, more like immigrants who came here in the 80s and 90s, not, you know, there's no reason to argue about the immigrants who came over 100 years ago when the US had something more akin to an open border state. Well, right. And also more akin to a limited constrained constitutional republic and didn't have a welfare state and things like that. So yes, I do think that when you have a giant welfare state, you do attract a different type of person. I'm not saying that's true for 100% of the people and probably not even the majority of them. But that, yes, you get this is basic libertarian economics that if you have a welfare state, you're going to get more people than you otherwise would have gotten to come here. I also do think that we are in we live in a drastically under a drastically different government and in a drastically different culture than we lived in the 1980s. And as someone who's old enough to remember parts of the 1980s, I do not think it can be overstated how profoundly different. Born in the 1980s, Dave. Yes. How much do you actually remember? Oh, I remember. I mean, I was born in 83. I remember, you know, I got early memories. I got memories from like 86. I think you're trying to play the Village Elder card and I'm like, I know exactly how old both you and Zach are. Chris is the mystery box over there. 82. Dave, I do feel like you're side stepping the question a little bit and I do think it's a question that is served by going in, you know, going towards specifics. Like, I mean, we have pretty good data that indicates that generally speaking, immigrants of the recent past are not these leeches on the welfare state. They are net contributors. Is there something about the people who are flooding the border today that indicates that that won't be true any longer? I'm not saying there's something about the people. I'm saying that I think there's something about our culture that indicates that that may not be true anymore. And we did not have this kind of like intense grievance based left wing culture in America in the 1980s. And we did not have this intense kind of populist right wing culture in America. And there was, look, I know it's not the 19 or I know it wasn't the 1920s. But even in the 1980s, there was much more of like this kind of pressure to assimilate. We were much more of a pro American culture and there was and we don't have that at all anymore. And in fact, what's happening now as you can see over the last few years with the waves of immigration is that you essentially have the progressives lining up to offer as much free stuff. And to tell the people coming in that they are the victims of the white supremacist society already and how awful our culture is. But hold on. But like, do the people who are coming in, sorry to interrupt, but I mean, do the people who are coming in by and large actually believe it? I mean, I feel like it's not as if they're like listening to the retarded, excuse my French, Brooklyn hipsters and just swallowing that narrative wholesale. No, I'm not saying Brooklyn hipsters. I'm saying like Nancy Pelosi and people like that. Do we have any evidence that indicates that they're going to be those types of Americans versus people who, I mean, we have a ton of good data that indicates really high levels of religiosity among recent immigrants, really high levels. Oh, they're religious. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not denying they're not religious. I mean, I don't know exactly what you're asking. Patriotism too. I'm saying that it's not as if they're just being fed this narrative of like America is a declining land and really they should just engage in this vicious cycle of grievance mongering. No, no, no, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that they're believing that America is this is a fallen land or something like that. What I'm saying is and look, I mean, I don't know if there's if there's opinion polls amongst illegal immigrants, which I don't think exists or opinion polls amongst legal immigrants or whatever that that might exist. But but yeah, but there are certainly there's you can look at anecdotal evidence of people making videos about how to squat in people's homes. You could certainly look at there were there were protests outside of the immigration facilities in New York City when they had to move them for a couple days out to the boroughs because they were outraged that they weren't going to continue getting the free housing that they had gotten in New York City and we're only going to get free housing out in Queens. So I don't know exactly how pervasive that is amongst these guys. But yes, there certainly is some evidence that this the progressive like stuff works. That's why it's taken over the entire country. When you hand people poor stuff and then start giving them a narrative, it has some effect. And so yeah, I'm certainly concerned about that. Well, so I want you to I don't want to interrupt and I want you to flesh it out a little bit better. I mean to steal man like the specific example that you're citing I remember it because I'm a Queens resident. As you know, and part of the reason some of the illegal immigrants were frustrated about being moved from shelters in Manhattan to shelters like near where I live in Rockaway like Floyd Bennett Field, which is a massive housing facility for immigrants for illegal immigrants. Part of the reason they were pissed off about this is because now this means they have to ride the bus for like an hour in order to receive the social services that they had thought they were going to get or in order for their children to continue going to the schools that they had been assigned or in order to wait in lines to get their New York state IDs. Right. Like it wasn't just this like holding out the hands being like, but my free stuff type mentality. Even what you just described is my free stuff. I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that I saying they have to get they have to get on a bus to go get their handouts or they have to switch their cool. There's kid into the free school that they get their kid into. I mean, no, no, that's not no. I want to I want to legitimately understand what you're saying. And I also want you to legitimately understand what I'm saying. I'm not saying that I'm on board with this whole thing. But to some degree, it does kind of make sense if you're going from being on, you know, first stab and fourteenth. And, you know, you know that the place where you need to get your New York state ID in order to then be able to apply for work authorization. You know that the place where you need to apply for that ID is three blocks away. And now you're being transported to Floyd Bennett Field out in Queens. And so it's going to take you an hour and a half to do that commute to wait in line. I mean, you can understand why they would be confused and frustrated by that, especially because they're totally unfamiliar with the geography of New York City. It's not right. Different than what they envision. I understand your point. And certainly I could understand where they'd be confused. And look, none of this is like central to my arguments against open borders or anything like that. But I would also say that like, I don't know, I've I've grown up like I had to. It took me so long. It took me probably until the last few years that I could afford to live in like where I wanted to live in New York City, like be in like Manhattan rather than be in one of the other boroughs. And it's not just that they're confused or they're upset. It was the fact that they were protesting. Like as if there is something here that's owed to them that does kind of indicate to me like, yeah, there does seem to be a different character of this generation of immigrants. Then the people pouring in in 1870 who it was kind of like, yeah, you're going to live like shit and you're not going to complain about it at all. And you're going to do that in the hopes that if you grind your fingers to the bones, maybe your kids will grow up here and have a better life. There does seem to be some indication to me that that's different. By the way, I think that's different across the board throughout our entire culture. And I think it's not so great. But again, none of this is really central to my argument. We agree. The example just stuck out to me and worth clarifying because I remember a lot of hay being made out of it and feeling as though some parts of it were kind of cherry-picked. And it was turned into this narrative that was perhaps not totally representative of what was actually going on. But I totally agree with any sort of entitlement versus industriousness. Like I want industrious immigrants to come to this country. If they were outside, right? And I think you and I are totally on the same page. Look, if I would have a lot more sympathy if they were outside saying, give us permission to work. All I want to do is go get a job. And there are restrictions in their ways to going and getting jobs. So I would have, but at the same time- Please try the federal government, the real villain in all of this, right? Well, yes. But look, I grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I am probably the only member of my friend group who grew up there who could buy a house in Park Slope, Brooklyn right now if I wanted to. They have all been priced out. Like all of them have been priced out. Now a lot of that's because of government policies that led to housing prices going nuts and a lot of different stuff we probably all agree on. There is something that does kind of rub me the wrong way about people who just got here to this country protesting that they have to commute in from Queens rather than say- By the way, they're given metro cards by the taxpayers. And so those same people, my same friends who can't afford to live where they grew up are working their asses off and paying the taxes that pay for all the stuff that these people are getting. And they're protesting that they got to go out to Queens. I will say that that does rub me the wrong way. Yeah, I totally get what you're saying. I do think they're, again, it is tough because especially like it was funny because Zach mentioned quote unquote, you know, the migrant crisis earlier. And at least to me as a New York City resident, I very much do feel like it is a crisis right now because there is this sense that New York had this consent decree, the right to shelter law in place that I think New York authorities seemingly sort of unthinkingly put into place just expecting nobody to ever need to make good on it. But in fact word got out whether through, I mean, there's some evidence that it's through like social media that a lot of newcomers have found out about this. But essentially now we have this huge issue where New York is running out of money and Eric Adams is basically saying, Nope, turn around. Don't come here because New York, I think, thought that this would go a lot better than it actually has gone. And of course, it's not going well when you have a massive number of immigrants coming into a city that only has so much ability to accommodate that. And they end up being this huge drain on social services. It creates a really, really big problem. And it's kind of wild watching Adams and a bunch of progressive New Yorkers realizing actually the bill always comes due. And I'm very curious about whether there will be a political backlash among New Yorkers who basically say, Hey, this isn't something that we really consent to. Literally called a consent decree and yet a lot of people feel like I did not consent to this. Can I just say very quickly that number one, it's been amazing watching every progressive Democrat magically transformed into a Trumpian from 2016 has really been something that's pretty great. Without acknowledging it or addressing it that like, oh, yeah, we were demonizing this guy so hard and now we're saying the same things he was. And the other thing I would just say is like a little bit of a thought experiment. If you see how crazy the situation is right now and how crazy the rhetoric and how crazy the drain is. Just imagine if under current circumstances right now, we just said the borders are open and this was announced there are zero restrictions going forward. What the next year in the United States of America would look like. And my my best guess would be that if you think Trump is a right wing populist, we'd be about a year away from living under a real deal right wing dictator. Okay, let me pick up on that idea, Dave, to bring to put a last question to Chris and then I'll let you guys, you know, ask each other one last question and wrap up this. Although let me mention one thing about me putting a crisis in square square. I'm not downplaying the idea that there's a lot of problems that are being caused by the government's inability to cope with all the migrants that are coming to the border in the cities. I just wanted to underline the idea that the government like the state's benefits from crises real or imagined or exaggerated and often takes that opportunity to grow as we saw in recent years. But I want to pick up pick up on Dave's point about the difficulty of absorbing a large influx and like what would happen if there was if we just decided okay we're going to have open borders. Liz and I were looking at some of the Gallup polling they ask migrants worldwide all the time how you know if you could if you could migrate if you could leave your home country would you do it. And in 2021 a peak of nearly 900 million worldwide said that they would migrate. If you dig into that about 18% of them say that they would choose the United States as their top destination. If you do that math it's about 162 million in a scenario where the US is the only country that's opening its borders you can imagine that number might be even higher. What do you say to people who are concerned that a huge you know almost half the US population coming from around the world here would change the culture change the economics and just kind of sow the seeds for the kind of really scary backlash that Dave is raising there. Yeah so actually if I could offer a thought on sort of the previous discussion I think it's so I mean I think it is the case that most immigrants tend to be net contributors and simply because they consume sort of state funded benefits at one point in time doesn't mean that they will continue to be a net consumer over time. So like just in my own case like I presume I was a net consumer for the first 18 years of my life until I entered the labor market and then I became a net contributor so it's it's very plausible to me that you know immigrants who come here get on their feet. Perhaps thanks in part to state funded benefits will be net contributors over the course of their lifetime but but but I can set that aside. On the point about you know having hundreds of millions of immigrants coming in and one thing is expressing a desire to immigrate doesn't necessarily translate into action and especially not immediate action, but to not dodge the question. I don't know I would say, what if we institutionalized any sort of radical libertarian proposal tomorrow. So if somebody said, we can put heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow. That would change the culture pretty rapidly or what if we said, you know, we do away with the income tax tomorrow. That would have a lot of radical consequences as well and so you could just so go on down the line. And so I would just sort of make a symmetry point here like I could see you go and want go in one of two ways. One is just, I am a purist libertarian, and I want heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow I want to. This is like that the libertarian button I think like did you press the libertarian button and make it a libertarian society tomorrow. Because you press the button you put the heroin, you know, in the pharmacies, you get rid of the income tax, you privatize everything overnight, you might say I'm a purist and I would do that, you know, let just justice be done though the heavens may fall. I'd press it. And if that's your view, I say all right cool then what don't don't worry about immigration like it's it's one in the same like it's just part part of this this package of radical libertarian views. But then you might say I'm a little more conservative than that like maybe we, you know, we start to criminalizing some stuff and, you know, and like reduce the income tax over time because you know we have good Hayekian reasons to not have radical change overnight. I say that sounds reasonable to me, in which case you say all right, you know, as per sort of Liz's suggestion maybe we just sort of ratchet up the number of immigrants permitted in each year and see how it goes. But so here again like I don't think there's a special problem with immigration like this is a problem with any sort of libertarian position like if you do it all overnight it's going to have a lot of change really quickly. And if you're fine with that you should be fine with that in the case of immigration. If you're not fine with that in the case of drugs and taxes and everything else and I say okay like fair enough I can see the point in that. But then here again there's no special problem with it. But there is there is a special problem and I laid this out earlier and I don't think it's been addressed. Look, I would unquestionably press the button to legalize heroin or to abolish the income tax because you're right it would be a drastic change. But the drastic change would be a radical reduction in violent crime a radical reduction in OD deaths if you're talking about drugs. And my God I mean the radical change from abolishing the income tax would be to make this country enormously more productive incentivize work. I mean like I just know like myself like I would hire three more people if the income taxes were the amount of jobs that would be created. It would be like this huge boon to the economy and it would be starving the most evil parasitical organization which is Earth. But the difference with the immigration system will number one I would argue it would be a disaster an epic disaster if we open the borders tomorrow. But it's also that look you have this dynamic where there are uninvited people coming here. They have no right to be here. There is no natural right that says if a caravan of 100,000 people who are uninvited come here they just get to enter property that isn't theirs. And so why if we were just pushing the button like say we are just pushing a button to legalize heroin. We are just pushing a button to repeal the income tax. Those are the if we were just pushing a button to open the borders what you're going to have is millions of people who were not invited here flooding the country. Why is that a libertarian outcome? What natural right do they have to play it out? Play it out for us. Why would opening the borders tomorrow be a disaster? What would that look like? Well, I mean, okay, we've had the record highs under Joe Biden. And what so far do you think that looks like? I mean, okay, you've got all the stuff you were just describing in New York City. Kids who are in public schools having to make sacrifices. You've had the social safety nets being drained. And by the way, the response to that is not going to be there for we abolish the social safety net. The response to that is going to be there for we have to increase the social safety net. And you have Donald Trump, if he's not removed by these criminal charges cruising on his way to reelection. Is that the results anyone likes? Open the borders. You're going to get something like that times 10. It's going to be, I mean, the the reactions that we're going to get from this are going to be nothing even moving us close to a libertarian direction. In fact, I think it would probably move us much, much further from a free society. Chris, do you agree with that idea of what would happen if we did this tomorrow? If we did it tomorrow, I mean, I don't know. To offer like if that's that's Dave's vision for what, you know, March 27th looks like. I am more skeptical, I suppose, than than Dave is about pressing the libertarian button. So like, I like privatizing not everything, but I like privatizing most things. I like getting rid of the income tax. I like legalizing drugs. I like all those those ideas. That doesn't mean if we did it overnight, the consequences would be good tomorrow. I'm Hayekian enough to think that gradual change is probably the best. And so like it is very hard to predict what's going to happen as a result of any of those radical changes here. Again, I don't think there's a special problem with immigration. And so I probably wouldn't press the libertarian button for any of those things. And it like it's just not obvious to me that say if we put heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow with, you know, other things in place, perhaps. So if that's the if that's what we're imagining, say, keep everything else in place, but we open up the borders. I could very much imagine an increased fiscal burden resulting from an increase in the number of heroin users, for example. OK, but let me ask, you know, I guess, you know, Dave kind of laid out his dystopian vision of a future with much freer immigration. Could you lay out your positive vision like what like it doesn't have to be open borders tomorrow. But let's say we start letting just a lot more peaceful, nonviolent people come here. What do you see as the future for America? I mean, I see it is in many ways the same as the past, like this is, you know, not to get all sentimental about it. But I think this is a big part of what has made America great is like people can come here from anywhere in the world. They can they can work here. They can earn far more money. They contribute to economic growth. They contribute to cultural diversity, all these sorts of things. And so like I think it has worked extremely well so far, having not completely open borders, but very open borders. I think our culture, I think our economy is stronger as a result of immigration. And I don't see any particular reason to think that that's going to change. I would certainly agree that certainly in the time period in America when we didn't have a welfare state or a central bank or an income tax, and we were an industrializing society that I think the policy of very loose immigration worked out very well. So I do agree with you that I just think we have a lot of fundamental differences today. I just wanted to give you guys the opportunity to ask each other very briefly. What's like so what's like one short question that you have for your opponent here that you just really want to hear with open ears their answer to picture this as a sort of couples therapy session where Zach and I are your therapist. Dave, you go first. What question do you have for Chris? Well, look, I would just I would kind of ask the question that I was asking before I'd say if there's somebody who was coming into America who was not invited. Do they have a natural right to come into a country in other words if Japan doesn't want me to come there tomorrow do I have a natural right to go to Japan if I'm not invited by anyone. So I think it depends on the particular. So I think you have a natural right to, you know, use somebody's private property if they give you permission they have you have a natural right to work at a job if somebody's willing to hire you have a natural right to associate with you. But I'm saying if that none of that's happened. I'm saying if nobody's given me permission nobody's hired me nothing I just want to come in. I'm here and I want to come in. Yeah, I mean I think the answer is yes for the same reason that somebody can come into West Virginia from Pennsylvania even if they're not invited by West Virginians. So I mean I think a lot of the disagreement comes about as a result of the this sort of public property issue. And so my concern is like having double standards. So again, like somebody can come in from one state to another, and they can start consuming tax funded services in that state they can start changing the culture of that state. They don't have to be invited. But like I think here again, it would be very unlibertarian to say that we can't have people moving across state borders for these sorts of reasons. And so I don't think we should have restrictions on people moving across national borders for those reasons. Chris, do you have a question that you want to pose to Dave. I don't know am I as bad as a communist. Well no because you didn't say you backed off of wanting open borders tomorrow so that's it you're better than better than a communist. By the way, I follow you on Twitter now you got a lot of great memes making fun of the communists by the way I enjoy. That's what I know somebody introduced me exact did you introduce me as a meme maker. This is my legacy. I don't know if that's a good thing. I like philosopher slash meme maker is a good that's a good. Chris wasn't I part of the origin story of why you started making the memes. Yes. So I remember I was the greatest good I've done outside of birthing my son the second greatest thing I've ever done was bad. Because now I'm making noise but no it is because I remember I was a meme skeptic. I like I like that means I remember your phrase was like democratizes knowledge or something like that. She's got a point. I think I conveyed I acted as though memes have far too much power in this world but like then again maybe they do right like. They might have more they probably have more power than they should which is not to say they have a lot but yeah. All right let me give you each an opportunity for a final closing statement Dave went first. So I guess that means Chris will go last so Dave do you have a final you know few minutes you know up to five minutes max closing statement. Sure sure and I'm actually pressed for time so I'll try my best to not go long. I would just I would say that what I said earlier in the conversation about I think feel like I've already at least kind of got the concessions that like we all grant that there can be some restrictions on public property and I think that's something that I like libertarians to at least accept so I'm very happy with that. Thanks all you guys for doing this I really enjoyed it. I would just say OK very very briefly. Let's say I was like a trained killer. OK like I'm a Navy SEAL or something like that and I got a bunch of weapons in my house and I got an AK 47 loaded ready to go in my hands and an unarmed guy breaks into my house and I watch him do it. And then he goes and like just assaults my family and I watch him do it and he takes all my stuff and I watch him do it and I and he leaves I just watch the whole thing. I think it could kind of be deduced from that that I allowed that to happen because I am a trained killer with a weapon who very easily could have protected my family and I chose not to. Similarly when you see this like this struggle of Joe Biden saying hey we really want border security and we're really trying to do it and the Democrats wanted and the Republicans wanted but they just can't get it together. When you have this government of savage killers who literally are the most powerful organization in the history of the world that can touch a wedding in Yemen if they think there's a guy suspected there who they don't like and blow the whole thing up. I would say similarly they are allowing this to happen and they're allowing this to happen for a reason and I think it's related and I'm not saying like what the whatever the cartoonish like great replacement theory thing is. I'm not saying it's anything like that. I don't think it's like to replace white people. I don't think that has really even part of the equation. I think that we're living in a crumbling empire. The people have in a major way particularly in the heels of covid woken up to the corruption of government and much like the Russians wanted to flood ethnic Russians into their satellite countries to break up their kind of national unity. I think that's kind of what's going on here and it's not a coincidence that the people who the biggest government proponents amongst us are the ones who have been kind of orchestrating this policy. I don't think that libertarians should handcuff ourselves and say that we must actually go along with this plan and we can't actually say that what the overwhelming majority of property owners in this country who wish for this to stop that they don't have a right to do that. And specifically in areas like Texas where private property owners are asking the government to fulfill their one legitimate function of protecting their property. I think libertarians should be outspoken supporters of that and supporters of what the government in Texas is doing there putting up that fence. I would just say the and this will be my final thought that what I think this all comes down to is as Chris agreed is the issue of government property and that when government does something when government takes control of something. There are other things that government is then obligated to do. There's probably lots of people in prison who the four of us don't think should be in prison people on drug charges people on gun possession charges things like that. We would like them to be freed from prison. But as long as we're they're in prison we insist that the government feeds them. And if the government if someone were to come along and say I'm going to abolish this government program of feeding prisoners we would not be like yes less government. We're saving money. You'd be like oh no now you're murdering those people. This is actually much worse than just imprisoning them. Likewise there can be an order of operation. You know so like you're like first you have to free those prisoners. Then you could talk about cutting back on the food that you were giving them when government has taken over control of the borders of a country and also run so much public property that it literally reaches up to the house of each individual American to have a compulsory opening of those borders is as much as non libertarian as a compulsory closing of all of those borders. And I think that libertarians unlike some of our other unpopular views this is one that we don't have to it's an albatross we don't have to wear and so I would encourage them to shed it. And that's all thanks very much guys. Okay thank you Dave Chris your final thoughts. Sure I'll keep it quick too because I know Dave has to run. Yes so I agree I think really the disagreement all turns about all turns on this question of what can be done with private property. I would just reiterate my main point which is whatever sort of reason we want to give to restrict someone's access to private property. We want to make sure that we actually can accept its implications for cases that don't involve immigration. So here again if the idea is that we can restrict somebody's access to private property if that sort of restriction results in desirable political outcomes. Then this opens the door to things like here again like restricting the use of or restricting the transportation of anti libertarian literature on public roads. And I think that's a position most libertarians wouldn't want to endorse if we can restrict someone's access to a public road on the grounds that that sort of restriction results in you know I don't know reduced consumption of tax funded services. That's you know going to imply maybe that somebody should not be allowed to use a public road to transport themselves to a hospital that receives public funds because that might increase the consumption of government funded services. And so that's just sort of the formula that I would use for analyzing these sorts of cases like are we willing to accept the implications of this principle for cases other than immigration. And then lastly I'll reemphasize the point about the so called keyhole solution so if you're really worried about immigration and consumption of tax funded goods and services that I would say the solution is not to restrict immigration it's to restrict access to those goods and services. Maybe you require some sort of entrance fee something like that. Because I think that that is a less restrictive solution to the problem than outright restriction of immigration and I'll leave it at that but thanks to you all for this. Thank you guys. Yeah this was a great conversation. I'm very grateful to both of you for being generous with your time for our listeners I want to remind you that we you can email us just asking questions at reason.com. We're going to be adding a ask us question segment so ask us direct questions also feel free to suggest future guests or topics we want to hash out lots of issues. This is a good model for like what one version of the show we want to do so if you have other guests and topics please send them there just asking questions at reason.com. Chris Freiman, Dave Smith, Liz Wolf. Thank you for your thanks for talking with us today. Thanks so much guys. Thanks for listening to just asking questions. These conversations appear on reasons YouTube channel and the just asking questions podcast feed every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please rate and review the show.