 When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. Do immigrants bring with them the worst attributes of the countries they left behind? That fear motivates populist nationalists and some free market economists, such as Harvard's George Borjas, Britain's Paul Collier, and George Mason's Garrett Jones, who speculate that mass immigration from countries with illiberal traditions will undermine Western culture. In her new book, Wretched Refuse, The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, the Cato Institute's Alex Narasta and Texas Tech University economist Benjamin Powell took an exhaustive look at the data and found that destination countries not only benefit economically from immigration, but that key markers of liberal democracy, such as support for the rule of law, limited government and private property rights, improve when newcomers arrive en masse. When Cubans leave Cuba and move to South Florida, they're not Cubans who want to recreate Cuban socialism. They're the most anti-socialist voting bloc in the United States. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, Californians who are fleeing Gavin Newsom's lockdown state there and moving to Texas are not the type of people who want to recreate California in Texas. Powell points to the example of Israel in the 1990s, which took in a massive number of refugees from the former Soviet Union. A massive flood of people coming from a country with a 70-year history of no rule of law, no economic freedoms pile into Israel with immediate voting rights because of the law of return. It increased the population of Israel by about 20 percent in that decade. Confidence and property rights didn't go down. It went up. Economic freedoms across the board, except size of government, but that recovered. Overall, Israel went something from like 90th in the world and economic freedom to 45th during a period of massive immigration from a communist country. Norasta stresses that the U.S. created its largest social welfare programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, at times when immigration flows were at historic lows. Immigrants coming in make native-born people in the U.S. less likely to support bigger government, to support welfare states because they don't want to give these benefits to the foreigners who are coming in. Despite or perhaps because of Donald Trump's anti-immigration animus, positive views of the contribution of newcomers are at record highs. Public opinion eventually affects policy. And one interpretation I think of the Donald Trump era is it's sort of like the temper tantrum before everything changes, sort of in the same way that in the mid-1960s, George Wallace and others sort of having their large nationwide temper tantrum against the end of segregation. And if you were just looking at what political candidates were saying, you'd say, wow, the segregation stuff is really on the upswing in the mid to late 1960s, but it's really the opposite. It's sort of like the death rattle of it. What you see amongst Republicans, amongst independents, amongst Democrats is either they like immigration as much as they always have, or the favorabilities are going through the roof. Narastas says that translating public opinion into pro-immigration policy is a slow and sloppy process. He was an outspoken critic of the relatively restrictive policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, along with those of Donald Trump. But he and Powell are optimistic that policy will eventually catch up to public opinion. We can point back to our Italian, Irish, Welsh, Persian ancestors who came here and faced sort of the same criticism that immigrants are facing today, whether it's about institutions like our book is about, or whether it's about economics or anything else. And these fears in the past turned out to be unfounded. And we can make that argument again and again in the U.S.