 Well, I hope you've all voted on the resolution. Yes, no, or undecided. The US should have free immigration, except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease. Speaking for the affirmative, Alex Narasta. Alex, please come to the stage. Speaking for the negative, Francis Menten. Francis, please come to the stage. Alex, you have 20 minutes to speak for the affirmative. You can take the podium. Take it away, Alex. Well, thank you to the SOHO Forum, Gene Epstein, Nicholasby Reason for organizing this debate over whether the US should have free immigration, except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease. It's fitting that we are having this debate in New York City in the United States. The United States had free immigration for the first 85 years after independence. It continued with a policy close to free immigration for an additional 50 years. Free immigration allowed tens of millions of immigrants to arrive on these shores without burdensome regulations, immigrants who contributed mightily to the economic and social development of the United States. But the current legal immigration system is essentially planned Soviet-style mess that restricts immigration to a small fraction of what it otherwise would be. Now, I have a slide that should go up at just this moment right now if everything is well timed. There you go. This is one half of a very simple legal map of one small part of the legal immigration system. Can we have the next slide, please? And here is the other half of that map. That's just one small part of the legal immigration system. It is second in complexity only to the income tax. This is the reality of American immigration law and policy today. This is the reason why so many illegal immigrants break immigration laws. To support the current laws or to support even more restrictions is an endorsement of this system or something similar to it. On the other hand, free immigration is a policy consistent with the principles of classical liberalism, libertarianism, and the Enlightenment. Let's start with those principles. We have a presumption of individual liberty. People have inalienable and individual rights. Immigration restrictions require the government to use violence and the threat of violence to stop the voluntary movement of people across borders. This use of government power restricts the inalienable rights of Americans and those of immigrants. Those who oppose free immigration should have to show that government force, which is funded coercively at taxpayer expense, should be used to stop the peaceful, voluntary, and mutually beneficial interactions of willing individuals. The presumption, that starting point, must be free immigration and the government can only restrict it if it has a very good reason. In an important way, our debate is about more than immigration. There are really just two broad political philosophies. The first is liberty and the second is power. It is the exercise of power, not liberty that requires justification. And those who advocate coercion in any arena must bear a heavy burden of proof. Free immigration is part of the philosophy of liberty. It stands on its own. It requires no special justification. Immigration restrictionism is the philosophy of government power over the lives of individuals and the use of government power to stop immigration must be justified and it must be justified well to overcome the presumption of liberty. In our debate today, my opponent will try to justify infringing on individual liberty, but all of his counter arguments will be small and unconvincing compared to the presumption of liberty. In short, the philosophy of liberty will overcome the philosophy of power. One of our individual and alienable rights is freedom of association, which means the freedom to voluntarily interact with whomever we want on a mutually agreed upon basis. On that principle alone, Americans should be able to associate with immigrants at any time they choose, assuming the immigrant also chooses to associate. This extends of course to hiring, firing, marrying, renting a department, or any other type of voluntary interaction. The state, the government, should not interfere unless under exceptional circumstances, like a criminal conspiracy to injure the life, liberty, or property of others. Orders exist to limit the powers of governments. They do not exist to limit the liberty of individuals. Another core principle we hold is free market capitalism, an economic system of decentralized, voluntary, economic interactions with mobility of capital, entrepreneurship, and labor. The movement of people toward economic opportunity is an important component of capitalism and every government regulation and law that restricts that freedom imposes a burden on Americans and on immigrants. These are deep and ancient traditions in the Western world that are infringed upon by government immigration restrictions. Immigration restrictionists and my opponent have much to overcome to justify taking away our fundamental and alienable rights by supporting government control over immigration. They do not even come close to overcoming it. Moving from the realm of principle to practicality, the economic benefits of immigration are extraordinary. Immigrants make three to 10 times more money in the United States than in their home countries, even after adjusting for the cost of living. Economist Michael Clemens has estimated that free immigration would increase the amount of global economic production, gross world product, the global version of GDP by 50 to 150%. That's 50 to 150 trillion dollars of extra production every year. In the United States, immigrants are already responsible for a disproportionate share of employment or twice as entrepreneurial as native-born Americans, create job opportunities for natives, are more likely to patent and are responsible for much of the productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II. There are no counterarguments that will be made tonight that come close to showing that the costs of immigration are higher than those benefits. Benefits of that under a global system of free immigration would increase annual economic production by a present value, a present value of about a quadrillion dollars. Now, I promise that's a real number. I had to look it up. It's a thousand trillions. Take my word for it or Google after the show. But even if that estimate is exaggerated by a factor of 10, we're talking about a present value of a hundred trillion dollars. In a purely consequentialist framework, immigration restriction is a monumental economic failure. Relatedly, the economic consequences of immigration are so large and so positive that they can't even be used to overwhelm our principles. But immigration restrictionists still have many other arguments against immigration. On crime and public safety, immigrants are about half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans. Now, it's true, some groups of immigrants by countries of origin have higher incarceration rates. Others, a lot lower. Illegal immigrants, based on data from Texas, have a homicide conviction rate that is either a touch higher in most years or a touch lower in a couple other years compared to native-born Americans, depending on the year you look at. Since 1870, immigrants overall have a lower incarceration rate than native-born Americans and specifically also a lower incarceration rate than white native-born Americans. The overwhelming impact of immigrants on crime is small and generally they lower the crime rate in places where they move. Terrorism is another threat. There were 219 foreign-born terrorists responsible for 3,046 murders and terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 through the end of 2022. The chance of a person being murdered in one of those attacks is about one in 4.3 million per year. 98% of those deaths were on 9-11. Terrorism is a small and manageable threat without more immigration restrictions. Immigrants also assimilate rapidly into American culture. According to research by Jacob Vigdor, an economist at the University of Washington, immigrants and their children assimilate rapidly when they learn English language, education levels, income, civic engagement and religious attitudes. The grandchildren of immigrants are on average indistinguishable from native-born Americans whose ancestors have been here for centuries. When it comes to patriotic sentiments, immigrants express slightly more patriotism than native-born Americans. When it comes to political opinions, immigrants have policy opinions similar to natives but tend to vote more democratic for the first generation. Subsequent generations are nearly identical to longer-settled Americans. Immigrants do not take our jobs, nor do they lower our wages. Immigrants are workers, that's true, so they increase the supply of labor. You might think that lowers wages and in some cases, for some workers, that's probably true. But in most cases, it's not true because immigrants are also people and they buy things and that increases demand. And immigrants who buy are people who buy goods and services and that creates other employment opportunities and raises wages, especially for native-born Americans. Every economic argument against immigration is just normal, left-wing, zero-sum economics applied to people. Once you see that, it's impossible to take the economic argument for immigration restrictions seriously. However, the welfare estate complicates the economics of immigration. Milton Friedman famously said, quote, you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare estate, unquote. Many of you have probably heard that quote before. But whether you can have free immigration and a welfare estate, it's an empirical question. You have to look at the data. It is not a matter of principle. If immigrants consume more in welfare than they pay in taxes, it would be a problem. Unfortunately, Friedman didn't conduct any empirical research on this question. But those who have done this research find that the empirical evidence doesn't support Friedman's point. Immigrants use 27% less welfare than native-born Americans on an average per capita basis. If we widen that analysis to include all government expenditures, education, police, welfare, military, et cetera, and all taxes paid by immigrants, immigrants pay $1.43 in taxes for every dollar they consume in government benefits. And that includes the state, federal, and local levels. Native-born Americans on average, and I'm sorry to have to insult my fellow native-born Americans, pay only 73 cents in taxes for every dollar they consume in government benefits. Paradoxically, it may be impossible to sustain a large government without the massive boost in tax revenue and economic growth delivered by immigrants. That last point, of course, does give me mixed feelings as a committed libertarian because I wanna abolish the welfare state, but those are the facts, and I'm here to give them to you. Now let's zoom in on education for a moment. An enormous government-controlled sector of the economy. State and local governments supply taxpayer-funded education at a price of zero to students. The students include legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and the US-born children. It also, of course, includes the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the descendants of all past immigrants. Public education is expensive, with all levels of government spending about $17,000 per pupil, per year, on average across the country, with much higher costs in some locations than in others. But immigrants do end up covering that in tax payments if you think about it for a moment. Most economists model education as an investment in human capital that pays off in more productive and educated workers who make higher wages, and higher wages mean more tax revenue. Thus, in education, up to a point, don't get that master's degree in poetry or anything like that, but education up to a point increases wages of educated workers, which increases their tax payments. Another reason is that immigrants tend to enter the US after they are done with high school and start paying taxes immediately. While their young children or US-born kids start consuming government education a little later. Thus, you've got a taxed worker or workers, kids in public school, and those kids will eventually grow up, start working, and paying more taxes because they are more educated. Now I want to make a principled meta-observation about self-described libertarians who are opposed to free immigration. Those of them who rely on the welfare state to argue against free immigration are not consistent libertarians, and those who claim to be anarcho-capitalists are contradicting their own supposed ideology. They often argue, like Milton Friedman did in his quote above, that because the US has a welfare state, then that means the country can't have free immigration, or that we should even more radically reduce legal immigration. That is a non-libertarian reaction to the existence of the welfare state. The non-libertarian reaction is to use the existence of welfare to oppose immigration. The real libertarian reaction is to use the welfare state to try to abolish the welfare state, or at a very minimum, to build a higher wall around it. And no other policy issue do so many self-described libertarians use the existence of welfare to argue against individual liberty. For instance, libertarians want to legalize drugs. I want to legalize drugs, but we have a welfare state. You can make the argument, quote, the welfare state exists. If drugs are legalized, someone somewhere will overdose on drugs and go to the emergency room. That person could use emergency Medicaid. Therefore, we shouldn't legalize drugs. You never hear libertarians make that argument because it's obviously non-libertarian. Another analogous argument, we have a public school system. Do we ever hear libertarians say public schools exist? If Americans are allowed to have as many children as they want to, then some of those kids will go to public schools and consume taxpayer resources. Therefore, every woman should have to get government permission before getting pregnant. That's obviously monstrous and non-libertarian. The libertarian response to public education is to abolish or radically reform it, not to impose other restrictions on our fundamental individual rights to reduce the harm of other government policies. Why do so many self-described libertarians suddenly develop a blind spot to immigration that they don't have on these other issues? Ludwig von Mises, one of the most well-known Austrian economists, had some lessons here that self-described libertarian opponents of immigration should pay attention to. Mises's writings on interventionism, which is when the government regulates or otherwise interferes in markets, lays out several problems. But one major issue with government intervention is that the first intervention creates problems by disturbing the market process. Those disturbances then lead to other interventions and an attempt to correct the problems created by the first intervention and so on. The cycle continues until the entire economy is controlled by government regulatory regimes with bad consequences. Libertarian immigration restrictionists unintentionally fall into this bad cycle of interventionism that leads to more state control over the economy when they endorse government rules to restrict immigration and reaction to other government rules in the market economy. Those self-described libertarians opposed to immigration because of public education, welfare, or any other problems created by anti-capitalist policy have been led astray. The answer to immigrants imposing some cost on public education and the welfare estate is not to get rid of the immigrants, it's to reform or abolish welfare and public education. Almost every problem that you wanna blame on immigrants is better understood as a problem caused by bad public policy elsewhere. Do not fall for the supposedly easy answer of quote, just close the border on quote. Don't fall for the temptation that one violation of individual liberty justifies another government intervention that further decreases liberty. Keep your eye on the real source of the problem, the government. The reaction to immigration has severely restricted the freedom of Americans. Whenever any one of you wants to get a job, they must now fill out government forms to prove that they are not an illegal immigrant. Many states, mostly conservatives, require that all new hires, including native-born Americans, must be checked through a government database search tool called eVerify to ask for permission to work to guarantee they are not illegal immigrants. Cooperation between local, federal law enforcement, surveillance, building the wall goes on and on and on. Americans have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor family members or workers. Enough is enough. Free immigration is part of the philosophy of liberty. Immigration restriction is the philosophy of government power. It's time for self-described libertarians who are skeptical of immigration to see that, shape up, and to become consistent libertarians. Libertarianism isn't buffet, stop acting like it. Conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, and others support meritocracy. What are immigration restrictions, but the largest and most destructive system of affirmative action for native-born Americans ever developed? As a believer in meritocracy, and I know my opponent is a believer in meritocracy, getting rid of immigration restrictions like this will open up the United States, make us a much more meritocratic country, and destroy the last vestiges of affirmative action that are far more destructive than what the Supreme Court recently struck down. The burden should not be on immigrants or Americans to prove that they can exercise their inherent rights. The burden should be on the government and for restrictionists to show that these government restrictions should be imposed on free and willing people who just want to interact with each other voluntarily. Libertarian and classically liberal values, American enlightenment values, our support for free market capitalism, and support for meritocracy all compel us to support free immigration. Thank you. Francis Madden for the negative, take it away, Francis. Thank you to Gene Epstein, and thank you to the SOHO Forum for having me to this debate. I'm so happy to be able to do one of these. I once did a previous SOHO Forum debate, only one which was virtual. So this is my first time before a live audience here at the SOHO Forum, and I'm so pleased to do it. Now, why me for this SOHO Forum debate? I'm not really a known guy in the immigration policy world. I do have a blog, Manhattan Contrarian. I think I'd certainly hope that many of you, or most of you are readers, if you're not, you should be. And I've written on immigration from time to time, but the immigration policy world is pretty much divided between people like Mr. Narasti, who takes a very principled but somewhat extreme position of wide open immigration. That's his position. That's the position of his employer, the Cato Institute. And others, on the other hand, there are think tanks that are very much restrictionist and think immigration should be greatly restricted if not eliminated, or at least there should be a moratorium. So, but this is a libertarian debate series, and I think one of the few people who you could say is kind of in the middle. I support robust immigration. I believe strongly in the principle of freedom and liberty that Mr. Narasti was so eloquently supporting. I support robust immigration, but that's not the same as unlimited immigration. So, the resolution here, I'll read it. The U.S. should have free immigration, except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease. Now, that is really quite an extreme proposition, and I actually thank the SOHO Forum for giving me a proposition like that, which shouldn't be terribly difficult to defend. Even those of us who are very much in favor of robust immigration, the totally free immigration idea really is too much, and I will, as much as I support the principles of freedom that Mr. Narasti talks about, I wanna kind of break the arguments that I'm gonna be making down into two categories. One of them is that all the benefits of immigration that he talks about are completely dependent on the maintenance of our basically libertarian system that we have in the United States. That's what makes it all work, and if we can't maintain that, then it all falls apart. So, what do I mean by that? Well, you might not think we have such a basically libertarian system, there are a lot of restrictions that he was talking about that aren't libertarian at all, but in this world, our system is pretty libertarian. We have private property, we have free exchange of property, we have free use of your labor. Yes, there are regulations and there are restrictions, but basically our constitution keeps the government from undoing that. We have a culture of individualism, of hard work, entrepreneurialism and self-reliance. That doesn't exist in a lot of the rest of the world, not only that, but there is a rather large political movement that we're all aware of, sometimes known as the left, which is fundamentally opposed to all of that and wants to undo it. So, we might think that our system is hugely robust and hugely immune to being undone, and I submit to you that it is not. Now, let us take a look at what the rest of the world looks like and what we would be facing in an unlimited immigration world. First, a few numbers. The current U.S. population is about 330 million. Current world population recently passed 8 billion, so we are approximately 4% of the world population, 96% outside, 24 out of 25 people in the world live outside the United States, so just one in 24 of those people coming here would mean doubling our population. Two out of 24 means tripling our population and the current population becomes a small minority of who we have in the country. U.S. per capita GDP is about $70,000. Take the rest of the world, take out the U.S. and the rich countries, Europe, Canada, Australia, a few Petro States, which are about 1 billion out of the 8 billion people, and the other 7 billion have per capita GDP of about $7,000 and the majority of them well less than that. So, of course, many, many people would wanna come here. Is it as many as our entire population? Not in a year, I don't think so, but it could very well be in a short period of time. Now, what happens when large numbers of people like that come? First of all, immigrants, this is a little known fact, immigrants get counted for congressional reapportionment and presidential voting as soon as they arrive. Not when they get to vote, not when they're legal or illegal. How many people here knew that illegal immigrants absolutely are counted in the census for purposes of congressional reapportionment and presidential electors? Anybody here know that? Oh, we got at least a couple of people, but that's a completely well-established, completely well-established proposition. And, of course, legal immigrants too, not just when they become citizens and can vote. That is why the left wants a lot of immigrants, immediate immigrants that are hoping they go into democratic areas. So, congressional districts have different numbers of voters because some of them have a lot of immigrants and some don't. The district with the fewest voters of all congressional districts, they all have the same population, but the fewest voters is the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez district in Queens and Bronx. If they could bring in enough immigrants as they have population, they double the population with no more voters and they get two congressmen instead of one. And the same thing could play out across the country, but more generally than that, and the expectation of the left, by the way, is that the immigrants will go into the heavily democratic areas and swing the Congress very quickly. But beyond that, how would the immigrants vote? Would the immigrants, if we had not just a million immigrants a year, like we have now, legal ones, and maybe a couple of illegals, suppose we had 10 million immigrants a year or 20 or 50, which is not impossible. How would they vote? Well, let's look at how the Latin American voter votes because that would be the number one source for a large increase in immigration if it were all opened up. And if you look at the Latin American voter, you will find that almost every country, certainly every major country, in Central and South America has voted for an overt Marxist regime within the past 20 years and most of them within the past five. And I could give you one after another. Venezuela elected a Marxist in 1998. Hasn't been a remotely fair election since. The opposition leaders are jailed, the vote counts are highly dubious, the economy has been destroyed, and the Marxists keep themselves in power forever. Mexico, Mexico had a, what was a huge success story, had a election commission that was known for its fairness and allowed center-right candidates to be elected after decades and decades of one-party rule in the early 2000s. And then in 2018, this guy, Amlo, over at Marxist, got elected. Immediately, great increase in the welfare state, immediately a wave of nationalizations of major industries. And he's gone after the election commission and thrown out the people who oppose him and he's rigging the election so that his party will never lose again. Now the Supreme Court of Mexico blocked him a couple of months ago, that's still up in the air, but that's what's going on in Mexico. How about Peru? Peru elected an overt Marxist in 2021. He immediately said he's gonna rule by decree, huge crisis erupted, he got thrown out, he got impeached and removed from office at the end of 2022, but that situation is not resolved. The Supreme Court has been backing his opponents. He's not in office right now, but he's very much claims the right to it, still out there. How about Chile? Chile elected this Marxist boric in 2021. His big plank was to replace the Constitution and he immediately comes up with a Constitution that enshrines every far left dream like the right to welfare, the right to health care, constitutional rights for animals, I'm not making that up. Well, the Constitution got voted down. Boric is still in office and he's trying again. I won't go on too long with this, but the same story, Bolivia, same story, Colombia, same story, Brazil, same story, Nicaragua in January or take it, it's even worse, Ecuador, same story, one after another after another. This is what the Latin American voter votes for. So all the economic benefits that my friend is talking about are completely dependent on our being able to maintain a free market capitalism, non-Marxist system here. Free market capitalism and non-Marxist are not the norm of the world. Latin America is poor because of years and years and decades and centuries of authoritarianism and non-libertarianism. That's what they vote for. Unlimited immigration brings them all here. If they're legal in the United States, they can vote, first of all, they're counted for congressional apportionment immediately. They can apply for citizenship after five years. Those are the rules. I'll move on to a few other points. Let's talk about crime. I submit that unlimited, with unlimited immigration, increased crime is a very real concern. I'm certainly not saying that all immigrants are criminals, far from it, but in any given population, the criminals are a very small percentage. I am saying that if you look at the big population countries south of the border, which would be the immediate source of a large increase in immigration if it were all opened up, they're all far higher crime rate countries than ours, and those are the people who would be coming. So the murder rate in the United States, and I will use that as a proxy for overall crime rate because other crimes are much more subjective and subject to different definitions. So murder is a good proxy. I'll use the murder rate. The overall murder rate for the United States is five per 100,000. Murder rate in Mexico, 29 per 100,000. Venezuela, 37 per 100,000. El Salvador, 52 per 100,000. Brazil, 27. Honduras, 39. Guatemala, 22. In other words, the main sources of a big influx of new immigration are places with crime rates five to 10 times hours. And I would submit to you that the raw crime rate for the entire population understates the likely crime rates of the immigrant population. Why? Because the immigration population skews younger. Old people don't commit many crimes younger do. The immigration population skews toward men. Men commit more crimes than women. Not saying those are huge differences, but I think the crime rates I gave you understate the prevalence in the percent of the population that would become the immigrants. Now, Mr. Narosti talked about a study he did for the Cato Institute in 2020, a big study. It's well known and well reported and I read it in preparation for this, which concluded that the illegal immigrants have approximately the same or lower crime rate than the native born population, which it did. However, I would point out, and he did these studies, I didn't, but I also looked up, but there are counter studies. And the famous counter study, which is a specific study that addressed that one came out in 2022 and it's by an immigration restrictionist guy named Camarota from something called the Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. But Camarota says, Mr. Narosti's figures are all off. First of all, it's only from Texas. The reason it's only from Texas is the only state that actually breaks down its crime statistics to break out illegal immigrants. But Camarota says they don't know who the illegal immigrants are. So if they don't know whether somebody is or is not, they record them as part of the general population. So a lot of crimes are recorded as part of the general population when they're not. Then over time, they find out more people were illegal immigrants. They changed the statistics. Over time, it turns out that more of the crimes were committed by illegal immigrants, but they'll never find out who all of them were. And so the study is flawed in that respect. Now I can't say I know all the details. All I'm saying is there is absolutely every reason to think that the population of people who might come in in an unrestricted immigration regime would be skewed toward higher crime rates. And that is a real concern. Another real concern is competition for low-skilled work. And what I would submit is here, you can't extrapolate the results of how the low-skilled labor market has worked out in a regime where immigration might be 10 or 20 or 40 million people a year in the low-skilled category from a regime where it's been one or two or three million, where it becomes suddenly 20 and 40, that is a very, very different situation. And the effect on the low-skilled labor market is highly likely to be very, very dramatic. It would not particularly affect me or anybody else in this room, but it would be a dramatic effect on the lowest skilled and could drive their wages down. And that is a very legitimate concern. I finally wanna talk about culture. Because culture, economics is not entirely what this is about, it's also about culture. And many of the people from around the world who could come in without restriction under this new regime are people whose culture is very, very different from ours. Those people outnumber us by multiples. So how would we feel about accepting tens and even hundreds of millions of immigrants who are intolerant of religions other than their own? Don't treat women as co-equals with men. Demand that women be subservient to men. Don't accept marriage outside their religion. Don't accept homosexuality. Honor killings, how about honor killings? These are serious issues. Now, look at what is happening in France. France has a large concentrated population of people from one area who have a very different culture from theirs. They have come in and live in France. They live seething with resentment. A young Muslim Arab man was recently killed by police. France erupted in riots for weeks. Hundreds of police stations attacked. Hundreds of schools, thousands of businesses burned down. The Interior Ministry from France, here is his quote. Their goals are to destabilize our Republican institutions and bring blood and fire down on France. These are important issues. So, the success we've had with immigration so far is with limited immigration where we can assimilate those people. We can discuss what a reasonable number of immigrants should be. Maybe it should be increased. But unlimited, that's a step too far. So, thank you very much. Five minutes to re-battle. You can take the podium if you'd like, yeah. So, he made several points in response. I'm gonna go through them one by one. On the institutional point, the idea that these economic benefits will only arrive if we maintain our free market system, he's absolutely correct on that. When you take a look at American history, when immigration was most restricted is when the government grew the most. We, as I said in my opening speech, the US had about free immigration for the first 135 years or so. The borders were closed in the late, mid to late 1920s. Right after that, we got the New Deal. Not too long after that, we got the Great Society programs. In fact, Paul Krugman, I don't say this very often, but he wrote an excellent column called Suffer Little Children. And it was about the immigration restrictions of the 20s and how bad they were. He said, but if they'd never closed the border, we never would have had the New Deal. Because the best political argument against welfare and a large state as all these foreigners are gonna come in and take advantage of it. And when you remove that argument by closing the border, you unleash the desires of the median American voter to have a lot of stuff for free and a tax to rich. That's what happened in the New Deal. Vernon M. Briggs Jr., a socialist labor economist from Cornell who recently passed away, was very opposed to immigration because he wanted the Great Society program and he recognized that without immigration being 4% in 1965, 4% of the population, the lowest in American history, without that, never would have had a Great Society program. Because the political arguments opposed to welfare, the strongest ones are that immigrants are gonna come in and take advantage of it. That's why the greatest surge in growth and the size and power of the federal government happens when the borders are closed. When the borders are open, growth slows down substantially. Both since the late 1960s and prior to the mid-1920s. I know it's hard to believe right now, but if the US government had been growing at the rate it did when the borders were closed, the US government would be substantially larger than it is today. Now why does that happen? Immigrants have policy opinions. When you ask them about policy, social security, welfare, taxes, about the same as native-born Americans on all these topics. So that's like good and bad, right? Because native-born Americans have terrible opinions about these policies. But the reason that it cuts down and kills the growth of government is because immigrants kill labor unions. And labor unions are the number one most effective lobby for bigger government and growth in government, and immigrants kill them by undermining that. Another thing to recognize is that immigrants are not a random sample of people from their home countries. They are self-selected. If immigrants were a random sample of people from their countries, I mean, those just aren't the people who move. If you think that immigrants are gonna import their institutions, I think you've gotta explain why Cubans vote Republican. Venezuelans vote Republican after fleeing socialism. Colombians overwhelmingly vote Republican in the United States after seeing what the FARC did to their countries. The descendants of immigrants from Eastern Europe, from Taiwan, from Vietnam vote Republican, because they see what these things have done in their home countries. On crime, you're right about that study, about the Texas study. The numbers that I gave were the up-to-date ones, which were about the same, a little bit lower, a little bit higher in some years for the illegal immigrants. In terms of culture, what cultural changes have happened in the last 20 or 30 years that you don't like? Think of a few. Think of, like, wokeness, right, that I don't like. How many of those were imported? How many of those are foreign? They were invented by native-born Americans for native-born Americans. When you poll immigrants on things like affirmative action, you poll them on things that are related to wokeness, that go back to the 70s, far, far less woke than native-born Americans. When you take a look at all the bad cultural developments that have occurred, at least during my lifetime, that I don't like, not a single one of them is imported. But all the good ones are, like food, you know, like, I love that stuff. Seriously, what kind of life would it be? And about riots in France, yeah, riots in France are terrible. I right now employ a French au pair to take care of my three young children. It is a political tradition in France to riot every two years or so, everywhere. Seems to me the immigrants have assimilated well to French political culture. On top of that, France does do some things bad. You go there, you get welfare right away. That's not the rule in the United States. But, you know, a lot of these concerns that we hear about, I think they're vastly overstated. And we should be more an optimist about this. Immigration has worked great in the United States. And it's gonna go great in the future. And I think this wonderful hall full of people and everyone listening out there who's an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants proves that. Thank you. My next party would like to take the podium, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, I think the biggest piece that Mr. Narosti is missing is the huge numbers that are out there that could be coming. And the effect, the potential effect on stability. And I guess related to that is the really extreme nature of the proposition he's trying to defend, which he hasn't really grappled with. So, I mentioned how huge the numbers are that we only have one person out of 25 in the world. There's 24 out of 25 left to come with, and all of their incomes average less than a 10th of ours. So, there's every reason to think that large percentages of them would wanna come. And in fact, Mr. Narosti emphasized that when he was pointing out that the wages here are three to 10 times what they could earn, of course they'd wanna come. Well, that's tens and hundreds of millions of them, not the one to three million immigrants that we get today. And when he talked about how immigration worked out in the unlimited phase back before 1900 or up to about 1920 in this country, it did when almost all immigration was from Europe and the cost of travel was far, far higher than it is today. Today, lots of people can get here, lots and lots of people can get here. Let's just focus on one aspect of the extremeness of the resolution. One of the things in our immigration law is that the immigration authorities are supposed to assure themselves that the person coming in is not going to be a public charge. That's the word in the statute, not gonna be a public charge. And the person at least theoretically has to prove that if they're applying for legal immigration. Of course, that's one of the things that's gone by the board with the wave of illegal immigration, but that is out there in the statute. And I think most people, even most open immigration people would think that's a good idea. I mean, can people, it could it really be that somebody could say, yeah, my plan is to come in and go on welfare and live on that for the rest of my life? That's the plan. Well, under this resolution, yes, we have to take that person. Not only that, it's worse than that under this resolution. Under this resolution, a foreign government, and it could be a not very nice foreign government, could say, yes, this is our chance to get rid of all the people we don't want. I mean, maybe the security aspect of the resolution precludes convicted criminals. But how about, how about the beggars, the street people, the drug addicts? How about we empty out our asylums and put them on boats and send them over to the United States? This resolution says, yes, the United States should take those people. Really? Again, I basically support the libertarian principle, but I think that our government has some responsibility to the existing citizens and the taxpayers not to burden them completely unreasonably, which that would do. Now, I think there could be a fair debate out there. As I said early on, I support robust immigration and I'm prepared to support immigration substantially more than we have now. The current legal is about a million to a million and a half. We're getting about a couple of million of illegal. Maybe more than that now, but still three, four million a year. And there could be a very reasonable debate on what a reasonable number is. Those charts about how complex the system is, well, it doesn't have to be that complex. It doesn't have to be nearly that complex, although changing the law is very difficult and government is always a mess. But there could be a very reasonable debate on what the level of immigration should be. But completely unlimited, I submit to you, is really quite an extreme proposition that is impossible to justify. And it's a, in a world where all we libertarians would like to see the government smaller, one of the core functions of the government is to establish the borders and to protect us as a country from outsiders. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that as a function of government. So thank you very much. Thanks to you both. And we now go to the Q and A portion of the evening. I want to establish a moderate's prerogative to ask a couple of questions. And also I invite you both to ask each other a question whenever you'd like to do so. My moderate's question would be first directed at Alex Narosta. I notice you haven't used the term open borders. And I don't know my related question is to what extent are you proposing open borders, but then more especially when Buddy Menton mentions that there could be hundreds of millions of people who wanna fly in here every day. Doesn't that potentially bother you? So my related question is, are you in favor of open borders and are you fearful to share Buddy Menton's fear that a couple hundred million people could show up at Kennedy Airport in the next few months if you got your way? So this is on, correct? I don't like the term open borders because I do think that the government has a legitimate role in keeping out violent and property offenders, security threats, people who are sick and have a high probability of harming the life, liberty, and private property of people who are here. So I think that's totally legitimate. So I don't like open borders because it sort of implies like none of that. So I like the term free immigration because that's sort of what I'm going for. When you look at the US Constitution, there is no enumerated power for Congress to have general restrictions on immigration. It doesn't exist. It was invented by an activist court during the progressive era. There's no power for that at all, enumerated for Congress. There's a power over naturalization. So but looking at what it is that government can do when other enumerated powers that have been listed by, that were listed by the founders, I think protecting life, liberty, and property from anybody is their legitimate function. In terms of the numbers, those are limited by the extent of the market. People come and go based on job opportunities based on the price of real estate in the United States, based on the demand for their labor and the supply for the labor in the United States. If you look at inside of the United States, for instance, there are huge wage differences between different regions of the United States, right? Wages are a lot higher in New York City than they are small town Nebraska, right? But not everybody from small town Nebraska decides to move to New York City to get those higher wages because the market regulates that. So yes, I do think there would be a lot more immigration. Those numbers are regulated by supplying demand, the extent of the market. And I think it is not wise to trust the government to try to demographically or centrally plan the population of the United States by tinkering with immigration. That's what markets are for and that's what they do best. So the real concern is you're saying that you don't expect 10 million people to show up and apply for welfare the next day. Well, in terms of the welfare rules that are currently on the books, and I've been on the books for a long time, if you come here on a green card, you are barred from almost all means tested welfare benefits for the first five years that you were here in the United States. If you're on another work visa, you're also barred until you've been lawfully present on a green card. There's like 40 different types of visas in the United States and a lot of restrictions. And I support those restrictions. I wanna get rid of the welfare state. If we can't do that, we do have a pretty robust wall around welfare benefits. And I'm saying build that wall higher. That's one wall I wanna build higher. So we can do that. But even when you take a look at welfare consumption currently amongst immigrants, on a per capita basis, it's 27% lower than native born Americans is. And when you take a look at the dynamic effects of the taxes paid and the benefits received, et cetera, immigrants reduce the budget deficit in the United States. Buddy, do you wanna comment on Alex's answer to that question? Yes? No. Okay. All right, we'll leave it open to questions. So please just ask your question, ask a question and no need to identify yourself. Do I get to ask a question? Excuse me? Yes, and I got to ask a question. I have a question for you. You're gonna save it later? I was gonna save it for later. Okay, save it. Is that right? Okay. Yeah, good. Just thinking about migration within the United States, you have a number of people moving to Florida. You have a number of people who went to San Francisco. So my question is like to both of you is if we did have this free immigration, do you see us ending up like Florida or like San Francisco? Florida, San Francisco, what's your point? We repeat that? You mean politics? What? Well, it seems that Florida is doing well and San Francisco is not. And they both seem to have, I guess we would call free immigration, within the United States. So do you see free immigration, United States becoming more like Florida? I guess the logical question is more for Alex. Go ahead, yeah, go ahead, Alex. So one of the phenomenons we've noticed is sort of this self-sorting where left-wing Americans like to move to more left-wing places and right-wing Americans move to more right-wing places. So you can see this in Texas, actually. If only native-born people who lived in Texas voted, it would be a democratic state. But native-born Americans moving from other parts of the United States to Texas, people like my brother, who are right-wingers are the ones who are keeping that state fairly Republican. And you see that in places like Florida as well. San Francisco attracts more left-wing Americans there. So there's a self-sorting that's going on in this. But one of the things we have noticed is places like Florida have gotten substantially more conservative in their voting over the last several years, while the number of Venezuelans, of Cubans, and Nicaraguans, of people from outside of the United States who have been fleeing failed socialist regimes and central, I mean, failed socialists is redundant, right? But failed socialist regimes and central and South America have been moving there in large numbers and voting for folks like Governor DeSantis. Coming from you, buddy? No, that's not that. Okay, yeah, buddy, hold on a second. Yeah, I didn't want you to be scanty, so I will lay my question on you, buddy. A lot of the initial, as you know, preparation on part of Alex to set the stage for his argument was the default position, the burden of proof position, namely that libertarians support free association. And if I may comment further, you are certainly right. And I think Alex would have to concede that we are looking at unknowns in the future. We have the past, it helps predict the future, but obviously it is not sufficient to predict the future. But do you recognize, acknowledge Alex's argument that because the default position is in favor of free association, that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate harm from immigration, not on him? Do you recognize that argument on his part? I don't know, I mean the term burden of proof, I was a trial lawyer for my career and the term burden of proof is a very specific. The default position, default position. The burden of proof is a very specific thing. I withdraw the term, I withdraw the term. Here it's not such a specific thing. I withdraw the term, that the default position is in favor of supporting free association between foreigners and U.S. residents. The default position. Okay, I start from that position too, but when you have out there seven billion people in the world with an average income of $5,000 to $7,000 per year each, and they could make it 70 by coming here, and we only have a whole country of 300 million people. I mean this is what you call getting swamped. And the prospect of actually maintaining our constitutional system and our basic libertarian approach to the world under a constant assault from the left who hates it, let alone numbers of immigrants that could be a multiple of the people already in the country, that's a very, very daunting prospect. And I think that's enough to shift the burden of proof. Comment on the answer. So what's interesting is the general social survey. It's the largest biennial survey in the United States. You can separate by immigrants, natives, et cetera. They ask a wide range of questions about what you think about America. Is it the best country in the world? What do you think about our institutions, trust in the government, trust in the Supreme Court, trust in the Constitution, and immigrants are far higher than native-born Americans in terms of trust in all these things. They think the Supreme Court is pretty good. They think Congress, constitution, pretty good. They're more patriotic than native-born Americans when you ask them on this question. I think if you're more, we get a self-selection effect where people who like these things are more likely to come here, and the cynical joke is all they haven't had much experience on watching Congress to learn how to hate it. But in this sense of if you're worried about trying to preserve the Constitution and these principles, immigrants are, I wouldn't say the ones holding it together, but they are certainly more positive about it than native-born Americans are because they have experience with things a lot worse. They really do. And in terms of the burden of proof, there's this concept called the precautionary principle that left-wingers use all the time. Whenever there's a new invention or a new technology, we hear an environmentalism. It is on the burden of the inventor to show that this new technology won't have some catastrophic effect on the environment. It's basically the way of thinking that killed nuclear power around the world. The inventor has to prove it. Well, I'm glad they didn't have the precautionary principle when electricity was invented because we'd still be using candles. And I'm glad that we didn't have to use the precautionary principle in 1800 to justify the system of free immigration that we had then because if we had this system or near-closed borders beginning in 1800 to today, there'd be about 90 million Americans and we'd probably all be speaking German. And I think things have turned out pretty well. It's the burden of proof, I think, is on those who wanna use taxpayer money and the power of the government to coerce and tell the rest of us what to do to show that their ideas are really good and it makes sense. Next question. My question is to Francis. It was a lot of good. My question is to Francis and then I want to ask, based on the data you brought about violence and crime, I'd like to know if you would limit domestic migration from the most violent states in the US to the most proper of the states in the US, given that they have the same diversity that we have internationally. Many of these states, they have other cultures, other religions, they have different races. So I would like to know if you would prevent domestic migration from the most violent states to the last violent states. Did you get the question, Ben? The answer is no, but I'm standing up for the maintenance of our constitutional system. And although this may be one of those things that you can't find in the actual text of the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has definitely held that domestic travel in the United States cannot be restricted or prevented by any of the states or the federal government. So that's wide open and I do not propose changing that. Coming from you, Alex, or anyone else? I wouldn't stop immigration between states either. You guys agree on something for once. Okay, next question. So Alex, you said earlier that... Alex, yeah, yeah. 27% of immigrants, well, immigrants use welfare at a rate 27% less than native-borns, but you didn't mention that that number is a heterogeneous mixture of high-skilled, middle-skilled, low-skilled immigrants, immigrants from different countries. As Steven Camarota of the Center of Immigration Studies has pointed out in his studies, which Francis mentioned one of them, if you actually break that data down, the low-skilled immigrants, including illegal immigrants, actually do use substantial amounts of government benefits, including food stamps, Medicaid, they get tax credits, it's quite substantial. And so I would imagine that if you did allow a billion people to come into the United States within like five or 10 years, you would get a massive rise in whatever those existing welfare usage rates, usages are, even at the same rate. And yeah, the Democratic Party is going to do everything they possibly can to enable that, expand that. And so it just doesn't seem plausible to me that it's gonna be actually easier in a situation like that to build a wall around the welfare state, let alone abolish it. So two points on that about the other study you mentioned by Steven. What he does is I look at individual use, which allows me to tease out the immigrants from the non-immigrants. Steve looks at households. So in a household, if you have an immigrant and natives, he counts all of that and the household is being the immigrants, even those a bunch of natives. One of the other things Steve does is he excludes two-thirds of welfare programs from his analysis. He excludes Social Security and Medicare, which are the bedrocks of the welfare state in the United States, the largest portions of the welfare state. They are progressive redistribution schemes that are means tested in the sense that they give more benefits to poor people than they do to rich people. They are the ones that are actually bankrupting the United States currently. And when you do either one of those differences, you can exclude the entitlements and just count the immigrants or keep the entitlements in and count the households the way he does. It works out much closer to my finding than it does to his finding in there. But if you wanna read this study, it's Steve Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies. See how he counts a bunch of native-born Americans who use welfare and blames on non-immigrants. Let me just put a finer point in the person's question. That if you take the poorer immigrants, rather the less skilled immigrants that they tend to, the numbers switch, they use welfare much more than they contribute. You don't acknowledge that fact. In our fiscal cost analysis that we did about the United States, the lowest decile of immigrants by education do consume more in government services of all kinds and they do pay in taxes. So that is true. There are, of course, some individuals who are net drain. It's not like every immigrant is a huge net taxpayer. So for the lowest decile, that's true. But when you compare it to the lowest American decile on that, if native-born Americans behave like those lowest decile immigrants on there, it'd be substantially better. Immigrants do behave substantially better than similarly poor Americans on all those metrics. But it's right, the lowest decile do consume more in benefits and they pay in taxes. That's true. Yeah, well, you're coming, buddy. Yeah, my comment would be that I don't think it's legit to extrapolate to extrapolate from our current immigration mix, which consists of a million to a million and a half legal a year, many of which are specifically selected for high skills and another million or two or three, we don't know how many of illegal in a year, but that mix to extrapolate from that to what might be 20 or 50 or even a hundred million immigrants, many of whom could be very, very low-income people. So I don't think to extrapolate from the numbers that Mr. Narosti is giving, which are our current immigration mix to the prospective mix in this free immigration system is something that you could really expect to happen. Next question. So for the negative of the resolution to win, the only thing that needs to be proved is that some immigrants who are not security threats or have serious contagious illnesses should be excluded. So my question to both of you is, don't you think that immigrants who would be a net fiscal burden to the United States, which would probably be most of the world population, should not be allowed to come to the United States? Obviously, you can argue that, well, we can build a wall around the welfare state, but the reality is that I don't think that social security and Medicare, the biggest fiscal problems of our country, are going to go. So working under those constraints, don't you think that some people who would be net burden should be excluded? I guess that's question is directed to you, Alex, could take it? Yeah, so what's fascinating is the Social Security Administration models increases of immigration, how it affects Social Security and Medicare's finances, and it's one of, and it's incredibly positive in terms of expanding the life of those systems. So what's interesting is, and they only model a slight difference. They only model like 250,000 more people a year and how that extends the life of the system by a couple more years, but when you model in substantial increases in immigration, let's say going from like one million a year to five or 10 million, you can extend the life of the system even without other reforms by many, many more years. So it may be, I think, the opposite of what Milton Friedman has said, right? Milton Friedman said you can't have free immigration in a welfare state. It's probably likely that you can't sustain the current mix of entitlements in welfare without more immigration. Immigrants who tend to be younger working, more likely to work, and the education mix has been going up quite a bit for immigrants over the last 15 years, without any legal changes. The average education level of immigrants has gone up by almost two years over the last decade. So much more productive people. So in terms of sustaining and paying for a lot of these programs, I wanna reform them and get rid of them, but it could be that having more immigration, the evidence I think is pretty consistent with the fiscal analysis of this, that having more immigration allows us more wiggle room to have more of these types of reforms without cutting grandma out of Social Security too quickly. I mean, I wanna cut grandma out, but we can do it a little softer. Coming buddy. Sorry grandma. I'm not gonna try to take on the gigantic issues of Medicare and Social Security, but I do wanna point out that to win this debate, all I have to really win on is that if a foreign government says we're gonna round up all our beggars, all our mentally ill, all our drug users, and send them to the United States, we shouldn't have to take them. I have to say that is a very good question and challenge, buddy, so if I may exercise moderators prerogative, I wanna phrase it as a question to Alex. What if that happens, some foreign government says, actually, Cuba is supposedly sent to sort of their criminals. Historically, that happened, although- We all saw Scarface. What say? We've all seen the movie Scarface. Although actually Miami seemed to do pretty well as a result, but that aside, what about Buddy's challenge? Iran says, we're gonna send all these yo-yos to your shores. What are you gonna do, Alex? Well, I think a lot of that's covered in the security threat portion of the question. A lot of it is covered in the serious, contagious diseases portion of that, right? I mean, a bunch of people who are in prison or in sane asylums in other countries, I don't know, do you think insane people in sane asylums aren't security threats? I mean, if you wanna take the widest, expansive definition of security threat in serious, contagious disease, I wouldn't argue with that. We're arguing about a fraction of a percent of people. But, yeah. I think in the US population, the people who are not criminals but are somehow badly impaired by mental illness, drug use, and the like, is not some fraction of one percent. I'm not saying it's half, but it's more like five to 10%. It's a pretty significant, it's a pretty significant number. I will say that one of the things that I was thinking of using in this debate was the Mariel Boat Lift. But I can't remember what year that happened, but that- 1980. 1980? It's that long ago. Holy cow. But I didn't think everybody here would know about that, but that was a time when Castro, people started coming by boat to the United States and big numbers in Castro opened up his prisons and sent huge numbers of prisoners to the United States. But I didn't think that was fair because fairly speaking, that would be under the security risk category. Was it even such a disaster anyway when they came? Yeah, some of them definitely were, right? I think would be under the security risk category. But what's interesting is there was a large, robust empirical literature in the microeconomics journals about the Mariel Boat Lift because it increased Miami's population by 7% in 42 days. So it's a great, what we like to call a quasi-natural experiment. Something that happened outside. Miami didn't cause it. What happened to the economy of Miami thereafter? What we basically saw using more updated research by people like Michael Clemens and Jennifer Hunt, who are two well-known economists on this, you may have gone a slight wage dip for about a year or two and then wages went right back up in the trend. You saw Miami creating more jobs and more wage growth about 10 years later than other comparable cities. If you owned real estate in Miami, that was awesome because all of a sudden you had a bunch of people who had to rent apartments and buy houses and native-born Americans owned the vast majority of real estate. There were some issues, it wasn't perfect. There were some crime issues caused by that, I think, subpopulation that we saw so dramatically depicted in the movie Scarface, great movie, Al Pacino, fantastic. Somebody said I looked like him in high school. They were probably trying to get on my good side. You still do look like him, yeah, go ahead. Thank you very much. Thanks, Meng. There is some cost to this, right? I mean, there was cost to a growing city, a cost to a growing country. Would you rather have the cost of a growing place or the cost of a shrinking place? Would you rather be Houston, Texas or Detroit? Next question. Yeah, I had a question specifically for Mr. Menten. When you're distinguishing the old era of free immigration in this new proposed one, you mentioned the differences between mainly like the European immigration and the Southern American immigration. However, your concerns with the radical religious was also a concern that was applied mainly towards the Catholic, Irish, and Italian immigrants. And they didn't turn us loyal to the Pope yet. So I was wondering if you think that still is a differential factor between the two. Did you follow the question? Go ahead, do you have a really good question? Well, I think I understand the question. Well, we're changing for the rest of us. I had trouble understanding. You had trouble understanding. Well, I think he's asking me to distinguish between how the Catholic, Italian, and Irish immigration of the late 1800s and early 1900s seemed to work out pretty well for the United States versus what I was raising of culturally very different people who could come here in very large numbers today from very different cultures and potentially destabilize our society in various ways that I talked about. Have I got the right idea? I guess so. And the numbers of Italian and Irish immigrants were not small, but they were always, and I don't have percentages year by year. And I think there were times when the immigration wave of the time got over, and Alex probably knows better than I do, got over a million people when the population of the country was under 100 million. But today we get three and four million when the population of the country is between three and 400 million. So it's not all that different. The issue is, I might as well be upfront about it, the culturally different people who are culturally different in ways that I think most Americans would not find acceptable if they were here in the range of 100 million people are basically Muslims. People who do not recognize equal rights of women, do not recognize homosexuality, do not recognize marriage outside the religion, et cetera, et cetera. Now when we have something like five or six million Muslims in the country, that's not a problem. But if it was 100 million, that could be a huge problem. And it's a big problem in France where the number of North African immigrants living in the country is about 5% of the population. It's not really that high. May I do this? I see three more people, we're running out of time. So what I'd like to do is the three people who have a question, could you ask the questions and then maybe our debaters will be able to address those answers in their summaries. So please ask your question, sir. Go ahead, what's your question? My question is for Mr. Menton, which is that he talks a lot about the dangers of immigrants from countries with socialist values influencing American politics. But as Alex, I'm sorry, I forget your last name. As he noted, Vietnamese Americans, Venezuelan Americans, Cuban Americans, all trend Republican, which is one of the reasons why Republican, why Florida is going right. And then there's also the matter of America's constitution, the fact that our federal judiciary is discovering its backbone again. And then there's also the matter that we have a really good job of implementing socialist policies without outside help. What is the danger necessarily of immigrants coming to the United States with the apparent danger of influencing political institutions? Yeah, okay. Next question that you may want to just do somebody. Go ahead, sir. My question's actually for the pro, which is that I think estimates say that about 160 million people with our current regulations want to migrate to America. So just using that number, it would be... So in America right now, I think we know it's like in a housing crisis. If you look at California, we have 170,000 people who are homeless and it hasn't really been getting fixed with billions in investment or whatever. So my question would just generally be how can these hundreds of millions of migrants be productive when they first need to be given housing and how can we expect them to even find housing if we can't find enough housing for our existing population already? Yes, next, and then final question. So this is a little bit similar to Mr. Mark's question, the judge. Into the mic, please. So I just wanted to ask when it comes, this is for the negative, when it comes to your kind of analysis of how socialism, I guess like Marxism is more president like South America and we kind of look at the threat of immigrants coming over and presenting that to the government and to American politics. To think of like the average immigrant who's coming here, a person who we can understand that wants to come into a country with a better per capita GDP, a country with better opportunities. Do you truly believe that a person like that would pose such a threat to introducing Marxist like ideologies into American politics on such a widespread scale? Okay, that will be the final question of the evening and we have no more time for questions. Both debaters will be attending our after party. You can chat with them there. They're both obviously very approachable, but we wanna go to the summary portion of the evening. The affirmative goes first on summary. Alex, if you'd like to take the podium, please do so. The most robust counter argument that we heard this evening is the one about American institutions, values, capitalism. It's true, immigrants come from countries that have worse economic institutions, that have more socialism, more redistribution, other problems with their governments. However, the person coming to the United States is not a random person plucked from those countries, from orbit and dropped down the United States. It's self-selected. The person who is going to take a boat from Cuba is not the hardcore committed communist who loves Fidel Castro and thinks the global revolution is yada, yada, yada and all that crap, right? It's people who don't like what's going on in Cuba and wanna get out. Same for Venezuela, same for Nicaragua, same for Colombia. When you poll take a look at the opinions of a lot of Mexican Americans, of Muslim Americans, for instance. When you poll Muslim Americans and the people who are over here from that part of the world, substantially more liberal on all of these measures than the people in their home countries. They basically look like Americans around the year 2009 in terms of their opinion. So like 13, 14, 15 years behind, if you think the current cultural values are really good and people should assimilate to them, but they're a little bit behind, not too far off. When you take a look at measures of political opinions in the general social survey, immigrants' opinions are within the margin of error of native-born Americans on all of these measures. There's one big difference, or there's two huge differences, pretty much. One that's relevant here is on the issue of immigration. Surprisingly, immigrants like immigration more. That's one of the reasons why in my home state, I'm from California originally, prior to Prop 187, which was a proposition voted on in 1994, pushed by conservatives in the state. It was sold as an illegal immigration, but also, well, not too artfully sold as a way to cut welfare for illegal immigrants. It also had a provision that said if a public employee, a government employee comes into contact with any illegal immigrant, they have to report that illegal immigrant to the INS, including kids in school. Anyway, prior to this proposition being voted on in 1994, on state-level elections, and California has elections in off years, on state-level elections, Hispanics in the state split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. And in some years, a point or two more for Republicans. Since then, it's been about 70, 30 Hispanics for Democrats over Republicans. And part of the reason for that is, is the way that this message was brought, the political campaigns at the time, is if it was a very broad stroke, broad brush, anti-immigrant message across the board that was sold to states. So the danger, I think, is less from immigrants coming in and voting, and more from how conservatives and the Republican Party react to them and whether they decide to make them the enemy. Now, what's remarkable is given all of what we've heard from a lot of our friends on the political right over the last several years, immigrants are trending a little, and Hispanics and Asians are trending more to the right than they were in previous decades. Hispanic votes in the last election, if you take a look at the exit polls, about 39% for Republicans, which is way up from what it was just 10 or 15 years ago. And if it wasn't for the influence of Asian-Americans and leading the charge and trying to kill affirmative action in higher education through the students for fair admissions, students who were the ones discriminated against, most brutally, by affirmative action in public institutions leading the charge and being such sympathetic victims, I don't think that we would have gotten this overturning of affirmative action for that reason. So if you're really happy about these political trends, I think you should go out there and say that these are the consequences of immigrants and their descendants in the United States. Lastly about meritocracy, I am a firm and ardent proponent of meritocracy. The United States has about 4.6% of the world's population. You can't really call yourself a meritocracy if you're basically closed off from the rest of the world. If you say basically 95.5% of people can't even compete if they want to. So I applaud the ending of affirmative action in university admissions. We have a lot further to go to ending in government contracting in the private sector and everywhere else. But the biggest place where we can break it down is to remove the affirmative action for native-born Americans who don't need it, by the way. I think we do quite fine without it in the United States and to go that far. Basically, my base principles of meritocracy push me in this direction. American history push me in this direction. And my principles as a committed free market libertarian push me in this direction to supporting free immigration. So thank you very much. Five minutes to the battle, buddy. I guess I think the most important point I could make in response to those last couple of questions and also to what Mr. Narasti just said is that I don't think it's fair to try to extrapolate what a wide open immigration system would look like and how the immigrants who would come in under that system in the aggregate would shake out from our current immigration system or the statistics that have been collected. Now, there's some important numbers that I actually had in my notes here but never got to in my prior presentation but I'll mention now. So currently, as everybody here probably knows, there's a huge surge of illegal immigration across the southern border going on but that's only the past couple of years. Before that, there was quite a bit of illegal immigration but the fact is that most of the immigration was legal and if you go back to 2019, 2020 where I looked up numbers, the number of immigrants living in the country was about 40 million out of a population of 300 and something million, so say 13, 14%. And of the 40 million, roughly 20 million, it breaks down roughly 20 million citizens so they've lived here long enough to apply for citizenship and become a citizen. 10 million legal and 10 million illegal and of course illegal has no root to citizenship so that basically 30 out of the 40 million had come in legally and the legal immigration system has all kinds of complications which you couldn't even read and I don't even know what they are but I do know that in there, there are preferential things, there are special visas when a company wants somebody for a special skill, there's a lot of high skilled people and there are also people who come in by lotteries but the legal immigration population is in general a pretty high end population, the illegal immigration less so. Well what's occurred now is we've had a surge of illegal immigration so several million, nobody knows exactly how many, three, four, five million over the past couple of years maybe more but those people, nobody's got statistics very much on them yet so when you get statistics like Mr. Narosti has, he comes from a world where three quarters of those people were the high end legal kind. Now we're talking about a world where there are going to be tens and 20s of millions of people a year who would not have won the legal immigration thing and there's every reason to think that they would be preferentially a much lower income bunch and also come from all kinds of more troubled places. We don't know exactly but that is not an illegitimate concern and I don't really think you can extrapolate from the preexisting numbers so we are fortunate that the South Americans are mostly of a religion that's similar to ours, France is not so fortunate but I think that France does illustrate for us the risks of having cultural people very different from us let alone we have a left in this country and all over the world that hates America, that hates capitalism, that hates freedom and that is beating up on everybody in the world who is not a wealthy American that you are oppressed, that you are a victim and that Marxism and Socialism provide the root out of it for you and that is something that's not going away. So this is, it would be a gigantic leap of faith to suddenly be taking in a much, much larger immigrant population that could be a multiple of what we've been having, mostly lower income with a whole education system and a whole left ready to indoctrinate themselves that they're victims and oppressed and think that that's not going to have a major effect on our political and economic system here. So with that I think my time's about up so I will rest, thank you. Okay Jane, please open the final voting. Yes, no, or undecided, the US should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease. Yes, no, or undecided on the resolution and while you're deliberating, again, I want to invite you all to the after party, two blocks of town, follow me, follow Buddy Menton, the Galaxon roster knows where it is as well, some others, it's on Great Jones Street, 55 Great Jones Street second floor. We want to see you all to discuss this issue as well as many related issues. As well, I want to mention that the sole form is back from Porcupine Festival where we did a couple of debates and one of them has been posted on YouTube and the podcast and that was a debate I did with David Friedman, illustrious son of Milton Friedman on specific issues of libertarianism. I also appeared on the Tom Woods show to discuss that debate. If you go on our website, you'll find that debate in particular between me and David and go on the Tom Woods show, you'll find my discussion of that debate. We also had another debate at Porcupine Festival between Matt Kibbe and Jeremy Kaufman on particular issues of libertarianism as well and that will be posted within about a week. But also right here on this stage on August 21st, of course, both you guys were invited to attend, we will have Corey DeAngelis who has made a bit of a name for himself as Mr. School's Choice. I believe he was at Cato but then went on to bigger and better things and he will be, I think we have the makings of a debate. He went on to other things and he will be debating the issue of school choice against Stefan Kinsella and the specific resolution is one of great contention among libertarians. Corey will be defending the resolution today's school choice movement in the U.S. is worthy of support by libertarians. Stefan Kinsella will take the negative on that resolution. That's August 21st here at the Sheen Center and tickets are on sale for that debate as well. September 18th, we're gonna have, that's gonna be a Monday, we're gonna have a sort of a knockdown, drag a debate, drag down debate between two illustrious names, Yaren Brook versus Brian Kaplan. Yaren will defend the rather aggressively worded resolution. Anical capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity and that will be defended by Yaren Brook and of course all our debates are civil. I make sure of that. You guys were civil to each other and even though the wording is aggressive, it will be a civil debate. Brian Kaplan will take the negative. That's September 18th. I'm sure you guys wanna come to both of those events. Don't wanna miss it. October 18th, we will have, that'll be Wednesday, October 18th. We will have a debate between Mark Mills and Rosario Fortuno. Mark Mills will be defending the resolution between now and 2035. Electric vehicles in the consumer market will likely disappoint environmentalists by remaining a product bought mainly by the well-heeled minority. I'll read that again. Sometimes these have to be a bit worded, bit wordy because we wanna keep them careful and at our debates, by the way, both sides sign off on the wording of the resolution. Again, that's gonna be about electric vehicles in October between now and 2035. Electric vehicles in the consumer market will likely disappoint environmentalists by remaining a product bought mainly by the well-heeled minority. Well, I do hold in my hand the sole forum, Sootsy Roll, which will go to the winner, according to Oxford-style voting of this debate. Drumroll, please. The ups, yeah. Well, the yes vote rose from 45.7% to 58%. So it picked up a little over 12 points. That's the number to beat. The no vote went from 34.5 to 34.5. It remained flat and, therefore, the Tootsy Roll goes to the yes vote. Congratulations to you both. And please come to our after-party and meet and greet the debaters and greet our man who's gonna do lupures, who'll do book signing and sales. Uptown from here, two blocks.