 Does the current coronavirus pandemic make it necessary that the federal government tighten restrictions on immigration? That was the subject of an online SOHO Forum debate held on Wednesday, May 6, 2020. Mark Cracourian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, defended the claim that we need closed borders because of COVID-19 against George Mason University economist, Brian Kaplan. And here's Mark Cracourian versus Brian Kaplan in an online debate moderated by SOHO Forum Director Gene Epstein. Tonight's resolution reads, the current pandemic makes it all the more necessary for the federal government to tighten restrictions on immigration. Defending the resolution, Mark Cracourian, opposing the resolution, Brian Kaplan. When each of you has five minutes and one minute remaining in your allotted time, I'll be briefly interrupting to inform you. Jane, please close the initial vote. Now, Mark Cracourian, who goes first defending the affirmative, is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and author of The New Case Against Immigration. And I'll introduce Brian in due course. Take it away, Mark. The issue, it seems to me, in tightening immigration policy in the current pandemic is not a health-related issue. I mean, actually, most travel has already been shut down. It's a labor issue. In other words, it's the effects, the consequences, of our reaction to the pandemic that make it imperative to tighten up on immigration, at least temporarily. And then we can have a debate on the rest of it later. As in medicine, so in practical governance, the first principle has to be, first do no harm. Prudence, in other words, and prudence is called for in our reaction to the economic consequences of the current crisis. 30 million people have filed for unemployment since the Wuhan virus arrived here on our shores. And the numbers of new claims from last week will be reported tomorrow. And then on Friday, the Labor Department will report the monthly unemployment rate for April. We're going to see an extraordinarily high rate of unemployment, possibly in May and probably, possibly for April, possibly even in May, the highest rate any of us has ever seen in our lifetimes and may ever see again. And unlike the Great Depression, which where unemployment took several years, actually, to grow, what we've seen today is a dislocation of the labor market that happened in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, it's not going to recover in the blink of an eye. An economy is an organic thing. It's not a light switch you can turn on and off at will. And so it's going to take years to recover economically from the consequences of this virus, especially when you consider the changes in hospitality and retail and entertainment and air travel and a whole lot of other industries that are now going to essentially reboot but in a very different way. In other words, it's not that everyone who lost a job is just going to show up again in a month on Monday and then that's the end of it. This is going to take years to recover from. Nothing like this has ever happened in our history and possibly never in the history of any other country. So regardless of broader views on immigration, and Brian and I have debated that, I was delighted to come to the SOHO Forum and talk about that and I'd be happy to do it again. But regardless of our broader views, prudence demands that we take vigorous steps to tighten immigration in the current situation so as to ease the reintegration of those of our fellow citizens whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the response to this virus. And whether it was excessive or not, that's a different question. It's happened and the question is, what do we do with it now? And remember, these are disproportionately not the sort of people who are watching or participating in this debate. We're talking about people who are disproportionately less skilled, people who had fewer options even in the best of times. Finding their way back into the world of work is going to be hard enough. They don't need two million new foreign workers every year coming into compete against them. We have and we will have for some time a glut of labor in our economy. Let's not add to it. The legacy news media have reported that President Trump has essentially already done this in a presidential proclamation last month. It's a kind of executive order. I don't know why they call it that instead of an executive order. But in any case, don't believe everything you read as we all should have learned over the past several years. The proclamation did reiterate the principle underlying our immigration laws. And let me just quote from that, from the proclamation, in the administration of our nation's immigration system, we must be mindful of the impact of foreign workers in the United States labor market, particularly in an environment of high domestic unemployment and depressed demand for labor, unquote. So far so good. Unfortunately, other than that, this proclamation really didn't do much at all despite the president's tweet the day before touting it. What happened is the exceptions essentially consumed the rule so that according to our calculations, this 60 day immigration pause, so-called, applies to only about 5% of green card issuances. You know, those green cards are lawful permanent residents, of which total about one million a year and 0% of the nearly one million guest workers, supposedly temporary workers admitted every year. Now the president did hint that there might be a followup proclamation in 30 days from whenever he issued it. So in a couple of more weeks, limiting some guest worker programs, but the nature of that measure is undecided. It's still up in the air from what I'm hearing. And it's the subject of fierce wrangling inside the White House between the high immigration forces and the low immigration forces. And the reason for that is the reason I have little hope that the council of prudence will prevail in the White House is that again, contrary to the fairy tales, that the legacy media and the establishment organs like the Times and CNN would have you believe the president is not an immigration restrictionist and neither are most of his advisors or his staff, not just a son-in-law, but it's throughout the whole administration. That said, what steps would prudence suggest? I'll touch on a few of them. I'm gonna go into all the alphabet soup, but a few examples that specifically relate to the importation of foreign workers. They involve either or both of two ways of approaching it. One is limiting the number of people coming in who aren't here already, but also not renewing or reviewing the status of supposedly temporary workers who were already here. And let me just give a few quick examples. There's something called the H2B visa. This is not the H1B you would have heard of. I'll talk about that briefly, but the H2B, it's for less skilled seasonal work that's not in agriculture. Most of these people are landscapers. They work in forestry, amusement parks. There's no reason for having this visa at all, but I'll have that debate later. For now, this has to be put on ice. Tens of thousands of additional people from abroad, perfectly normal people. They're workers, they're not evil, they're not rapists. They're just regular folks. But when we have 30 plus million people looking for work, the idea that these jobs that Americans do do, because in every one of the major categories of people that are admitted under this H2B visa, half or more, in some cases, 90% of the people who do them are American, native born Americans. So this H2B visa should be put on ice. The another example is the H1B visa. This is one that's more familiar. It's usually used by tech companies, although there are some others, some physical therapists and other people sometimes use it. It's mainly used by tech companies to import routine, people of relatively modest skills to do routine computer work. It's essentially, and I'm not really, this isn't really an exaggeration. It's essentially a white collar for a CERO program, a farm worker type, a guest worker program, but for white collar workers working in cubicles. And it's used explicitly and lawfully to replace American workers. Disney, you may recall, it was a front page story in the Times about it a few years back, Disney used this visa to replace American workers. They fired all their American IT staff, replaced them with these H1B workers, and then forced the Americans to train their replacements. And frankly, didn't really know what they were doing. This is, and this is not the only example. Hundreds of companies have used it this way. It's again, a program that I think should be gotten rid of altogether, and I'm willing to have that debate in a year or two about whether we should have this at all. But for now, putting it on ice seems to me imperative because the economic crisis that we're facing isn't just people who are working at Starbucks who have been impacted, but white collar workers as well. Couple more categories. There's something called the optional practical training program. Sounds kind of wonky and narrow, and yet it's one of the largest guest worker programs in the country. It's based on a legal fiction where foreign students, not immigrants who happen to go to college, but students who are foreigners who are given a visa to come to study here. After they graduate, are continue to masquerade as students but are given work permits. And for certain categories of jobs, they can stay in this false status basically of pretending to be students but actually being workers for three years. They pay no payroll tax, no social security tax, no Medicare tax, no unemployment tax. Their employers don't pay those taxes either and so they are preferred. Locke, you have for five minutes. Go ahead. Thank you, Gene. So again, this is a program that I think should just be abolished altogether, but if we're looking at short term, temporary prudent measures, it makes perfect sense to not enroll people in this program once they graduate because each year tens of thousands of foreign students graduate and sign up for this OPT program as kind of a way to bridge them to eventually getting a green card. Halting signups for this program. Again, a common sense, I would submit imperative short term measure that we can revisit next year or the year after. And just the last specific point I wanted to bring up is something I hadn't really thought of until I spoke to one of my analysts, used to be a visa officer and it makes sense. A lot of the categories either for green cards, in other words, permanent residents, or for these supposedly temporary work visas require some kind of certification that the employer can't find workers for this spot, can't find Americans for the spot and therefore they get the green light to bring in a foreign worker. Well, all of those labor certifications were done in a completely different economy. The world changed about a month and a half ago. And so again, as a measure of prudence, every one of those labor certifications they're called needs to be canceled and resubmitted. Maybe some people still will be able to make a case that Americans, they can't find Americans for certain jobs, I don't know, probably not, but in any case, that should have to be redone because circumstances have fundamentally changed from when those applications several months ago at least were submitted. So those are some of the specific examples. There's a lot more tightening up in immigration, I think that needs to happen, but you get the idea. There'll be a time, like I said, for a more fundamental debate over the long-term direction of immigration policy, but that's something that's gonna have to be done through Congress. Ultimately, the legislature is supposed to be legislating, not just on immigration, but on everything else. It's not clear that Congress is capable of doing that right now, but that's where the more elementary, long-term changes in immigration policy have to happen. But the kinds of things I've pointed out here are administrative measures. The president has the authority to do the kind of temporary, prudential restrictions on immigration that I think are hard to argue, in my opinion, that they're not needed. The whole reason for the lockdowns that we've been going through over the past couple of months was for us as Americans to do what was needed to protect our fellow citizens, especially the most vulnerable, from the ravages of this virus. Because most of us on this event, I mean, I don't wanna ask anybody's age, but for the most part, probably, there wasn't that much chance we were gonna get sick. The reason we did all of this was to protect the elderly, protect the immunocompromised, et cetera, to protect our vulnerable fellow citizens. As the economy reboots, prudent steps related to immigration have to follow the same tack. In other words- One minute, Brock, one minute. In other words, we need to do what we can to ensure that our fellow countrymen, especially the most vulnerable, are the first people in line to be hired or rehired as we reboot the economy. Thank you. Okay, you left about a half a minute there, Mark, but we don't have any purchase of a transfer of time to the other side. So you lost that half minute. Brian Kaplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the graphic book, Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration. Take it away, Brian. So I've debated immigration many times before, but today there is a new and gripping argument against immigration. Almost anyone can see the force of it. Coronavirus originated in China, migration brought it here, and suddenly life is terrible. Dogmatic libertarians can keep droning on about liberty, but everyone else now plainly sees that strict immigration controls could have stopped this plague, and only strict immigration controls can stop the plagues of the future. Now, this argument sounds so right. What could possibly be wrong with it? I'll start by backing up. Before the coronavirus, did we have anything close to open borders? Of course not. Mark himself has considered this point in prior debates. Under open borders, the US could easily have tens of millions of immigrants annually. A conservative estimate says that our borders are normally 95% closed. I say it's more like 98% closed. So what? Even with our borders 98% closed, the virus still had no trouble spreading here on a massive scale. Once a few sick people enter your country, it spreads far and wide. The same is true all over the world. The United Kingdom is an island nation, but it is the second highest body count on earth. So it seems like we couldn't have solved our problem with moderate further restrictions. We need to virtually end immigration altogether. But would that be enough? No way. You would also have to virtually end international tourism too. Note, that doesn't just mean keeping foreign tourists out. It also means keeping domestic tourists in. Or at least you have to tell your own citizens if you leave, you can't come back. The upshot, even cutting immigration down to Japanese levels would do very little documentation. Instead it looks like you would have to approach North Korea's policy of no one gets in or out alive. Now, at this point you might be wondering, well, couldn't we allow tourism but simply require restrict supervised two week quarantine for all international travelers? Indeed you could. Sadly, this is so burdensome, it would practically eliminate international tourism. People would take one or two international trips per lifetime perhaps, spending two weeks in quarantine on arrival and return. But that's about it. The benefit of tourism is too modest to offset weeks of confinement. Right now we reached the trillion dollar question. What would be enough to offset weeks of confinement? The indubitable answer is the opportunity to permanently immigrate. If you're already willing to leave your country of birth to build a new life for yourself, two weeks of quarantine only modestly increases the cost. Even seasonal migrants would endure quarantine. They might lose a month of time on a round trip, but US agricultural wages are five times as high as they are in Mexico. The punchline then is that if you are mortally afraid of contagion, what you need to stop is not immigration, but tourism, which is by the way the opposite of what is likely to happen because we have long been ruled by enumerate hysterical demagogues. An immigration policy of open borders combined with a two week quarantine would in my view be an immense improvement over the status quo. I say that would move the border from 98% closed to 95% open. If contagion were your sole objection immigration, this is the policy you should favor. I know of course the people of a long list of other objections to immigration. Indeed, as far as I recall, this is my first debate with Mark Reeve at mentioned contagion. Instead, Mark primarily relies on cultural objections in the past he has while downplaying immigration's economic benefits, which makes me wonder, has the present crisis shed any new light on our earlier disagreements? The answer, yes, on both counts. Culturally, the crisis has shown that Americans have a lot to learn from other cultures. Our way of handling contagion has been clumsy at best. Maybe we should have learned from Singapore and South Korea. Maybe we should have learned from Iceland and Sweden. What Americans definitely shouldn't do is look in the mirror and admire our wonderfully functional culture. We're not the worst on earth, but now is a fine time to embrace a curious cosmopolitan perspective. The economic lesson of the crisis is truly clear cut. Since mid-March, the greatest economy in human history has been in shutdown or lockdown. Our standard of living has crashed and unemployment is near the level of the Great Depression. Why? Because we have temporarily annulled the right of free migration within the United States. Let me repeat that. Our standard of living has crashed because we have temporarily annulled the right of free migration within the United States. Americans are no longer able to work and shop where they like. The result is not a minor inconvenience, but disaster. We are suddenly stuck in a post-apocalyptic movie. I detest hyperbole, but this, my friends, is no hyperbole. What would we think, however, if this economic shutdown had existed for all of living memory? We'd probably be content with the only life we've ever known. We only know what we're missing because until very recently, we had it. And we all look forward to a future where we can restore free migration within the United States and regain its immense benefits. What does this have to do with immigration? To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, more than you can possibly imagine. In normal times, current immigration law keeps the whole world on permanent lockdown. While people can usually move freely within the countries of their birth, governments strictly regulate international mobility. This regulation traps billions of people in unproductive backwaters of the global economy. Current policies don't just needlessly impoverish all the would-be immigrants eager to build better lives for themselves. They also impoverish their billions of customers. The secret of mass consumption is mass production. This is the most fundamental lesson of economics. When you shut down the restaurant industry, as we have, you don't just hurt waiters and chefs. You hurt diners. When you shut down immigration, you don't just hurt immigrants. You hurt all the natives who would have purchased the fruits of immigrant labor. Is the harm of ongoing immigration restriction really comparable to the harm of the coronavirus lockdown? Definitely. The highest estimates of the fall in US GDP are about 30%. And that combines the effects of the virus and the policy response. Estimates of the total damage of immigration restrictions in contrast are typically around 50% of global GDP. In both cases, draconian restrictions on freedom of movement strangle production. Even the most ardent fans of the coronavirus lockdown do not deny how much the policies have depressed our standard of living and our quality of life. Even the fans of immigration in contrast rarely realize how much the immigration lockdown deprives humanity year after year. How come almost everyone sees the former cost, the coronavirus lockdown cost? Yet almost no one sees the latter, the immigration lockdown cost. Because it's much easier for human beings to miss wonderful things they used to have than it is to miss wonderful things they've yet to experience. Can we really compare the coronavirus lockdown to the ongoing immigration lockdown? We can and we should. The coronavirus lockdown is only temporary and delivers a semi-plausible benefit. I'm against this lockdown, but maybe I'm wrong. The ongoing immigration lockdown in contrast has gone on for about a century and delivers benefits so dubious even their fans struggle to articulate or quantify them. And when we sympathetically examine economic, fiscal, cultural and political objections immigration, they turn out to be either flat wrong or greatly overstated. If you want details, try my new open borders, the science and ethics of immigration. But here's the quick version. One, economic objections immigration are totally wrongheaded. To repeat, the secret of mass consumption is mass production and immigration restrictions strangle production by trapping human talent in low productivity countries. A Mexican farmer grows far more food here than he can grow back in Mexico. Not convinced, how productive would you be in Mexico? Now, Mark has this argument that unemployment is really high and therefore we need to keep immigrants out. This is a standard response during almost every economic downturn. It was the standard response during the Great Depression. You may have heard about farmers being paid to destroy food during the Great Depression, the slaughter pigs that are fed to no one, to tear up, to bear at fields so the food cannot be delivered to consumers. And you may have wondered, what was the point of all this? The point of all this is to save jobs during a time when production has collapsed. So this is the wrong way of looking at any economy. You've got to focus on production. What they were doing there was just reducing the production of mankind during a time when people are going hungry, when the situation's desperate. When things are doing very badly, you still need to remember the fundamental principle. Namely, get production back up. I'm gonna talk about this more when my rebuttal. But Mark's reaction is indeed the normal one during any economic downturn is to say, well, right now we've got a lot of unemployment. Let's try to figure out a way to keep production down. Five minutes. And that is not the right way of looking at it. That is a way which has a lot of superficial appeal. When you really step back, you see this is madness. This is the act of short-sighted people who forget the whole point of an economy is to create wealth. Now, two, fiscal objections to immigration are flimsy. Despite the existence of the welfare state, which libertarians always bring up in these situations, boring apolitical number crunchers conclude that even low-skilled immigrants are a net fiscal positive for natives as long as they arrive when they're young. You don't have to take my word for it. If you like looking at numbers, try chapter seven of the 2017 report from the National Academy of Sciences. If you're reading this, you can get the link and go right to it. Three, cultural objections to immigration are weak. Insofar as we can even measure them, almost all second-generation immigrants speak fluent English. Immigrants' crime rates are lower than natives. And advanced statistical work on the effects of nation's ancestry and average IQ still imply massive gains of immigration. In a previous debate, I asked Marker Korean why he chooses to live in the capital area, one of the highest immigration regions of America. I kind of expected Mark to say something like, it's hell, but I'm sacrificing my well-being so the rest of America doesn't have to endure the same fate. But if I recall correctly, Mark just shrugged, it's complicated. I suppose it is complicated, but I can't understand why you would lead a political crusade against anything complicated when the world is still packed with stuff that's blatantly bad. Four, political objections finally look minor at best. In the US, the foreign born are, unfortunately, more socially conservative and economically liberal. But the immigrants is modest, even immigrants eligible to vote have low turnout and their descendants assimilate to mainstream American culture. It's not a big deal. And even if you disagree, why not welcome immigrants to live and work but not vote? I know this is a lot of information in short space. I'm happy to expand on any of these topics in the Q&A, but I predictably stand by the conclusion of my book. Immigration restriction is a solution in search of a problem. People don't really know why they want to restrict immigration. They just know that they do, which of course is why Mark is arguing for immigration restriction now that unemployment is high. They'll know he was not doing so back or not saying the opposite was low. He is a broken record. Now, even if my book is thoroughly wrong though, the current crisis provides no bonus argument in favor of immigration restriction. Tourism, including American travel abroad, may be a problem. But we can safely admit all willing immigrants with a suitable quarantine. And such a quarantine would do little to discourage immigration because the gains are astronomical. Last point, if you fear a world where American citizens in the name of disease prevention lose their basic freedom to travel abroad, I share your fear. But when you cherish this freedom, please remember the vast majority of the world's population has lacked this freedom for about a century. Even the world's poorest people can scrape together the money to get here. What most will never get is the government paperwork that allows them to live and work in peace. Our shutdown will end in the foreseeable future. The world shutdown will endure until we see it for the needless cruelty it is. Thank you. Okay, well, you gave up a minute and 20 seconds. So there you go, you did mark one better, Brian. Mark, you have five minutes for a rebuttal. Take it away, Mark. Well, let me start by pointing out, to some degree, we're kind of talking past each other, at least initially, because I'm not really making an argument with regard to the pandemic. I think Brian is right. That, I mean, I actually would go further than Brian. I don't think there's any practical way to genuinely hermetically seal against viruses like this. This is gonna happen again and again and again. Hopefully we'll be better prepared this time. It was different in the old days. It reminded me, his comments reminded me of the speech from Richard II, the one this England, where he says, this fortress built by nature for herself against infection in the hand of war. Because England was an island and it did help, although even then England suffered from the bubonic plague quite significantly, as did Europe. But I think the basic takeaway here from Brian's comments is that even in today's conditions, we should have unlimited immigration. In other words, the 14-day quarantine thing is something he's willing to conceive, that's nice, but it's still unlimited immigration in a conditions where we have great depression levels of unemployment. If you don't like Trump, or if you do like Trump, you're gonna get a lot more of that. You're gonna wish you had Trump. The New York Times will have strange new respect for Trump, given whatever the political consequences would be after we instituted a situation of open borders under today's conditions. So if for nothing else, political prudence suggests responding to the concerns of the public. But my point is that the immediate emergency we face does in fact call for limits on the number of new people allowed to come and move and work in the United States. You know, it's not entirely caused by the state. Brian's point that the lockdown is something the government did, the government partly did it, but the government was a lagging indicator. People already stopped going to restaurants and movies and what have you because of fear of the virus. That's why regardless of what governors do as far as allowing businesses to reopen, people aren't, this is not gonna just bounce right back. This happened for organic reasons, not simply the decree of the state. But Brian's basic point is that everyone in the world should have the right to move here. I mean, this is what it boils down to. This is always what the debate between libertarians and immigration restrictionists comes down to is two different points of view. Brian believes that everyone in the world has the right to move here with certain conditions we might impose in a very limited way. My perspective and frankly, honestly, anyone you ask on the street is that no one has the right to move here except under conditions that we set. Now, Brian's scenario could lead to low immigration. You could say everyone has the right to move here but you have so many conditions and exceptions that the numbers aren't that high. Doesn't work that way, of course. The reverse is also true. You could say that no one has the right to move here as a privilege that the self-governing American people through their elected representatives confer on you as a non-member. But still have extremely high levels of immigration like we did until this virus and like a lot of people in both parties actually want to the gang of eight bill, you may recall, doubled would have doubled immigration and doubled guest worker admissions. But the principle, the basic principle is everyone gets to come, in other words, the American people have no right. One minute, Mark, one minute, guys. Right, that's the distinction. Do the American, that's the question. Do the American people have the right to decide how many people move into their country or not? That's, I mean, to get right down to it, that's what we're talking about. Brian says, no, that the American people through their democratic processes, through their elected representatives are not allowed to decide how many people get to move here. And my contention is I embrace democratic self-governance. The American people have a right of self-determination and through their democratic process have the right to decide who gets to move here, how many people and what the conditions are. Now, we can debate what those numbers should be, what the conditions should be, who should be picked, who shouldn't, how we enforce the law. But the bedrock principle from my perspective has to be the American people have a right to self-determination and Brian denies that right. Thank you, Mark. Brian, five minute rebuttal. Thank you very much. So, I am very, sorry, how come I'm not appearing on the screen? Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. Okay, so I am extremely gratified that Mark is not making the argument that almost every man on the street would make, which is that the reason why we have this horrible problem is that we were too easy on letting a bunch of foreigners in and they came and spread a bunch of disease and got us sick. And the thing to do is to first of all recognize the problem was that we left them in the first place and second of all keep them out of the future. Now, Mark, I'm delighted actually that Mark is not making this argument. My whole picture was that Mark would be saying this thing, which is very popular right now. So, I congratulate Mark for not agreeing with the man on the street this time. Because the man on the street, you know, his view makes very little sense. Of course, it's the one that politicians are pandering to. So, I mean, I'm glad that Mark is willing to say that it does not make sense to say we're gonna keep out immigration, be immigrants because they will spread disease. And if we just had a more restrictive policy, we'd be having less disease. So anyway, that's great that Mark doesn't say that because that argument is wrong and doesn't make a lot of sense. I hope that Mark makes an effort to tell his supporters that this argument is incorrect because they're not gonna believe it if I say it. But if Mark tells them, I think they will actually believe him. So, you know, like often I will say that if there is an argument that supports my view that I think is wrong, I go and I tell my friends, stop making the argument. The argument's wrong. We have to fix the argument. Truth first. And I would be very happy if Mark would go and do the same and spread the word among opponents of immigration that fear of contagion is not a good reason to stop it. Now to focus on Mark's argument, let's just go back. As I said, during every major recession or depression, there are voices like Mark saying, we've got to figure out a way to protect jobs, right? And the logic of this does go down to the Great Depression route of trying to restrict production in the hopes that if say you go and destroy a whole lot of farm production, this will make more jobs for farmers. In the hopes that if you go and say we're going to keep out foreign imports, then this is going to create jobs for people in import competing industries, and so on. These policies have a very bad track record, right? And again, it's not so surprising why because Mark's problem is that he's not focusing at all on production. When Mark says the fundamental disagreement between restrictionists and advocates of open borders is this concern for the nation. I say it actually comes down to the basic economics. When you look at an economy, do you look at it as a redistributive system of giving people a job? Or do you look at it as a system of production for enriching the world? Libertarian view is it's there to enrich the world. And once you take that perspective, taking a look at a recession saying, what can we do in order to go and protect people's jobs? It's just the wrong way of looking at it. It's like, what can we do to get production back up? Right now, Mark was going over a lot of different arcane immigration categories. In the case of agriculture, it really is a problem right now that a lot of American crops are not likely to be picked because apparently even according to Mark, for no good reason we are keeping out seasonal workers. Now, in a long ago debate, Mark disagreed with and I seconded his disagreement with the argument of the jobs that Americans will not do. Mark very correctly said, we'll make the wages high enough and Americans will do them. I said, but there is a correct and improved version of this argument. And this is jobs that won't be done at all if only Americans can do them. There are a lot of crops that simply will not be picked if you have to pay Americans wages. And so that is food that will not be ending up in our grocery stores at a time whereas you may have noticed, a lot of shelves are empty with a lot of products that ordinarily would have been there. Let's see, and of course the same goes for many of the industries that Mark is picking on. So Disney, right? Disney is really suffering. They're down about a billion dollars, right? At this point to be kicking them by going and saying, we've got to go and disrupt the whole business model to make them create jobs for Americans. One minute, one minute. At a time when there is minimal tourism anyway. Again, this is what I was thinking. Even Mark should be worried about the possibility that you wind up putting one last kick into the head of business. And so rather than creating jobs by saying they have to hire Americans who just wind up sending the businesses into the garbage can. But again, there are a lot of retailers as well that seem like they may just very well close rather than ever open. Let's see. So, let's see, let's see. So, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Oh yes, let me just make one last point. I noticed that Mark did not say anything about letting in more healthcare workers. This is really important to do right now. It would be really great to let in more healthcare workers into the United States. But by this logic of, well, we got to go and create jobs for people and protect them rather than thinking of the point of a job as to provide a useful service. We probably are going to keep them out. A shame. Okay, well, that concludes the first part of the evening and we now go to the Q and A. We've had a number of interesting questions coming in. Let me just exercise moderator's prerogative to remind Brian and certainly remind Nick and then inform Mark that there are a lot of libertarians who disagree with Brian and in fact, there's a fair amount of divisive opinion among libertarians with respect to the immigration question. But that aside, which is not so important, I first want to ask Brian and ask Mark, do you want to put a question to Mark, Brian? Mark, do you want to put a question to Brian? Or do you want to wait for the audience's questions? Either one of you. Mark, Brian, what do you want to do? Let's have the audience give their questions. I mean, that's more important. Brian and I have done this a lot. We know each other's answers and questions. Well, of course, of course you want it. There are people, you guys are just not that popular, Mark. There are a lot of people out there who haven't heard this act that you guys have taken on the road. So you could ask questions. Brian, do you want to ask Mark a question? What do you want to leave? Absolutely, because I don't know what Mark is going to say about this. Okay, Mark, so should we reopen the borders to tourists right now, today? Gradually, slowly, I mean, no, not right away, but you see, and no, this is the point you were making about the, you know, you were glad I wasn't making the argument that immigrants are diseased or whatever it is. I'm not actually sure who's made that argument that, I mean, clearly flights continued from Wuhan to the West Coast, even after the chai comms knew the virus could be transferred from one person to the next. So that was actually outrageous and should not have been allowed. So controls on travel, controls on tourism, I think are appropriate as a prudential, short-term measure. It doesn't shape immigration. What difference does it make now? And what's that? What difference does it make now? I don't know. I mean, we have times of it right here, so why not reopen and let tourists back in? I mean, I'm okay for reopening, but I'm for reopening in general in a graduated, prudent, cautious way. The airlines, first of all, there has to be somebody who wants to come. The airlines have to take various security steps, that sort of thing. But I'm okay with that. Again, if it's done in a deliberate, prudent, planned out fashion, not just, okay, everything's back to normal, which is not the way we're opening any other businesses either. Okay, Mark, you want to wave your right to ask Brian a question and, but of course you can exercise your prerogative at any time during the Q and A. We're getting a couple of interesting questions for Mark coming in, and I've heard this point made before that you answered the question about tourists, and then there's another question about a related challenge about new entrants into the population. You said, Mark, that we should take it to a vote as to whether we get new entrants into the population, that the entire population should vote on whether some employer in Massachusetts or in New York City accepts an immigrant. It should be the right of the people. That's where the question is summarized. That seems to be your position, correct? Yeah, well, I mean. The right of the people to vote on this. And so whatever, so if you want to hire an immigrant, then to assist you on your research, maybe somebody from Armenia, then it should be the right of the population to referendum to vote on whether you can hire that person. No, that's not what I mean. No, the referendum is a terrible way to run government. Okay, then it should be the president. My point is that the elected representatives of the people should set up the rules within which all of these things operate. If they want to restrict it to 50,000 a year, so be it. Whatever it is, it's up to our elected representatives. It's up to us, but through our elected representatives. I'm a Republican, not a fan of direct democracy. Okay, fair enough. And that's a murderous review and the challenge or more of a sad review point. And then the question is, aren't there new entrants on a continuing basis from tourism? Should there be a limit on that? And then the other challenge that I know is classic that this president probably got from Walter Block. How about those new entrants that are newborns? Brian has got four kids. All of those people streaming in and a lot of foreigners as you know, foreign born have a lot of kids. Should there be the Congress and the president dictating how many new entrants can come from newborns by the same logic? That's the challenge. No, definitely not. Which is, frankly, I mean, I'm not, I see myself more as a conservative than a libertarian, but I am sympathetic to libertarianism in one country to borrow from, to adapt somebody else's phrase on this. In other words, within the United States, it's not the government's building business. Tell anybody how many kids they have. I have three kids. He's got four. Please have more. But it's the government's business to tell you, in effect, how many immigrants you can hire for your non-profit. Those are completely different things. Okay. It's a different category. It's a category error to put those together. All right. Do you want to comment on that, Brian? Or should I get to this? Do you want to comment? Yeah, I mean, of course it's not really a category error. It's just that Mark considers the right to have as many kids as you want to something that should be above democracy, whereas the right to move is to something that should be up to democracy. As to why exactly there's that difference, I don't know. I mean, when Mark goes and presents his position, it makes it sound like I'm a terrible leadist who's depriving the people of their choice. And he is a good guy who is letting the people decide what to do, right? But when it comes to how many kids you have, then suddenly it's not up to, it should not be up to the people. It should be up to the individual. I say it should be up to the individual in both cases. Of course, and the last person would ever make Mark hire an immigrant. And the last person that would ever make him is a socialized with immigrants. And as I said, I wouldn't make him live in a city that has a lot of immigrants, although he has chosen to live at least near it. I can't remember Mark's address, whether it's DC, no. Don't die to me, Brian. Yeah, I wouldn't dream of it, my apologies. I mean, let me just, I mean, this isn't about immigrants as people. This is always the mistake that, and there are in fact some restrictions that just don't like foreigners. There's no question about that. But this issue is not about immigrants as people, it's about immigration policy. Now I'm not gonna go and say, look, some of my best friends are immigrants, although honestly, I spoke Armenian before I spoke English. The church where I'm actually an essential employee and have been on the altar every week during this lockdown, every other person on that altar is an immigrant. So, this idea that somehow being for a more limited federal immigration program, because it's what it is, it's a government program like farm subsidies or SBA loans, and so it can be bigger or can it be smaller. Being in favor of a smaller federal government immigration program has nothing to do with the moral worth or the individual personality or qualities of immigrants. Immigrants are people just like anybody else. Some are good, some are bad, some are a little bit of each, just like all the rest of us. It's about government policy and what we as a people, citizens of a nation who have an obligation to each other, which trumps the obligation we have to foreigners, what we decide to do collectively about admitting new people into our club. And it's our right to do that, and then we can debate about how best to do that, but the first principle has to be that we get to decide as a people who moves here and who doesn't. A question for Brian. Thank you, Mike. A question for Brian. Could you put on your crystal ball and predict what is likely to happen if indeed open borders were declared tomorrow? There was, of course, questions coming in about concern that at a 20% plus unemployment rate and the likelihood that the unemployment rate is gonna be slow to come down, that there could be a lot of pain at this point for domestically-based workers if open borders were imposed right now. So what in your view would be likely to happen if open borders were declared tomorrow? So we actually have pretty good data about this from the open borders period, although it's true even today, namely that when economic conditions are good, more people wanna immigrate, when economic conditions are bad, fewer people wanna immigrate, and when economic conditions are terrible, people do tend to stay home. You can actually see this in the European Union where they got open borders within the union, and you'll notice that workers move very heavily to the countries with low unemployment rates and very rarely move to the countries with high unemployment rates. So I'd say that to a large extent, that problem does tend to take care of itself. Although, here's the thing, if people were worried that the open borders wouldn't last and it was just a brief window, then I think there are a lot of people who would come no matter how desperate conditions are just to get in before they get closed again. So it really just depend upon the exact hypothetical. But again, when people are worrying about the suffering of American workers, remember the flip side of this is the suffering of American consumers, right? So if you sit around saying, okay, how can we go and protect jobs for workers? You are simultaneously saying, let's go and screw over consumers and not worry about production, right? You can't have it both ways. If you're going and trying to keep workers out of the labor market, you are also there by keeping goods out of stores, right? Now, people like to forget this, but again, the secret of mass consumption is mass production. If you cut down on production by reducing employment, you are cutting down on the standard living, right? This is standard short-sighted, impulsive thing to do during difficult times, but we must resist this impulse. Even during hard times, we need to focus on getting production back up. And actually, since this is very much a supply-driven recession rather than end-driven one, that case is even clearer. We've got to get production back up. We've got to get goods back in stores and that means workers, right? And notice in particular, there are a lot of Americans who are too scared to work. There are a lot of foreigners that would be happy to assume the risk. So keep that in mind as well. Right now, like in New York City, at least a few weeks ago, the U.S. was paying $10,000 a week for nurses from other parts of the country to go there. If we could have had open borders for medical workers, we could have gotten a lot of other medical workers in there and had much greater availability, but of course, that was not done. Yes, I guess if I had to slip in one more last question, Mark, how about, hey, Mark, can we have temporary visas for health workers right now? Please? How about that? Okay, Brian, as a matter of fact, somebody read your mind and that question came in from our audience, but please hold on that question because in terms of protocol, I want Mark to comment on the answer you just gave to that prior question. Go ahead. Thank you, Gene, because this issue of what would happen if we opened the borders, let's even take it apart from the current emergency circumstances because of the pandemic, Brian touted the estimate that global GDP would increase by half again, or whatever it is, trillions of dollars of increased production. It's ludicrous on its face. And the reason is the assumptions behind that estimate have to be examined. This is what people who aren't familiar with this sort of thing have learned about all of this modeling COVID nonsense that if you put in garbage assumptions, you get in garbage results. And this trillions of dollars of increased output is based on the assumption that virtually every human being from the third world moves to the developed world. Five billion people at least would move to the United States, Europe and Japan. That would be roughly, if you think about it, maybe two billion people from the third world would move to the United States. The institutions that create the greater productivity that we enjoy would not survive under those circumstances. It is an absurd situation, or it's an absurd assumption to say that open borders would result in massively increased output. And look, we're not just BSing in our sophomore college dorm rooms. We're talking about actual policy. And actual policy, actual governance, has to consider what would actually happen. Open borders would lead to political revolution. And so if you want more immigration, just as a hint, I mean, just as a tip, you want an incremental approach, which is what basically the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party, the corporate elements of it, are pushing for. They're not coming out and saying they're for open borders. That's true. They would keep an arms distance from Brian. But they are essentially the Mensheviks to Brian's Bolsheviks. And I don't mean this in a derogatory, sort of derogatory, how can you avoid it? My point is they're incrementalists. They want to achieve the same thing Brian does, but they want to boil the frog slowly, so it doesn't jump out. My point is the frog is gonna wanna jump out if you turn the heat up. Yeah, can I comment on that? Yes, yeah, because Mark actually brought up a new issue having to do with the 50% rise in GDP, I want to have another round on that. Would you respond to the challenge about the estimates of the GDP effect and whatever else you want to say in terms of what Mark just said? Go ahead, Brian, yeah, sure. First of all, I really hope that Mark is right, that the whole Democratic Party and the corporate wing of the Republican Party is secretly with me or they are with me in spirit or somehow they're trying to pave the way for what I'm talking about. I've actually talked to a very large number of American Democrats and corporate Republicans and they very rarely see eye to eye with me. They almost all of them totally disagree. So this is really a strange conspiracy theory that Mark is somehow fond of. Not a conspiracy. Guys, all right, that they secretly do. It's a hive, it's a beehive. That they say, all right. Now, in terms of the model, so I only had about 30 seconds to talk about it, the models that Mark is talking about, when he says that you need to look into them, the people that developed them have looked into them, I've looked into them, I just didn't have time to go into the details. Now, when I talk about, say, doubling the production of the world with open borders, I don't mean that it would happen tomorrow. Right? I mean that it is a reasonable prediction of the long run effects. But think about it this way. If we had kept open borders, if we had not went on a shutdown immigration starting in 1921 and then 24, this is the world that we would be in now. A much better world with much higher production. Yeah, so if you let in a billion people overnight, I agree that is going to lead to very drastic consequences. You probably couldn't even drive in the streets. There'd be so many people there. Fortunately, that's not actually what happens when you go and open borders because the normal thing that happens, you can go and read Paul Collier's excellent book, The Aspirant, so that's just the aspirants. But anyway, so I'm letting you know these books where he talks about diaspora dynamics. So Paul Collier, who is also very skeptical of immigration, he says the way that immigration usually works it starts off low and then it snowballs. And that's right. And that's why open borders is a fine policy because when you first open a border, you get a modest amount of immigration that then grows and grows and grows, which means that you can absorb it at a reasonable level and then you can grow a lot of enormous amount over time, but it does take a long time. And we can just get an idea of like, is it really scary to bring two billion more people here over a century? It's not scary at all. The US now is about a hundred times the population that it had in when it first was formed. Basically each century, we're getting about an increase of about 10 fold. Some of that from normal population growth, but a lot of it from immigration. If you increase the population of the US a hundred fold in 1789, that would be a disaster. Do it over two centuries and it's totally fine. And people barely even realized that there was a difference except that there's a lot more people enjoying a much better life. I mean, if I could just add one asterisk, I don't want people to be able to get their questions in. But we've never had open borders because in the past, putting aside the legal restrictions that existed even in the 17th century against poppers immigrating, for instance, that sort of thing. So there have been immigration restrictions literally from the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Column. But put that aside, with primitive transportation and communications technology, the oceans were our immigration limits. That is how we limited immigration. And the reason immigration ended up having to be legislatively restricted, statutorily restricted starting in the 20s was precisely because communications and transportation had become so cheap that the oceans no longer serve the purpose. As Shakespeare wrote, served in the office of a wall or as a moat protected. Once the world shrinks, the only way you limit, the way you have to move to limiting immigration is through statute rather than relying on geography. Mark, Mark, to follow up on the point you just made, if Brian got his way and open borders were declared tomorrow, then how many people do you think would migrate to the US over the next 12 months? I can't come up with a number, but it depends on several things. Let me say one, does every other developed country have open borders? Well, let's say it's just the US. If it's just us, you could easily end up with 10 million people moving here in a period of a year. I mean, that would not be, in my opinion, that would be a low estimate, but I don't know. I mean, I haven't gamed it out, but yeah, it could easily be 10 million people. Not now with the virus situation and the economy, the way it is, but start like January 1st of 2021. Yes. If you completely open the borders, you would have, I think you'd get at least 10 million people. Gallup is ass people and 168 million people around the world have told Gallup that they want to move here. That's less than 3% of the US population right now. So it would be not a huge increase. But anyway, any further mention you want to make of this point, Brian, or do you want to go on? Yeah, let's go to questions. Okay, sure. Another question for Mark, which seems to pick up on what Brian had called his keyhole solutions. Mark, a couple of things that are related. Brian asked about healthcare workers. He also raised the question as another question or has about agricultural workers letting them in. And then the keyhole solution that somebody proposed was that there might be some kind of tax imposed on employers who want to bring in immigrants. And then that money would be allocated to augment the unemployment insurance payments that are being made to unemployed people, which as you know, now being subsidized at 600 a week. So that actually unemployed people in many cases are getting over $900 a weekend in compensation, which is actually giving them a disincentive to work. But again, healthcare, agriculture, and then potentially imposing some tax on employers who bring in immigrants in order to soften the blow to domestic workers. Would any of those things matter to you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the farming issues, I'm glad Brian brought that up too earlier. And that's an important one because I actually, in probably from somebody on my side, and actually this is something I actually do differ to some degree with a lot of people on my side, I'm actually okay with the administration's facilitating the entry of what they call H2A farm workers. These are people on farm worker visas. Not because I think that's a good idea, but because, in other words in general, but because the farmers do in fact have the stuff in the ground already and the adjustments that will be necessary to wean them off the drug of foreign labor take time. So I'm actually okay with the foreign farm workers being admitted now. What I'm most concerned with sort of in the medium term is that it represents, it underlines a vulnerability that we have. Just as the reliance on Chinese-made pharmaceuticals and the Chinese government's use of them, use of sort of withholding them using it as a kind of weapon or an attempt at coercion against us is a vulnerability, our reliance for our food supply, at least for a small part of our food supply, the vegetables and fruits, not all the rest of it. Most of our calories come from crops harvested by machine, but the produce department comes from stuff harvested not a largely by hand, but significant element of labor is involved. That is a vulnerability, a very serious vulnerability to food security. And the issue is not that immigrant farm workers are sort of tainting the food or whatever, you actually hear some fringy kooks bringing that up, that's not the issue. The issue is farmers can't get this stuff out of the ground without importing people from other countries. And so for doing that right now is essential, but what the government needs to do going forward is make it clear to farmers that that's not gonna be allowed to continue, that the price of importing this foreign labor is going to increase 10% every year. And I would actually to follow on the other part of the question you had, charge the farmers and the farm workers, payroll taxes, they now do not pay payroll taxes and give the farm workers back their payroll taxes as rebates, take the farmer portions, invest it in mechanization technology because it's true that you're not gonna have the same number of Americans going out picking cucumbers as there are foreign workers doing it now. What you can do is move away from the medieval form of labor arrangements that we have in the fields now toward a more modern kind of harvesting of fruits and vegetables. And that's something the government does need to give a push to farmers too, so that you'll have instead of 100 people kneeling in the dirt picking radishes by hand, which is literally the way it's done now. You'll have a machine which exists now in Europe and Japan because they don't have the same access to cheap labor as we do. You'll have a machine run by three people harvesting 10 times as much in half the time. So for now, imported farm workers, I think actually are essential this month, next month, the month after, but there has to be a plan for weaning farmers off this addiction to labor that's imported from abroad. Okay, the other related parts of that question which maybe we could get back to, do you wanna comment on that Brian for the time for the moment? Yes, so it's striking to me that for agriculture, Mark finally has the economically sensible view in part that the point of farms is production and we should not be focused on just creating as many jobs as possible for Americans. This is a good view. This should be the view that Mark should have on all areas of the economy all the time. Focus on production, not jobs. The jobs take care of themselves in a well functioning economy like the US normally has is production that's hard. Now, when you talk about foreign labor as an addiction, this is really just the same as saying that I've got an addiction to gasoline or an addiction to any other cheap, convenient thing that we have. You could go and wean Europeans off their addiction to machinery by going and putting a big tax on that and then they'll do it in some other way. The key point is that the reason why we're doing this way is because we have a resource and a technology that is actually better considering the cost and cost is the way that sensible economies manage things, not with some kind of a Buzz Lightyear idea of the highest technology is always the best. Very often high technology is not a good way of doing it. Often I will do something by hand because the technology advanced way is actually less convenient. Similarly, American farmers will hire workers because the farm machinery is just too expensive and it makes sense to do it the cheaper way. Just as a final point there, Jean, it's not actually just the immediate cost because there's a certain, there's a hump that you have to pass when you mechanize, you have to change the whole system of production, including packing, including shipping, et cetera. And once you get over that hump to a different situation, you actually will end up with higher productivity on the part of the workers. It's just that there has to be an incentive to do that. Immigration removes that incentive and what it does is it permits agriculture to continue in what amounts to a kind of medieval labor arrangement with people as quasi-surf deep kneeling in the dirt and picking stuff with their hands. A modern economy shouldn't be feeding itself that way. Yeah, getting back to that then a related question, I guess Mark, we could pass over the other ones, but the estimate of over 10 million people working illegally in this country, would you have the government expel them? Well, first of all, it's the number of illegal immigrants, it's 10 to 12 million, the number who are working is probably seven to eight million because some of them are kids, some of them are old people, some of them are wives at home. So illegal workers are like seven or eight million. No, again, prudence, none of those people should be here. They not only broke administrative rules, they're all, virtually every single one of them is engaged in criminal activity. ID theft, perjury, tax fraud, et cetera. But given all of the decades of a feckless immigration policy by the other members, if you will, of Brian's Beehive, who don't realize that they are essentially moving in the same or recoil from admitting that they're calling for the same thing as he is, but are in fact doing that, my point is you've got that many people, it is imprudent and disruptive to throw everybody out all at once. What we need to do is make it harder for illegal immigrants to get jobs, harder to live a normal life so that through attrition we shrink the numbers and then after at some point we come to a decision that we've done about all as much as all we can, let's legalize everybody else, rip off the band aid, I'm actually for an amnesty at some point in exchange for deep permanent cuts in legal immigration. In other words, clean up the mess of our past immigration policy, but going forward with a different and newer immigration policy, and let me just put in one last point. Because we are rebooting our economy in effect, I mean, they talk about the ship of state, sort of the desktop of state was turned off because it had a virus and we're not rebooting it, we've started it again. And what we should be doing in my opinion is using, for instance, eVerify, which is an online system for people when they hire somebody and take the social security and IRS information they have to collect anyway to require them to actually check online and see whether that's, whether they're lying to them or not. That is the kind of step that you take now we can correct some of the distortions that have developed in our economy over the years which because we're rebooting the system as it were. A comment from you, Brian? I bet that, no? Any comment from you, Brian? Also, that's fine. Okay, then let's go back to a classical question which I guess reminds us that not all libertarians have always agreed with Brian, the Milton Friedman question who held that the welfare state is incompatible with unrestricted immigration. Could you address that point, Brian? Sure, so logically speaking, the argument makes perfect sense. It's theoretically possible that the welfare state is so excessive that when we let immigrants in we don't actually get these benefits. And furthermore, I would say, and probably Milton would say that if the damage to American liberty is large enough then it would be justified to go and restrict the liberty of foreigners in order to offset that. So I'd say, oh, so, but again, large enough. Now the question is, how do the numbers actually turn out? And I say when we go and look at those numbers, National Academy of Sciences, you'll see that Milton Friedman is just plain wrong. The American welfare state is not so large to actually turn immigration into a fiscal burden on Americans. In fact, even low-skilled immigrants, as long as they're young, are a net fiscal benefit in the modern United States. Like how could that possibly be? A couple of things are going on. So first of all, a lot of government products or a lot of government services are non-rival. That means the cost doesn't depend upon population. And so you can let an immigrant in charge of modest taxes and he's still more than pays for himself. Second of all, immigrants tend to be young, tend to be young, which end most of the American welfare state goes to the old. Now, if that sounds like a pyramid scheme, it is not because this basic finance tells you, a debt delayed is a lower debt. If you can make a debt, if you pay the same debt 50 years, it is in fact a smaller debt than you pay it right now. So in fact, letting in more immigrants does make the system in welfare state more sustainable, not less. And then finally, it's also true that a large part of the cost of immigrants is for educating their kids. Often though their kids are in fact US citizens because they're born here. But the key thing to remember is that if you have family of three natives, two native parents, one native kid, US taxpayers pay for all three of their educations. If you have family of two immigrant parents and one kid, US taxpayers only pay for one education. So that's another reason why immigrants are a great deal. Now, this does bring us back to that question that Mark did like about if government should control immigration, how not, why not fertility? But again, really it is exactly the same issue. So if it's justified to say the welfare state is so big, we're gonna take away people's freedom to migrate. Why is it justified to say the welfare state is so big, we're gonna take away the right of poor people to have kids when they want to? And philosophically I would say it is the same problem. And in both cases, I think the reasonable answer is if we're gonna be a total disaster, then maybe it would be okay to limit that freedom. But let's make sure it would be a total disaster before we start going and doing something that crazy. And when we go and look at those numbers, it's just not there, so. Yeah, Brian, no, bottom line, Milton was wrong. Okay, but Milton was wrong indeed because he's deceased, absolutely. Because you were speaking about him in the present tense because of course he's always with us in terms of his arguments, which was great. And now we go to the final part of the evening. Mark, you can of course obviously respond to what Brian just said. You have your five minutes free bottle, take it away, Mark. Well, I mean, I think I wanna respond and sort of make a more general point. Brian is saying that the restrictions on foreigners moving here, that's a limitation on their freedom, that is, he's analogizing it or not analogizing, he's equating it to the decision of Americans to have kids. In other words, that they should be the same thing. They should either both be restricted by the state or neither. The problem is that this goes back to the original fundamental disagreement we have. I think that Americans have a moral responsibility to each other that is greater than they have to foreigners. That the United States and the American people are a nation. And the members of a nation, the citizens of a nation have responsibilities to each other. There are different rules for those who are us as opposed to those who are them. And the us in them is not a moral critique in the sense that somehow foreigners are inferior or defective or what have you. But the same rules do not apply to them. We met when the preeminent constitution says we the people of the United States. That's not we the residents who happen to be here in the United States at this particular time. It's those of us who are citizens of the United States. And as a citizen, you have rights given to you by God which are enshrined and protected in our constitution and our laws. Those rights do not all apply in the same way to foreigners coming here. A foreigner has a right to life just as an American does. He doesn't have a right to a life here. Sovereignty, the basic concept of sovereignty is that the sovereign, which in our system is the American people. It's not the king, it's not the pope, it's not the emperor, it's the American people through their elected representatives. Get to decide who moves here and who doesn't. There are rules and privileges that we enjoy, that we are subject to, that foreigners are not. And that is what it boils down, really in principle what it boils down to. Somebody who is abroad in a low productivity country which is low productivity, not because of anything we did. It's simply because of their lower level of cultural development. Whatever inheritances they have from their own history and their own past, it's just not a very productive place. They have no right to move here. That's their country. We have no right to move to their country. And you can call for higher levels of immigration if you want, but the only legitimate way in my opinion to make that argument as part of democratic discourse is to argue that the American people would benefit. And Brian does that sometimes, but he's trying to steal a base because necessarily he would support the unlimited immigration of people from abroad even if it were bad for Americans in his conception. And that's, in my opinion, not, that's a value question. It's sort of a, it's a, you know, it's like a, the fact, I mean, a, a, in geometry, you know, a basic theorem, the definition of a point, a line, and a plane, you don't have to justify those or prove those, you take those as given. Well, you have to take as given, whom do you have your primary responsibility toward? One minute, one minute. Who is, what, what moral unit are you part of? Who is your responsibility toward? And that is, that's not something you can really, you know, game out and debate and come to some kind of empirical conclusion. It's a value question. I value my fellow citizens more than I value foreigners. Doesn't mean foreigners or subhuman or any sort of that pre-modern concept where every tribe called itself the human beings and everybody else was not human beings. I'm a Christian. I recognize that all of us are children of God, but I have a greater responsibility to my own people than I do to foreigners. Brian does not accept that concept. That's not a wrong position. It's just a different position. But if you start from one of those two positions, you end up at very different places at the end of the day. Thank you. Thank you Mark. And whatever, c-i-s dot org. Thank you Mark. Brian, five minutes of rebuttal, of concluding rebuttal, yeah. All right. So let's go back to the actual resolution of the debate, which is, does the coronavirus crisis actually enhance the argument for restricting immigration? What's striking to me is first of all, Mark distances himself from the normal argument that people on the street actually make. Of course, it's a little hard to meet people on the street anymore, but on the phone, the kinds of things that my dad would say. All right, so and again, the normal argument that I think a large majority of Americans accept is that the reason why we got this problem is because we were too lax in letting foreigners in. They came and they sickened us. If we had been stricter, it wouldn't have happened. And if we don't want this to happen again, we gotta be stricter in the future. All right, Mark doesn't actually seem to wanna make that argument, which is great. But I think that by refusing to make that argument, he has really eliminated most of the case that he could make for further restrictions on immigration. All he's really left with is this depression economics one of when unemployment is high, we should go and try to protect jobs without any real consideration of the effect on production, the harm that this will do to businesses that are immigration dependent. And then he makes a few exceptions. Well, yeah, okay, agriculture, okay. But Disney, on the other hand, he's still mad. I'm not quite sure what he's got against Disney. I love Disneyland, by the way. It's a wonderful place. And if they operate with immigrants, more power to them. In any case, so remembering the resolution, it's about whether this current crisis enhances the argument that Mark has been making for many, many years. And he doesn't use, he doesn't make the argument that you would actually think he would make, which is good because I said it's wrong. We couldn't actually, we could not actually kept the virus out at a reasonable cost by simply closing the borders. And again, you would have to eliminate tourism, including our right to travel abroad. So it's just crazy. And again, if you're really worried about that, you should focus on quarantines rather than anything else. And then again, this unemployment argument is just the usual one that people shred out during every recession, where they keep their eye off the ball of production and on this distraction of employment, which is a terrible mistake, especially when stores have lots of empty shelves. I have been there. I am terrified now to go shopping, not just from getting sick, but just to see what has happened to my beloved grocery stores and what has happened to them. You know, like what consumer would want you now? It's very sad. Right? Now, on this question of whether or not you have a right to immigrate or not, I think you do. But again, you could just as well make my argument saying yes, democracy, whatever it says is great, but democracy should vote for what I'm saying. And almost all of my arguments still go through. You'll notice that I really only switch over to the moral argument when the moral argument comes up. Otherwise I'm happy to focus on the actual expected consequences. Let's see. So there's one thing I want people to keep in mind from all of this. It's that we actually learned something about immigration from the current shutdown. As I said, during the current shutdown, we are suffering because Americans have been deprived of their normal right to free migration. We're no longer able to live and shop what we want, which is terrible. We have lost an enormous amount because we can't move around anymore. This is a permanent problem with the global economy. We are permanently losing these benefits because there are a lot of gains of letting people move from country to country the same kinds of gains that you get by being able to go to your job or go to a store where you want, that someone gets by being able to come to you. These are the gains that we give up in the global economy every day. The reason why we can easily believe that we're having enormous losses right now is that we remember how things used to be. The reason why Mark has so much trouble believing that things could be dramatically better is that we haven't seen these gains. They are foregone rather than taken away. And what I'm saying is we really should focus on what we are missing. Again, if this lockdown went on long enough, eventually we would forget that anything better was possible. And then there'd be someone like Mark saying, oh, this is all fantasy. It can't really improve that much. It would be so disruptive to our institutions if people could go and sit down at restaurants. What would happen to the grocery stores? All this kind of negative focus on employment rather than a positive focus on progress and production. It has great appeal, but emotionally, right? And it's the kind of thing that counts people's heads. It's the kind of thing that any good economics class tries to beat out of the students so thoroughly that it never comes back. And so let me try to beat it out of you right now. Let's see. And yeah, just one last point. So Mark does not like the argument of keep out immigrants because they're inferior. Here's what I say. That's the good argument. That's the argument that makes sense. If immigrants really are barbarians and they're going to come here and run and mock, then I can understand why people don't want them here. That is what the scurrilous members of the internet who are hardcore opponents of immigration do. Now, Mark, I think Mark sincerely does not agree with those people. The nice thing Mark doesn't really have any good argument left. All he's left with is some discussion about how Americans are different theoretically from foreigners, but he never really addresses the point of the complaints that you have about immigrants also apply just as well to Americans. So if you're worried about immigrants taking jobs, you're worried about Americans taking jobs. You're worried about immigrants taking jobs. You're worried about more women working. The logic of this, Mark doesn't want to deal with any. I think the reason is that if you really pursued it, you would end up at my view, not his. Thanks. Thank you, Brian. Okay. Well, that concludes the arguments on both sides. Jane, please open the final vote. And you who are watching this on live stream, please cast your final vote. However, we won't be announcing the results until next Tuesday. The reason is going to release this on video and audio this Friday. And people will have through the weekend and into Monday to watch and cast their own final vote. The results will be announced again next Tuesday. Thanks to you both, Brian and Mark. I want to remind you both of course that you are alumni of the physical solo forum. Brian has been at the physical solo forum a couple of times. Mark visited us once. We hope to have you back. I just learned before we turn this on that Brian always looking for new employment and to diversify his own skills, wants to apply to be a stand-up act at the solo forum. Brian, I remind you that we are the Big Apple. And therefore, I encourage you to try out your act with the nerds at GMU, the faculty and students. And we'll get some recommendations from them. How do you get to the solo forum? Practice, practice, practice. Well, by the way, can I just say one thing? I'm so happy to see all of you. I'm really happy to see Mark. I just feel so lonely, so distressed by this terrible situation. Just to even see a human being on a screen is a big improvement for me. And honestly, this is the same feeling that I have wherever I need a new immigrant to this country. I'm glad to have you. I'm glad to see all of you. If you're seeing this in another country, I want you here. And if Americans get their act together, you'll be allowed. Got on that note of love, Brian and Mark have both come to love each other, even though they disagree profoundly about certain issues. And I hope to see you both at some point back in the physical space at 45 Vicka Street in the Subculture Theater in a not-too-distant future. Good night and stay well.