 If you believe in free will, then you don't believe that you are determined by your culture. You don't believe that you're determined by your race or ethnicity. You don't believe that you're determined even by your ideas. Now that's kind of weird because we in objectivism take ideas seriously. So how is it that you're not determined by your ideas? He's got an example of that from Elon, right? You can take your ideas seriously. You cannot take your ideas seriously. You can be consistent on those ideas, like some jihadis who take it all the way. Or you can say, you know, violence, even though it says in the Quran, I should be and I'm not really going to take that part of it seriously. You can choose to be a violent jihadi or just to believe in some of the ideas behind violent jihadis without actually engaging or advocating for the violence. So we are not determined by any of those factors. It is choices that we make that will guide the kind of life that we live, the kind of actions that we take. Now how is this related to the immigration debate? There are certain assumptions being made by those who are antagonistic to immigration. And of course in this political climate, this is a big issue, right? And I'm sure there's going to be some, even in this room, some disagreement about this issue. You know, I've been shouted down twice in the last two weeks. I've been tried, two very different groups have tried to silence me in the last two weeks. Once, you heard Steve mention, in the UK, I was basically silenced by, for at least a little while, by a group of pro-Palestinian leftists who didn't let me speak on free speech. Interesting. So it was great because I had this whole introduction about free speech is under attack and I could skip the introduction, could I say, see what just happened? But then a week later, I was in Chicago and I was talking to a group of about 600, it turns out, Trump supporters. And I tried to say something about immigration. I just raised the idea that maybe Donald Trump is wrong about immigration. Oh my God. Oh, hell, broke loose, right? 600 people were booing, were chanting, wanted me off the stage, wanted me out of the country. I had a number of people that suggested I should be deported, were upset that I was already a citizen so they couldn't actually do it. This has become this really hot button issue. Why? Why? America, 150 years ago, had a completely different attitude to immigration. I mean, think about the Statue of Liberty. Now, I don't have the exact quote, but basically, the Statue of Liberty says, bring them on. Please come. And who? The poorest, you know, the oppressed, bring them on. Bring them to this country. Why? Why do we believe 150 years ago about human nature, about America, about our ideas, that we were saying, you know, millions, come over. We don't care where you come from, what culture you come from. I mean, I wish they didn't care, but implicit in this, we don't care what race you are, what ethnicity you are, just come. What do we believe about human nature? What do we believe about free will? We believe that people could change. We believe that when confronted with good ideas, with just ideas, with right ideas, with freedom, that people would adapt to those ideas, that they wouldn't just mindlessly bring their culture to America and impose their culture on America as we believe today. Oh my God, we can't have Mexicans here because we'll turn America into Mexico. No, what we believe then is we will turn the Mexicans into Americans. That's what we meant by a melting pot. We get rid of the bad stuff that they brought in culturally, embrace the good stuff, but ultimately make them Americans. Make them, not make them in a sense of force, but make them ideologically, because they have free will, because they have the capacity to change, have them embrace the ideas that made America America. The individualism, the capitalism, the freedom. And suddenly we could do that with our kids. It would be maybe hard if they're older and set in their ways, but certainly the second generation or third generation would embrace and become Americans. And indeed, history suggests that attitude was right. But people came here from all over the world and we all think, oh, they're all Europeans. So what? Oh my God, you should read some of the newspaper articles from back then, right? Most Americans, I don't know, were probably from British descent. They hated the Irish. And the Irish hated the Italians, who hated the Poles, who everybody hated the Jews just as much as today. We hate the Mexicans and we hate the Muslims and we hate this and we hate that. Now we've got more justification to hate the Muslims than any of those groups had in their past. But the point is that that hatred of the other always existed, but there was deep down a belief that in spite of that, they could adopt what it means to be American because they had essentially free will. And if our ideas were good, if our ideas were right, if our ideas were just, then they would adopt our ideas. They would come around to become Americans. I think fundamentally today, the reason we are so scared, and it's scared, what were those 600 people really pissed off at me for? They're afraid. You can see it. They are so afraid of immigrants. Immigrants who look differently than they do. Really, they fear that. And you see that on Facebook and you see it on Twitter and the kind of posts. People are scared. What are they scared of? Well, they've given up on the idea of free will. They've given up on the idea that other people will change. And they don't know, and this is the more fundamental question, they don't know what America is. They don't know what they stand for. They don't understand what our ideas are. They have no confidence in the ideas of individualism, of capitalism, and freedom. So what are we going to actually convince them of? We don't have anything to say to them. And they're just fixed. They are what they are. As Elon said, they are products of their culture. People who come here with a different culture, they're just fixed. They're not going to change. And of course, multiculturalism, the whole movement of multiculturalism, said we don't want them to change. This is the undercutting of the idea that American values are superior. The left has managed to undercut that. So we have no confidence in our own ideas. And then we also don't believe that they will change when they come here. You're seeing more and more of a racial attitude towards this. Racism is on the rise. We have a white culture. If somebody comes who's not white, they can't adapt because there is no free will. We're determined by our genes. This is that there are consequences of the whole attitude of determinism through genes. Well, if we're determined through our genes, and certainly white people have different genes than brown people because something changed the pigments, right? That's a genetic thing, then we're different. And we can't be convinced of the same ideas. So we're culturally determined. We're religiously determined. So you're a Muslim. You're a Muslim. You must be bad, right? And it's the same if you're Iron Hoseali or if you're, you know, some terrorist. It doesn't matter. They're all the same. We don't evaluate how you hold those ideas, how seriously you take them, right? Whether you're religious fanatic, crazy religious fanatic, or, you know, you pray a few times, you go like you go to church on Sundays, right? But you don't really take the ideas that seriously. You're labeled as a Muslim and you're out, right? So we're determined that they're determined by their culture, their race, and their religion. And indeed, we Americans, why are we Americans, what we are? Because we just are. Not because of choices, not because particular ideas, not because we take particular ideas seriously. Again, we have no conception of what American exceptionalism means. That term, even American exceptionalism, now has a kind of an ugly sense to it because people who've said it typically don't know what they're talking about. So it's often got this negative connotation. But America is exceptional because of the ideas it was founded on and because we took, at least for a while, those ideas seriously and implemented those ideas. So we believe people, you know, just can't change. They are what they are. And, you know, people choose, people choose to come to the U.S. and we look at who chooses to come to the U.S. today when we have, I don't know how much you know about immigration laws, but we have the dumbest, stupidest immigration laws in America today that one can imagine. If you constructed immigration laws, I mean Donald Trump will probably make them even stupider. But it's hard to imagine immigration laws that are more, you know, just constraining and bureaucratic and limiting and not focused on essentials and not focused on bringing in people who really want to be part of America. So, for example, who do we lose by having very limited immigration? Who do we lose by building a wall? Some people will come here even if you build a wall, right, which will surprise, I think, a lot of people. The walls actually don't prevent people from entering the country. They can dig under, they can go over, they can go around. You know that Mexicans now do not need a visa to enter Canada. Canada is allowing Mexicans to come to Canada with no visa. What does that mean? You buy an airplane ticket which is less than paying a coyote, right, and you go to Canada and you cross the border, right? There's forests, that's an easy border, but we can build a wall in Canada, right? I mean, but who comes when you build a wall? Because this is part of, you know, this question of the kind of immigrants that people assume are coming or not. Who comes when you build a wall? Well, people are most desperate. People who have the least will lose. People who have the most to gain, in other words, are going to come. And who do we lose? We lose the people who have the least to lose. So you lose. You know, the tougher you make it to get into this country, the fewer people who have a good education are going to come. The fewer people who live in western civilization countries are going to come. Because, you know, if you live... I always say, you know, people love Sweden. They think Sweden is an ideal. And I always say, if you dropped all immigration limitations between Sweden and the United States, which direction do you think people would go? And I don't know if there's anybody here from Sweden. No, not in this group. But what do you guess? Americans would move to Sweden? Now, people say it's not fair because of the weather. So this is the deal. Open immigration only between Minnesota and Sweden. How do you think people are going to move? Well, I bet anything that Sweden would empty out. At least empty out of the most talented entrepreneurial people. They would go to Minnesota. And I know many Swedes who say, I'd love to move to America. I'd love to move to America. But you guys make it too hard. It's just not worth it. Sweden is not that bad. So it's not worth the effort to come to America. But if it was easy, I'd be there tomorrow. If you're a poor Guatemalan or Mexican, we've got somebody from Guatemala here, right? And life sucks, right? Life is really tough. And there are gangs. And there's violence. And you've got little kids. And you have no future. You have no future where you live, right? And Guatemala, by the way, has a future. Because there's some people here from Guatemala. That's the future, right? You're willing to get up. You're willing to risk your life, to dig under a wall, to take a boat around, to do whatever it takes to get out of the threatening situation you're in to attain some level of freedom. Now, if you value human choice, if you value human freedom, then what is your attitude to somebody like that? Now, the Donald Trump attitude is, boo, that's terrible. We don't want them. They're from Guatemala. And they're poor. And implicitly in that is they're going to be violent. And implicitly in that, we don't want them, right? And my attitude is, that's heroic. That's heroic. That's taking your life seriously. That's saying, I want to change my life. I want to live a better life. Now, what's more heroic than saying, I live this one life. The place I happen by accident to be born in sucks. I'm going to make a better life by making this amazing effort, scaling walls to reach freedom so I can make a better life for myself, have a better future for myself, and for the people that I love. I mean, wow, I get teary-eyed just thinking about it. People talk about anchor babies. Anchor babies, right? Women who come to America to have a baby in America. Wow! It's my approach. Here's a pregnant woman, women willing to walk across the desert so that a child is born in freedom. That's an amazing choice. That's taking your life seriously. That's taking your future seriously. That's what morality is about. And we want to say, oh, no, bad people. This is what America was supposed to be about by taking your life seriously, pursuing happiness, pursuing freedom, making the most of your life. Now you might say they come here and they take welfare and they just come to have babies for welfare. Really? It's just empirically not true. And really, you're going to walk across a desert. You're going to risk your life and your baby's life to get a check from the government. I don't think so. Something else is driving you. Something else is motivating you. Maybe when you get here, it's hard to find a job because you know what? We've declared you illegal, so it's really hard to find a job and you get in welfare for a while. But think about it. Who do you resent more? Who do I resent more? I don't want to speak for you. An American who was born in this country with all the opportunities this country offers, with all the goodies they get, all the freebies they get as kids and as young adults growing up and decides to go on welfare with somebody who's risked their lives to attain more freedom, can't find a job and goes to welfare. I resent the American much more. I'm much more charitable. If welfare was not forced on me, if it was charity, I would be more inclined to give charity to the immigrant who's struggling and who's come into the country that I am to an American who's been here and who hasn't taken advantage of all the wonderful opportunities that exist in this country already. So if we value free will, if we value morality, the choice that people make their lives better, the choice that people make to try to seek freedom, and people say it's all about money. People come here for economic betterment. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. That's a virtue, not a vice. Life is not separate from economics. Living poor is not good. You want to be able to make a living for yourself and for your kids and everything else. So the economic motivation is just as good in the motivation so if we value those things, if we value human life, if we value individual life, then we have to be pro-immigration. If we believe in determinism of culture, of race, of religion, or whatever it is that people are determined that they are what they are, they're shaped by their environment, they're shaped by their genes, that is the primary motivation, I believe, behind the anti-immigration attitude out there combined with a complete lack of confidence in what it means to be America, what America stands for, and the ideas, the idea that we can't convince other people to adopt our ideas. We say, and I'll end with this, that all immigrants come here and they vote Democratic, and many do, partially I think, because if you're an immigrant to this country and the leading candidates from the Republican side say, we hate you guys and we want to kick you out of the country and you're never going to get citizenship and you guys are all scumbags, then yeah, I'm not voting for you. Surprise, surprise. Immigrants don't vote Republican, right? Won't vote for Donald Trump. It's not surprising at all. It's the ideas that he projects it's what he says about them that generates that. But even if they do, then if we believed in free will, if we believed in our ideas, I mean this assumes that the Democratic Party is probably worse than the Republican Party after, you know, mentioned that I'm not convinced that's always the case, right? But we should be confident enough to believe that we can convince them otherwise, that we should turn them around, that we can argue against their ideas again if we believe that people, all people have the capacity to change and therefore have the capacity to change because they have free will. So, I mean, that's a big topic, very condensed, but an important one in this election season. Thank you all.