 Do the one way, pretty much nobody agrees with us, Johan. And that is immigration. Oh my God. And again, this one, I mean, people think that the left somehow is promigration and the right is anti-immigration. At least in the U.S. that's not true at all. Both anti-immigration for various reasons. Bernie Sanders has often said that he doesn't want more immigrants because it lowers wages, it's bad for unions, it's all things like that. And of course, we know Trump and what the Republican Party's view of immigration is. But so before we get to why, what is good about immigration? What's the benefit of immigration? More people. And to lots of people, that sounds awful. We don't want more people. We have enough problems with the ones we have because you tend to think historically that this has been the complaint from the kind of Malthusian leftists and conservatives. More people means more mouths to feed, more problems basically, while always forgetting that it means more brains and more hands who can work and can accomplish new things and come up with new and better ideas to do things. And that case is, it's very similar to the case for free trade because it means that more people who can do things locally as well because not everything can be bought and sold digitally or put on a container tanker. The whole service sector is dependent on people being, you can't ship your home to the Philippines to clean it up and take it back or sort of put our hair cut out there and get it back like that. It means that more people are available to come up with new ideas and to work and to exchange with us. And the major difference with that in trade is that the benefits are much larger if we really had open trade, open immigration. The economists who have looked at it talk about how sort of a really back-of-the-envelope calculation that allowing people to move to the place where their job is in higher demand would increase the world economy by roughly doubling it. So there are trillion dollar bills on the payment because around two thirds of the wage you get is actually dependent on where you happen to be born. It's not your education. You can have exactly the same education. You can be an engineer or a doctor with exactly the same kind of education. If you're born in the wrong place you don't have those opportunities because you don't have institutions, the openness, the property rights and so on. And you don't have complementary technology and other workers that make yourself more productive. Yes, I mean, in a sense I think if we had complete free trade globally and if we had capitalism everywhere the need for immigration would be reduced because we'd be free everywhere and productivity would rise. But the fact is there's such, I mean, if the same worker from Africa comes to the United States, his productivity automatically rises because of the innovation, the machinery, the equipment, the computers that we have in the United States that he doesn't have access to in Africa. Just that move increases productivity and therefore increases the value that he adds, the economic value that he adds. And that's where you get this doubling effect. So. Quite right. That's why Swedes became so much richer when they migrated to the US. Because it was the land of the free. So suddenly their hard work and their ideas was suddenly they could benefit from it and profit from it. Yeah, and Bernie Sanders never mentions that that Swedes in the US are actually richer than Swedes in Sweden, even today. Yeah, that's right. And by the way, life expectancy is the same. Life expectancy is not different. Yeah, Swedes have done very well in America as does everybody who's come here relative to where they left. Yeah. So one of the arguments against immigration, right, both in Europe and in the United States, is, well, you can't have immigration and actually even Milton Friedman, who I hate to disagree with on economics, but even Milton Friedman said, you know, you can't have open immigration and welfare, right, because what will happen is people will come just to get the welfare. What's the argument against that? Well, first of all, I think there's a simple answer and that's, okay, so let's make sure that they don't get the welfare state rather than building a wall around our country. Let's build a wall around the welfare state. If you don't agree with the assumption of abolishing it for everybody, then why don't do it here? Make sure that, for example, social security and welfare systems you pay into those systems and you get something only if you work for it. And I mean, Sweden has made a small transition into that by reforming social security pension benefits because now it's dependent on what you pay into the system. It's not any kind of defined benefit. It's a defined contribution system. Now, if you do that in various parts of the welfare state, that would deal, I think, with this criticism. But apart from that, even in our system, I would say that in the US system, it's then an empirical question. So do they use the welfare state more? Do they cost more and skip work? Well, from all the research that I've done in various places, I learned that migrants don't go anywhere because they don't have initiative or an interest in hard work. You don't cross an ocean. You do it because you want to improve your life and make life better. If you have a good chance to do that, for example, in the US with the relative free market that's there, then that's what you're gonna do. And you'll see very high employment levels. You'll see, well, the latest data I saw on Medicaid was that if US natives use Medicaid as much or as little as immigrants did, it would be reduced the cost by 42% straight away because they don't rely on those systems for various reasons. In some parts of Europe, I think it's the other way around and Sweden might get close to that once in a while. It depends a little bit on when you arrive and the business cycle, the culture, various things. But that's because we make it incredibly difficult to start working for outsiders, for asylum seekers and so on. But we make it incredibly easy to get funds from the government and welfare payments. And then obviously we destroyed the incentives that should be there. But I'd say that's our mistake rather than the mistake of the immigrants. It's our fault. So to what extent? I mean, Sweden is an interesting example and it's always used as a negative model about immigration because you've got, you had a large percentage of the population now, relatively speaking, immigrants, mostly Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. These are considered, if you will, the worst kind of immigrants because they come from a very different culture and they supposedly are bringing this really bad culture into Sweden. So give us a bit of an update on where we are in Sweden in terms of immigration, in terms of work, in terms of culture. There's the stories about rape. Give us a little bit of, from Sweden, what does it look like today, the situation of immigration in Sweden? Yeah, well, Sweden has been an immigrant country since at least sort of big time. If you look at big numbers since the 1990s and that's from the Balkan Wars and people came from former Yugoslavia to Sweden but also Latin America and so on. And then we had a second wave in the last 15 years or so from the Middle East from war zones like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. And that makes up many of the migrants but also parts of Africa, which means that we've had lots of refugee immigration rather than labor immigration and lots of people who don't have not just equivalent education to what Swedish natives do but some of them very, very little or even none. And that has obviously created problems for a Swedish social model that even though it's changed a lot since the 1970s and the 1980s, this is not your granddaddy sort of socialism, it's not Bernie Sanders country anymore. But yet we do have some areas of the labor market where we haven't liberalized it. So we have, for example, we don't have minimum wages in Sweden. The government is not allowed to so tell us what to pay people but we have very strong collective bargaining because the trade unions are fairly powerful in many areas. So in most sectors, the average minimum wage, a de facto minimum wage, not a legal one, but the de facto one is around 70 to 80% of the median wage in those sectors. And that means if you arrive in this country and for one reason or another, you might be young without the skills or you might be an Eritrean immigrant who doesn't know how to read or write in Swedish and you are only 65% as productive as the median Swede. You're priced out of the market, you cannot do the work. So obviously we have a huge challenge when it comes to integration and assimilation in Sweden because of those stupid mistakes, I would say, the areas that aren't reformed in our economy. And yet despite all of this, and I think this is a major challenge that we're gonna have to deal with, but yet the average employment level among the foreign born in Sweden is around 70%. And that's actually higher than the average employment level in much of Southern Europe. So it tells you that it's not the disaster that they would have you think on Fox News or something like that. Slowly and steadily they are entering the labor market and integrating into society, but it takes much, much longer than it could. And are you seeing that, if you will, assimilation into Swedish culture? Cause a lot of the complaints about immigration are around culture and around behavior and is that happening? Well, it is definitely happening if you're looking at, for example, the world value surveys on when they're trying to look at attitudes among immigrants in Sweden. We can see that even then, what's supposed to be then the most difficult group to integrate Middle Eastern immigrants with a Muslim upbringing. Yes, they do hold less emancipatory views such as sort of gender equality and tolerance against homosexuality, things like that. But interestingly, even in this first generation, they are much more than tolerant than the countries that they come from. So there's somewhere halfway between origin and destination and actually close to the views of Southern European Catholic states when it comes to this. And the longer they've been in Sweden, the more Swedish their values become. But obviously it takes some time and if we shut them out of the labor market, if it's so difficult to get a work and it's so easy to become welfare dependent, well, then you're stuck with your family, with your clan and with your tradition and you don't meet Swedes with other values. And then again, it takes much longer than it should do. Yeah, and it's interesting cause people always complain about economic migration. Is this coming to get a job and improve your own economic well-being as a bad thing? And yet that's the kind of migration that doesn't suffer even from these issues. They assimilate quicker and they get to work faster and it's the economic migrants that actually integrate much, much faster than do kind of the refugees that are not there necessarily because they wanted to be there. Yeah, exactly. And this is, I've never understood this why people are so hostile to labor immigration because when we look at our own history and you know, Swede's treasure, the example of the Carl Oscar which is a famous fictional character from a book by a novel, a series of novels by Willen Moberg who bravely then crossed the ocean created a new life in the United States and so on. Yeah, he was an economic immigrant. He just wanted to feed his family, put food on the table because he couldn't do that in a backward authoritarian country like Sweden back in the day. And obviously as you point out, then you're heading for integration and assimilation with those values because you want to make it into the labor market into that culture, into those neighborhoods. And for one, I think that all immigration should be labor immigration. Yes. That's the idea. I mean, you're not going somewhere to live on welfare. You're going there to make sure that you create a better life for you and your loved ones by working hard. That's the intent of everybody who migrates and if it's not they, well, they really shouldn't. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I've long argued that in the United States, one way to dramatically increase immigration in a healthy way is just to say anybody who can get a job is welcome. Any kind of job, because I don't believe central planners should decide whether engineers are more needed than Apple pickers. I think the market should decide that. And then anybody who wants a job and can get one should be allowed in, as long as they're not. And I think you talk about this in the book. As long as they're not criminals and terrorists and carry infectious diseases, let them in, let them into work because we know trade is win-win, is value-added. And I think this is also something that people miss all the time. They think that, yeah, if we can get the Nobel laureates, that's fine because we want them. But hey, how do you become a Nobel laureate? Again, Leonardo Michelangelo, they shouldn't have been forced to produce their own food because that wouldn't leave much time for the other things. Well, how do you become a Nobel laureate by focusing on research? And then getting low-skilled migrants who can do the housework, the cleaning, being the nanny, taking care of the kids and so on, that has liberated thousands and millions of people from being stopped from focusing on what they're really good at, specifically women. Lots of you as women have their career to thank for this kind of low-skilled migration. Absolutely. And if we think about Nobel laureates or really, really smart people or one-in, whatever, a million, well, then the more people we have, the more of them they're gonna be. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to thank, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes, that should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, I wanna see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it, I wanna see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share. And you can support the show at youronbrookshow.com slash support on Patreon or Subscribestar or locals and show your support for the work, for the value, hopefully you're receiving from this. And of course, don't forget, if you're not a subscriber, even if you just come here to troll or even if you're here like Matthew to defend Marx, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on, when they're on. You'll get notified, right? 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