 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. Free Thoughts is a project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. I'm Aaron Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org, and a research fellow at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies. Should we have limits on who can enter this country? Should we exclude certain kinds of people? Or only let in a certain number? Such questions of immigration policy provoke much debate, anger, and often ugly politics. And immigration isn't just a matter of policy, of what effects immigrants have on America's economic outlook. Immigration raises important moral issues, too, and impacts basic human rights. Joining us to discuss immigration today is our colleague Alex Marasta, an immigration policy analyst here at the Cato Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Alex. Thanks for having me. So before we get into policy of immigration or what we ought to do and how we ought to think about it today, maybe you can fill us in a bit on how the United States has dealt with immigration in the past. How have we approached this question? Have our policies looked the same as they do today for most of our history, or are they quite different? Yeah, so immigration policy has changed quite a bit throughout American history. And you can go all the way back to the founding colonies, pre-revolutionary war to get some sense of that. States and colonies had some immigration restrictions. You know, they had restrictions on poppers coming in, for instance. They made certain ships by bonds for immigrants, so if the immigrant came and went on charity, the shipowner would have to, who was responsible for bringing that person over would forfeit that bond. But with the founding of the United States and the Constitution, the first immigration law passed in 1790 was essentially an open borders law. And the only restrictions on it were who could naturalize and when. And I think it's important to realize at that time there were no restrictions on gender, on wealth, on religion, or on ethnicity, with the exception that only white people were allowed to naturalize. So from our perspective it's pretty hideous and backwards. From the perspective of from that time it was pretty progressive. Now that was rectified with the 14th Amendment later on in the 1860s, so that sort of went through that time. But in terms of restrictions on who could come, how many people could come, where they could come from, there were absolutely no federal restrictions of any kind. Does the Constitution prior to amendments say anything about immigration? So it doesn't say anything about what it does have as a section on uniform rules of naturalization. So the federal government can make those, it takes that power away from the states as part of the compromise. Interestingly I think in the section where it talks about the limiting of the slave trade in 1808, it says no laws restricting migration or restricting the importations of slaves shall be made before 1808. What's interesting though is in the declaration they do mention the word migration as being one of the rights that King George sort of interfered with was the movement of Englishmen to the colonies. So they definitely knew what the word meant and they used it the same way we do today. So if we get to 14th Amendment and then sort of the wave of immigration I think was probably the highest in the latter part of the 19th century I would imagine? Yeah, a lot of part of the 19th century, early 20th century, the percentage of people coming in every year was a little bit greater than 1% of the total population of the country annually. They gave you an example that's about three times greater than what it is today in terms of the relative numbers. So you saw some movement for laws at that time beginning of course in California where a lot of the bad trends began, legislative trends. During the Civil War they passed laws against Chinese immigration in the state of California. A lot of those were sort of not enforced or not held up, the courts struck them down. But then you saw a federal law passed in 1875 against a lot of contract labor coming in. So you saw the end of like indentured servitude contracts being made illegal. That was meant to target Chinese because the idea was that these Chinese were all being hired as basically slave laborers. So the same, and they were taking people's jobs, was that also an idea would you say? Or was it more concern for the Chinese? Oh, I think it was definitely the concern for Americans. I mean, I don't think the concern for the Chinese entered into it at all. Concern for immigrants rarely enters into the discussions of immigration law. But I think seven years later people realized that most of the Chinese coming were not indentured servants and weren't prostitutes, which was another thing that law was meant to start. So stop. So in 1882 they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first time that a large... That's what I was just clearly named there. Yeah, you know exactly what it does. It was very controversial actually because it was thought to impact foreign policy with China. So a lot of American presidents sort of spoke up about it, were critical of it, saying, hey, this worsens our relations with China, but it didn't matter. So that was set to expire 10 years later before it was able to be wiped off the books. They reauthorized it and made it basically permanent. After that you sort of have a gentleman's agreement between the United States and Japan in 1907. Japan said, we won't give any immigration visas. And America said, yeah, we'll turn them away. So there was nothing legislative, but it was sort of off the books. In 1917 you see sort of this building movement for a literacy test. So you saw a lot of Eastern European immigrants, a lot of Italian immigrants, sort of what people back then called the new immigrants coming into the United States. As opposed to them who were the old immigrants? Yeah, as opposed to the pre-1890 immigrants who were of Northern European, mostly Protestant stock, a lot of Germans, Swedes, English, Scots, etc., being replaced by Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Poles, Southern Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, you know, different looking people from different cultures with different religions. And the stereotype was these people are all literate and they're all coming in. We can't have illiteracy in a modern society and all the other usual things. So they passed a literacy act. So you had to basically read portions of the U.S. Constitution in any language that you came from to come in. So you didn't have to be literate in English. You could read it in Slovak or German or something else, but you had to prove it. Immigration, the numbers didn't really fall off after that. They fell off during the World War I period, but after World War I the numbers jumped right back up to what they were prior to that. So they passed the law in 1921. It said that it was a national origin quotas, so it limited immigration to, you know, if you're from a particular country, it limited the quota to 3% of what that foreign-born population was in the U.S. in 1910. So if there were 100,000 people from your country in the U.S. in 1910, you had a quota of 3,000 people per year that could come in. They realized that that led in too many people from Southern and Eastern Europe. So by 1924 they changed it to 2% of the 1890 census, which favored Northern Europeans, Irish, et cetera. And basically beginning with Hoover and continuing with FDR, they didn't really issue any visas to anybody coming out because at that point you also had to go to consulate abroad to get your visa before coming. But there is a big law. I think it's a 26. There's a big immigration law that was passed that started the wave of... Well, especially it was passed amidst a lot of eugenics discussion, if I remember correctly, that at the time they were also very into purifying the human race in a variety of ways. It was a hugely popular intellectual movement. The Supreme Court upheld eugenics in 1927, the State of Virginia forcibly sterilizing a woman. But I think before that, as 26 was when they passed the immigration law, a lot of it based on keeping out the bad human stock outside. So first you keep the human stock, the bad ones on the outside of the country, and then you purify the blood inside the country, I think was the process they were looking at. Yeah, so the 1924 law I think is the one that you're referencing. I mean, all these immigration restrictions at this time and sort of from the 1910s sort of up through World War II were definitely influenced by eugenics ideas. They give you an example. They used, when arguing, debating about the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, they used the term race suicide was used frequently on the halls of Congress to describe what was occurring with immigration in the United States. The American Economic Association, which was founded in 1885, which dominated by eugenics, eugenicists early on. They began offering prizes to people who wrote essays about why immigration needs to be closed off. Irving Fisher, a famous economist in the 20s, said, you know, leaving aside the issue of race, immigration is economically beneficial, but the issue of race made it non-beneficial because these people were polluting the English race. 1887 progressive economist Edward W. Bemis decided that the idea of using the literacy test was sort of a good gateway to it. And sort of an interesting side note, who was sort of this Fabian socialist at the time in the UK. Like, these eugenicists' ideas were popular everywhere, to keep in mind. He sort of came up with the term adverse selection to describe English race suicide by allowing in Jewish immigrants to the UK for really the first time ever. So, I mean, it's hard to separate the ideas of eugenicists' notions at this time from immigration restriction. And that probably is just generally true. There have often been relatively little, I would say, high brow or good reasons maybe for restricting immigration historically. It's usually been pretty bad, pretty base reasons. Usually pretty base, but what's interesting is with these early immigration laws, like these eugenics-inspired ones, there were no national origins quotas applied to countries in the Western Hemisphere. So, Mexicans, Canadians, Central South Americans, Cubans, there are no explicit quotas for them. They focused mainly on Asians, what they called Asiatics back then, Africans, and on Southern, Eastern Europeans and Jews. So, it was basically something that was born partly out of eugenicist concerns, but also out of concerns of while who were the immigrants who were coming today as opposed to thinking about who were the people who could potentially come in the future. What does this history tell us about the current concern? Because the concerns that are expressed today about immigration are not eugenics ones. They're stealing our jobs. They're having a negative economic impact. So, we've got this history of immigrant groups coming in. Does that history speak to these concerns? Is there evidence that when a new group, whatever it happens to be, floods in, it depresses the wages of the prior groups? Yeah, so that's one of the more interesting questions. If you think of your standard supply and demand model, increase the supply and the price goes down. So, you think of, okay, well, that's wages. Well, then it must do the same thing. But, of course, labor is not homogeneous. It's heterogeneous. If I bring in a bunch of PhD-level rocket scientists, they're not going to bring down the salary of, say, an immigration policy analyst, because we have different jobs. I mean, they're incomparable. No number of me is going to make up for a rocket scientist, like, period. So, the same thing applies to immigration. So, because immigrants are complements, that is, they have different skills than a lot of native-born workers, different education and stuff, we don't see a whole lot of that in history. We see maybe evidence that wage growth was slower than it otherwise would have been because of immigration, especially when the immigrants are more similar to Americans. But that's only a nominal wage growth. When we take a look at sort of real wage growth, which is the amount of money that you have in your pocket, with what you have, immigration a lot of times lowers the price of things. So, if you think about it this way, you know, a lot of us have kids or want to have kids in the near future. If you lower the price of net nanny for your children by, say, 50%, because you allow a lot of, you know, low-skilled immigrants come in who could be nannies, while that increases your real wage as an American worker. So, there's a lot of complicated effects. But generally, the most negative thing that we've ever found is that from 1990 to 2006, low-skilled immigration to the United States has decreased the wages of Americans with less than a high school degree by about 4.5%. That's in a time period we have about 30 million immigrants coming into the United States, about 10% of the American population, total, up to this point. And that's the most negative finding you can find. What's interesting is for other education groups, you see a slight wage increase because of this game, because of complementarities in the labor market because of different specialization. So, the question then is, as libertarians, how should we generally be thinking about this, as I think that the way you pointed this out, and you mentioned it earlier, too, about we talk about how does this affect the people here? The people of any given country when the immigration comes in, how does it affect them? And very rarely do we talk about what about the immigrants. It doesn't seem like that's ever the focus of the policy discussion. But of course, the immigrants have got to be better off, and maybe that's where our focus should be. So, as libertarians, and as people who like freedom, should we be thinking about how much happiness immigration can bring, and I think it probably can bring a lot? Yeah, I mean, I think we definitely should include the economic benefits and the other benefits to immigrants. I mean, they're of equal moral worth, or ethical worth to the rest of us individually. I mean, they're not worth any less just because they happen to be born in a different place. Of course, the state doesn't really operate like that, and a lot of people sort of think of foreigners as being different. I mean, Brian Kaplan has that great insight where he thinks that people have an anti-foreign bias. But how should libertarians, or how do libertarians sort of think about this issue? I mean, you guys can correct me, you're the experts in libertarian philosophy, but I see, from my perspective, really broad, you know, thoughts in libertarianism. I see, you know, sort of the natural rights perspective. I see sort of ethical intuitionism, sort of the micro-humor idea that what is wrong in our day-to-day lives is wrong for me to coerce somebody else. Therefore, it's wrong for the state to do the same thing no matter what its goals are. And then I see sort of a utilitarian or consequentialist school, sort of like the Milton Friedman, David Friedman School, like this is good for everyone, it's good for their economic welfare, it's good for that. Well then let me ask, as has been kind of a common theme through a lot of our Free Thoughts podcast, we talk about how many people disagree with libertarians, but libertarians also disagree amongst themselves. And this is one area where there is a large amount of disagreement among people who all would call themselves libertarians. So there are people who are very opposed to liberalizing immigration, letting more immigrants in, they would like to radically restrict it. People on the opposite end who would like to just open the borders entirely and let people move across them freely. And all of these people are justifying this or claim to be justifying it based upon principles that lead them to libertarianism. So is there a way that things like natural rights can speak to both sides of the debate or you could derive either side from these principles? Yeah, that's a good question. To begin it, I think using these three sort of sides in debate, you can very easily come to where there should be very few restrictions on immigration, just taking them all at face value. But a lot of people I think use sort of the natural rights perspective to justify immigration restrictions and they make sort of a faulty analogy. They say, listen, as a prior property owner, it is your right to exclude people from your property. You can build a fence, you can patrol your borders, you can shoot people who come into your house, etc. So therefore, why can't the nation do the same thing? Which is sort of a... It's common, you see it all over the place, but if you think about it for a little bit of time, it doesn't make that much sense. I mean, the government doesn't own a land in the United States. We're not in North Korea. And the United States government is not a club of the sort whereby anybody who's in the clubhouse, that is the country, automatically decides that nobody else in the clubhouse is associated in any kind of way with other people. I mean, Michael Humer makes that point really well in his essay. Just because the government has sovereignty over the US, over the territory of the United States, doesn't mean that it can do anything. I mean, the sovereign is limited. That's where the whole point of the Constitution, right, is it will sort of limit the sovereign. And then the kind of argument is, well, these people are outsiders, they're coming in, it's sort of like an aggressive foreign action. They're meant to defend Americans. They're from other sovereigns. That's where the whole sovereignty sort of argument comes into it. What also seems like restrictions on immigration at some sort of basic level are also restrictions on us, of us being on the side of the border, because they're telling me that I can't associate with someone who's on the other side of this line that I would want to associate. It's particularly true when we're talking about jobs because the issue here is immigrants coming in and then getting jobs here. And they're getting those jobs from, presumably, or most of them are from Americans who want to hire them. And so you're stepping in and saying, look, you can't hire this person. You can't pay them mutually agreeable wage for work. So that seems, yeah, that's a limitation on the strong limitation on the freedom of Americans. Yeah, I mean, to limit the rights of immigrants, you necessarily have to limit the rights of Americans to deal with them. I mean, you have to destroy these contract rights to sign a contract. And you have to limit the use of American property. So I'm not allowed to hire somebody from another country to come onto my property because of these sort of arbitrary immigration restrictions that have to do with that. And that's something that a lot of people forget. I mean, yeah, it's true, most Americans are fairly skeptical of immigration, but most Americans are fairly skeptical of a lot of things. If most Americans were skeptical of computers, that wouldn't be an argument for making computers really all I think. And I think most libertarians would accept that. Somehow when foreigners are brought into it, some people sort of become very skeptical. Another thing that I think is effective sometimes at convincing libertarians to be opposed in immigration is the rule of law argument. So they take a look at the current situation. They see a decent number of unauthorized immigrants. And I think libertarians, you know, they rightly conclude that the rule of law is important for a well-functioning, prosperous and free society. But I think they wrongly conclude that therefore we should enforce the immigration laws as much as possible as they are in the books. And I think that that second part is just wrong. I mean, to give you an example, I mean, the rule of law, multiple definitions of what that means. I mean, Trevor can tell us all about that. But I mean, three broad things that they mean is predictable outcomes, equal application, and consistent with our traditions. You know, in particular, our peculiar Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty in the United States. So it has to basically satisfy all three of those and be consistent with that. But the immigration laws, if you taught anybody, you go to the system or lawyers. I mean, there are virtually no predictable outcomes. They are not applied equally. You hear people with the exact same sort of qualifications. They should be eligible for a green card. But because a bureaucrat checks a box differently or does something else, they get denied. And they're certainly not consistent with our traditions of liberty. And you can go back and read the writings of Jefferson, a Blackstone, a lot of Benjamin Franklin, a lot of sort of the early American Enlightenment writers. I mean, John Locke has an essay about naturalization and about how it's the right of people to move and to alienate their former property and to find new property and to move to different climes or other places. That's sort of a natural right that's understood. Groteus, Hugo Groteus, one of the early proponents of international law, one of a great writer, classical liberal thinker, wrote about the necessity of letting people leave and go someplace else. But in order to leave, you have to have a place to go. That's not Antarctica or the Middle of the Ocean. Yeah, that's not Antarctica or the Middle of the Ocean. Now, I think that's a little bit faulty in some ways. That doesn't mean that every country has to have perfectly open borders. But that means that the country should be a little bit less restrictive in the people they allow to leave. So the question then on the rule of law issue is you have the other people say, well, I'm for immigration. I just want this to be legal immigration and they should get in line. So where's the line? Well, we should also say that one of the obvious problems with the rule of law argument is what if the law's not just? You know, I mean, it's like there was a time when slavery was the law of the land. But to say like, well, that just means we should return runaway slaves until we get go about changing the law. We need to enforce the law before we can fix it. Which is insane. Which is insane. Oftentimes, illegality is the only way that we can live under a series of unjust laws. All of us are doing illegal things all the time. All the time. Not that I want to compare American immigration system to the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps. But there's a story that I go back. You know, Brian Kaplan tells a story about somebody that he met who was imprisoned in both and his whole family was imprisoned in both a Nazi and then a Soviet concentration camp. And Brian asked him which one was worse and he goes, oh, the Nazis by far. And it's like, well, why? And he goes, well, because the Nazis enforced all the rules and they believed in the rules. Meanwhile, the Soviets would let things slip all the time. But the the issue is with current American immigration laws. You know, Ellis Island is closed. There was a line there. I think a real line actually. And there are lines in some places of American immigration law. But generally, if you are not highly skilled, closely related to an American, one of a small number of beneficiaries of the diversity visa, which is only 50,000 a year, 14 million people applied for it last year, but only 50,000 a year are issued, or a refugee or a siley, there is no way for you to enter the United States lawfully to get a green card. A Mexican without a high school diploma who, you know, a younger man probably would, if he went through every process and procedure to get authorized to come to here, it would take him about 130 years under the current wait times and everything to try and get to the country. Yeah, so there's 5,000 green cards set aside for low skilled workers in the United States annually, 5,000. And most of our ancestors came in on low skilled, they came in, they didn't have to come in in the early 20th or 19th century or before then. So if you were to apply American immigration laws in the past, virtually none of us would be here today. Unless our parents were like rocket scientists. Yeah, which is absurd because in 1940, only 12% of Americans had a high school degree. To compare that to current immigrants today, two-thirds have a high school degree, and about half of illegal immigrants have a high school degree in the United States. So just, which is similar to the American workforce in 1965. So I don't know if anybody would call the American workforce in 1965 horribly unskilled. By today's standards they were relatively unskilled. But it's not like we're importing a bunch of serfs from Central Europe who are all literate in the 13th century. These are people who are pretty skilled by international and by historical standards. Another argument that I hear made to restrict immigration, it's one that I find really troubling and off-putting, but it's a common one I think is, look, if the goal is to promote policies that are going to increase liberty, and we're going to do that from within the United States, we're going to try to increase liberty within the United States, immigrants have, it's claimed, these anti-liberty views. New immigrants don't vote for candidates who are for liberty. Or whatever it is. So by allowing those people in and increasing numbers, we are over time going to diminish the amount of liberty that's available to everyone, including them. Yeah, I mean, if you assume that there's no kind of political or civic assimilation, I mean, I guess you can make that argument. I mean, but it's a silly argument and it's quite frankly kind of, I'm not easily offended, but it's kind of an offensive argument, assuming that the only reason why I want immigration is to stack the political deck in my favor. I'm willing to keep people in horrible places unless they're Republicans and then they can come over. Or some other libertarians. It's trying to create like a curly effect. As if the only reason why anybody could legitimately be in favor of immigration as an American is to stack the political deck in your favor is just quite frankly offensive. But immigrants aren't even that, they're not like Stalinists compared to the average American today. And there's much greater differences amongst American voters of different ethnicities, of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and just geographically in the United States are between the average immigrant and the average American. So there's a recent paper by this guy named Hal Pashler of UCSD and he sort of took a look at this and just to give you an example of like affirmative action, U.S. born Americans 53.8% strongly opposed affirmative action compared to 45.9% of immigrants. Now that's a difference, that's 8% point difference like that is something, but does that mean they're going to usher in a new age of like socialism and push us towards central planning? I don't think so. But when you take a look at all the people who support affirmative action in the United States, only 18.3% of Americans do, but about 23.8% of immigrants do. So the differences are relatively small but the funny thing is some of these differences between Americans and immigrants support like the conservative position which is something that you don't hear very often. So they're more in favor of banning certain types of like anti-American literature and libraries. They're more interested in banning like pornography or having restrictions on it. They probably also think that more in line with Republicans that hard work is rewarded in America and it should be encouraged in a general sense. I think that they came here for opportunity and they should be almost more American than maybe privileged white people who have been here for long enough and forgot what it's like to work hard. I won't comment on the privileged white people but in terms of like Pew does surveys about this all the time and they ask if you work really hard in America can you make it? And Hispanic immigrants, Asian immigrants and generally most of their children agree with that statement more so they came here for three or more generations. I also think it's the case that it's I mean I think it's a immoral argument to make that we should restrict immigration based on the beliefs of the immigrants especially for people who consider themselves libertarians who care about rights care about liberty and care about treating people equally and autonomously that to say we're going to restrict the rights of a certain group of people because they don't share the same beliefs we do seems like a deeply deeply anti-libertarian anti-liberty position to take. It's deeply wrong. I mean as a Virginian I don't want to restrict the movement of DC residents into my state even though they're much more likely to you know vote for candidates that I find to be abhorrent. I mean that's just something that I think we can all agree on the use of coercion to keep out people of different opinions is wrong. It seems like a really pernicious form of censorship. It is really pernicious. But I think the place double advocate for a while I think a lot of these pro restrictionist libertarians or people like that they'll say well politics is different you have a very high negative externality to having people vote for these candidates and they don't for big government candidates that they don't bear all the costs for and you sort of you see that stated frequently but I think this doesn't have much to do with the inborn opinions of immigrants. I don't think immigrants are naturally more likely to like big government than other people, other Americans. I think the main problem is that the expressly pro big government party in the United States has been aggressively and successfully courting them for centuries. And Republicans have been alienated for at least 30 years. The supposedly small government Republicans who use you know at least some libertarian rhetoric occasionally when they talk about economic freedom alienates them by being sort of skeptical of immigration, its benefits and using some tactics. What's interesting is in the 19th century with immigration immigrants voted overwhelmingly Democratic as well but that is when the Democratic party was the laze at least the northern Democratic party was the laze fair party a free trade, fewer regulations domestically on business at least the northern Democrats were like that and they switched around the early 1900s to being the sort of big government party but immigrants kept their allegiances and what's interesting is third generation immigrants today using the general social survey data ideologically they align almost equally with all other Americans sort of being conservative, very conservative liberal etc. but they're still more likely to vote Democratic. I think that has more to do with identity politics and successful political strategies than it does to do with sort of some sort of genetic or inborn or cultural like ideology. Also given the fact that just the term immigrants encompasses a huge amount of people, everyone who's not inside this country and saying one thing about them seems a little bit excessive but the one question though that someone would probably be thinking right now listening to this is what about Europe and the old the Markstein type of argument and Aaron says this is a really bad idea to restrict immigration because of their beliefs but you have this idea that Europe is being overrun by Muslims and those Muslims in Europe are not assimilating and very soon they're going to turn Europe into a Muslim world. That's Mark Steimer an entire book about that. America Alone. Yeah which is it's an interesting book. His demographic projections have already failed because there's one thing about trends is that we know they always change that's the one thing we know about them the Muslim birth rate in Europe is decreasing dramatically a lot of immigration in Europe has decreased dramatically and the native born birth rate and the European birth rate has increased actually a little bit. Yeah a little bit so there's this weird cohort effect that occurs in demographics that we can talk about later if you want but what's interesting is Europe does have different issues in the United States one issue is culture so it's very it's much more difficult to assimilate into a European culture some of them it's impossible. And they have a blood borders culture based conception of national identity. So your tribe killed some other tribe in some area settled there 2,000 years ago and to be considered a member of that nation state now you have to be a member of that tribe. So you and I and Aaron if we all immigrated to Germany and learned German and became German citizens and called ourselves Germans, Germans were correct us. They would say no or really this or that we're the opposite here in the United States we get offended when people who come here and want to live here don't call themselves Americans. So we have this soft cultural push because to be American well you can't have a blood definition of American that's absurd. The largest ethnic group in the United States by last name is German at 17% so the notion of American by blood is kind of silly with the exception of maybe Native Americans. So we have a civic conception of what it means to be an American and probably a linguistic conception. I mean English is associated with that and that's not going to change. And that tend to gotten broader over time. Another reason is the welfare state. So Europe has much larger welfare states especially on the low end for like poor for the impoverished public housing things like this and it's much easier to get in many of these countries than it is in the United States. So it is conceivable to immigrate to Europe and in many of these European countries get unwell for immediately as an immigrant stay in public housing, never have to work in a local language and basically be in an ethnic ghetto and have live a pretty poor existence probably better than the place you came from and not have to assimilate at all. In the United States if you're here on a green card you have to work for five years before you can get any kind of means tested welfare benefits in most states and the benefits that you get are relatively small compared to what you can do just by working a little bit here in the United States. So there's sort of this cultural push to assimilate here that's stronger than in Europe because of our history and because of who we are but there's also not this welfare state which has two components which is keeping people separate and not having to assimilate but also selecting people who are more likely to move for welfare benefits. Different type of person. A different type of person, not the type of person who's more likely to want to become part of the United States. That's of course like not to say that most immigrants to Europe or in Europe are bad. I mean most immigrants now in Europe are from other European countries. I mean the Schengen Agreement in 1993 made it legal for every country in the EU to basically have open borders with every other country in the EU and I lived in London for a year and you have enormous number of, I mean London is like the fourth or fifth biggest French city because they're escaping these high tax rates in their own country so there's a lot of like European immigration so it's not just that Europeans are worried about Muslim immigration they are, a lot of them are, but you also have a lot of British people worried about Polish plumbers and you have a lot of people worried about the Bulgarians and Romanians. On January 1st England has to open up, the rest of the EU has to open up its borders to Bulgarians. People are worried about that for a lot of economic reasons. I mean it's estimated that somewhere between 77 and 100,000 Bulgarians may come to England every year for the next 5 to 10 years. Now that's an enormous amount of people for a smaller country like the United Kingdom that sound like much to us Americans, but they're really worried about that and I think a lot of it has to do with their cultural ideas and conservatism and welfare state. So before we get on to what we ought to do to improve immigration policy to bring it both more in line with libertarian principles but also just to make it more effective, what let's try to be charitable for a moment and just ask are there any not necessarily good but certainly better arguments than the ones we've just talked about for heavily restricted immigration. For limiting more than we are now or at least keeping things the way they are. The question I'd like to ask is is there any argument that applies against immigration that doesn't also apply to newborn children? There might be some that are better. If people have children then maybe they take our jobs and all these issues we can talk about. Are these good arguments taking our jobs, cultural change, welfare state, any of those things? Well the economic arguments really aren't any good and this is some of that almost every economist. I mean even George Borjas who is the most pessimistic about the economic benefits of immigration concedes that it's on net very beneficial for the US. He thinks it's small somewhere on the avenue of like 40 to 50 billion dollars a year but he still concedes it's positive. And that doesn't even include the benefit to the immigrants? No they do not include the benefits to the immigrants in a lot of these discussions. They should because when we talk about the benefits of trade we include the benefits to foreigners that we trade with so I think that we should include that. I think the argument that does have the most power is the political externalities argument that we talked about. So it's conceivable if we had more immigration that we had right now that there could be sort of a swamping of the electorate especially if a lot of immigrants could vote and didn't actually politically participate. You could have a lot of sort of bad ideas or more anti-liberty ideas involved in the political process than you currently do right now. But I don't necessarily think that's an argument against restrictions so much as it is about changing the rules of naturalization. That's something that the government does have power over so if you want to be here for five years before you can apply for a citizenship if you want to make it 10 or 15 or 20 years that they're more politically or civically assimilated I think that's a perfectly reasonable argument. But there has to be someone I mean going about the economic argument there's got to be someone out there who's hurt by immigration who has a job right now and I know unions have always been pretty against immigration. You mentioned the people without high school diplomas saw the 4% drop in ways. That's the most pessimistic I mean. But are there people outside of say that group and how many I mean how big is that group? How many people in the U.S. currently don't have high school diplomas? Over the age of 25 about 9%. Okay. So it's not that many I mean it's a lot of numbers but it's a really small percentage of the American population. I mean with every economic large economic scale economic policy shift like this there are going to be winners and losers. I think the challenge is finding out whether the winner is out number the losers and whether the amount they win by is greater than the amount the losers buy the losers lose by. So you know free trade that's the situation and virtually everything that's the situation. But if we're really really worried about the impact on low skilled Americans there are a lot of like cheaper things that we can do to try to help them. If the government has to be involved I don't want to be but if it has to be involved there are a lot of cheaper things that they can do to help that doesn't include locking out foreigners who could see their wages increased by 3 to 15 fold by moving here increasing world GDP increasing their livelihoods as well as the livelihoods of Americans who want to work with them. I mean one simple thing is like hey get a GED there is a number of how much relatively open borders would increase the GDP of the world that's been someone took a hazard a hazarded guess at that. Yes someone did a back of the envelope calculation and Michael Clemens from the center of global development sort of did a literature survey of estimates and he was a simple general equilibrium model so it's real simple but he estimates that if there were open borders and people were allowed to move to higher wages and there are basically no restrictions on that then world GDP would stabilize at 50 to 150% greater than it currently is which is somewhere between about 30 and 90 trillion dollars of additional global output annually. That's amazing. Which and you know as radical of a libertarian as I am almost every sphere I can't think of another policy shift around the world that would have such a big impact on so many people so radically. Yeah because the problem with being in Haiti for example or sub-Saharan Africa is that they don't have it's being in Haiti it's the institutions it's the lack of basic government it's a lack of interesting lack of government here but it's a lack of trust for the core systems misdirected it's a more predatory. Yeah and so letting them come here seems to it seems to me even just standing in the way of them coming here is presumptively immoral. It is you're exerting coercion on people who want to come here and sell their labor in an open market. And there's someone here who wants to buy their labor. Yeah and someone here who wants to buy the products that they make and rent to them and all the different sort of economic exchanges are really standing in that way. I think what you'd see if that policy was ever enacted a lot of countries like Haiti Zimbabwe, Zambia, a lot of these really poor countries with bad institutions basically empty out and become ghost countries and you see this sort of you know some groovy people like Paul Collier who wrote in a recent book about the brain drain you know if we do this and all the bright people in the third world all of the educated people they're all going to leave even if that's happening now that's going to hurt the rest of them. Well that assumes that every person's intellect and productive capacity is partly owned by the society in which they were born and that any sort of benefit to that deserves to be owned at least in part by the people around the place where he was born which is sort of a terrible argument I think ethically an absurd argument but also it just has the virtue of like not being true so factually what we see is when countries like the United Kingdom allow South African nurses for instance to come over the United States allows Filipino nurses you see the number of people in these countries trying to get these degrees skyrocket go up dramatically and not all of them are able to leave I mean if you start an education program at the age of 18 with the intention of getting to the U.S. by the time you graduate at 22 you know maybe life got in your way and you can't leave but you still have those skills so we find out that it actually increases the total skill amount in these countries by having the ability to study and go abroad with those skills and make more money because you've increased the incentive to get that kind of education so if we think that it's presumptively immoral or that's what I think I think you guys agree with me that to stand in the way of someone who's trying to leave a place where they're being oppressed and impoverished and keep them from coming to a place where that's not going to happen that's presumptively immoral so you need to have a good reason for that and if a lot of these reasons don't really flush out so what about open borders you know why don't we have open borders there are some people like Brian Kaplan I know is very big into open borders just makes the pure philosophical argument that there's no good reason to do this but yeah you are not an open borders guy but what about the case for that and where's the problems with that let me just define a term I guess so we can have going forward when I think of open borders I think of the border between Virginia and DC and the idea there's no inspection you know I can walk take the train drive whatever it's very very easy to do that that's what I think of when I think of open borders I do think that there is no justification for blanket bans or blanket restrictions on categories of people but there is good justification for inspections and there are three broad sort of subgroups of types that I think can be legitimately restricted by the state to enter the United States one is violent and property criminals people who either have a severe suspicion of being so or who have been so in the past another group are suspected or actual terrorists or national security concerns like legitimate ones like that I mean that's sort of in the same categories of criminals another is people with deadly and serious communicable diseases so these are three groups of people who we think if a lot of them are allowed in not all of them but a good number of them the danger is significant enough that they will hurt the life, liberty and prior property of other Americans either intentionally or unintentional intentionally to such a degree that having inspections I think would produce a better outcome for Americans and for most immigrants by the way who want to come here then having totally open borders and is that what Ellis Island pretty much was that's pretty much what Ellis Island had some other stuff but that's pretty much what Ellis Island's predecessor Castle Island was I mean they checked you for diseases they checked you to see if you were covered in prison tattoos and that was about it there was issues with terrorism actually back in the early 20th century people will forget about so you know the present wave of terrorism is not something that's new or unique to us Italian anarchists Italian anarcho-communists you know the Gallianists they blew up like 38 bombs in 1919 they tried to kill the attorney general they blew up a bomb on Wall Street they did and that was the time when you had a communist revolution going on in another country you had world leaders assassinated by communists sharing the same ideology including an American president in the recent past including you know Azar of Russia and other world leaders you had the LA Times building blown up and I think it was 1910 like the largest terrorist attack of that time in the United States by a bunch of union communist thugs so this was like a very real threat that people were very much aware of and it was gaining traction overseas so it's not like some new thing but just to put it into sort of perspective like this terrorist needle in a haystack the government the FBI has an integrated automatic fingerprint identification system called IAFIS of known of criminals known as suspected terrorists etc 73,000 known as suspected terrorists are in there out of a total of 70 million people that's one tenth of one percent of people who are in that system are accused or suspected of being terrorists and to put it in sort of a more interesting perspective in the decade since 9-11 there are only 37 deportation cases on terrorism related grounds 37 deportation cases out of a total of about 3.4 million 3.4 million deportations to cases total but only 37 of them were on terrorism related grounds now it doesn't mean they were convicted of terrorism that just means that they were suspected enough to be able to get a deportation case against them so I believe that equals to 0.001% of all deportations in the decade after 9-11 happened to do with terrorism but you know terrorism can cause a significant amount of harm and kill people so I think that there is an argument for some inspections to try to root out those types of people okay so it seems like we should have you know these low restrictions for both our benefit because I like having immigrants here you know Italians bring Italian food Germans bring German food, Mexican food it's not just the food but they bring culture they enrich our society I'm really glad that I don't just have to eat you know horrible midwestern food bangers and mash yeah that's a good example this really is just about food this is just about food for me so we should let these people in it would help them, it would help us and we should have these small restrictions and then someone would clearly say okay well then we're gonna have 500 million people or however many million people come to America and there's just not enough room we can't have that many people here it would be a shock to the system of America where people would be living in Hoovervilles on the side of the road it's just unworkable we can't have 800 million people in America what do we say to that? well I don't think they're right all of the constraints on growth in the United States especially property development come from the government that's why you see places like San Francisco being so expensive there are geographic limitations but you can build up, you can build down and you can build more densely so you have places where American cities are not allowed to do that so if let's say we had a system like this I'll give you an example Gallup does a poll every couple of years where they ask people around the world like do you want to immigrate, where do you want to go? about 150 million people said they want to come to the United States so let's say we do this policy and we get 100 million more people in a relatively short amount of time well I don't think they're going to be drawn to a lot of these places that are crowded already because of poor provision of public services I think a lot of them places like Houston, like Dallas like San Antonio, cities in the Phoenix cities in the Southwest where that are relatively less regulated in terms of expansion and we'll be able to accommodate them much more easily and it's also funny to note that this notion of crowding is only brought up in places where there's a public provision of these goods and services you know how many store owners complain about crowding, well that's an opportunity to charge higher prices or increase output and charge the same price and make a lot more money and increase profits so it's only in areas like electricity, housing traffic is going to be horrible traffic is going to be horrible we charge people for using the roads so that's sort of the argument but I don't think there's sort of any innate natural number carrying capacity for the United States in terms of the number of people I think that determines that's determined by our standard of living by how many of them that we can profitably employ and how many of them want to be employed over here it's determined by the market by supply and demand. So the flow of immigrants itself would not just it would not just it would be affected it would not just be a constant stream as the conditions of the United States change people say well I'd like to go there because there's opportunity there. Yeah. And we've seen that historically I mean in 1907 when the stock market crashed and you had a depression in the United States we had open borders with Europe but immigration went to net zero within a year because there just weren't that many opportunities here relatively. I think in the first decade of this century too that Mexican immigration was zero wasn't it? Well from 2006 to 2010 net Mexican migration to the US was zero because the housing market were a good number of them were working because they have lower skills but it's relatively high pain collapsed in the United States no jobs they don't come their benefits increased over that time they didn't come for those a lot of them returned and what you see is now that the economy is recovering a little bit you do see numbers of unauthorized immigrants finally recovering to what they were pre great recession and perhaps starting to expand a little bit and you see the same trend of legal immigration both in this country historically and over time I mean people don't just go because there's not a pot of gold waiting for you the second you get into America you have to have a job people who are here to be able to get a job you have to know how to go about that you have to know how to rent an apartment you know there's a lot of things you have to know a lot of barriers information and then cost about things you're leaving behind yeah and there's a lot of things so it's a it's a supply and demand can I ask about this this issue this I mean government gives the people who are its citizens stuff I mean that's why we we have a government it gives us you know whether that's enforcement of the laws of protections and some people argue it it's obligated to give us welfare state and all of that and how does that how those sorts of concerns like what a government is duty bound to do for the people who live under it how does that apply to this immigration issue because are we talking are we you know we can make the case that we should allow people into this country but then are we then obligated to provide them with these sorts of services that government does whether it's welfare or just access to courts or schools or police or whatever else I mean I don't think we're bound to offer those things to anybody like including you know newborns a lot of those things are to new people who enter society by whatever means I don't think the government is bound to it I don't think that we as taxpayers are obligated to supply them through our resources there then becomes a question of like what should it do what's optimal for it to do like what are you know am I I'm a consequentialist utilitarian for instance you know I want the government to provide some access to courts but the notion you're talking about a citizenship you know what rights obligations responsibilities should somebody who comes here have citizenship is something that I am totally flexible about in terms of being able to naturalize if you want to pass a law that says we can have meant much more immigration to the US but you have to live here for 40 years before you can naturalize I think that's a totally fair trade-off I think that's something that almost every immigrant would want to do if it meant that they could finally come here nobody when I say nobody but very few people come to the United States because of the opportunity to vote in American election okay nobody thinks oh man I can't wait to get in there to vote for you know Obama or to register as a Republican or a Democrat like that's not why people move thousands of miles from their native cultures their families the places where they grew up and are comfortable with they come to the United States they come here for economic opportunity that explains the vast majority of immigration throughout history with some of it being explained by like refugee and other sort of conflict but once they get here aren't they going to want and potentially demand a say in the policies that are then affecting them they also demand schools and everything else too first they want that right they are and you know there are institutional limitations to what we can do currently in the United States so we're not you're at the decision in 1982 said that you can't you can't you can't exclude somebody who's an illegal immigrant or the child of an illegal immigrant from public schools the states can't yeah the states can't do that so you can't charge tuition either that was another issue that was brought up to cover that you can't necessarily exclude them from a lot of the courts there are due process is open to immigrants both unlawful and lawful immigrants a lot of unlawful immigrants do not take advantage of it because they fear the court system and the police but I think it's in our interest to at least extend some court protection to apply national defense for instance to the immigrants who are here in the United States and we can't really separate it to do that some police protection but in terms of making special accommodation no absolutely not and I don't think you see a lot of agitation for a lot of that stuff with the exception of someone authorized immigrants who are here already but I think the reason why you see so much agitation for it is because there is literally no way for them to do it now so if there was a way that was long that was difficult that was laborious the required tests I don't think you'd see that because there would be a goalpost at the end of the tunnel now there's no goalpost you know there's no light at the end of the tunnel I mixed up my metaphor there but there's no there's no light at the end of the tunnel so I think if you provide just some of that you'll get rid of almost all that and of course the legal immigration is partially a product of how difficult it is legally illegal immigration they always that's not a constant flow at all I think if you liberalize the pathways that are legal immigration then you don't need as much border defense right yeah absolutely I mean unauthorized immigration is a substitute for legal immigration so when you make legal immigration impossible or difficult you're going to get illegal immigration that's just sort of the black market natural response to that the go off the issue that Aaron said one issue about citizenship that is important is citizenship by birth or birthright citizenship I think that's much more important I think that is very much worth defending and is a very important part of our institutions I mean it goes back a thousand years about common law just sangui and that's law of the blood so we have just so lie so law of the soil so anybody born here that the government has jurisdiction over which include the legal immigrants we have jurisdiction over them the government has jurisdiction over them because the government has power over them that's why it deports them so I just want to put that out there for anybody who might say otherwise but it's important part of cultural and civic assimilation that people born here are citizens you take a look at places like Germany and Japan we have generations of people born whose parents were unlawful immigrants who are not citizens themselves they don't feel attached to the countries they're in they certainly have no access to the courts or the police and what you see is a very high incidence of crime you see a lot of sort of attachment to weird often radical political ideologies I'm not talking about libertarianism but I mean like communism or islamist political parties that sort of you know talk about the victims and they are victims of like a really bad legal system so it's understandable that a lot of them would go to that so I think birthright citizenship is like vital to long-term successful assimilation of immigrants in their descendants interesting so I wanted to ask about some of the people some of the dirty backstory this is something Alex and I have talked about before but the backstory of some of the restrictionist of immigration we talked about the eugenicists as some of the reasons that people started getting anti-immigrant but there's also the sort of environmentalist population control people so I asked about what's the comparing capacity of the United States but a lot of these places are people who organizations who have their genesis in population control measures that some of them come from environmental concern yeah so that's one of the interesting immigration brings together a lot of different sort of interest groups on different sides of the issue both for and against so what we have now is the three main anti-immigration groups in the United States and the Center for Immigration Studies CIS they all have their origins and being founded by a fellow named John Tanton John Tanton was a he is I think he's still alive he's very elderly and sick right now but he was an ophthalmologist in the state of Michigan he was an avid environmentalist and part of this sort of population control environmentalism you know bought into the population bomb he thought that people were destroying the natural environment so we needed population growth restrictions and he saw immigration as a way of increasing the population of the United States now it seems like just a distribution of population so it wouldn't matter but his argument was if immigrants come here and become wealthier they're going to consume more they're going to damage the environment more they're going to damage the planet more you do all the damaging as part of this sort of anti-capitalist environmental extremism this sort of population control environmentalism was like died out since the 70s but he started these three groups in the 70s and 80s based off of this so he got a lot of money and founded them and they were relatively unsuccessful at getting a lot of environmentalists and left us on board even though Tanton himself was involved with the Sierra Club he had zero population growth all these different sort of environmental councils he was relatively unsuccessful at convincing left wingers to go along with it in terms of trying to decrease American immigration sort of change their tactics in the 90s to try to focus on conservatives and they've had a little bit more success but they're really wary of the environmentalist origins of the organization the environmentalists on the board all this other stuff so that is sort of an interesting cultural immigration movement in modern America is that it has a lot of its foundings in that now you'll see a lot of people at these organizations Ferris CIS and Numbers USA who are not population control advocates personally I mean most of them aren't they may not even know about the origins well they probably know now because there was a report written by a fellow named Mario Lopez earlier this year that was about this sort of exposition and they got a lot of flack about it so it's just a weird sociology I mean you have until the year 2000 labor unions in the United States were always opposed to immigration always every situation I mean the only way that unions can bargain for higher wages above the marginal value product of their workers is by decreasing the supply of workers available to employers so immigration of course increases supply but unions are in such desperate situation that they are starting to argue for immigration reform since 2000 as long as they can unionize with the president but they're also they're being deceptive about it so they want to do it to try to unionize the people who are of the same ethnic and racial groups that work in these types of jobs who are the descendants of these immigrants who have a more favorable view so it's partly political in terms of membership gaining in the United States but their rhetorical difference is they're in favor of legalization and family immigration but they're like steadfastly opposed to future worker immigration which is of course why most people come here but they don't want anybody else to come in who could potentially work So if I've understood everything that we've discussed so far it's that immigration is a benefit I mean a huge benefit to the immigrants and also a benefit to those of us who live in this country it's gonna it's gonna raise GDP it's going to help us out economically it's gonna bring these cultural goods and that the concerns that are raised against immigration are either misplaced entirely or would be better addressed by doing something other than restricting the flow of immigrants is that Absolutely I mean that's sort of the broad impact and So where do we go from there then I guess is that like aside from you know what are the kind of realistic next steps that we should take to address the immigration issue I think the next steps are gonna be some sort of guest worker visa program to allow people to come into the country lawfully going forward to work temporarily in the United States I don't think we're ready yet to reopen at least I have not been successful enough in convincing my fellow Americans in making the case that we should really reopen in Ellis Island so we're not there yet so I think you know some small baby steps like a guest worker visa program maybe the idea of charging for an unlimited number of guest workers visas so charge say $10,000 for a 5 or 10 year work permit Charge the immigrant or the business or the business you know charge anybody who wants to sponsor somebody you know if you want to sign a contract with an employer or family or whatever to bring people over still be better I mean not the optimal solution but it's so bad now so bad now I mean that would be sort of like a tariff and you know some libertarian might say oh well that's less than perfect we shouldn't go for that I have to get that criticism a lot but I like to say you know and Adam Smith and the wealth of nations he argued for an export tax on wool and Adam Smith is like the founder of like modern free trade how to think about like modern free trade a huge proponent of it he didn't argue for export taxes on wool because he thought that that was the optimal policy he argued for it because there was an improvement over policy at the time which was to a total ban and restriction on wool exports so he thought that as a way to get toward a marginally better policy he was right in doing so so I think we can do a lot of that with immigration there's a lot of small things to along the margin that we can improve I mean one of the benefits of moving toward a pricing system like a tariff which I want to differentiate from an auction you know they're pretty different things so a pricing system one of the great things that moving toward that is it allows us to argue about one thing and allows us to argue about the price that we should charge for people to come into the United States and to focus on that and we have to argue about local prevailing wages that they're paid the impact on Americans in this regulation we have to argue about the types of industries and where they're located because there are different rules for different industries whether it's zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 occupations where they are in the O-net classification how they impact wages and probably going forward some sort of labor market complex labor market formula as well as education tests everything like that so if we just focus to arguing about one thing there's a lot of evidence that when this was done with trade when they just focused on tariffs and sort of excluded quotas and everything else you're actually able to argue down the level of government restriction much more easily and effectively because there's not some sort of back way that you can increase restrictions while on the surface decreasing them so generally speaking are you optimistic about something right now the system would you call it broken no I think the system actually works as it's intended it's highly restrictive so I mean to be broken it has to do something that's not intended to do and to be frank like the number of unlawful immigrants in the United States is like relatively low compared to what you would expect given the differences in wages across countries so given from the restrictionist perspective if I was a restrictionist I'd be pretty happy because the system is working pretty well in terms of being broken I think it's broken in the sense that it doesn't serve the best interests of Americans I don't think it serves the best interests of immigrants and I think it's radically out of line with our traditions of individual liberty and free markets I want to thank our colleague Alex Narasta for joining us today on Free Thoughts and thank you for listening if you have any questions you can find me on Twitter at A-R-O-S-S-P and you can find me on Twitter at TC Burris TCBURUS and thank you again for having me on you can find Alex Narasta at Twitter at AlexNarasta A-L-E-X-N-O-W R-A-S-T-E-H and to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org