Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again
2015-12-19 · Guest: Alex Nowrasteh (Cato Institute) · 52:15
Principles and facts of immigration policy
Bob Zadek interviews Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute to discuss the principles and facts behind immigration policy. They explore the economic benefits of open borders, debunk myths about national security and welfare usage, and analyze the historical and political context of immigration restrictions in the United States.
Topics: Immigration, Open Borders, National Security, Economics, Amnesty, Welfare State, Entrepreneurship, History of Immigration
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Alex Nowrasteh
Principles of Immigration Policy [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM. Thanks so much for listening. We are the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. We are proudly the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation at any time. All calls, all points of view are, as always, welcome.
When you watch the presidential debates, be they Republican or Democratic, the issue that always seems to be front and center is the issue of immigration. Everybody has a strongly held opinion on immigration. Immigration is seen to be the source of so many of our problems, from national security to economics. The problem is the opinions expressed in the mass media, the opinions expressed by the candidates, are, to say the least, fact-starved. The opinions, the conversation, is without factual support and, most importantly, emotional and, most important of all, without core principles.
I’d like to spend—invite you to spend—the next hour with myself and my guest, Alex Nowrasteh. Alex is a scholar at Cato and a student of the issue of immigration. He has devoted his life to studying immigration. This conversation will be fact-based and principle-based to help you, whatever your point of view is, to help you see if your position can be supported. Alex, thanks so much for joining me this morning.
Alex Nowrasteh: Thanks for having me, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, the conversation on immigration is so distressingly emotional and devoid of facts and principles. Now, just to orient our audience this morning on the issue of immigration, what in your opinion should be the principles—the principles—that govern our immigration policy? And then we can set about seeing, once we establish the principles, we’ll set about and see what policies further those principles.
Alex Nowrasteh: I think the number one principle is that people have universal rights to life, liberty, and private property. And one of those rights is to be able to use that life, liberty, and private property as they see fit in mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges with people, no matter where they are in the world. So the default position I think we need to have is that folks, immigrants, need to be able to travel internationally to set up shop anywhere, to work anywhere, with a minimal number amount of government restrictions.
And the burden needs to be on the government to show that individuals or perhaps groups of people should be barred from coming. And there are a few reasons why we can do that. I think national security is a legitimate reason for barring some individuals. Criminals, people who are violent and property criminals, I think is another good reason. People who represent a health threat. But I think that the large number of reasons given, such as economic protectionism or other reasons like that, or cultural homogeneity, promoting cultural homogeneity, are not reasons that can be supported for barring immigrants from coming to the United States.
National Security vs. Economic Benefits [04:13]
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, what you said is really important because—all of it is important—but I’d like to invite our listeners to focus on the issue that first of all, when you said that the right to freely travel is a human right, you aren’t limiting that only to American citizens. That inherent in that is a recognition that all humans ought to have the right to free movement and to improve their lives by moving from place to place. Now, to the extent that a listener believes that’s not a human right, they will part company with us. So we start with that principle.
Second of all, the second important point you made is that yes, there is a right to travel, but we have to be sensible about this. And therefore, there is a trade-off. And the question is, as Franklin famously put it, there is this tension between security and liberty. And how much are we going to allow people the freedom to come here but and give up security as a basis? There is a tension between the two. And the question is how much security and how much liberty? And therefore, we have to understand how much security are we surrendering by opening up—and we’ll get into what that means—opening up the borders. So tell us about—and you have studied this issue perhaps more than anybody else—tell us about the tension between security and somewhat open borders and what the facts are about the loss of security by allowing somewhat open borders.
Alex Nowrasteh: So I think we can take a look at the post-9/11 world in the United States as a great starting point. Since then, since 9/11, there have been on average three murders every year in the United States committed by Islamic jihadists, by terrorists who have come in. And most of these folks have come in from abroad. About half of them have come in from abroad, but you can trick the numbers to make it seem like a little bit more. So let’s assume 75% of them are Islamic terrorists who are foreign-born people coming to the United States.
Looking at general sort of basic actuarial tables and taking the worst possible cost from these, that means that those three murders a year cost the United States about $50 million, cost the economy about $50 million every year. Let’s double that number to $100 million to take account of other costs that are going on. Economists have estimated that the yearly gain from immigration to the United States is $200 billion a year. With a cost from terrorism of about $75 million a year. So the cost of, let’s say if we were to do a total moratorium, stop all immigration, that would cost about 2,000 times as much as the benefits from increased safety.
Methodology and Risk Assessment [07:50]
Bob Zadek: So now, those statistics, of course, everybody in public life and in the media and in the political world quotes statistics. They quote numbers, often made up or questionable numbers. Tell us somewhat about the methodology by which that calculation was made.
Alex Nowrasteh: Sure. So I got the numbers of the Americans killed by Islamic terrorists in the United States from the New America Foundation, which is a Washington, D.C., sort of non-partisan think tank that tracks national security issues. They also track all other deaths by other types of terrorists in the United States per year. So there’s like, for instance, 48 deaths since 9/11 of domestic terrorists only, sort of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, things like that. So they track those numbers annually.
And then the $200 billion number comes from a paper from economist Benjamin Powell, who is an economist at Texas Tech University in West Texas, where he tried to estimate the rent-seeking costs of a moratorium on immigration and combined those with the economic benefits annually from immigration to the United States to come up with a number that was $236 billion, I believe, in total. But I rounded it down to make it easier for calculation purposes. So my calculation basically underestimates the cost of such a moratorium and exaggerates the benefits of it so that I could try to get sort of the fairest way of viewing this as possible. I wanted to be as charitable to the other side as I possibly could.
Bob Zadek: So now we have, in effect, a question to put to the American public. Are you willing to strip the economy of about $200 billion annually in order to possibly—and we’ll get to this in a second—save a few lives, which probably wouldn’t be saved anyway because the jihadist would simply find another way to accomplish their goals, perhaps? But is that a trade-off any rational American would be willing to make? And I dare say the answer is no.
So therefore, if you look at—and it might seem callous to reduce the conversation to economics, but you have to reduce it to something. You have to have some rational basis to form an opinion. And a rational basis is cost to the economy. Now, one can say perhaps, “Well, even one life, it’s not worth it.” But that’s kind of silly because the amount of money we have to spend in any walk of life to save one life is enormous because we have to affect the behavior of all citizens. So that concept is sort of silly, I dismiss it. So on the basis of a rational, objective measure, the denying or closing the border to accomplish a national security goal cannot be defended. Is that a fair conclusion?
Alex Nowrasteh: I think it is a fair conclusion. And I’d like to point out that a lot of libertarians and conservatives understand that reasoning perfectly well when it comes to environmental risk. So they hear liberals or environmentalists talk about the danger from some chemical, and then conservatives look at the numbers, or free marketeers, and they say, “Oh, wait, the chance of dying from this is, you know, one in five million, one in ten million. The benefits, though, are really high. It’s just not worth banning this chemical.” Or we see it in the gun debate. I myself am a gun owner. There is a certain risk to owning firearms, but I think a lot of the data shows that there’s a bigger risk to not doing so. So we take a look and we weigh these things, and we realize that in these things that we’re defending, these issues that we’re defending, the value of human life is not infinite. If it was infinite, none of us would ever leave the house. So clearly, I think we know that’s true by fact. I just am asking that we apply these same reasoning skills that we apply toward environmentalism or gun ownership also to the issue of national security and immigration.
San Bernardino and the K-1 Visa [13:47]
Bob Zadek: And of course, there’s been a lot of press about the San Bernardino killings of a few weeks ago. And of course, that speaks very little about immigration because only one of the two perpetrators of that crime, of that 14-person murder, was implicated in the immigration system at all. The other was sort of self-radicalized or radicalized while here, whatever may have happened. So it is almost that whole San Bernardino issue has just about nothing to do with immigration. It shouldn’t even be discussed under the subject of immigration. It simply was a crime.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, I mean, we can talk about that in more detail. I mean, the Syed Farook, who was the name of the fellow, he was born in the United States who carried out the terrorist attack. His wife, Tashfeen Malik, came from overseas. She came in on a fiancé visa, called a K-1 visa. There have been about 600,000 of these K-1 visas issued in the United States since 1981. And of those visas, one person on them has committed a terrorist attack, and it is this woman. So one out of 600,000, apparently, based on this vast data set and years and years of experience that we have, is the risk that we’ve had so far. So it’s a very—relative to a lot of other visas that we have in the United States—it’s a very safe one.
The Political Landscape [15:47]
Bob Zadek: Now, the candidates, of course, we try as we might, we can’t ignore the fact that there are two presidential primaries going on, as tiresome as that process is. And the candidates seem to be almost speaking as one, with Rand Paul possibly being an exception, about the issue of immigration and specifically immigration by Muslims into this country or immigration by people from certain countries rather than others. Can you summarize for us—and it’s very hard to do, Alex—the position of the leading candidates in both parties on the issue of immigration?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, so this is pretty broad-brushed to paint with, and I think we should always take into account that at this stage of the campaigns, people are just saying whatever they need to say to get elected. So it’s hard to actually look into their hearts. I’ll start with Donald Trump, he’s the obvious one. He basically wants to put a moratorium on almost all immigration to the United States, as far as we can tell, based on the statements that he’s made and based on his position paper that his campaign published back in August.
The position of Ted Cruz has changed so much over the last three years that I have almost no idea where he currently stands. Back in 2013, he was in favor of legalizing current undocumented immigrants without a path to citizenship, so like a permanent green card. He wanted to increase the number of highly skilled immigrants by five-fold into the United States. So he was a pretty interesting guy. Now he seems to be backing off his support for more skilled immigration, so he seems to have changed.
In the other Republican field, I guess Jeb Bush has always been supportive of comprehensive immigration reform. And Rand Paul, I can’t really peg him. He always goes back and forth on this issue. He introduced an act earlier this year called the SECURE Act, which would have substantially limited green cards and refugees being issued to people from majority-Muslim nations around the world. So that’s where the Republicans stand.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has been all over the map over her entire career on this issue. In the early 2000s, when she was a senator, she was a bit of a restrictionist. Since then, she sort of just toes whatever the major position is in the Democratic Party, so she’s moderately pro-immigration reform. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has been an immigration restrictionist his entire career. He had an interview recently with the website Vox where he said that open borders would destroy wages for Americans and is basically a Koch brothers-funded conspiracy, is what he said. He has since then changed his position a little bit, so he’s much more supportive of legalizing undocumented immigrants and hasn’t said anything about stopping legal immigration yet. So I think that’s where the major candidates stand on the issue.
Bob Zadek: And just as an aside, you mentioned this, I want to make sure our friends out there understand it. Sanders’ anti-immigration position is much more founded in his somewhat strange view of economics rather than national security.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, he’s got sort of a much more union-focused, sort of old-school Democratic view about immigrants coming in and taking our jobs and impoverishing the middle class. It’s sort of the same argument that he uses in his anti-China, anti-trade rhetoric.
Bob Zadek: So Sanders’ position is not really founded in national security issues, as is allegedly the other major candidates for the nomination. His position is purely economic.
Labor Markets and Economic Impact [18:09]
Bob Zadek: And of course, on the issue of economics, Alex, as you know, because you have written so much on this issue, before the San Bernardino murders of a couple of weeks ago and before some of the national security issues, the opposition to immigration, the “close the border” crowd, was much more founded in—allegedly founded in—economics, in sort of protecting jobs as if it’s a zero-sum game. And it was felt that allowing immigrants here is going to somehow harm the U.S. economy. And that’s where you have done, Alex, so much work. Tell us about—you mentioned it briefly before—how immigrants affect both ways, if there is a both ways. What is the effect of immigration on the U.S. economy?
Alex Nowrasteh: So immigrants generally just expand the supply side of the economy. They make it possible for more things to be built because immigrants are workers and entrepreneurs and inventors and investors. But they also increase the demand side of the economy. As consumers and as customers, they buy a lot of the products that either other immigrants make or other Americans make. So by having more immigrants in the U.S., we basically see a larger expansion of the U.S. economy.
So when you drill down into it, though, you can see, well, do immigrants compete with Americans for jobs? And the general answer is no, because immigrants have different—most immigrants have different skills than most Americans. So immigrants tend to be either very low-skilled on the low end—you think maybe illegal immigrants who are Mexican—and on the high end, they tend to be very skilled. Sort of out by you in Silicon Valley, a lot of Indian, Chinese, East Asian immigrants with engineering or computer skills background. Most Americans, though, are in the middle. They are between those extremes. They have some college or a college education, but they’re not on either extreme of those of the skill distribution. So automatically off the bat, immigrants and Americans aren’t really competing with each other.
And then when you drill down to it even more, immigrants and natives who have the same level of skills or the same level of education have different skills. And the number one skill that is different is language ability, English language ability. So what happens is lower-skilled immigrants come in and they push lower-skilled Americans up the distribution of wages ladder. The best example of this is a restaurant. Low-skilled immigrants in restaurants do the jobs that don’t require communication with the customers. They are the busboys, they work in the kitchen, they’re the janitors. While the low-skilled Americans are the ones who are the waiter, the waitress, and the hostess. 30 years ago, those low-skilled Americans would be washing dishes. Now they’re serving customers and making a lot more money. So that seems to be the general effect in the U.S. economy.
Bob Zadek: So in other words, now, putting aside the fact that even if—even if—the immigrants were competing for the same jobs, what most Americans don’t realize is that the benefit to us Americans is good because if wages are lower, then the cost of stuff we buy, whether it’s goods or services, is lower. So therefore, it keeps the cost of living down. While it’s harmful to the person who now—or the native-born, the American—who now has to compete for a job and accept a lower wage, well, that’s just too bad because that’s the market value of his or her skills.
Alex Nowrasteh: And we also—and we also—just need to keep into in mind, though, like how few people there are who are Americans who are who are losers in that skill level. So when we take a look at occupations, there are certain jobs where the wages have gone down a lot due to immigration, such as working in agriculture, some other low-skilled areas where the wages definitely have fallen due to immigration. But what we’ve seen is that Americans have moved out of those industries and into more highly paid industries, largely because of immigrants taking those jobs at the bottom and pushing them up.
Bob Zadek: And so—so therefore, any way you slice it, while you can identify some American who is negatively affected economically by immigrants, the overwhelming majority of Americans are positively affected. So if you focus on the one, I’ll say victim, but victim is the wrong word, but the one person who’s adversely affected and you don’t focus on the hundreds of thousands who are benefiting, you get a very distorted view.
Historical Context and Restrictions [23:23]
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, of course, a lot of the issue about immigrants and jobs is focused on a concept—we have a minute to go, but and we’ll finish this after the break—but it’s this concept of “immigrants are taking my job.” And I reject the concept that anybody owns or has a right to his or her job. You only will have your job if you are the best person who is willing to work for the lowest wage. That is all that makes a job your job. And for Americans to shy away from competition when our country was founded on a capitalist competitive system is simply un-American.
America’s had a very checkered history on immigration. Immigration is a very interesting historical issue. We start with, going back to the founding, when of course we are, as everybody is fond of saying, we are a nation of immigrants. And we have had totally open borders till around the 1880s. And while the immigrants who came here weren’t necessarily automatically embraced, we have had a history of racism and bigotry, and that is simply—I don’t mean to dismiss it, but I say somewhat discouragingly that seems to be part of human nature. But forget about the views that individuals had privately as Americans as being here first, but as a matter of policy, we have always opened the borders until around the 1880s. And then we started the exclusionary process. And of course, until the 1880s or thereabouts, we had incredible growth, and there’s no dispute the growth was directly related to immigration. And isn’t there a correlation between economic growth and immigration?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, historically there is a big correlation. In fact, I would say it’s a causation that runs initially in one direction. So initially we have a lot of economic growth in the United States. The Industrial Revolution has taken off here in the mid-1800s. And you have, as a result of that, a sort of increasing stream of immigrants from Europe, from places like Germany and Ireland. Although Ireland is a little different, a lot of them came because they’re fleeing a famine. But you had this sort of steady stream increasing from all these places across Europe to feed the Industrial Revolution, as well as some people moving out to the frontiers. So you have a lot of Nordic immigrants moving out and settling places like Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Dakotas. Germans going into Missouri and the Midwest. A lot of Irish going to the East Coast in the cities.
And then this begins to change a little bit in the 1880s. 1870s and 1880s, we see a lot of Chinese immigrants coming in. Famously they work on the railroads and mining out West, but they also diversify into agriculture, all different types of services in San Francisco, most importantly. And as a result of that, they passed sort of the some of the first anti-immigration laws nationally, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which became law in 1882, which did exactly like it says: it excluded all Chinese immigrants from the United States.
This law coincided also with a change in the type of European immigrants who were coming here. So instead of getting people from Northern and Western Europe, the center of immigration started to shift South and East. So we started to get a lot of Italians, a lot of Greeks, and a lot of Eastern Europeans—Poles, Russians—with a very, very heavy percentage of them being Jewish fleeing a lot of the persecution going on in the Russian Empire at the time. And we see this trend accelerate such that by 1920, immigration is dominated by Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, and other groups from Southern and Eastern Europe. And as a result of that and the growing eugenics movement in the United States, as well as the influence of labor unions, Congress passed a number of laws in the 1920s that restricted immigration, the numbers of immigrants, specifically discriminated against those from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.
The Dillingham Commission [29:18]
Bob Zadek: And it should be mentioned that all of these various exclusionary laws were not based upon any core principle other than bigotry, other than dislike. There was no fact-findings that supported any of these laws. So they were pretty ugly stuff, and they were not principle-based unless you want to cite ugly principles as the basis. They were not principle-based and they were not economic-based or security-based.
Alex Nowrasteh: And I want to say that there was a commission that was done between about 1907 and 1911 called the Dillingham Commission. And this was one of these congressional-led commissions that investigated immigration, tried to come up with reasons. But it was stacked entirely with anti-immigration activists, labor union people, and academics. There was only one person on the entire commission who was supportive of immigration. And at the time, people realized that the facts they were producing, the “quote facts” unquote that were produced by this commission, were generally unsupportable and garbage.
I mean, just to give you an example, they argued that Jewish immigrants, the children of Jewish immigrants in the United States, had an IQ of about 66, which would put them in the category of being severely mentally disabled, and that this was a genetic predisposition and that Jewish immigrants and their descendants would never, ever be able to rise above basically being mentally handicapped. That is the type of facts that they were using at that time.
Bob Zadek: And that is just one piece of the ugly history of immigration legislation in the U.S. It has never been based upon fact. It has always been based upon the crudest form of bigotry or just protecting jobs from competition. In other words, protecting the few at the expense of the many. And most importantly to me, the sacrifice of what I consider to be some of America’s first principles, which is the right to or the supporting of the freedom of travel from place to place and giving people an opportunity to make their lives better.
Alex Nowrasteh: That’s absolutely right. And I think we also need to make a distinction between naturalization and immigration. So naturalization is when you become a citizen, you can vote, you can be fully participating in politics. Just being an immigrant, though, doesn’t mean that you have those rights or those abilities. So just because we had this sort of open system that allowed people to come here doesn’t mean that we handed out citizenship to everybody who came here. It was a long process to become a citizen. It took years back in the 19th century to be able to do it. It takes years today to be able to do it. So it’s important, I think, to lay out that distinction. We allow people to come here and work and live, but the government has always been more restrictive on who it allows to vote, too.
Immigrants as Entrepreneurs [32:49]
Bob Zadek: And of course, as I have observed on prior shows, we support—everybody in public life at least gives lip service to supporting entrepreneurship and independence and improving your lives. And of course, I think it’s easy—no one can disagree with the fact that immigrants are the ultimate entrepreneurs. If entrepreneurship means betting your—as they say in the closing phrase of the Declaration of Independence—betting your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor, betting everything on coming to America to make a go of it. When you have language barriers, you’re not a citizen, you probably have very little money, you’re rolling the dice just to make lives better for your children. They are the supreme entrepreneurs. And therefore, as a group, they have the values and the motivation and the temperament to be exactly the kind of economic players we want and I dare say need in this country. And also, Alex, aren’t there statistics about the percentage of entrepreneurship filled by immigrants versus native Americans?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, so the Kauffman Foundation puts out statistics every year about the number of businesses founded by immigrants versus natives. And they find that immigrants are twice as likely to start a business in any given year than a native-born American is, which is, by the way, remarkable because Americans are known the world over for being entrepreneurs who are willing to take a risk and roll the dice.
Bob Zadek: And so here we are denying access to the people who embody—embody more than native-borns statistically—embody our the economic qualities that have made America the economic engine that it has been.
Amnesty and Criminal Justice Reform [34:53]
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, we have the issue that is always being discussed, is being discussed by the candidates with total irrationality, is this issue of amnesty. The number quoted is there are 11 million undocumented residents living here, people who are “illegal immigrants.” I put that in quotes because I’m not even sure exactly what it means. But there are the 11 million or whatever that number might be. Now, tell us about the issue of amnesty and what you feel should be done to have what is now an unresolved issue, how it should be resolved.
Alex Nowrasteh: So amnesty has really become a swear word, especially in the Republican primary, and it’s really unfortunate. We’ve seen in the past we’ve had numerous amnesties for immigrants going back to the 1920s. And an amnesty for these types of laws is basically an admission that the law does not work as it’s written. It’s a fantasy piece of legislation. Our immigration laws are fantastical in the sense that they are going to be successful at separating people from the economic opportunities that are here in this country. I think we should know looking at history that that never works out and is definitely not working out this way. I think ideally what should happen is that those undocumented immigrants who are not violent or property offenders and national security threats should be able to come forward and ideally get a work permit and a path to citizenship eventually if they want it. I think that’s the best way, the easiest way to solve this problem. And then going forward, we need to make it easier and cheaper for people to come to this country legally so that they don’t have to resort to the black market in the future to come here and work.
Bob Zadek: You know, Alex, what’s really strange about this whole—and you’re exactly right in saying amnesty, instead of being simply a neutral word dealing with an issue of policy, it has become a negative word, a loaded word, like accusing somebody of favoring amnesty is to make them wear an armband of some sort. It’s very interesting because in today’s—in a related issue, we have all of these incarcerated, mostly blacks, men, mostly men, who are incarcerated for relatively minor drug crimes. This has gotten a lot of press. And there has been unusual bipartisan support for what’s called criminal justice reform. And President Obama, to his credit, has been pardoning and letting some of these, mostly crack-related crimes, criminals out of jail, out of prison early. And there is bipartisan movement held up by Senator McConnell in the Senate for the minute, but there is bipartisan movement to release from prison lots of these non-violent drug offenders. And there’s not much opposition to that policy.
Now, that policy is amnesty. One can say, if you want to borrow the rhetoric from the immigration discussion, “Hold it a second, they violated the laws, they were convicted, they should serve their full sentence. We’re sending the wrong message if we let them out.” Well, of course, that’s patently absurd because the problem was the laws were heinous and they shouldn’t—those laws shouldn’t have been enacted. So you can tell a law is a bad law if nobody thinks it should be enforced. And the same is true of immigration amnesty. If anybody supports criminal justice reform, you must in the same vein support amnesty. It is hypocritical to support one and not the other.
Alex Nowrasteh: I agree, and I would argue that there are many, many more people who would probably benefit by amnestying unlawful immigrants than would be amnestying these non-violent drug offenses. I mean, I believe we should amnesty both of them, but we’re talking about millions and millions of more people who are illegal immigrants who are living in the shadows who could have a much more productive and freer life, except for the fact that we have these old labor union-inspired labor market restrictions, also known as immigration laws, that keep it so that they have to work continuously in the shadows. And an amnesty is an admission not that breaking the law’s okay, it’s an admission that the law was bad. And that’s what we need to understand.
Bob Zadek: And that has been, as a matter of public policy, one can observe, mostly with criminal law, that criminal laws are ill-advised if no one respects the law and nobody considers it to be immoral or wrong to violate. Think of our tax code where everybody, I dare say, takes certain liberties in preparing their tax return because they don’t feel themselves to be tax cheats or felons. It’s because there is no respect for the law itself. People drive more than 60 miles an hour on the freeway or 55, whatever the limit is, because they think the law is silly and they are better judges of what’s safe and what’s not safe. So by dint of wholesale non-compliance, it is a message by the public that the law is the wrong law. And immigration laws, to the extent that they say it is illegal for you to try to make a better life for your family and for yourself, to criminalize that is just plain wrong.
Alex Nowrasteh: And it goes back to sort of this founding idea in the Enlightenment that laws need to be discovered, not made. And the laws that we all respect, like murder and theft, or that most of us respect most of the time, are laws that are similar across all human civilization and time. They are laws that are discovered. Laws, though, that restrict drug use or restrict firearm ownership or restrict immigration are laws that are made, that are created out of whole cloth by legislators and by bureaucrats and by activists with no account of how humans actually view these things. And that’s why you get these law enforcement disasters out there.
Bob Zadek: In law, we call the distinction laws that are malum prohibitum and malum in se. That dichotomy, those two Latin phrases, describe laws that are malum prohibitum—malum is wrong—per se is obviously wrong. Those are the laws Alex described as murder, rape, robbery, theft, things of that nature. Every society acknowledges they’re wrong. And then there’s malum prohibitum, which is wrong only because somebody in some legislative body decided an otherwise innocent act should be or lawful act should be made unlawful. And those are unnatural impositions because it’s an attempt to legislate morality, which cannot be legislated, and to criminalize non-criminal behavior. And that’s the distinction that Alex is making.
Alex Nowrasteh: That’s right. And I think we see most of these problems in laws and most of the problems with illegality and most of the reason why people don’t respect the law as much as they used to because almost all of them are now these types of laws where there is no victim. It’s sort of the creation of the legislature that you talked about and not natural laws.
Legal Status vs. Citizenship [42:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, you had mentioned about the 11 million illegal immigrants. You had mentioned they should come out of the shadows, of course. They should be given work permits, of course. And then a path to citizenship. Now, “path to citizenship” is another super-loaded word. Tell us about what that word means in general in the political discourse today and what you meant when you used it a second ago.
Alex Nowrasteh: So what other people who are opposed to amnesty say that a path to citizenship just means handing out citizenship to anybody so that they can vote immediately after they are amnestied. What I mean by a path to citizenship is that these folks are granted a green card or the ability to get a green card, which means that in five to ten years in the future, they will be able to, if they want to, to apply to become a citizen so long as they didn’t break any other real crimes.
Bob Zadek: So you would favor some statute that says as to undocumented aliens right now, they ought to be, first of all, being given legal status so they’re no longer in the shadows and they participate in economic life in America and ultimately they have some requirement whereby they can become citizens in some period of time.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, if they want to. And that’s the crucial caveat, is if they want to. Now, when the government amnestied illegal immigrants in 1986 during the Reagan administration, they did a survey of this 20 years later and they asked how many of you who were amnestied actually became citizens eventually, and only 45% of them became citizens. The rest were happy living on a green card or another type of legal status because most of the reason why people come here is to be able to work and live, not because they want to vote in national elections. So I’m convinced that if we allow this to happen, most of these folks don’t even want citizenship. They just want to live here and work and not be molested by the police. So that’s one of the also one of the reasons why I think the citizenship issue is one of the less important ones when it comes to this debate. A lot of people like to focus on it, but the most important issue is that these folks can live here and work and thrive legally and not have to live in the black market. If there was a compromised position where somebody said, “Alex, we are going to legalize them, but we’re not going to allow them to get citizenship,” I think that that is acceptable right now given how horrible the legal conditions are.
Welfare and Immigration [46:28]
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, we have only a few minutes left, but there’s a very important issue I’d like you to share your wisdom with our friends out there. And that is there is a belief that—and Milton Friedman spoke about this extensively—that in our welfare-driven society, there is the fear that if you allow relatively open borders and free immigration, that it will overtax, overstrain the welfare system and immigrants who come here, they take more from the welfare system than they put in back into the economy. Speak to that misconception if you would.
Alex Nowrasteh: Sure. So first issue is to point out that legal immigrants, if you’re here on a green card, you don’t have access to welfare for the first five years that you’re here. If you’re here on a work permit, like a student visa or an H-1B or some other type of visa, you don’t have access to welfare at all either. If you’re here as an illegal immigrant, you don’t have access to welfare benefits in the United States. It’s only after you’ve been here legally for five years on a green card that you have access to some of these means-tested welfare benefits.
Now, when we dig down into the numbers and we take a look at how many immigrants are consuming welfare benefits versus how much they’re paying in taxes, what we find is that they generally pay their own way. They pay as much in taxes over the course of their working lives as they consume in benefits over the course of their working lives. And one of the main reasons why—and this goes for other government benefits and services as well, like public education. So if we think about it this way, everybody focuses on the children of immigrants who are in public schools, but they forget to focus on the immigrant himself who came here when he’s, say, 25 years old, didn’t take any classes in American public schools. He’s consumed no benefits. So if you take all of those into account, all of this sort of initial boost of economic activity and the low benefits use rate and the taxes they pay over their lives, immigration is about a net zero. It doesn’t make deficits any worse than they already are.
Bob Zadek: So—so it’s just plain not true that immigrants come here for the welfare benefits because they can’t get them. So that is patently not true. And that they are a drain on the American economy. That’s factually incorrect.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, it’s entirely factually incorrect. Now, this is something where if we want to make more laws restricting welfare, if we want to say instead of being here for five years you have to be here for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years or you can never access welfare benefits, then that would be a fine—I’d be in favor of that law. I think that’d be a fine law to do. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not really a problem as it is right now. It’s a problem in people’s minds mainly than it is in reality.
Bob Zadek: Milton Friedman famously observed—while Milton Friedman favored open borders, he was fearful that our welfare system could not absorb the wave of immigrants. But of course, that was before there were laws limiting access to welfare benefits by immigrants. And I think immigrants who come here, I think they have access to healthcare. They can’t be turned away from the hospitals.
Alex Nowrasteh: They can’t be turned away if they have—so yeah, the only exception to that really is under the EMTALA Act. So if you show up at an emergency room and you’re ill, they have to stabilize you. That’s basically the only exception. That’s a relatively small program compared to everything else. And what Milton Friedman—the second part of that quote where Milton Friedman’s always quoted about how you can’t have open borders in a welfare state, the second part of that quote that everybody always misses is that that is why he favors illegal immigration. He basically favors salutary neglect where the government makes immigration illegal but doesn’t enforce those laws because then we get people who come here and they can’t get any welfare but they work.
Closing [51:10]
Bob Zadek: Alex, we only have a minute to go. How do our friends out there follow your writings and the work of Cato, and what are you working on these days?
Alex Nowrasteh: So I’m working on a lot of information about how risky these specific visas are in terms of terrorism, looking back all the way to 1975 to see how many terrorists have come in on each individual visa to try to analyze and compute the risk of each one going forward. But if you want to take a look at that work and other work, I recommend going to www.cato.org. And you can take a look under our issues tab and you can follow all of our work on immigration or any other policy issue.
Bob Zadek: Thank you very much. This is Bob Zadek thanking my dear friend Alex Nowrasteh for joining us for an hour this morning to try to shed some light where there is just darkness on the subject of immigration. I only ask that as you form and moderate your position on immigration, please make it principle-based and fact-based. Thank you so much for listening. I’ll be back next Sunday. Please have a nice day, everyone.