American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why.
2023-02-13 · Guest: Alex Nowrasteh (Cato Institute) · 52:45
The legalism fallacy and US immigration policy
Bob Zadek welcomes Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute to discuss the “legalism fallacy” and the historical roots of American immigration law. They explore how current regulations have evolved from racial animosity into a complex, restrictive system that differs fundamentally from other areas of American law.
Topics: Immigration, Legalism Fallacy, U.S. Constitution, Naturalization, Chinese Exclusion Act, Cato Institute Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Alex Nowrasteh (Guest)
The Legalism Fallacy [00:08]
Bob Zadek: Hello, friends. I’m Bob Zadek, host of the country’s longest-running libertarian broadcast, nationally streamed 8:00 a.m. Pacific time Sundays on the 860 AM app. The archives of my Bob Zadek Show podcast hold 15 years of major issue discussion, and it’s the ideal resource to revisit our prior missteps since so many seem to reappear. I promise you in-depth content on social, political, and economic issues that really matter, always with the ideal guest, accessible and entertaining.
He has most recently co-authored the data-rich book, Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. Alex, my friend, welcome back to the show.
Alex Nowrasteh: Thanks a bunch, Bob, for having me.
Bob Zadek: If I may, a personal note to my audience: Alex was my first Cato friend. At my very first visit to a Cato retreat, on the Thursday night opening dinner, by random, Cato had the very good judgment of having me sit next to Alex. We met then and we’ve been friends and colleagues and laboring for liberty ever since. So, Alex, when I welcome you back to the show with “my friend,” I truly mean it.
Alex Nowrasteh: Well, thanks, Bob. It’s a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to be your friend. And I’m so glad that the planners of that Cato event sat us next to each other.
Bob Zadek: Oh, me too. Now, to tee up today’s subject: irrespective of one’s position on immigration, everyone seems opposed to illegal immigration. In such conversations, when that topic comes up, I’ll follow up by asking whomever I’m speaking to, “Actually, which are you more opposed to: the ‘illegal’ or the ‘immigration’?” In other words, if all immigration were legal, would you be content? That’s where the real conversation starts, and that is where my conversation with Alex begins.
Alex, in your Substack blog found at alexnowrasteh.substack.com, you presented the “legalism fallacy” as an impediment to the nation’s conversation about immigration. Please explain, if you would.
Alex Nowrasteh: So, the legalism fallacy is the assumption that a policy is good because it’s legal. It’s a focus on the legal issues, and it just means that you ignore mainly the consequences of it. So in immigration, it means that people, like you said, are just very fired up and they focus on the fact that there’s a lot of illegal immigration, but they never deal with the consequences of it. They never try to deal with the effects of what causes illegal immigration. And they never deal with the idea—or rarely deal with the idea—of, “What can we do to make immigration more legal, for instance, and are the consequences of that policy good?”
So, it’s a focus on the law and assumes that the law is what’s right, and that’s it. And it really just crushes any kind of interesting debate about what policy should be and just focuses where everybody tries to pretend to be a lawyer.
Bob Zadek: In other words, to put a little flesh on those bones, if I might, the legalism fallacy could have used as an example, hmm, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Drinking alcohol became illegal. That didn’t seem to make it bad to use alcohol. Nobody believed Prohibition was a really good idea simply because it was a law.
And let’s not stop there. Let’s go to the Constitution and let’s observe that women didn’t have the right to vote. Let’s observe that slavery was legal and apply Alex’s thought of the legalism fallacy to those issues. In other words, the law is neither good nor bad per se. It’s good or bad if it complies with our view of what society should be like and what life in our country should be like. And in this case, immigration fails miserably.
So Alex suggests—and we will spend the hour discussing what’s (and this is actually a semester crammed into an hour)—what’s wrong with the law regulating immigration now? How does it fail on so many levels? Now, Alex, let’s start with the so-called law because it’s such a mess.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, the law—it isn’t even clear what our rules are because there’s no coherent set of rules.
The Constitutional Basis and History of Restriction [08:15]
Bob Zadek: Let’s just drill down a bit and let’s start at the highest level possible with the Constitution. Just to get us into the ballpark, if you will, it lists as the power to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” That’s it. That’s all the Constitution says to us about immigration policy. And it seems to require a uniform rule. So the founders only cared that it be uniform. Now, what’s the opposite of immigration policy today? Uniform.
So Alex, we have Congress having abdicated its power. It’s a political hot potato like Social Security, and Congress doesn’t want to go near it. The president from time to time steps into that quagmire and examines executive powers, stretches them, if you will, and rules by executive power to fill the void in what Congress has failed to do. So give us a very broad—we’re not going to drill down at all, we have too much work to do—but the big picture on what passes for immigration policy today, and then we’ll test it and see how it fails.
Alex Nowrasteh: So you mentioned naturalization. There are two big parts of immigration law. The first part is naturalization, as you mentioned, which is just the process of becoming a citizen—who can become a citizen, et cetera. That is clearly within the power of Congress.
The other part is, well, who can come here to live or work? Not become a citizen, but just come here and live and work. And the Constitution is silent on that. Beginning in the later part of the 19th century, Congress started to pass some rules, some laws restricting the peaceful movement of people to the United States, even if they didn’t want to become a citizen. And since then, this body of laws has grown through successive Congresses and executive actions to be the second most complicated portion of American law. The only portion more complicated is that of the income tax, according to many law professors who study this topic.
And within that, the general starting principle of American law on immigration is that nobody is allowed to come here except for a handful of people who fit into very specific categories that Congress has established. So that’s the opposite of every other way that we think about law. In every other area of law, we think everything is legal except for a few things that are illegal that are specifically spelled out in the law. Immigration is the opposite. Everything’s illegal except the few things that the government says are legal.
And a few areas that are legal are if you’re a foreigner who has an immediate relative or a close family member in the United States, it’s relatively easy to come here. The government sets aside about 140,000 green cards a year for highly skilled workers and their family members. And then on top of that, there are a large number of different types of visas for low-skilled temporary workers, for students, for others.
But the overall effect of this is to create a highly restrictive system that is under an enormous amount of government control and oversight with a bloated bureaucracy that costs Americans and immigrants an enormous amount of time and money to navigate, and that blocks out the vast majority of people who want to come to this country lawfully. And that’s the most important part: U.S. immigration law blocks out the vast majority of people who want to come here lawfully.
In the days of Ellis Island, 2% of people were blocked from—were sent back from Ellis Island. They weren’t allowed into the United States. And it was called the “Isle of Tears” because of that. Nowadays, only maybe 5% of people who want to come here are able to apply and do so in the first place. So it is far, far worse than anything we’ve experienced in American history.
Bob Zadek: Now, Alex, you did a bit of a whitewash in one of your comments of a second ago. You were too kind to American political history. You mentioned, of course correctly, that in the late 19th century, we started to enact legislation kind of for the first time—excuse me—to limit immigration. What you left out—you were too kind to our political predecessors—the adjustment from “let them all in,” the adjustment was done out of racial animosity. It wasn’t done because it was good or bad for the country. Far be it; it was done for the ugliest of motives.
And by the way, that attitude continues through today. But the audience must have immigration policy in the indisputable context that there is a humiliating—if you’re an American, humiliating—context for immigration policy, which is racial and ethnic bias in the worst form. And indeed, I think the first regulation of immigration policy was, I think its title was the Chinese Exclusion Act. I think that’s an accurate summary. And it was done because we didn’t like having so many Chinese. We just didn’t like it.
The Ugly History of Immigration Restriction [12:23]
Bob Zadek: There was no data-rich study. We just didn’t like the Chinese anymore. And then we developed an animus and an active policy. So, Alice—Alex, expand on that a little bit, and then we’ll drill down into what else—what other ugly motives drive immigration policy.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah. So in 1882 is when Congress passed—and they called it the Chinese Exclusion Act, as you said. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt put together an agreement where they blocked all Japanese immigrants from the United States for the same ugly motive. In 1917, there were a series of laws that were passed that barred all African and all Asian immigrants. And then beginning in 1921 and ending in 1924, Congress passed two laws that put severe restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigrants, mainly with the intent of trying to keep out darker-skinned Italian and Greek immigrants, as well as Eastern European, primarily Jewish immigrants, who were the main targets of those.
Now, in combination with the sort of racial and ethnic prejudice, there was also a push from labor unions to restrict immigration so that they could protect themselves and their workers—or attempt to—in the United States. And there was also this growing sense of American nationalism, this idea that certain ethnicities or groups of people or religions—focusing on Jews primarily, but Chinese and Asians and other groups—would never be able to assimilate and integrate into American society. You could never become fully Americanized because of their ethnic and racial and religious backgrounds. And those were a lot of the justifications at that time.
Um, I—and we can talk about how those have sort of played out since then—but the eugenics movement, which was incredibly popular amongst progressives, especially in the early 20th century, but also amongst some American nationalists, was a tremendous intellectual fad at the time, which inspired many of these immigration restrictions that ended America’s period of free immigration where most of our ancestors came here. So it’s an ugly, ugly history. And unfortunately, for a reasonable quantity of immigration policy today, it has its roots in those base motivations of racial and ethnic bias. And we must—we must not allow ourselves to forget that as we discuss immigration policy. It is always there.
Natural Rights and the Economic “Fixed Pie” [17:45]
Bob Zadek: Now, what there hasn’t been so much discussion in immigration policy on a topic, Alex, that you and I believe passionately about, which is: don’t look at only how it affects—how immigration affects the United States, but put ourselves in the hearts and minds of the immigrants. You and I passionately believe that all humans—all men are endowed—by “men,” the founders meant all people—all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights. Not just Americans. All men are endowed, and they have rights that they are born with. And including in those rights are the right to travel. And—perhaps a tiny bit less so, but there is the right to want to improve your lot in life, make life better for your families.
So you and I react with equal passion, I dare say—I don’t mean to speak for your passion, you’re able to do that—but I do, to the rights of the immigrant. How dare we, I say, say to an immigrant, “You cannot have permission to move from a place where you’re doomed and your family is doomed to poverty and ignorance to a place where you have an opportunity to make life better”? The free movement of human beings from one place to another. And very little of the discussion—of the selfish discussion—of immigration policy focuses on that: the inherent right of the immigrants themselves. It just doesn’t get discussed.
Alex Nowrasteh: That’s right. It’s not discussed at all. Um, just to put a number on how severe these restrictions are, a Mexican immigrant with the same education and age as another American, just by crossing that border, can increase their income by a factor of three. Somebody from Guatemala, it’s a factor of six. And for a Haitian, it’s a factor of 10. And that also includes, of course, the cost-of-living adjustments. So we’re talking about immigration laws as a restriction that infringes upon the natural rights of immigrants and of Americans that deal with them how they choose, but imposes not just that rights violation, but an enormous economic cost.
I mean, just about every Haitian who has ever escaped poverty has done so by leaving Haiti. And many more of them would choose to do that if they could. And our immigration laws, in combination with other countries’ immigration laws, are essentially locking them in enormous poverty. I mean, imagine if you were to go on vacation one time, you know, to Haiti, and you’re on your plane, you know, and now your vacation’s over, you’re leaving to come back to the United States, and, you know, the official at the airport says, “No, you can’t leave. You have to stay here.” I mean, that would be devastating, not just because you were born in the United States or because you want to go back to your home, but devastating in terms of your future potential and your income and a gross violation of your freedom and human rights. And that is what U.S. immigration policy and the immigration policy of many other countries around the world is doing today.
Bob Zadek: Now, lest anyone in the audience starts to think that Bob is a bleeding heart, whatever—that assumption, that wrong assumption, would have implicit that for this immigrant to come to this country and earn a living is doing so—this is the important concept—at the expense of somebody here. So I am—people might think I am proposing a wealth transfer of giving from somebody living here wealth, giving that to an immigrant. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Immigrants increase the wealth of people living here. They don’t take away that wealth. This is the opposite of a wealth transfer. It is a wealth creation.
So, Alex, help me dispel that concept that immigrants will take our jobs, as if we own a job. “Take our jobs” is a concept I despise. Nobody has a right to a job. You have a right to offer your services at the right price to somebody who’s willing to buy it. And they have the right to have somebody else perform your exact services if they can get somebody to do it for less. You do not have a right to a job. You have a right to try to get a job and a right to try to maintain it if you can maintain that relationship. There’s no such thing as “your job.” But Alex, help me explain how increasing immigrants who will then increase their own well-being—they do not do so at the expense of those of us who are already here.
Alex Nowrasteh: That’s right, Bob. The economy is not a fixed pie. One of the great blessings of a free market economy—and even an economy like ours that has too many regulations and high taxes and other government restrictions—it’s still free market enough where people who come here, they increase the size of the economic pie. They create more goods and services that are valuable that other people want to buy and sell. They create economic—economic opportunities by doing so. One of the main reasons is that immigrants have different skills than native-born Americans. So they’re not competing so much as they are complementing each other. They work together because they all have different skills.
And one of the most robust facts that we see in immigrants is that when immigrants move into an area, it generally bumps Americans up a little bit in terms of their wages and productivity because Americans have different skills that are more valuable, like English language skills, et cetera. So what we see is that Americans, native-born Americans, typically start to take more managerial positions. They take higher-paying jobs where communication is more important because we live in a country where the vast majority of people speak English, and immigrants have a slight disadvantage at that. So immigrants and natives work together and as a result create so much more productivity.
I am not in favor of the existence of the welfare state or wealth transfers or anything like that. When I said earlier that immigrants make, you know, between three and 10 times more money in the United States versus their home country, that’s because they’re so much more productive here because they’re working in a relatively free market economy with more security of contract rights and property rights. And as a result, they’re able to supply and create more goods and services, which means that they are more highly paid than they are in their home country. And you and I and everybody else, we are the beneficiaries of the production created by immigrants. And that says nothing about immigrants also being consumers. They consume goods and services created by other Americans that create lots of job opportunities. But they’re also twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans are.
Immigration and the Accident of Birth [22:54]
Alex Nowrasteh: I mean, you take all these factors into account, it’s basically impossible to get a shrinking economy where more immigrants are moving in. I mean, immigrants move to productive places, of course, but when they move to these places, they are literally adding factors of production. They’re adding workers, entrepreneurs; they are creating new businesses and services. This is increasing the size of the pie, and we all benefit from that.
Bob Zadek: And one last thought on the subject of looking at immigration from the standpoint of the immigrant, because we have a lot to cover for the rest of the hour. But let’s remember one of the reasons, one of the powerful reasons that our founding generation rejected the British system was their abhorrence—passionate abhorrence—of peerage, of nobility from birth alone. The fact that any individual could have a societal or economic advantage by the accident of birth. It was important enough to find its way into the Constitution.
What better example do we have today than the rebirth of peerage, the benefits because of the accident of birth? The fact that Americans, because we happen to be born here, have certain privileges that foreign-born individuals don’t have because of the accident of their birth. It is, in my opinion, the continuation of peerage in another form. Accident of birth—how dare we deny somebody else’s privileges we enjoy because of where we happen to be born? We didn’t contribute very much to our location of birth.
In the Declaration of Independence, one of the complaints against King George III was that he, quote, “has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands,” unquote. One of the complaints of the founders was that the British didn’t allow the American colonies to increase immigration. How far we have fallen in that today. American politicians, many of whom claim to support the Constitution, support immigration restrictions that our ancestors rebelled against.
Now, Alex, in the piece you recently wrote in your Substack column, you mentioned that—or you focused on—what the policy should be. Now, in terms of your view of what policy should be, to what extent should what’s best for the country affect that policy? And the reason I ask the question is when I was, I think, a bit more naive, my immigration policy—my personal view—could be summed up in four words: let them all in. That was where I started.
Then I recall I learned a statistic. This was maybe a decade ago, that there was a poll done in, I believe it was India. And the poll was—and it was conducted including the large Indian middle class—and it asked the population of India, “If you could freely move to the U.S., how many of you would move here?” And the number, which I read, was about 80 million citizens of India. And I said to myself, “What am I talking about? Am I prepared to have, in a country of 360 million people, the somewhat immediate influx of 80 million?” This is only one country. I expect you would have similar polls. So how embarrassing it was to have me back off from my own idealistic view to something more sensible. So help me balance—help us balance—what policy should be, considering the human aspect from the immigrant looking in, and in terms of policy which would be most healthy for our country, if that is a consideration.
The Practicality of Open Borders [29:10]
Alex Nowrasteh: So I think it is a consideration, but one thing about the poll that you mentioned is, you know, talk is cheap. It’s easy to say you’re going to take an expensive undertaking, like moving across the world to the United States. But even if we had that policy, and even if everybody who said that meant it, it’s not like they’d all come over immediately. So, like, if you were to transport 80, 90, 100 million people into the United States over the course of a day, that would be hard. That would be difficult. There’d be a lot of problems.
But what we see when we have, say, free immigration policies like were instituted in the EU and other places, is immigration increases, but it increases at a steady rate. So it may be 80 million people over the course of 40 years or 30 years or 20 years. That is a far more manageable number of people. And indeed, the U.S. economy would adjust very rapidly to that vast influx of productive people. The construction sector of the economy would boom in terms of building all those houses—new housing—at least in places where you’re allowed to build in the United States, and there would be a tremendous boom.
I mean, for instance, look at Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has open immigration with the United States; it’s part of the country, and it’s a far poorer part than any other U.S. state by a lot. And still, it took a century of open borders with Puerto Rico for a majority of all people of Puerto Rican heritage to be in the United States. It took a century for that to happen. And there are still millions of people left in Puerto Rico who haven’t come here for higher wages.
So, in terms of what the ideal policy is, I do think that these people should be allowed to come here, so long as they aren’t criminals or national security threats or have serious communicable diseases. But the notion that they would all come at once, I think, is just not true. That’s not how people behave. You know, they come in waves. We’d see a large increase in immigration in the short term, of course, but it would be spread out over decades and centuries.
Bob Zadek: To some degree, some proponents of a more enlightened immigration policy suggest standards, something like we should be more welcoming to immigrants who will directly contribute to our prosperity. That is, they are performing jobs in the tech sector—a lot it’s mentioned—engineers, doctors; we have not enough healthcare professionals. We should focus on what jobs we need, sort of like a big job fair, a nationwide job fair, and have immigrants come because there is a clear benefit to all of us to having them. To what extent should that be part of the matrix to establish immigration policy?
Alex Nowrasteh: Well, that would be better than the current system, which doesn’t consider that hardly—which barely considers that at all. But the big problem with that is that policymakers, politicians, bureaucrats are going to be the ones deciding which types of occupations, jobs, and at what wages are in the national interest. And that’s a big problem.
Now, if there were a system that said you had to have a job offer before coming to the United States as an immigrant, that would be far preferable to the current system. But still, there are lots of people here who want to come here who will be entrepreneurs, who will start firms. And the government is not very good at identifying those people before they arrive in the United States.
Now, you know, I work at Cato; I work with policymakers. I have my ideals and my principles, but I also want to try to improve things. So I’ll take, you know, one slice of bread off of that loaf, if it’s better than getting nothing at all, right? So I’m willing to compromise and work with people and get a better outcome. So some kind of system that allowed more immigrants to come if they had a job offer from an American company, that would be an improvement over the current system.
But that is certainly not ideal because what we’ve seen is some of the great entrepreneurs in America, like Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google—you know, hey, he came here as the child of a refugee in the 1970s. Nobody knew that he was going to eventually create a multi-billion dollar company that employs tens of thousands of people, a company so large and successful that it’s become a verb, right? To Google is now a verb and part of our English language. We can’t expect the government to do a good job of identifying those individuals in advance because he was just a kid. What economic—what did he add to the economy, right? He probably went to public schools.
But if we had a system that tried to get people here once they were offered a job, that would still be a vast improvement over our current system, which is so restrictive and only considers that in a handful of cases.
Bob Zadek: You recently engaged in a debate on Bari Weiss’s Substack. And we’re not going to get into that debate, but I invite our listeners to listen to that debate. It was quite interesting. But when I listened to it, your opponent, if you will, in her answer to this question, she wanted to establish a standard—and this is what I flagged, Alex, and I couldn’t wait to have you on the show to discuss it—she would establish as a standard: we should have immigrants come here who demonstrate—and her phrase was—“a likelihood of success.”
Bob Zadek: And I have that in quotes, and I say that’s fine. That’s probably every immigrant. Every immigrant is probably going to succeed. That’s why they’re coming here. It’s almost as if immigrants—I am passionate about entrepreneurship and I respect those who are entrepreneurs who bet everything on their own ability to succeed. Well, the typical American immigrant can’t hold a candle to an immigrant track about betting everything on only your skill and your drive to succeed. Track, they come to a country where they may not speak the language; they have only what’s in their suitcase and their determination to give their kids a better life. They universally have a likelihood of success. So I would tell Jessica, if I were debating her with you, I accept that standard, and that means totally open borders. I just had to sneak that in, and I hope she’ll be listening when I comment.
The Culture Wars and Assimilation [34:05]
Bob Zadek: Now, there’s an interesting part of the debate: the so-called culture wars. And I say, what a strange concept. The Constitution has no interest in anybody’s view of culture. The Constitution does not legislate culture. That is left—the culture is the result of a bunch of human beings acting off one another. That’s what culture is. Culture is a result, not a goal. And yet we end up having culture wars. People are afraid of our culture changing. A, we have no culture other than one that is constantly evolving. And so, but the culture wars are such a disproportionate part of the conversation. And I mentioned that, Alex, and invite your commentary, because earlier in the show, I commented a bit out of perhaps disappointment that so much of our policy is born of discrimination, racial animus, and the like. And here it’s all hung out to dry: the culture wars. So talk a bit about the fear that the nativists have about losing something which in reality doesn’t even exist.
Alex Nowrasteh: So one of the most unique aspects of American culture historically is our welcoming of immigrants and our assimilation of immigrants into American culture, into American society, where we treat them as Americans and they think of themselves as Americans. And that continues to this day. If you take a look at rates of English language acquisition, volunteering, educational assimilation, income assimilation, family size, religious attitudes—immigrants and their descendants do a wonderful job of assimilating to the American norm, much as well as they did a century ago, and even better on some metrics. So the idea that we have or have to have a government assimilation bureau or some kind of policy to do this is just crazy, in my opinion, and ignores the vast success that we’ve had over the centuries and continue to have of assimilating people.
And all of the recent controversies in the culture war, I think they mainly revolve around the issue of wokeness and this sort of new idea about racial essentialism. This was not an immigrant import. The idea of wokeness was created by Americans for Americans. It is an indigenous cultural evolution. It is not a good thing, in my opinion. I don’t like it, but it is not the aspect that immigrants have brought in. And when you do polls to try to get at what wokeness is and ideas about that, immigrants are far less woke than native-born Americans. So for all these nativists who are really complaining about the culture war and changes to American culture, if they really believed what they said, they would be supportive of more immigration because these people—immigrants—have attitudes that are more similar to Americans in the ’70s and ’80s than Americans today in terms of those issues.
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is you mentioned, as I knew you would, the word assimilation. Assimilation is what those who oppose immigration use as one of their arguments: that immigrants are slow to assimilate. And I have two comments on assimilation for which I’d appreciate any thoughts you might have. Number one, there are some groups who never assimilate. The Amish in Ohio. Now, somehow, maybe I’m just naive. I don’t feel that threatened by the fact that the Amish refuse to drive EVs and even cars. I don’t feel threatened by the Amish aggressively remaining insular and living by themselves in their lifestyle. I don’t feel threatened by the fact that New York City and San Francisco and other cities have a Chinatown. I’m not threatened by that. I’m not threatened by Japantown in Los Angeles. I like it. I like to go there. I will enjoy walking in the streets. I respect the fact that they are seeking to retain their culture. And let’s not forget Haredi Jews in Brooklyn, New York. They refuse to assimilate. They integrate themselves in New York City economic life. They participate, and they go back to Brooklyn and they live their very insular, almost in many ways, medieval lifestyle in some ways. And I say that with respect and with curiosity, not as a pejorative.
So none of that threatens me. So assimilation lumps together, I think, two concepts: cultural assimilation, which I am not threatened by and I welcome; and then there is political assimilation. The fear is also, Alex—and this isn’t discussed quite so much—and that is that many immigrants come from authoritarian regimes, socialist societies, communist societies, collectivism, and they bring with them those political views, and therefore they represent a threat to—use a nativist phrase—“our way of life.” Oh, how much I hate that phrase. So if you could comment—I’m drilling down a little bit on the concept of assimilation, which is used as a reason to oppose immigration, but it’s misguided.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, that’s right. So on the first part about assimilation broadly, I don’t have a problem at all with people trying to retain unique aspects of their culture, like, you know, like Haredi Jews do in New York or the Amish or Chinese, as you mentioned. But the fear from a nativist perspective—when you just take a look at the broad big facts, you know, the vast majority of immigrants and their kids do move toward these American norms, and they do it on political issues as well. So when you take a look at polls of new immigrants to the United States on various different political issues and policy issues and compare those to native-born Americans, they’re very similar. They’re usually within the standard of error, standards of error. So it’s like a statistically insignificant difference on a whole host of issues from tax policy to welfare policy and other policies.
But a lot of immigrants do come from countries with authoritarian and or socialist governments. And what’s interesting is the people who leave are generally different than the people who stay behind. Usually the people who leave don’t really like it so much in their home countries. They don’t like the policies; they’re open to new experiences and new ideas. And what we generally see with people like the Cubans, with Taiwanese immigrants, with Vietnamese immigrants, with Venezuelan immigrants in the United States, and with a lot of Iranian immigrants from Iran, right? All totalitarian societies in different ways, is they vote against those types of policies in the United States, right? Cubans are a massive anti-left-wing voting bloc in the state of Florida and in other states because of their experiences and history with communism in Cuba.
Now, I wrote an entire book about this called Wretched Refuse, which you mentioned earlier, with Benjamin Powell. And the general finding is that when immigrants go to a society, we take a look at how they affect the economic freedom of that society—how free you are to exchange in goods and services. And we look at lots of different countries over time, and what we find is that immigrants either don’t affect that at all, or they result in more free-market policies for a number of different reasons. And when you look at the United States, the most sort of socialistic, government-interventionist period in our history was from about 1930 to about 1970, when we had the New Deal, we had numerous nationalizations, we had the Great Society programs. That was when immigration was closed off to this country. And my theory is that immigrants, by coming into a country, undermine labor unions. They destroy labor unions. And labor unions are the most effective pro-big government voting and lobbying bloc in the Western world. So by undermining labor unions, immigrants, not intentionally but accidentally, destroy the major American institution that pushes for big government and undermines its growth and slows its growth substantially. So if you’re a free-marketeer and you’re worried about the growth of government in American society and the growth in the size of the state and its impact on all of our lives, immigrants have done quite a bit to undermine that growth since the 1970s.
In this portion of the program, the host and guest discuss the nuances of how immigrants integrate into American society, specifically focusing on the distinction between cultural and political assimilation. They explore how legal frameworks like birthright citizenship support this process by ensuring that the children of immigrants are fully integrated into the legal and political system.
The conversation also addresses the economic relationship between immigration and the welfare state. The guest provides data to clarify common misconceptions about public benefit usage, suggesting that legal restrictions and demographic factors result in lower usage rates among immigrant populations compared to native-born citizens. The segment wraps up with a discussion on the value of approaching immigration topics with an emphasis on empirical data rather than emotional arguments.
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