Daniel Di Martino on Immigration
2021-10-25 · Guest: Daniel Di Martino (PhD student and Venezuelan immigrant) · 52:27
Economic and systemic failures of US immigration
Bob Zadek interviews Daniel Di Martino, a PhD student and Venezuelan immigrant, about the systemic failures of the U.S. immigration system. They discuss the economic and national security costs of restrictive high-skilled visa policies, the “lump of labor” fallacy, and the unique benefits of admitting immigrants fleeing authoritarian regimes like Venezuela and Hong Kong.
Topics: Immigration Policy, High-Skilled Visas, H-1B, Green Cards, Economic Growth, National Security, Assimilation, Authoritarianism, Venezuela, Hong Kong
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Daniel Di Martino
Bob’s Evolving View on Immigration [00:32]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. This Sunday and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
This morning I’d like to revisit the subject of immigration. My views are pretty well known to my audience. I favor—well, I used to favor a policy which, over-simplistically, was “let them all in.” That was my starting point. I came to realize there were impracticalities in that, so now I modify my position: instead of “let them all in,” let as many in as we possibly can without suffering measurable, direct adverse consequences. And frankly, my friends, we are nowhere near that at this point in time.
Introducing Daniel Di Martino [01:25]
Bob Zadek: To help me, and therefore you, learn about the issues, the problems, the theory, what is working and what is not working in the United States immigration policy, I’m delighted—huge smile on my face—as I welcome to the show Daniel Di Martino. Daniel is a PhD student studying the economics of immigration. Therefore, he has acquired enormous amounts of data on the subject of immigration, at least the economic effects of immigration on both the immigrant and on our country.
And to give him even more impressive creds, Daniel himself is an immigrant. He was born in Venezuela in a middle-class family. When he was born, there was no reason on earth why he wouldn’t live the middle-class or higher life in Venezuela. A reason popped up, which was the Venezuelan government and its extreme tilt toward socialism. Daniel and his family left, settled for a while in one of my very favorite Midwestern states, Indiana, and he had the good fortune to study at Purdue University. Purdue is one of my favorite universities, both because of it and also because of the head of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, who I many years ago hoped he would be a presidential candidate. I would do all I could to get him elected. He decided for personal reasons not to make the run; we all are worse for it.
So Daniel has lived, if you will, under the governance of Mitch Daniels, who I wish was my president, but he was the head of the university where Daniel studies. Daniel brings firsthand knowledge and incredible thought to the subject of immigration and the result of all of his studies. So Daniel, I hope I haven’t set the bar too high for you now that the audience is on the edge of their seats waiting to hear what you have to say. So with that introduction, Daniel, welcome to the show.
Daniel Di Martino: Thank you so much, Bob, and thank you so much for the kind words. I really look forward to a good discussion about this very important issue.
Why the Immigration System is Failing [03:50]
Bob Zadek: Now Daniel, you have said, both in writing and in interviews, that the immigration system doesn’t work. It’s not working. The word “working”—guests often on my show use that to make a point, and I need to drill down one notch. When you say, or when I say, “it isn’t working,” what are the standards? What is not working? What are the goals of immigration in your opinion, and once you let us know, share with us your views on what the goal of immigration is, tell us why it is not meeting those goals.
Daniel Di Martino: I think that it’s not working primarily based on the benefit that Americans should be accruing from immigration. I don’t think Americans are benefiting as much as they should be benefiting from immigration to this country, and that is the fault of the immigration system as it is implemented by the executive branch. And then it’s also not working based on what the legislature of this country intended. Most things in immigration right now are simply different forms of interpretation of the law by the executive branch. A lot of the problems that we have are implemented in ways that shouldn’t be, or that, for example, cause a waste of green cards. Not as many immigrants as Congress intended are being admitted, or the type of immigrant that is being admitted is not the type of immigrant that Congress intended in the law. So it’s not working either for Americans on a policy way, and it’s also not working on a legal way as Congress intended.
High-Skilled Immigration and Global Competition [06:10]
Bob Zadek: I think it seems that we can divide the subject of immigration into two subcategories: benefits to the country and benefits to the immigrant. Because you could have one without the other, or you could have both. I think you and I both believe we will have or should have both. But if you want to take the approach which you just have set forth, which is the country isn’t getting the benefit from immigration that it could, what is the benefit, as specifically as you can, and explain how it is measurable? What is the benefit that we are depriving ourselves of by a bureaucratic, sluggish, poorly thought out, poorly administered immigration system? Please help us understand the benefits, how one measures those benefits, and how this system deprives ourselves of that benefit.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah. Well, especially on the area of high-skilled immigration, the United States has fallen behind most other developed countries. And so if you are somebody who has a PhD in a STEM area, or if you are someone who is a corporate executive, or if you are someone who has a lot of money who wants to invest and create jobs in the United States, it’s so much harder to immigrate to this country than say to Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and other developed countries in the Anglosphere.
And that has resulted in lost jobs for Americans. That has resulted in lower wages for middle-income Americans. And that has also resulted in many ways in less innovation, less entrepreneurship, in a less dynamic United States, right? Then there are also the cultural and the family side of this issue. If it takes sometimes years for you to be able to bring your spouse into this country because of bureaucratic delays, is that really a system that Americans should keep as it is? I don’t think so, right? I think that if Americans have the right to marry whomever they want, and once that happens, they have also the right to come to this country, right? And that shouldn’t be controversial, and it should be a speedy process. Same with the children of Americans.
It’s an overly bureaucratic system, and that’s hurting Americans and immigrants alike in an unnecessary way. In many ways, the system takes so long to respond to people’s requests that no matter whether the standard should be to approve them or not, that uncertainty for years of waiting for your asylum decision, green card decision, or special ability visa decision—that is uncertainty that takes away years of your life, productivity, it hurts the economy, hurts Americans, it costs money to the bureaucracy and therefore the taxpayer, and it’s just nonsensical. And this is just common sense; I’m not even starting to talk about how many immigrants to admit or which immigrants. I’m just talking about the debureaucratization that needs to happen.
And so America benefits from immigrants in the economic way, right? From high-skilled immigrants on the innovation and the job creation part. But then it also benefits from other immigrants in the cultural side. America wouldn’t have all the diverse forms of food that it has if it hadn’t been for immigration over the centuries and immigrant assimilation into this country. That’s what makes America special, right? There’s this beautiful quote by George Washington that he wrote in a letter to a Dutch pastor after he arrived to America—this was shortly after the independence of the country and winning the Revolutionary War—and he said that “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” And I thought that that quote really should be the guide of what American immigration policy should be. American immigration policy should seek to admit virtuous people and people who are persecuted by authoritarian governments abroad. And that’s what would make America a more virtuous nation and a nation that is less likely to fall into the hands of authoritarianism.
The Bureaucratic Maze of Green Cards [11:30]
Bob Zadek: Of course, I couldn’t agree more with what you have just said, including that quote from our first president, George Washington. But in giving that quote and describing our country as it should be—a virtuous country—that tends to combine two issues into one, which sometimes it’s easier to discuss immigration if you keep the issues separate. Number one, a virtuous country is we should offer a safe haven to those who are living without safety—Venezuela, your native country, as just one of many, many examples. That has nothing directly to do with a benefit to the country. Indeed, I believe that even if the country doesn’t benefit directly from immigration, we owe it to those in the rest of the world to allow them to have a shot at what I have by the accident of birth. That has nothing to do with benefit to the country.
But what you have written about so with so much data driving it and such objectivity is the benefit to the country itself of having highly skilled immigrants. And I would distinguish those seeking asylum who are not per se highly skilled—they will contribute to the economy for sure, and you could give us the data and I hope that you will—but even putting aside high-skilled, which has been the subject of a lot of what you have written about, even the low-skilled immigrants provide an economic benefit. But you have taught me in your writings and our conversations something that as you explained it, it seemed utterly irrational, which is the relationship between the STEM-related PhD programs in major American universities and immigrants who make up most of the population of those programs. When you explained it, I first had trouble even believing it—I do believe it, of course. So please help our friends out there understand how we treat and how we deal with the subject of highly skilled, highly motivated, highly intelligent PhD students in our major universities and immigration. So tell us about the PhD programs in this country and its relationship to immigration, please.
Daniel Di Martino: Yes. Well, let me start by saying what are the different ways to immigrate to the United States permanently. How to obtain a green card, which is what gets you on the path to citizenship, not just a regular visa. You can either have a direct family member in the United States, so you’re either the spouse, the minor child, you’re the parent of an American. There’s then very small categories that take over 10 years if you’re the sibling, so I’m not going to count that, but that’s how you immigrate through the family system. Two-thirds of all people who come here permanently come through that system.
Then you can either request asylum, right? Or you are brought in as a refugee through the UN refugee system, and that’s very few people as well. And then you can also win the lottery, which is called the Diversity Visa Lottery, which is only for people from countries from which there are few immigrants in America. Venezuela was just disqualified from the lottery, by the way, this year, because according to the government there’s too many Venezuelans here already.
And now, the only other way left if you don’t have family members or win the lottery and are lucky as a high-skilled person is to come through the employment-based green card system. There are several categories, the five of them. One of them is if you’re a millionaire and you invest over a million dollars and create 10 jobs. Another which, you know, if you’re a high-skilled entrepreneur or you are a researcher, you’re a PhD, you’re unlikely to be able to do that. You are either a religious worker, you come as a priest, so that’s not really high-skilled. One is for agricultural workers as well, the EB-3, so that’s for low-skilled immigrants and there’s only 40,000 of them a year that are allowed.
And then there’s 80,000 green cards a year—only 80,000 out of 1 million that are given out every year—who are for people who have college degrees at least at the master’s level or equivalent and come either as extraordinary ability and exceptional ability professors, people who come here with national interest waivers, people who are a Nobel Prize winner, an Olympic medalist—so it’s also in sports, in fashion—and there’s only 80,000 of those people a year that are allowed into this country for a country of 331 million people. It is truly a mess.
The PhD Brain Drain [14:10]
Daniel Di Martino: And because of that cap, and because of how difficult it is, what happens is that most PhD students in this country who come from abroad—which are, by the way, most PhD students in this country are foreigners—they have to go back to their home countries. Not because they want, but because the U.S. immigration system doesn’t allow them to stay. And what’s the consequence for day-to-day Americans? They have a lower quality education, right? Because there’s fewer professors, there’s less knowledge in this country. They have fewer physicians, because many of these are physicians, and that’s a horrible problem in our healthcare system. And they also result in less innovation, right? In less businesses created, and that’s a bad thing for everybody.
It is truly a mess, right? And then imagine I’m talking about 80,000 a year. But what happens if you apply for those categories? How long do they take in getting back to you? Well, if you’re sponsored by a company, maybe it takes less, but the company then has to spend tens of thousands of dollars in sponsoring one single immigrant. So most companies, small businesses, are not allowed to sponsor extraordinary ability people. So the system is then biased towards big corporations because of the high cost of entry imposed by the government and by the lawyers, because the system is so complex that you have to pay so much money to lawyers. And if you want to sponsor yourself as an immigrant because you think you have high ability, there are categories in which the government can take time to respond to you of up to two years. Imagine waiting two years for your immigration decision with total uncertainty, not knowing what to do in that time.
What do allied countries do? The United Kingdom takes five business days. Australia takes less than a month. The dependents of the high-skilled immigrant who come—their spouses and children—they obtain work authorization automatically. Here they have to apply for it and wait another year, and then pay thousands of dollars more in fees. It is an inefficient system like everything else this government does, and it’s a shame because it’s hurting everyday Americans.
Bob Zadek: So what you have explained to us is most of the STEM PhD students in our country—who by the way achieve their PhD or are in the PhD program without cost to them, isn’t that correct? You don’t as a PhD student, you don’t pay tuition as such. That’s on the house, isn’t it? The universities pay for that?
Daniel Di Martino: That’s right. And then the universities also pay us a salary, and that’s all financed through the master’s programs, which are very highly profitable.
Bob Zadek: So what you have just said is the programs that produce the most valuable, if I can use that expression, graduates, PhD graduates—the PhD program in the country at the major university is free to the PhD student. The PhD student is—what percentage of the PhD students in the country, if you know, are immigrants who are not assured of being able to stay here, and what percentage are Americans by birth?
Daniel Di Martino: It is most—in most students in STEM, that is science, technology, engineering, and math PhDs, including economics, are foreigners. So more than half. In some programs, it’s more than two-thirds.
Bob Zadek: So the universities are paying PhD students a salary, and the study is free, which means the country one way or another is paying, whether it’s through tuition that are assessed to masters and undergrads, which means Americans pay indirectly to underwrite the PhD program. And we are educating high-level, highly skilled PhD graduates only so they can then be kicked out of the country with the knowledge they have acquired for free to go back to where they came from unless they can make it through the laborious process of getting a green card. That is almost impossible to believe.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, in fact, in 2019, President Trump said that “we don’t want to lose our great companies because we have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people.” And that is exactly right. We have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people. And it is insane. It is not how other countries do it—other developed countries at least. And that’s a problem, and that’s something that is very easy to fix because you can just establish maximum processing times on the government. Congress should mandate that, and then you can also open up the—and increase the number of green cards.
Per-Country Caps and the 100-Year Wait [19:40]
Daniel Di Martino: Now, all this problem that I described is if you are from any other country other than China and India. This is where it gets messy. The U.S. legal immigration system not only has an overall cap in the number of green cards, it also has a cap on the number of green cards that people from certain countries can receive. And so if you’re from a highly populated country, then you have the same number of green cards allowed as if you’re from a smaller country. And that results in incredible wait times for people from India and China. If today you have a master’s degree and you apply through the EB-2 category for a green card that is highly skilled, and you are from India—you happened to be born in India, which was not your choice—you could face a wait time of, I kid you not, 100 years. You will never get a green card if you apply today and you’re from India. You will never get a green card if you apply today and you’re from India. That’s the situation right now.
Bob Zadek: You made a point a second ago that I do not want to have it be lost on our listeners. And you mentioned that green cards are allocated based upon countries that are in favor or in disfavor. What is the basis? How does a country get on the good list or the bad list? It sounds, Daniel—maybe I’m being too harsh—just pure, dare I say, racist. What is there about—it’s not related to, I don’t think, risk of terrorists, it’s not related to anything that rational. So how are the visas allocated among favored and disfavored countries and why?
Daniel Di Martino: Well, it’s not like there’s a list of favored and disfavored. There’s just a cap per country. It’s called the per-country caps, and it means that no country can receive more than—in the employment-based category, no country can receive more than approximately 7% of all green cards. And that results that if your country is a very large country, happens to be a large country, like China or India—Philippines is sometimes affected too and Vietnam, Mexico in the family category—then those countries will not receive—those people are in a separate waitlist. And so all the people on the waitlist that are for years and years are from India and China right now. And that’s a big problem, right? Because the U.S. immigration system created a sort of underclass in this country where there’s hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people already from India and China who are living and working in the United States under different work visas—H-1B, O visa, TN for people who are also Canadian but happen to be born in India.
And those people are approved for a green card—they are approved already by the government—but because there’s this arbitrary numerical limit, they have to stay on a visa. And if they get fired, they lose their green card too and their visa. Even though they have been waiting for 10, 12, 20 years, and they will have to wait perhaps their whole lives. There’s this issue right now in Congress which some Republicans—let’s say some Republicans are trying to fix it actually—and it’s the issue of the children of these people. Because these people are legal immigrants, they’re approved for a green card, but they will probably never get it. And then their children—they brought their children when they were one year old, five years old—so they are together with them in the green card application; they will also never get the green card. So they are on a visa, even though they lived in their whole lives in this country, they entered legally, and they will never become Americans because of this. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Young Kim, and others in Congress on the Republican side together with Democrats introduced an act that would fix that for the children, called the America’s CHILDREN Act. But the problem remains: that is just a symptom of the problem, which is that why are we limiting the number of very smart people that come into our country because we want to limit it to 80,000 a year rather than the real number, which is market-based, which should probably be like 200,000?
Bob Zadek: Now where did the 80,000—that sounds like somebody made a calculation. 80,000 is the sweet spot, that’s the perfect amount for the good of our country forever. But 80,000 is probably, I’m taking a wild guess, Daniel, somewhat arbitrary, the result of a negotiation between staffers on House and Senate committees negotiating in a vacuum. So it’s not as if somebody determined 80,000 was perfect. It’s totally random, at least it sounds that way to me. So we have an artificial low number which cannot be defended, which ought to be much higher for the good of the country. So help me understand, if you can, what’s the inertia? Why isn’t—let’s take the 80,000, increasing it to 200,000, which to me sounds low. Who would be opposed to that one piece of legislation and other pieces of legislation that fix the most egregious problems in our system? Where does the opposition come from?
Daniel Di Martino: Well, let’s start by that limit was set in 1990, actually. So it has not changed in 31 years. And that’s also, you know, maybe if that had been determined to be the sweet spot then, it didn’t even grow with the population and it didn’t even grow with the economy. And if that had grown, the problem that we have now would probably be very different. So who opposes this? It’s the same type of—it’s the same reason why there’s so much bureaucracy, right? Because imagine that you agree it’s 80,000. Then why should we have two-year processing times? Regardless of what you think the number of immigrants should come to the United States, the decision should be as fast as possible, obviously taking care of the security part. But the reason it takes two years has nothing to do with security; it has to do with the bureaucracy. A background check is fast; these people are already vetted, most of them because they already live in America and got another visa. So this is not about security; this is about inefficiency.
The reason is that some people want to make it hard for, including yes, high-skilled immigrants to come into the United States because they have this long idea that all immigrants take jobs away from Americans. And that’s just a total lie that’s been debunked in the economic sciences and that it’s not supported by any evidence. And we can go into this if you want.
The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Skill Complementarity [28:50]
Bob Zadek: And but you have said earlier that we are talking about the highly skilled segment of the immigration population, which are PhD students and the like. And I don’t remember ever seeing somebody wandering around the streets with a sandwich board which says “will code for lunch.” “Please hire me to code, I need lunch.” So it’s not as if the American-born PhDs are homeless and are living in appliance cartons somewhere. So whose job can possibly be taken away? And by the way, Daniel, one of my—where I really get the little hairs on the back of my neck sticking straight out is when I hear the phrase “taking away someone’s job” or “my job.” No one owns a job. You have a job because somebody else decided you were selling a set of skills at exactly the right price, and therefore the employer wants to buy that set of skills from you at the price you want to sell it for. It is not your job. You are always, always in a marketplace competing against others. And by the way, the competition—some people rail at the thought of competition—but the word competition in an economic context means competing to give Daniel, you, and I exactly what we want at the lowest possible price. I love cutthroat competition that people are fighting each other for the privilege of giving me something really cheap that I want. So I love that competition. But that’s for another show.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, Bob, I view this a little differently. I do think that it is a job of the U.S. government to try to admit people who will be a net benefit to Americans and to take care especially of lower-income Americans. And you know, I will concede the possibility that it is true that some immigrants will be a net burden on the United States if they, during their lifetimes, they make low income and they end up becoming citizens and collecting benefits. They may be a net burden. And it is not the—and I think that the United States would ruin itself if it wanted to admit everybody in the world who would be a net burden to the country, right? We would go bankrupt, basically.
So that’s not the goal. I’m trying to just give a reasonable solution to something that would be really a free lunch for Americans, and there’s very few of those in economic policy, right? And that is to accept people who will never depend on the government, so who are net taxpayers—highly net taxpayers—and not only that, but they create jobs, they’re entrepreneurs, they innovate, they give new products, and that’s a good thing for the United States. And so those types of immigration shouldn’t be limited.
Now we can talk about the cultural concerns; that’s a different question and I can address it. But the reality is that immigrants from highly skilled professions don’t take away American jobs. People have, especially anti-immigrant advocates, have really maligned the so-called H-1B visa, which is the visa that allows foreign workers to come here if they have a college degree in a specialized occupation. There’s only 85,000 of those every year. This is a temporary visa; this is not a green card. No legal immigrant can collect welfare, so that’s not an argument. And they argue that all these companies are basically bringing—what’s the name—callers, what’s for phone calls, and that’s just untrue. And they argue that if these immigrants—yeah, call centers—if these immigrants weren’t here, the Americans would take those jobs. But that’s totally not founded in reality.
First, American companies don’t need to have call centers in America to hire Indians. They go to India, they open the call center there, and they call you from there. That’s ridiculous. That would be too much money to bring somebody in for something they can pay them a lot less in India. So that is false. And the other reason is that imagine that you’re a coder, right? You talked about coding. Companies increasingly are relying on remote work. There will be a point in which in the future, they will not even need to bring those immigrants into America. They will be able to hire them from India. And that will be a problem. Why? Because if those immigrants were in America, they would be paying taxes in America. They would be contributing to many things in the United States and being highly paid. But if they hire them in India, they will be paying taxes to the Indian government. And what’s the result on jobs? It’s the same; the company is still hiring the same person. And I would rather have an immigrant paying taxes in the United States if it’s a net beneficiary than an immigrant paying taxes abroad and living in a different country.
And then we can talk about the cultural concerns; I think some of those are valid, some of those are not. But it is really on high-skilled immigration, it’s a free lunch because of the entrepreneurship, innovation, and the fact that it’s what we call in economics “skill complementarity.” Immigrants who have college degrees, when they are together physically—that’s the reason we have in-person classes most of the time and not remote classes—you run into each other. You have ideas from running into each other. That’s a positive externality. Then there’s agglomeration issues, right? That’s why we live in cities more now than ever, because when you are closer to other people, things are easier to do than if you’re farther away. Humans are social animals; we’re not made for living and working remotely.
So there’s so many issues like this. Another issue with high-skilled immigration that is brought up usually is that these immigrants lower the wages of high-skilled Americans, and that Americans who have a college degree also have a right to make more money. I’ve heard this argument actually very many times. And the reality is that they don’t really lower the wages of college graduates, because most of the immigrants who come here and who we’re talking about are not bachelor’s degree immigrants, they’re actually master’s and PhDs. And I don’t think that these people are concerned about the wages of college professors. I don’t think they’re really concerned about the wages of the best coders in America, which are making $200k, $500k, financial analysts. But their wages don’t go down because of these positive externalities of innovation that just makes everybody more productive.
In reality, what happens is—and this is something that’s not talked about enough—the wages of blue-collar workers go up from high-skilled immigration. Because the more doctors there are, the more financial analysts, the more coders living in this country for the same number of plumbers, of construction workers, there will be more demand for their services and not more supply for them. So the relative wages—so the college premium from getting a degree—actually goes down. It will be more profitable to go into trades and trade school rather than college if you bring more high-skilled immigrants into this country. And that’s something that conservatives should embrace, right? We want more people in trade school, we want people who are in construction, who are blue-collar workers to make more money like they did in the past.
National Security and the Export of Knowledge [35:30]
Bob Zadek: Now you had mentioned all of that, of course, and you have data which I may ask you to share with us just a bit. But before we do that, explain a bit more when we in effect award PhDs to immigrants who are here on a temporary visa program but do not have green cards with permanent status. So we educate them, we give them free high-quality education and pay them a salary, but they do not get permanent residency status. Where do they go and what is the effect upon our country and on the country they came from before they studied here? That really amounts to a huge country-to-country wealth transfer, doesn’t it?
Daniel Di Martino: That’s right. There’s this really good paper by Dr. Britta Glennon, came out last year at the University of Pennsylvania—she’s an economist—and it studies the restrictions on H-1B visas. So these are temporary visas; these are not the high-skilled green cards, but they are the temporary ones. And when America has changed the H-1B cap from time to time, and that has allowed economists to study the effect on the economy on jobs of firms that used to hire H-1Bs that can’t anymore. And the result was that those firms decided to relocate, most of them, to Canada, China, and a few other countries, especially Canada. And the reason is that if you can’t hire the workers that you need and who you know who are the best for the job in Toronto, and then just export your things to the United States or come here—it’s just an international intellectual property product—why would you have an office in New York and not in Toronto? In fact, Canada has a lower corporate tax rate than the United States, so it’s also not such a bad deal in taxes. And that’s why companies are relocating to Canada. Did you know that Burger King is not an American company anymore? They bought a subsidiary in Canada and now they’re Canadian. That has to do with taxes, not so much anymore, but Canada and other countries are really stealing America’s lunch because they make it so much easier to hire international high-skilled entrepreneurs.
Bob Zadek: And it’s not just Canada. Canada, of course, is a benign—is our neighbor with great similarities. But tell us about the effect on China, on other countries whose political system is seen to be somewhat adverse to ours; they are often looked upon as being our enemy. But tell us about our exporting information through PhD graduates into China because they cannot get to stay here. Because that has a direct and negative effect upon national security, although I hate that phrase.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, no, but it’s true. If half of the foreign PhDs in America don’t stay because—and that’s the actual number, it’s approximately half of them don’t stay because of these immigration rules—they will, most of them are actually from China, and they will go back to China. And China is America’s number one adversary and enemy, and it is really a despicable human rights violator. And we shouldn’t want the biggest threat to the United States to have smart people who were educated by the United States, paid for by American institutions. It’s ridiculous, right? Now some people who would be anti-immigrant would just say, “Well, then just don’t admit Chinese immigrants in the first place to get them educated.” Now that’s one possible answer to this problem. I think that the best answer is yes, admit as many smart Chinese people who are not obviously politically involved with the Chinese Communist Party, vet them well, and make sure they stay. Steal all the smart people from China. That is the smart strategy. That is what we did with Germany in World War II, by the way, and that’s why we developed the atomic bomb and beat them with Albert Einstein and others. That’s what we need to do with China today. It’s an intelligence race against China.
Assimilation and the Victims of Communism [37:10]
Bob Zadek: Now you have written about, and it caught my attention, Daniel, and I’d like you to share this bit of scholarship with our friends, about when you analyze the behavior of immigrants from very authoritarian countries into the U.S. Tell us about how they assimilate. We’re talking about those from Venezuela, from Cuba, from authoritarian countries in the Far East and the like. How do they fare statistically as citizens when they arrive in the country? And I’m asking the question—I kind of know the answer, but I’d like the audience to hear it—about what our policy should be towards immigrants from those authoritarian countries. So tell us about how that cohort fares as opposed to other immigrants.
Daniel Di Martino: For sure. That’s actually what I’m studying this year; it’s the assimilation differences—economic assimilation differences—of immigrants from authoritarian and democratic countries. It turns out that immigrants from democratic countries fare worse than immigrants from authoritarian countries in America. And when I say fare worse, I mean that their wages converge to the wages of American workers at a slower pace than the wages of immigrants from authoritarian countries. And that’s a puzzling thing, right? Because you would think that immigrants from democratic countries—this is all adjusted by education, by age, by initial income—and you would think that people from democratic countries would do better. At least that’s what my instinct was. But it turns out that that’s not the case; it’s immigrants from authoritarian countries.
And what I’m trying to find out is specifically why. My hypothesis, which may be wrong—so let’s see—is that there’s more self-selection. And with that, I mean it’s harder to leave an authoritarian country, so only the most determined people from those countries leave. Or also it could be self-selection from authoritarian countries pushing out the most entrepreneurial and skilled people from their country. And so they are the ones who are the risk-takers and they’re the ones who leave, and therefore they’re the ones who fare better once they arrive in America. And that has immigration policy consequences if that’s true, right? So if that’s true, it means that America should really be trying to admit many more people from authoritarian countries. And that’s not happening now.
America has not admitted one Venezuelan refugee in the last 10 years. So somebody who was referred by the United Nations through the U.S. refugee program—not one has come from Venezuela. All of them have come from Africa, from Asia, even thousands have come from Europe, Eastern Europe, from Ukraine and such. None has come from Venezuela, which is the largest refugee crisis in the history of the Western Hemisphere and the second largest refugee crisis in the world right now. It’s about to overcome the Syrian refugee crisis and become the largest. Yet America has not brought in one, only people who arrive here on tourist visas and can request asylum later, which are very few.
So that has to change. We should have a policy like the policy we have with Cuba, which has been very successful, right? Which is the Cuban Adjustment Act. It allows Cubans who have stayed in the United States for one year legally to apply for a green card of their choosing. They don’t have to, you know, many don’t, they don’t have to, but—and they have to enter legally in some way—that allows for some self-selection. But then if they stay one year legally, they can apply for a green card. And that has allowed hundreds of thousands of Cubans over the decades to become Americans. And what are Cubans now? One of the most successful economically Hispanic groups. They’re also the most conservative because they know what socialism is like. That’s why I’ve been pushing for something called the Victims of Communism Visa that would allow people from government—U.S. government-designated socialist countries—to immigrate to the United States much more easily than it is allowed now.
Bob Zadek: In effect, what you’re doing is you’re saying we have in effect a Berlin Wall in the United States where we are preventing immigrants to vote with their feet and to demonstrate the failures of socialist and authoritarian regimes in the most clear way possible by having them flow through the Brandenburg Gate. You want to—in effect, you’re saying, Mr. Biden, tear down that wall. I can just hear you saying that, Daniel.
The Hong Kong Crisis and Closing [43:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, the last issue I’d like to discuss because it’s current, it’s relevant currently, and because we have a rather insane policy, and I’d like to sort of use as our last topic—we have a few minutes—the proof pudding of everything you have said is what our policy towards Hong Kong immigrants should be and what it is. We are missing a golden opportunity to improve the mix of talent in our country if we were to change our policy towards Hong Kong. So speak for a few minutes as we close about Hong Kong and how it fits into everything you have said.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, so Hong Kong—this was a big problem because you know that Hong Kong was the freest actually city on the planet, economically freest, and it was, you know, a former British colony, then it was devolved to China in 1999. And after that happened, the Chinese Communist Party has increased its control over the city. And recently, over the past couple of years, they enacted this Chinese National Security Law that basically criminalizes any speech. There were many protests, people got killed, they got kidnapped, they got jailed, political prisoners, and that’s a big problem for the city, right? And so all these people from Hong Kong wanted to leave and live in freedom.
The United Kingdom decided to grant basically all of the people of Hong Kong the option to immigrate to the United Kingdom, and hundreds of thousands have already exercised that choice. But many people could come to America, and I think America should give them a chance. These are people who love freedom, who know what it is like to lose it, just like other people from socialist countries, and that we could also save lives, right? It’s not just about the benefit, even though I think that the benefit is the most important part for America, but it’s also about saving lives. And we could do that.
But because after we imposed some sanctions on China and we started—we decided to stop treating Hong Kong as a separate country from China because effectively it is not, so now it doesn’t have trade preferences, but it also means that it doesn’t have immigration preferences. And why is that important? Remember when I mentioned earlier in the show that there are country caps for immigrants? Well, now, before, Hong Kong had a different country cap, a separate one from China. Now it is part of China for immigration purposes, which means that it has the same cap as China. And therefore, now immigrants from Hong Kong face wait times that they didn’t before. So after they were taken over by the Chinese Communist Party, we are making it harder for people from Hong Kong to escape. It’s the total opposite of what we should be doing. We should have made it easier for them to come to America, but we made it harder because of a misguided choice that people don’t know their implications of treating them the same for lawful purposes.
So we really need to rethink the immigration system. The problem in our political discussion is that most people don’t know the things that I’m telling you right now, Bob. And I don’t blame them; the immigration law, it is as one of the circuit court judges said in a few years ago, the most complex, perhaps only less complex than tax law in this country. It is incredible. And so we need people who know immigration law in power to fix it, and we need people who want the smartest and best people in the world to be able to come to this country and people who know what freedom is like, right? People who will support American values. That’s what immigration policy should be about.
Bob Zadek: Daniel, how can our friends out there follow your thoughts and your writing and your appearances in media?
Daniel Di Martino: Yes, so you can follow me on Twitter @DanielDiMartino. So that is just my first name Daniel and then Di Martino, that is D-I-M-A-R-T-I-N-O. And then you can also go on my website, danieldimartino.com, and you will find my contact there. You can subscribe to my newsletter, but most importantly, just read about what I write, which is usually things related to Venezuela, economics, and then immigration policy.
Bob Zadek: Daniel, the work you have done is just so informative, and you have taught me in the brief time since I started following your work so much that I’m slapping myself in the face—how come I didn’t know that? And I’ve learned so much and there’s so much yet to learn about our Byzantine, tied-in-bureaucracy policy towards immigrants that is most importantly self-destructive both to the immigrant and to the country. So thank you so much, Daniel, for all the work you have done. Good luck on getting your doctorate degree, and I look forward to having you back on the show often to check in on immigration policy.
Bob Zadek thanking Daniel for his scholarship, for his work, and for just plain being here, Daniel. Thank you so much, and thank you to my friends for giving me an hour of your time. Please check me out on my podcast. If you like what you hear, please indicate, offer suggestions, and the more stars the happier I am. Thank you so much and have a good Sunday.