What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns
2019-05-23 · Guest: Alex Nowrasteh (Cato Institute) · 51:04
Economic and Social Impacts of Immigration
Bob Zadek interviews Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute to dissect the economic and social impacts of immigration. They discuss wage effects, welfare usage, the “merit-based” system, and crime statistics, concluding that the data largely supports more open immigration policies while suggesting “keyhole solutions” for specific concerns.
Topics: Immigration, Economics, Welfare State, Labor Markets, Crime Statistics, Public Policy, Libertarianism, Cato Institute
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek — Host
- Alex Nowrasteh — Immigration Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute
Framing the Immigration Debate [00:23]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio—and that’s a big universe, all of radio, and we are number one. Thank you so much for listening this Memorial Day Sunday morning.
I hate illegal immigration. I despise it. Like most Americans, most Americans who are polled, of course, don’t like—they oppose illegal immigration. But when one talks about that two-word concept of illegal immigration, and when one opposes illegal immigration, the question must be asked: which part of that—those two words—do you oppose? The “illegal” part or the “immigration” part?
And by that I mean, if the law were changed so that, let’s just say hypothetically, all or almost all immigration was just made legal—open borders, if you will—so now the “illegal” part is removed from the two-word concept and now we have a one-word concept: “immigration.” Are all those people who oppose illegal immigration, are they now placated and are they now content with the policy? I fear not, although the answer for me would be certainly yes.
And the problem with this issue, which is so much in the news on a daily basis, thanks in part to President Trump’s obsession—it appears to be an obsession—with immigration, it is so much in the news and the problem is, the problem is policy is made and opinions are formed not based upon fact, but based upon emotion, based upon fake news in the extreme.
Introducing Alex Nowrasteh [02:53]
Bob Zadek: Well, when given this situation, the best I can do to contribute to the long-term economic and other health of America is to bring back to my show Alex Nowrasteh. Alex is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. We like liberty and we sure like prosperity. Alex has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and Alex has pushed around Tucker Carlson on Tucker Carlson’s own show—if you can find the YouTube videos, they are worth watching.
Alex has in his head and at his disposal so much factual information concerning immigration. Before you allow your opinions to be spoken or formed any further, please listen to what Alex has to say. Alex brings to the show fact-driven analysis on the hot-button issue of immigration. Alex, welcome to the show this morning again.
Alex Nowrasteh: Bob, thank you for having me, and thanks for that introduction. If you could see me, you’d see that I’m blushing.
Bob Zadek: Oh shucks, Alex. Well, you’re allowed to blush when you’re talking to friends. Now, Alex, on this subject of immigration, people seem to oppose immigration—not illegal immigration, on a policy level, they seem to oppose immigration for several significant-to-them reasons. One of the primary reasons that there is strong opposition to immigration is the fear that immigrants are coming here, or the immigrants who come here will harm us economically. It is a net economic minus to our country and therefore why should we give away our treasure and the pleasures of living here? Why should we give it away to strangers?
Now Alex, I’d like to discuss that issue on two levels. First of all, I’d like to discuss the facts, the economic facts of the effect of immigration on economic life in America and even break it down, because there are, as the phrase often goes, winners and losers. So tell us if you will, with some facts, what is the economic effect in broad terms of immigration in America? And then Alex, I’d like to discuss even if the facts were a net negative, whether that in and of itself is a moral reason to oppose immigration. So first the facts, Alex.
The Economic Impact of Immigration [05:41]
Alex Nowrasteh: So the fact is that immigrants come here, they make up about 13.5% of the U.S. population, about 16% of the workforce, so they’re more likely to work than native-born Americans are. And they boost GDP by somewhere around 12 to 15% based on the estimates. So our GDP is about 12 to 15% greater because of the immigrants who are here. Of course, they get most of the benefits of that because they are the ones who are adding to our production, they’re the ones working here.
So there’s no doubt and nobody disagrees, even the most sort of anti-immigrant economist would disagree with anything that I’ve said right now. The only sort of point of disagreement is the effect on wages of native-born Americans by having these immigrants who are here working. One economist from Harvard University named George Borjas—he’s probably the most skeptical economist of the benefits of immigration—he finds that from 1990 to 2010, the roughly 30 million or so immigrants in the U.S. who came to the U.S. lowered wages of native-born high school dropouts by about 1.7%.
But he raised the wages of every other group of Americans by about 1% or so overall. Meanwhile, on the other side of this are economists Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano, and they find that over that entire time period, immigrants raised the wages of native-born Americans by about six-tenths of 1%. So we’re basically talking about very small differences, small effects on wages, but overall for the vast majority of Americans, wage increases. And the most negative finding in the entire academic peer-reviewed literature is that immigration over the last 20 years or so has lowered the wages of high school dropout natives by about 1.7%, and that is the worst finding that you will ever find in the entire literature. But it’s outweighed even in that research by the wage benefits to other native-born Americans who have at least a high school degree or above.
Efficiency, Automation, and Labor [08:06]
Bob Zadek: And so of course the effect is only, as Alex said, on a small, small cohort of the working population, which is white males with a sub-high school education. And I would submit that—
Alex Nowrasteh: It’s all native-born Americans who are high school dropouts, and they—high school dropout adults in the U.S.—are only about 9% of the population.
Bob Zadek: So a small, small cohort of the working population is negatively affected, and that’s in a minuscule degree. And I would point out that there are so many factors at work that reduce the wages of that cohort of the working population. Automation does that. New products do that. Movement of capital does that. So there are so many factors that reduce wages, and those factors, although they reduce wages of one group, they benefit society profoundly as a whole.
So why aren’t we opposed to all the other, if you will, labor-saving devices and phenomena that happen in society? Why aren’t we railing against efficiency? Because efficiency destroys jobs as well, but efficiency is good for all of us, although there always are people who suffer. Should we have opposed the invention of automatic elevators because of the effect on elevator operators? Well, of course not. So to focus on the effect on one small group, even though the overall effect is positive, makes no rational sense.
Immigrants and the Welfare State [10:29]
Bob Zadek: Now Alex, also just dismiss as you do so often when you’re on mainstream media, this concept, this pure fallacy that immigrants come here for and are successful at taking advantage of our generous welfare system, and that means we are simply sharing our treasure with total strangers by giving them welfare just because they managed to find their way across the border.
Alex Nowrasteh: So legal immigrants and illegal immigrants do not have access to means-tested welfare benefits under U.S. law, with very rare exceptions. And the exceptions are for generally people who are very ill, show up at emergency rooms, emergency Medicaid, and sometimes school lunch programs. But those programs are all funded by the state level; they are not funded by federal benefits in this regard.
But they all make up a very small percentage of federal benefits. When we take a look at it though in more detail using data from the CPS and SIPP, which are two surveys that measure among other things welfare use of different groups in the United States, we find that immigrants in the U.S., regardless of their legal status, are much less likely to use these benefits than native-born Americans are. And furthermore, when they do use these benefits, they use them at a lower rate, such that a foreign-born person in the United States, whether they’re naturalized or not, on average all lumped together, cost about 42% less than a similar native-born American when they come in here on welfare.
Milton Friedman and “Building a Wall Around the Welfare State” [12:43]
Alex Nowrasteh: Now, we’ve written about welfare a lot at Cato. I’m of course opposed to the existence of any means-tested welfare state or any welfare state at all. And so we wrote a paper though, sort of a middle-ground solution, called “Build a Wall Around the Welfare State, Not Around the Country,” that would make those rules even stricter so that nobody who’s not a citizen would ever be able to have advantage or take advantage of the welfare state in any kind of way.
And it’s remarkable to me in Washington D.C., taking a look at my friends on the right who are conservatives, almost none of them ever talk about this option. They want to use the welfare state as an argument to cut immigration. I want to use immigration as an argument to cut welfare.
Bob Zadek: And that’s totally consistent, I should say, with Milton Friedman’s view. Milton Friedman has observed famously that immigration and a welfare state cannot coexist. He agreed with that. Professor Friedman’s approach was of course to get rid of welfare, not to get rid of immigration. Of course, getting rid of welfare is impossible politically; it may not even be desirable politically or economically or socially. So let’s put aside the impossible of getting rid of welfare, but Cato and Alex’s solution is nothing short of brilliant. It keeps welfare in place for those who favor it because attacking welfare is pretty much a political impossibility, but it removes welfare as an argument, as it is so often used as an argument against immigration. And it’s just a—everybody wins in that approach. And we pretty much have it now, but the Cato approach would make it the wall, if you will, even stronger.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, so I want to say, in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act that was passed during the Clinton administration, the most successful portion of that bill and the portion that lasted the longest are those that restrict non-citizen access to these benefits. You know, it’s politically popular to restrict benefits so that non-citizens can’t get them. Members of both parties even like it. I mean, during the Obama administration, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice discovered that the state of Pennsylvania was giving means-tested welfare benefits to some small number of illegal immigrants by using federal dollars, and they sued the state of Pennsylvania to get that money back. So it’s something where like if even Eric Holder’s Department of Justice wants to make sure that illegal immigrants don’t have access or abuse welfare benefits in the United States, then it’s a pretty much a guarantee that both sides of the political spectrum are open to this. And we had last year, last Congress, Representative Grothman, who is a Republican from Wisconsin—like he and I don’t really agree on immigration overall, but we agreed on the issue of welfare and denying all non-citizen welfare benefits. So he introduced a bill based on our ideas, a wonderful bill that would basically solve the vast majority of these problems going forward. So we’re interested in working with anybody on this topic.
Merit-Based Immigration and the Canadian Model [15:29]
Bob Zadek: Now Alex, in the news of late was an announcement by President Trump, a little short on details, but a hint of what he has in mind and what his administration has in mind with what has been called by many a “merit-based” immigration system. Now merit is kind of a strange word, but what is that all about? And how would that improve, if it would, the current system? And are other countries using anything resembling a merit-based system, and what does that even mean, and how have those countries fared under a merit-based immigration system?
Alex Nowrasteh: So the way that the President uses that term “merit-based” is that they want to take the current U.S. immigration system, under which about 80% of current immigrants come in legally because of their family ties to other Americans or other green card holders—so about 80% of those coming in legally today are coming through the family-based immigration system. The other—and only about 7% or so are coming in through the skills-based system, through this merit-based system that we have currently.
What it seems like President Trump and Jared Kushner and these other folks want is they want to decrease the percentage coming in on the family-based system and increase it on the economic side. Make sure that more people who are coming in are economic migrants who are very highly skilled. That is in and of itself, I think, not a terrible goal. If we’re going to have immigration restrictions and limit the number, then we should probably have more people who are, you know, well-skilled, educated, willing to work, etc.
The where they go wrong though is that they want to cut the total number of immigrants coming into the United States. Like they could change the percentages easily by just allowing more skilled-based immigrants, not by cutting family members. But unfortunately, Trump and Kushner and these other folks, they want to cut the number of family members who can come in.
Now, compared to other countries like Canada and Australia, which have these skills-based, merit-based immigration systems, it’s true that a much larger percentage of their immigrants come in on these visas—about a quarter, for instance, about 25% of immigrants to Canada come in on the skills-based system exclusively. But the difference is Canada lets in, as a percentage of its population, about double the number of immigrants as the U.S. does each year. So we could get Canada’s skill—or something similar to Canada’s merit-based system, but the easiest way to do that would just be to double the number of immigrants coming to the U.S. each year, but saying those immigrants are all economic immigrants, all skills-based immigrants, they’re all people who are coming here because they’ve shown they have a high education or they want to invest and build businesses in the U.S. So that’s how I suggest that the President go forward with this. Like get rid of this idea that you want to cut legal immigration, get rid of the idea that you want to cut family-based immigration, and just increase the economic side. And voila, you will get the merit-based immigration system that Canada has.
The Need for Low-Skilled Labor [18:58]
Bob Zadek: Without cutting the family-based immigration quota, the amount of people. And why in the world should we permit Canada and Australia and perhaps other countries to have access to skilled workers who contribute to the economy while we say you’re not welcome here? How could they possibly not be welcome if they have skills we need? That’s how a merit-based system is—they have skills we need and we say no, the numbers are too high, go to Canada, go to Australia. It makes no sense.
Now Alex, one observation on a merit-based system. Obviously, a merit-based system focuses on better-educated immigrants, those with advanced degrees or at least degrees in areas where we are short native-born people holding those degrees. My only issue is that on a merit-based system, since we are short many somewhat unskilled workers as well—the farms, the hotels, the hospitality industry, they are all begging for workers which they can’t—and they can’t get native-born Americans to fill those slots. So I would say a merit-based system ought to also give merit credit to unskilled workers simply because we need them. Is that built into the system?
Alex Nowrasteh: No, it’s not built into the merit-based idea at all. And I agree with you that lower-skilled workers are tremendously valuable; they add a lot to the U.S. economy as well. And any sort of dream immigration proposal, something that we’d really want, would include a way for these folks to come in legally in larger numbers.
Now, when we’re talking about merit-based immigration, we’re talking about green cards. And green cards are a way to permanent residency. You can live here forever on a green card and become a citizen eventually if you want to. The U.S. government does have temporary work visas that aren’t a green card, they don’t lead to citizenship, for lower-skilled workers. The problem is that these visas just don’t work very well. They’re too expensive, they’re too regulated, they’re only available for temporary workers, not year-round workers in the U.S.
And that’s why we see all this illegal immigration activity, I think, in the United States—is that there really is no legal way for lower-skilled workers to come here lawfully to work temporarily and go back home. So any kind of like immigration reform that solves a lot of these problems, especially if it included merit-based immigration, has to include changes to our low-skilled guest worker visa programs so that some of these folks can come in legally and work in agriculture and tourism, but even in other industries like construction, retail, industrial industry, etc., so that these folks can come in legally and work and go back home if they want to at the end of it. And that’s really like the key that’s missing, right? We’re focusing, and the President is focusing on merit-based, but we’re ignoring I think the elephant in the room, which is most of the people who are coming here illegally or overstaying their visas, becoming illegal immigrants, they’re not very highly educated people, but they fill an important role in our economy. And if we want to stop illegal immigration, we gotta find a way to make it so that these people can come here legally, work legally, and go back home if they want to.
Bob Zadek: The one thing that strikes me as so irrational—and as the intro said, we are a show of ideas, not attitude—well, the pure attitude and absence of ideas is this concept that we benefit when a guest worker comes in here and works, and that same worker we benefit when they leave? How can that possibly be? Here we have somebody who clearly has obeyed the laws, has contributed to the economy—of what possible benefit could there be by us having that individual leave? It makes no sense to me. It is utterly bizarre. They are here, they have learned how we operate here in America, they obviously like it, they contribute to the economy, and that’s the kind of person we want, not somebody—we don’t want that person to have to leave. That makes no sense whatsoever.
Asylum and Perverse Incentives at the Border [27:47]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending a wonderful morning, as I always do, with Alex Nowrasteh. Alex is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He has appeared on every mainstream media outlet there was, as well as on the Bob Zadek Show many times, I proudly say. We are trying to add some rationality and some intellectual thought to the most contentious and emotional of topics, which is immigration. We will learn from Alex when we come back from our short break. We will learn from Alex how the system works at the border, how crazy is it, what’s going on now with asylum, how does that fit into the whole system? Lots more to follow. Please stay tuned. We’ll be back in 30 really short seconds.
[Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are spending this hour talking to Alex Nowrasteh. Alex is an immigration policy analyst at Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Who could oppose global liberty? Who could oppose global prosperity? Answer: of course, no one. He is the author, co-author with Mark Krikorian of a book called Open Immigration: Yea and Nay, published by Encounter Broadsides in 2014. Alex holds a master’s in economic history from the prestigious London School of Economics. Alex, welcome back to the show.
Now Alex, those of us who learn about what’s going on at the border from the evening news, it makes no sense. There are these asylum seekers and they cross the border, and once they’re here they get to stay here, we are told. They are moved around the country. Now, it’s been observed that our immigration statutes—and of course there are many—is the second most complicated body of law in the country behind the Internal Revenue Code. It is a patchwork, it is wholly irrational. What is the—give us if you will, the big picture of what is the effect of all of the economic statutes, what are the bullet-point rules, and what’s going on at the border these days? We can’t figure it out.
Alex Nowrasteh: It’s a very complicated situation. I’ll give you the rules, I guess, that focus on what’s going on at the border right now. So under U.S. law, you can ask—if you’re a foreigner, you can ask for asylum once at a port of entry when you enter the U.S. or once you’re already inside of the country. And what asylum is, is you go to the government and you say, “I have a well-founded fear of persecution if you send me back to my home country based on my race, my religion, my membership in a social organization, etc.” So if you send me back to my home country, I will likely be killed. I have a very good reason to think that I will be killed or at least persecuted by the government or by the lack of the government trying to protect me, which is its duty, against other social organizations attacking me for one of these reasons.
So this creates a perverse incentive in a way along the border. So what the Trump administration has done is they’ve limited the number of people who can ask for asylum at a port of entry. But under U.S. law, they can’t limit the number of people who ask for asylum after they’re already in the United States. So this creates a perverse incentive where people from Central America who want to ask for asylum have no incentive to wait at a port of entry; instead, they have every incentive to enter illegally and then turn themselves into Border Patrol agents and ask for asylum this way, which is exactly what they’re doing.
On top of that, the Trump administration has started to put in detention facilities—basically big government jails for illegal immigrants—only single people who are coming across. So if you don’t have a child with you, then they will put you in one of these detention facilities. But if you do have a child with you, then they will let you go in the U.S. with a court date and say, “Show up in a couple years for your court date,” which gives an incentive for people from Central America to bring their kids with them because then they won’t be detained in any facility.
Now, after you enter as an immigrant on this, you ask for asylum, you enter, in 180 days you get a work permit, a legal work permit to work in the United States prior to your court date. The court backlog, however, for these asylum claims is about 900,000—900,000 cases. So the court date, we expect, will be three to four years before they’re even allowed to see a judge to sort out whether they have a legitimate asylum claim or not. So this is just a huge catastrophe of bad incentives, bad rules, and no other way for these people to come here lawfully.
Congressional Abdication and Executive Power [30:23]
Bob Zadek: And so I remind my American friends out there: this is a statute, or a series of statutes, that your elected representatives have enacted. This is what they are doing to earn your faith, trust, and reelection. And therefore, this invites a brief commentary, just very brief, on the tension between executive order—a muscular executive, i.e., a president—and Congress.
And in this instance, as in many others, but we’re only talking about immigration, what we have is we have Congress with a monumental problem—everybody concedes it is a monumental problem—but they are so—Congress is so dysfunctional, they are unable, unable to see the lunacy of the existing system that Congress created. And therefore, the president, whoever it is—Trump and Obama before him—have found it necessary to do the best they can to deal with the problem because their duty is to enforce the laws and to see that they are faithfully executed.
So the president, the executive branch, has the absurd task of being charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that the laws are faithfully executed. The laws are impossible to be faithfully executed, and the president gets the heat for all of this, for all of these problems at the border. This is a monumental failure of Congress. And clearly, if Congress would enact legislation that in any way fixes the problem—while no one can say for sure, but there is certainly a strong indication that the president will sign it. So there is no reason, no reason other than utter cowardice or stupidity or worse for Congress not to do the very job they were sent to Washington to do. Alex, am I being too harsh? Is there parts of that discussion that I have over- or understated?
Alex Nowrasteh: I don’t think you’re being too harsh. I think in a way you’re being too lenient. This is a problem that Congress has created, not just in immigration law, but in so many other areas of law. Basically since the 1920s, they have abdicated their constitutional responsibility to craft laws that they themselves figure out how to enforce, that they create the mechanisms for enforcement. Instead, they’ve gotten lazy and they just put in the law like “the president can figure this out, he can issue the orders that he wants, he can do this or that.”
So the immigration code is full of these. I mean, the president’s actions, for instance, on the travel ban that he did shortly after taking office, the actions of sort of surging Border Patrol to different portions of the border, of reallocating resources according to whatever he wants—most of these are spelled out explicitly in the immigration law that gives him this power. And it’s Congress that has basically said, “We don’t want this power anymore, the president should do it.” And we see it in immigration law, you see it in many other portions of U.S. law, and it’s really an unconstitutional abdication of Congress’s power that violates what we rightly hold to be an important constitutional feature—it violates the separation of powers doctrine. And this is dangerous. I think it’s dangerous. I’ve come to the realization, I think over the last decade or so in working on policy and seeing the actions of President Obama, seeing the actions of President Trump and thinking, you know, up close and studying them, and thinking the executive branch is really the most dangerous branch of government, and Congress has basically given them all—given these executives, Republicans and Democrats, all the power they could ever want and is giving them more and more. And this is very worrying to me.
The Moral Argument: Frederick Douglass and Natural Rights [34:41]
Bob Zadek: Now Alex, we learn—those of us who have studied American history recall Thomas Jefferson’s very famous essay when he talked about—it was a letter actually—when he talked about the battle between his heart and his mind. He was doing so in connection with a love affair of sorts he was having when he was in Paris from 1784 to 1789, but he knew it was wrong but he couldn’t help himself. And he wrote passionately about the battle between his heart and his mind.
In immigration, I find myself with my mind says, as you have instructed us and taught us, that intellectually, on a data-driven analysis, immigration is in every respect good for our country. So that satisfies the mind, the rational part of me. But here I have my heart is also in sync. I don’t have any battle between my heart and my mind in immigration. Both organs are in sync. And what I’m driving at is there is a moral, a philosophical component to immigration. Libertarians recognize that the right to freely travel, the right to travel to improve the life of yourself and your family is a natural right that all humans have solely by dint of their humanness.
So let us assume for the minute that Alex—let’s talk just for a moment about the philosophical. Let us assume there was no tangible benefit to you and I by allowing somewhat open borders, far more open than they are now. Can’t an argument be made, even if it’s not necessarily good for America, that on a basis other than what’s good for us—the selfish argument—that a strong argument can be made to somewhat open the borders, or materially open the borders, just to allow others to enjoy the benefits of our country?
Alex Nowrasteh: I think there is a strong ethical and moral argument for that. Frederick Douglass, the famous former slave and prominent abolitionist, made this argument himself several times when opposing efforts by labor unions and nationalists in the 19th century to block Chinese immigration. He gave numerous speeches arguing that even though Chinese immigration and Chinese immigrants may compete with black workers in the U.S. and maybe lower their wages, that that was immaterial, that that did not matter. That the natural rights of Chinese immigrants, who are endowed to them because of their mere humanity, trumps any kind of material or economic self-interest of any group in the United States, even a group of free slaves and black Americans like himself. That was immaterial. That’s not what mattered. What mattered were our ethical and moral obligations.
I’m not as, I guess, hardcore as Frederick Douglass was maybe on this issue, but I think that there is a point perhaps when the harms—if the harms are very bad—when it might be acceptable to close them, close the borders. But fortunately, or fortunately I guess I should say, there’s really no evidence of that. But it has to be a very severe downside. You have to show me that a very bad thing would happen if the borders were relatively open to convince me that we would have to close them. I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to close the borders, and that we should have a presumption in favor of looser legal immigration, we should have a presumption in favor of allowing people to come here unless there’s very good evidence to the contrary that it would cause a very negative effect on the United States. So I put the burden of proof on those people who are nativists or restrictionists who want to close down the border to show us what bad thing would happen, to provide evidence and convincing arguments. And that the default for libertarians and for people who believe in individual human freedom should be to allow people to move unless there’s a very good argument to the contrary and excellent evidence.
Keyhole Solutions and Gun Control Analogies [41:01]
Bob Zadek: And of course, as you have pointed out with your suggestion of building a wall around welfare rather than a wall around the country, even if open borders has a negative—an overall negative effect—there are many ways to remove the negative effect without closing the border, as you have pointed out with separating welfare from immigration. So even if, even if an argument can be made that there are some negative consequences from open borders, opening borders like opening our hearts is a positive good. And if there is a negative that comes from that, let’s focus on the negative, on fixing what’s—how we’re being harmed other than by closing the borders, until we get to a point that we have exhausted our skill in fixing the problem of open borders and then we must with a heavy heart close the borders. But we’re nowhere near there, as Alex pointed out, we’re nowhere near that. And even if there are negatives, those negatives can be dealt with by the skill of legislation and by compassion and not dealt with by building a wall and denying another human being the right to improve their life for themselves and their family. And maybe this is the only way they can improve their life.
Alex Nowrasteh: That’s right, that’s right. And I would say that these sort of solutions to decrease the downsides of more open immigration, right, like building the wall around the welfare state—we like to call those “keyhole solutions.” Sort of like keyhole surgery. Sort of it’s a better way—keyhole surgery is less invasive, it’s less likely to lead to death, it’s just a lower-cost way of achieving the really good outcome, which is fixing what’s wrong with you. So I like to call these small solutions to problems of immigration “keyhole solutions.”
And a lot of my friends, my conservative friends or friends who are on the right, they will accept these keyhole arguments for other issues, say like gun control. So I’m a very pro-gun individual, I conceal carry even in Washington D.C., I have a legal permit to conceal carry in Washington D.C. and other places. So I’m very much pro-gun. On the left wing, you know, the left-wingers, they will say, they look at some crime or tragedy that occurs because of a criminal with a firearm and they’ll say, “Well, we need to ban all guns, or we need to restrict the ability for people like myself to carry guns because there’s a small number of people who do harm with them.” And I think conservatives rightly understand that’s a really broad brush, that’s a really unjust way to punish the vast majority of gun owners for what a small number of people actually do. So they propose keyhole solutions. They’ll say, “Well, you know, if you’re a violent felon maybe you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun, maybe if you’re mentally ill you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun, etc.” Those are some severe and serious restrictions, but they’re a lot better than banning all firearms, which is what a lot of liberals want to do. So they accept—conservatives accept these arguments, these sort of middle-ground solutions, maybe they’re worth talking about, they’re worth considering, they’re worth putting in the law. So what I really just want a lot of my conservative friends to do is to embrace that type of argument, to embrace those types of solutions when looking at immigration just like they do when examining the gun issue.
Immigration and Crime Statistics [44:51]
Bob Zadek: And that of course is bedrock constitutional law. In the very foundation of our country, it is irrefutable constitutional law that once Congress, once the courts recognize that there are certain rights that we have as Americans, such as freedom of assembly, free exercise of religion, free speech and the like, once we have certain rights, it’s not a question of whether government can take away or limit those rights. It’s a question of, in order for government to do so and pass constitutional muster, they must satisfy the courts that what they are—the deprivation or the limitation of rights—is in accomplishing a valid governmental purpose and, this is the important part, there is no other less intrusive way to satisfy the problem. So applying bedrock constitutional law to what Alex just said, Alex has said, “Okay, even if there is a problem caused by open borders, we must find the least intrusive, the way that deprives us of our rights of travel in the least intrusive way to solve the problem, not by the blunderbuss way of okay, let them all out, close the border.” That never works.
Now Alex, you mentioned crime a second ago, and there’s one more issue that I want to cover in the limited time we have. Donald Trump is an offender of this—they will raise the specter, and it’s a two-part specter that I’d like you to address: the fear of losing control of our borders, i.e., letting terrorists in, and also letting criminals in—that immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of crime and therefore you’re making the country less safe. Can you please for us dispel that nonsense?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yes, so the foreign-born population in the United States is about, as a percentage of their population, less than half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans are overall. Now the comment I get from this is, “Yeah, sure, legal immigrants are less likely, but illegal immigrants are more likely to be criminals,” and that’s just simply not the case either.
Now Ann Coulter in her book Adios America makes the claim that no state in the United States tracks convictions or incarcerations by legal immigration status. They just, you know, so they don’t check to see if people are illegal immigrants or legal, they just classify them all as immigrants. Now that’s true in 49 states except for what I think is one of the greatest states, which is the state of Texas. Texas actually counts the conviction rates and the incarceration rates by immigration status. So when you take a look at those populations, what you find is that illegal immigrants are about half as likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans are, and legal immigrants are about 70% less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans are. And these carry over into the incarceration rates in those states.
So what we see, the overwhelming amount of evidence on both illegal immigrants and legal immigrants going back over a century is that they are less likely to be incarcerated, less likely to be convicted, less likely to even be arrested, and less likely to be sent to jail than native-born Americans. So it’s basically just a myth, this popular myth, and I think part of it is because of how the media treats these things. Like if a native-born American kills another native-born American, well that’s just a normal day. But all of a sudden when an immigrant or an illegal immigrant does it, then it becomes this national media story like we’ve seen in the tragic murders of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa and some other murders around the country like in San Francisco of Kate Steinle in 2015 by an illegal immigrant. But what we don’t notice—and this is sort of a politically incorrect point, I don’t know how to say it in a nice way so I’m just going to say it—but it seems like the media and American consumers of media, they only really care when an immigrant or an illegal immigrant kills a native-born American. But the vast majority of people who murder somebody else in this country murder somebody who they know personally—they murder their neighbor, they murder their friend, they murder their spouse or a member of their family. So what happens is the vast majority of victims of illegal immigrant crime are other illegal immigrants in this country. So there was this tragic individual case in Seattle earlier this year where this illegal immigrant killed his girlfriend in a brutal way and then had a standoff with the police before he was arrested. And you’d think that this would make national news. The reason it didn’t is that the victim of his crime was another illegal immigrant. So people just didn’t care that much. So we need to view what the media says about these things, we need to view which news stories along these lines become popular through these lenses of what people and the consumers actually care about, and we need to basically open our mind and look at the data. And the data say that illegal immigrants are much less likely to be criminals.
Terrorism Risks and Final Thoughts [49:01]
Bob Zadek: Alex, we have a few seconds left. Alex, we have two minutes left. One in 3.8 million—tell us about the risk of a terrorist attack by an immigrant. We have only two minutes, Alex.
Alex Nowrasteh: The annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil committed by a foreign-born person is 1 in 3.8 million per year from 1975 through the end of 2017. Your annual chance of being murdered in a homicide during that time period, however, is about 1 in 14,000 per year. So if you’re worried about immigrants or foreign-born people committing terrorism and murdering you and your loved ones, I suggest that you calm down about it and I suggest that you view it as the very small risk that it is.
Bob Zadek: Alex, thank you so much. You are so wise and have so much information. You have helped all of our listeners when they discuss and think about immigration, they use their minds and not their hearts. Thank you so much for the great work that you and your colleagues at Cato have done, and thank you for giving us an hour of time on this Sunday morning. Now Alex, we have about 30 seconds left. How can our friends follow your writings at Cato?
Alex Nowrasteh: So you can go on our website at cato.org, that’s C-A-T-O dot org, or you can follow me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @AlexNowrasteh, that’s at A-L-E-X-N-O-W-R-A-S-T-E-H.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, my friend. Wonderful spending a Sunday morning with you and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Alex Nowrasteh: Thanks, Bob, you too.