Benjamin Powell is an economist and the Executive Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He appeared on The Bob Zadek Show at least twice: once in a 2015 episode where his research was cited by guest Alex Nowrasteh, and once in a 2022 episode where he was the featured guest discussing his edited volume Wretched Refuse. His work on immigration economics, particularly the costs of restriction and the complementarity of immigrant and native labor, formed the core of both appearances.
The $200 billion estimate and cost-benefit reasoning
In the 2015 episode “Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again,” Alex Nowrasteh cited Powell’s research to quantify the economic cost of immigration restrictions. Nowrasteh explained that the $200 billion figure came from a paper by Powell, “an economist at Texas Tech University in West Texas,” who “tried to estimate the rent-seeking costs of a moratorium on immigration and combined those with the economic benefits annually from immigration to the United States to come up with a number that was $236 billion, I believe, in total.” Nowrasteh rounded the figure down to $200 billion for calculation purposes, noting that his calculation “basically underestimates the cost of such a moratorium and exaggerates the benefits of it” in order to be “as charitable to the other side as I possibly could.” Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015)
Bob Zadek framed the resulting trade-off in stark terms, asking whether Americans would be “willing to strip the economy of about $200 billion annually in order to possibly—and we’ll get to this in a second—save a few lives.” Zadek argued that “the denying or closing the border to accomplish a national security goal cannot be defended” on a “rational, objective measure.” Nowrasteh agreed and extended the reasoning, noting that “a lot of libertarians and conservatives understand that reasoning perfectly well when it comes to environmental risk” and gun ownership, where they weigh costs and benefits and recognize that “the value of human life is not infinite.” He asked only that “we apply these same reasoning skills that we apply toward environmentalism or gun ownership also to the issue of national security and immigration.” Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015)
Ellis Island as a policy benchmark
In the 2022 episode “The Economics of Immigration,” Powell introduced his preferred framing for liberalized immigration policy: Ellis Island-style migration. Bob Zadek described Ellis Island as “a placeholder or a marker for open borders,” where “immigration officials were looking for disease and criminality” and “it was a pretty low bar to get in.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Powell pushed back on the term “open borders,” calling it “a loaded term that packages a lot of things together for people, including the chaos that’s going on on the southern border of the United States along Texas-Mexico right now.” He noted that the southern border is “not an open border when people pay $5,000 to $10,000 to coyotes to smuggle them across,” which he called “a pretty good indication that you’re not free to cross openly.” Powell distinguished between “no checks, willy-nilly jumping across the Rio Grande” and what he called “Ellis Island migration policy or free migration like free trade,” which “just implies no blanket quantitative restrictions on immigrants coming from any particular origin country.” Under such a system, “you could have basic qualitative—come through legal checkpoints, have basic qualitative checks of contagious disease, if so quarantine, known criminal or terrorist, you don’t get in. But otherwise, much like during the Ellis Island time, any number from any origin are welcome.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Powell offered a political rationale for the Ellis Island framing: “a number of people I talk to about immigration, they’ll say, ‘It’s just illegal immigration that I object to, not legal immigration. You know, my great-grandparents, my grandparents, they came here legally.’” Powell’s response is that “Ellis Island immigration policy allowed most people in the world to legally come to the United States. Right now, almost everybody in the world is legally prohibited from migrating to the United States.” He characterized his proposal as a return to “law and order immigration” without numerical restrictions. The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Immigrants as complements, not substitutes
Powell’s central economic argument in the 2022 episode was that immigrants complement native labor rather than substitute for it. He explained that immigration “changes the mix of jobs that the native-born population does to better correspond to what we are good at, and they take up the slack of what they are better at.” When Bob Zadek supplied the term “comparative advantage,” Powell accepted it: “It shifts the jobs to those things that we have a comparative advantage in.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Powell described the skill distribution of immigrants as “an unbalanced hourglass where you’ve got lots of ones that are low-skill, kind of few in the middle, and more up at the top,” compared to the US labor market, which “would look more like a diamond where most of the people are kind of in the middle.” Because of this distribution, “immigrants for most of us aren’t a direct substitute. They’re—if we’re going to use economics terms again—they’re a complement. They free us up to do what we’re better skilled to do and take away the tasks that we’re not as well-suited to do.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
On wages, Powell acknowledged a debate among economists about the impact on high school dropouts, where “some of these economists get all riled up about this and call each other frauds over how they use their data.” The debate concerns “whether people without a high school diploma in the United States might see as much as a negative 8% impact on their wages or as little as nothing or even slightly positive, and if it lasts for like under two years or all the way to two years.” Powell called this “kind of a sideshow” relative to “massive global gains from migration.” He offered the example of a roofer who, when more immigrants take roofing jobs, “becomes the foreman of the roofer who talks to the English-speaking customer,” illustrating how “it’s about changing what you’re doing in your job in response to how your skills differ from the immigrants.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Bob Zadek added a consumer-welfare perspective, arguing that if low-skilled wages fall by 8%, “consumers are paying 8% less for a service or for a product collectively.” Zadek called this “a feature” rather than a bug, asking “what’s wrong with a governmental policy that means that consumers get to buy the same good or service for less money?” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
The fragility myth and internal migration
Powell addressed the fear that immigrants might undermine American institutions by drawing an analogy to internal migration within the United States. Speaking from Texas, he noted that people there talk about Californians moving in and ask, “Is Texas going to turn purple because of all of the Californians coming?” His answer: “When you look at, like, voting rates, non-native-born Texans vote for Republican candidates at higher rates than native-born Texans do. They self-identify as conservative more.” Powell attributed this to “a selection bias of who chooses to come here,” observing that “the Californians who move here are more likely to be the ones who want to go buy a gun when they get here.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Powell extended the logic to international migration, suggesting “there’s kind of a pre-assimilation on some margins that America is still a thing, imperfect as it may be, and when immigrants choose to move here, it’s not certainly with the intent to undermine American institutions that make us wealthy and productive, but instead to become part of that.” He acknowledged the strongest counterargument—that immigrants “unknowingly bring with them cultural traits and beliefs because they don’t understand what makes America prosperous”—but said that in the book, “we don’t really find evidence for it.” He argued that “greater immigration in bigger numbers was associated with smaller government growth and limiting the socialist movement in the United States back when we had Ellis Island-style immigration policies.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Market-based solutions
Powell proposed that if quantitative limits on immigration persist, visas should be allocated by market mechanisms rather than bureaucratic process. “If you’re going to have quantitative limitations, it seems to me we should be using a market to allocate those visas instead of the cumbersome immigration process,” he said. He elaborated: “Allow employers to bid on them to bring people here and allow people here to bid on them to give them to a relative to reunite with, allow people in other countries to bid on them to get the right to come here. Hell, allow immigration restrictionists to bid on them so that they could burn the permits.” He concluded that “conditional on limiting quantity, the only way to get the most efficient mix is to use a market to reconcile the competing demands for those visas. But if we had a truly open Ellis Island system, the market price would be zero because anybody could get one by showing up.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
On whether there is an upper limit to immigration, Powell said: “Yes, there is a limit. No human being knows it. We cannot centrally plan an international labor market any better than the Soviet commissars could centrally plan the market for shoes, televisions, or anything else in the Soviet Union.” He noted that “nowhere where people are free to move between jurisdictions do you see wage differentials of more than 30%, but yet we see them by orders of magnitude between countries.” He concluded that “we are so far from optimal immigration that we could let this process play out for a long time before we’d be going towards that limit, and then the market process itself would slow it down and stop it. We don’t need the government planners to do it.” The Economics of Immigration (2022)
Across episodes
The two episodes show no development in Powell’s position but rather a division of labor: in 2015, Alex Nowrasteh cited Powell’s cost estimate to frame immigration restriction as an economically irrational trade-off; in 2022, Powell himself elaborated the underlying economic theory of complementarity and proposed institutional alternatives. The 2015 episode treats Powell as a source of data; the 2022 episode presents him as the primary theorist. Both episodes share the premise that immigration restrictions impose large economic costs and that the burden of proof lies with those who would restrict movement. Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015) The Economics of Immigration (2022)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Powell’s educational background beyond Bob Zadek’s introduction in the 2022 episode, which mentions a PhD in economics from George Mason University. The excerpts do not describe the methodology of Powell’s $236 billion estimate beyond Nowrasteh’s brief summary, nor do they name the paper in which it appeared. The excerpts do not cover Powell’s other books beyond Wretched Refuse and Socialism Sucks, nor do they provide details about his role at the Independent Institute beyond Zadek’s description of him as “a senior fellow.” The excerpts do not state whether Powell appeared on the show more than the two times represented here.
Episodes
1 appearance, 2022–2022.
- The Economics of Immigration (2022) — Economic and social impacts of immigration. Executive Director of the Free Market Institute