First, a bit about Alex Nowrasteh
Alex Nowrasteh is the director of immigration and trade at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. His popular publications have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, and most other major publications in the United States. His peer-reviewed academic publications have appeared in The World Bank Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Public Choice, and others. Alex regularly appears on Fox News, MSNBC, Bloomberg, NPR, and numerous television and radio stations across the United States. He is the co-author (with Benjamin Powell) of the book Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which is the first book on how economic institutions in receiving countries adjust to immigration. He is also the co-author (with Mark S. Krikorian) of the booklet Open Immigration: Yea and Nay (Encounter Broadsides, 2014) and has contributed numerous book chapters about immigration to various edited volumes.
Ed’s Questions: Segment one
Welcome to The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy, sponsored by Sage, transforming the way people think and work so their organizations can thrive. I’m Ed Kless with my great friend and co-host Ron Baker, and folks, on today's show we are honored to have with us from the Cato Institute. Alex Nowrasteh.
Ron, how you doing?
Ron
I'm great. I always love having Cato guys on. They're wickedly smart.
Ed
Absolutely, looking forward to having Alex on. And a quick shout out to my friend Kathleen Stokes, who is the one who connected us with Alex. She worked on the Joe Jorgensen campaign and ran across paths with Alex, I think in Michigan if I've got that correct, but maybe not. I'll have a talk about that with Alex. Let me get the bio out of the way and get right to the interview. Alex Nowrasteh is the director of immigration and trade at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. His popular publications have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post and other major papers and publications in the US. He is the co-author with Benjamin Powell of the 2020 book, Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, which is the first book on how economic institutions in receiving countries adjust to immigration. Welcome to The Soul of Enterprise, Alex Nowrasteh.
Well, first off, Alex, congratulations. I understand you're a new dad.
Well, congratulations again. That's awesome. Since you bring up children, I'm going to go right to one of the first things that I posted of yours back on Facebook, and through the magic of logging my Facebook posts and doing a name search on it, I came up with something that you posted back in July of 2014. It was a podcast that you did with Cato Daily. The podcast, which title was “Unaccompanied children in limbo.” I don't know if this is ringing a bell for you, Alex, this topic seems to still be a problem. Has it changed? Or could you just replay that 2014 podcast, and we would be good to go on it.
And obviously, in you calling for different policies resolutions back then I assume that some of them are still in order? And the question is, why haven't we dealt with this, if this is a constant crisis? My perception—and I don't want to be too cynical—is that this is a great fundraising opportunity for both sides. So that's why we don't fix immigration.
Well, thank you for that. I wanted to address that first. It's obviously currently in the news, and we're dealing with it, but I'm going to take you a little bit back now, we've got five minutes left in this first segment, roughly. I've run for office before as a Libertarian, I'm in Texas, so this does tend to come up. And one of the things that I've come across is that immigration is actually not mentioned in the Constitution, at all. The word naturalization is used, and naturalization—my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong—is the process of becoming a citizen. Whereas immigration is the entry into the country. In my view, especially if you're a strict Constitutionalist, shouldn't that mean that immigration is really an issue for individual States to discern how to handle, and what would be wrong with going back to that and then let the federal government decide who is and who is not a citizen.
And correct me again if I'm wrong, and I'm sure I heard this from you on the various podcasts that I listen to, but Canada does do immigration by Province, correct? Or there is at least some authority over immigration by Province, and it seems to work fairly well for them.
I just think it would make a much better system. From my perspective, like I said, it gets local control back to where it’s needed. If you need more agricultural workers, you let in more agricultural workers, it just makes so much more sense. I think there are two things from Canada I think we should import, maybe more, but at least two. One is their immigration policy, and two is the privatization of air traffic control. Both things that I think they do better than us. But we are up against our first break.
Ron’s Questions: Segment Two
Welcome back, everybody. We're here with Alex Nowrasteh, the Director of Immigration and Trade at Cato Institute. Alex, I grew up on The Ultimate Resource, and The Economic Consequences of Immigration by Julian Simon, which had a profound influence on me, and George Gilder who said Castro set out to build the world's greatest city, and he did so, in Miami, Florida. These were all pro- immigration. I mean, without immigration, we wouldn't have been able to build the bomb and then the war, we wouldn't have got Hollywood. According to what I've read, half the companies in Silicon Valley had been founded by immigrants. Is there an Einstein Effect? You hear this argument, or at least I used to hear this argument from the right, that, hey, if we get one Einstein in, one incredible founder, a Google Sergey Brin, someone like that. And it pays for a lot of costs that immigration may bring with it. Is that still talked about?
And not that college is the only way to become an entrepreneur. In fact, I think most great entrepreneurs probably didn't go to college. But that said, the people that are here in college and graduate, shouldn't we make it easier for them to stay here? It seems like we make it really difficult.
And then when you get into the whole illegal crossing, and the argument, “Oh, they're taking our jobs at the low end. And they're driving down wages for the unskilled worker.” I look at this stuff, and yeah, I might say there's some affect there. But isn't there a grand fallacy here, the Lump of Labor Fallacy, that there's only so many jobs (a fixed number of jobs in the economy).
Alex, one of the things that I've learned from Thomas Sowell is in economics, there are no solutions, there's only trade-offs. And Thomas Sowell is not an open immigration economist. I'm sure you're familiar with some of his work. He takes it to task, and he said, “You can't talk about immigration in general, because there's no such thing.” And he kind of takes you around the world and proves this. And basically says there are no solutions to this. There's only tradeoffs, the best economists can do is ask politicians the questions that they're going to need to answer. What's your take on Sowell’s work?
Well, I think he would say—and I don't want to try and speak for him, we did have him on the show. And I did ask him this question about immigration. But one thing he writes about, and basically it's in his book, Applied Economics, if you want to see where he really goes into this topic. Then he's got a scholarly Trilogy as well, that gets into immigration, migration, and culture [Migrations and Cultures, Race and Culture, and Conquests and Cultures]. But he said this, in equating human immigration with trade. He said, when you buy a Toyota and the Toyota crosses the border, it doesn't have little Toyotas. And it doesn't bring a culture, and it doesn't demand the new country accept its language. And it comes with its own culture, which affects behavior. It's not simply a movement of people. And I think he's also worried about the cultural impact, the crime is part of it, but just the culture, kind of the same point that Samuel P. Huntington makes, and I wanted to ask you about his work as well, because he's brought up some of these cultural and spiritual issues that don't really relate to the GDP and some of the economic impacts that we normally talk about around this issue.
And like you say, our culture is so ubiquitous and overwhelming in this country how can you not adapt to it.
I like that. Well, Alex, this is great. Unfortunately, we're up against our break.
Ed’s Questions: Segment Three
And we're back on The Soul of Enterprise with Alex Nowrasteh. Alex, great segment with Ron. I was waiting for him to spring the Sowell on you. When we were prepping for the show earlier he said he was going to do that. So I was really interested in your answer. But I'd like to take you through some of the cliches that are still out there. The first one: illegal immigrants are, by definition, criminals.
You anticipated my next question. So I can go on to the third question, which is—and I love this, it is my all-time favorite, and Ron alluded to it earlier—"Illegal immigrants simultaneously take away jobs and have come here just to collect welfare.
So wait, there's not a box with my name in it that has all my money that I've been sending in? This is great stuff. And what I have heard, and this is kind of interesting to me, the argument, “Well, they come and they use our schools.” And I'm like, isn't educating them a good thing? Because then they go on and like you said, produce more stuff here. I never quite understood that, and what percentage of the school system is illegal immigrants? It's not that tremendous, I can't imagine it is, anyway.
We have about one minute to the break. One of the things when I was running for office that we often talked about—to allude to Texas again—is we don't have a state income tax, but we do have a sales tax, which people who are legal or illegal pay into that system, whereas Arizona does not, they have an income tax, and that's where they fund it. And so there's clearly, I think, more of an immigration problem in Arizona because of the state tax law. Would you agree with that as well?
Great stuff, Alex, and we're up against our last break.
Ron’s Questions: Segment Four
Welcome back, everybody. We're here with Alex Nowrasteh talking about immigration. And Alex, Samuel P. Huntington makes this point, which I find interesting. He says, you hear the partial truth, as he calls it, that “we're a nation of immigrants.” But he draws a distinction between settlers who form new societies, and then immigrants who come later who were attracted to those societies. How do you see that? Or how do you think about that?
Yes, [Milton] Friedman's question, “So what?” I know you're a Southern California boy, and I’m Northern California, born and raised here as well. And one of the things that frustrates me about this whole topic is the caricatures and the cliches thrown around, like we're a nation of immigrants. How do you specifically answer this, I'm sure you've heard this a million times: “If you want to see the effects of illegal immigration, look at California, a red state up through 1998 and now look at it, it’s a complete economic basket case in a lot of respects.” What's your response to that?
Alex, if you were in charge of immigration, how would it work? What would you do? I know you'd refuse that job, but if you were in charge?
Excellent. Well, Alex, thank you so much. This has been an honor to be able to talk with you. Thank you so much for appearing on The Soul of Enterprise. Ed, what do we have coming up next week?
Ed
Next week, Ron, we have Leah Power from the Institute of Canadian Advertisers to talk to us about her work.
Ron
I think it's the Institute of Communication Agencies, actually. Well, I’m looking forward to it. I'll see you in 167 hours.
Bonus Content is Available As Well
Did you know that each week after our live show, Ron and Ed take to the microphone for a bonus show? Typically, this bonus show is an extension of the live show topic (sometimes even with the same guest) and a few other pieces of news, current events, or things that have caught our attention.
This week’s is bonus episode 335 - More on immigration and Guest Garrett Wagner
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