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June 23, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
21:40
Episode 115 - How to Solve Immigration, and Lots More
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Well, we got all kinds of good news and good ideas today.
It's a sunny day here in California.
I hope it's just as nice where you are.
And do you know what makes your day even better?
Yes, I think you do.
It's coffee. It's coffee with Scott Adams.
It's the simultaneous sip.
It's time for Simultaneous Sip.
So today what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach you how to solve the whole immigration everything problem all at the same time.
And solve a bunch of other problems also at the same time.
Now, let me frame this for you this way.
What you're going to see is a whiteboard presentation in a moment, in which I'm going to show you how the government could get out of this deadlock where they can't solve anything about anything.
So that's where we are in a lot of domestic issues, immigration, etc.
We're kind of deadlocked.
And we can't get out of it.
So I'm going to teach you the techniques for getting out of this kind of a deadlock.
Now that doesn't mean my ideas for what I'm going to tell you are really the ideas that we should do.
So that's not really the point of today.
The point of today is to teach you a negotiating persuasion set of strategies that you use in this situation.
Doesn't mean they'll work, doesn't mean I know what's going to happen with immigration, but I'll tell you the strategies that will be useful no matter what you're dealing with in the future.
Let's start with what the current strategies are.
So you've got the Democrats saying don't separate the families and you're all a bunch of racists if you try to do anything to tighten border security.
Now, the Democrats have a super persuasive stand.
They've got families.
They've got babies being ripped from mothers.
You know, how do you beat that, really?
They've got the racism charge against the Republicans.
How do you beat that?
So, the Democrats have pretty much a full house, but it gets better.
The Democrats win if immigration is not solved because it's this big problem they can partly pin on the Republicans.
Now some would argue, oh wait a minute, the polling seems to suggest that the President has some advantages here in the argument.
I'm not sure that makes any difference because at least the people in Congress think that they've got a great issue.
So they don't want to solve it because it's a great issue.
Now, if it were solved, and let's say that solution caused, you know, more immigration of folks from South America and Mexico, the Democrats say that's even better because they're going to vote, you know, if we get DACA and everything, all these new people are going to vote our way.
So the Democrats win by getting more votes if they don't do anything, and the Democrats win by If they do something and get a path to citizenship, a path to voting.
So the Democrats have a full house and no reason to really do anything, but if something is done, it's going to be something in their favor.
So what's that leave the Republicans?
Even with a majority, they don't have enough of a majority to get anything done, because they've got some internal dissension.
So what do you do when you're in a total deadlock and the parties don't even have a reason to solve it?
They have almost as much reason to not solve it.
Here are the techniques for getting yourself in at this kind of a jam.
We're going to go to the whiteboard.
Now some of these techniques you've seen before So they won't be a total surprise, but I'm going to show you how they work in this context.
So here are the tools you want to be looking at.
Adding variables to the situation.
Because if you have more variables, you just have more things to work with, more things to negotiate.
Shake the box. This is the President Trump special where you just say, this situation is no good.
Let me shake the box.
Let's see what happens. Huh.
Nope. Still doesn't work.
Shake that box a little bit more.
So the shake the box method is going to come in handy here.
We're going to figure out how to make it a win-win.
As opposed to somebody wins and somebody loses because we'll never get anywhere with the win-loss model of negotiating.
And then my favorite is the hard-to-measure variable.
You want a solution in which it's going to be a little bit hard to know who won.
A little bit hard to know how it's all going to fold out, but everybody can still spin it in a way that looks like their side won.
So that's what gives you the win-win.
So here's the general idea.
You've got a bunch of immigration problems that mostly have to do with the Latino-Hispanic community.
So most of the immigration problems, not all of course, but the stuff that has the energy, is about people from south of the American border.
I say, one way to solve this, conceptually, again, I'm not trying to actually solve this, this is more conceptual, is to combine a few extra things, throw some variables in there.
And here's the most productive variables you could throw in there.
Something to do, something that would be directly beneficial to the black community in the United States.
Why do that, you might ask?
Well, here's the problem. The way the Republicans have framed, and this is President Trump, have framed their defense, their alternative narrative, To the Democrats is that the Democrats have these super persuasive things on their side.
Separating families sounds bad.
You know, don't be a racist. That's like super powerful stuff.
So what do the Republicans have that has equal persuasive weight?
Well, what they've gone with so far is a completely bad approach.
Which is, you saw last night, I think you saw the president doing an event for angel families.
Now, death and safety are really high emotional things, and therefore, it seems like, okay, they've matched them emotion for emotion.
You got charges of racism and children being separated over here, but over here it's like, oh, they're coming in and killing our people.
What's wrong with that?
Everything. Because here's the thing.
I don't believe that the average Republican is a racist.
Because I spend tons of time interacting with him.
I'm not one. But I spend so much time interacting with him, it would be kind of obvious.
If the average Republican were a big old racist and was thinking that way about the border.
So as soon as you say, our defense is that immigrants are coming in with crime and killing people, you've just played right into the racist frame.
Because the implication, even if you don't mean it this way, is that there's a little extra rapiness, a little extra killing, a little extra crime coming from south of the border.
The problem is that the statistics don't back that up, at least in a way that the whole public is going to agree.
The statistics, and you can fact check me on this, but in a way it doesn't matter.
The facts don't actually matter in this case.
The counterargument is that the people coming in illegally actually have a lower crime rate than the people who are already here.
So as long as that's true, that they're not really bringing in more average crime, it just looks kind of racist.
Now again, I'm not saying that Republicans are racist.
I'm not saying that the reason for their using the crime argument is racism.
It seems to me that the reason they use it is because it's so emotional.
Crime, it just makes you get in this fearful, I gotta do something to get rid of this crime mode.
So although on one level it makes sense because of the emotional impact of the crime that's coming in, it just doesn't sound convincing and it plays into the racism stereotype, so it's a failing frame.
Here's the frame that would work better.
Economics. So get rid of the whole crime argument.
It's a loser. You know, crime is important.
You have to deal with crime, right?
But as an argument for immigration to get something negotiated, it's a total loser.
So instead, you change the argument.
You reframe it to economics.
As soon as you reframe it into economics, You have more variables, you can shake the box, you can find a way that everybody wins, and you can create some hard to measure standards.
So you've gotten all of the important things by including, by reframing the immigration thing as a jobs economy thing.
As soon as you've reframed it, then you can throw into it some other impossible to solve, but we want to solve, Problems that have a lot of impact for the black community in particular.
But they're all the things that also have a jobs element to them.
So look at this. DACA has a jobs element to it, right?
People want to work here.
How many people are in the country?
Do we need more workers?
Just depersonalize it.
What's it do for the economy?
Well, it'd be better for the economy if we just get this off our plate, make sure we know how many workers we have, etc.
You want to build the wall. You want family safety.
That's the separation of the people.
Prison reform. Jared Kushner already has plans drawn up for prison reform, but can't get enough support, apparently.
So apparently he needs more support.
There's that list of how to deal with pardons and commute sentences that the NFL put together, which is also jobs, right?
Because if you do prison reform and if you start pardoning people or commuting sentences, There are more workers that need to be trained.
They're available to do stuff.
So these all have direct or indirect impact on economics.
Sentencing reform, weed legalization.
Again, if people are in jail, they can't work.
If they're in jail, they're available for the workforce.
Police reforms. You saw that Hawk Newsom had a number of good ideas.
And I'll just stick with the easy ones that Republicans shouldn't hate.
An easy one would be funding more body cams for police departments that don't have enough and need them.
Because if you have body cams, you're about 75% of the way to having a safer situation.
There are also some rules changes that Hawke Newsome has suggested.
I'll just give you one example that right now if a suspect is in custody, And complains that they need medical care, right now it's not automatic that they get it.
The police officers use some judgment.
There may be a better rule for that in which the police don't have to use medical judgment.
They just automatically say, all right, we'll get you some medical attention.
There might be a way to deal with that.
Then, I'm just throwing this idea out myself.
If you want to depersonalize immigration, You might want to connect it to some kind of employment figures, and this is how you turn it into an economic story.
You say that the total level of immigration, whether you've got a merit-based or lottery, and obviously the lottery versus merit-based should be on this list as well, but you could tie your immigration total levels, your net levels, with employment data.
So you could say, look, We're just going to depersonalize this.
If we need lots of workers, we'll have more immigration, and as employment fluctuates, so will the number of people we let in, because it's all going to be about economics.
Now, you might say to yourself, gosh, you've made this so complicated now that we can't even tell who wins.
Like, suppose all this got passed as some kind of a big economics, employment, job package.
Could you even tell, did the Democrats win?
Or did the Republicans win?
Because the Democrats would get a bunch of stuff that might make the Hispanic and Latino voters happy, because they might get some immigration stuff they like.
But at the same time, the Republicans would have delivered on a whole bunch of things that the black community wants.
So you might see a situation where the Democrats are picking up Latino-Hispanic votes, where the Republicans are starting to peel off some of the black vote that traditionally had been in the Democratic Party.
But, who gets more?
Is there any way you could tell who comes out ahead?
I don't think you could.
You wouldn't know who won.
Did the Democrats win?
Did the Republicans win?
Can't tell. That's perfect.
Because if you can't tell, everybody claims a win.
And everybody says, yeah, my preferred way of measuring this shows that we really came out ahead.
Vote for us. So if you want to break the log jam, add some variables, which I did.
Shake the box. This shakes it pretty bad.
Create a situation where you don't have a winner and loser situation.
And make sure that your results are hard to measure but are directionally, you know, where everybody wants them.
So if you combine the immigration issues with job issues, with other reforms that would be especially popular with the black community, you created a situation where you can get a big comprehensive jobs economic solution and you can depersonalize all of this stuff.
What the Republicans have done, and I think it's a huge mistake strategically, is they've personalized it.
It's about mom and a child.
You don't want to be on the wrong side of that, right?
And even though the Republicans are actually, for the most part, on the right side of that, nobody wants to separate parents from kids, because it's been framed that there are two sides and the Republicans on the wrong side, they just can't win that.
And the other thing you can't win is people coming over the border are bad people and they're going to have more crime.
First of all, it doesn't seem to be true.
And second of all, it just sounds racist even if you don't mean it that way.
So if you try to be the not racist party, Maybe stop doing things that are so obviously racist or look racist or can be framed racist if you want to get to the next place.
So this is my suggestion.
And again, I always question you that this is not about truth so much.
Truth is good. Facts are good.
But they're not persuasive.
So sometimes you have to take a little break from strictly being factual if you need to get to the next level for the benefit of everybody.
What about the media?
Well, this would be media friendly as well because what it would do is give the media so much to talk about And a lot of it they would like, that it would be hard even for the media to figure out who is winning and losing.
And that's part of the benefit of it.
You don't want a negotiation where it's just obvious who's winning and it's obvious who's losing.
Because you can never get to the finish line that way.
You need to make it...
Less obvious who's winning and who's losing so everybody can say they won.
Now where have you seen this technique before?
North Korea. What was it that made North Korea go from impossible to self to, hey, this looks like it's moving in the right direction?
They added variables.
The president added more pressure.
That was a new variable, even though it was an existing variable, but there was more of it.
But the biggest thing was they started talking about reunification.
As soon as reunification of the Korean Peninsula was on the table, suddenly everything became easier.
Because who believes that North Korea wants to bomb their own country?
It doesn't even make sense anymore.
So adding variables can change the whole mix of things, and you saw it in North Korea, and you could see it in other domains, and this is one.
Jobs for those pardoned.
Yeah, so the reason that it's all a big jobs bill is because it would be getting people out of prison, and they would need jobs.
So it would all be in the mix.
All right.
How much of this made sense to you?
Let me get a little feedback here.
So, you saw the concept.
Forget about the fact...
Oh, let me add to this.
You've got a lot of people running for re-election, and they don't want to say, I voted for something unpopular.
But by putting it in a big package, it allows everybody to say, yeah, I voted for a big package that has some parts I don't like.
But look at all the stuff I got.
I got all this stuff, and yeah, I had to hold my nose and vote for a couple things, you know, and accept a few things that are in it.
So it allows everybody a free pass with their voters because they would get enough stuff that the stuff they didn't get or didn't like wouldn't be overwhelming.
You know, it's funny.
I see... I see a lot of tentativeness in your comments about this.
Because this is pretty radical, right?
It's radical in the sense that it's the first time you've seen it.
Somebody said omnibus logic.
Yeah, in a way it's omnibus.
But what it's really trying to do is just repackage from violence and families and emotional stuff over to economics where everybody can win.
And it's just less emotion and more ways to get it there.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments, by the way.
So I'm getting more positive comments than negative.
So, and I remind you that, you know, once I got into the details here, it looked again like I was suggesting a specific approach, but this is more about teaching you the general concepts, that if you're stuck, you got to shake the backs, add some variables, make sure everybody has a story in which they win, and some ambiguity about how to measure things, otherwise people can't all claim a win.
Alright, I think I might keep it short and keep it on this topic today.
If I come back, I'll come back with another topic.
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