3117 62% of Illegal Immigrant Households on Welfare | Steven Camarota and Stefan Molyneux
According to a recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies, 62% of households headed by a illegal immigrant participated in at least one welfare program in 2012, compared to 49% of legal immigrant-headed households and 30% of native-headed households. Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Steven Camarota to clarify what this data means and to debunk the common myths and non-arguments concerning illegal and legal immigrant welfare usage in the United States. Dr. Steven Camarota serves as the Director of Research for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington, DC based research institute that examines the consequences of legal and illegal immigration on the United States. In recent years Dr. Camarota has testified before Congress more than any other non-government expert on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration. In addition, he was the lead researcher on a contract with the Census Bureau examining the quality of immigrant data in the American Community Survey.Find more of Dr. Camarota's work online at:http://cis.org/blog/17http://www.nationalreview.com/author/steven-camarota-0Sourceshttp://cis.org/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-Native-Householdshttp://cis.org/Welfare-Use-Legal-Illegal-Immigrant-Householdshttp://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/camarota-welfare-final.pdfFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
I have on the line Stephen Camerata, who is the Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Now, he has testified before Congress more than any other non-government expert on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration, which, of course, is a hot topic at the moment, not just in America, but for our friends over there in the European Union.
Camerota, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Now, I don't want to start with me, but I want to go over very briefly where my thinking has changed, and your data has a lot to do with this.
When I was growing up, there was this general idea that sort of came out of the left, but was fairly pervasive by the time I sort of came of age intellectually.
And this idea was that human beings are fundamentally interchangeable.
No culture is better than any other culture, and people will adapt to anything.
And where they're not interchangeable, they're highly malleable.
In other words, you bring someone from a foreign culture into your culture.
Within a generation or so, they've merged and adapted to the local culture.
So, people are interchangeable as a whole, and where they're not, they're highly malleable.
And the data that you have put forward...
On the topic of immigrants in America and welfare usage seems to define both of these predictions of the interchangeability of people and the malleability of people and so on.
And I was wondering if you could just talk about the major findings in the study, of course, that you've recently put out and the implications that it might have for social discussions and policy down the road.
Sure.
Well, what we did was we used a survey that has seldom been used, but it's been out there.
It's called the Survey of Income and Program Participation.
It has the most detailed information on welfare use by families and households, but it's hard to use.
And so most people have used another survey to look at these questions called the Current Population Survey.
That survey has some strengths.
It's mainly used to measure the labor market.
But this survey of income and program participation is really the better survey, but again, it's difficult to use, but that's what we did here.
And so we looked at households that were either headed by an immigrant or a native.
In this data, about 25% of households are headed by illegal immigrants.
About 75% of households are headed by legal immigrants.
It may surprise your listeners, but we are very sure that illegal immigrants do respond to these Census Bureau surveys.
There's a whole literature on that, which I won't go into, but we're pretty confident that it's roughly three-fourths legal, one-fourth illegal, and that's roughly the situation in the population as a whole.
Overall, we found that 51% of all households, legal and illegal, used at least one of the nation's major welfare programs, and here when we look at welfare, we're looking at the cash programs, we're looking at the food assistance programs, Medicaid, or...
So either they live in public housing or someone in the household, usually more than one person, is getting one or more of these programs.
We did find that welfare use was high for both new arrivals and well-established immigrants.
Of households headed by an immigrant who'd been in the country for two decades or 20 years, 48% access one or more welfare programs.
So it's 51% overall, but even for these well-established immigrants, it's 48%.
The comparison for natives is 30%, so it's a good deal higher.
I should also point out that no single program explained immigrants' higher overall welfare use.
We can exclude any one program.
For example, don't count the school lunch program.
it's still 46% for immigrants overall using welfare, compared to 28% for natives, not counting Medicaid.
Overall use rates for immigrants would then be 44% instead of 51%, but it would be 26% for natives, so the gap stays about the same.
The really big differences are in the food programs and in Medicaid.
Some differences, also the immigrants have higher use of cash.
Use of public housing or subsidized housing is about the same for both groups.
One, I guess, maybe other final point that may interest your listeners, welfare use varies very much by immigrant group.
So for immigrants from Mexico and Central America, 73% access welfare.
For Caribbean immigrant households, 51%.
For African immigrant households, it's 48%.
In contrast, immigrants from East Asia, which would be, say, basically China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, 32% access welfare for immigrant households headed by someone from Europe.
It's 6%.
And for those from South Asia, which would be India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, it's about 17%.
So the low groups would be East Asia, Europe, and South Asia.
The high groups would be Latin America and Africa.
Given what's happened in American immigration policies, particularly since that landmark switch in 1965, when the decision was made to focus more on third world immigration rather than European immigration, and also to include the capacity to sponsor family members over, which of course, given that third worlders have Pretty large families has a big impact.
Would it be an overstatement to say that the policy over the last 50 years has had the, I guess charitably could be called, the unintended consequence of replacing far more self-sufficient immigrants with immigrants far more dependent on public welfare?
Well, yeah.
I mean, the main, you know, maybe a little quick explanation.
The reason that happens is basically is that welfare use is exactly what you would suspect.
It is highly correlated with educational attainment.
Immigrants from, say, Latin America are mostly the least educated.
Immigrants from South Asia, such as India, are the most educated.
So just very briefly, 80% of immigrants from India have a college degree.
For immigrants from Mexico, which is like the biggest sending country, not just for Latin America, But of all countries, that percentage would be more like 6%.
So, if I told you nothing else about those two populations, you would guess one would be much poorer than the other, a much larger fraction of one than the other would live in poverty or near poverty and be eligible for welfare.
And you'd be right.
There's also some fertility differences.
Mexican immigrants can have somewhat more children than Indian immigrants, and so that further increases their eligibility for welfare.
That's right.
So that would be a fair statement to say that it is fair to say that the least educated immigrants who often come from places like Latin America, Latin could broadly define Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, South America, tend to have the highest use rates, followed by some groups like African immigrants.
But African immigrants, a lot of them are refugees.
But even the non-refugees do seem to be using welfare at pretty high rates.
And that should be in contrast to immigrants from East and South Asia who tend to be the most educated and have the lowest welfare use rates.
But I want to say something else, and this is very important when thinking about this.
The vast majority of immigrant households using welfare have at least one worker in them, and this is true of the native-born.
Most people come to work, most people do work, but The way our welfare system works, again, and people who have never used it don't necessarily understand, you can work, but you can still get food stamps.
You can work and still live in public housing.
You can work and still sometimes get SSI or free school lunch for your kids or the WIC program, which is another nutritional program.
So you can qualify for Medicaid.
Just to give you a quick example, and again, this may surprise people, if you just took a mother and two children, so a household of three people making $20,000 a year That household would qualify, depending on some other circumstances, for just about every welfare program in America in just about every state.
States differ for some programs, but that's helpful in understanding.
So if you have the re-arrival of a lot of folks who don't have a lot of education, then you're going to get a lot of people signed up for stuff.
And efforts, as I explained at length in the report, there's a whole appendix on this, efforts to try to curtail immigrants Eligibility for welfare have largely not worked, and they may have some impact, particularly in individual cases.
They don't work because one thing is states sometimes step in and provide their own welfare.
The restrictions often didn't restrict every program.
People often have been here long enough so that they now qualify for everything, and that's true of most immigrants.
Most immigrants have been here for quite some time.
Also, and this is the most important reason, is they have children, and those children are born in the United States, and even the children of illegal immigrants are awarded American citizenship, and so immigrants often receive welfare on behalf of their U.S.-born children.
It's an extremely common occurrence.
So, in the end, it's not likely that you can bring in unskilled people and not let them sign up.
For welfare, if you did that, you would have to basically argue that we're not going to help disabled immigrants, we're not going to help poor immigrants, we're not going to help the children of poor immigrants.
Once people are here in our society, it becomes very difficult not to extend them all these programs.
And they're very costly.
I'm not saying they're not.
If you want to avoid the situation, you'd need probably two basic points.
A very selective immigration system that takes into account these things we've been talking about, And a vigorous regime of immigration enforcement to make those who are not supposed to be here go home.
If you're not prepared to do those two things, then you're just going to have to accept that a lot of unskilled immigrants will come and many of them will access programs designed to help low-income people.
Well, and there is a great tragedy that occurs, I think, within societies that get caught in this kind of trap Which is that the welfare cliff, which is, of course, as you gather benefits under the welfare state, they tend to displace the value of increasing your social and economic capital from getting better jobs and more pay.
You know, there's some estimates that somebody who's on welfare, a mom and a kid, that she'd have to end up making $60,000 or $70,000 a year to make up for welfare benefits she'd lose along the way.
And so you have these systems which...
Obviously, to some degree, inadvertently, trap people in poverty through these dependence on government programs at the same time as, you know, more educated and richer people tend to be doing better, which creates this widening disparity of income that, to some degree, is the result of government programs, which, naturally, the government suggests more programs to try and solve.
A perfectly understandable position, and I... I think that as a general proposition, there's a lot of truth to it.
I disagree with it on some points, but it's got a lot of truth to it.
The thing you have to keep in mind, though, is if your immigration system adds a lot of low-income people, then you're going to even get a bigger issue of lots of folks on welfare.
Just to give you one example, one out of every three children in poverty today in America is the child of an immigrant.
I was a young child of an immigrant.
So that's an example.
Given those numbers, you're just going to have a lot of folks who are using these programs.
Another example about sort of the way it pays out politically is we heard a lot during the debate over Obamacare and even now about the growth in people without health insurance.
But the same data that we can use to measure things like welfare and employment also asks people if they're immigrants, when they came, and if they have health insurance.
No matter how you slice it, it looks like about two-thirds of the growth in the last two decades of people without health insurance are immigrants and the young children they have after they get here.
In a very real sense, the growth in the uninsured was driven by immigration policy, legal and illegal.
As a consequence, though, it created enormous political pressure to address this problem, and one of the ways in which this political pressure manifests itself is to expand Medicaid and provide a lot of They support, income support, they're called affordability credits in Obamacare, so that people can buy insurance on their own, of course, with fair help.
And so that's a great example about how bringing in lots of low-income people can change the political dynamics.
The people who are pushing Obamacare or a greatly expanded government role in healthcare were not pointing out that immigration was the driving factor for the growth of the uninsured.
They didn't say too much about that.
That's how it played out.
If you want a more restrained government and you want the government not to take such a large role in healthcare, then adding a whole lot of low-income people who end up uninsured is probably not helpful.
And this is the kind of question, so let me address this.
Where libertarian thinking doesn't take people very far sometimes.
Libertarians would say, understandably, look, people should be self-sufficient.
We don't want these programs.
It's an infringement.
It's income redistribution.
There's a whole series of very consistent philosophical objections.
But if that's the outcome you want, then in a democratic society like ours, if you add a whole lot of poor people who are going to Be in your country, you're going to create enormous political pressure to do something about, quote-unquote, that problem.
And one of the things you're going to get is a lot of political pressure to take care of them in terms of health insurance coverage.
It seems unavoidable.
Now, you can still say principally, no, it shouldn't.
We should not provide all this health care.
Yes, there might be 10, 15, 20 million immigrants and their kids uninsured, but darn it, we're not going to do anything about it.
But the fact is that the middle-of-the-road public, the progressives in the society will say, no, we should, and the middle-of-the-road people will look at those numbers and say, well, we have to do something.
The uninsured is growing.
And yes, you can argue against that, and many people have, but as a practical matter, if you want to restrain the size of government, you can't grow the poor population, because in our country, and in all democratic societies, it's going to create both a larger clientele who will want those programs, But it will also make the rest of society hear the arguments for greater attention, say in the area of healthcare, all the more sympathetically because, well, the uninsured is now 46 million.
It used to be only 36 million.
Well, I guess we're going to have to do something about that.
Well, and of course, the reality is that people who have insurance or not, they can go to an emergency, which is about the most expensive conceivable way to deal with healthcare issues.
It's not like the cost vanishes if people are denied any kind of insurance.
They just go to an emergency where usually by law they're mandated to receive treatment at its most expensive factor.
Yeah, and that's a perfectly reasonable point.
I should make two points.
That's exactly right.
So you don't really avoid the cost.
It is true that uninsured people do get a lot less health care, and if your only concern was cost, just leave them uninsured.
They'll run to the emergency room occasionally, and that'll be very costly when they do, and they'll let their own conditions persist longer before they seek out care, and then it's more expensive to treat.
But the studies generally show that they're still going to cost less.
To taxpayers if you do that.
But that's not the only thing we consider, right?
We're a compassionate society.
Someone has diabetes.
They don't have health insurance.
Sure, we could say, well, just wait until you have your heart attack or your sugar level gets too high and then show up at the emergency room.
Okay, okay, we'll treat you.
We're just not going to approach it that way.
We're going to provide that person with their insulin treatment in regular medical checkups.
If they can't afford it, we'll pay for it.
And so, it isn't just a matter of cost, even if the costs are cheaper, and as you point out, often they're not, but even if they are, the dynamics of it will not work out that way.
Either, again, we're back to my original point that you're very selective about who you let in, or in effect, if you had to put it in a bumper sticker, you have to shut up about the costs.
There's just no middle ground here.
And if your goal is a more self-reliant population with a restrained government in terms of its size and scope, bringing in lots of poor people is going to really challenge that idea.
I want to jump back to the education because you pointed out, of course, that I think it was 6% of Central Americans and Mexicans come in with degrees.
But if I remember your data correctly, Even at the highest level, I think that's measured of education, bachelor's degree and above, the immigrant welfare usage, while obviously lower than lower education, was still double that of native people with that level of high education.
Yeah, and at some future date, that is a clear area in need of more study.
Basically, you're right, that the least educated and the least educated natives, the immigrants were somewhat more likely to use some programs but not others.
But the interesting thing was immigrant households headed by someone with a bachelor's degree were still significantly more likely to use welfare.
About 26% of those households accessed a welfare program, those households headed by an immigrant with a bachelor's degree, compared to about 13% of native households with a bachelor's degree.
And their use of programs was higher across the board for cash food, Medicaid, and housing.
And it's very puzzling.
Several possible explanations is that the immigrant households are somewhat, though not that much, because the high education immigrants don't have high fertility, but they're somewhat more likely to have children.
That might explain it.
There might be some age differences in the populations that explain it.
But it was an interesting finding that the most educated immigrants use significantly more welfare than the most educated natives, which may also be an indication that a bachelor's degree is not always a bachelor's degree, which is some fraction of people educated overseas who identify as having which is some fraction of people educated overseas who identify as having a It might be from Hyderabad Community College, and it might not be as meaningful as it sounds.
Now, there were two areas in the data that seemed to defy the general pattern.
The general pattern seemed to be You know, close to double, a little bit less than double in terms of immigrant versus domestic welfare consumption.
But the two areas were cash transfers and subsidized housing.
I thought maybe subsidized housing was because of the length of the waiting lists or the complexity of application or so on.
Did you have any answers or did you get anything out of the data that explained why, at times, it seemed to be equal usage or even slightly less immigrant usage for cash programs and public housing?
Yeah, your point about the complexity of getting public housing and the waiting list, it's an oversubscribed set of programs.
In other words, there's always more people trying to move in to public housing or get subsidized housing than there is housing available.
Unlike programs where, look, if your income is here and you have a kid, bam, you qualify the program.
If your income is below this level, you get it, that kind of thing.
That's how other programs, but not housing.
Housing is a limited stock, and if you can't get it, you just gotta sign up and wait.
So that may be it.
The other thing about cash that may serve to lower immigrants' use of the welfare programs is a slightly higher percentage of immigrant households have a worker in them, and people who work often, well, they can get things like Medicaid and free school lunch or live in public housing and food stamps.
It does make it harder to get the cash programs.
The other thing is the restrictions on immigrant access to welfare Often focus on cash, particularly the program called SSI, which is for the disabled, the low-income elderly, and some other populations, and what's called TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, used to be called AFDC, Aid to Family with Dependent Children.
It's like the classic welfare program.
Restrictions for immigrants have focused on those things.
Even with all that, the immigrants still have statistically higher use of cash, but it's not that much higher, and part of the reason might be these restrictions.
Though it is true that the longer the immigrants live here, it depends on those programs.
Their use tends to rise quite a bit.
Right.
And one of the things I found, I always love it when I get a delightful cannon shot of data into my prior assumptions.
It always makes my hair taste sweeter.
But one of the things that I was a little bit surprised at is when people look at higher immigrant consumption of welfare programs, one tendency is to think, oh, you know, the lazy people, immigrants.
But the reality is the data that you provide seems to me incontrovertible.
as 87% of immigrant households have somebody working compared to 78% of native-born, if I remember those numbers correctly.
And so the myth of the non-working immigrant is not true.
So saying, well, let's just get them to work will not solve the problem, if I understand it correctly.
Yes, that's exactly right.
It's not right to say that this is about non-work.
It's true some of those people are working part-time and it's probably true that they curtail their hours sometimes or don't seek better employment because they know they'd lose programs.
But the bottom line is Welfare and work go together like love and marriage, and I think that's the part that people who've never used welfare don't quite understand.
It is not the case.
The immigrants mostly come to work.
Most immigrants' households have a worker.
In fact, when you look at households with a worker, their use of welfare is about the same as all households.
Now, obviously, those without workers have the highest welfare use rates, but there aren't that many of them.
Welfare is mostly in America used by households with workers.
Now, there is another type of welfare, like when people are in nursing homes or disabled and they're in an institution.
But let's put that aside.
We're just talking about the non-institutionalized population right now.
When we look at the non-institutionalized population, it's mostly people who live in families and households with at least a worker.
And this gets to a really complicated point that maybe given, but it sounds like your listeners are people who are interested.
And so let me throw this out as a kind of philosophical question.
In a society, this is what it costs.
Now, you don't have to like it, and you're perfectly right to argue government subsidies played a big role, but in a society where an individual healthcare policy, very roughly, across the state, again, it's a rough estimate, costs about $6,000 a year, and a family policy costs $12,000 a year, There's no way for someone to come in and earn ten dollars an hour and afford that.
Ten dollars an hour working full time, three hours a week with no vacation, is twenty thousand dollars a year.
How could you have any, if you have a kid, just one kid, the way the family policies often work, that's a ten, twelve, fourteen thousand dollar cost.
Somebody's got to pay it.
Now your employer might pick up a bunch of those costs, and for many of us, thank god they do, but The point here is the value of a person's labor is so much less than just this one basic commodity in America that they're going to consume.
A commodity that government policy has played an important role in promoting inflation, but we'll have to put that aside for a moment because the person comes in, this is what it costs.
Even the employer's going to pay it, the taxpayer's going to pay it, or somehow that person with $10 an hour income is going to pay it, which is not going to happen, of course.
They may pay $200 a month towards it, but that's about it.
And so this is why you have to think through any argument when an employer says, well, gosh, I need workers and fill in the blank.
I need them to work in my seasonal hotel in upstate Michigan.
Well, I need them to work in my furniture factory in New York.
I need them to work in my meat and poultry processing facility in Oklahoma.
Well, maybe you do need workers, but if you're only paying $8 to $12 an hour, who's going to pay for the health care for those workers?
People who make that income can simply not afford it.
It is not a possibility.
Either you, the employer, has to pay, and the employer's like, well look, the worker's not that valuable to me, so I'm not going to pay it.
Well then, guess what?
The taxpayer's going to end up either treating the person in the emergency room or covering them with Medicaid or related programs.
It seems difficult to avoid, and it's why you might say the message of this whole report is there's a high cost to cheap labor.
And it doesn't seem there's any obvious solution.
And I just mentioned one issue, healthcare.
You can't bring in poor people and expect them to pay in a society where healthcare costs this much.
Well, I mean, the big picture view that I gravitate towards is something like this, that the presence of highly subsidized cheap labor, and it is highly subsidized, as you point out, somebody making 10 bucks an hour can barely afford to live hand to mouth under a bridge in the United States.
So the question is, why is this labor not being automated to the degree which it can be?
or why aren't the real wages being paid that people would have to live in the country and those costs of course in hotels would be passed along to the customers and so on so we've created this kind of artificial subsidy situation where automation the impetus to automation is delayed or slowed particularly I'm thinking in the realm of agriculture you know if you could pay a penny a day for workers we never would have combine harvesters because it never would have been cost efficient to automate the process of harvesting to that degree so
So I think that there's such a distortionary effect, and it does create, you know, return to this argument, sort of two worlds in America.
And if there wasn't this massive subsidy towards cheap labor in the United States, there would be a ripple effect that would iron out a lot of social problems, in my opinion.
But, of course, the people who've already set up their business models for the subsidized cheap labor are quite keen on this cheap labor.
Keeping it in place.
Absolutely.
Very briefly, right.
If you're used to paying $10 an hour, and I said, well, now, we're not going to give you all this immigrant labor.
There's all this idol there is.
The number of working-age, less-educated people not working in the United States is unbelievable.
I could run through the numbers, but just very briefly, between 18 and 65, or 16 and 65, I should say, there are about 72 million people who are working-age now, Not working, and very roughly half, well more than half, don't have a college education.
But they're not working.
They're either unemployed, so they are looking, or they're just completely out of the labor force.
These are all kinds of record numbers.
I could give you more numbers, but that's the idea.
We should probably let wages rise, even if it does go up.
The $15 an hour to try to draw some of those people back in, because whatever cost they're creating, they're already here.
Letting employers have access to foreign labor by tolerating illegal immigration, having big family-based immigration that brings in lots of unskilled, or creating some guest worker program in which people end up not going home anyway, none of those things make as much sense as just using all this Unskilled labor already here.
The employers don't like it.
Some of those people are not the best workers.
Some of them have been out of the labor force for a while.
But if we're ever going to draw them back in, keeping wages really, really low is not likely to help.
And by bringing in this foreign labor, however much the employers like it, however decent the people we bring in are, is going to kick taxpayers in the teeth.
For the reasons we've been discussing, it doesn't seem possible to avoid that, but they're so used to it that they keep pressuring Congress.
For the Democrats, and they're in the Republican Party, there are a lot of business owners, particularly large corporations, but sometimes small businesses.
In the Democratic Party, the way the Democrats see it is one, you could say more charitably, they see people who better their lives by coming here.
They are mostly minorities, so the Democrats will tend to want to identify strongly with them.
And so that's part of it.
And by a lucky coincidence from the Democrats' point of view, these people overwhelmingly vote for progressive social policy, whether it's new social programs, income distribution, healthcare, that sort of thing.
It's like 80-20.
It's like 80-20.
It's not like 51-49, if I remember the numbers correctly.
It's overwhelming.
Yeah, of immigrants, of legal immigrants who come in, it's probably, my read of the data, and you could look at it different ways, it's two to one.
So it's about two Democratic voters in the long run, about one Republican voter, and so this also makes the Democrats less inclined to worry very much.
I would think they'd be worried about the job competition or the potential impact on making the welfare and redistributive state Less viable in the long run and creating burdens for it.
But it turns out they're not very worried by that.
And they rightly perceive that it creates a lot more support for those things when you bring in poor people.
So, you know, from their point of view, it's not so bad.
They're allied with elements in the business community.
And quite frankly, a lot of ideological libertarians at the Cato Institute, people like Paul Ryan, who say, look, the free movement of people's got to be part of, you know, kind of the notion of basic human freedom.
And they don't consider the consequences politically.
And sometimes when I press my libertarian friends on this, they say things that I find, two things, for example, that I find kind of not realistic.
One is, well, we'll get rid of the welfare state.
And my response is, okay, do that first, and then you can have your mass immigration.
I always feel like saying, get rid of the welfare state is a little like saying, well, if gravity were less, I could jump higher.
Yeah, maybe, but it's not likely to happen.
I'm not going to die it.
I'm just going to move to the moon.
Yeah, that's right.
I'll be able to jump.
I'll be lighter.
And then the second thing they say is, when you point out, well, you know, that they generally don't agree with you politically.
It's their right.
It's a democracy.
They're coming in.
They'll eventually become citizens.
They vote.
The system has to represent them, and they, like Obamacare, for example, the libertarians, we don't have to let them vote.
We'll make them all guest workers, as if America is a place...
We're going to have a helix classroom, like ancient Sparta, where the people have no political rights.
That's very attractive in a democratic republic.
So the people, they clean your toilets and pick up your trash, but they have no political rights.
First off, that again is back to, really, is that attractive?
And it's not likely to ever happen.
Unless you're prepared to do things like deny the children of these legal, I guess, guest workers a citizenship, then you'd have a perpetuation of it.
And again, is that really attractive, especially in a democratic republic?
I don't think so.
But that's what I get when I press them on this.
And so there's a real cognitive dissonance for them.
And I think they've convinced themselves, again, the Cato Institute, Paul Ryan and such, that large-scale immigration is a necessary part of a restrained government and human freedom and so forth, and they haven't thought through the consequences.
Well, I think this is the real challenge with immigration for a lot of people is that everybody wants everyone in the world to have a great life.
I mean, of course, you know, I want to wake up in the morning and think that everyone else is having a better life.
But we have a system where people are moving kind of into your financial house.
They're not just moving onto your street.
Now, whoever wants to buy a house on my street, yeah, go for it.
Have fun.
Enjoy yourself.
And what do I care, right?
I hope we'll be good neighbors.
But the problem is of course that there are direct financial impacts to the domestic population when newcomers come in and say, oh, America was built.
As a nation of immigrants, well, that's true.
But generally, they came from the European tradition, which is relatively small government, separation of church and state, and a laissez-faire, to some degree, economics, and when there was no welfare state.
There were all these friendly societies, and there were churches and charities that took care of people, and I would argue much more effectively than the welfare state does at the moment.
But comparing the past in America and saying that it's directly analogous to now, I think, is quite a misnomer.
Right.
I mean, just almost one statistic.
In 1900, during the previous great wave of immigration, which is generally 1880 to 1920, total spending, federal, state, and local, was very roughly 5% of GDP, right?
Today, it's 35%.
Right there, it tells you that even if it works out that you can bring a lot of poor people in in 1900, there's a whole debate about the relative poverty of immigrants back then versus the average income now.
We don't have to discuss it.
It's 5% versus 35%.
It means that bringing in people who don't pay much in taxes has enormous negative implications in 2015 in a way it didn't have in 1915.
It's just the reality.
Right.
And I think, you know, the real challenge with, I think, any kind of public policy is trying to get people to understand the basic law or principle of economics, which is look past the seen to the unseen, right?
So what happens, and I think we touched on this earlier, is what happens is, say, hotels get heavily subsidized labor, which means that they can charge less for their hotel rooms, but that adds, I would argue, far more to the tax bill, not even counting You know, the borrowing and the compound interest on the national debt and so on and unfunded liabilities in the future, social security and all of that.
And the scene is, well, you know, if we stop subsidizing, then my hotel price is going to go up.
However, the unseen is the degree to which getting cheap labor adds to your tax bill and that's a lot harder for people to make the connections if they aren't used to that way of thinking.
And it's always bad in economics when you have a hidden cost That everyone's bearing a diffuse cost, in this case, the taxes to support low-wage workers, because the employer will love that situation.
You, in effect, are paying the wages for his workers.
You know, let me run through some very quick numbers on agriculture.
In agriculture, and you'd be surprised how true this is in everything, unskilled labor is only a trivial, or tiny, I should say, part of the total cost the consumer pays.
So let's take the people who do fresh fruit and produce.
Those jobs pay $10, $12, $14 an hour.
They're hard jobs out in the hot sun, but that's all they pay.
So if you pick apples or heads of lettuce for a living, that's about what you make.
If you go to the store and buy a head of lettuce for a dollar, which of course would be a great price, but how much of that actually makes it back to the guy who picked the lettuce?
Well, it turns out, we know that calculation.
It's been pretty well studied.
It's about six cents.
So, or 6% of the cost.
If you pay $2, it would be 12 cents.
So, if you let wages rise 50%, and they're paying $12 an hour, they pay $18 an hour, the cost of your hypothetical lettuce could still only be, let's say if you paid $2 for it, still a decent price, it would still only go up.
By 50% of 6%.
So that's 3%.
And 3% of $2 is 6 cents.
That's it.
It can only go up by about 6 cents.
In that case, and it would only be a one-time hit, and all of this assumes that all of it gets paid onto the consumer.
In the case of lettuce, just to give you one example, most of the bagged lettuce you see in the supermarket today is already being picked machine.
It's only head lettuce that still is mostly hand-picked.
So, if we had less immigrant labor, and they had to pay more, head lettuce would be more of a premium, and we'd get more bagged lettuce.
But we'd avoid all the fiscal costs that we're talking about.
So what does all this tell us?
A, we get that fiscal cost taken care of by mechanizing.
The second advantage is that we don't have a huge poverty population.
In the United States, and so we avoid that issue.
And what few people there are who would then work in agriculture, at least make $18 an hour, which isn't so bad.
It's not making $12.
So we'd have less poverty, as I say.
So there seems like a whole series of advantages to just curtailing immigration, letting wages rise, letting capital substitute for labor.
But now let's flip it around and look at it from the farmer's point of view.
It's 6% for consumers, but for the farmer, only 18 cents of that dollar makes it back to the farm, and 6 goes to the guy who picks it.
Therefore, from the farmer's point of view, it's one-third of his cost.
You see?
So he is going to fight like heck politically to keep those people coming in and his wage is low.
To him, it's a very big deal.
And he will have a very different perspective.
But in our society, unskilled labor just doesn't account for much of GDP. The general calculation is that the poorest 20% of workers, which is well over 20 million people, still only account for something like 7% of Maybe 8%, but probably more like 7% of total GDP in the United States.
So if you assume two-thirds of GDP is labor and one-third is capital, they just don't get paid very much.
So the poor, the bottom end of the labor market, where immigration often has its biggest impacts, Is not saving consumers that much.
Put it a different way, you can't lower the wages of the workers at the bottom end of the labor market and get a big benefit to consumers.
But again, from the employer's point of view, he ain't gonna see it that way.
He's gonna see it as a big chunk of his cost.
Right.
Now, I have, of course, a very literate and contentious and argumentative audience, so I wanted to give you the chance to reply to some of the criticisms of the methodology and approach that the Center for Immigration Studies has taken.
Just, you know, my two cents, I did go back and forth, particularly with the Cato Institute, and I did not find their rebuttals to be particularly compelling.
To put it as mildly as possible, but I wanted to bring them up so that people could get your responses to it.
So, of course, one of the big questions is why household income rather than individual income?
The argument being that that over inflates because immigrants have larger numbers of people in a household.
That over inflates welfare consumption to talk about households rather than individuals.
Well, there's a couple of things about that.
First off, that's how welfare is determined.
If you have a very low income, but you're married to a woman who makes $200,000 a year, you don't get any food stamps.
It's not based on just you.
It's based on your family, or in case of food stamps, mostly households.
So the way our welfare system works, and I think we mostly agree, assuming we're going to have a welfare system, is you can't just say, well, what do you individually make?
It's what does everyone make?
And it's also the case that how much you get, because some people get a lot more on stamps than others based on how many kids you have.
So we only give out these programs, primarily anyway, based on the total characteristics.
It doesn't make sense.
Think about it this way.
How would you do individual calculations for public housing, for example?
It doesn't make any sense.
Everybody in the household gets public housing.
The only way to think about that Other issues are, well, the immigrants are just related issues.
Well, when you do housing, one of the problems is immigrants have more kids on average, and so it's not going to increase their welfare use.
And there's also more adults on average in immigrant households.
They're, roughly speaking, just about 2.5 people per native household and 3.5 people per immigrant household.
But the problem with that argument is the presence of kids represents a choice.
If you're choosing to have children and then are unable to support them and then turn to the taxpayers to feed and house and clothe and provide medical care, that's an important finding and that seems to be what happens in the case of a lot of immigrants.
The fact that they're choosing to have the children and then a large fraction get on welfare doesn't invalidate the methodology.
In fact, that's one of the key findings.
In terms of having more adults, well, that cuts both ways.
One way, and which is positive, is the more adults in a household, the more people who can potentially work and just make the family self-sufficient and won't have need for welfare.
It doesn't work out that way for immigrant households, but larger household size is not a particularly compelling critique.
And as I say, we look at things by household when we give out these programs.
Other quick point, not only do immigrants, unfortunately, have higher welfare use, but all the available evidence suggests that, reflecting their lower income, by the way, even though they work, is that immigrants pay less in taxes.
We have some discussion in the report, but if we just look at federal taxes, which is what pays for welfare programs mostly, they look like their households pay about 11% less on average in taxes.
So not only Do they get welfare more often?
But to the extent we can measure it, they pay about 11% less.
And that's assuming, because I didn't take the illegal immigrants and people who cheat on their taxes into account, just their tax liability.
If they paid everything they're supposed to, it's still less.
So all of that looks like a pretty negative equation.
And in fact, people who've tried to look at all the taxes and all the services immigrants use indicate that at least at the household level, it's negative and My research certainly confirms that finding.
Now, there's a debate about whether American-born children of immigrants should be counted as a welfare cost of immigration because, of course, they're citizens, whether their parents are there illegally or illegally or whether they're anchor babies or not.
They're citizens.
And in a glorious example of a slippery slope argument, someone at Cato said, well, you know, if we're going to count them, what about grandchildren, great-grandchildren?
My sort of first thought was, well, I think one big difference is that the question is whether you've paid into the system that you're withdrawing from.
And children born who are receiving a proportion of welfare benefits, clearly being children, have not paid into the system, whereas, of course, multi-generations later, you've had people hopefully paying into the system.
But why would you think it's important to count the children of immigrants as a cost of immigration?
Well, here's the thing.
The whole welfare state is really geared towards helping children, right?
Roughly half of all welfare spending, very roughly, is towards children.
The whole thing is for children, particularly those working parents with children who have low income.
So if you took out the children, then...
And you did that for the native born, too, presumably, because you'd have to do it for them.
Well, then, nobody's using that much welfare, because that's our system.
Our system is designed to help children.
Some programs are only for children, right?
The TANF program I mentioned used to be called Aid the Family with Dependent Children.
It's basically only for households with children, and WIC, women, infants, and children, nutrition program, and free school lunch, and subsidized school lunch.
So, again, the whole thing is geared towards children.
The other question here is, for that argument to make any sense, which you have to basically say, If a person comes to America and has a child in the United States, signs that kid up for Medicaid, gets free school lunch, lives in public housing, maybe they have a second kid who's younger who's getting the WIC program, and they get a check every month for those two children.
Now, the check technically is for the two children, not for the ineligible immigrant parent in this case.
But all of those costs I've just outlined don't exist really.
They're not real, and they have nothing to do with the immigrant.
Who came to America and couldn't support his children.
That's the only way that argument makes sense.
It seems kind of silly.
It says that basically if somebody comes and all these costs are created as a direct result of them, and then the children they had in the United States were not going to count it as a welfare cost associated with immigration.
If you do that, then it seems like you've missed the whole problem, which is, as we try to stay in the report, a big chunk of these issues are that people come to America, have children, and then turn to the taxpayer now.
Now, I suppose you could say, look, I don't care, it doesn't matter, those kids were born here and therefore whether the billions spent on them that would not otherwise have been spent had it not been for their parents coming in, we're not going to count that.
It seems, again, kind of silly and ridiculous.
One final point, when we look at households with no children, the immigrants also have significantly higher welfare use than native households with no children.
The results often reflect the presence of children, in other words, but even when you take out the impact of children, the immigrant households have much higher use than corresponding native households pretty much for every type of program.
Cash, in that case would be mostly SSI, food stamps, public housing, and so forth.
So even without counting the kids and comparing the natives when you don't count the kids, you still get much higher rates for the immigrants anyway.
Well, and we've had Dr.
Jason Richwine on the show talking about issues, multi-generational issues, particularly with Hispanic immigrants, that immigrants from Europe do tend to assimilate, do tend to end up in the middle class and so on, but there are multi-generational issues among Hispanics that don't tend to resolve over time.
I mean, the causes for all of that are obviously up for debate, but the facts seem to be fairly incontrovertible.
Right.
In our appendix, if you want to go through it, and some people have, the statistics for native-born Hispanics.
Well, about 58-59% of all children born to immigrants are born to a Hispanic immigrant, partly because Hispanics are almost half of all immigrants, and they have the higher fertility, so they're much more than half of all births among the foreign-born or among the immigrants.
When we look at native-born Hispanics, well, the welfare use rates are shockingly bad.
So that's even a more troubling problem.
Most of those people, native-born Hispanics, are mainly the children of immigrants.
They've just reached adulthood.
So, for example, if you look at all households, let's see, well, these are households with children.
I just have in front of me, this is in table 8, if anyone wants to look at it in the report.
76% of households headed by Hispanic immigrants with children, Hispanic natives with children.
So the household is a Hispanic native household, and they have children at 76% versus 41% for, say, white households.
So a very large difference.
If we just look at all households, which may be another way, We won't just look at that.
Let me find that number very briefly.
Yeah, so for all Hispanic households, with kids, without kids, it's 54%.
The rate for all native households is 30.
So for Hispanic natives, it's 54%.
For all, it's 30.
And then for whites, it's 23.
And for Asians, it's 22.
So the rates for Hispanics native-born Are in some ways even more troubling than they are for immigrants generally because the Hispanic natives really are using every type of program kind of across the board.
They're very high use of cash, incredibly high use of food programs, but also Medicaid and housing and so forth.
So U.S.-born Hispanics, many do succeed.
Many are joining the middle class.
Many are very affluent, but a disproportionate share, truly disproportionate share, are in or near poverty and have signed themselves or their kids up for just about every welfare program you can name.
So that's an extremely troubling finding.
We didn't go into that report, but the data is there if you'd like to see it.
Yeah, so this is not something that resolves itself.
This is not a cultural adjustment shock that resolves itself within a generation.
You are involving a multi-generational problem.
Now, another issue that has been brought up in opposition to the data, you know, I'm not even going to say my thoughts, because you obviously rebut it far better than I do, but, like, man, why did you not include Medicare and Social Security?
They're much more expensive than this stuff.
Well, I think a couple of things is they're not welfare.
Very briefly, everybody uses those programs when they get old, including the immigrants.
The use rates for immigrants, 65 and over, just not like you would be surprised, for things like Social Security and Medicaid, just like the natives.
It's virtually everyone.
Everyone signs up for those things.
Welfare is entirely different.
Not everyone uses welfare when they're young.
So what this tells us is everybody's pretty much a fiscal drain when they're old.
It's just when they're young is when the differences are, though obviously there's some very rich, old people who still pay a lot of taxes.
But the bottom line is those things are not means-tested anti-poverty programs.
They're universal.
Everybody uses them after 65.
Whereas welfare is very different.
It's an important way in which immigrants and natives can differ.
And when we look at those differences, they unfortunately appear to be quite large.
So I guess that's the bottom line.
Welfare is free stuff, basically.
Medicare and Social Security are certainly programs that, after a while, do pay you back everything that you put in.
But not anti-poverty programs.
Not only are they universally used, they're programs people do pay into.
And some people never get the money they're back.
No one pays into TANF.
No one pays into food stamps.
No one pays into public housing.
It's just free from the taxpayer.
And so it seems kind of silly, again, to say, well, they're welfare, too.
I suppose in some big philosophical sense, but when you think about it fiscally and how the programs actually work, they are not, I think, in anyone's mind, certainly not the American public, not in my mind, and not in the way they actually work.
They're not welfare programs in the same way.
Yeah, I mean, if Bill Gates can get it, I would be pretty hard to categorize it as welfare in particular.
Yeah.
So, I want to give you the big sort of policy.
I'd love to share a thought or two with you, and you can obviously comment and then finish up as you see fit.
I've always believed that if you give people the right information, they'll generally make the right decisions.
Or, another way of putting it, is if they have the wrong information, they'll never make the right decisions.
And one of the things that has troubled me about this conversation regarding immigration...
It's the degree to which the right information, the correct information, or at least the closest we can get to it, is just not present in the conversation.
So it's one thing to say, oh, you know, immigrants are great for the economy.
They're cost-effective.
They're going to work hard.
They're going to pay for your retirement because Social Security has been characterized, not unjustly, I think, as a Ponzi scheme preying on the young.
So we get these immigrants in.
They're going to work hard.
They're going to pay for your retirement.
They're a net positive to the economy.
That's an appeal to self-interest.
And we may more justly feel that we can inflict someone's self-interest on them against their will, so to speak.
But if on the other hand, as your data seems to, I think, more than suggest, that immigrants...
As they're currently demographically constituted, are a net negative to the economy, are a net cost, and some of that cost is paid in the here and now, some of that cost is paid in the near infinite future based on the deficit spending and the unfunded liabilities that so plague just about every political system.
And so saying, well, I like immigrants, but they're very expensive, and so you should pay for them.
As well as me.
Well, that's to me a very different moral argument.
Saying, well, it's in your best interest and here's the numbers and so, you know, you should pay because you'll get more money back.
You know, libertarians may still have some issues with that, as might I, but it's a more compelling argument than I wish to satisfy my conscience by giving people a better life at your expense and you should be forced to pay for that which I prefer, which is a net negative to you, at least economically.
And I think That, to me, is the debate that needs to happen, but until we get clarity over the true costs and benefits of immigration, it seems to me that everybody who doubts it is sort of, in some definition, just automatically a bad person, because the correct information about costs and benefits is just not part of the conversation.
Keep in mind that we haven't really discussed the economics.
We've discussed more.
These data have very negative fiscal implications.
But there is the economic side, and we should talk about that at some point, not now.
But I think everything you say is kind of unassailable.
It's like, I like immigrants, so you should be willing to pay for the subsidies so I can get my psychic gratification.
It does seem a very weak argument because at least I could just respond, well, I understand you like people from other countries.
You can send them your money.
That's fine.
And then many people do, and that's laudable.
If there's lots of poor people, you can help them.
Good luck.
And maybe I do it too, but the point is that's very different than you should pay for my desire by bringing these folks here.
Yes, that's a very different argument.
But for lots of libertarians, here's how they reason.
I've thought about this and I've kind of had an epiphany on it.
Their position is, look, people should have a right to move to better their lives.
Just like you can move from Chicago to the suburbs if you think it's better, and then you can go from Illinois to Massachusetts if you think that would be better.
It's the same.
Somebody should be able to come from the Central African Republic and go to Florida or Massachusetts if they want.
Or anywhere else for that matter because the individual should have that right in the same way he should be allowed to express himself and say what he wants.
He can't hurt other people.
It's that kind of thinking.
If all of this is being interfered with by the foolishness in their view of having a welfare program, well then that's not the immigrant's fault.
Okay, so we have these things.
Yes, you're right.
He will probably get them if he comes.
If he's an honest libertarian, say yes.
Nothing costs.
And that's a problem, but the solution is get rid of the welfare state.
So, now, that is a very post-national, it's a very internationalist, anti-what you might call national perspective, but there is a certain consistency to it, and people like Alex Narasta at Cato, who weighs in on these things, that's what he basically believes, what I just described.
My criticism of him is probably he just won't say that very often.
We're on once in a while, but he won't say, look, I don't care about America.
If it imposes a huge cost, tough luck, taxpayers, because the right of people to come trumps your desire to not have those things.
And if you, America, want to have a welfare state because you feel it's humanitarian, tough.
The immigrants are going to use it then, and you've got to pay for it.
He would say, let's get rid of the welfare state.
He's very strong, committed to individual rights, but patriotism and love of country, they're anachronistic.
They're like medieval chivalry to him.
It doesn't make any difference.
And so that's an important point.
This is sorry to interrupt, but this is what drives me into the nuts about this argument is, okay, if we say, well, we can have free immigration if we get rid of the welfare state, then given how immigration is currently constituted, you are importing votes for the welfare state, which seems highly risky if you want to get rid of it.
So why not wait until you've gotten rid of the welfare state and then open the borders?
Wouldn't that be the logical consequence of that argument?
Absolutely, right.
And do that.
But they're going to say...
Maybe.
That would be the better way, he'd say, to do it.
But if we're not prepared to do that, then let's let the immigrants in, and it'll be...
This is with...
I forgot his first name.
Kaplan.
At George Mason, he'd say the same thing.
Well, okay, maybe it is true that they're a big net fiscal drain, but that's not their fault.
That's your fault.
Get rid of the welfare state.
They should still have a right to come.
After all, life is really bad in Haiti, and it's a whole lot better in Miami, even in the poor parts of the city, so they should be allowed to move to Miami.
The political impact, the impact on my personal freedoms, the fiscal costs, well, you know, all of that is trumped.
And again, it's all very post-national.
But most people care about their country. - Yeah, I can only assume then that the people who are pro this also are ignoring the degree to which non-culturally compatible immigration has a net negative effect on the quality of public education.
And I think that's something that, you know, the amount of resources that get diverted to language barriers, to cultural barriers and so on is substantial.
And I'm not sure exactly why the domestic children should pay for the moral sensitivities of libertarians in terms of getting a lower quality education as a result of influx of people who are very expensive to accommodate within the existing public school system.
Yeah, which I think you're touching on is, look, immigration, we just talked on one thing, the arrival of someone who comes and gets a job can, in fact, Have a huge impact on lots of things.
And one is public offers.
One is public education.
One is a sense of community.
There's just lots of things.
And if all your focus is on his right to move, you miss all those things.
It's as if his right to move trumps every other concern.
And that's...
And that's essentially what...
I mean, I'm not trying to use this word provocatively, but that's the extremist libertarian.
Now, I don't think most regular libertarians are even post-national.
Most of them are patriotic.
They say, look, America's tradition is this.
We should preserve it.
We certainly have a bigger obligation to our own people and other people.
I love America.
Most libertarians probably would say those things.
I want to see her great.
I want to...
I want to preserve.
I want to bring down the size of government.
All these things, partly out of a sense of patriotism.
But the intellectuals who are libertarian like Kaplan, like Narasta, that isn't their perspective.
Let me make something clear.
They're not anti-American.
They're just indifferent.
They are post-national, or as my colleague Mark Krikorian likes to say, and what's troubling about them is they usually just won't admit that in public.
But sometimes they will, in fairness to them.
And I know we're short on time.
One very quick thing we wanted to – you mentioned economics.
Maybe we can get you back on to talk about that more because it's such an important issue.
One of the things that I found striking as well, which is not talked about in the immigration conversation, is the vast amount of capital that is transferred from America.
To other countries in the form of sort of these sendbacks or these remittances.
I mean, so in a weird way, I mean, American taxpayers, you could at least say, well, the tax money goes to families who spend it in America and so on.
But in a lot of ways, this money is heading overseas and maybe never to return.
And that is a huge amount that you're subsidizing, not even people living in America, but to people living outside of America.
Right.
I mean, remittances must be $20 to $40 billion a year, well worth thinking about, and it's certainly money that is not able to be taxed.
And unfortunately, it's money, it's consumer power, it's potential tax payments, it's anything like that.
It's money that could be spent on improving the education of children here that is flowing out of often some of the poorest communities in America already.
Okay.
Well, I really, really appreciate your time.
It was a great pleasure.
And I am looking forward to everyone who calls me a bad classical liberal for having this conversation.
But I think the information that your group has put together is absolutely essential for people to...
You can't just live in the platonic world of forms.
You need to get that good old-fashioned human empirical data from time to time.
And I think that the information your group has put together is essential for informing people Do you have any up-and-comings that my listeners and watchers should be on the lookout for?
Well, no, we continue to put stuff out.
I'm going to put stuff out, obviously, on health insurance coverage and poverty and stuff, and some of the immigrants do quite well.
There's not so much.
Also, another big issue to think about, if you're interested in cultural questions, is the flow of Syrian immigrants.
Obviously, Europe is transfixed by it.
But there's going to be a lot of pressure to take in 100,000, 200,000 people from Syria.
It is not possible to vet them.
Records were terrible in Syria before the war, and now they're nonexistent.
To know, to identify people, to know about their national security risks and their political orientation is not going to be possible, and that's going to impact.
The other thing is the United States spends...
Remember, just to give you an example, 91% of immigrants from the Middle East who are refugees, according to a different survey called the Annual Survey of Refugees, access food stamps and a third are getting cash assistance.
We spend a lot on refugees.
Bringing in 200,000 refugees over a few years will cost many billions of dollars.
That's something we need to think about.
And the evidence seems to be very strong that this will not be a one-time cost, that it's in perpetuity to some degree, at least as far as the data has stretched multi-generationally, that it is not a one-time cost.
Well, I really, really appreciate it.
We'll put links to your group below, links to the study.
I really strongly recommend to people to go and read it.
it just go go and get the facts and and question the degree to which various groups are interchangeable or entirely malleable by circumstances the data from psychology seems to show and genetics seems to It seems to show that human beings are not water, that you could just pour them into any container and they'll take that shape.
And that is an important part when it comes to think about what kind of society we want to live in.
I'm not saying you endorse any of that.
I'm just saying that those are my particular thoughts.
And I really, really appreciate the conversation.
And, of course, I hugely appreciate the work.
And, of course, to some degree, the flack that you're taking for getting this information out there.
Because a better informed populace is really one of the most essential components for why social decision making you've done.
You guys have done a lot to add to that, in my opinion.
Well, thank you very much.
Hope you'll send me a link by email to once you get it up there.
