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July 5, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:03
3337 America's Immigration Controversy | Jason Richwine and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom in Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We're back with our friend Jason Richwine.
He has a PhD in public policy from Harvard University, is a contributor and writer for National Review and just published a report on the cost of welfare used by immigrant and native households with the Center for Immigration Studies.
You can follow his blog at an alarmingly wide number of places, which we'll link below.
You might want to go to jasonrichwine.com.
Dr. Richwine.
Richwine, thank you so much for your time today.
Well, thanks for having me.
So, the general impetus that is put forward a lot of times for immigration always seems to be sort of rough and ready and kind of seems like reasoning after the fact.
But the general story goes something like this, that we have an aging population, declining birth rates among natives, and therefore we're going to bring immigrants in to sort of prop up the tax requirements for Social Security and other sort of entitlement policies.
Or paid in sort of takeout kind of programs.
And I think it's fair to say that some of the work that you've done and the data you've aggregated seems to, I don't know, how do they say, challenge that narrative just a little bit.
Yeah, I would say so.
I would say so for sure.
The fiscal impact of immigration is an important issue for sure.
And, you know, I just did a paper for the Center for Immigration Studies on the cost of welfare for immigrant-headed households and for native-headed households.
And the cost disparities are pretty large.
I mean, we looked at the The numbers for 2012, we found that immigrant-headed households get about $6,200 worth of welfare benefits on average.
And that's including the households that get no benefits, so the zeros averaged in.
And then the natives get about $4,400 in welfare benefits.
So there's a difference there.
And, you know, there's a fiscal impact here, but there's also, I think, maybe sort of a more bottom-line feeling about these numbers, which is, Basically that, you know, immigration is supposed to benefit Americans.
I think most people view it that way, at least.
I certainly do.
And it's really hard to believe that we have designed the optimal immigration policy if immigrants are taking in more welfare than natives.
I mean, if we were just to sit down from scratch and say, let's design a great immigration policy.
I don't know that there'd be many people in the room who say, yeah, let's do it in a way that immigrants use 50% more welfare than natives.
It's sort of very unlikely in my view.
Well, immigration, too, it's a pretty permanent decision.
And as a permanent decision, not just the short-term impact, which, as you point out, is fiscally challenging, but the long-term impact is important as well.
How do, and again, we're talking, of course, a lot about a lot of people from south of the border, how do they fare intergenerationally in the long run?
Well, it's not as positive a picture as we would hope it would be.
I think a lot of times people make the mistake that you mentioned of seeing immigration as just a one-time thing.
Somebody comes here for a first generation and then that's it.
Nothing else happens.
But, you know, the reality is, and this is an important lesson for anyone Dealing with immigration is that it's a long-term, basically permanently transformational policy.
I'm not sure there's any policy that could be developed, that could transform a nation more than immigration can do, at least with mass immigration.
And, you know, you mentioned immigrants from south of the border, Mexico, Central America.
If you look at the intergenerational progress there, you do see some positive progress from the first to the second generation.
Children of immigrants do better than their parents.
There's no doubt about that.
But they don't close the gap with the average native.
And at that point, the progress seems to stall, regardless of the data set you look at.
If you look at a cross-sectional data set, or a longitudinal data set, or the time period you examine, you get that second to third generation stall.
And there's just not a lot of very good evidence that assimilation is happening the way we want it to happen.
And what are the theories behind that kind of stall?
Because, of course, they would gain a significant boost being born and educated in the country, being native English speakers and so on, which their parents probably didn't have that advantage coming from other countries.
Is there anyone, maybe yourself included, who's working on what is causing that stall?
Well, it's a big question.
I would say that cultures are very long-lasting.
They are tenacious.
And cultures express themselves in so many different ways.
I think we may have discussed before the book Albion's Seed.
It was by David Hackett Fisher, I believe.
Probably a lot of your listeners are familiar with it.
It's sort of a cult classic where he looks at the four sort of main groups that colonized The U.S. or the Americas from Britain.
And what he found was that if you look at, say, the Puritans who came to New England or the Cavaliers who went to Virginia and North Carolina or The Scotch-Irish who went to Appalachia, and then who am I missing?
The Quakers who went to Pennsylvania.
They had noticeably different cultures when they arrived, and the key thing is those cultural differences have to some degree persisted up until today.
We've had over 300 years for this group of, let's see, white British Protestants, all from the same island, all came here and still have noticeable cultural differences.
And I think it's an important question for us to ask then, that if those kinds of differences can persist, what kind of differences are we going to see when we take people who are not from Britain?
You know, when we go to combine people from Europe and Latin America and Africa, In Asia, you combine all those people together, you know, the odds of just an easy, quick assimilation within a couple generations is really pretty unlikely, given our past experience with that.
So to deny that or, you know, to just sort of, you know, hand wave and say, oh, let's not worry about that.
We'll be fine.
I think that's a major, major mistake that we make.
Well, of course, I mean, as you point out, immigration is one of these undoable situations, right?
If you pass a law that turns out to be bad or wrong or has negative consequences, you can repeal that law, you can change it.
But immigration plus citizenship, well, that is a permanent change to the country.
It can't be undone, can't be reversed, at least it's hard to imagine how it could possibly be done.
And so when people are talking about immigration, they're talking about a permanent change.
To the cultural mix within the country.
And as you point out, the evidence doesn't seem to be very strong that for certain groups at least, where the culture is different enough, that integration to a level of interchangeability, in other words, same kind of income, same kind of educational attainment, same kind of Birth rates, same kind of welfare usage.
That convergence just doesn't seem to be happening.
And that is, I think, quite alarming for a lot of people.
I know that that's driving a lot of what Donald Trump's success is being built upon.
But I think people recognizing just how permanent a change to the country is means that, I mean, the more permanent the change, you know, it's not like you're getting a henna tattoo.
You're getting something pretty permanent on your body.
That's right.
That's right.
And you mentioned Donald Trump.
I mean, his speech that he gave after the Orlando shooting, I thought was pretty good.
And one of the things he mentioned in that speech was, look, this shooter, yes, he was second generation.
He was not an immigrant, per se.
But nevertheless, he would not be here if his father were not allowed to immigrate here.
His father, this Taliban-supporting Afghani, this, I think, legitimate question as to why he was allowed to I mean, we have to look at the first generation, and this goes back to exactly what we're talking about.
Immigration is a long-lasting, permanent change.
Speaking of that whole issue, you look at this and And, you know, you say, okay, we have a second-generation immigrant, and clearly, you know, there's an assimilation problem here, right?
To put it mildly, yes, I think we can safely say that.
When you want to kill your fellow citizens, there's, you know, we haven't quite gotten that assimilation the way we wanted it to.
And there are people who say, you know, don't worry, we don't have the problem that Western Europe does.
You know, France has a larger Muslim population, it's poorer, and they're going to have more attacks.
And besides, they'll say, well, France has such a sort of exclusivist culture that You know, we don't have that here.
We're so much more open.
We can assimilate.
I think there's some truth to that, probably.
Probably we can do a somewhat better job than Western Europe.
But can we do a much better job?
I really doubt it.
And we're starting to see the results of that.
And for those who argue that, you know, there's nothing to worry about, what exactly is the argument?
I mean, if we have a lot more Muslim immigrants, Well, we haven't exactly shown a great capacity to do assimilation so far.
And, you know, it seems that, you know, precautions seems to require that we take a really hard look at this.
Well, one of the challenges I think that people don't understand is they think, because the way that we learned about immigration, at least the way that I was taught about it, was taking the 19th century model.
You know, America was the melting pot and people came over and so on.
Now, of course, the reality is back then there was no welfare state.
And so people who could not economically make it in the United States would go back to where they came from.
And my understanding is that about a third of immigrants in the 19th century returned back home.
They didn't like it, they couldn't fit in, they couldn't make it, or whatever it was going to be.
The difference, of course, is that assimilation, I think what we genuinely or generally mean by assimilation has a lot to do with economic assimilation.
In other words, you become part of the economic fabric of the nation.
One of the challenges with big scale immigration from non-English speaking cultures is that with the welfare state the drive to integrate and the capacity to self-deport if you fail is not nearly as strong because you get that kind of economic support through the welfare state and also when there is a huge amount of immigration you know it's the Chinatown on steroids you create these bubbles of culture that mirror the country of origin And then,
of course, people can swim in that relatively big lake without ever feeling like they're restricted.
And I think those challenges are something that is different, because people always say, well, in the 19th century, but conditions were very different.
I think you're exactly right.
I think that there are really two major differences today.
I mean, there are some people who talk about the difference...
Between the America of today and the America of, you know, around 1900 or so in terms of its ability to take in a lot of immigrants and assimilate, I think that's absolutely right.
I also think that the immigrants themselves have changed, that we have immigrants from very different places, that it's going to require a lot more work if there's going to be convergence in terms of not just economics, but sort of socially and also in terms of the way people view sort of what they call patriotic assimilation, the idea that You're going to come here and really feel like an American.
And that's not an easy thing to do.
I think we forget how hard that can be.
But imagine you or I moving to China for a couple years, and maybe we think that's going to be permanent because, you know, we got a job over there with a multinational corporation.
Well, would you consider yourself Chinese?
You know, would you immediately adopt that home and say, yes, China is my home.
You know, how dare you suggest I'm actually an American, you know?
That would be an odd thing for sure.
And so, as I said, yes, America probably does have some advantage in assimilation, given its history, given its more open culture.
But nevertheless, I don't think it's a huge advantage.
And so, yeah, there's lots of things going on here.
And I think the welfare data is a good starting point for talking about it, partially as fiscal impact itself, but also as a lesson about just how badly we're kind of screwing this up if we're really trying to help America.
Well, and also help the immigrants who've come to America who want America to be America.
You know, a lot of people have struggled hard to come legally to America because they love something about America.
And if immigration begins to erode what they love about America, we've not done much of a service to the people who've come to America for its American-ness, so to speak.
That's right.
That's right.
And so the more it changes, the less attractive it becomes.
But that is the nature of things.
And so we have to be really careful with this.
As I said before, it just seems like over and over again, we think of immigration as a single generation event.
We don't talk about it in multi-generational terms.
And, you know, maybe, I mean, if there's any kind of silver lining to the Orlando tragedy, I mean, it's that maybe some people will start thinking about this in broader terms.
I mean, it's terrible, absolutely horrible that that would be what has to spark this kind of conversation.
But it's long overdue.
So it's either now or never when we start talking about it.
Well, and it's also struck me that people who come from foreign cultures because of the internet can keep in much closer touch with their original culture.
And that, again, to me, would erode their desire or capacity to assimilate into America.
And something else that I've thought of as well, I want to get your thoughts on it.
When I was a student, I was broke like most students.
And so I took in roommates because I kind of needed the cash and to pay the bills.
And it sort of struck me, Jason, that politicians, if you want more people, so to speak, in your country, if you're a politician, you're not thinking in sort of a quarter century timeframe, you know, like, well, you know, we're going to encourage birth now and then 20 years or 25 years down the road, we're going to get a whole crop of taxpayers.
So, because children are a big expense for society, obviously.
I mean, they consume money like a forest fire consumes wood.
And so if there's sort of an encouragement of or a reduction of barriers to people in the country having children and you get a higher birth rate, that actually costs the politicians money.
You know, they've got to pay for mat leaves or benefits or, you know, of course, education for the kids and all that kind of stuff.
And it takes people out of the workforce to raise them.
So it's kind of a net negative for governments to promote births in the here and now.
However, if they import sort of adults, generally, if it's the Democrats, most immigrants tend to vote left.
So they get people who at least to some degree can contribute or aren't as expensive as kids and will also vote in a way that kids are going to take 18 years to grow to.
So it seems to me sort of like if you're short of money, And you have a house where you could rent out some rooms.
You don't sit there and say, well, I'm short of money.
I can't pay my bills.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a bunch of kids because then they're going to grow up and then they'll be able to take care of help me with my bills because it's going to be a lot expensive before it makes money.
Whereas if you bring in roommates, they can start paying the bills immediately.
And I think that skewed perspective on native births versus immigrants seems to have some sort of political and economic drivers to these decisions.
I think that's a pretty good insight.
I mean, I think you're describing how countries dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes.
I mean, with the analogy to roommates, it would be that you bring in the roommates now and you get money from that, but then the roommates, you know, charge you or ask you to pay back the rent they paid you later on, something like that.
Or just trash the place.
Right.
Will, of course, help with Social Security and Medicare for a time, right?
I mean, like any Ponzi scheme, that's the way it works.
If you bring in adults, they'll be paying into the system, but not taking too much out.
But then, eventually, the bill comes due.
And if you're a low-skilled person, then even Social Security is going to pay you more than you paid in originally.
And Medicare, of course, that pays everyone right now more than they paid in, which is a A huge problem.
So, yeah, I mean, actually, it's funny, it reminds me that, you know, when the CBO was scoring the most recent amnesty proposal, the Schumer-Rubio amnesty in 2013, the benefits, at least the original welfare benefits, were structured in ways that the path to citizenship, so to speak, you know, would start, but you wouldn't be eligible for welfare for the first 10 years, you know, and then you could get it after that provisional period.
You know, the 10 years, of course, just happens to be the budget window CBO looks at when they're scoring these bills.
Now, in fairness, the CBO did go out 20 years, which was nice.
But the fact is, you've got to go out 75.
You've got to go out a long way if you want to look at the real impact.
If you're going to count the payroll taxes the immigrants pay into something like Social Security, if you're going to count that as a plus, you've got to go out farther and count the benefits as a minus.
If you don't, you're getting a really skewed picture.
Right.
Now, one of the things that you wrote about recently, we'll link to this article below, was this question of Schrodinger's immigrant.
I wanted to help people unpack that.
It was a very interesting article.
Oh, yeah.
So Schrodinger's cat, right?
It's this paradox, which I guess I probably don't even completely understand.
The idea that a cat could be both dead and alive at the same time because of some quantum physics principle.
So there's this new internet meme going around where you apply that To other political issues where you are trying to argue that someone is being inconsistent.
So the idea with Schrodinger's immigrant is coming from open borders groups who say that immigrants, you know, who accuse restrictionists of simultaneously saying that immigrants are lazy, you know, no good people who just use welfare.
But at the same time, they say immigrants are stealing our jobs.
So the implication is, gee, these restrictionists are just such hypocrites.
They can't even get their story straight.
What's going on?
It's a binary.
It has to be one or the other.
It's a switch.
There's no dial.
Right.
But the fact is, in the case of immigrants, it actually can be both.
It can be that you're on welfare and working at the same time.
That's exactly what we found in the CIS report and pretty much any time we look at these kinds of numbers.
The reason is that people have this mistaken view That welfare is just cash.
It's just cash you give out to people who don't work.
That is increasingly not what welfare in America is if you're looking at means-tested anti-poverty benefits.
I mean, the programs that we looked at were cash, like SSI and TANF, but also Free School Lunch and the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program.
And food stamps and Medicaid, public housing, subsidized rent.
I think I got all of them there.
So all these things are welfare in one form or another.
And the key thing is you can get almost all of them while you're working.
That's why welfare really is targeted at the working poor these days, not at people who don't work.
So it is completely consistent for immigrants to come in And be very industrious.
And we can talk more about that later.
Very industrious, having very high labor force participation rates.
But at the same time, use lots and lots of welfare because they're poor.
That's what you get.
I mean, if you're a family, like a mother and two children, the mother's making 20, 25,000 a year.
In almost every state, you're going to be eligible for most welfare programs.
And even if you're working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, you know, you've got those welfare programs and immigrants have done a very good job.
I guess it's through networking of some kind of figuring out what benefits they're eligible for and getting those benefits both for themselves and for their children.
So the bottom line is the Schrodinger's immigrant meme really kind of falls flat.
Right, right.
And the degree to which Immigration has become this big giant government program.
You know, I have, I guess, maybe you do too, a certain amount of occasional friction with the open borders libertarians who, of course, you know, a free movement of goods and people and so on.
But the welfare state and a variety of other government programs has meant that immigration as it currently stands is a big, giant, subsidized government, massive program, and has nothing to do with the free and open idea of a more libertarian society.
Well, you know, I often hear from my friends on the open borders write that, you know, what we need to do is build a wall not around America, but around the welfare state.
You know, build a wall around the welfare state.
You know, there's a couple problems there.
I mean, first of all, even restricting immigrants from welfare is easier said than done.
Actually, there still is a five-year ban on immigrants receiving welfare after they become permanent residents, but that's only for some programs in some cases, and there's all sorts of exceptions for being poor.
I mean, that's I mean, that's sort of, you know, kind of a weird exception to have.
But on top of that, and really the big driver here is welfare that goes toward the U.S.-born children of immigrants, because there's no way that can be restricted, right?
I mean, you cannot tell a U.S.-born child, sorry, you can't have Medicaid because your parent was an immigrant.
It's just unconstitutional.
And so there's no way— Sorry, your parent was an illegal immigrant.
Is that what you mean?
Well, even if it was an illegal immigrant, I mean, it doesn't really matter.
I mean, illegal or legal, if you're born in the U.S., you know, whether your parent was illegal or legal at the time, you're entitled to as much welfare as anyone else gets.
And there's really no way around that.
And the way that some of the open borders right has tried to get around to themselves and say, well, that's okay because they're non-immigrants, you know.
That doesn't go very far.
You know, if you're an immigrant and you come here and have a child and then ask the taxpayer to support it, I'm sorry, that's an effect of immigration.
That's not somehow independent of immigration.
And so, you know, and also I should point out that that's a benefit to the immigrants themselves.
If you, I mean, parents are generally expected to pay for the medical care and the food and so on for their kids.
And if the taxpayer is doing it instead, well, immigrants, that's, you know, more money for immigrants to spend on something else.
Right.
The labor force participation aspect of what you talked about recently, I find particularly fascinating.
Seeing this, it's almost like America has carved off a separate country with people who don't work or who won't work.
I know some of it is for disability, although those seem to be going up even faster than an aging population would predict.
Right.
But what are the effects on – the softer effects on immigration?
Because it's not like, well, I went to go and get a job, do an X, and there were a bunch of immigrants or illegal immigrants lined up ahead of me, therefore I didn't get the job.
And that's, of course, what a lot of people think when they think of immigrants displacing immigrants.
Native-born labor.
But it's much more subtle than that insofar as, you know, as they drive down wages, not working or getting support from the government becomes more attractive or appealing even to native-born people.
Is that a fair way to put it?
I would say so, yes.
In fact, actually, I would go a little bit further in saying that the problems of the native underclass, which we can talk about in a second, are not entirely due to immigrants.
And that shouldn't be a controversial statement.
But sometimes, you know, friends of mine say, oh, no, no, don't say that.
Just say it's all because the wage has been lower.
And certainly that has been part of it, you know.
I'm not going to leave natives off the hook here.
There are some real problems.
I did this article for the American Conservative recently where I looked at labor force participation rates over time.
Actually, what I looked at is people who were not in the labor force, which means you're not working and you're not even looking for work in the given week where they're being interviewed.
In 1962, there's only 5% of working-age men who were not in the labor force.
I intentionally chose working-age men because Generally speaking, there's not really an excuse for not working if you're a working age and you're a man, right?
And just so people know, that's 25 to 64 years of age.
Well, you're 14.
You should be working on a farm.
I mean, you're keeping it very sensible.
Right, okay.
So in 1962, the feeling was that if you weren't working and you were a healthy, able-bodied man, And you're a bum.
That was basically the view.
And so only 5% not in the labor force.
That number very slowly creeped up over the last half century.
Never in a way to spike or going up and down in big wild swings that the media might pay attention to.
Just this drip, drip, drip of increasing people just sort of dropping out of the labor force.
So last year, remember, 5% in 1962.
Last year it was 16%.
16%.
So more than tripling.
You might say, well, okay, fine, 16%.
It's not that bad, right?
Well, you have to look at where the problem is concentrated, okay?
This is not the case of college grads dropping out to be stay-at-home dads, okay?
The problem is concentrated among low-skilled people, especially low-skilled natives.
So in 2015, among natives without a high school degree, again, working-age men, 40% were not in the labor force, 40%.
Now, for black Americans in particular, it was 53%, so more than half not working.
And so there's a big problem.
And sorry, not just not working, but not even looking for a job.
That's correct.
Not even looking for work.
So the media focused on the unemployment rate, which is only people who are looking for work.
And that number does go up and down a lot based on the health of the economy.
The labor force participation rate, on the other hand, does not vary all that much with the economy.
I mean, sure, there's a little blips here and there.
It was a little higher in the late 90s, but it's not nearly as much of a correlation as the unemployment rate.
So anyway, this is a really big problem for the native underclass, really big.
And, you know, whether you're on the left or the right, I think everyone can agree that when work disappears from a community, it basically rots from the inside.
The economic and social capital in working class communities evaporates when people are not working.
Well, as does things like family stability, social cohesion, neighborliness, the value of men.
Traditionally, of course, women are disabled by pregnancy and child raising and And therefore, the men have to go out and hunt down the bacon or whatever they're going to bring home.
But when men are largely unemployed and the women can get their money from the state, the value of men diminishes enormously.
And that has a huge effect on culture as well.
That's right.
And it's also important to point out that there was a time when this was primarily a problem with the inner city ghettos, primarily a problem with black Americans.
That is not the case anymore.
The problem is very much spread.
To a number of rural white areas, the so-called redneck areas, especially in Appalachia.
So this is not a monoracial problem anymore.
It's a problem of the lower class and really sort of an underclass, sort of a dysfunction.
So we might say, where does immigration fit into all of this?
And I would say certainly there is an impact here when you bring in lots of low-skilled immigrants who do have very high participation rates.
And certainly it does reduce the wage and make it less attractive for immigrants.
Immigrants for natives to join the workforce.
But the real problem is that you'll get people saying, you know, well, if it's a matter of the wage, then sure, yes, immigration is hurting the native underclass.
But if it's not a matter of wages, if it's a matter of natives just being lazy, you know, then, you know, immigrants aren't hurting them at all.
But I would argue that's not the case.
What's going on here is that we're able to sweep the problem of the underclass under the rug.
The way we're able to do it is we keep bringing in new immigrants.
And of course, when their children join the underclass, it's okay, because we have that faucet that's still pouring in new immigrants.
So the immigrants come in, they keep the farms operating, they keep the businesses operating, all the while our native communities are kind of rotting, as I said, and it allows us to not focus on the problem.
Imagine for a minute if we turned off the spigot, right?
If suddenly immigrant labor was not available to workers and farms and other sorts of factories, Can you imagine how quickly employers would turn to figuring out how to get natives into the workforce again?
Certainly, part of it would be increased wages and also other kinds of job amenities.
But it's going to go beyond that.
It's going to be for politicians as well.
They're going to be hearing it What about the culture in general?
I can imagine if rich people suddenly can't find people to If you're an able-bodied man and not working, that you are a bum.
We can bring that back, that mindset.
All of that, I think, could come back to some degree, not as much as the 1960s, but to some degree, if you turned off the faucet and didn't have so many low-skilled immigrants at the ready, ready to To come in and help sweep the problem under the rug.
That's why I call the article the immigration band-aid.
You know, it's a band-aid over the underclass.
And so, as I said, I mean, one of the big issues here is how do we help the underclass?
Well, even if the problem is entirely that they're lazy, this part of the solution, you know, a first step has to be let's get rid of the immigration band-aid.
Right.
I think Ann Coulter put it very memorably when she said to rich people, why don't you ask your maid if she'd like a raise?
And then, you know, she has, of course, a way of accordying down these issues into really pithy bites.
But, yeah, as you point out, I mean, the discrepancy between native-born non-participation force in labor versus immigrant is enormous, right?
I mean, it's very high, but it's lower, of course, among the immigrants as they pour in.
And, of course, one of them want to find work and look for work.
Of course, an excess in supply is going to drive down wages.
That's not even Econ 101.
That's like negotiating to swap your Halloween candy when you're eight.
That one is not particularly.
And you point out there is some data behind this, you know, we assume where there's a hypothesis there are facts to bear it out.
And you talk about how in 2006, a bunch of, there was a sort of high profile raid on a Georgia poultry producer.
What happened then?
Oh yes, that was very high profile.
This was back when the Bush administration was trying to demonstrate that it was, you know, getting really tough on illegal immigration because they were preparing to try to pass the amnesty in 2007.
And so you're right, it was a Georgia upholstery processor that had, oh, something like 75% illegal immigrant workforce, something like that.
They were raided and they lost a huge number of their workers almost overnight.
And if you think about, if you're a manager, what do you do?
How do you open the plant on Monday morning if you lost 75% of your workforce?
The answer is you try to recruit natives.
After all, there were lots of natives here who Apparently we're not doing much and we're willing to work.
And so they immediately advertised higher wages.
And it wasn't just higher wages either.
They said, okay, we're going to give you free transportation and also free lodging for workers.
Come, we'll drive you over here.
You can stay in this housing we have on the campus if you want.
And there's higher wages.
So they did all that because they were desperate.
And to me, making employers desperate Is perhaps a good idea.
I mean, it's true that efficiency won't be there as much as you'd like it to be.
But, you know, if you have a real interest in helping the underclass, I think that that has to be part of what you do.
Right.
And Arizona, of course.
Really worked hard on reducing illegal immigrant population.
And according to reports, the wages there for construction and farm workers went up 10% and 15% respectively.
That is, well, that's quite an incentive for a lot of people.
Absolutely, yes.
And I remember the Wall Street Journal was quoting, Some of those contractors and employers in Arizona are saying, I have a quote here, so it says, now you have to put out feelers, you've got to buy ads, you've got to go on Craigslist, tap job agencies just to get a few men.
It's like, oh, gee, you actually have to go out and recruit.
But that's what they do.
That's what they have to do.
And I would point out, I mean, just to sort of bring balance to this story, that in the Georgia poultry processor case, they did bring in lots of natives who got jobs, and it was a very good thing for them.
But it was also true that the natives who got jobs were considerably I guess you could say a bit harder to work with than the immigrant laborers.
It depends on your perspective on that.
If you're sort of a labor guy, that means they were asserting their rights.
If you're not so much, that means they were goofing off, you might say.
Again, I think you can kind of understand the employer's perspective here.
The more an employee just sort of shuts up and does what he's told, the better from their perspective.
You have to consider the fact that the underclass right now is, you know, dealing with developing a good work ethic, and I think this is part of that process, part of that transition.
And hopefully, as I said, if we had more of this happen, if we actually did Restrict not just illegal immigration, but try to keep legal immigration to low enough levels that they're not substituting en masse for native workers, then I think you would see that work ethic start to grow.
I think you would see employers and employees start to get along better.
But I'm not going to pretend it's not a difficult transition.
Oh, it will be a A difficult transition, which is why we should try to achieve it rationally sooner rather than later, because it's not like it's going to get easier as job skills, as work ethic decays.
And of course, you know, I think about the kids of these people who have...
The kids grow up in environments where they may not see a single parent or even both parents.
They may not see them working.
They may not gain the wisdom of being able to sit down and say, you know, well, I have this job issue.
My boss is doing this.
What should I do?
And oh, yeah, I remember when I, you know...
There's a lot of sort of softer human capital that is transmitted through people working and negotiating and navigating a system which, you know, it only takes one generation for that knowledge to kind of dry up and no longer be passed along and that's important stuff.
I completely agree.
And what I would say to that is that, you know, there's so much focus these days on schooling in terms of academic test scores, cognitive test scores, how's your math score, how's your reading score, and so much obsession with raising those test scores.
You know, what policy raises scores at fourth grade and can we maintain those scores to eighth grade?
And then, of course, the 12th grade, you find them all leveling out.
I mean, with very little success, frankly, in terms of raising these test scores, all with the view that, you know, everyone should go to college or something like that.
I mean, to me, you're really looking at the wrong thing, because raising academic ability has been...
Something that's been very difficult for a very long time.
But you need not look back too far.
I mean, I cited data from the 1960s when work ethic, industriousness, all those things were indisputably better, you know, even for the lowest classes.
And so, you know, you can't tell me it's not possible for people without high school degrees to go to work every day because they used to do that.
You know, they did it once.
They should be able to do it again.
And so, yeah, that's an area we could focus on.
And sure, it's not the most attractive in terms of what gets politicians excited about policies, but it would do far more, I believe, toward improving the lives of low-skilled people than it would to inundate them with various math tests as soon as they hit fourth grade.
I don't see the benefit of that compared to the benefit of having a general culture that says, look, if you're an adult, I was actually in England.
I grew up in the 70s in England.
And I actually saw that transition take place.
I've talked about it in the show.
And for those who want to sort of get a sort of meme-based...
The humor is a little dark, but it's well worth it.
There's a meme called Old Economy Steve, which is a guy, like a totally 70s looking guy, and the memes are like, you know, Old Economy Steve graduates from high school, buys a house, raises three children, works for 40 years, like all the things which now are a pipe dream.
For most people, we'll put a link to those below.
This one that I remember, Old Economy Steve arrives at an airport 15 minutes before his flight.
Welcome aboard, sir.
Old Economy Steve.
Now, the other thing, too, is it's not just the low-income workers, particularly in America.
And the one thing I think that's important for people to understand is the degree to which we've talked about business as a whole.
But high-tech business in particular being very dependent upon, it's hard to not characterize these as quasi-SRF-like conditions of the people who come in on the H-1B visas.
Who are kind of tied to their job and who don't have much ability, if any, to negotiate and can be kind of worked hard without complaint.
A lot of the high tech companies do rely on these quasi medieval semi sweatshop visa programs.
And if you start talking about limiting immigration or limiting migrant workers or workers that can be used in these Coding farms, a lot of the high-tech companies, let's just say that they may have a bit of a conflicted self-interest, and this is important to understand when you're, you know, consuming Facebook or Twitter or other places.
A lot of these places are relying on non-native labor with very little ability to negotiate, who I, you know, argue relative to native labor, they can underpay.
And that is, I think, really important.
Altering or affecting the degree to which this conversation is accessible through public technology and social media.
Oh, no, no.
But of course, I mean, the people that H-1B is bringing, they're all geniuses, right?
I mean, these are needed workers.
They're absolute geniuses who are going to found their own companies.
If they were, it's hard to explain exactly why so many STEM graduates in America are out of work.
Yeah, I think that's something that doesn't come into the debate very much.
If you look for this so-called STEM job shortage, it's pretty hard to see.
You would expect the wages to go up for one thing, and you don't see that very much.
That's usually a good indicator that there's a shortage if the wage goes up.
Of course, shortage doesn't necessarily have a very precise economic meaning anyway.
With these H-1Bs, typically they're college graduates.
That's who they are.
And, you know, again, what employers want is they want to lower the wage.
I mean, I certainly don't begrudge them that.
I mean, that's the whole point of business is to make a profit.
And if you can make a profit by paying lower wages, then you should do it.
But the problem is, you know, it's...
It's undermining native labor to a great degree because you're bringing them in from the outside.
We've seen a lot of stories about this.
People paid to train their replacements.
Natives are laid off and then they have to train their replacements as a condition of their severance agreement.
It's really kind of ugly stuff.
Clearly, there's no shortage there.
If you're training your replacement, there's not a shortage.
You already have someone doing the job.
They're just charging too much by having access to the free market.
Because you're being replaced.
Yeah, right.
There's the best study I've seen on the impact of H-1Bs is one that exploits the sort of a random variation.
I hope I'm remembering this correctly.
Basically, that at some point, there is a cutoff.
You know, once they receive a certain number of applications, then there's no more for the year from employers.
And apparently on the final day, the The applications that are submitted are randomized.
They take a random selection of those and accept them and the rest are rejected.
So you can sort of get this random variance in which employers get employees and which don't from the H-1B program.
And what they find is that there's basically no difference between those two companies.
They don't create many new jobs the way it's claimed to be.
They don't pay higher wages or anything like that.
They're just able to lower the wage because they got that one worker.
You know, this is actually even worse.
I mean, that's the H-1B program, which is high-skill.
But a lot of these guest worker programs are pretty scary in terms of what you mentioned before about how they're sort of tied to one worker.
There's the H-2 program, which is for lower-skilled people.
Just looking at one case from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where I believe it was in It was in the Northwest where a company had brought in a lot of Thai workers, people from Thailand.
And the way they handled this was, I mean, quite honestly, it was closer to slavery than it was to our normal understanding of what employer-employee relations are like.
They first confiscated their passports, saying, you have to give these to us for right now.
And they also required this sort of down payment back when the Workers were still in Thailand.
They promised them really high wages.
It's going to be fantastic.
So they first make this investment, the workers.
Then they go there, and they realize that, first of all, they're tied to this employer.
They can't really leave, and they don't even have their passports, right?
But they have to make money to pay off the loans they got back home in order to get here in the first place.
So they become essentially like slaves.
And one of the complaints filed with EEOC It involved one of the foremen beating one of these Thai workers over the head with a cane because he wasn't working fast enough.
We think, wow, this is America, apparently?
I mean, this is really bad stuff that goes on.
And there are so many repeat offenders, too.
This particular company, I'd I don't remember its name now, but it had been cited many times before, and yet it's still allowed to participate in a guest worker program.
I mean, these are the lengths that businesses will go if you allow them to, to recruit cheap labor.
And as I said, you know, well, I obviously don't support beating people over the head with canes, but as I said, I don't begrudge companies from trying to make a profit.
But, you know, that is a further indication that we need to have some fairly strict laws about exactly how they bring in these guest workers.
Well, I think, you know, power corrupts and every law or program that reduces people's ability to negotiate in the free market is going to promote corruption in one form or another.
It happens on the public sector union side where they can effectively shut down key areas of an economy without competition.
It can happen on the employer's side when they have workers who can't quit or easily negotiate for their salaries.
So, yeah, anything that reduces voluntarism and economic interactions, I think, praxeologically, is going to promote this kind of corruption and abuse.
And you have to get to the source, you know, rather than, oh, well, yeah, hitting the guy over the head is really bad.
The question is, what were the dominoes that led up to that?
And anybody who's not allowed to negotiate freely is to some degree or another enslaved.
And that is actually one of the fundamental problems with calls for lobbying reform, campaign finance reform, all these sort of anti-corruption measures that the left, I think, holds in too high a regard generally.
The idea that you can, say, restrict campaign donations and somehow remove the influence of big money on politics is a fantasy.
It's a complete fantasy.
Take it from me, actually.
I've been in the think tank world a lot, and one of the things I've noticed is that the people with lots of money have an amazing ability to set the terms of debate.
They define what we talk about and also what the boundaries are of those debates.
And that happens with or without campaign contributions.
You could completely ban campaign contributions at every election publicly financed.
You would still have big money people basically setting the agenda.
Not controlling it, but setting the agenda in a way that people without that kind of money can't do.
I'll give you an example, actually, of think tanks, state-level think tanks.
So, there is a, you know, conservative think tank in virtually every state.
It might actually be all 50 states.
And I've worked with many of those in the past.
When I was at Heritage Foundation, which is a national think tank, we oftentimes worked with a state-level think tank like Like the one in Ohio, I've worked with Washington State, Texas as well.
So that's great, right?
But think about what those think tanks actually do, okay?
Those think tanks are not like Heritage.
Heritage is, you know, a so-called across-the-board conservative organization.
They do conservative economics and social issues and foreign policy.
What do the 50-state think tanks do?
Well, in almost all the cases I've encountered, they do one thing, which is libertarian economics.
Right?
They do deregulation.
They call for lower taxes.
They call for school vouchers.
States rights.
Let me go out on a limb here.
States rights.
Well, sure.
States rights are nice.
But, I mean, this is economic.
I mean, within the states, really.
I mean, they're not even lobbying the federal government.
It's lobbying their states for lower taxes and less regulation.
And so all perfectly fine.
But you might say, hmm.
You know, how come they're not talking about social issues?
You know, aren't they important too?
How come they're not talking about foreign policy?
Well, okay, fine.
There's states.
Maybe they don't care about foreign policy.
But there's lots of things that they could be talking about.
Can I take a guess?
Can I take a guess?
Okay.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I'll let you.
Let me just see if I can shoot the arrow over the hand to hit a target.
Is it because they wish to promote policies that will draw business to their state?
Well, I think that's a big part of it.
But, I mean, even within the state...
You know, the point is that that's where the funding comes from.
It comes from businesses in the state, or actually potential businesses that want to come to the state.
I mean, so that's where the money comes from, and that's why we have those think tanks.
And, you know, why are there so few social issue think tanks?
Because people who support social issues tend to be more grassroots.
They tend not to have lots of money.
There's the Family Research Council, you know, It was constantly under the gun from the SPLC for being a so-called hate group.
And there's the Heritage Foundation and not much more.
If you look at AEI, for example, it used to do a little bit with social issues, but not much anymore.
You know, it's hard to find many other examples.
And again, I'm not condemning their agendas.
I'm a small government guy myself.
But they want to make it easier to do business in the state that they operate in.
Sure.
I mean, I don't have a problem with that in itself.
I'm just trying to illustrate the fact that that the fact that that we have lots of advocates and analysts and talking heads.
And so talking about these issues is because there's money for those things backing them.
And I'm not accusing those analysts of being shills, not at all.
In fact, most of the people I've encountered in my experience in the think tank world are perfectly genuine about their agenda.
The point is, though, there's lots of other people with other agendas who are not on the mainstream scene because there's just not as much money to back them up.
So I want to give you the final word with regards to immigration.
I know that you work with other topics, but Your expertise plus the fact that immigration is the big topic throughout the Western world at the moment.
Not so much throughout the non-Western world because they don't really have a lot of immigration, but of course this is the big topic with Brexit, which is of course imminent.
And it is the big topic with the Trump campaign and it is a big topic around Europe as a whole.
To try and sort of sum up The issues with immigration and potential solutions, how would you best characterize that to people who are listening to this?
Well, I guess I would start with where we began in our conversation, which is the idea of immigration as transformational, that it's something that there's really nothing comparable in terms of policy that you can do to affect a nation culturally, economically, politically, and socially than you can with mass immigration.
And, you know, I guess I'm not here to tell people what to think.
I mean, there are some people who would say that's good, and certainly there are pros and cons associated with immigration, but these are long-term Basically, permanent effects that affect things in so many different ways.
And we talked a lot about the economics of it today, especially considering, you know, how they impact the native low-skill workforce or non-workforce, as it may be.
And so, you know, to think about this requires a very broad view and a very long-term view.
And we can't just think about the first generation.
We can't just think about it in terms of how they're going to benefit the Social Security system in the next 10 years.
We can't just think about it in terms of how much they love America or love Western Europe.
We have to think broadly and in a futuristic sense, a long-term sense.
If we don't do that, then I think that we will end up somewhere where we never intended to be.
And I think there's a lot of People, a lot of working-class people who already feel that way about immigration, that they see their communities changing in so many different ways, and what especially frustrates them is that They never voted for it.
They never asked for it.
They never felt like there was any national discussion about it, and yet it's happening.
And unlike the richer people, more connected people who can sort of enjoy the benefits of immigration while shutting the costs away, working class people can't really do it.
If their community changes, well, then it's changed, and they just have to accept whatever has happened to that community.
And you can see how that can lead to frustration.
You know, you can see how You know, they can be especially annoyed if someone calls them a bigot for simply being upset with the fact that the neighborhoods they grew up in are different now.
And so that's the kind of thing that leads to support for, you know, what we're seeing now with Donald Trump and a lot of working class support for him.
And I think that they are absolutely right to be frustrated and are right to want to express that frustration through someone like Donald Trump.
So it's kind of a long answer.
But, you know, my point is basically that this is a very broad issue.
That's good.
We like the long answers.
We're not here to get sound bites.
Well, thanks so much for your time.
It's always a great, great pleasure to chat.
It struck me as well that, of course, the think tanks at the state level...
Sorry, I hate to circle back.
The think tanks at the state level are not exactly going to want to draw a lot more business in because that would be more competitors for the people funding the vet.
But they are going to want to make it easier to do their jobs at the local level.
Really appreciate your time.
Just wanted to remind people, jasonrichwine.com, where you can pick up.
Are you going to work on a book?
Are you going to do a book at some point, right?
Oh, I would like to.
If you know someone who wants to pay me in advance, though, just let me know.
Right.
Okay.
Well, so yeah, jasonrichwine.com, where we'll link to a bunch of other places where you can get Jason's work.
He was recently on Fox News and did a great job.
We'll link to that as well.
As always, Dr.
Richwine, a great pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thanks very much.
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