Listen Live every Sunday morning at 8am PACIFIC

The Immigration Crisis in Context

Alex Nowrasteh makes the case for more liberal immigration as the best solution.

16 min readApr 22, 2021

The Biden administration continues to downplay the humanitarian crisis on the southern border. However, there is a sense that the situation is increasingly chaotic. Chaos, in turn, results in a public backlash and tightening of immigration policies, which only makes the problem worse.

Wretched Refuse?

Alex Nowrasteh — my go-to immigration expert — returns to the show to unpack the root causes of this chaos, and offer practical solutions that don’t put the blame on those seeking a better life in America.

I was eager to discuss Alex’s new book, co-authored with Benjamin Powell, Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2020). We grappled with the political problem of immigration reform, along with the misconceptions underlying nativist hostility to more open immigration.

While Biden’s idea of a solution includes cash payments to would-be immigrants to get them to stay in their home countries, Alex has a better plan that also doesn’t cost nearly as much: “Encourage free trade, end the drug war, and liberalize immigration,” he says.

Of course, the President is not entirely to blame for 150 years of bad immigration law — ultimately it’s up to Congress to replace the patchwork of executive orders with a rational framework and plan for naturalizing future American immigrants, while disincentivizing dangerous illegal crossings.

TRANSCRIPT

Our Extra-Constitutional Immigration Policy

I’ve invited you back to the show because you have recently written an important book entitled Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.

What’s going on with immigration? Just a very brief introduction, who’s in charge of immigration if your source of reference is the Constitution?

The Constitution says nothing about immigration. The powers of Congress that are enumerated in Article I Section 8 do not list immigration there. They list everything else: the power to raise taxes, raise an army, build a Navy, establish post offices and post roads and weights and measures, but it does not mention immigration anywhere. In the federal system envisioned by the founders, essentially, the states would have power over this, not Congress.

This changed in 1889 when the Supreme Court said that Congress has what’s called plenary power over immigration, which means that they can do whatever they want. The Supreme Court invented this power out of nothing. They say it’s an inherent power of sovereignty. There’s no sovereignty clause in the Constitution that they appeal to.

Since the 1880s, Congress has created an enormously complex law that’s second in complexity only to the income tax. The income tax law is probably the only law more complicated than the immigration law. At the same time, it has given the President an enormous amount of power over the system.

“This is an extra-constitutional system of immigration regulation that we find ourselves in today.”

Part of the problem is with the Constitution not having any designation for immigration — not giving that power to anybody, to any organization. Because it invented plenary power, they have given most of their power to the President. This is an extra-constitutional system of immigration regulation that we find ourselves in today. I think is a primary reason why it’s so complicated and has resulted in such a mess both at the border, inside of the United States, and such a restrictive government-created system to limit who can enter this country.

The Origins of the Crisis

From the Chinese Exclusion Act up to today, immigration policy has been driven by a total absence of intellect, of important government policies, of economic considerations. It simply is Congress reacting to biases of the people. That’s what Congress has done with this power. The founders had nothing in the Constitution about immigration. Did they forget or did they not care?

They cared a lot, and they didn’t forget. They just thought that it was 1) good for the United States to have free immigration with the world and 2) it was an important portion of the Enlightenment values that they supported, which was that people should be free to leave their home countries, and to go to other countries, so long as they aren’t criminal, aren’t violent, aren’t spies or an invading army, or otherwise.

Freedom of association across borders as an important liberal value was part of our natural rights, inherent to us being human beings, and also a policy that would grow the United States into a wealthier, larger and more powerful country and secure for us the blessings of liberty and prosperity and independence that have been brought down to us today. We have this American nascent nationalism, as well as the liberal values that they supported, both pushing in the same direction.

Debunking Immigration Myths

In the Declaration of Independence, our initial founding document in the declaration, it starts off with that wonderful language that Jefferson authored — All men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. We have that beautiful language.

In the third section of the Declaration, we have the indictment, America explaining to the world why they are entitled to declare independence from the king, and they list their complaints against the king. One of the specific indictments of the king was that the king endeavored to prevent immigration to the United States. It can be said without qualification that free immigration is an enumerated complaint against the king, and therefore, one of these specifically listed values that drove independence in our country.

What are the principles that govern whether we should restrict immigration or not?

The first one that people say is that immigrants are going to take our jobs, lower our wages, and especially hurt the working poor. The evidence for this is very poor. It doesn’t really exist. The reason is immigrants increase the supply of labor, which is true if you think of the supply and demand curve. It increases the supply of labor.

They also increase demand for labor because immigrants are people. They buy things. The net effect of more immigration is the slightly increased demand for labor a little bit more than an increase in supply, which means that we get slight wage increases as a result of having more immigration here. The same reason why countries that have a baby boom like the United States that after World War II, saw such large increases in wages and productivity as a result because more people are good for the economy. It seems so obvious to have to say it, but it’s true whether these people come from a natural increase from more births. It’s true if it comes from more immigration. The economics are the same.

The concept of “taking my job” is profoundly offensive. You don’t have a right to that job any more than if you are selling a used car for $5,000. No, it is not your job. It’s only yours if somebody is willing to hire you at the price you demand for the quality of work you’re going to give. A machine takes away manual labor. Is that an argument against machinery, against efficiency, against robotics?

In order to believe the arguments that nativists use against immigration in the economy, you have to also be anti-technology, because they’re the exact same argument. I think about that story, supposedly, when Milton Friedman went to China, and he saw a giant construction project, and thousands upon thousands of laborers using shovels to dig a giant hole. He asked the Chinese managers, why aren’t you using heavy equipment? Why aren’t you using bulldozers? They said, “Oh, well, we wanted to create more jobs for people.” Milton Friedman said, “Well, if you wanted to create more jobs, why don’t you give all the workers spoons instead of shovels?”

What’s another reason offered by those who oppose increasing the number of immigrants?

A lot of people are worried about immigrants committing crime. They think that immigrants are more likely to commit crime than native-born Americans, they especially think illegal immigrants are. This is one area where the evidence going back as long as we’ve ever had crime statistics in this country, show that immigrants — legal immigrants, illegal immigrants — both combined are much less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. They are much less likely to commit property crimes than native born Americans, are much less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans across the board, which means that the more immigrants you have in your community, just mechanically because they’re less likely to commit crime, the lower crime rates these places have.

There are always individuals and any large number of people in any group who are bad people who will commit a crime and we should absolutely punish them to the fullest extent of the law, and try to keep them from coming to the United States in the first place. But as a general rule, and general principles statistically, immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are much less likely to commit real crimes than native-born Americans are.

Milton Friedman, spoke to this fear that they are coming here because we have a generous welfare policy, for free money.

There’s really no evidence of this. One thing, We do have a large welfare state in the United States. The way that these programs are structured is they’re very restricted against new immigrants. For instance, you have very little access to these programs for the first five years that you’re here in the United States illegally, very little, almost no access if you’re here illegally. Even when you do have access, immigrants are much less likely to use these programs than native-born Americans. When they do use these programs, they use them generally for a shorter period of time and consume less money.

Now, I’m opposed to the existence of the welfare state. I don’t think it should exist for anybody across the board. If you’re worried about immigrants using welfare, The only real solution is to build a higher wall around the welfare state instead of around the country. Make it illegal for anybody to use welfare until they become an American citizen. You resolve almost all the concerns that people would have about immigrants coming here to use welfare.

Furthermore, what we see is that immigrants in the United States are less and less. are not going to the states anymore that have large welfare programs that even allow some immigrants to use them. They’re much more likely to go to states now like Florida, Texas, Arizona, states that have smaller welfare programs, and make it more difficult for immigrants to use them.

Some immigrants still go to California, New York, New Jersey, these other places. But compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago, as a percentage of all immigrants come in the United States, these places are declining. The places that are booming where immigrants want to go, are places that are governed by Republicans that have smaller welfare states that don’t let immigrants get welfare as much. That’s because immigrants aren’t coming here for welfare. They’re coming here for jobs. They’re coming here to work.

There is also a fear that they are coming here to vote out our system of government. They are coming here with a planned and insidious plan to upset our political system. Once they achieve the right to vote in sufficient numbers, they will vote us out from our entire system of government. Speak to that issue that they are here to undo our system of government so that it will be unrecognizable once they achieve a substantial voting bloc.

That’s actually the topic of my book with Ben Powell, the Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions published by Cambridge University Press. We take a look at this topic in the United States and around the world to see if there is any kind of relationship between more immigration and more socialist or big government policies. We find that there’s either no relationship at all.

In some cases, more immigration leads to more economic freedom, more representative government, more prosperity along the lines that libertarians believe in and want. There is this pernicious stereotype in our literature that immigrants vote for socialists, but it’s just not true. You see it, I think a lot in the 2020 election. You saw a swing of a lot of Hispanic voters in favor of President Donald Trump and a large swing in terms of immigrant voters. The immigrants themselves who are naturalized and able to vote, swaying toward President Donald Trump. You also see it around the world in places from Israel, Jordan, Europe and other places.

More immigration is generally correlated with more economic freedom. Historically, in the United States, the government has grown the most and the fastest when immigration was the most closed, which was during the period of time for about 1930 to 1970. The size of government during that time increased the most historically when immigration was closed. The time period since 1970 and before 1930, the government had grown much more slowly both of those time periods when immigration was more open. The folks who are making this argument, the correlations aren’t even going in their direction.

Historically the United States and even today on the state level, states with more immigration, the governments in those states are not growing more quickly than states and governments and states with less immigration. It’s simply this myth. It’s a pernicious myth. It’s one that unfortunately makes a lot of my Republican and conservative friends against immigration when they otherwise would be.

Fears About Assimilation

President Reagan said, “ You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.” Now, that ought to say it all Alex, but just speak to this fear because it seems to drive a lot of people.

A lot of economists have spent a long time thinking about how you measure something like this and measure cultural assimilation. They’ve narrowed it down to whether an immigrant or their kids are indistinguishable from other Americans based on some measures. These measures are size of family, religiosity — which doesn’t mean the specific religion you believe in, but whether you go to church, attend services, etc., the education level, or civic participation, like voting, joining the military, and income. Generally, what we find is that immigrants and their kids assimilate on average by the third generation, or the grandkids of the immigrants themselves are generally indistinguishable from all other Americans who have been here for a longer period of time along those metrics.

The sad thing is immigrants assimilate so much that their kids and grandkids start to commit more crimes like the rest of us. They assimilate in terms of crime, which is a bad thing. I wish it isn’t similar in terms of crime. In terms of everything, this is how powerful the United States is, as the cultural force and the world. When you’re living here is that even on the bad things, people assimilate to American attitudes.

Sociologists call the United States a graveyard of languages. because you have millions of people that used to live here who spoke German, who spoke Yiddish, who spoke Hungarian, who spoke polish, all languages that are dead in the United States, and in the next 50 to 100 years, languages like Mandarin, like Urdu, and even our ventral languages like Spanish. If it weren’t for more immigration coming in these languages would be practically dead too, because immigrants today and their kids are learning English at such an astonishing rate and forgetting the languages that they came with. The United States will allow the graveyard of languages in the United States to grow.

The importance of your response, Alex, is that it is fact-based. It’s not like you started with a conclusion and were determined to prove it’s right.

There’s this great research called ethnic attrition. What this means is the intermarriage of ethnic minorities who are the kids of immigrants or the immigrants themselves marrying outside of their racial or ethnic group. The kids are much less likely to identify as that racial minority. That’s a big reason why there’s so much assimilation, especially amongst Hispanic immigrants. It’s something that I learned about myself and my family because my father’s side are all Iranians and my mother’s side are all Europeans. I have always identified on surveys and everywhere else as a white, European background, and it never mattered to me. It’s not like an important part of my identity. I always check that box and never ever think about it. It turns out there’s tens of millions of other Americans today, who are just like that, who’ve never thought about it. It’s just because of the way that this country through intermarriage, through assimilation to the power of our culture, turns us all into Americans. It’s continually doing that even today.

American culture is the result of a mixture. It’s the stew. That’s what American culture is. The fact is that if the stew has a little more carrots and a little less potatoes and a little more meat, it’s still stew. Stew is the American culture.

There are the Amish who live totally separate. They live in the Midwest. They have their culture. They are as foreign as foreign can be. Does anyone listening to this show feel that they represent an existential threat to America, the Amish? Before you answer that, I’ll ask the same question about the numerous China towns and Japan towns that exist around the country and the little Italies that exist around the country. What about the Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and in other places in New York? Does anybody feel threatened? Somehow America is diminished by the fact that there is a little Italy.

If you want to know what the extreme non-assimilation looks like, go to Amish country, buy a pretzel and come home, and you will be happy for the experience, be happy that they’re there and hardly feel that the musket has to come out of the barn because they have taken over.

The Border Crisis

Finally, Joe Biden has declared the border situation to be a crisis. Tell us what is the present crisis? What caused it, and what is the solution?

We have had border crises in 2014, 2018, and 2019, and now again today. The fundamental problem is there are people in Central America who want to come to the United States. There are Americans who want to hire them. These people from Central America can have incomes of three to six times higher coming here, but there are no visas available for them. There is no way for them to come lawfully. What they do is they come up to the US border, they tried to enter unlawfully, or they tried to enter on asylum. A lot of them have legitimate asylum claims, but some of them are lying because they want to get into the country to work. They try to game the system to come in.

This has produced a crisis along the border. It happens every couple years. The government tries to solve it by using strict enforcement. It has worked for a few years here and there but it always comes back because the black market always wins in the long run. That is the fundamental source of the problem.

Biden wants to, among other plans, pay these would-be illegal immigrants to stay where they are. Let me get this straight. He wants to use tax dollars net outflow to prevent people from coming here and providing a net inflow to the economy. It’s like paying a factory not to produce. It’s like paying a farmer not to grow the crop.

I have to have my head examined for even saying the words, “paying somebody not to come here.” They want to come here to work. They want to come here to buy stuff. They want to come here to rent a house and to buy a house. They want to come here to purchase appliances. They want to come here to contribute to the economy, to pay into my social security. They want to come here to do all of that, and we’re going to pay them. “Please, we’ll pay you whatever you want, do not provide us with a benefit.”

The good thing about the Biden plan is it wouldn’t work. What it would probably do is cause more of these people to come because one of the things is a lot of these folks down there, they have to pay smugglers to come up to the US border. In order to pay a smuggler, they have to borrow money, usually 5 to10 thousand dollars. If the US government is handling them money saying don’t come, what that will probably do is just cause a lot of them to be able to pay a smuggler to bring them up to the United States. It will even succeed on Biden’s own standards.

There’s a ton of development work on this done by development economists, which is people leave their home countries often to the point where their country where they’re making about $10,000 a year or so, purchasing power parity and income, and after they make $10,000 starts to decline but as the income goes up to $10,000, more and more then were able to come. So in these countries, money increases their income because in these countries, their income is 5 to 7 thousand dollars a year.

If Biden’s plan were to work, it would result in more immigration by accident. It’s just another example of unintended consequences. It’s really crazy. It’s like Every problem to the government can be solved by burning billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

Just like prohibition, it was a wealth transfer into organized crime from the government. Paying immigrants not to come here is a wealth transfer from the Biden administration to the cartels, who smuggle in immigrants.

A Laissez-Faire Approach to Immigration Limits

Statistically, is there a cap where even you would say we have to stop open immigration?

The market regulates that. If there are no more jobs available in the United States, if the economy is doing poorly, if the land prices are so high because so many immigrants here are buying up the real estate, then it doesn’t make sense to come to this country anymore, people won’t come anymore.

It’s like asking the question, is there a theoretical amount of steel that can be produced after which it’s bad for the economy? That theoretical point is determined by the market and determined by prices and determined by supply and demand. It cannot be determined by bureaucrats or politicians. There probably is a theoretical limit. Whatever that limit is, the government will not ever be able to identify it, will not ever be able to enforce it. It will be identified and enforced by the free economy, by capitalism, by supply and demand.

That happened a few years ago when we had a bit of an economic recession, and there weren’t so many jobs, immigration naturally just stopped. That sent out a signal and it was efficient for immigration to stop because of the absence of jobs. It’s that invisible hand of the market that operates — even cross border.

RELATED SHOWS:

What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns, May 26, 2019
Unprepared: Government Failure at the CDC/FDA, with Alex Tabarrok April 2020
Alex Nowrasteh on Misconceptions about Open Borders, June 5 2015
Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue, December 2, 2016
Immigrants — The Ultimate Entrepreneurs with Alex Nowrasteh, August 18, 2013
Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again, December 20, 2015
ICE in the Age of Trump with Mitch Jeserich, March 30, 2018
The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin, August 6, 2017
Let Them All In with Alex Nowrasteh, May 5, 2013
California Immigration Reform with Harry Reid, December 5, 2010
Immigration Reform Is Broken with Elise Foley, May 15, 2011