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What would an actual open borders regime look like? How would it affect those already living in the United States? And why is the case for open borders stronger than the case for restrictionism, or at least the prioritization of high-skill immigrants? Bryan Caplan explores these questions in his most recent book: a work of graphic non-fiction co-produced with illustrator Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a regular blogger at EconLog. He’s also the author of three previous books: The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Myth of the Rational Voter.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: Open borders. I think to some people, it sounds like an idea that you would bat around in a college dorm room. In the real world, it sounds fanciful.

This might not be exactly what you mean, but it’s the idea that national borders would be the same as the borders between places like Illinois and Indiana. Am I right, or are you thinking of it a little differently?

Caplan: That’s definitely one version of it. You could still have open borders where you have all of your TSA, but they just let anybody in whose passport isn’t on a watchlist for crime.

What I’m imagining is the extreme version, where there’s no TSA, no walls, maybe a turnstile or a guy with a clicker, so that we have a general sense of the number of people.

So, that would be fine too, but I think that the key idea of open borders is the idea that anyone can take a job anywhere. You’re free to live and work in any country you want. Of course, you still have to pay for your housing and find a job, but if you can arrange for those then you’re allowed to do it.

In terms of what I’d consider the conceptual border: The way I sometimes describe it is, “Unless you belong in jail, you can go where you want.” So murderers don’t have open borders, they’re stuck in jail. Similarly if you’re wanted for murder and you show up at a country, they say, “Well, look, you can’t come in. We’ll put you in jail if you want.” But other than that, that’s what I have in mind.

Would there be some sort of border security?

So I don’t really talk about that so much —

I think people are imagining chaos — terrorists coming in, just rolling across the border.

If you’re worried about that, you can still keep all of the current system of TSA, like I said. So one of my policies is that I always push radical ideas in my books, but I try to do one at a time. So I don’t try to sell everyone on every idea I have. But again, the heart of this proposal is that anyone can take a job anywhere.

And in the book you also make it clear that you don’t have to take the whole thing in its most extreme version.

Right — I’m not in a college dorm. The difference to me between 99 percent open and 100 percent open is just one percentage point. It’s not a big deal — what I really want to see is a very large move in this direction. But I do the extreme case just to say, “Look, this is an idea that actually makes a lot of sense, and I want to stand up for it.”

I can already hear one criticism coming from the listeners: What you’re saying is that America’s not really going to be a country anymore. You have to have borders to be a country, and you’re basically saying that there really are none. So what is the United States, then?

Right — and to me this is very silly. The US had hundreds of years of open borders and it was a country. The idea that just because the border’s open, you’re not a country anymore — unless you’re going to say that the US didn’t become a country until 1921 or something like that, then of course you can have open borders and be a country.

So this isn’t your conceptual first step towards a plan of no countries, one world government, some Star Trek-like reality where there’s no America anymore? Maybe there’s an Iowa, but no America.

Right, it didn’t work very well in Star Trek. No, so one of the main reasons to have open borders is because there are many countries that are very poorly run and people want to get out.

I have a whole other chapter on the possibility of a totalitarian world, and my view is that world government is the most likely route. So I’m not a fan of world government by any means.

I was listening to a debate on this very topic, and the person who took what you could call the open borders, or lightly-regulated borders position, was talking about a lot of economic studies. He was pointing to where we might get in terms of wages and economic growth — he was showing a lot of charts. And the person against open borders who wanted immigration restriction — the only number in his entire presentation was some survey about how many people would like to live in the United States.

And the picture he slowly painted for the audience was of a massive horde of people coming across the open borders, and basically ending America as we know it. Maybe we’d still call ourselves the United States, but we wouldn’t resemble it.

You’re going to have all of these people who don’t have American values, who have no interest in the Founding Fathers or the Constitution, and you’ve basically just ruined America. “Thanks a lot open borders people.” I have to tell you — the person who I felt was more effective in dealing with that audience was not the person with the charts.

Here’s the thing: If you moved a billion random people from other countries here today, then I think this argument makes a lot of sense. But this ignores the way that immigration actually happens.

As I said, the US had open borders for centuries. The US population today is about 100 times what it was when the country first started. A great deal of that is due to immigration, and yet the country remains recognizably American when you’re multiplying population 100 times. So why you couldn’t just triple it again and continue to retain the same Americanness is very hard to understand.

And again — how could you go and raise population 100-fold and yet remain American? The answer is that you don’t do it all at once, you do it gradually. So each wave gets, first of all, partly Americanized, but also they have kids who get fully Americanized. And when we look at how immigration works, it generally works in the “snowballing” fashion. It’s not that people don’t want to move — they definitely do. And if those numbers are correct, it’s just the question of, “Over what time period?” How soon would it occur?

So the best example we have of this in practice is Puerto Rico. In 1902, the US gets open borders with Puerto Rico, and at first there are only a few thousand Puerto Ricans that want to move. And you might say, “Hey, well they just don’t like the weather here. They don’t like it.” But the next decade, then it’s tens of thousands — then the decade after that, it’s a lot more. It falls off during the Depression, then it revives.

And the story is now that most people of Puerto Rican descent live in the US. The Puerto Ricans that are here are highly Americanized. So, first generation ones may still have some problems with English, but their kids are almost totally Americanized. And again, this is really what I’m talking about with open borders, and the reasonable forecast is that, yes, a lot of people come in the end.

And whenever we talk about the big benefits of open borders, it requires a lot of people to move. But it’s still important to remember the snowballing process whereby immigration comes. It starts soft and low, especially when you first open a border between two very different cultures, and then it keeps building. And each time you’re getting acculturation of the previous group.

Essentially, the people you would have thought of as part of your assimilation problem if they came altogether become part of your assimilation solution when it happens gradually because right now, who helps us to assimilate new arrivals? It is the descendants of Italian, German, Russian immigrants, and Jews, and Chinese.

Migrants from Haiti and Africa argue with federal police officers as they protest outside the Siglo XXI immigrant detention center. REUTERS/Jose Torres

There’s a lot of skepticism from people about those acculturation and assimilation issues. That it will not work as well as the past, because of the types of immigrants that are coming. Or that we have a society that doesn’t place as great a value on assimilation as we have in the past.

Right. What I’d say is that in the types of immigrant, we actually have a big advantage compared to the past.

So in the 1900s, when you get a Sicilian peasant coming to Ellis Island, he’s probably never heard English and never used electricity. All he knows is his donkey and his farm up in the mountains of Sicily. That guy arrives in Manhattan, and that’s serious culture shock. That was standard European immigration through most of this time.

Today, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone like that in Sicily, because Western and especially American culture has transformed the world. It has spread far and wide — knowledge of English is very high in countries that, 100 years ago, it would’ve been very unusual to speak English. Right now, you’ve got about 1.3 billion fluent speakers of English on Earth, and most of those are not actually in countries where English is the first language, but they picked it up.

So I’d say that, in many ways, our assimilation problem is actually easier because a lot of people are now pre-assimilated. And by “a lot,” I don’t mean, like, a million. I’m talking about a billion pre-assimilated people that don’t live in first-world countries who are ready not just in terms of language, but they’re also acculturated. They understand — through the internet, television, and movies — what life is like. So they’re much more ready to hit the ground running than they were in the past.

On this idea that assimilation just doesn’t work very well —

Or that we’re encouraging people not to assimilate. “You don’t want to lose your identity.” It goes to all of those criticisms of the “hyphenated Americans.”

Right. I think that even goes back to Teddy Roosevelt — the story’s been around for quite a long time.

I guess I’d say that the main thing is that I agree that public schools don’t try as hard to assimilate immigrant kids as hard as they used to. But I don’t think that was ever very important compared to the labor market, and shopping, and making friends, and just the ability to get along in society.

As opposed to them just sitting in some class being taught “American values and ideas.”

Yes — so I’ve done a lot of other research on political knowledge of the US population. And for as long as we have data, the knowledge of the American people about the US government and history has been near zero.

You can go all the way back to the 1930s — the idea that back in the good ol’ days, schools really taught everyone about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the Civil War, and that this was common knowledge that people no longer have?

Everyone knew who the Secretary of Labor was.

Right, as far as we can tell it was simply never true. But assimilation happened anyway. I have heard this story — “Well, they didn’t know the words, but they knew the music.” Alright, if you’re going to say that then I don’t know what evidence would ever convince you. But just in terms of the way that immigrant kids go and get acculturated — it’s not primarily by getting a lecture, which is what any educational psychologist will tell you.

So you’d be fine with a more enhanced assimilation process?

Yes, it’s generally what immigrant parents want. They generally want their kids to understand the new society that they’re in. So there have been immigrant parents who have said, “You can’t speak our language in the home because I want you to be ready in this society.”

So yeah, I just don’t think lectures are very effective for educating people or changing behavior. There’s a lot of work on this: Human beings learn primarily by doing, not by being lectured at.

Do you think it matters that, if you were coming from Europe, it used to be a big trip? You probably weren’t going back anytime soon. You had to take a ship across the Atlantic, and it was really quite a voyage.

Now, it’s getting on an airplane, landing at Kennedy, and if you want you can go back. So maybe these immigrants are less “all-in” on America than past immigrants.

That’s true — like I said, there are many ways in which assimilation is much easier than it used to be because the world is just more Americanized than it was 100 years ago. But yes, there are also some reasons why non-assimilation is easier. So, differences in communication and transportation for instance.

I have a friend whose wife is from Taiwan, and he says that every day she just “lives” in Taiwan: She’s talking in Taiwanese to friends back home.

But still, on balance, what we can say is that we have had data since early periods about immigrant language acquisition. It seems like there was never a time when first generation immigrants who came when they were adults became fluent commonly. It’s just really hard to become fluent in a new language when you’re thirty years old. So when you meet someone who’s a first generation immigrant who came as an adult, and they don’t speak fluent English, this doesn’t show some decline in our cultural capacity. That’s normal.

The thing to look at is the kids, and second generation immigrant kids, when we look at their language, they still have near-total fluency. So I would just say that rather than speculating, we can go measure this as much as we can. And by the measurable standards, we still have a very effective engine of assimilation, or in some ways more effective through the way that the American culture has gotten all over the world.

So in a real-world application of open borders, how big is the United States in 50 years? We’re at 320 million now.

In 50 years, I think the population will double. And it sounds like a lot, but the US has done this many times before. While people at the time were complaining, they weren’t complaining noticeably more than we are today with a much smaller flow.

Unless I’m mixing up my statistics, the share of the US population that is foreign-born is at a historically high level right now, though.

It’s almost at the peak, the last time that I checked the data.

So people say, “Hey, slow down. Look what’s happening to society. What we’re seeing is a reaction against that, and we should be having a pause, not an acceleration.”

What I would say is that you can go to the higher-immigration parts of the US, because of course the US doesn’t have equal shares in all places. Not only would I say that when you go to the high-immigrant places, it’s unclear what the problem is or to even articulate what the problem is supposed to be, but people who are there don’t see it as much of a problem.

New citizens at a naturalization ceremony at the New York Public Library in Manhattan. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

The people in the US who are, in the data, most worried about immigration are people who live in places where they hardly have any. So I’d say this is something where the fear is not based on firsthand experience of seeing that it’s not working — rather, it’s based upon ideology. The idea that, “It can’t work, it mustn’t work.”

And again, if you think it can’t work, go to the cities in the US where you have 40 to 50 percent foreign-born. What’s so bad about this? What is it about this that has to be stopped? And honestly, I just don’t see what people are talking about — moreover, the people living in those areas are not upset about it.

It’s the people who don’t live in those places who are more worried about what they’re picturing rather than what, in fact, happens.

How much of your interest in this is driven by wanting to help raise the standard of living of non-Americans and people from poorer countries?

I’d say probably about 60 percent of it is that — just saying, “Look, there are a whole lot of people who’d be much better off if only they could come here.” And then, I’d say 25 percent is that there’s also a lot of gains that are being missed out on by natives, because we don’t get to buy all of the things and innovations and ideas that immigrants would be making.

So, right now there are probably a lot of people stuck in villages in India who, if they could come here, they’d be going to MIT and Caltech, and who knows what they’d be contributing?

But I think that if people heard an American politician break it down like that – “I’m 60 percent concerned about poor people in other places, and I’m 40 percent concerned about something else” – they’d say, “Are you kidding me? You should be about 99 percent concerned about Americans. You have a special obligation to Americans, and that should be, by far, your main focus in policy.”

Right, and what I’m saying is that there are enormous gains, on balance, to Americans. The reason I say that I’m not putting as much weight on them is because Americans, right now, are doing very well.

Just the other day, I was thinking, “If you could live in any other time in history and on any other country on Earth, would you choose America today?” That’s a pretty good answer.

Right, I don’t want to live in America last month, let alone last week.

We both remember the 80s: People say, “There’s been stagnation since the 80s.” Like, are you out of your mind? You couldn’t drag me back kicking and screaming to the 80s. The standard of living was terrible back then.

Basically, it comes down to this: There’s a policy that greatly enriches the world, but there are a lot of people who gain from it who, right now, are living in abject misery. And then, there are people here who could be twice as rich, but since some of those people are doing quite well it’s not as dramatic a change.

Like, I’ve gone from being a starving student in America to being a professor, and it’s great, but I wasn’t miserable when I was a student. And yet, when you’re talking about letting people get out of Haiti to come to Florida to shine shoes, that really is a transformative change to their lives.

I think that it is terrible that there are laws saying that they can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. All they want to do is come here and get a job, and have a better life, which I think would be a very relatable aim. When there’s someone who has their own plan for fixing their own life, it is the kind of thing where I’m baffled that someone wants to get in the way of it.

When I mentioned that debate, the person who was for open borders spent a lot of time talking about job and wage data, and the impact of immigration – much less a lot of immigration – on the lower end of the income scales.

What do you feel like you know for sure, or are pretty confident about, regarding the impact of lots of immigrants competing for these jobs? They’re not all going to be at MIT or starting tech firms right away. On the lower end, how does it affect native workers?

So just to back up: The thing we’re most confident about is that there would be a very large increase in total production from more immigration. Right now there’s a lot of human talent that’s stuck in poor countries with poor productivity, and you can move those people to rich countries. Almost overnight, their productivity greatly increases.

Who cares about their productivity? Well, the answer is that anyone who consumes what they make should care about their productivity, because we’re their customers. So once someone moves from a poor country to a rich country, they aren’t just making themselves better off — of course they’re doing that — they’re also increasing what they produce. And when you increase what you produce, then you are bettering all the consumers of your products.

Now, when you focus specifically on low-skilled workers, here’s the key thing to keep in mind: There’s a big difference between a low-skilled Haitian and a low-skilled American. A low-skilled American is probably quite high-skilled compared to a low-skilled Haitian.

A low-skilled Haitian might really only be ready to do very menial jobs, they might have very poor literacy, that kind of thing. So these are jobs where Americans would not be directly competing with them. Often, actually, a likely scenario is that you’ll have relatively low-skilled Americans who’ll be supervising the more low-skilled foreigners who are coming and taking over.

You’ll have Americans that are running the cleanup service in a hotel, for example. Or, in an American restaurant, you’ll have Americans who are relatively low-skilled working in front and dealing with customers and then lower-skilled migrants who don’t speak English will be working in the back of the restaurant.

And again, people normally want to think about competition between these two groups, but it’s always important to remember that very often other peoples’ labor is complementary to yours. Where, because they’re around, they actually make your life better rather than worse. And obviously, if you’re going to be managing them you want more people to manage rather than fewer.

But the restrictionists are extraordinarily confident that what you’re saying is wrong. That we’ve already seen the sorts of immigrant flows – much less the scenario you’re outlining – that absolutely drive down wages and push less-skilled Americans out of employment.

They’re totally confident — what are they missing?

I’ll just say — usually people who are really confident of this just don’t read empirical research at all.

Or they read only some research that agrees with them.

Yes, and of course you could accuse me of doing the same thing. I’ll just say — if you don’t know me then I don’t know why you’d trust me, but you can check the references.

I made a very strenuous effort to read very broadly, I don’t just read people who agree with me. I try to read everyone that I can find that writes about a topic, and I don’t just read economists. I try to read what sociologists and political scientists have to say. I try to read pundits and popular writers. I really do have a great phobia of writing when I have the feeling that there’s something out there that I should’ve read that I haven’t.

In terms of the empirical work, there’s a very standard view among almost everyone who does this that, at most, the effect of immigration on US wages is very slight. So there’s basically a debate between people who say, “We can’t find any,” those that say it’s slight, and then another side that says, “Actually, even for low-skilled workers we’re seeing gains. Because the immigrants don’t just compete with you, they also sell you stuff.” That’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

People do tend to focus so much on the side of, “What does this do to me as a worker,” rather than “What does this do to me as a consumer?” But if you want to understand how it effects your life, you want to consider both things at once.

We’ve heard a lot about the “China trade shock,” and the effect of opening up China to the world economy, and that it’s really affected some particular regions. I think some people hearing this are saying, “Now this is going to be the immigration shock. There’s going to be another shock with this onslaught of human beings, and we just can’t take the risk.”

Of course, some people think the onslaught has already happened, and they want to blame whatever problems they see in the world on that.

Stepping back, what I would say is this: All progress hurts somebody. This is just fact. So, the automobile went and hurt people involved in the horse industry, and Uber is hurting people in the taxi industry, and driverless cars are going to hurt all of the people who are working now as drivers.

There are two reactions to this. One is you can say, “Aha, we should stop progress,” and I just think that’s insane. And the other reaction is, “Hm, I guess that’s right. All progress does involve some people that are losing out.” And then the question is — who are they? How much are they losing? How long do they lose for? And then, of course, you can say, “Is there anything we can do to make this easier for them that doesn’t involve stopping progress?”

I have a chapter on that question in the book, it’s the chapter on “keyhole solutions.” It comes down to this: If you’re really worried about the effect of immigration on low-skilled Americans — or of course, the effect of driverless cars on low-skilled Americans — the sensible thing is not to try to hold back these great gains in productivity. The sensible thing is to say, “Alright, so what can we do to make it up to you? What’s it going to take?”

In the book I talk about things like — “How about we have an admission fee for low-skilled immigrants? Or we have surtaxes for them, and we use that money to compensate the Americans that you think are losing out?” I don’t say this because I favor it, but I’m totally ready to make a deal, right? And that’s a lot of what I’ve gotten out of economics — “What’s it going to take to get you to sign this? Okay, here are some specific concerns — let’s suppose you’re right: What do I have to do to make you feel like I’ve handled your concerns?”

Would one concession be, let’s just focus on people who are the smartest of the smart? High-talent people from countries with more advanced economies.

Let’s just focus on them, because we’re bringing in all of these other folks, robots are all going to put them out of a job. It seems like a terrible time with advances in AI and robotics to be bringing in anyone who wants to come. You’re going to create a permanent underclass.

So letting in more high-skilled immigrants sounds like a fantastic idea to me. And I would say this is one area where almost everyone wants that among researchers. Almost everyone says, “Sure, high-skilled are great.”

So what’s the problem with keeping out the low-skilled ones? I say it’s that low-skilled workers are also valuable, right? Like if a janitor suddenly drops dead, do you say, “Oh, good!” I don’t. Not just as a humanitarian, but because that guy contributed to society. That guy was doing useful things.

But robots can do that job.

Right, yeah, the robots are going to do this job.

You’re bringing in a bunch of people who are going to be replaced by robots the next day, and then what are you going to do with them? Send them back? I know that some certainly would want to do that.

Here’s what I have to say about robots: I wish all of this were true, but there’s no sign of this in the data. Really, the golden age of automation seemed to be from the 20s to the 70s, and since then, things have slowed down. And really, what we’ve got now is a lot of science fiction that is parading as fact, and it’s just quite silly.

We’ve got Andrew Yang trying to get a Universal Basic Income to solve all the unemployment we’re going to have at a time when unemployment is at a 50-year low. It’s like, why don’t we just wait and see what happens to unemployment before we go spending trillions of dollars every year to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?

What I would say is that there’s a long history of automation. Naïve people think it’s going to put people out of work permanently and impoverish workers. They’ve been wrong 100 percent of the time. They can always find some worker who has suffered, but the idea that it’s going to cause permanent high unemployment or make the poor poorer is just wrong completely, every time.

And what’s going on? Two things: The automation increases production and people consume that stuff, and the other thing going on is that when you automate one thing, people switch over to something else.

Which, I have to say, when you started getting tractors in agriculture, if you had tried telling people, “Don’t worry about it! You’re going to find something else to do,” almost any hard-headed person would’ve said, “That sounds great, professor — so what is the thing we’re going to do? Other than agriculture, the industry that has absorbed 99 percent of human labor for the last 10,000 years? What’s it going to be?”

Probably, you would’ve been stumped by this and said, “Uh, well, there could be, I don’t know, more factories?” And they’d be like, “How many shirts can one man wear? I already have two — why would I need more, Mr. Professor?” And yet, it is the person who’s saying, “We’ll find something else to do” who was the wise person.

The people saying, “There’s no way we can adapt to this, and you’re just going to make human beings obsolete,” was truly a naïve person, although I’d understand why you’d think that argument — that 99 percent of all people who have ever lived have been in this industry, how can we get rid of it and have things be fine — but not only were things fine, they’re awesome compared to the way they were in 1850, come on!

The prospect of having twice as many Americans on the Earth — I love it. I love the idea, I think Americans are great, I think we make the world better, I’d like there to be more of us.

There was a Washington Post column earlier this year with the title, “Why do we need more people in this country, anyway?” I quote: “For the extra traffic congestion? More crowded classrooms? Longer emergency room and TSA lines? Higher greenhouse gas emissions? We know more immigration benefits big business.”

Syrian migrants traveling through Bosnia and Herzegovina. REUTERS/Marko Djurica

So you’re maybe unintentionally helping your pals in big business, and maybe you like longer TSA lines. Or do we have enough people, possibly too many already?

This is another one of those questions where, in theory, it could be true. So, maybe the main thing that happens when you let in more people is that it just messes more things up for the people already here, and it’d be better if they weren’t here.

“I’ll never get home after work because of the congestion.”

Right. But on the other hand, maybe more people actually makes life better in some ways.

Now, how would we ever test these two stories against each other? I say the best way to test this is to go to places in the US with really high population density, where they have two things: They have a bunch of problems caused by high population density. They also have a bunch of good things caused by high population density. Then, we can go and see whether it’s expensive to go and live in those places or if it’s cheap. If it’s expensive, it shows that people like the package of good things caused by population and bad things by population more than they like the package of being in places where you don’t have the good or the bad.

Alright, so what do we see in the world? Go to a place like New York — they do have bad congestion. They’ve got crowding and other things, but do you know what? Prices are really high in New York, and the reason is that New York has a bunch of awesome things that are also caused by the population.

They’ve got all kinds of jobs that wouldn’t be there, they’ve got all kinds of entertainment options that wouldn’t be there without the high population. They’ve got exciting people to meet, they’ve got restaurants, they’ve got different ways to spend their money.

And on the other hand, you could go and move to Hays, Kansas, a nice little town I stopped at on my honeymoon, and what they’ve got is a barbed wire museum and a Walmart. If you go there, you can get rid of all the problems of high population, but you also throw away all the good things that come with high population, and you know what? It’s dirt-cheap to live in Hays, Kansas.

So what I’d say is that actions speak louder than words: The fact that people are willing to pay so much money to live in places with high population density shows that, actually, population is good. And it would be better for us, overall, if we had a higher population — and people actually do like it, although they do complain.

And again, this isn’t just, “If you don’t like it, get out.” It’s saying, “Look, if you live in Manhattan and you own property there, and you don’t like it, you can just sell and take that bag of money and go live without working for the rest of your life in Hays, Kansas if that’s what you’re inclined to do.” And the fact that people don’t do that, to me, really shows that population is something where, even if people complain about it, they actually like what it does for them.

“Hell is other people,” Bryan.

[laughs] Hell is listening to people talking about other people being Hell. Like, Hell is listening to other people complaining when they’ve got a perfectly good way to solve their own problem, but they don’t do it.

I want to read one other thing for you — it’s maybe the most interesting criticism of your idea — it’s an argument that I think is originally from the economist Adam Ozimek a couple of years ago:

“The big, fundamental meta-question to me is this. Why is the US richer than countries that most immigrants are coming from? Well, it’s a combination of different levels of physical capital, human capital, technology, social capital, and institutions. But the last two are extremely vague — and our knowledge of how institutions and social capital emerge and evolve is not great. A decent amount of immigration only changes these things slowly, but open borders could change them very quickly. Would these changes be positive or negative? We don’t know. But given that the US is already very rich compared to the rest of the world, the risks are to the downside.”

It seems to me that this is not a riskless proposition, and we’re already doing pretty great. This is a common concern — you’re taking people from other countries who are not raised here as Americans.

They may not have the same beliefs, patterns of life, whatever that thing is that makes America great. They’re coming from a place that doesn’t have it, and you’re bringing all of them over here, and they may change whatever that secret sauce is.

In my book, I have a section where people ask me, “What’s the best argument against your view?” And I say it’s that argument you just read.

So there’s a precautionary principle — things here are fine. Any big change we should be worried about, so let’s just not do it. A few things about that: One thing is that I think we have more knowledge than Adam was indicating. So, we can actually do public opinion work on the foreign-born and see how different they are in terms of their political views. There are some differences, but they’re actually quite modest. So there’s that.

Does that go for all of them, or are the people who are poorer different?

Yes, so for the average immigrant, the differences are quite slight. When you look at low-skilled foreigners in the US, they are more different. But I also say that when we look at voter participation, they’re quite low. So the people who are the most worrisome don’t participate very much.

And then there’s also work on assimilation which finds that we have high assimilation. So in the book I talk about, “Go talk to first generation immigrants who grew up in another country, and they often have some very strange political views.” Like, talk to an elderly Italian grandma and she’ll talk about how great Mussolini was or something like that.

But you go and talk to their kids or their grandkids, and the opinions of the grandma back from Sicily are just an embarrassment to them. There is this high level of assimilation. Again, my wife is an immigrant from Communist Romania. I see no lingering sympathy for Communism, there. Of course, most people who get out have some grudge against the Communist regime, but the elderly people often still have some views they picked up from the Communist regime. But at the same time, they just aren’t very political.

They’re mostly concerned with just making their way in a new society — they’re not very interested in getting involved in politics. Now, the question of why we should take this gamble —

Well, you said that this gamble would mostly help people who are currently here.

Yes, there’s two things there: One is that not changing is also a gamble.

I know quite a few smart people who are worried that AI is going to not only put us out of work, but is going to nuke us. So the AI takes over the computers, they become self-aware like the Terminator movies. This is one where it’s like, “Couldn’t we just totally prevent this problem by getting rid of computers?” Like, I guess so, but there are a lot of bad things that could happen to us if we don’t have computers, too, and we shouldn’t just be thinking about nightmare scenarios that are really pretty fanciful. We should be thinking about the other kinds of scenarios that you might be losing out on.

This is one that, again, sounds like science fiction, but I don’t think I’s so crazy: What if there’s a guy right now in India who, if he comes here, will become a medical researcher and will give us 10 extra years of life? And if he doesn’t he will die unknown in India. That seems like an extremely great risk to me. “Wait a second, I could’ve had ten more years, and my kids could’ve had ten more years? Ten more years — maybe in those ten years, there could be another guy who could extend it another ten years.”

An Afghan immigrant, trying to find a ferry to leave the Greek town of Patras. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

There’s a lot of talent out there, and maybe some people think there isn’t. And putting them in a place where that talent can be cultivated is something that can happen in the United States, and maybe it can’t happen in the place they came from, and we all lose out on that.

There is an idea of, “Well, we just let in all of their elites and that’s all of the talent.” But especially in countries that are just much more backwards and much more unfair than ours, there are more people who are really talented who just don’t get the chance to rise very much.

And if they were here, they probably would be picked out, and would be getting scholarships to top schools and they could really contribute. Basically, what I say is that stasis is also a choice, and it’s also a risky choice.

Some people will point to the 1960s changes in immigration laws — if we hadn’t changed those laws, what would America look like today?

Great question — what’s funny to me is that the 60s are probably the decade that cultural conservatives hate the most. It’s also when the foreign-born share of the US reached, I think, an historic low. So, the idea that, “If we could just get rid of the foreigners, then we could all get along and we could have a nice, orderly, border-strong society,” I would say that’s so strongly contradicted, I guess you could say that it’s a one-off and it doesn’t really count, but that’s it.

It would indeed be a more homogeneous society, there would be far fewer people that actually would speak foreign languages, if you went to top schools you would see far fewer foreign-born students. But at the same time, we would’ve lost a lot of innovation.

So much of what’s happened in Silicon Valley and places like that comes from the fact that we allowed immigrants, so perhaps the US doesn’t end up being the center of global technology and getting all the things that come from that.

And then there are just many things about the fabric of life: What do we eat without immigrants? Well, I remember what people ate back in the 1980s. Back in the 1980s, we had American restaurants, which, even at the time, didn’t seem all that great to me. You got Denny’s, places like that, you had McDonald’s, and then we did have Italian food back then. There was some Italian left over from the Italian immigration, and I guess there was some Chinese food, and that was basically what we had to eat, right? And now when I go back to my hometown in Northridge, California, we truly have 50, 60 different kinds of cuisine available.

By the way, my dad is probably the angriest critic of immigration that I know, and yet, whenever he gets off the plane in Virginia he just says, “Hey, can we go to that great Peruvian chicken place?” Which I’d say, for him, is almost the only good thing to ever come out of Latin America, but even he really appreciates that.

And again, just in terms of quality of life, of what your money buys for you, right? So you say, “Well, can’t we just import the stuff? Why do we need the people?” Well, remember, 80 percent of the US economy is services. So this means things like, you have to go do your own gardening, your own cooking, you can’t afford to have a nanny for your kids so you have more skilled American women staying home with their kids instead of pursuing their careers.

So it’s not a disaster, but I’d say that you might think of it in terms of us potentially being noticeably much closer to Japan in terms of what life is like. Japan is not Hell, by any means — it’s one of the nicest places to live in all of human history, but they’re missing out. There’s so much more that they could have been.

I know this is an argument that policy books rarely make. Usually what you want to say is, “Everything’s a total disaster, the world’s going to Hell!” That’s not my view, and that’s not a true view, so I’m not going to say that. What I want to say is that we could’ve been so much more.

There are opportunities that we just passed up because we weren’t willing to calm down and say, “Hm, maybe.” And yes, since you mentioned what happens to people in other countries — I think it is terrible that so many people from other countries are stuck in Haiti when they could be living here. And it’s just like, “Why not?” Every immigrant that I know, especially the ones from poor countries, are here living good lives.

Why does a human being want to veto this, or why would you want to say, “That was a mistake — my friend is having a good life here”?

I’ll make this my final question: It seems like you’re facing a headwind on this issue, not a tailwind. Do you see that changing any time soon, or are you just putting the idea out there in the hope that, in time, we’ll see the wisdom of it?

So if you look at my books, I always choose topics with headwinds. Because other people have already written 50 books on the topics with tailwinds.

For me, it’s just not very intellectually interesting to work on a topic where there’s a lot of smart people who’ve worked on it before. Because then, they figured out the answers, and what do I have left to do? I like to work on topics that smart people have not done much on, where there’s just a lot of low-hanging fruit, a lot of new things to say, and where I can bring it together.

I like these orphaned ideas — ideas that I think are actually great, but no one or hardly anyone loves them, and I say “You’re my idea. I’m going to adopt you and raise you, and you’re going to grow up tall and proud and strong.”

So, in terms of how much things are going to change — here’s what I’d say: If you go look at US public opinion on immigration, for almost all of the recorded history probably going back to the 1960s, fewer than 10 percent of Americans said we should have more immigration. This was true for decades.

And then, starting about 15, 20 years ago, it started rising. And now, actually, it’s at about 30 percent of Americans saying that we should have more immigration. Now, you can still say, “Yeah, 70 percent say we shouldn’t,” but this is a tripling. This is a view that has gone from having almost no one who thinks it, to one that is actually a common view.

In terms of public opinion patterns, it does look a lot like public opinion on gay marriage and marijuana legalization. All three of these issues are ones where the public was strongly opposed for many decades. It’s not true that marijuana legalization became gradually more popular — it was very flat. Why is this? All of these potheads are growing up, but now they don’t want pot anymore? That looks like what was true. And then, suddenly around 2000, that changes. And I don’t understand why, but it did. And it’s the same thing for gay marriage.

Right now the public opinion for immigration — not for open borders which is very remote, but just for more — is a notable view. There is a serious question about how much of the support for more immigration is just thinly-veiled hostility to Trump.

“He’s for it, so I’m against it — and he’s against it, so I’m for it.”

Right, how much of that is there? I think some of it is, but I hope that’s wrong. You know, prove me wrong, people! I’d really like this to see this as an earnest change of heart.

My best guess is that you’re not going to get a noticeable change in the law until you’ve got one party that has strong control of all three branches, and even then it’s not that likely. I was worried during the first two years of Trump’s administration — you’ve got the presidency, you’ve got all of Congress, what are the odds that they go and pass a fundamental change in US immigration legislation? I was giving it a 20-25 percent chance, and they dropped the ball on that. And you can say, whether you liked them or not, that they failed.

My view is that you might call this ADHD. I will say — there are two kinds of people in the world. One is like me, and once I get an idea in my head, I’m like a pitbull and I just don’t stop. I just sit there, like “What can I do?” And then there are other people who hear something and say, “That’s great,” then they hear something else and they wander off. Trump looks to me like the second kind of guy.

If I was against immigration, I would be super disappointed with him because he said a lot. And of course, he’s changed a bunch of immigration policy through executive orders, but all of those policies can and probably will be changed once the next person gets into office. He hasn’t done anything lasting, so I think that the most likely scenario is of course that the status quo persists.

But, long run, I think that public opinion will keep moving in this direction, especially because it really does look like one of the main things that makes people friendlier to immigration is just being in an area with immigrants. This tends to feed on itself. It’s not the kind of thing where “To know them is to hate them,” it’s just not true.

Bryan, thanks for coming on the podcast.

This has been awesome — always a pleasure, Jim. Thanks a lot.