[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 217th episode of the Atlas Society. Ask. My name is Lawrence Olivo, the senior project manager here at the Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ein Rand in creative ways, like through animated videos and graphic novels. This week, our CEO, Jennifer Grossman has it off. She won't be here today, but I am excited to have join me, Atlas Society senior scholar and professor of political economy at Duke University, Richard Salzman, along with Atlas Society senior fellow Robert Traczynski. Now, for those of you watching this on Instagram x, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, you can use the comments section to type in your questions. And we'll try to get to as many of them as we can. Now, as you can tell from the title of this video, Richard and Rob will be discussing immigration today, covering many topics, including open borders versus closed borders versus managed borders, along with asking questions related to immigration and our current welfare state. So without further ado, let me pass things over to rob.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us and thanks, everyone, for coming. So the reason I want to talk about, I kind of propose this topic because we're in the election season and candidates are starting to make promises and they're starting to make bad promises, right? So we can hash out, I'm sure, at length with, with Richard. And I think we will, you, he and I will be 100. We don't agree on everything about the election, but we'll agree 100% on Kamala Harris proposing price gouging laws, which are basically price controls. And on some of the, I think there's something about taxing unappreciated, unrealized gain, capital gains. These are really bad economic ideas. But I also wanted to talk because you can't let anybody off the hook. Want to talk about what I think is the worst economic and political and many other ways the worst idea, probably on the republican side, which is this idea of mass deportation, I think the terrorists are a bad idea, but mass deportation is one that I think people are underappreciating. And this is the idea that not only we're going to halt immigration, we're going to crack down on immigration, we're actually going to go after the up to 20 million people who are here already who have immigrated illegally, and we're going to round them up, we're going to send them out. And 20 million may not happen. But in an interview, JD Vance was asked, well, can you really deport 20 million people? Says, well, how about 1 million? We'll start with that. So I think that itself also is a bad idea. And now I want to talk, I think Richard can talk a lot about the economics of immigration and why we need immigrants. And I think philosophically, the issue that I see is that it depends on if you view people as a burden or people as an asset. If you see people as productive individuals who add something to the economy and add something to a society versus them being purely a drain. And you hear this a lot on the republican side, that, oh, immigrants are all here. They just want to be on welfare.
They're criminals.
They don't want to work. They just want to be on welfare. Although there's always a curious contradiction there. Somebody calls this Schrodinger's immigrant. They're sort of, they are and they aren't, which is, on the one hand, they're going to take all their jobs. On the other hand, they don't want to work. They want to go on welfare. Now, what actually happens is immigrants come here and they do work. They often are very entrepreneurial. They start new businesses at a very high rate. They do not commit crimes. For the statistics I've seen, they do not commit crimes at a higher rate.
So this idea that they're criminals, they don't go on welfare at a higher rate. They actually, they work. They create things. They produce. They bring new cuisines.
So this anti immigrant attitude is completely misplaced. But what I want to talk about to begin with, because im the politics guy, I want to talk about more the political aspect of it, which is the idea of mass deportation, I think has a particularly grim aspect to it. And this idea that, okay, were going to find all the people who are already here and get rid of them. Now, on the economic level, thats a bad idea because we have an actual shortage of workers in the economy, and youre going to get rid of 20 million of them. That's not going to create new jobs for everybody who's left. That's going to actually cause a sort of economic decline, not kind of a catastrophe. It would cause a new recession, possibly a severe one. But then there's the political aspect of how do you go about getting rid of all these people who are here in America, who are working, who have lived here for decades, who have established themselves?
How do you go and root them all out and then deport them? The scale of this sort of police state kind of tactics that would be required for that is the thing that I find most concerning about this. So, for example, well, to give an example of the problems you got to come up with, I saw an interesting article a few months ago about a guy in Florida who has lived in America his whole life. He just finished working for 40 years, paying his taxes. He goes to apply for a Social Security check and they say, well, we can't give you Social Security. We have no record jurist citizen. And he goes on and he finds out that in fact he is not, he came here illegally and he never became naturalized. He is not a us citizen. He came here illegally as an infant basically. And so he's not a us citizen. Well, the kicker in that story is they have the photo of the guy and behind him is a Trump flag, right? So here's a guy saying, oh, we got to get rid of those illegal immigrants those people are dragging down the country and it turns out he's one of them. So there's going to be a lot of cases like that of people who in many cases did not even know they were illegal or people who don't have the documentation.
And if you were asked to pull out, bring the paper showing that you're a us citizen. Now, some of us could do that, that Tracinski had been here a couple of generations, that I'd have a presumptive case, but it's going to create a lot of problems and a lot of potential injustices. And then also the thing to talk about with the enforcement is this idea that because the police don't exist to do it, the law enforcement infrastructure does not exist to do an enforcement effort this large. So there was talk, I don't know if this is trumpet directly, but some of the people around him that will send in the National Guard. And if the New York National Guard won't go in and root people out in New York, we're going to send the Missouri National Guard or the Florida National Guard, we're going to send them in to New York to go to order door and round these people up. Well, I think you can see there is really no way to do that.
Excuse me, I have a bit of a cough. No way to do that. That doesn't result in a constitutional crisis and all sorts of political problems. So I think from the political perspective, this is really asking for years of political crisis, for even the attempt to do this, years of court cases, years of potential injustices to people and all that, turning everything over for something that is actually going to be bad for the country.
So I want maybe to invite Richard to this point to comment on that part, but also comment on, I'm going to defer to you on the economics of it because I know you know these issues very well.
[00:07:11] Speaker C: Well, I do want to touch on, I think we promised them ethics, economics and politics. That's a lot, the mouthful, but, and I think actually all three are in your commentary, Rob, which is great. And I want to do that, too. But I have broader points to make and principles to name. But I, for the purpose of the flow of the conversation, I will address this right away. The deportation.
Yes. On the surface, it looks very grim and very police state and very rough and very show us your papers. Although the part that says show us your papers, I mean, that sounds nazi, but every time somebody asks for a license to buy beer or vote or anything like that, you're effectively asking, what you're asking for is, who are you and are you a citizen? And those are related, I think, closely to whether you can vote or not, whether you can do a whole bunch of legal things, including getting driver's license in the country. I think, though, deportation, to not drop the context here, it's a problem, or call it a policy response to a whole bunch of other problems, namely the borders aren't being managed. And so millions of people are coming in. And because the borders are not being managed properly, we don't know who these people are. And the idea of deporting, I think, is more like the flip side of amnesty. Rob, you remember in the mid eighties, I think it was called Simpson Mazzoli Reagan's view was, well, we can take in immigration, but we need to fix the immigration system. Well, grant them amnesty. So he was not so harsh as to come up with deportation, as you know, although that was a small part of the program. But the idea was grant these people amnesty, I forget how many millions it was, and then fix the immigration system, actually secure the board, put money into ins and other things, and Congress basically reneged on the deal. They didn't do it. So we've had subsequent 40 years of this kind of thing, and it does ebb and flow and everything. But I can't say that I'm against deportation. But it's like saying, like, what do you do after the government wrecks the economy? Should it bail out the banks or not? Well, the bigger problem is it already wrecked the economy, and nobody wants to bail out the banks or do anything nasty or reckless. But we have to remember the context that the fundamental thing for me is neither closed borders, which is the Trump type approach, or completely open borders, which is the Democrats approach. I've often used the phrase the Ellis island model, which is managed borders. It kind of basically says anyone can come in. Anyone really can come in, with three exceptions.
They can't be contagious disease.
They can't be like, hardened criminals. I don't mean just jaywalking. And then the other one normally is either terrorists or if you've identified foreign countries that are enemies of the United States, those people can come in. Now, except for those three exceptions, that does allow a lot of people in. And I think during the 1892 to 1954 period, Ellis island brought in something like 12 million. But in the data I looked at, I never saw more than ten or 15% of the us population at the peak that immigration represented. So what I'm saying is, especially under Obama and then especially under Biden, they let in so many people undocumented. And I think they should have been documented through processing centers. They deliberately do not do that. I'm not sure why they deliberately don't do it. But there are people who are legally processed. We know who they are. We know whether they fall into those three categories. We try to make sure they don't. And I just think the deportation problem, just honing in on that and on the kind of grim aspects to it, it drops the context of how we got to the point where we don't know who these people are. And actually, I actually agree with most of the kind of insights and statistics you named. I'm not one of these people who think immigrants are necessarily a drain on the country or they're above average criminals or welfare lazy people or anything like that. But the problem is these numbers are murkier and murkier because, precisely, we don't know who they are. So I'm not even sure we can trust the immigration numbers anymore because so many of them are undocumented.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: Yeah. How do you count something that's undocumented? By its nature, it's not made it, but not counted.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: When it starts becoming 5 million, 6 million, 7 million, I worry that the ones that are undocumented are precisely the ones that might fall into those negative categories that I mentioned. So I'll stop there. But that's just kind of what I.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Wanted to do, is I wanted to agree with you in part that, yes, I think there has been a failure to let in documented immigrants. But I have a different, somewhat different diagnosis as to the cause, which is that I think we've not allowed enough people in to come legally. Extremely difficult to come. The old Reagan.
I think this was Reagan. I'm trying to remember. You probably would. You might let me know if this rings a bell. But he said something like, we have high walls and with wide doors.
[00:12:30] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: And the idea is we're going to let in a lot of immigrants. But I think our system, I think illegal immigration is the system we voted for over the years. And it's because what we've done is there's this tremendous, this economic incentive and political incentive. I mean, a lot of people coming here. So one of the things that's changed in recent years is that the people coming across the border from Mexico are not, it's not primarily Mexicans anymore. It's a lot of people coming from farther south. They're coming from Honduras and they're coming from very turbulent and chaotic places in Central America. You have people coming from China because we've really clamped on, on immigration from China, but people want to get out as it becomes somewhat more authoritarian recently, people coming from China, they're going across the Darien gap between, they can come to South America, they cross the Darien gap into Panama, and they make their way up to the southern border. And I think that comes from the fact that we have, it's kind of like any system where the government says, look, there are huge incentives to do this, but we're going to pass a law saying you can't. Well, if you don't address the incentives, you can't pass the law saying the incentives are going to go away. And oftentimes you then end up passing a law that you can't really enforce. And I think that's what we have is we have, I like the idea of manage borders. If it were the Ellis island model, which is, yes, everybody can come in, but you will be processed, you will be screened. And I think we could realistically enforce that if it weren't for the, because right now anybody who, with malicious intent who's trying to cross the border and be screened out, they can hide among millions of just ordinary people who are coming across because they're poor and desperate and, and afraid of being killed by the junta, wherever they came from, that sort of thing. So, yeah, I think that's why I say it's not just a democratic failure, it's a bipartisan failure, and it's because of this issue we have not been able to agree as a country of do we want immigration or not?
[00:14:25] Speaker C: Well, I don't, I'm not sure if you go back and look at, I agree that it used to not be a bipartisan, partisan thing, but I think it is now if you go back and look at quotes from Clinton, Bill Clinton, earlier than that, the old Democrat party before they became totally crazy. But even Obama, Obama had many deportations, but the numbers were so low, they didn't make the radar screen. But they've changed enormously party wise. But instead of getting into the point now, it's a total. Before, they used to be very close together, the two parties on this, and they kind of had this view that immigration is good. Let's have these exceptions for nasty immigrant and nasty people. But otherwise, okay, there's going to be waves. Remember Cuba? They're going to be waves that occur. We have to figure out how to adjust. Maybe. Then there's the m one. What is it called? The m one? B visas for engineers in Silicon Valley.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: H one b.
[00:15:21] Speaker C: That's a whole different. Yeah, that's a whole different discussion. But what I've noticed in the last 15, maybe ten or 15 years or so is the parties went this way. I'm moving my fingers apart here, and they've given us a false alternative, and they're feeding off of each other in a way that I know you and I hate. So, like, on the one hand, someone will say, open borders. We have no idea who's coming in. They could be blowing up buildings. And we have, and we can't even document, since they're undocumented, we can't any more reliably document whether they do have low crime rates, whether they do actually go to work, whether they do pay taxes, you know, whether they do add to the culture and all those kind of things. It becomes harder and harder to measure. But then on the other hand, the reaction to this is that seems so outrageous, and I think it is outrageous, and it's actually inhumane, what you see going on on the border, the capturing of kids and stuff like that, the breaking up of families. The other side becomes all, you know, East Berlin on us. They go all East Berlin on us. They build a wall.
I'm generally against walls, but I want processing. And that does mean there has to be rob, you would agree there has to be a tangible border, whether it has to be these 20 foot walls. I'm not saying that, but I'm more intrigued by what do you think is the reason? I'm not sure I really have found one. Why isn't there a bipartisan support for putting a lot of money into. I don't even know what they call it anymore. Is it ins? They've changed the name so many times. Here to me, is a legitimate government function, an actual legitimate government function, like integrity of the borders. It's a central definition of any nation state. And they're violating. And they're not doing it. They're doing every other goddamn thing, like central banking and taxing and all these other things, public school. And they won't do this thing well, okay? And the question is, why won't they do? Why both parties won't get together and say, as you say, call it not the Ellis island model, but the Reagan model walls. Not walls tangibly, but walls in the sense of symbolically, Orlando. Figuratively or tangibly, we're going to process everyone, and it could be millions of people. We don't have a problem with that. But you do have to put resources into it. You have to build up border patrol. You do have to build up the gateways, literally the processing centers. That's what I mean by Ellis island. To me, on the southern border, there should be like 25 of those. 25, like, huge processing centers. And I'm not sure they have. I don't know. I'm not sure what they have down there, but they're clearly being overrun. And, Rob, if you and I were in Central America and we were poor, Lisa said this to me the other day. She said, wouldn't you want to come in illegally? I said, damn right I would try to get up here and come in. Now, on the other hand, I'm like a guy who would want to work, raise a family, break no laws. But I'm not sure. Everybody's like that. But I. But that is another way of looking at it. If we were in that position and the US had the same porous borders and it was dangerous and it was all these things, and you run the risk of being illegal, would you do it anyway? Yeah, if you wanted freedom and opportunity. That's a hard argument.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:29] Speaker C: Safety.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: I mean, safety isn't safe. You got to get killed. Well, so this is kind of a tangent, but I just came across an interesting argument somebody made to me about how, it's a paper I read talking about how brain drains are actually good for the countries that have brain drains. And it was a perspective I hadn't heard before, but they basically said, first of all, your talented people are able to go off and do well and make money and send it back home. And furthermore, there's more incentive for people to become doctors and lawyers and have. Acquire all these skills, because if you have the ability. Oh, if I acquired this skill, I can go to America. That gives people more incentive. And they don't all leave. Some of them stay. Right. So you actually end up with more doctors and lawyers. And then the last thing is, uh, there's evidence that countries that have large amounts of immigration to free countries, those countries end up having a better record of freedom. And that was kind of counterintuitive to me because I thought, well, maybe all the most pro freedom loving people would leave. But what actually happens is people end up with this connection. They know what things are like in America. They have this connection to America and they begin to import some of those ideas back. So it's like a, I think it is a giant win win. You know, it's a win for the country that loses people. It's a win for us for gaining, you know, enterprising people. I mean, like, Haitians are among one of the most successful, terrible, horrible dictatorship at home. They come here and they're incredibly successful and productive people. But I want to talk about why we don't have this, because I think that's a curious question. So one of them is, we just had a deal on this that was offered that would boost a lot of this enforcement efforts, and the Republicans turned it down despite being the ones to negotiate it. So it gets caught up in electoral politics. But also the second part about that is, I hate to, hate to break it to you, Richard, but I think you will be, you'd be seen as a, among a lot of people in the right. You'd be seen as a wild eyed, open borders fanatic. And that's because, you know, I think the reason we don't have 25 processing centers where we let people in and we check them out and then say, okay, go on your merry way, go get a job, is because there's a lot of people who, you know, there's always this sort of level of saying, oh, I'm not against immigrants, I'm just against illegal immigrants. But if you push those people off and what you get is, I'm against immigrants, then arguments like, oh, they're going to change the culture and they're going to, they're coming from unfree country, so they're going to make it less free here. They're going to go vote in, illegal emits are going to vote and they're going to fix the election for the Democrats, or they're criminals and they're bad and, or they're going to be on welfare. All these arguments that we've heard, and the thing I find interesting about a lot of those, by the way, is that a lot of them are recycling of things that were said about the Poles and the Italians and the Irish 100 years ago. I caught one of these things, very highly xenophobic thing from a far out, far right guy, and his name was Joey Mannarino. And I thought, I would like to see this guy go back and look at what they were saying 100 years ago about guy's name, Mannarino, when they came here.
[00:21:13] Speaker C: Well, I agree that to the extent, but I think it occurs on the right and the left and the middle. I guess we always forget about the middle. I do believe that maybe part of the reason they're reluctant both sides, to come to this kind of deal that says, let's pour a lot of money. And I don't think it'd be, I don't think it'd take a lot of money. Maybe it would take like one 10th of the Defense Department budget. Now, what would that be?
[00:21:36] Speaker B: Well, that's like 80, 70 billion.
[00:21:39] Speaker C: I did look up the numbers on how much border patrol is paid or how much it would be to construct those processes there. But it's only a 700 miles border. I can't imagine it would take that much. You'd have to do other things on other parts of the border.
But my point is, I do think you can find on the right, but also on the left, this kind of nativism, this kind of xenophobia, outright racism, a hatred of. But you're right, that goes all the way back to the Ellis island. The Italians hated the Irish, and the Irish hated the Italians, and the French hated the Germans. And yet we still took them in. Because now here's a challenge. I would make the Ellis island model. Every time I bring it up, quite rightly, someone will say to me, because the Ellis island model was roughly 1892 to 1954. It closed in 1954, but the peak was really in 19, 2021 or so, because so many people came over during World War one from Europe, that Congress, I think in 2020, 219 23, really restricted more immigration. So if you look at the numbers, they really go very high. 1892 for about 30 years. But the pushback I get is they'll say, well, that was not a full fledged welfare state. And the point is that's true. So in other words, the american welfare state didn't really grow up until begin to grow up until the new Deal, right? So Americans seeing this flood of people coming in 1892 to 1920s or so, not only could they realize they were being checked these three ways, that they're not criminals, they're not contagious, but they also knew they were probably likely coming here for freedom and opportunity, not to suck off the tit of the welfare state. The problem we have today, Rob, is if you lean too far in the direction of let them all in, we don't have a let, we don't have a kind of limited government system now. So I'm somewhat sympathetic. Not to the nativist argument, not to the xenophobic. I'm somewhat more sympathetic. And even Milton Friedman said this. He said, listen, I'm for freedom. I wish we had freedom across the board. But if you have a welfare state, you can't be quite as free about your border policy. Now, I think that's actually regretful. I think it's a sign of what Hayek called controls. Breeding controls.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: If you have statism in one area, you end up.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: That's exactly what I was going to say.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: It's awful in that regard. And so we need some system of unwinding it. But I definitely lean in the direction of not, not only for political, economic reasons, but ethical reasons. We want to be the country that's a magnet for brains and liberty lovers and people.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: Not just brains, but also, I mean, there tends to be a thing that it's easier to sell people on. Well, it's sometimes easier to sell people on the idea that, okay, we should let people in who are doctors and who are.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: I don't just.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: I don't mean that you're talented, who are educated. Yes.
[00:24:26] Speaker C: No, I mean, it could include entrepreneurial brains. And people want to start businesses. That I just meant.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: And also anybody who wants to. Everybody wants to work there by. Simply, by working.
Now, as you know, my wife's in the construction industry. She deals all the times with guys who are framers, who are plumbers, who are electricians, who are bricklayers, people who are not doing high skilled labor. But they're adding something really constructive. I'd like to see what happened to the construction industry if you got rid of all the Mexicans.
That. The thing is that these are people who come to work, and I think so that this. I knew this would come up, but I was going to bring it up if you didn't, which is this Milton Friedman argument, and it's one that's like custom tailored to appeal to guys like you and me. Right. Because you know what? Oh, yeah. With welfare state, that's bad. So we should, we should. That's a good argument against immigration. But I think it's his worst argument, his least convincing argument. And the reason, first of all, is partly what you said, the controls be controls. That if you set up the standardization, we can't have freedom in one area until we have perfect, basically perfect freedom in all these, in these other areas or we can't have more immigration. And I'm a political realist, so I know that we're not going to have the laissez faire utopia in my lifetime, most likely unless I live to be extremely old.
[00:25:42] Speaker C: We're not, I didn't know. Oh my God.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: So I don't like to talk about things like, oh, we could have, should we have open borders as the ideals like, well, that's not even on the table right now. I call that sort of libertarian debate club. You know, we could talk about how would things work in a ideal society, but we're not, that's not politically what's happening right now. What I say the issue is, I think what we need is a policy that is more welcoming toward legal immigration, one that says, okay, we're going to have the processing centers. We're going to let the people in. I think it will solve a lot of the problem. But the thing is that.
[00:26:14] Speaker C: We have.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: A lot of evidence of what these people actually do when they come here and they're not taking welfare. I think we've also, and I don't have the details of this, but we've also had a couple of rounds of, of welfare reform that basically says you are not eligible for welfare. Now there's ways to game it and defraud the system, but this idea, you're not, and some cities may not enforce it, but the idea that you are not eligible for welfare if you're illegal. So, for example, this guy I mentioned who had come here illegally and worked here for 40 years, paid taxes and then he can't get Social Security. And that's part of one of those laws. But I think because of that, the figures I've seen are that they are actually net payers into the welfare state because theres all sorts of people who come here and work illegally, immigrants who come here and work and pay into the welfare system through taxes, through payroll taxes, but then who never end up collecting. And some its like young guys who come here to make money so they can build a house back home and then they go back home. So they come here for five years or ten years and then they go back, or other people who come here and aren't eligible to collect various welfare state benefits. And so they never draw from the system. So they're actually, they're paying more in, in taxes than they're drawing out those. Now I guess all these are estimates. We don't know for sure, but those are the best estimates I've seen, let me say.
[00:27:32] Speaker C: I like those comments. It's interesting on the Friedman thing, by the way, I always, always smiled when I would hear that. Because you could go either way.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:43] Speaker C: When Milton Freeman says, well, you have a big welfare state, you gotta be careful about taking immigrants in. Well, you could reduce the welfare state.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, we can't have a welfare state because we have reduced, reduce the.
[00:27:54] Speaker C: And he, you know, to his credit, he tried in some cases with a negative income tax to reduce the welfare state. So you could go the root of. If you think that's the problem. Or you could go the root of. And sometimes he would say, we can't fight the welfare state. Since we can't fight the welfare state, we'll fight like complete open immigration because it will overrun the borders and bankrupt the welfare state. But you could go either way. So it's not a terrible argument, but at least it's someone pointing out that you can't just have an immigration policy that's fairly liberal of the kind I think you and I agree with out of context. Is this 1922 or is this 2022? And that's the part where I'm sympathetic to people who worry that we've created this magnet. Now, the other thing I want to say is I want to push back, rob a little bit. I know you're not in this ethical camp, but part of the argument you're using, and I've resisted with other people, is this cost benefit analysis of, well, they contribute this and they take away that, and there's benefits here and there's hazards there. And it's kind of like an overarching. You hear this sometimes also where people will say, well, we want immigration, but we want to, like, figure out whether they're doctors or not or whether we need more janitors or whether we need more swim coaches. That approach bothers me because I would rather set up just objective standards of, you get to come in if you don't have all these risks that I already named, and you exclude things like bad countries to us. But the idea of picking and choosing winners like we do with it sounds utilitarian to me. It sounds like you're doing a collective societal welfare calculation about whether we should take in immigrants generally. And I would much prefer setting up a standard and then just see who meets it. And it could be a european, it could be an asian, it could be a guatemalan. But I don't want to sit there putting up quotas in advance either for certain kinds of countries or certain kinds of professions. I kind of want to leave that to the market. And people themselves deciding, hey, should I go and try to be a doctor in America or not? So what do you think about that? Do you get that?
[00:30:00] Speaker B: No, I agree with that as the ideal. What I would say is tactically, I'm okay with saying, you know, if in one particular case saying, look, why are we getting h one b visa guys, they just want a big international cricket match for us. Isn't that amazing? You have these guys. So there's A, in India, there's two big cricket teams, India A and India B and some. And they had this one in America that defeated Pakistan, which is one of the top teams in the world. And somebody said, well, that's not India b. It's India h one b. It's a bunch of indian immigrants and people from the Caribbean who came to America as immigrants. They're working for tech companies and they won cricket. We should bring in talented people. And if that moves the needle on at least loosening up some of this, because I really do think these controls that exist right now are holding back progress. And by making people come illegally, you hold back people from fully integrating into the economy. And also, I think the restrictions we have right now make it harder for, I think, actually put a bias towards the unskilled immigrants coming, because if you're willing to just cross, cross the border and get construction jobs as well as you catch as catch can, you will come here. But if you're a doctor and you want to work as a doctor, not being, you know, being illegally here is going to be a real problem for you. You're not going to be able to license your, you're not going to be able to get a job. It's going to be a lot less attractive to you. So I think it's actually preferentially keeping out the talented people. So that's one of the things I think we need to look at. But I want to also make a case to provide some sympathy for the left on this, which is, I think, part of their opposition to making the kind of deal you want, Richard, is that I think they sense that the right wants more enforcement, not because they want to have people be documented but still come in. The right wants more enforcement because they want them out. They don't want them to come in at all. And there's a history behind this that I think, you know, I've begun to take more and more seriously because I start hearing some people, this is like the far, far right people these days. But they're louder than they used to be. And a lot of them are complaining about the Immigration act of 1965. Now, what did the immigration act of 1965 do? Well, it changed the quotas to allow more people from Africa and Asia.
[00:32:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: And, you know, before it was fixed.
[00:32:18] Speaker C: To people, mostly Europe.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: Yeah, from Europe. And that was part and parcel of Jim Crow.
[00:32:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: Part of the reason for that is, you know, more, more black people coming, more people of non white, ethnic, racial minorities coming in the south saw that and said, well, those people aren't going to, aren't going to, you know, aren't going to, like, segregation. Their children and grandchildren vote against segregation, so we can't let them in. And so there is a certain sense I do see, like, you know, some of the, some of the messaging on this sometimes, too. There was something that was tweeted out a while back by someone very prominent where it was like, well, here's your suburb. Here's your, here's. Here's the America with, with, with closed borders and border enforcement, and it's this beautiful, peaceful, bucolic suburb, and here it is with immigrants. And nobody in the picture was not black. It was basically, we will be overrun by hordes of black people. And so there is almost like, there's an attempt to create this sort of xenophobic fear. These people are other. They're different from you. They're not like us, us good people. And like I said, the irony is us good people were the people who were viewed as the foreign hordes and the rabble, by the way, on the Germans, the Saltzmans. I came across a fascinating little history about World War one. During World War one, there was a vast anti german hysteria, and there were dozens of german language newspapers in the US, and they were shut down.
People who were German changed their names so that they wouldn't sound german enough. So, you know, every ethnic group has had this sort of.
[00:33:48] Speaker C: And of course, the Japanese. Of course, the Japanese. Oh, yeah, intern, face the same thing with the internment.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: And so I think. I think that that sort of, that xenophobic aspect of it is one of the things that the last.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: I agree that the sympathy I have for not the far right wackos and the sympathy under the xenophobes, the sympathy I also have. But this is very crude fear. It's that part of Americana that says we're losing our culture. We're losing the 1950s white picket fence, middle class, suburban America because of immigration. And therefore, we don't want immigration or the cultures changing or they won't accept our language. That's actually not to me, an unimportant thing. Ellis island. One of the first things they did was they go over to the language office and learn the language. Of course, that's not true anymore. So these critics will say something like they're not only not learning the language, they go into our public schools and they demand that English is a second language. So that kind of cultural lack of assimilation on the part of immigrants coming in, I am sympathetic to people who resist, but I wouldn't resist it to the point of closing the borders or restricting the incoming as the way they do it. But let me ask you something, Rob. Flip the script here and answer this question. Why do you think, I understand why you're saying the right doesn't want them in, but we know the left won't sign an immigration bill either. That processes in the way we do. Why do you think they want them to come in undocumented in the millions with this chaos regardless? In other words, they're not sitting there saying that is really inhumane and that is crazy and that is dangerous. So we're going to wait around for a bipartisan immigration bill. They're not waiting around their motivate. You think it's totally electoral or.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no. I don't think it's electoral. I don't think they think legal emirates going to vote for them because there's not any real evidence that that happens. People tried to drum it up, but it's really kind of unconvincing. I haven't seen the numbers. It's very small numbers.
[00:35:48] Speaker C: You don't think California went from Reagan country to Newsom country in 40 years because of immigration?
[00:35:54] Speaker B: I think it did it because of immigration, but not because of illegal immigration. That is, it wasn't, or rather it wasn't people who were illegal voting. It was people, it was like the next generation of people after that and all the hippies in hate Ashbury. I mean, one of the things we have to take into account is that a lot of the, if you would look at who's the leaders of the left, it's a bunch of people named Warren and Sanders. Right. A bunch of white people named Warren and Sanders. And heck, now who we got now waltz, a german immigrant from Minnesota. So I think it's kind of simplistic to, oh, we went to the left. I have seen an interesting analysis that.
[00:36:27] Speaker C: So if it's not electoral, what do you think they're, why do you think.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: There'S speaker one, two things one is, I think if you go back far enough, Democrats were not pro immigration at all.
[00:36:35] Speaker C: No.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: And then one thing I've noticed, for example, is Joe Biden, the one thing he hasn't changed from Donald Trump is he didn't get rid of the tariffs. Why? Because I remember the 1980s. I remember when the Democrats were the tariff party, they were the guys who wanted to keep the Japanese from importing all those automobiles.
And, and so, you know, that's Joe Biden for all way back.
[00:36:54] Speaker C: That's the old, that's on, that's on, that's on, that's on tariffs. So that's on importing goods, not importing people.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: But the other thing I would say.
[00:37:02] Speaker C: About Democrats have changed on this, though.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: I think Democrats would actually accept a deal like you're saying. I think they viewed a huge win to have something even a little close to what you're saying if it actually included the provisions about letting more people in. But the problem, and I've been watching these, these negotiations for years, and it's never about that. If Republicans have, look, we will raise all the caps and quotas, will provide funding for such and such, more bureaucrats to process these applications as long as we then, you know, have more, more budget to control the border. I think that would be, I think there are a lot of Democrats who sign up for that, but that, I don't, I think there are a lot of Republicans who would bulk at it and they would say, oh, no, that's letting in these, you know, all these foreigners who are going to destroy our culture.
[00:37:44] Speaker C: Yeah. So the, I'm glad we brought up these past examples of, like Reagan, although again, not perfect, or Clinton from the nineties, again, although not perfect.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: I just looked up something on Reagan that his last, very last speech he gave in the White House is described as somebody described as a love letter to immigrants. He's waxing eloquent about all the things immigrants.
[00:38:10] Speaker C: I mean, he was, he was very good on, yeah.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: The left right things have sort of switched back and forth over the years.
[00:38:14] Speaker C: He has switched back and forth. They were very, but they were, they were, those two were not only very decent on immigration. I thought I, but the two parties were much closer. So the paradox, really, or the tragedy, if you will, is why they've split so much since and why there seems to be no solution. And each side seems more and more advocating policies which look really inhumane. I think we can say on both sides, this flooding over of anarchy is inhumane and maybe dangerous, but also the, where are your papers and I'm going to deport you is inhumane and authoritarian as well. So it's so tragic. Right. So, Rob, if you and I crafted, which we could do probably in 60 minutes, an immigration package that said we need to massively, for the first time ever, an objective that says massively increase government spending on this legitimate function. And here's how many processing centers we need and here's what kind of integrity and security, but also liberality we're going to have at the border and we craft this.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:39:20] Speaker C: Then the question would be, you go into Washington, I'm not saying overnight, because they're at each other's throats over the next five years, which party would be more prone to accepting that kind of, as you look at them now, you know them better than I at this stage. You go to, hey, you go to the republican RNC and say, here's, here's run on this, you'll win on this. Americans will love that. Or you go to the DNC and that. Which one would be more receptive?
[00:39:47] Speaker B: I don't think the republic is going to be receptive anytime now, anytime soon, because I do think that sort of the cultural conservative, the sort of xenophobic wing is, is much more sort of, not necessarily. It's not necessarily majority, but they're like the loudest and angriest people right now. And they're getting a lot of, even though there's some odd little, you know, I talked about how ironic it is that somebody named Mannarino would be anti immigrant. Well, we got a guy named Vivek Ramaswamy who's anti immigrant, and it's like not even two generations back. It's his father, it's his parents who came. Right. People that they go very nativist, so that there's a very strong nativist contingent that I think the Republicans won't be able to contradict any time soon. I'm not sure, though, that you're going to get, you know, you go to.
[00:40:31] Speaker C: The DNC, are they going to accept it or why?
[00:40:34] Speaker B: I think.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: Why wouldn't they?
[00:40:35] Speaker B: Well, I think you could get them to say that would be great in theory, but, you know, the thing is they're going to say, but, you know, get somebody else. Get somebody to propose it. What I think the only thing they say, get somebody to propose it, meaning not just you and I, because we don't have a constituency.
[00:40:50] Speaker C: What I'm saying is why in the Democratic Party is there no constituency for saying we want to let in millions?
[00:40:57] Speaker B: That's an interesting question.
[00:40:58] Speaker C: Well, of legal immigrant.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: I bet there is a constituency there.
[00:41:02] Speaker C: Because if you go to them now and say, we want everyone to vote as you do, dear democrats, but we want them to document themselves. We want them to bring an id to the thing and they're viewed. No id, no documentation. It sounds very similar to the board.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: Yeah. The id thing, first of all, comes out of the history of techniques.
[00:41:23] Speaker C: Why do they not want documentation either of voters or of immigrants? It does seem.
[00:41:28] Speaker B: No, I do think that in the mainstream DNC now, here's what I think is the, is the way it's actually going to have anything like this is ever actually going to happen. It's going to look like the INB groups, the YIMBY movement, and this is one that I think is the most interesting things that happened politically because it's something actually good that's happening for the most part. I mean, there are better and worse versions of it, but this is the. Yes, in my backyard, the idea of saying, if you're in San Francisco, they have the problem with the nimbyism. They're not in my backyard. You can't build this, you can't build that. And then pretty soon nobody housing becomes extremely expensive. And you've had this movement there that had started in San Francisco and it spread many other places where they say, no, actually, we need to get rid of some of the zoning laws. We need to get rid of some of the restrictions and some of the things that prevent people from building new housing and new development. And that has been something interesting that percolated up sort of from the grassroots and outside of the usual partisan lines. So the thing I always found funny about the YMBs is this bunch of, like, young urban democrats who are basically arguing for deregulation.
And it kind of gives me a kick that they don't exactly think of it in those terms. They think of, you know, again, they put it in terms that, like, well, this is about helping us have more affordable housing, but we get more affordable housing by getting rid of regulations.
And it actually got, I mean, Obama said something to that effect at the DNC, and Harris said something that effect. And now if you look at their actual proposals, it's like a mixture of a couple of good things. And she's going to subsidize people to buy houses, which is actually more likely to happen than actually getting rid of the regulations. But at least it's percolating up and getting attention.
And I think that's it's going to have to happen by somehow gaining a bipartisan constituency, that isn't that it, that is working this issue outside of the normal partisan politics for a while and then bringing that back up and bringing that from the grassroots up to the national level. Because right now what you have is the typical politics that we have, which is every side is beholden to its most radical wing. And right now we have a very close election again. And so each side says, oh, I dont dare tick off that there may be 8% of our voters who absolutely will not accept a certain policy or absolutely demand a certain policy. I dont dare tick those people off because I need all 8% of those because I know I cant. Its so close I cant win without them. And they will actually, you know, and some of them are, you know, the crazier people are, the more likely out there to say I'm just going to stay home. And even if they hate the other guy more, they're just, you know, they're, they're, they'll, they have this sort of suicide bomber kind of mentality towards voting. Um, so can I just say something.
[00:44:13] Speaker C: About, but uh, to, because we don't have much time left. I don't know, uh, Lawrence whether you have questions in the, in the hopper, I just wanted to say something quickly, uh, because you mentioned it earlier, Rob, when we were talking about Friedman, someone did try to split the baby on this and they came up with a, I forget the number proposition in California and it was in the nineties and this is when people were worried about too much immigration and bankrupting the welfare system in California. So I remember this specifically because I was debating someone at the time and the proposition was you can come in, but you have to sign a waiver. You can't get on welfare, you know, for some period of time and five years or something like that. And guess what? It was challenged all the way up to the courts. The courts rejected it as unequal treatment.
It was only, it violated the 14th Amendment. In other words, you can't pick this citizen and say they can't get welfare in that as long as they're eligible, they get to. And of course the counter to that was they're not citizens yet. The whole point is they're illegals and so they don't, well, but the minute they step on the soil they get all the rights of citizens. So that has been tried actually. And that kind of confirms Friedman's view that once you have this welfare system, you cannot carve out exceptions and keep them off the system. But adding to that we know what happened subsequently. Not only was that rejected, the whole sanctuary city phenomenon developed after that. Where, especially in California, in Oregon and Portland and Seattle, they went the route of not just saying, you can't be on the welfare rolls. They went the route of saying, please come here, especially if you're illegal and undocumented, because ice is chasing you or INS is chasing. And the whole point of sanctuary was kind of anarchy. It was kind of the idea that what we're keeping, what the sanctuary we're keeping here is you being protected from federal law. And to the extent the federal government is responsible for the borders, that was a kind of lawless, outrageous. It's still going on. Of course, there's at least 25 cities in America flouting the law, flagrantly flouting law, and they're all democratic cities. So, yeah, you have to be troubled by that. That is a kind of lawlessness that the anti immigration people just eat up and I hate. I'm not anti immigration, but those are the kind of things that make the wall, I call them the wall people. That gets the wall people so upset. It is kind of outrageous, isn't it? Sanctuary cities?
[00:46:38] Speaker B: I mean, no, I don't find it nearly as outrageous as you do, because I think it has to do with the problem of enforcing something like that in a federal system like we have. Right. That when you and you could probably find some federal laws that are not well enforced. Well, here's a great example. There's a whole bunch of local officials who have said they won't enforce certain gun laws.
[00:47:02] Speaker C: Yes, that's.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's the exact same thing.
You know, Rufus T. Wainwright in the rural county out there somewhere else's constituency, that if they pass this law against, take away your firearms, I'm not going to enforce it.
[00:47:16] Speaker C: Okay. You know who's at fault for this then? That's his nullification. We know. Nullification. Right. Rob goes all the way back to the jeffersonian theory that if I don't think that's constitutional, I don't have to obey. Like, Biden kind of did that on the constitution with student loans.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: Yeah, he tried.
[00:47:35] Speaker C: Like a local San Francisco mayor will say, I don't like the immigration laws of the federal government, so I'm not going to enforce them in San Francisco.
[00:47:43] Speaker B: But I think it has to do with kind of violates the caution. But it's also, I view it as almost a feature of the system in one respect, which is anytime the federal government says, oh, we're going to come doing some big restrictive thing.
The federal government doesn't have that many law enforcement agents. You know, it doesn't have that many troops. It doesn't have, you know, national, you know, it doesn't have federal troops on the streets of every city. In fact, it's banned from having troops on the streets of our cities except, you know, the National Guard, which are under control, the states. So there's this whole system. So the federal government can make big restrictive, I mean, this is like go back to prohibition in the 1920s, right?
[00:48:23] Speaker C: No, this is not so much restricted. This is just the government saying we should have documented immigrants and if, well.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: But it's documentation within the context of a highly restrictive.
[00:48:34] Speaker C: But if a Democrat city says, listen, literally they put up a sign we are a magnet, both welfare magnet and for illegals.
[00:48:43] Speaker B: That is, that is, here's the thing. If you have the question of should we have more immigrants or not? And people says, oh, we think more immigrants would be great, then you're going to have trouble enforcing that law that highly restricts immigrants.
[00:48:56] Speaker C: To me, it's very similar to the voting thing. Perplexing.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: So here's, I've got a great analogy for you. This is exactly like the debate when.
[00:49:03] Speaker C: Someone says, why don't you just document the voter?
[00:49:06] Speaker B: There is, why don't we just document people owning guns?
There's a whole long gun registration argument, right? And it sounds reasonable. Why not document the people of guns? I think the reason why the gun rights groups have fought this all the time, for as long as I remember, is then you have a list of people whose guns you can confiscate. So again, um, there's an old thing called Barone's law. Michael Barone, political calm. He said, all process arguments are insincere, including this one, which I was like.
[00:49:34] Speaker C: There'S always a substantive argument behind it.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: That anything about saying, well, we're on that against this, I just think we should register it, that the process is never the heart of the issue. The process is what, the actual substance is what's happening. So I think the substance of the issue is more immigrants versus less immigrants.
And then the, and because what if that's, if that's the position that people actually have more immigrants versus less immigrant immigrants, that distorts and colors how they view the process argument.
[00:50:02] Speaker C: So I read, if I were to summarize this, I would say you and I want order at the border, but we want lots of immigrants to come in. We want lots of immigrants to come in legally. We'd rather illegal things not be done. And both at the border and inside the border, I think we both agree both parties are so far apart on anything like that.
I think we're scratching our heads a little bit on why. I think you blame the Republicans and the conservatives on the right more than I would, but I'd say a pox on both their houses.
[00:50:36] Speaker B: There are nutty people on the left, too. I will never contradict that, Lawrence, any.
[00:50:42] Speaker C: People that want to criticize us heavily and dismiss our arguments or.
[00:50:49] Speaker A: Well, I think. Well, I think both of your had really good positions here and that we're not. A lot of the questions. Yeah, a lot of questions that were already answered just by you two talking. A lot of them were about.
Yeah, for, for example, what about fishery 21 on YouTube, asked about the whole pause on immigration after World War one. There's that pause.
[00:51:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:51:13] Speaker A: That something that was more important to help people sort of naturalize to a general sort of culture that's already here.
[00:51:19] Speaker B: You all kind of talk about to mention about assimilation, though, is that one thing we had in the early 20th century is there were voluntary organizations. This was a government effort. It was all sorts of private organizations saying, okay, here, we're going to help you assimilate. We're going to teach you English. We're going to teach you how to make american food, which was maybe if the Italians are coming in, maybe that's not a good idea, let them make italian food. But the point is that there were volunteer organizations. So one thing I say about people who are really super concerned about, about natural, about assimilation, well, go start some of those organizations. And you probably find a lot of immigrants, legal and illegal, who'd be perfectly happy to get free lessons in English or to other, these other attempts to help people settle and or lessons on the american constitutional system of government.
[00:52:10] Speaker C: That was true. And Rob, that was true of the pre welfare society. Also these mutual aid societies and things like that. Bad. Yeah. You can either argue that they decayed and then this government stepped in, or you could say the government stepped in and displaced them all. But you're right. Now, even, even cute little things like Little Italy or Chinatown, even when immigrants came in and didn't assimilate to the extent that they congregated and concentrated in certain areas, even those were adorable. I mean, they were adorable. The Americans would go in there and let's put them in Chinatown and everything, and they were welcoming and. But when you think about it, they were unassimilated, but they were also not bothering anybody. You know, there was no ethnic tension over it. It was kind of cute.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: And one of the things I've noticed is that, you know, one of the things immigrants always bring to this country is new food. You know, you can go get something called pho, which is a vietnamese soup. It's delicious vietnamese soup. You can get that. There's a Thai. You get really excellent thai food.
[00:53:04] Speaker C: Oh, the thai food. Yeah.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Right in this country now. And, you know, everywhere. And you can get sushi just about anywhere.
[00:53:12] Speaker C: That's the rob, maybe that is the old. That's the missing link. That is the only thing all sides agree on. The food's great. The food variety is great. So maybe the only thing that brings these two parties together and gets a rational immigration policy is a food element. I don't know.
[00:53:27] Speaker B: Let in the chefs. Let in the cooks and the chefs and the nonas who will make their favorite, their family recipes and pass them.
[00:53:34] Speaker C: On to cook offs and saying, whoever wins the cook off, will you widen your quotas or something? I don't know. It's crazy.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: And, you know, and their whole swaths of America where, you know, tacos are as american as apple pie or Pete, you know, I came across something hilarious in the Atlantic in 1949. There was an article very seriously explaining this exotic new food to America that Americans aren't familiar with called pizza.
[00:53:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Which is, now you consider it like it's an american, a totally american dish. And there's, you know, every region has its own style of pizza. But it was totally new in 1949. It was new to an exotic.
[00:54:09] Speaker C: I know.
[00:54:10] Speaker B: Well, I think that's a microcosm for the fact that, again, I started with this idea of looking at new people not as a burden, but as a blessing, as producers, as people bring something positive. Food is the one area where people can actually see that, that, yes, these immigrants coming in, they're bringing dishes that I enjoy going out and eating. So, yeah, I think that's kind of a microcosm that there are all sorts of other examples of how immigrants coming in will bring positive things. It's just, that's the one that's most visible and hardest to argue with.
[00:54:40] Speaker C: Any other questions, Lawrence, or comments that seem interesting to you or that you want to pose us yourself?
[00:54:46] Speaker A: Well, there is a question here, and you both approach, have already touched on this before, but this is by Alan Turner on YouTube, who asks question, why do both libertarians and Democrats love open borders? Now, of course, that's a whole thing of itself. They could take a long time. But when you mentioned Democrat, it reminds me of its not up down uniform on the way because of course, democratic party by and large, for a long time in the past was against immigration. But there is sort of like the rise in recent years of the sort of international socialist types sort of harkening back to days past of like, well, you would say, like what, Lenin, we should be free to go around and work wherever you go. So theres that group and then theres the Democrats at large. So I think the libertarians, it's easy to say that by and large that's open borders is sort of their policy. Maybe you all want to talk a little bit more about this sort of change in the Democrat view on the libertarians.
[00:55:41] Speaker B: I want to say that libertarians have a long, long history of having big knock down, furious debates over issues that are not all relevant to anything that's happening in american politics today. So that's what I call it, libertarian debate club. They had a whole thing, uh, they gave Gary Johnson a hard time at a libertarian debate because he wasn't against driver's licenses. And this was considered the litmus test. You had to be against issuing driver's license because that's the state telling you what to do. And so the libertarian party tends to have like what's the most futile position I can take? And then that's what they, that's what they go for. Um, or I saw some guy free Ross Ulbricht, uh, t shirt on the other day. Uh, you know, these very niche issues that only a few people who are very online know who Ross Ulbricht is. Uh, so that's, that kind of explains libertarians. But um, on, on the Democrat side, I, you know, the, I think both parties, reasonable people in both parties are not well served by the leadership and national agenda of the parties. And that's, again, because you have these radical wings that, and this tends to happen in politics, but it's happening more now, a little more now than it used to, that you have radical wings who have to be appeased. And the biggest problem I had, it's the idea of 50 plus one that there became, the more that, when's the last time we had an actual landslide presidential election? It was 1984. Reagan. Everyone after that has been much closer. They've been, maybe Obama's second time did a little better, but they've been very, very close elections. And there's, people have much more parties have had much more of a message that's, that's basically aimed at, let's get 50% of the population plus one. And, you know, Trump won with 45. You know, so they've even figured out sometimes, you know, if things are divided and there are spoilers in the race and the electoral college tips your way, you can actually don't even need to get 50%. And when you have that attitude, you end up saying, okay, what do we do to appease the loudest and most fanatical people? Or in the Democratic Party version, it's the loudest and most, most extremely online people. Right. The other people. How do you please the people who are on social media all day and will gang up on you and yell at you if you don't, you know, state whatever the latest, you know, defund the police or whatever the latest, which is like the most unpopular message the Democrats, I think have ever had was defund the police. But they had to say it because you had these fanatics who would, who would give you a hard time for it. So I think that's part of the problem, is that you need to have a system. You need to find some way. Like YIMby ism is one rare example where you get, like, reasonable people from both parties who say, you know what, that's not a bad idea. And you could maybe, hopefully change the, you change the consensus from below and create something that's big enough that the fanatics can't block it.
[00:58:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't really want to comment on the libertarians because they don't think they're influential. But I did want to say something that might clarify things for people on the republican side, which I do tend to analyze more closely. I'm intrigued by. It's very disturbing, this devolution from Reagan to Bush to Trump. And just quickly, Reagan, think about it. Very good on immigration, favorable to importing people, if you will. But he also was for free trade with Canada, free trade with Mexico, and gave us the beginnings of NAFTA. He was also anti establishment. Well, Trump is too, to some extent. Remember, Reagan was kind of an outsider. The Nixon Rockefeller wing, the Bush wing.
And Reagan wins two landslides with that message. And it's a very profound father's message, but it's also future looking, benevolent, no name calling, optimism, mourning in America. Trump could not be more different, except that he stole the line, make America great again, which actually came from Reagan. The Reagan Bush team in 1980, their tagline was, let's make America great again. And they got no shit for it because it was like a normal aspiration people had. Now look at Trump. It's a broader context. He's not just, and you could say this about Vance, too. What do they share that's anti Reagan?
They're anti immigration, so they're anti importing people, but they're also anti importing goods. They're protectionists. They're anti goods coming into Walmart. They're also for industrial policy, which used to be a Dukakis thing. Remember, Rob, the Democrats? And they call them the Atari Democrat. They used to be for industrial planning and stuff. Reagan wasn't. Reagan resisted that. Reagan was against that. So the Trump Vance lineup, on almost every issue, even though they call themselves Republicans, they're really anti free trade, anti immigration, industrial policy, and the pessimism and the backward looking part of it, and the fatalism is so unregan. It's so unlike Reagan. It's remarkable to see a political party, and I think the Democrats have deteriorated badly as well. They both deteriorated very badly. But it is disturbing to see when the Republicans basically have this history, and they had it with Lincoln as well, frankly, they have this model that succeeded and had landscience, and no one will go back. I don't want it to go back for the sake of going back. I'm just saying it's not as if a successful model actually doesn't exist. It was a model that was closest to capitalism that we're probably ever going to get in our lifetime. And even the objective is hated Reagan. Remember Rob? So I'm bothered by that. But it is starkly different, isn't it? But there is a commonality in this. The anti foreign anything is all part of the Trump message now. And I think the only question is whether this is idiosyncratic to him. Namely, when he's off the stage, the Republican Party will go back to sanity, or whether he's in the Republican Party, because it's gone insane.
[01:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so I just had a piece go up at Discourse magazine yesterday, addressing this idea of what's the difference between Trump and Reagan? And the fundamental that I saw was, again, pessimism versus optimism. And Reagan was populist in the sense of appealing to the common man against the elites and the bureaucrats. But he appealed to him in a positive way of like, basically, here are our highest principles, and here's how. How we can have a better future. And Trump tends to appeal to fear and declineism. He says, we're like a third world country. And something I didn't put in that piece, but I was thinking about was Reagan comes along in 1980, and we're in the middle of economic decline, stagnation, foreign policy catastrophes, and Carter calls it a national malaise. And Reagan says very famously, I think our best days are ahead.
[01:02:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:02:22] Speaker B: And Trump comes along in a period right now, which for all the problems we have, we have lower unemployment than we had under Reagan, even under the Reagan recovery, I believe, you know, very low unemployment. We have, we're wealthier than we were then. We're not actively involved in any wars. Right. Directly involved in any wars right now. We got, you know, it's peace and prosperity by the standard of most of american history. And Reagan, and Trump says, oh, we're like a third world country. And I think there's a self fulfilling prophecy to that. If you have this doom and gloom attitude, you will tend to do things that make it worse. Whereas if you have the attitude of, look, we have all these capabilities, we just need to let ourselves be free to do these things, then you're going to more likely to adopt policies that will actually, and I think Reagan actually did make America great again from 1980 to 1988, especially if you extend that to 1990 and follow the Berlin Wall then, you know, he, you know, all those things, the economy, foreign policy, the fate of freedom in the world, all those things dramatically reversed. And he made America great again. But it's because he had that positive vision of how to do it.
[01:03:28] Speaker C: Yeah. And one sign politically, you know, this, Rob, one sign politically that want there, there's a kind of semi revolution going on that's successful is when the other party copies you. So to me, the entire nineties, Gore, even Gore, of all people, pushing for NAFTA, you know, against Ross Perot, so, and Clinton, you know, welfare reform in 1999, he didn't keep those tax rates down. And they were, he realized he was eight. He had to ape the Reagan programs, pretty much not change them too much to be successful in the nineties. So that the Reagan years and the influence of the Reagan years kind of like spilled over into the nineties.
[01:04:09] Speaker B: Well, a successful example, an accessible example, inspires imitators. In 1999, I remember going to a gathering of, of right of center political types from across the world. So you had a bunch of american Republicans and british conservative party people and then smattering people from other, from other european countries. And the universal complaint there, oh, it's really terrible. Why is it terrible? Well, they're stealing our agenda. I'm like, this is what's called winning when you want on the issues, the other guy steals our agenda.
[01:04:39] Speaker C: The Brits did the same thing. Remember, Tony Blair was.
[01:04:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it was the british people. Yeah.
[01:04:44] Speaker C: And I think I recall, like on their Tony Blair in the nineties, or forget what it was, the first time they ever dropped the nationalization plank from the labor party. It had been there since 1918. And it took till Tony Blair for them to say, maybe we shouldn't nationalize industries. And now that Meg, now that Thatcher has privatized most of them. But yeah, things can really, because those 20 years, call it 1980 to 2000, remarkably in the direction, I would say, of capitalism. Obviously not fully there, but what a remarkable turnaround, because I think of the last 20 years as definitely going the other way. And who would have guessed that at the turn of the century, who would have guessed, looking back 20 years, at all the progress and the winning the cold war and all that, and Reagan and Thatcher, who would have guessed that standing here now, the whole world went the other way? I think the whole world went the other way.
It's not as catastrophic, Rob, I agree, as the way Trump paints it, but it really did reverse.
[01:05:42] Speaker B: There is a definite reversal there. Some people call it a freedom recession. But I think a good issue to end on would be the fact that I think this issue of turning towards markets and optimism to notice that those two things are connected, and maybe there's a reason they're connected. There's a certain view of the world and human capability that we can go out and build and create things. That goes hand in hand with the pro market, pro capitalist approach. And when we turn against that, but that goes hand in hand with the pessimistic, oh, we're losing everything. We're declining.
We have to claw down other people and try to keep other people out in order to keep us from declining.
[01:06:19] Speaker C: And the same thing you see, historically, when reason is doubted and you're in a medieval, dark ages, the pessimism is enormous, and enlightenment and renaissance, the optimist, it definitely got. But if we use our faculty of awareness, our main tool, reason, all of a sudden we're confident.
How surprising.
Reason is under attack. All of a sudden we feel like we're animals. Yeah, because you surrendered your. The one thing that distinguishes you from animals. So we start acting like animals. It is. I like that connection between, it's basically reason, liberty, optimism. They go together. If you're rejecting reason, if you're going woke, if you're going post modernism, you're going to be illiberal and you're going to be pessimistic.
I think. What do you think, Lawrence?
[01:07:08] Speaker A: I think that is, should we stop?
[01:07:12] Speaker B: It's a great.
[01:07:13] Speaker A: We've gone over time, but I think there's a lot of stuff that's really covered. I'm still processing and I know everyone else in chat probably is too. But again, I think y'all did a great job of answering pretty much the questions as they came in whether you knew the questions were there or not. So I want to thank both of you for jumping on to do this day and I want to thank everyone in pod for asking these questions. And besides, if you enjoyed this video, of course, as always, make sure to check out the rest of our content and support our
[email protected]. donate and be sure to join us next week when Jennifer Grossman will be back and she'll be interviewing she'll be interviewing professor of economics at George Mason University, Brian Kaplan about his new book build Baby build the science and ethics of housing regulation. Richard Rob, thanks again for today.
[01:08:08] Speaker C: Thanks, Lawrence. Thanks, Rob.
[01:08:09] Speaker B: Thanks everyone. Enjoyed it.
[01:08:10] Speaker C: Thanks.
