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Home » Interviews » Episode 33: Alex Nowrasteh [part one]

As director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh has spent years studying the positive impact of immigrants on the United States. In the first half of a two part episode, Nowrasteh discusses how myths about immigrants have evolved and persisted throughout American history and into the present. Listen to his JobMakers episode to discover the truth behind many canards about immigration.

Transcript

Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed and this is JobMakers.

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Denzil Mohammed: For time immemorial, we’ve been hearing the same messages. ‘Immigrants take this’ or ‘Immigrants increase that’ or ‘Immigrants have used this’. I say time immemorial because the same things said of immigrants today were said of immigrants a hundred years ago. No matter the group, whether Irish or Italian, Mexican or Haitian, those already living here uttered the same things. For Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s director of immigration studies, he’s heard it all before; over and over again. So last summer, he compiled a quick and easy publication. Anyone can download it, it’s called ‘The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong’. You can get it at Cato’s website or libertarianism.org. In it, Alex lays out in simple terms, researched responses to anti-immigrant fabrications like ‘Today’s immigrants don’t assimilate like immigrants from before’ and ‘Immigrants are a major source of crime’ and ‘Immigrants won’t vote for the Republican party’. This is the first part of our conversation. And some of what you’re about to hear might surprise you. Alex knows that, but getting truth and facts out there is paramount in advancing sensible immigration policies that benefit all Americans, new or old, as you’ll discover in this week’s JobMakers.

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Denzil Mohammed: Alex Nowrasteh from the Cato Institute, thank you for joining us on JobMakers. How are you?

Alex Nowrasteh: Great! I’m doing well. Thanks a lot for having me! I’m looking forward to this.

Denzil Mohammed: So you recently released a report on the most common arguments against immigration and why they’re wrong. Why did you feel the need to do this?

Alex Nowrasteh: So I’ve been speaking and writing about immigration for over a decade and I basically get the same questions every time. And I figured these questions are probably the ones that everybody has about immigration. So it would just be very convenient for everybody if I wrote down my quick answers to all of them, with citations and links to other research, to give people out there who are getting these questions but don’t have the benefit of having done years and years of research on each of them like I have. So that’s what basically gave me this impetus, sort of like a cheat sheet for everybody to know what I’m thinking whenever I get these questions.

Denzil Mohammed: One of the biggest misconceptions that I found in your report was the one on voting, that immigrants are automatically going to vote blue. That is not necessarily true. California is a good example of that. California and Texas, the two states with the largest immigrant populations, right?

Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, that’s right. California and Texas. And interestingly, part of the argument against voting or the idea that immigrants and their kids are going to vote for the democratic party in perpetuity forever is it’s partly focused on immigration, of course. It’s also focused on largely Hispanics. It’s the idea that Hispanics, whether they’re native-born or foreign-born or just this permanent blue voting bloc. And if you look back at history, if you look at what’s going on today with political realignment that’s just simply not true. There’s so much evidence to the contrary that it’s kind of overwhelming, but what we really hear is this crazy narrative about how this is some new voting bloc in Porter by the Democrats, supposedly, to create sort of Democratic Party dominance, which, I don’t know when that’s ever existed since the 1960s. And I can talk about why, I mean, the history of this is kind of fascinating. So I’m from California. And when I was young, in 1994, there was a debate, a statewide proposition that everyone gets to vote on called Proposition 187. And Prop 187 did two things. One was that it denied welfare benefits and other government benefits to all unlawful or illegal immigrants in the state. And then the second thing was it told every single state official that if they suspect that somebody is an unlawful or illegal immigrant, they have to report that person to the INS at the time for deportation. And what happened was, in 1994, this was pushed by the then governor Pete Wilson, who was Republican. He was facing a pretty hard reelection campaign in 1994 in California; the economy wasn’t doing well, the end of the cold war really hurt a lot of defense industries in California. So he was facing an uphill battle. And so he latched on to this Proposition 187 as a way to galvanize voters to support him so that he could win reelection. And what’s fascinating is you take a look at this, in 1990, when peoples and first ran, he basically split the Hispanic vote on the state level with Democrats. Basically he got 47 percent. The Democrats got 48 percent. 1990, it switches. Pete Wilson got 25 percent, Democrat got 70 percent, but Pete Wilson barely pulled it out because he got so many more votes from black Americans, white Americans and Asian Americans. But then you fast forward to 1998, and you see that Hispanic vote for Republicans keeps going down. It goes down to like 17 percent. And a state like California, where the Hispanic population grows from like 10 percent in 1970 to 40 percent around the year 2005, that’s a devastating shift. And basically what happened was the Republican Party in California in my home state decided, ‘We really needed to win this election in 1984, let’s piss off the largest demographic in the state that’s growing the fastest and be surprised when we lose basically every election after that, except when Arnold Schwarzenegger is running.’

Denzil Mohammed: So you concluded based on this, that how immigrants vote depends on how the party treats them, particularly Hispanic voters.

Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah. Surprisingly, right? No, I’m just joking. I mean, it’s obviously not surprising, human beings don’t want to vote for people who hate them. James Carville, the Democratic strategist has said this, point blank. If voters think that you hate them, they won’t vote for you.

Denzil Mohammed: You talk about assimilation, and that’s, of course, one of the biggest myths when it comes to immigration; that today’s immigrants don’t assimilate as immigrants from the past did. How are they wrong?

Alex Nowrasteh: So assimilation, we basically measure it as whether the immigrant or the immigrant’s kids or grandkids: how similar they are to Americans who’ve been here for much longer period of time on issues like education, income; civic participation, which includes voting, volunteering whether they nationalize, whether they call themselves American and consider themselves to be American. And on these measures from survey questions that go back, in some cases over a hundred years, what we see is that basically, by the third generation, that is, the grandchildren of the immigrants themselves, their grandchildren across the board, on average, are basically identical to Americans who have been here for four or longer generations in terms of all of these measures. Now, some groups take a little bit longer than others. There are a lot of Hispanic immigrant groups, because, when they come here, they have a little bit less education, it takes a little bit of a while to earn that education and pass it on to their kids. That can take three, sometimes four generations. With Asian immigrants it’s basically the first or second generation because they typically come here with higher education level. They already speak English when they arrive and that sort of jumpstarts assimilation. And then what we’ve also seen is a lot of intermarriage. So a lot of Hispanic immigrants or Asian immigrants will marry a non-Hispanic or non-Asian American. The kids will be mixed. Their kids won’t self-identify as that ethnic minority or racial minority. And because of this intermarriage, what happens is that basically pushes along assimilation. It speeds it up by an extra generation. So I like to call it ‘assimilation of the altar’. And that’s something that happened in the past; that’s what happened with Irish, with Italian immigrants, with German immigrants. Like if you notice in this conversation, a lot of what we’re seeing today is what people were noticing, a hundred or 130 years ago with the immigrant groups that were coming then. Is this happening with a whole new group of people in the United States? And it turns out it’s not that different. And in some ways, it’s a little faster. So it took on average, the Irish about five generations to assimilate by our measures. And that’s probably because the Irish, when they came here, they were especially poor, especially devastated, especially poorly educated and coming from a real backwards part of Europe at that time. They’ve caught up, Ireland’s caught up, but back then, it was really backwards by comparison to the United States. They didn’t even use money in large parts of Ireland because there was basically a feudal economy where you would pay your landlord in produce that you made from your farm. And then you get shoved into industrial aged New York. Crazy, right? Crazy transition. But if you think about today, like an immigrant from Mexico or from India or from Nigeria, they don’t have to learn how to read a clock. They don’t have to learn how to use money. They don’t have to learn how to rent an apartment. They know all these things already and they have some exposure to American culture through TV and music and everything else. So, in a sense, there’s a ton of pre-assimilation going on around the world because American culture is so dominant. The English language is just so dominant globally that it really helps jump start that process. So if I were looking backwards at time from the year 3000, I would say the assimilation trends in the United States around the year 2021 are far superior to what they were in the United States in the year 1921. I’m just that much more optimistic about it.

Denzil Mohammed: That’s fascinating. Clearly, this has happened before. This is a natural phenomenon that happens when people move and whether they came from Ireland or from Italy or from Guatemala, it’s probably going to follow the same trajectory. One of the other biggest misconceptions that you addressed is on crime. And it’s interesting to note that as populations have increased in the U.S., that’s in Metro areas, violent crime rates have gone down. Yet, we’ve seen this mushrooming of immigration to the U.S. since the late sixties. Tell me a little bit about that. And how do you counter people who come with other statistics about immigrants and crime that totally contradict yours?

Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah. So what you said is absolutely right; going back to the late 19th century, there have been about half a dozen different government commissions that have studied the issues of immigrant assimilation in the United States. And most of these commissions have been stacked against immigration. The Alibi Congress and basically nativists are put on the boards to study these things. But what’s remarkable is, every time, from the early 20th century, from the Dillingham commission, which recommended quotas to keep out Southern and Eastern Europeans because they were genetically inferior, supposedly. Up until the Barbara Jordan commission in the 1990s, that took a look at immigration, also stacked with a bunch of people who are anti-immigration on that commission. Every single one of them, they say a bunch of negative things about immigration, but they have all admitted that immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than the native-born Americans and much less likely to be incarcerated. So this is something that goes back over a century; this finding and continues to today. In fact, when you take a look at the census data, because we do have census data on crime, and we take a look at those who are incarcerated in American prisons, the foreign-born population in prison, as a percentage, is below the percentage of nationwide population. And we know that for a fact. That is uncontested. What other people say, though, is ‘I may believe, Alex, that legal immigrants have a much lower crime rate,’ but then they say ‘Illegal immigrants have a much higher crime rate, though.’ And they say that because, well, they broke immigration laws. So they must be more likely to commit crimes rather than just these immigration law violations. And Ann Coulter in her book, Adios America, which, and I say this unironically, is actually a great book because you’ll understand what an anti-immigration person thinks about all this stuff. In very clear detail. I learned more from that book, I think, than any other book on immigration, surprisingly. And what she said is, ‘Illegal immigration is a huge source of crime. And the reason why you know that is because no state counts criminal activity or convictions or arrests by immigration status.’ And she has this funny line in her book where she says, ‘Nielsen American census bureau people know how many pigs are being raised on American farms, but you’re telling me they don’t know how many criminals were arrested or illegal immigrants? Of course they’re hiding it!’ And she says they’re hiding it to cover up some great things.

Denzil Mohammed: That is very scientific, by the way.

Alex Nowrasteh: Oh yeah. Very scientific criticism. It’s just this nativist paranoia. But what’s fascinating is, she’s right about 49 states. 49 states do not count crime or convictions or arrests by immigration status, but one state dots. And that’s the state of
Texas, which is the best state to measure for this. It’s a border state. It has one of the greatest numbers of immigrants in the country. The second greatest number of immigrants in the country are in Texas. The second largest unlawful or illegal immigrant population is in Texas and a lot of them are Hispanic, which, when people talk about crime and immigration, they’re mainly talking about Hispanic immigrants. They’re not really complaining about Asian immigrants. They’re complaining about Hispanic immigrants. And, even better, Texas has been governed by Republicans for about 27 years nonstop. So there’s no argument you can make about some kind of liberal conspiracy to cover up illegal immigrant crime, right? They’ll want to report it. And what does it show? You take a look at the Texas state data on this. You take a look at criminal convictions committed by people by immigration status. You’ll find that illegal immigrants have a criminal conviction rate about 37 percent below that of native-born Americans and legal immigrants have one that’s 57 percent below native-born Americans. And that’s as a percentage of each subpopulation. So just to give you an example, the native-born American criminal conviction rate, 2019 was 1,190 convictions for every 100,000 native-born Americans. For illegal immigrants, it was 749 convictions for illegal immigrants for every 100,000 and for legal immigrants who was 510 for every 100,000. So it’s just clear as daylight that these numbers line up in an incredible way. And when you take a look at different crimes like homicide, when you take a look at sex crimes, when you take a look at larceny, when you take a look at all these crimes, you go down the list and about the same relationship holds. Legal immigrants and illegal immigrants are much less likely to commit homicides and be convicted of them or arrested for them. Well, larceny it’s the same thing. Sex crimes is the same thing. So this is just across the board. We take a look at this and this is what holds and people spend a lot of time arguing about why this is the case, but we’ve come to the point now where people don’t really dispute that this is the case, that legal immigrants and illegal immigrants have a much lower crime rate. This has been a sea change in opinion the last couple of years, but I finally convinced people, even Mark Krikorian, I even convinced him. He has this great quote in the Dallas Morning News where somebody asked him about my paper. And he said, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that illegal immigrants have a much lower crime rate than native-born Americans.’ The only response they have is, ‘Well, one is too many.’ And if you want to talk about how to allocate scarce law enforcement resources to diminish crime, knowing which populations, by immigration status, are the most dangerous, is worth knowing. Because we only have so many police officers, so many resources to develop the best. And if you really want to make an impact on crime, you should police more the native born population; which, I’m sorry to say, us native born Americans are super crime prone and super more likely to kill each other, than you should police illegal immigrants or legal immigrants.

Denzil Mohammed: That is such a powerful point. It better resonates because this is what the data has consistently shown. And to remind listeners that, for instance, authorized immigrants; people who are hoping for their green cards, for instance, they walk a very, very tight rope when it comes to committing crimes. They can be instantly deported if they commit certain kinds of crimes. So they have additional evidence to stay on the side of public safety versus U.S. boards who don’t have that kind of risk.

Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, that’s right. Gary Becker, who’s a late Nobel Prize winning economist. He studied the economics of crime and he said, ’If you want to understand the turrets for crime, you need to multiply the chance of being caught times the punishment. And that will basically be the deterrence.’ And the thing is, for any crime, any immigrant, whether unlawful or legal, who is not a citizen of the United States, the punishment of being caught for committing community crime is much greater because the punishment is they get to serve their prison sentence, and then they get deported. And being deported is not technically a crime under U.S. law, but from the perspective of the immigrant, it is oftentimes a much bigger punishment than being in prison. And as a result of that, the deterrence factor is enormous. And as a result of that, people who decide to become immigrants are just going to be those types of people who just don’t really want to commit crimes because they’re thinking ahead. And the one thing we know about criminals is they don’t really think ahead. And immigrants, one of the things we do know is they’re doing it for the future, for themselves and they really think ahead.

Denzil Mohammed: They do it for the future. They want to establish a better life for themselves and their kids. Putting that in jeopardy, they don’t want to do that. That’s not in the equation. And thinking long-term that’s a fascinating way to position immigrants. And that’s really very true.

Alex Nowrasteh: It’s like an investment. It’s like an investment that they make in themselves and in the United States, as a result. The median immigrant who comes here to the United States from a country around the world can expect a four fold increase in income, adjusting for cost of living. That is tremendous. I’ve never had a job where one job to the next is a fourfold increase. I just can’t imagine. And a fourfold increase for somebody from Latin America or from Africa or from Asia. That’s a lot bigger difference in terms of the standard of living than a four fold increase for me would be. Like you increase my income by a factor of four, I’ll buy another house or something like that. I’ll fly first class. That’s nice, right? But it’s not going to be the difference between me sending my kids to school or not. It’s not the difference between seeing a doctor when I’m sick and not. It’s not the difference between me being able to retire at some point and not. That’s what these people face. So it is tremendous investment in themselves. And as a result, they invest in the United States! And it’s better for all of us.

Denzil Mohammed: Better for all of us. they want better paying jobs, they want to climb the ladder, they want to make more money. They pay more in taxes as a result. Immigrants or refugees give back more than the benefits that they initially received. JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant contributions, history topics and research produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thanks for joining us for today’s gripping discussion on the facts to combat all those anti-immigrant messages. If you have feedback or know someone we should talk to, email Denzil, that’s D-E-N-Z-I-L (at) jobmakerspodcast.org. We’re going to be off for Thanksgiving but back on December 2nd, when Alex Nowrasteh discusses undocumented immigrants, anti-immigration research and Ann Coulter in the next Jobmakers.