In part two of an interview with Alex Nowrasteh, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, he shares research on how immigrants benefit all Americans. He also discusses where anti-immigrant myths come from and how they can be countered. Listen to the episode to find the facts behind the rhetoric.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: In the last episode of JobMakers, we began a very enlightening conversation with the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh, their director of immigration studies, and a regular immigration commentator on Fox and other news outlets. He’s compiled a great booklet that you can download for free at cato.org or libertarianism.org, called The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong. Last time, Alex laid out the facts for us on immigrants and immigration in the U.S., countering many of the false narratives we’ve been fed all our lives, and our ancestors fed. Facts like: public safety has increased as immigration to the U.S. has increased; immigrants aren’t a lot for the Democratic Party; as immigration increased, so did American prosperity. This week, Alex hones in on a fact that research has consistently found: that immigrants benefit Americans. And given his many years of speaking on this topic to anti-immigrant audiences, he gives us his insight on where anti-immigrant arguments come from, as you’ll find out in this week’s JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Where does all this misinformation or disinformation come from? I spoke to Professor James Witte from George Mason University’s Institute for Immigration Research, and he made very clear that there’s something called misinformation and there’s something called disinformation. And you mentioned names like Mark Krikorian and Ann Coulter, who I would argue are possibly spreading disinformation, actively doing that. People are being fed certain messages in their minds, and if they believe certain things as facts, for instance, the crime, where does it come from? You’ve been talking to this audience for a long time.
Alex Nowrasteh: I think it comes from many different places. I think part of it is, people focus on anecdotes and they don’t focus on data. So they’ll look at the newspaper and see some horrible crime committed by somebody who is an immigrant, and they focus on that, they don’t look at the data behind it. And we do that with everything, by the way. It’s a real problem with human cognition and perception, it’s a big systemic problem. So I think that really pollutes this debate a lot, if people focus on anecdotes and on those cases. I think some of it also comes from the way that our brains are hardwired. Our ancestors grew up in caves, on the savannas of Africa and other places, and they evolved for that kind of environment where resources are fixed. There’s only so many buffalo running around that we can hunt to feed ourselves and our family. So in that kind of environment where resources are fixed, a new person coming in, or a new group, really does lead to a decrease in resources for everybody, really does make your group poor. And so you view outsiders with suspicion, you view new people with suspicion, it’s a dangerous thing. But we live in a modern world. We have free markets, we have trade, we have capitalism, we have what’s called positive sum growth. People are creators, we create things, we’re not just taking animals from the environment to eat or clothe ourselves. We’re making goods and services from raw materials and from the ingenuity of the human brain. And so what’s happened is our minds are just not evolved. Our economy has evolved faster than our minds have kept up. And as a result of that, we have a very primitive mindset where we just see new people, whether they’re from abroad or whether they’re births or whatnot, as taking away from us. And it’s a primitive mindset, it’s an incorrect mindset. And I think part of it is a lot of people who are anti-immigrant don’t actually want to tell you why, or they don’t actually know why. They just don’t like foreigners, and they look for a reason to justify why they don’t like foreigners and they go down this list. So one of the things that I’m worried about is they might say, “I don’t like immigrants because they take our jobs and lower our wages,” and I respond to that. And then they go on to the next one, “well, immigrants are going to take welfare,” and I respond to that. And they go, “well, they’re going to be criminals and terrorists,” and I go down the list, and I worry that I’m not actually responding to the real reason. They’re just giving me what they think are acceptable reasons. And so we’re doing this whole long song and dance where we’re not really responding to what the other person is saying or really thinking, and that’s just a horrible, difficult way to talk about it. I suspect that a lot of the reason why people don’t like immigrants is they just don’t like foreigners, and it’s really, really hard to say that without sounding like a xenophobe, and people don’t want to sound like xenophobes, people who don’t like immigrants. And so it makes it impossible to have this discussion. So in a way, it’s sort of like political correctness and patriotic correctness, which is the right-wing variety, makes it very difficult to have an honest conversation about immigration. But I will say, I think there’s one thing that people don’t talk about very much that I think matters a lot, and this is chaos. I think most people dislike and hate chaos, and they view our immigration system, they view what happens on the border, they view all this stuff as chaos. And if people see chaos, they become immediately turned off. They hate it and they want to clamp down on whatever that chaotic thing is. You see it with the drug war, you see it with crime, you see it with everything else. So as long as we have a chaotic border, people are going to be really upset about immigration. Even though the border has very little to do with the total immigration debate, it’s a very small feature of it, but it bleeds over on everything else. But the catch–22 is, we can’t get control of the border until we let more people in legally, but we can’t let more people in legally until people think that there’s no chaos on the border!
Denzil Mohammed: We know visa overstays, for instance, traditionally account for more unauthorized immigration in the U.S. There’s no focus on that. Legal immigration is a huge deal, people getting their green cards, being naturalized every year, entering our workforce. There’s no focus on that. But focusing on the chaos is what has engendered this kind of disposition among people. And you brought up the idea of anecdotes versus data and research. The border, individual crimes, alleged rape in Virginia high school, things like that, those are the things that people remember. They don’t remember that 13.7 percent of the U.S. population is foreign–born. They still believe in what they hear, that it’s an invasion and an infestation, it’s probably closer to 50 percent, doubting the census numbers because somehow the census may be biased. We’re up against a lot here, Alex, so I don’t envy your work at all.
Alex Nowrasteh: Oh, it’s a challenge. What’s interesting is the late economist Alberto Alesina did a bunch of surveys in Europe and the United States, and he just asked about some factual questions first. He was like, “what percentage of the population is foreign–born,” “what percentage are immigrants,” et cetera. And then he asked them what they thought about immigration policy, and one of the things he found is that people who are very opposed to immigration and immigrants just greatly exaggerate the percentage of the population that’s foreign–born. They will exaggerate by a factor of three or four. So they’ll think the immigrant population is 60 percent when it’s really like 14 percent. So people are not just wrong and misperceiving things, they are twisting their view of facts to fit that. I mean, there is no city in America where it’s 60 percent foreign–born, right? The largest is just over 40 percent in Miami. To be wrong by 50 percent upwards from that shows a level of twisting reality to fit your partisan biases to an extent that is worrying.
Denzil Mohammed: One of the difficulties in doing research on immigration, you pointed out earlier that they don’t ask your immigration status when you go to court, when you’re picked up for something. It’s difficult to show that immigration causes certain things, for instance, economic revitalization of all the metro areas since the sixties, it’s because immigrants moved in. Why is it so difficult as you as a researcher and so many others out there to parse out definitively about immigration?
Alex Nowrasteh: So part of the problem is there’s a lot of things going on. Immigrants, just to give you an example, they increase the supply side of the economy. More workers, increased supply side, because that means more things can be made. There’s more productive resources in the United States. But is that causing all the increase, or is the demand for these workers, by an inherently growing U.S. economy, causing that? And then the immigrants are just going to the demand and then they’re rising together? So it’s just really hard to parse that. It’s what economists called causal inference, which is trying to tease out what causally happens there. We can definitely find that demand plays a big role. People are coming to the U.S. because wages are high and they’re much more productive here. But after the immigrants get here, they increase productivity, they increase the wages of native-born Americans because immigrants are not just workers, they’re also consumers, they buy things. And by buying things, that’s more customers, and having more customers means that American workers who are supplying these goods and services to new customers become more productive because the prices go up for these goods and services. It’s just this miraculous new thing. What we see across economies around the world is more people means more productivity, more people making things, more people buying things. And the measure of your wealth is how many things and goods and services you have access to. It’s not the number on your bank account, it’s how many things you can get with that number in your bank account. Immigrants increase the supply of stuff dramatically, and that’s something that we just lose sight of. But the evidence is overwhelming. Even George Borjas, who is the most skeptical of immigration, of the benefits in the United States, of any economist around who is published in the [inaudible], even he admits, using the evidence in the way that he does through his sort of analysis, immigrants increase the amount of production in the United States by somewhere around one quarter to one half of a percentage point of GDP. So you’re talking between like $60 and $90 billion a year in additional stuff made by native–born Americans just by immigrants being here. Does not include at all the roughly 12 to 15 percent of GDP that immigrants produce in themselves, but they just make Americans more productive by being here.
Denzil Mohammed: So issues like economics, labor, manufacturing, but then you get into also things like housing values, even crime. We look at the preponderance of evidence and we see that there is some sort of relation, even though we can’t say directly some immigration causes X or Y. And with the crime, immigration goes up, crime goes down. Immigrants move into areas with low rent, over a generation they build up storefronts, they get safer sidewalks, they start bringing in customers to the nail salons, things like that.
Alex Nowrasteh: If you look to the places where immigrants go, you see this happening. You don’t see immigrants going to places in West Virginia or in Eastern Kentucky or other places that are suffering. And part of the reason they’re not going there is those places are doing poorly, but those places are also doing poorly because immigrants aren’t going there and they can’t make these investments in public safety or start new businesses. They’re going to cities and suburbs around the country that are growing well and making a positive contribution.
Denzil Mohammed: Immigrants go where the jobs are. I mean, that’s why suddenly immigrants are going to the Dakotas, they never went there before. They’re going to Nebraska in meatpacking plants. They’re filling incredible voids, and we saw that a lot during the pandemic in terms of things like agriculture and food supply. Immigrants are almost 50 percent of our agriculture workers. What would we have done? What position would we have been in without that massive, disproportionately large essential workforce? And in terms of agriculture and other areas, many of them are undocumented, right?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah. Many of them are unauthorized immigrants in a lot of these places. The most mobile immigrants in the U.S. economy that is willing to move from one area to another at the drop of a hat are usually unauthorized or unlawful immigrants in the United States. And that is something that’s really underappreciated, having this large mobile workforce is dramatically positive. And one of the interesting things, many of us had to work remotely for a while during the pandemic, a lot of white collar workers had to work remotely. And if it weren’t for the large number of H-1B visa holders, high–skilled temporary workers, many of whom worked in IT making that possible for us, it would have been much harder for a lot of mid–range and higher income people to work remotely like they were able to. So imagine the world without these hundreds of thousands of H-1B workers already working here in the United States, making IT services more available to American firms. A lot of smaller businesses probably would’ve shut down entirely. A lot of big companies would have had a lot of trouble, if not had to shut down entirely, or they would have had to outsource all these services to other countries around the world. And we didn’t have to do that nearly as much because we have such a large pool of talented workers on the H-1B visa.
Denzil Mohammed: Because we attract and hopefully retain talent. And might I just add, we are recording this podcast over Zoom, and we have a high–skilled immigrant to thank for that. You’re from Southern California. You live in DC now. You sound pretty American to me, but you have your own sort of immigration story, don’t you?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah. I mean, the thing is we all do as Americans. Just about a 100 percent of us have an ancestor in the last several centuries who came here from somewhere else. My paternal grandparents immigrated from Iran in the late 1940s. My father was born here in Wisconsin, so he’s this tall, dark, swarthy guy who looks Iranian, who talks with a slightly Oshkosh accent, it’s kind of hilarious. And he moved to LA to work in the film business. My mother’s family has been here, the first one in their family came in the late 1600s. But then some left, went to Canada, came back, others came from Europe, French Jews from Europe, Germans, basically a whole mess of Western European Jews and Protestants coming over at different times. And then they both grew up in the Midwest and then moved to California to work in the film industry, met out here. And then my brother and I, we’re technically I guess third generation because the stuff that we grew up in, but I don’t speak Farsi, I’ve never been to Iran. I eat the food every once in a while, but frankly I eat Italian food more, and Mexican food more, and Thai food more, and Chinese food more. So I’m really just this American mutt with a really hard to pronounce last name, and basically people view me as ethnically ambiguous, which, you know, I’m fine. I guess I am ethnically ambiguous, that’s being an American. And my labor on this issue is not a labor born of personal experience. I grew up around lots of immigrants in Southern California, that’s the norm to me, it feels great, but I don’t have a personal experience or something troubling that happened to me. It’s partly because I’m sort of a patriotic American and this is something that really makes America different, and because of my background as a social scientist because immigration is so fascinating, and because immigration is something where if we’re able to liberalize it in the United States, allow more legal immigrants to come in, it’s worth tens of trillions of dollars to our economy in the world.
Denzil Mohammed: That, plus the access to Thai food and Mexican food and Italian food and Chinese food.
Alex Nowrasteh: Oh, yeah.
Denzil Mohammed: Which we are so lucky to have in the U.S. because of immigration. We take for granted all these things that we’re afforded that people in other countries aren’t, and we have this buffet, this smorgasbord, of things to choose from every single day, because that’s what immigration gave us. So people can download The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong. It’s a really beautiful read, it’s very visual, nothing is complexly stated. It’s free to download, you can get it at libertarianism.org and also on the Cato Institute’s website. Any last comments about this particular project?
Alex Nowrasteh: So this project is the combination of over a decade of my work and research on this, bringing together tens of thousands of different pages of research written by other scholars and doing original research myself. So if you want to see the highlights of what I’ve learned on this topic for a long career, with only spending maybe 20 minutes of reading, this is the thing for you to get. I highly recommend it. So please check it out, download it, and if you have any questions or other follow up, send me an email. You can find my email on Cato’s website at cato.org.
Denzil Mohammed: And soon I’m going to be talking to one of your colleagues, Johan Norberg, the author of Open: The Story of Human Progress, and I think we’ll explore some of these themes further. Alex Nowrasteh, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers.
Alex Nowrasteh: Thanks a lot for having me, it was a real pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant contributions, issues 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. Got comments, questions, know someone we should talk to? Email denzil@jobmakerspodcast.org. Thanks for joining us for this week’s revealing discussion on how immigrants benefit all of us. Next Thursday at noon, we’ll meet one of those immigrants, Carlos Castro. His businesses in Virginia have employed hundreds of people over decades, a far cry from his humble beginnings in El Salvador, where there were no such opportunities, as you’ll learn in the next JobMakers podcast.