What’s So Good About Immigration?

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Zeke Hernandez: We give a million green cards a year, two thirds of those, of those green cards go to people that are coming for family reunification. Only 15%, actually less than 15 percent are employment based green cards, right? And so, and so if you’re running a business in this country, it is impossible to hire all the, all the talent that you need.

Only 5, 000, only 5, 000 go to people that don’t have a college degree. I can assure you that my state of Pennsylvania by itself needs way more than 5, 000 legal or workers who don’t have a college degree. So the need for people is so much higher than the supply in our legal system that that creates an incentive for illegal or irregular immigration.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my co host, the executive director of The Progress Network, Emma Varvaloucas. And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we talk to interesting people about interesting topics. scintillating people about scintillating topics, wise people about unwise public discourse.

And we do so with an eye toward how are we failing to address our problems in the spirit of how are we going to solve our problems? One of the conversations that’s happening, particularly in the United States, although it’s also happened in Europe a lot over the past couple of years, that’s gotten increasingly hysterical is this whole question of immigration, legal, illegal, and otherwise.

If you have even a momentary glimpse onto the presidential and congressional campaign trail, immigration is one of the hot button issues of our time, poll after poll confirms. Many Americans, even those living far from the southern border where most of the issues about immigration and illegal immigration arise, express deep concern about the system and deep concern about illegal immigration.

And the result has been that many politicians are making that a centerpiece of what they will do to solve the problem. What’s fascinating about that, of course, is how few of us really understand what’s going on, really know what’s going on. We know what we’re being told is going on, but it’s actually hard to find hard data about what’s actually going on on the southern border.

And how few of us really understand our immigration system and the way in which immigration into the United States actually shapes the U. S. economy. So, we’re going to talk to someone today who’s written a recent book, who is a sober voice in an un sober time, and a cogent voice in an incoherent time. So, who are we going to talk to, Emma?

Emma Varvaloucas: So, today we’re going to talk to Zeke Hernandez. He’s a professor of business at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and we’re going to talk to him about the book you mentioned, which is called The Truth About Immigration, Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers. And that book has a lot to do with his original research into how immigration affects immigrants.

innovation, investments, all kinds of different economic impacts, but not just the economy. We’re also going to talk about lots more things. So are we ready to talk about Zeek? Talk about Zeek. Are we ready to talk to Zeek and also talk about Zeek?

Zachary Karabell: We are ready to talk about, talk with, have a conversation.

Conversate. Let’s do it. Zeke Hernandez, thank you for joining us today for What Could Go Right? So, immigration’s been a topic, an issue, a question, a deeply. Woven into American society issue forever. And certainly of late has become a much more palpable political issue. Hardly the first time that’s happened.

There have been multiple backlashes against immigration in the United States following waves of acceptance. So this is not. unique in American society, our current contested moment. What may be unique is that there’s been no actual legislation about immigration since the 1980s. So what do you make of the current immigration hysteria?

Is it, is it just how Americans react when they’re feeling in economically insecure? There’s kind of a, there has been a natural tendency to kind of turn on Immigrants as a cause, and probably not just an American thing, obviously the European Union and some of the tilt of European states to the right over the past years was seemingly indirect response to this surge of immigrants from the Syrian civil war to places where immigrants hadn’t been like Sweden and elsewhere.

So not, you know, this is not just an American thing. What do you make of this current maelstrom around immigration in the United States?

Zeke Hernandez: You know, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. And let me start answering that question by actually saying that The premise of your show is very appropriate for this topic because when we talk about immigration, if you look at the evidence, it’s not one of those issues where you have to kind of go look for what could be right, right?

And you find, you know, 5 percent of it is right. Like, Almost all of it is right and good for us, and yet it’s like, you know, it’s sunny and 68 outside, but the way we talk about the issue is as if there were a giant storm and a hurricane is coming, right? And so the disconnect between what reality is and how we talk about it is, is, is really disconcerting.

and so what do I make of it? I think, you know, that would be my first answer. It’s disconcerting when you actually know the truth, meaning the empirical truth. But it’s also not new. So, you know, immigration is. An issue that’s politically very advantageous to frame it negatively. it always mobilizes a certain percentage of voters and a non trivial percentage.

And so it works. The, the, the reason is that it’s politically effective to speak negatively about it. And, you know, we’re at a time where for a bunch of the convergence of a bunch of historical and economic reasons. It’s been very advantageous for certain parties to frame it negatively, and like you said, not just here in the U.

S., but all over the world.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, Zeke, you know, you definitely opened up the quintessential What Could Go Right question, which is, you know, hearing that it’s really sunny and 68 outside is music to our ears. So why don’t you tell us why that’s the case? I mean, why the impact of immigration is so positive, even though I guess the reputation, quote unquote, is the opposite?

Zeke Hernandez: Well, I would say, you know, an easy place to start is let’s look at economic effects, right? How, you know, how does immigration affect us economically, not immigrants, but us? You could think of. of five key ingredients, five key inputs that a successful, prosperous, vibrant economy needs. and those inputs are investment, innovation, job creation, talent, and taxes.

You want those five inputs, right? Without that, an economy Struggles to thrive and the evidence of, you know, decades and decades of research is that immigrants contribute positively to all five of those key ingredients. Without them, we would have not just less of them, we would have less of a variety of those key ingredients.

And we would be poorer. We would be worse off. And then to that, we could add all the sort of cultural contributions that make our communities more interesting to live in, you know, that make our food more delicious, that make our music more entertaining, et cetera. So I’m happy to get into any one of those specifically, but that’s kind of my overview answer.

So it’s really study in 68, right? Immigrants bring us all these good things.

Zachary Karabell: So one pushback, and we can get into the question of illegal immigration a little later in the conversation, but one of the pushbacks I’ve heard. And it’s a little hard to know what’s real in all these pushbacks and questions, is that the legal immigration system, because it hasn’t really had much updating since the mid 80s, is also really not functioning optimally, and that it’s becoming the lottery for visas, is such a small number once you factor out the ones that are taken up by family members and, and then there’s, you know, HB1 visas, there’s student visas, there’s professional visas, but that it’s actually getting unduly hard to legally immigrate to the United States relative to the past, relative to need, and relative to the, just the many, Not only the many benefits, just how much of American society is essentially constructed by immigration, but a seemingly broad range of American support for legal immigration.

Again, we can get to the question about illegal immigration. non documented immigration. But what, where do we stand with that question?

Zeke Hernandez: Well, actually sort of the issue of legal and illegal immigration are inseparable because the problems and all the dysfunctions in the legal system that you started to mention are the main cause of the amount of illegal immigration.

You mentioned that we haven’t updated our system since the 80s and you know, the, the, the accurate date really is 1990. 1990 was the latest. The last reform in U. S. history where we updated not so much the types, but more the quantity, the number of people that could come through different visa types, you know, family reunification, employment, et cetera.

And we haven’t updated it since then. So it’s been nearly 35 years. The economy has more than doubled in size, by the way, right? So from 9 trillion to 25 trillion. And, we didn’t allow enough immigrants even in 1990 for the number of people that we needed for all kinds of reasons back then. So the system was outdated off the bat and now it’s been, you know, 35 years and we haven’t updated it.

And so, just to give you a few, I think a few facts and figures that are very telling, we give a million green cards a year, two thirds of those, of those green cards go to people that are coming for family reunification. Only 15%, actually less than 15%, are employment based green cards. Right, and so, and so if you’re running a business in this country, it is impossible to hire all the, all the talent that you need.

You just cannot get it. The temporary work visas like H 1B, H 2A, H 2B can’t keep up. You know, in our green card system, out of that 15 percent of green cards that go for employment based purpose, only 5, 000, only 5, 000 go to people that don’t have a college degree. Right? And so, if you, if you own a factory, a farm, what else?

A construction site, I mean, you name it, you need home care. I, I can assure you that my state of Pennsylvania by itself needs way more than 5, 000 legal or workers who don’t have a college degree. So, all of that decrepit, outdated, insufficient system means that the need for people is so much higher than, than the supply in our legal system, that that creates an incentive for illegal or irregular immigration.

Right? People come in knowing that they’re going to find work, businesses either turn a blind eye or, or, or don’t even know that they’re hiring someone that’s here without authorization. So it’s our own fault that we have illegal immigration, and so you wanna, you wanna take care of a better legal system and illegal immigration simultaneously, we just have to update the legal system, and illegal immigration will take care of itself.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, what’s funny about immigration is that It’s something that people have really intense opinions about and then they actually have like very little idea of like how this all actually works, right? It’s just a really great online game that you can play. You can like take on the role of someone in the world and try to come to the U.

1. legally. And so like you’re a 26 year old, you know, engineer in China. I realize like, you know, exactly what you’re saying now, like actually like just how difficult it is to come to the U. S. With all good intentions, right? I wonder if you could maybe explain some of that like lack of public knowledge because it seems that for a topic that inspires so much tension in the United States that we would all like have a little bit of a better idea of what the system is as it actually stands.

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah, yeah. And I think again, perhaps going back to that analogy, the reason that we Say a storm is coming when it’s 68 and sunny is because of that ignorance. The reason that I was inspired to write this book is because after nearly 20 years of doing research on this topic and understanding the system, I started going out and speaking to groups from all walks of life.

about this issue. And it wasn’t just highly educated groups like, you know, like the students that I teach. It was people from the, you know, the Rotary Club of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, church groups, community service organizations, business executives, and even, of all people, congressional staffers who are in charge of immigration policy.

And to all these groups, I would administer a questionnaire, 10 questions, right? This is the professor in me who can’t help but test, right? And so I would give out 10 questions. And every group, no matter their politics, no matter their level of education, would get basically every question wrong. And so we really do have this systematic ignorance problem.

And, and I think it’s because there are, there are, again, a minority, but a very motivated minority that has a very powerful incentive to distort the truth, right? So if you read the headlines, the headlines about immigration tend to be very negative. If you read the headlines, they focus on a very narrow issue like a temporary crisis at the southern border and the facts are not reported.

You know, and again, there’s a great political gain in distorting the truth and distorting the facts. And so I think it’s a lot of one flip side to that is that the majority of Americans view immigration favorably. They’re just not very passionate about it. Right? They feel about it the way you and I feel about ketchup or mustard, right?

Like, we like it, but we don’t spend all our day thinking about ketchup or mustard. But then you have a very, very, very small vocal group of people who are obsessed with like telling you that ketchup and mustard are terrible for you and that’s all they talk about it. So, so you get this like distortion, right?

You start believing that, oh, maybe this ketchup and mustard I’m eating isn’t so good for me. even though that’s not true. So, so yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of the political incentive of a minority that gets in the way. I don’t, I don’t want to oversimplify it, but that’s a big part of the answer.

Emma Varvaloucas: One thing I will add to that before Zachary asks this question is that I’m, I like reverse immigrated from the U.

1. to Greece. So I live in Greece now. And I will say that one way to make you really enthusiastic about ketchup and mustard is to take ketchup and mustard away. So like living in a country that does not historically have high levels of immigration, The Mexican food is gone. The Japanese food is gone. The Thai food is gone.

Like there’s so many things that like all of a sudden when you realize when you’re in a different context in the U. S. that you’re like, Oh, I, I really should have connected the dots a little bit better about like why it’s like this here. So I just wanted to add that.

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah, no, I think that’s such a good way to put it.

And I try to make that point a lot is actually it’s, it’s a bit like the fish that doesn’t realize it’s in water, right? And so in a country like the United States, it’s We, we are so blind to so many of the benefits, right? I’ll go back to these big five inputs into the economy, right? Not just the foods we eat, but all the technological innovations, like literally the technologies that are making it possible for us to have and record this conversation and for your listeners to listen to it on their phone, through the airwaves.

So much of that, of such a high percentage of that, is because of immigrant talent, right? Immigrants are just 16 percent of inventors in the US, but they account for 36 percent of patents, right? So more than double their representation. So many of the leisure activities that we enjoy from basketball to soccer.

to yoga are, you know, things that we wouldn’t have had without immigrants, you know, let alone a lot of the companies that are started, right? Immigrants start over half of technology startups in the United States, a quarter of all businesses in the United States. So, we are, we, like, our lives from wake up to sundown, are affected by contributions immigrants have made, but we just don’t see it.

We take it for granted because it’s just always been in the history of the United States. So perhaps a way to, like you said, Emma, to increase awareness is to imagine what would happen if we took away immigration, right? And we don’t, we somehow don’t think of it that way.

Zachary Karabell: Which we’ve done, which Americans have done in the past.

I mean, in 1880, Excluded all Chinese immigration for, a decade. We, in 1924, had a very draconian immigration bill that restricted many forms of legal immigration. Actually, one of the reasons why the United States did not take in Jews, European Jews fleeing from the Holocaust was a direct result of that 1924 bill.

And then we opened things up again in the 1960s. And now we’re in this kind of weird, you know, twilight zone of, inadequate legislation and unclear laws. Maybe illuminate for a moment, because even, even I think those who think of themselves as informed have a very hard time grappling with what’s actually going on in the Southern border, because.

If you listen to one political party or the other, you know, you essentially get irreconcilable realities. So on the one hand, you have one set of people saying, you know, there are tens of millions. I think we know that that’s factually impossible, but millions upon millions of people abusing asylum laws showing up, not enough staff at the border, people coming through, no enforcement.

And then you get the complete sort of forgetting of Whatever Donald Trump’s promises of deporting X numbers of people, you know, 2 million people were deported under Obama in 2009 to 2011. Partly, I guess, to lay the groundwork for an omnibus immigration reform that, that almost happened, but then didn’t.

You had both Bush and Obama actually building a fortified border and wall, just wasn’t a very pretty one. It was, you know, cinder blocks and barbed wire, just wasn’t a big, beautiful wall. But like, how many people are actually coming into the country and abusing asylum? Like, I have no idea. And do those figures actually exist, or is it just all hopelessly politicized?

Zeke Hernandez: Well, it’s mostly hopelessly politicized. you know, if, yeah, if you’re asking who is, how many people are coming and abusing asylum laws, that is a very hard question to answer, because presumably when someone is claiming asylum, they, they could be telling the truth or they could be lying, right? And we don’t have numbers on truth tellers and liars, right?

But I will say it’s a much smaller number than gets thrown out there and that people imagine and here’s why. You know, the big, the big shifts started happening, yeah, about, let’s say about a decade ago when, you know, up until then, the typical. Immigrant who was here without documentation was a Mexican male who would come here for work and was single, right?

And, and the entire system that America had built to deal with the border was based on that assumption that you would have sort of young men coming here for work and pretty much, you know, the U. S. sort of, you know, was sort of okay with, with a certain level of, of that kind of immigration. Then about a decade ago, you started getting a lot of people from Central America, more recently from Venezuela and Colombia.

And interestingly now, even from further parts of the world, right? People who are like crossing the Darien Gap and they’re coming from China and even India, and they’re coming as families and they’re claiming asylum, right? They’re not young men coming here for a job. And so the problem is we, as a country are not equipped to deal with that, right?

Having said that, if you come in through an authorized port of entry, and you request asylum, and you are told by an immigration officer that you may remain in the country while your case is being adjudicated, you are not in the country illegally. You are here legally. The government knows who you are, and they know where you are, and you have a date to show up in immigration court, and that is the vast majority of cases are that, right?

And so what you see in the news of people being called here like illegal immigrants. That is not the case. There are people who are here legally. They might be here temporarily, so their case might not be approved and then they have to go. And then you have a minority, which I don’t know how to put a number on that, but it is a minority that are crossing in between ports of entry.

So, the typical like illegal border crossers and because they’re coming here without authorization, and if they get through and we don’t know that they did, we don’t have a great count on that. but the most recent count of the illegal immigrant population in the U. S. went from about eleven We’re at 1 million to 11.

2, 11. 3, so the latest estimate is that there might be a few hundred thousand more, so we’re not talking millions. That’s the best I can give you. So we’re at the level of a few hundred thousand. That would be the ballpark.

Emma Varvaloucas: And what about the dual and like dueling realities that Zachary mentioned, where like if you’re living in a border town in Texas, like the reality of the situation.

It’s very different to you than if you’re living in Maryland. Same thing, you know, here in Europe. If you’re living on Samos, which is the Greek island where a lot of the refugees come through and there’s a huge refugee camp there, your reality is very different than somebody who’s living in, say, New York.

I don’t know, Lithuania.

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah, so it’s true that, there are certain pressure points in parts of the country that, that see the biggest numbers and, and, and, you know, so that would be, of course, other border towns, Florida, you know, people who are far, far away from those places. You know, they don’t experience that reality day to day.

Now, of course, with this busing of migrants, right, what, what, what Governor Abbott has tried to do is, in his own words, sort of bring the border to these woke liberal cities. And, and so, you know, you have places like Chicago, New York. Denver that are, that are experiencing some of that surge. So yeah, Emma, I think if you’re asking me about what’s the day to day experience, I think it is true that in the short run, in the short run, I mean, you know, within, in a matter of a few weeks or months, there can be chaos, right?

But again, the chaos is because our system is not equipped. We, and it’s a, it’s a system failure that we don’t have any systematic way of housing, feeding, paying for the immediate needs of these people that are arriving. And so indeed it’s chaos, but. Why is it chaos? Again, because our legislators have not acted, right?

And so they leave it up to the discretion of whoever happens to be around that day to figure out what to do with these people that are arriving in an irregular manner. But what’s interesting is that, you know, once you get past the first few months, it’s very clear, and we know this from the data, that these people very quickly, You know, they start integrating into the fabric of whatever community they settle in and they start working, they start paying taxes, in the long run start businesses, you know, they become functional citizens.

And so, a lot of what we’re dealing with is like very short term stuff, it’s, it’s just very noteworthy because it’s chaotic, right? And so I think if we separate short term from long term, that’s important. The other thing is the, the federal government, and this is Congress inaction, is, is a lot to blame because These jurisdictions that suffer the short term costs of, of kind of dealing with newcomers, they don’t have any federal help, right?

And so they do have a fair point when they’re saying, Hey, foul, like we’re not getting any help. That is true, right? We do need a way for the federal government. to help and distribute the cost more evenly. That is a fair point.

Zachary Karabell: As cynical as, as Governor Abbott and DeSantis ploy was to put all these, you know, people on buses to Northern cities, I was surprised at how effective that ploy ended up being.

I mean, and you know, it, it, it generated real anti immigrant sentiment in New York and Chicago and elsewhere in Boston, along with, you know, Exactly the kind of complaints you just articulated. I mean, I’m in New York City and this became a big thing of, you know, give us enough money to house and help these people because it’s coming out of our own budget without a tax base to support it.

It worked, right? I mean, it really worked in terms of it, it, it pushed the worst sorts of buttons of, of, you know, danger, Will Robinson, you’re coming, the immigrants are coming, they’re coming to take your jobs, they’re going to commit crimes. All it took was You know, it takes like one crime, the New York Post has a headline for a week.

These very old anti immigrant buttons seem very easy to activate in the United States, particularly when people are feeling economically secure. And I think, you know, you usually can track these things, not 100 percent one on one, but pro and anti tend to oscillate much as economic sentiment does. You know, people feel less economically secure.

They’re much more likely to believe that, oh my God, immigrants are coming and taking our jobs. They feel more economically secure. They’re much more likely to believe, oh my God, immigrants are coming and enriching. The warp and woof of our, of our collective fabric. Question, you know, there was this bill in February, bipartisan bill, to address both security and quotas and legality and DACA.

It seemed to actually be a decent bill. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if you read through it. I did not. And obviously it died before it had a chance to live. But. At least it gave me some hope that there was an emerging consensus. was that your sense, or not necessarily?

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah, I have mixed views on it, to be honest, right?

And I think, I was not against it. I thought it was better than doing nothing. But I think that, I’ll go back to your statement that, that sort of the stunt worked. It did, you know, the stunt of, of bringing kind of the border to the, to major cities worked in the sense that it, it caused even otherwise pro immigrant or liberal politicians to start using the same talking points, right, as the anti, anti immigrant movement does.

I think the, the problem with, enforcement only bills like this one was, or enforcement mainly bills. is that they think that if you just add more traffic cops and you give more traffic tickets, you will solve the problem at the border, you will solve the flow issues. But that’s only true if the speed limit is sensible, right?

If I put a 25 mile an hour speed limit on I 95 or whatever major highway goes through wherever you live, I can assure you, you can add all the traffic cops you want. But people will still speak right? If that is the only artery that is the essential artery for which they get to work and to the hospital and you know get to their kids and do whatever they need to do.

And so the, the, and we have a lot of evidence on this, so Doug Massey and a lot of other people have shown that the more you increase enforcement on a system. that it, that doesn’t have a high enough speed limit. In this case, it doesn’t allow enough people in. Actually, the more you incentivize, even more undocumented immigration, right?

And that’s because you increase the cost of moving back and forth through the border. So people come and stay permanently because it’s so costly, to move back and forth to have flow. And so I was, I was like, fine, we should pass this bill because it’s better than nothing. But my big critique is it did nothing to really reform the system significantly.

It didn’t increase the speed limit in the sense of providing significantly more green cards, significantly more employment, visas, etc. So again, enforcement has to enforce something that makes sense. Otherwise enforcement makes it worse. And then the problem is that you keep, I mean, we’ve done this for the last 60 years, right?

More enforcement creates bigger incentives for irregular immigration, which creates more anger, which creates political incentives to enforce more, and so forth and so forth, and you never solve the problem, and in fact, the tool used to supposedly solve it makes it worse. So that’s why I think that I would have been okay with the bill passing, but I, I wasn’t too sad that it didn’t be there, right?

Because until we have the, the, the famous comprehensive reform, enforcement won’t do anything.

Newscaster 1: Donald Trump, his campaign has been successful at the politics of fear, right? That crime everywhere, crime at the border, crime in your cities is tied to what he sees as this huge influx of Migrants, who he says are mostly criminals, they’re murderers, they’re rapists. So in that equation of facts. Data versus feeling.

How do you turn that to a winning combination?

News Guest 1: Oh, it’s a really good question, right? You, you, you do have to acknowledge people’s fear today. I mean, there are many neighborhoods in this country that have unacceptable levels of violence. That is just true. but you don’t have to feed in to the irrational fear that Trump is trying to make people feel.

feel, and it is important to push back on this idea of a migrant crime wave. We don’t have to accept that as the dominant narrative. Why? Because the data actually tells us that immigrants to this country commit crimes at a rate lower. The Natural Born Americans. Now that is an inconvenient narrative for Fox News and for the Trump campaign, but it is true.

So I think we have a moral obligation as well as a political obligation to push back against this idea that you are at risk if you live in a community with more migrants.

Emma Varvaloucas: Zeke, I wanted to go back to something that you talked about before with your five inputs on the economy and that Zachary has alluded to a couple times, which is the, like, the immigrants take your jobs.

I can’t say that without thinking about South Park going, take your jobs. Anyway, it’s just stuck in my mind forever since the early aughts. I’m curious to, to hear about why immigrants do create jobs, especially when The narrative, right, is there’s a certain number of jobs, there’s a certain number of people.

If you add more people, but not more jobs, then fewer slots for more people. So, yeah, enlighten us about that.

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah, well, look, if politics is the proximate cause of why we can’t make our immigration system better, the real fundamental cause is that we have terrible mental models of how the economy works.

Just terrible. And one of the worst is, is that we have this lay mental model of what a labor market is, right? And that model is, it’s a very much zero sum model. that is if I have a hundred workers in the economy right now and 20 more workers come in. Those 20 workers will directly compete for the jobs of the a hundred workers that were already there.

And then the law of supply and demand will mean that some will lose their jobs and wages will go down. That that is actually not how the world works. That’s just a bad model because that bad model of soup has makes, is based on two really bad assumption. The first one is that those 20 new people that are coming in are only here to compete for jobs, as if they’re not going to consume anything, right?

They’re just going to work but not spend their paycheck, right? They’re just going to work but not go to the movies. They’re just going to work but not buy food, right? They’re just going to work but they might, they’ll never start a business. They’ll never bring a good idea and introduce a new technology.

Do you see what I mean? And so you start to see how ridiculous it is to think that 20 new people only provide their labor but nothing else, right? And so once you realize, wait a minute, now we have an economy that’s 120 people large, that’s 20 percent more demand. Some of those are going to start businesses, some of those are going to invent a new technology that makes us more productive, etc.

And so that’s one, right? one reason why the model, You know, that bad mental model falls apart. And the second

Zachary Karabell: Hold on, let me interrupt you for one second. I mean, there is the pushback of remittances in that you could have people coming and living, you know, 20 to a room and sending back 80 percent of their paycheck to wherever they came from.

I’m not defending that as a pushback. I’m just saying That that pushback exists.

Zeke Hernandez: It does exist. It’s not correct. I mean, yes, immigrants do send a non trivial part of their paycheck back home many times, but it’s not, I mean, they still, like, they still have to live, right? And you still have to spend a significant portion of it here.

And it’s still more than zero, right? It’s still, they’re still spending more than Than, than what it was before. But the other, the other bad part is the assumption that those 20 new workers are identical to the a hundred ones that used to be there. It’s the assumption that a worker, as a worker, as a worker, no matter what they, where they come from, and that’s also not true.

We know from the evidence that immigrants are different in really useful ways. That is, they want different jobs. But for example, they do farm work and STEM work and construction work that American workers will not do or cannot do. But they also, even, even within the same professions, they bring different skills.

So like in construction, they might not speak English very well. So the native worker becomes the foreman and gets promoted and the immigrant workers do the drywall work, which doesn’t require language skills. And so then there’s kind of room for everyone. What I’m saying is the economic pie gets bigger, but it also gets more diverse.

in, in a way that is good for both native and immigrant workers. And so actually the, the latest estimate by, Kayumi and Perry is that in the last 25 years, the arrival of immigrants increased wages and created jobs for native workers, right? So there’s a win win rather than a win lose. And, and on top of that, those direct effects, you also have the other, the other elements of the big five I mentioned.

Immigrants are investing more in the economy, immigrants are starting businesses. Immigrants are creating new products and services. immigrants are paying taxes. So all of those things also make immigrants net job creators. And so, yeah. So the next time you hear the argument that immigrants are taking jobs or lowering wages, go, go to those two assumptions.

And usually people are making one or both of

Zachary Karabell: those. It’s interesting that, in conjunction with the anti immigrant sentiment that seems to be increasing. There still is pretty strong openness to student visas for people studying at American universities, including several hundred thousand Chinese students who still study in American universities.

For all the pseudo Cold War between China and the United States, there’s still a seeming openness to lots of Chinese students. I mean, you, you know, you do get moments of. suspicion that they’re all spying for the CCP, but nonetheless, the visa system seems to be providing them. And then you even have people like Trump at times saying, well, we should give all these college graduates who come, you know, we should give them a green card, which is sort of fascinating, right?

Coming from a other end of what you think is the most anti immigrant sentiment. How do you think this all plays out in the next couple of years? Are we going to, you know, if you had to read the tea leaves, right? If we’re having this conversation in a few years, are we going to get more and more draconian enforcement?

Like the bill earlier this year that didn’t pass, but presumably something will pass in 2025. I mean, I don’t know what it’s going to look like. Will you have actual pathways to citizenship a la some of the compromises that were floated about the dreamers in 2017, 2018? You know, there too, I thought that, I thought the Democrats should have kind of caved on the wall and accepted the dreamers bill because the wall was, you know, there’s already walls being built anyway.

So like, who cares? But no, no one asked me . And I just like, I wonder like where you think this all goes in the next couple years?

Zeke Hernandez: Well, I’ll give you a short run and kind of more long run answer, so I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll go with the, with the, you know, since this is a, a podcast is about positive things or optimism.

I’ll start with the pessimism. Pessimism and end with the look as long as it pays off politically to vilify immigrants. I think there is a very realistic state of the world in which the rhetoric will only get more negative. And for example, in the UK, you saw pushback even against international students, right?

So if you actually follow the press there, there was like this This thing about, oh, we shouldn’t even have international students in our universities, which hasn’t happened in the US. I can definitely see that talking point becoming a thing here in the United States. So, so yeah, I think as long, as long as there’s a political payoff, that, that will be there.

And there’s no indication that that is going away. I think it’ll be really telling to see actually how this election and the next one goes, right? Will that die as a political talking point or not? Here’s why I’m optimistic in the long run, and it’s not, it’s not out of like, oh, people will just all of a sudden be nice to outsiders.

I think the demographic reality is so stark that countries will have no choice but to become immigration beggars, right? If you look at our birth rates, If you look at our aging rates, there is no way that any advanced country can keep up with, with, with what they need, with the, with the people they need for a thriving economy and society.

without immigration. There’s just no way, right? Our birth rate is well below replacement rate, and it’s even worse in Korea, Japan, you know, continental Europe. So far, the U. S. has been an immigration chooser because the best and brightest want to come, because other countries haven’t been very desperate for immigrants.

But the demographic reality is such that I think countries are going to be vying for immigrants out of sheer desperation, and that’s going to That’s going to make politics much more favorable to immigrants and countries will adopt pro immigration policies out of sheer necessity. I’m not talking in a decade, but I think in 20 to 30 years, my prediction is our immigration politics will be surprisingly pro.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, this reminds me of a video I saw on social media. I think it was Germany, but it might not have been, but it was somewhere in Central Western Europe. There was a doctor shortage. So they have a lot of doctors come coming from Costa Rica. And, this woman had posted a video who is now a doctor in that country from Costa Rica because a patient was upset that, that their doctor wasn’t German or whatever it was.

And she was like, well, you can see me or you can see no one, you know, like those are your options.

But see, I wanted to ask you too, you know, a lot of this conversation here and a lot of your book is about myth busting, right? And particularly myth busting around things that are, you know, very triggering for a lot of people. They stoke a lot of strong emotions. How do you avoid becoming the, like, actually guy, you know, where it’s like somebody’s having a strong emotional reaction and you’re like, well, actually, blah, blah, blah.

And most of the times, you know, that doesn’t make people want to listen to you. So how do you get around that problem?

Zachary Karabell: And just to add to that, you know, one of the things we’ve struggled with over the past couple of years with The Progress Network is the sort of, I mean, maybe it’s depressing, maybe it’s just human nature, realization that quoting facts in the face of emotions Emotions win like 98 percent of the time.

People really, particularly in an agitated state, and I mean this collectively or culturally, doing the, yes, well, here’s the numbers just seems not only not to work, but almost to, to fuel ever more. So I don’t know, like on Emma’s point, what, what one does around that, particularly on this issue. Or have you found that in fact, people are more receptive when you say, I mean, I, you know, I think the quiz is great.

People love taking quizzes. I took the quiz online, failed abysmally. I think I got 38%. I was very pleased with myself. That was number zero, but maybe your experience has actually been different in this. You know, you have a genial nature, calm voice, that probably helps too.

Zeke Hernandez: Well, thank you for saying that.

I, I’m going to tell everyone I know that you said I have a genial nature.

Zachary Karabell: yeah, so what do I know? It’s 40 minutes on the podcast. Yeah, no, you, you got me figured out. No, we’re going to go with

Zeke Hernandez: it. Yeah, look, so I appreciate the question from both of you and, and, and Emma, I’m going to, if you’ll allow me, so I, I’m going to push back just a little bit.

on this idea that the book is about myth busting because I actually kind of really cringe at the idea that that’s what I’m trying to do. In fact, I tried, I don’t know if I accomplished it, but I tried very, very hard to make the book not be one of these like, yeah, oh, actually, oh, you’re an idiot. You didn’t know this, but I do and I’m a genius, right?

To actually articulate not just a very positive vision, but to try to meet you in terms of what matters to you, right? And I think you’re absolutely right, Zachary, that if in a charged conversation you’re just kind of like that annoying little whiz who like is putting out facts, it doesn’t work. Because I’ll say this, I think the people who have skeptical questions about immigration are asking really good questions.

Actually, I would say this, the anti immigrant people ask the better questions. They might not want to hear the answers, but they ask the better questions. Right? And, and I think that the, the values and the things that emotionally is, are behind those questions are things that we can all agree on. For example, we can all agree that we want a safe community.

Of course, we don’t want anyone coming and threatening the safety of our children or our family. Of course, we want an economy that is creating jobs for everybody, right? Not, not a, you know, not a zero sum economy. Of course, we want an economy It’s full of, you know, interesting people. Of course, we want a demographic profile that is balanced where neither or two will.

So I think, I think what, what I’m trying to do is to say, look, you want all these things that make a society successful, right? Economic and social. you also want immigrants, of course, to like preserve our, our precious American values and heritage. Yes, I agree with you that we should want all those, those things.

And so my approach is to start by. focusing on those values and those feelings and telling you absolutely you want that, I want that too. And here’s the good news, the evidence tells us that immigrants are positive contributors to those things. And so, and so then yes, I can start throwing in some of the facts and figures and telling you why, why it is that we can be credibly believe that immigrants are bringing us these things.

But the starting point isn’t the facts and figures and the myth busting. The starting point is. Let’s agree on what we want and what’s important to us, and I think that every listener today, or wherever, whenever they listen to this, will agree that we want all those, right, that that’s what makes a society successful, and then we can have an intelligent conversation on how to get there, and the role that immigrant, immigrants play in helping us get there.

Emma Varvaloucas: I was just gonna say really quickly, maybe myth busting was a, a, a, Maybe that’s how I felt, like a lot of my like, poor information was corrected, so I felt that I had been busted. But I will say you do take really good care in the book, for instance, like it’s really clear that you’re like, I’m not coming from this from a particular political angle.

And so I just wanted to say that too, that, lest you feel that, that you had failed in your quest in the book, that I had taken the wrong impression from it.

Zeke Hernandez: Oh, thank you for saying that.

Zachary Karabell: So final question, Zeke. You know, there is a degree that one could look at past history, I guess a little more skeptically or cynically, you know, you said when the system was designed largely for single males who were crossing, many of those were undocumented, were vital to the agricultural industries of, particularly California.

And you know, there’s a wink and nod of like, you didn’t actually want to pay those workers and a living wage commensurate with what you’d have to pay an American citizen. So you, you wanted a bunch of people coming across who would work for cash and then leave because it worked for your economic model.

Still does work for the economic model. I shouldn’t actually put this all in the past tense. There’s a lot of present tense to it. And so there’s a lot of disincentive to change the system to increase legal immigration because you actually didn’t want legal immigration, right? You wanted You wanted undocumented people who couldn’t demand more than they were getting and would take whatever they could get because it was still better enough relative to where they were leaving.

I just wonder where this leaves the kind of, not only was 1990 a smaller economy, it was a smaller population base. I don’t, I don’t have the figures right here. I think it was around 250 million, 260. Is there any hope that you see going forward for actually increasing the quota amount? I mean, I know what you said about Demographics will demand that at some point, although you have the negative case of Japan where demographics demand it, but culture continues to resist it.

And, and they’re going more like, well, we’ll just build more robots instead of more people. I don’t know that that is an American solution per se, but clearly there are societies that even in the face of need resist, right? Do you see that as feasible on the horizon? And please, I know this is a show that we, we, we like to look to solutions, but false optimism is certainly not

Zeke Hernandez: Yeah.

It’s a good question. Yeah. We don’t know for sure. I think that there is a difference between, say, US and Japan is that Japan has really no history of large scale immigration in the past. Right? And so they have become immigration beggars, but with no, no history and no, no, no background to build a system.

I think the US, despite its worst impulses, has always actually been remarkably welcoming of immigrants. And when we celebrate them, sometimes we celebrate them, you know, 40 years too late when they’re already dead. But we celebrate them, right? So, I think that there is, I think that there is, there is a path.

I think that it will be a path of, honestly, of self interest. That is, we will realize that this is good for us. It won’t be a path of compassion. I think we have tried the compassionate message, right? That, that’s what the Emma Lazarus poem and the Statue of Liberty are. And that doesn’t work very well, it’s, you know, painting immigrants as victims who need our help and need to spend our resources to help them is not going to help.

So I think that if it’s going to happen, it’s going to be out of self interest. I think that that is where we’re going, both for demographic, economic, I would say even cultural reasons. But the good news is, and this is where I think I still would finish with, it’s still sunny in 68. is that we can have our moral cake and eat it too because what’s good for us economically and socially in our own self interest turns out to be also the morally right thing to do and the compassionate thing.

So I am an optimist and I’m an optimist because I believe that while self interest and morals align, it’s much more likely for something good to happen than when you just rely on morals. Of course, I believe in morals deeply, but I think collectively it’s very hard to have morals carry the day on their own.

That’s, that’s where I finish.

Zachary Karabell: Well, that’s a good, that’s a good, note to end on. I want to thank you for the conversation. Everyone should rush out and buy, Zeke Hernandez’s book, The Truth About Immigration. This is a topic that there’s a deep, if not inverse, but severe mismatch between the amount of heat and emotion that is brought to the topic and the amount of actual factual and, and, or other awareness that That many of us have about it, even, even as you said, even those of us who think we are somewhat informed are swimming in a sea of hyperbole when it comes to these questions and bringing down that temperature a bit and injecting a note of like, here’s what’s actually happening.

Here’s how the system’s working is vital for all of us. So thank you for the work. Thank you for the conversation. And maybe we will circle back next year as we have a clearer picture as to whether or not things have gotten better. Appreciably worse or appreciably better.

Zeke Hernandez: Well, thanks for having me on and thanks for what you do.

I, I love the premise of your show and your organization. Thank you.

Emma Varvaloucas: thanks so much, Zeke. I really liked that note of pragmatism at the end there about, you know, when people’s morals and incentives align, it reminded me of the conversation that we had about Abraham Lincoln, where we talked about how, of course, yes, this was a moral cause, you know, the Civil War was the grand moral cause, but Abraham Lincoln was very shrewd about getting people on board in a way that aligned with their self interest.

So I guess on, you know, you can look at that in a cynical fashion, but, if you really want to get something accomplished, and as he pointed out, the, We need to be compassionate to these poor people that need us. Has not accomplished much, nor, as he says, is it true.

Zachary Karabell: If anything, our experience has shown that only when idealism is married to pragmatism do we get meaningful change.

you can get a revolution, of course, which we’ve also talked about, where idealism rejects pragmatism and embraces extremism. And that is definitely a source of genuine change, but it’s usually change that carries with it massive destruction. There’s no kind of equivalent for that with immigration.

I suppose if we did a 1924 redux in 2025, a hundred years plus later, and banned all immigration, you know, including illegal, that would be a degree of burning down the house or, you know, burning down the village to save it. I doubt that will happen, right? There doesn’t seem, thankfully, we’re not, for all the anti immigration sentiment in the United States, there seems to be zero consensus or zero critical mass.

that would support a ban, right? Which is good. I mean like there’s, most people seem to be like illegal immigration bad, legal immigration good, right? Without understanding, as Seeq just pointed out so brilliantly in the conversation, how much of what we call illegal immigration, well first of all some of it’s not actually illegal per se it’s, it’s people provisionally in the country, awaiting an asylum court to rule on whether or not they’re illegal.

requestforasylumweregranted. But how much of the system of what we call illegal immigration is a byproduct of a broken legal immigration system? And I think people, myself included, sufficiently sensitive to that reality.

Emma Varvaloucas: You’re absolutely right about that. I wasn’t either really before I read the book.

But I definitely think as you’re pointing out, you know, vis a vis legal immigration, like there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. In the US, I don’t think that we could ever go back into the place where we’re like seriously talking about vans. Even like the Muslim ban, you know, the infamous one, you know, from our dear friend, President Trump.

Was it horrifying that that was put out there as an idea? yes. Was there immediate Intense backlash and legal action against it? Also yes. I just, it’s hard for me to imagine us ever going into a place that we used to be in like the late 19th century or early 20th century. But yeah, the illegal immigration question, right?

It’s like a, is a different one. And you, you mentioned this and so did Zeke in the interview a couple of times that he has this great quote in the book from a, I think it’s a Republican politician that was basically like, listen, the issue of immigration is much more useful to us. unaddressed, then addressed.

And those are the things that make you feel cynical about it as well.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, that’s funny. I, I thought in our conversation, there are real echoes of the war on drugs, with the dynamics around immigration in that the reach for enforcement and punitive measures as the primary way that you’re dealing with a problem does echo how we try to deal with substance abuse and drugs.

And as I think people realize after decades that it neither addressed the issues of substance abuse, nor did it reduce the amount of use. So it was a whole lot of time, energy, you know, money, lives ruined. With not a lot to show for it on either side. And I mean, we’re not there yet with the immigration dynamic, right?

Cause there’s still this belief of, we just hire more immigration officers on the border and build more detention camps and round up more people that will sort of solve the problem. But if the war of drugs is any indication and if Zeke’s arguments are any indication, we will simply fail to solve the problem by doing that.

Now, maybe we will have to go through the doing, the trying of it before we recognize that, you know, it’s, it’s not the way to go, which would be depressing, Unsurprising.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, because one thing is that, you know, however right Z is, the political message of like, Do you want to fix illegal immigration?

Let’s let more people in? Like, it’s just kind of a non starter as a, as a slogan or a message or anything like that. So that’s, someone’s got to figure that out.

Zachary Karabell: The message would be if you want to fix illegal immigration, fix the legal system, right? I mean, that would be the way to, it would be easily parodied as what you just said.

Unfortunately. Exactly. Yeah. So. So there you go.

Emma Varvaloucas: So there you go. So I’m really glad we had the conversation. it’s such a huge topic in the discourse in the United States right now. We hadn’t had a conversation yet about it. And I, I love talking to someone that really has a really thorough view, both from an economic perspective and from a technical, like this is how the system works perspective.

Zachary Karabell: Right. Cause during an election year, we, we certainly will not be educated. We will be harangued. We will be stirred up. We will be, we will be told. Facts and figures that are thrown out with reckless abandon will be completely inaccurate or invented. And so it’s good to have a conversation a little more grounded in reality.

Conversation is not likely to be as grounded in reality on the Hustings and the campaign trail. What is the Hustings, right? What exactly is a Hustings? You know, should we I have no idea. I just used it too. All right. We’ll do that for another conversation.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, maybe one day we’ll be educated on that, but, for now, hopefully everyone listening felt educated as well.

So as per usual, you know, thanks everybody for tuning in. Of course, thanks to Zachary, and we will catch you next time.

Zachary Karabell: Please send us your thoughts, your comments. We will not use, as I’ve said jokingly, used in past podcasts, the Emma Lazarus line of send us your tired and hungry, but do send us your enthused and or agitated comments, responses, and ideas.

Go on to theprogressnetwork.org and sign up for our weekly newsletter, What Could Go Right?, conveniently named The Progress Network. The same as the podcast and free in your inbox weekly. We will be back with you next week for a new conversation. Thank you, Emma, as always.

Emma Varvaloucas: Very final note, a hustings is a meeting at which candidates in an election address potential voters.

That’s the last thing for today.

Zachary Karabell: There you go. What could go right is produced by The Podglomerate executive, produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right? newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org.

Thanks for listening.