Factually! with Adam Conover - The Facts About Immigration with Leah Boustan

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Americans are trapped in two competing narratives about immigration: That we’re a nation of immigrants, and that outsiders are invading to steal our jobs. But if we set ideology and narrative aside, what’s the truth? Leah Boustan joins Adam on this weeks episode to discuss her research into why and how people come to the United States, and what actually happens to them and their descendants after they do. You can buy Leah’s book, Streets of Gold, at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show once again. I'm talking to you from Tacoma, Washington, where I'm about to do two stand-up shows at Tacoma Comedy Club. Of course, by the time this episode comes out, they will have already happened. However, if you live in New York City, Portland, or San Diego, head to adamconover.net slash tourdates to get tickets to come see me do a brand new hour of stand-up

near you. I do a meet and greet after every show. It has been a blast so far, and I hope to see you out there. And if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. You can get every episode of the show ad-free, plus join our community. We'd love to have you at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Now, if you pay attention to American political culture, particularly that coming out of the right wing, you'll notice that there's an incredible anxiety about immigrants in this country. That's nothing new. We've had it for a very long time. The fear is that immigrants will compete for, quote, our jobs, change American culture, or refuse to assimilate. And the most catastrophic and explicitly racist formulation of this fear, which is pushed by one of the most popular shows

on Fox News, asserts that immigrants are going to replace native-born, that's always meant to mean white, Americans. Now, let's be very clear. This point of view is not just fucked up, it's also deeply stupid. Because if you're an American, unless every single one of your ancestors was a Native American, you are either an immigrant yourself or you are the descendant of immigrants. Period. The Pilgrims didn't just ooze out of Plymouth Rock, okay? They took a boat from England. Now, it bears repeating that this is nothing new.

The history of the American people is the history of successive waves of immigration. And every single one of those waves was met with a backlash tinged with racist, conspiratorial paranoia, just like the ones you hear spilling out of your television set. In the 19th century, millions of Irish and German immigrants transformed America. But they were met with hatred by the Know-Nothings, a proto-MAGA group obsessed with conspiracies about a Catholic takeover of Anglo-Saxon America. And then America was transformed again by an even huger wave of immigration from the late 1800s to 1920, this time from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Now at each one of these waves,

people were afraid. Fears were stoked. They said these new immigrants coming in are not like us. They are going to transform America and their food tastes weird. But guess what? Lo and behold, they all pretty much became Americans. The Germans became Americans and then they started complaining about the Italians and Irish who were coming in. Then the Italian and Irish Americans started venerating their own stories of immigration. I mean, we tell these stories in movies by Martin Scorsese or classic films by Martin Scorsese or even in a couple of blockbuster movies directed by this guy named Martin Scorsese. What can I say? The guy has a theme and he loves to run with it.

And later in the century, the same society that treated Asian Americans as frightening pariahs now describes them as the, quote, model minority. Now, obviously, race plays a huge role here. Black immigrants and immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries are also essential to the American story, but their stories have much more rarely been celebrated, the same way that we celebrate those immigrants who have been, let's say, accepted into whiteness. But the fact remains that we tell these two simultaneously yet directly opposed stories about immigrants in this country over and over again. The first, that we are a nation of immigrants, and second, that we are a nation terrified of immigrants. But here's the thing. Both of these stories are just stories, right?

They're not studies. They're not actual accounts of what immigrants in America go through. They're not necessarily based on the real world at all. They're based on feelings that we have about ourselves and about other people. And stories are very important, but they're not, you know, reality. So let's set aside ideology and narrative for a second and ask, what do we actually know about immigration in America? Why do people come to this country? When they do, what happens? How do their economic lives change? How do their families change? What happens to their descendants? families change? What happens to their descendants? Once we start asking those questions, we might get a much better picture about what the makeup of this country is, and we might be able to have a little bit of an antidote to all the bullshit you hear coming out of cable news. So let's have that

conversation today. The research on immigration is deep and incredibly fascinating, and our guest today is one of the foremost experts on this subject. Leah Booston is a professor of economics at Princeton and recently the author, along with Ran Abramitsky, of Streets of Gold, America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success. Please welcome Leah Booston. Leah, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. So you're an economist. You've written a new book about immigration into America.

What are some of the biggest myths that you think we have about immigration in this country? And we certainly have a lot, I would have to say. Well, I think the first myth is a really simple one. I think a lot of people these days think that we have more immigrants in the country than we've ever had before. So you hear about a flood of immigrants or a crisis at the southern border. And the impression that you get is that the country is overrun and we have more immigrants now than in the past. And that myth is just completely wrong. And that myth is just completely wrong.

We actually have a very similar number of immigrants now as we had during the Ellis Island generation around 100 years ago. And so we have one in every seven sort of our golden age of immigration and how wonderful it was. It's a mythologized period in American history. It's not just myth, it is really part of our mythology. And we have a very positive hazy notion of that period. And so it's very interesting for you to hear you make that comparison. I mean, yeah, tell me more. Well, I agree with you. I mean, I think we have a nostalgic view of immigration from Europe 100 years ago. And some of that comes from the culture, you know, some movies, some of the great American novels. And I think for many people, it's also from our own family histories. You might need to go back three or four generations to find the person who migrated and was born in Europe and came here.

find the person who migrated and was born in Europe and came here. And then the memories get a little bit hazy and a little bit kind of self-serving, maybe, that the idea was, oh, we came really poor, but we worked really hard and we made it on our own. And by the next generation, we had the white picket fence. Yeah. And a lot of those stories often to me seem to have a political valence to them that when people are saying that about, well, my family or immigrants back in that period did it in such and such a way and overcame such and such an obstacle, they are implicitly making a point about immigrants today and usually not a charitable one or often not a charitable one, depending on who the speaker is and what their intent is. But you often have that,

there's that loaded sense behind it. So is there really a difference between what immigrants were doing back in, you know, the few hundred years ago and today? Well, I think there are two really important differences. And one is that almost all of the immigrants a hundred years ago came from Europe. And that wasn't a coincidence. There were a number of migrants that started coming, especially to California and to the West Coast from China. And those immigrant flows were very quickly shut down. We had an exclusion act against Chinese immigrants in 1882.

So it's not really completely a coincidence there, but as a result, they're not really included in that hazy positive history, even though there was immigration at the time, it's not in, you know, Fievel's story is not mirrored by the story of a, of a Chinese mouse who is then, you know, the immigrant flow is shut down. Uh, we don't tell that part, even though it's the same time period. Exactly. It's the same time period. But, you know, it's not such a positive part of our history. So sometimes it's glossed over. And, you know, another important difference is that essentially, if you're coming from Europe, all you had to do was get yourself to Ellis Island and then you could enter the country. So there really wasn't the same concept of illegal or undocumented or even the concept of a passport.

I mean, you didn't have to have identity papers to prove who you were or that you had family waiting for you or a job waiting for you in order to enter the country. So when people say, well, my grandparents came here the right way, you know, they came here legally and people today are not coming legally. It's really just an entirely different legal environment. Yeah. You can't actually make a comparison if you didn't even need a passport to come in. There was no such thing as coming in illegally. But, okay, what about this idea that, you know, immigrants then, you know, hardscrabble, gritty, but they overcame tough circumstances, and then they integrated or they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and they attained the next level, and, you know, maybe immigrants today aren't doing that. That's something that you also hear.

I mean, in terms of, let's make it concrete, you're an economist, in terms of social mobility, is there a difference that we see between immigrants, you know, 100 or so years ago and today? And if so, why? What kind? Well, the first thing that we wanted to look into are the immigrants themselves. When you talk about social mobility, you're also talking somewhat about the children or the grandchildren, but sticking for a moment with the immigrants themselves. You know, I do think we have this idea of rags to riches for immigrants 100 years ago. And the idea is you come poor, and then you make it up the ladder yourself. And we found that that myth is wrong in two different ways. First of all,

many of the immigrants who arrived from Europe did not come poor at all. Like they already arrived with a fair number of skills or resources or wealth, because we tend to forget that around half of the immigrants were coming from Western Europe. So they were coming from England, France, Germany, Scandinavian countries, even Ireland, as you get to around 1900 or 1910, were places where immigrants could go to before they arrived, they could have gone to school, maybe even high school, could have picked up a trade, they came already with skills that allowed them to plug in very quickly. And so we think about this as imagine half of our immigrants came from Japan or Canada or Germany today. Those would be immigrants who were already plugged into white collar or highly educated roles.

And then the second part of the myth is also not true. So if you do focus in on immigrants who arrived poor, which there were many, and you look at how they were able to progress over the course of their careers, over their lifetime of work, they did move up some, somewhat, but not nearly as much as we would think in terms of rags to riches, in the sense that they never even caught up with the earnings of other U.S.-born workers. So it's not like they even got to the average. They still remained below average in their earnings after working in the U.S. for 20 or 30 years, and many of them really just tread water. So this actually happened with my great-grandfather, which I hadn't really paid close attention to. One of the elements of our work is we go back to look at old family histories, but we try to do this at an enormous scale, really bringing in big data to collect as many families as we can. And we're really talking about the millions here. But I wanted to zero in also on my own family because I thought, well, geez, if I'm going to be part of this data set, you know, if my great grandfather's in here, let's take a look at him and see what happened to him. And it was really the same story that

as you follow him through the census records, he always reports the same occupation. Which was what? occupation. And he was, well, he called himself the proprietor of a store. But what this really was, was like a small mom and pop storefront where they're basically like a dollar store. They would try to find things that they could buy, you know, somewhat cheaply and then sell it for a few extra pennies. And he would have his kids also kind of go around and try to find things to sell, like sweaters where the necks weren't fitting quite right, or, you know, maybe like a whole box of fountain pens that they found one day. And so it was like an odds and ends kind of store. And he never changed in his occupation. He never moved up to something, you know, further up the ladder.

And it really wasn't until his children's generation that there was any sort of upward economic mobility. And that's what we see in the data at large, you know, that many immigrants, they never end up learning English in the first generation, and they stayed in the same types of occupations, whether that was farm laborer or dock worker or a general porter who was carrying things from one part of the train station to another. And in the case of my great-grandfather, just sort of like a very small shopkeeper, maybe one level up from a peddler, you might say. And this is somewhat at odds with, I don't know, the story that a lot of children of children of children of children of immigrants tell about that period, that, oh, yeah, we came and we made something of ourselves,

and da-da-da-da-da. Is the story that you're telling about your grandfather, is that the same thing we see in the data about immigrants today? Works the same way? Yeah, it works exactly the same way for the first generation today. And I think before we had brought this new work on the past,

what people had was good data for the present to see that immigrants were making some progress over their lifetime, but they weren't really completely catching up to U.S.-born workers. And then they were comparing the really good data for today

to the hazy, nostalgic myths about the past. And they said, well, I think in the past, immigrants were doing much better, and today they're going slow. The truth is they're actually going slow now, and they're going slow 100 years ago. Where the action really comes in, where immigrant families really start to achieve a lot of upward mobility is when it comes to their kids, the second generation. So these are

people who are mostly born in the U.S. Sometimes the kids may be born in the home country and then they move to the U.S. when they're young alongside their parents. The thing is that most of these children of immigrants are going to U.S. schools. So either they're born here or they come when they're four or five. And English is a native language to them. And even though they have immigrant parents, they're plugged in to, you know, potential educational networks or job networks. And they're able to really move up quickly and really surpass where their parents had been. Again, this is just like in an American tale, the movie, right? Fievel, the little boy, the little mouse boy is brought to the United States and eventually

he's able to go West in the sequel. He's able to ascend American society until now. Okay. I'm being silly. to ascend American society until now. Okay, I'm being silly. Well, let me ask if it's a similar story between 19th century, early 20th century immigration and today, why do you then see the children

of those immigrants say, no, we did things differently? Like what is motivating the change in perspective when in fact the stories are more similar than we often think? Well, I like to think that some of it is that we just didn't know how similar these two different groups truly are. And so we are bringing brand new data to the question, and I do hope that it can change a couple of people's minds. When we're looking at immigrants in the past and following their kids, this requires actually being able to piece a

family together over time. So we need to see children living with their parents and then see the kids 30 years later when they're working. And that's not easy in historical data. So what we're doing is we're using old census records. And when you're living at home with your parents, you're listed as a son or a daughter. And then 30 years later, you're listed maybe as a household head yourself. And we can connect people by using their names, their dates of birth, and their states of birth. So we can't find everyone. If your name is John Smith and you're born, you know, in New York, maybe there's too many John Smiths and it's hard to find you. But we can find a good 25-30% of the country. And then in the modern data, we're using information that comes from tax records. Like when you file your taxes, you have to list your kids as a dependent, or many people do because, you know, they get a tax break

from doing that. And so you write down your kid's social security number when you file taxes, and that's when they might be like two years old. And then 30 years later, they're paying taxes themselves and their social security number comes up. So this is really detailed data work that we had to do on our own, or in the case of the tax records that we were really lucky to be able to partner with others to do. So we hope that this is really new information. I mean, we're able to follow the children of immigrants today from a whole set of countries that are really targeted in the media. So it could be Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, could be Mexico, could be

poor countries in Asia like Laos or Cambodia. And we're finding that even if the kids are being raised in poorer households, they're moving up economically at exactly the same pace as children moved up during the Ellis Island period. You know, the Irish or the Italians that we now see, you know, in positions of power, you know, our Irish or the Italians that we now see, you know, in positions of power, you know, our president is Irish American, and he's really proud of that and tells that immigrant story. And we see, okay, sure, our president could be the son of the son of an Irish immigrant. And, you know, the question is, in, you know, in 80 years, are we going to have a president who's the son of a son of a Guatemalan immigrant?

And it looks in the data like, yes, these are groups that are on the same trajectory. Well, that is really fascinating. And by the way, the amount of data research you must have had to do to connect in the past data all of those census records to the later census. That sounds very painstaking, especially to do at scale. That's incredibly impressive. Was it very time-consuming? I'm just curious. Well, the thing is that we are able to take advantage of computing resources that never existed before. And so, sure, while it did take a lot of time, not nearly as much time,

it would have been essentially impossible 10 years ago because you would have had to do some of these things by hand. And when you're talking about millions of cases, that's just prohibitive, right? So for the historical data, we are able to take advantage of something that's really cool and your listeners might not know about, but members of the Mormon church actually digitize all of our old historic census data. I've heard about this. Yeah. So it's part of Mormon theology that it's important to track your family history. And so for their own purposes, for volunteers, we'll sit down and just, you know, in the evening for an hour, they'll transcribe some census data. And so we're able to take advantage of all of this digitization.

And then we needed to come up with computer algorithms to link people so that we're not searching through by hand. That's really cool that I love that story. I've heard that elsewhere, that like the Mormon dedication to genealogy has really benefited researchers. I think we need to get some other religions started doing data analysis. Maybe the Buddhists can tackle historical climate records, and we could get Jews into paleontology. I don't know. There's a lot of religious energy that we could harness.

Well, this is really cool stuff. What occurs to me, though, is that some of the groups that you were talking about, you know, say, you know, folks migrating from Mexico or from south of the American southern border. You're comparing, you know, those today to folks a couple hundred years ago. But folks have been migrating over the southern border for a very long time, for like really the entire 20th century. One of the myths that I've covered on this show before on Adam Ruins Everything as well is that, you know, migration over the Southern border is not at all new, that in fact, basically all American agriculture, you know, mass agriculture has been built on that kind of migrant labor. And the, the difference is that we started criminalizing it in the eighties, um, and which would change the pattern of immigration and cause people to, to put down roots. But, um, you know, the, even though sure the Irish came a little bit

earlier, folks have been coming over from Mexico for a very long time. And yet we still, you know, I think have a, have the general sense that prospects have been different for Mexican American immigrants versus, you know, European immigrants. And so why, why is that? And what other differences are there that are meaningful between, you know, the immigrant experience today and a hundred or so years ago? Big question. That's exactly right. I'm, I'm really impressed actually actually, with your immigration history knowledge, Adam. Thank you. Because I don't think very many people know this, that there's been, you know, over a century of migration across the southern border. And initially, it was almost entirely uncontrolled and people would come in and then return home on their own,

you know, with their own decision making. In the World War II period, there became like an official guest worker program called the Bracero Program. And for over 20 years, Mexican, primarily men, would receive a temporary contract to come to the U.S. for the harvest season or for some short-term work, and then they would return home. And that would be over half a million workers a year. And then that program ended in the 1960s. And promptly, many of the same guys actually just came across the border again the next year or two years later, and they would now be technically classified as illegal. So many of the same, you know, pathways and actions that had been either unmonitored or official in the course of this guest worker program was now suddenly illegal activity. And I think that essentially much of the migration up until the 1980s, like you said,

was temporary. So it was a short-term movement to come up until the 1980s, like you said, was temporary. So it was a short-term movement to come up for the harvest season. That's not true for everyone. And there are some Mexican-American families that trace their history back. But it was a much more common phenomenon then. And now there are a lot of families putting down roots. So the groups that we're looking at in the modern data are kids who were born in the 80s. And that's actually really important because many of those kids, even if their parents had come undocumented,

their parents were able to take advantage of the 1986 amnesty program that was put in place by President Reagan. And so the estimates are that there were around 3 million undocumented migrants at the time, and around 2.3 million or so of that group took advantage of the amnesty. So they were able to go on a pathway to citizenship. So many of the kids that we look at, even if their family has an undocumented history, the kids were most likely being raised in families that then got access to the workforce and work permits and maybe even eventually citizenship. And so one thing I worry about in terms of extrapolating forward and learning from our work about what's going to happen next is what happens now that we haven't had an amnesty program in 30 years. What happens now when there are families

that have been undocumented for, you know, they've been living in the country for 20 or 30 years and they've never had working papers. So you might say, well, go do some more work. But the problem is we need time for the kids to grow up and enter the labor market. Yeah. You know, we need to see them with their parents and then see them working. So if you're born in the year 2000, you're just not old enough. You know, you're 22 at this point, and we don't really know what your career is going to look like. So I'm excited to do another round of this work that we've done in Streets of Gold.

But it's going to have to wait maybe for a few more years. And I'm hopeful that the kids of immigrants are still going to be looking good in terms of upward mobility. But I'm also worried that for some groups that have been facing greater numbers of years in an undocumented status, that that might really harm their kids. Well, yeah, I mean, it occurs to me that the big difference today is the legal regime that we have built around immigration. I mean, you said in the, you know, early, you know, late 19th, early 20th century European immigration, there was no restrictions at all. You know, people could

just come in without a passport and, you know, eventually become American citizens. Then we started criminalizing. There was an amnesty in the 80s, but there's been nothing similar to that in decades. And so now the kids who you were talking about, oh, hey, yeah, they're the children of immigrants, but maybe they were brought over very early as babies. Well, they're undocumented, too, as well. And they're like under this, you know, under the dream. They're dreamers.

They're you know, they've got deferred enforcement. So the government has sort of tacitly said, wink, wink, you're not first in line to get kicked out, so don't stress too much. But like, there's still undocumented, I mean, there's still, there are legal barriers between them and full economic and citizen participation in the country in a way that there was not for little Fievel from, you know, mouse Europe. And I speak from experience. I have friends in Los Angeles who are like working comedians, who are, you know, who have dreamer status and are therefore cut off from many of the perks and privileges

of American citizenship. And that strikes me as new compared to the rest of the story that you're telling. Does it strike you the same way? Yeah, that's exactly right. And I also have personal experience with this because for years I taught at UCLA. And so I taught many students who have the AB 540 status, which means they're undocumented and they're allowed to go to the California college system. But then afterwards, what's going to happen to them? They're getting all of this education, but will they be able to work in their chosen field? So I had a student who was really excited to do some research assisting work for me. He was an

undergrad, probably at the very beginning of this project, actually, now that I think about it. And I was like, okay, that's great. Let's get you signed up on payroll. And he's like, hmm, okay, well, I need to mention something about that. I mean, he wasn't allowed to do research assisting work. And so we worked out a deal where it would be an independent study, and he could get a course credit for it. And that's worth money, because, you know, each course that you take costs a certain amount towards your final degree. So we figured something out, but like very jerry-rigged, you know, very short-term solution. And I always wondered what happened to him. You know, was he able to work? He wanted to become an accountant. And that's exactly what's going on for a whole generation

of kids. Luckily, many of the kids of undocumented immigrants are born in the United States. And so they have citizenship because they're born in the U.S. But many of them are brought into the U.S. as babies by their parents, as you mentioned. And for those kids, it's especially hard. So there's an interesting study of siblings, one of whom was born in Mexico, one of whom was born in the U.S. So they're being raised in the same family, same neighborhood, went to the same schools. And, of course, the kid who was born in the U.S. is doing substantially better than even their own brother because of access to jobs. And it just gets to the point where, you point where you graduate from high school and you think, well, why should I bother? Why should I go get a college education if I won't be able to use it?

And so for that group, we're potentially raising a generation of people who feel really hopeless. And so much of our work is quite optimistic, but I think we need to really be mindful that it might not carry forward into the future unless we make some changes. Yeah. I mean, when we're saying what are the differences, what are the actual differences between, you know, our hazy, positive version of immigration a century ago and what we have today? It's that we've put barriers in place to that success. The people aren't different. According to your research, that's what I'm taking away. The people aren't different if they're allowed to, you know, have the same immigrant story we're used to. But we have since put in like all of these different barriers, some of them legal, some of them cultural, some of them economic,

that get in the way of that. Yeah. You know, if we had found that the children of immigrants did not do very well, if they remained in this kind of permanent underclass, then you know that the anti-immigrant folks would have taken the research and said, look, this is why we have to shut down and close the border. Instead, what we're finding is that the children of immigrants are doing really well. And even then, I'm noticing a lot on social media in terms of response to the book, interaction on Twitter, that anti-immigrant folks are saying, well, see, this is why we have to shut the border. Because, you know, the children are doing really well. And if they're doing really well, they're doing too well. They're doing too well.

And that means that maybe I'm not able to do well or they're doing better than I am. And so it makes me think that, you know, as you said, we're putting barriers in place and it's like we're putting barriers in place because if children of immigrants are doing too well, then that's something that bothers the U.S. born. OK, I have to ask you a question on that point, but we have to take a really quick break first. So we'll get to it in just a second. We'll be right back with Leah Buston. Okay, we are back with Leah Buston. So you were talking a moment ago about how you got a little blowback from your book, or you saw people saying, oh my gosh, the book shows immigrants are doing too well. That means they must be taking away from me. So is that the case? Is immigration, do we have a zero-sum economy where if someone comes to the country and starts doing really great, does that take away from people who already live in the country or does it benefit everybody or what did you find?

Well, I think there's sort of this seductive element to the simple logic where immigrants are just workers. There's a certain set of jobs and that set of jobs is fixed. So if we have one more worker coming in, that means one U.S.-born worker must be out of a job. I mean, that sounds very simple. And so there's something compelling about it. But the first thing to keep in mind is that immigrants are not just workers, they're also consumers. So when they come to the U.S., someone needs to build them a house, someone needs to teach their kids in school, you know, someone is going to be selling them other products and services. And so that creates a lot of jobs for people who are

already here. And another thing is that immigrants these days tend to be either very low skilled or very high skilled. So if they're very low skilled, then they're doing a set of jobs that most U.S. born people don't want to do. So that could be agriculture, that could be child care or elder care. And you may think, well, if immigrants aren't coming, then maybe the wages would go up and other people would want to do those jobs. But I think we've seen that when immigrants do not come in, what happens is that a lot of those products just cease to exist. So if you think about agriculture, sure, we're going to be making some food, but we might not be making the food that requires a lot of handpicking. So I remember, because I was born in the 70s, that like what was

available at the grocery store back then, and that was that period of time we were talking about where suddenly the guest worker program with Mexico no longer existed and it became illegal to come in just to do agricultural work, the types of fruits and vegetables that existed was like really meager. We had like iceberg lettuce, we had frozen peas and corn. We didn't have all of the fresh fruits and vegetables that we're used to now. And so I think that a number of the kinds of industries and jobs that immigrants hold now would just sort of cease to exist without immigrant workers coming in. So it's not that suddenly jobs would open up for U.S.-born workers who want to work in the fields or who want to, you know, be a home health aid for an

elderly person. And then on the high-skilled end, there's workers coming in from abroad with all kinds of specialized skills, scientists, tech, maybe some really high skilled finance. And those kinds of jobs actually create other jobs alongside them. So it could be startups. It could be other kinds of scientists who are doing complementary kinds of things. It could be other kinds of scientists who are doing complementary kinds of things. And so the idea that's just, well, if one worker comes in and that worker has a job under his belt, that means somebody else has just lost their job is too simple to explain what's really going on. Yeah. Well, I want to push back a little bit on something that you said, because like agricultural labor, a lot of it is very highly skilled or requires a lot of experience, a lot of practice. You can go look at for some reason, see these videos on TikTok a lot. The United Farm Workers puts them out of like people doing, you know, like picking celery. Right. It's like, oh, my God, there's like a five step process. These people are athletes, you know, to do this over and over and over again. But it's you know, those are jobs that require less education,

even though they do require skills. And then there's also jobs that require a massive amount of education as well. But your point is really well taken that like everyone who comes here is also requiring more jobs to be done. Like every extra person who lives in America needs more food to be made, needs more health care to be given to them, needs more living space. You know, that's we have this sort of understand. I think even people who are anti-immigration know that you need growth as a primary part of our economy, that that at least in our current capitalist economy is like a foundational assumption that, you know, population

growth is good economically. And immigration, like, is part of that same process, is it not? Like, that more people means more needs to be filled, means more work to be done, means more things to be created, means more, means the pie gets bigger. Am I way off base? I have never taken economics 101, but this is part of my understanding. Well, this is also part of my understanding, but I've learned, especially in talking more about the book, that that's not part of everyone's understanding. So I think that there are a number of people on the right who we sort of think of as traditionally anti-immigration, but there's also a lot of people on the left who are really anti-growth, who think, well, we don't need to be so consumerist.

We don't need to have as many things as we currently have. And we don't need to get bigger. We're actually pretty comfortable as it is now. And even if that means that we might have slightly fewer nice services around. Like maybe I can't get a manicure, you know, for $25 or something like that. That's a nice, that would be a reasonable price to pay to just slow down on our growth. And so I kind of come at it from this perspective of we need to think about continuing to promote economic growth for the country so that we can have enough material resources for everyone, so that everyone can have a high

standard of living. But I've learned in talking about the book that that's not really a shared assumption across the board. And if you're not as focused on population growth or economic growth, then it's easier, I think, to be anti-immigration. And you could actually, that actually helps me understand how you could end up with an anti-immigration point of view from a left perspective. If you're someone who, oh, economic growth is bad for the environment, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, I'm sympathetic to some of those arguments. I don't have a position myself. I do understand when people are making them, but that could lead you down a road where you say, well, hold on a second. I don't want to add people to the economy.

So therefore I think people should stop having kids. I'm an antinatalist. And I think that immigrants should stop coming in because I think we need to degrowth our economy to save the planet or something. That's an interesting position that you could find your way to that I hadn't really considered. I'm hearing all kinds of positions now that I'm out there talking. I'm hearing everything. It's sort of fun when you discover, because look, our notion of politics is so impoverished in this country, which is Republican, Democrat, left, right. And it's kind of fun when you discover a political position that you didn't know existed. It's like finding a new dinosaur or a new Pokemon or something. Oh my gosh, it turns out there's people like this. And they were there

the whole time. I just for some reason was blind to, you know, these positions going together. Well, there's another group that we haven't thought about recently, and those are the pro immigration Republicans. We may think, geez, there aren't any of those, or that's like, if you say dinosaur, dying breed, right? Like, that's a species that no longer exists. And there actually were a number of these pro-immigration Republicans through our political history. And we already talked about President Reagan, who under his watch, that's when the amnesty program took place in the 1980s. And then you can think about people like Senator John McCain, who was part of the bipartisan attempt at actually codifying a program like DACA and allowing a path to citizenship. And that attempt failed, but he was at least part of that group.

So those folks are part of our political history. But these days, we may think, okay, they're extinct. And it turns out that they're not at all extinct. I've heard from a number of them. And one of the first groups to reach out to us for the book was the American Enterprise Institute in DC, which is sort of, you know, like a right leaning group, but they're also very pro-immigration. So these folks are quite hungry, I think, to find fellow travelers and to make the case that being pro-immigration is not necessarily something that conservatives can't be. And these days, that's, you know,

they're relatively few and far between, but I think they're still out there and they're trying to make a comeback. But for some reason it's died out of our sort of more vocal political culture. You know, I remember living in New York City and it would have been around 2005, 2006. You might know the date better than me, but there was a massive immigration like protest that was like I remember sweeping through New York. It was like, you know, don't try to drive your car in New York City today because there's a gigantic, you know, rally for, you know, immigration reform and around these issues. And I remember seeing articles afterwards that were like Republicans must take, you know take immigration reform seriously and we must liberalize our immigration laws. And this is the only way that the Republican Party won't die out and et cetera. You saw that for a couple of years.

And now that sort of language is dead. I mean, folks like you're talking about the American Enterprise Institute is like whispering to you like, hey, we actually like immigration. We're trying to find other people who feel like us, but don't tell Tucker Carlson that we exist, right? Because it's not part of, no one is running on this, you know, in the Republican Party. And frankly, even Democrats are not running on it very much. Like you had in the last election cycle, oh, I'm blanking on his name there. Well, there were one or two, there were one or two candidates who ran, but not the successful ones

were the ones running on immigration. And everybody else was kind of like, yeah, I'll say a couple words about it, but this is not a platform for me. Do you have any idea? I know you're an economist, not a political scientist, but any idea on what has changed in America

in the past 20 years when we still have immigrants, you know, they're still coming to the United States. The sort of fundamental reality on the ground hasn't changed, but our political culture has shifted vastly over the past couple of decades. Do you have any idea why that might be? Well, let me just start with the data, because I am an economist, an economic historian, too. So I always like to go to the data first. an economic historian too, so I always like to go to the data first. And the data very much validates what you're saying. So what we've done recently is go back to the congressional record to grab every single speech that's ever been given on the floor of Congress about immigration.

And that's around 200,000 speeches. So it comes from a set of millions of speeches, and we were able to pick out the ones that are immigration related. And that goes back to the 1880s. And then we have been able to classify them about whether they're pro or anti-immigration. And this all comes from, again, the power of computers. Of course, we couldn't classify 200,000 speeches ourselves, but we can classify, let's say, 5,000 or 10,000, and then we can ask the computer to tell us which other speeches have similar words. So if you're going to say illegal versus undocumented,

you're probably going to be anti-immigration. If you're going to talk about families and communities and hope and opportunity, you're going to talk about families and communities and hope and opportunity, you're probably pro. And if you're going to talk about criminals and bringing drugs and bringing crime, you know, then you're probably anti. And so we have then been able to look at the whole sweep of American history. And what's really fascinating about our current moment is that two things are true at the same time. First, we've never had a more positive moment in American history about immigration than we have now.

If you go back before World War II, almost every politician was anti-immigration. And almost everything that they said about immigrants at that time would be unprintable. Like I could not use those words on this podcast without you bleeping them out. Your computer algorithm was like, oh my God, this is, I can't believe, please don't make me read any more of these. Yeah. I mean, it was really terrifying what people said and the assumptions that they made. So we're more positive now than we used to be, but we're also more polarized by party, you know, and that's something that of course we feel we don't necessarily have to go to the computers to tell us that, but at least the computers can show that up until 1970 or so, the two parties were really lying on top of each other when it comes to

immigration. They, you know, there was no daylight between them. They all pretty much didn't like immigrants and to the same degree. And then as attitudes shifted more positive, they shifted more positive for both parties. So there really was no partisan gap. And it started to open up in the 1970s. And it's just been widening and widening since then. So there's not like one particular moment, you can't say, oh, it's September 11th, or, oh, it's, you know, Governor Pete Wilson, and what was going on in California when the worries about illegal immigration and, you know, immigrants crossing the border was really hot in the early 90s. You can't pick out any particular moment and say that's what did it. That's what led to this polarization.

It's been a very slow and steady process. And again, it's not only the Trump era either. process. And again, it's not only the Trump era either. What's different about Trump is that usually presidents are more positive about immigration than Congress people. You know, so we were also able to classify the presidential speeches and you see that, you know, whether it's Reagan or Nixon or whether it's Bush one, you know, these guys were actually pretty positive about immigration, even though they're Republicans, and they're more positive than Congress people were. Suddenly Trump, and that's really the big outlier, suddenly Trump was very negative on immigration,

as we all know, that's no surprise. But he's really quite an outlier, very different from any president we've had before. And so as to why that is, I'm worse on the why than I am on the data. I think showing that whole historical sweep has been really fascinating. But the why, I think probably you or your listeners would probably know just as much about it as I do. I'm also, you know, somewhat baffled because while we've had a long run history of anti-immigration in the U.S., you know, going back before World War II and all these unprintable things, why does it come back at exactly this moment? You know, why is it suddenly in 2016 that we have a president who's really able to exploit this? You know, I don't know know what are your theories on that

i don't know that i have any i mean it's true like what what was happening in the country in mid-2015 right you know trump goes comes down the the escalator and gives that first speech where he says those unprintable things right right? And everyone was shocked. Like, this is so outside the political mainstream for both parties. Like, there's no way that this can win. What was it in America that caused that to actually work for so many voters? You know, I can't say,

oh, there was some big incident the prior year or whatever. I don't know what it was. There's an undercurrent, I suppose, that he brought to the table. It's an undercurrent. It's exactly right. So, I mean, the two parties start to split apart in 1970, and the Republican Party just starts to march more and more anti-immigration as time goes on, and the Democratic Party starts to march more pro-immigration.

And I think it's like the frog in the boiling water or something like that. Like it's going so slowly that you don't notice, but, but Trump noticed and it was, and the undercurrent was there. And so, you know, maybe he's just really brilliant at taking a look at the political, at the winds, but the undercurrent was definitely there and had been growing pretty steadily. the undercurrent was definitely there and had been growing pretty steadily. Well, and the, listening to you talk about it, it makes me think that the sort of,

the base anti-immigrant sentiment of just people are coming in and I don't like that is one of those things that just kind of lurks within the human heart, you know, no matter who you are. And I think one of the things that we've seen, you know, there's a lot of coverage in 2020 of like a surprising number of, uh, Latino, Latina folks, uh, you know, voted for Trump or surprising according to the people who wrote about that. And, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's, uh, the children of a child of immigrants. And he said, you know, a lot of people don't realize that like a lot of recent immigrants like also hate new immigrants because they're they're like we came in earlier we came in the right way and they're not like that's something

that that recent immigrants might say um not everybody but you know he's like people in my family say things like that uh and so i i don't know i feel like there's maybe this uh you know that sentiment is opposed to the facts on the ground, as opposed to the research that you that you lay out. But it's it's sort of maybe a persistent thing that's with us throughout the story of American immigration that like, hey, Irish people come in and then a couple of generations later, they're like, actually, I don't like anybody else who comes in, even though my family did a couple a couple of generations ago. That seems to maybe be a constant. I don't know if you agree with that. Yeah, I do agree with constant. I don't know if you agree with that.

Yeah, I do agree with that. I think if you think about it more carefully, it makes sense sometimes for immigrants to be anti-immigrant because immigrants are the ones who are living in neighborhoods with a lot of other immigrants or who are doing jobs that other immigrants do. So if you're working on a construction site or something

and you're in LA, you're working like on a construction site or something and you're, you know, you're in L.A., you're a guy from Mexico and, you know, you're sort of doing basic stuff in construction. Well, who's going to compete with you most is maybe other newcomers from Mexico. So yeah, or from other countries. Yeah. So in some sense, immigrants are the ones who are almost like most exposed to some of this competition. The same U.S.born folks who are saying, oh, I'm worried they're going to take my jobs. I mean, they're doing things that are entirely different. And so they're in some ways protected. And it's immigrants who end up being more exposed. So I think it makes a lot of sense from a basic economic point of view.

And then if you look through history, this has been a very steady part of history. Some of the earliest research I did was on the great black migration from the south to the north. And the same thing was true for black migrants who had moved up to Chicago in the 1920s. Now, suddenly, there's a lot of migrants moving up in the 40s and in the 50s. And there was all kinds of op-eds in the black newspapers saying, wait a second, what's going on with this flood of new migrants coming up from the South? We've just started to establish our neighborhoods and now suddenly they're overcrowded. Now suddenly there's all these people that are almost fresh off the boat, so to speak, even though they're moving within the country.

So it's a very common pattern. within the country. So it's a very common pattern. And so in that sense, you know, when you think about Trump voters who are Latino, Latina, then it makes a lot of sense. Some of those same messages will resonate even in recent immigrant communities. How much of the story then do you feel is related to culture rather than economics? Because a lot of what you're talking about, you know, if I think about, OK, what is a what is a black person living in Chicago? And then there's a there's the great migration happens and a lot of new folks come in. Well, these folks come from a different part of the country. They're from the south. They speak a different way. They have a different set of, you know, et cetera. A lot of I think that friction is maybe coming from that. And that's, you know, you can be a little bit more understandable when, hey, I've been living in this place and now the place is changing around me. There's other people living here. And that, of course, is uncomfortable for people. You know, sometimes when we hear these concerns that lead to anti-immigration rhetoric, is it maybe cultural concerns dressed up as economic concerns?

I think that's 100 percent it. So the first thing I would point to is our work on the congressional record. or a Democratic speech about immigration, and the topic is economics, labor, taxes, et cetera, the rhetoric is almost entirely the same. You do not hear a lot of division going on by party on economic issues. Where you see the division is on cultural issues. And so Democrats are more likely to talk about families and communities and contributions

or about maybe persecution and victimhood. And therefore, immigrants need our help as refugees. And Republicans are more likely to talk about how immigrants will never fit in. They don't learn English. They keep themselves apart. They remain isolated. And so those kinds of cultural differences is where you really see the divisions. And when we talk to folks about our work, they're like, okay, well, it's great that you're telling me about how much immigrants are earning. But what I really worry about is immigrants these days don't learn English or immigrants these days live in really big enclaves, like in East LA,

where there's sort of a large Spanish speaking group and they're never going to get out of that neighborhood. So that's what we hear. And we're like, well, we're economists, what are we supposed to do? And so what we turned out to do is we said, well, let's go to the data. Let's see if we can actually measure some of these cultural differences. You know, is there anything to these arguments that immigrants these days are not, You know, is there anything to these arguments that immigrants these days are not, you know, trying to become American? They're not trying to fit in. And again, this idea of the hazy past, right?

Like, if you think about immigrants from Europe, there's this perception, oh, they became American right away. Like, they wouldn't allow their kids to speak Italian at home. They chose a new name as soon as they got to Ellis Island. You know, their kids went to English-only schools, that sort of thing. And that today it's when immigrants are not able to fit in. And so we wanted to compare past and present as well. And we looked for as many outcomes of cultural assimilation or cultural differences that we could compare in the past and present. And one of them is who do immigrants marry? Do they marry outside of their home culture? One is where do they live? Do they live outside of an enclave? Of course, the obvious one is learning English and how quickly they speak English. And then the one that we found most

interesting and in a way most illuminating is the names that immigrant parents chose for their kids when they got to the U.S. And the nice thing about names is that it's entirely free. You know, you can you can choose to name your kid Jeffrey, even if that's a name that you don't really fully understand. If you think, OK, that's going to help my kid fit in and get ahead in America. And it gives you a sense of how much immigrants know about American culture and how much they embrace American culture. So we can follow immigrant parents as they have their first kid, their second kid, their third kid, maybe, as they've spent more time in the country and maybe learn more about what it's like to be an American. And we see, not that surprisingly, I guess, that immigrants start out with giving their kids very ethnic sounding names. And then they sort of shift towards more American sounding names as they spend more time. But what's really

the kicker is that they do that at the same pace now as they used to. That was really surprising to me because I guess I bought into this idea of, well, now that there's more like opportunities to call home, you can FaceTime, you can watch like Spanish television or whatever it is. Like maybe people don't need to join American culture to the same degree. Maybe we have a global culture. But it seems like immigrants are really trying just as hard now to fit in as they did in the past. The same as they did after Ellis Island, you know, lower Manhattan, kind of that sort of, again, classic mythologized immigration. During that period, the sort of cultural assimilation was happening at the same rate as it is today.

Exactly. And that is so fascinating. That's incredible that you've done that research as well. I'm very curious, do you find any economic connection between these markers of cultural assimilation and economic success? Do the kids who are named Jeffrey do better than the kids who are named Ignacio or whatever name you might choose out of your hat? So the answer is yes and no. So, yes, there's incredibly strong associations between Jeffrey and Ignacio. You know, they have maybe two or three percentage points differences on unemployment.

It could be 5% versus 8% unemployment. The Jeffrey earns like a couple thousand dollars more. He's had an extra year of education. So those are all really big differences. So that's the yes. But the no is what if you compare brothers from the same family? What if there's a mom and a dad who named the first kid Ignacio and then they learn more about the U.S. OK, the second kid is Jeffrey.

Then there actually are no differences in earning or unemployment or education. So what that tells you is it's really not the name. It's not the way that the employers maybe or the teachers are responding to Ignacio, but it's more the type of family. maybe or the teachers are responding to Ignacio, but it's more the type of family. There's like a set of families who are giving their kids predominantly ethnic names, and those families are not doing as well as the families that are choosing the Jeffreys and the Davids, you know, and the Michaels. But if you have some mixed families, and there are a number of mixed families that as time goes on, they switch from the Ignatios to the Jeffreys. Actually, those brothers are being raised in a very similar environment and they do

very similarly. So you, but you did find, to summarize, that families that make an effort at a broad cultural assimilation, which is really, I'm going to be clear, would seem to me to be an assimilation into white American culture because that's the, you know, the dominant media culture and employment culture and all those things, that does bring economic benefits, the families that do that. That's a really interesting conclusion, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Like, what is that? What should that mean to us? I don't know if you draw any conclusions, but I'm the sort of person I believe, well, that shouldn't be necessary

to make your way in the United States. Like I think cultural enclaves are a wonderful thing, right? It's one of the great benefits, I think, of living in Los Angeles, that there are all these different cultures present. But I'm not going to argue with your data. And I'm just curious what what learning that gives you, you know, any sort of insight about thinking about the immigrant story in the United States? How does

it make you think about it differently to know that? Well, first of all, you're not alone in pushing back. So this is one of the pieces of our research that my undergraduates push back against the most. And they say they shouldn't have to do that or we shouldn't have to do that. You know, we shouldn't have to change who we are in order to get ahead. And so I thought of it as a little bit generational in a way that like the younger generation is sort of more comfortable in asserting their identity and saying, I shouldn't have to change what I look like or who I am in order to fit in. So I thought that was very interesting. The way that we think about it as economists is if there's some kind of cost to maintaining your culture, but you maintain your culture anyway, to some extent,

by choosing the name Ignacio, then that's a sign that it's very valuable to you. You know, you know that you're paying a little bit of a penalty that your kids might not get ahead as much, but you retain that identity anyways because it's meaningful to you. So it's not a prescription of what to do. It's not saying, OK, like, you know, everyone should become everyone should become David and Michael in order to fit in. But it's just sort of being very clear eyed about what the costs and benefits are and whether that's a cost that you're willing to pay. And many people are willing to pay those costs. And then as a result, we have the wonderful cultural diversity that makes up our country. Yeah. I mean, you could also see your results as evidence that there's a prejudice still inherent in the American economy and in

American culture that we could all work to, you know, take apart brick by brick if we wanted to and say, yeah, that shouldn't be necessary or we shouldn't see that difference. Just like we shouldn't see, you know, different outcomes for people of different races or different, you know, we shouldn't see wealth inequality differences between people of different races. But we do see this difference. And it's one that we if we agree we don't like it, we could try to do something about it, perhaps. Yeah, that if we agree we don't like it, we could try to do something about it perhaps. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's still with us.

Well, God, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I'm loving this. I do have to bring us in for a landing at some point. We drew this distinction that what has really changed over immigration in the last few hundred years has been our legal regime around immigration, which I have to imagine has an immense distorting impact on – actually, I'd love to share an anecdote. I just did stand up in – I'm on tour right now, as I mentioned in the intro to every episode of this podcast, perhaps to a nauseating degree for our listeners. But I was just in Phoenix. There was a comic opening for me in Phoenix who is an immigrant from India, extremely funny guy.

And he told me as we were hanging out, he said he was on an H-1B visa and he actually worked in tech. He was brought, well, not brought, but he came to the United States because he was sponsored by a company that needed a trained worker. And there, you know, there are not enough in the United States. And so they needed his particular skills. But now he's working for this tech company and he's like, I don't want to work for the tech

company. I want to be a comedian. Like, and he's a great comic, he's really funny, he could really make his way well, but he was like, yeah, my visa is going to be up if I stop working for this company, so I'm trying to decide what to do, do I go back to India and try to do stand-up comedy there? Well, obviously there's not much of a stand-up comedy industry compared to the one in the United States, but there's not really such a thing as an H-1B visa for stand-up comics, where you can get, you know, I mean, he's making a contribution to American stand-up comedy in my view, but there's no way for me to sponsor him for a special visa for that. So that strikes me as like a weird distorting effect of like our legal regime

on who gets to come here. I'm curious if you looking at the way that we currently, you know, penalize immigration of some kinds, encourage immigration of others. Is there some better system that we should have given the reality of why people immigrate here and what their lives are like once they do? Well, first of all, on H-1B visas, we have just as many slots for H-1B as we had in the early 90s, even though the economy is 30% bigger. Sorry, the population growth, at least, is 30% bigger. So we established this program, and this is a program to allow workers in tech and finance and maybe sort of high-end medical type stuff, people with a BA or an MA and special skills to come into the U.S. on a three-year program. And then maybe they can extend for another three years. And then maybe their company can

sponsor them for a green card. So this is one of the ways that we get high-skilled workers into the U.S. And we have not increased the number of slots since the early 1990s. That's crazy because there's, I mean, even in addition to the population growth, like the growth of the tech industry is such that there's an immense demand for these kinds of jobs. So that's nuts. So the first thing I think we need to do is increase the number of H-1B slots. And that's very simple. And then there's more complicated things about, you know, how can we attract really talented people without tying them down to particular firms, you know, and maybe fast

tracking them to a green card, which would allow them more flexibility so that if they do want to do something creative, if they do want to switch industries, you know, they're able to do that. And so, you know, there's many parts of our immigration system that are really frozen in amber because no politician wants to touch it. And so we're, you know, we're in a very old regime and we're desperately in need for some updating and some change. But you were saying that, you know, again, during the mythologized golden age of American immigration, we had no restrictions whatsoever. What's the problem with the regime like that? I mean, again, this is the way we did things in the Ellis Island day. That's where that's why a lot of people are here right now. We all love those stories resulted in some great

movies. You know, what would be the big deal if we just said, hey, people naturally want to move from place to place in order to get a new job. Certainly people were traveling over the southern border to pick fruit in Texas for hundreds of years. And then we started putting guards at the border. We started limiting the number of people who come through. And the only result of that was misery and death. And so why not just throw the borders open? I mean, again, I'm wading into some territory here I know nothing about. I'm curious what your view is, though. Well, our historical data was certainly from a period like that. So we know that it was working in 1910 and 20.

Our modern data, the data with the kids that were born in the 1980s, is from a much more restrictive regime. And we know that those kids were doing well, but we don't know what would happen if we threw open the borders today. You know, so at least in terms of extrapolating from our research, I don't think that we can say what would happen. And so what we feel comfortable saying is, well, we can start to marginally or incrementally innovate based on where we're currently sitting. Like we currently have, you know, around 700,000 legal immigrant entrance slots. And we

end up getting around a million rather than 700,000 because there are some people who are unrestricted because they're like the spouse of a US citizen. So we're at around a million. Well, why is a million the right number? You know, why don't we play with that a little bit? Like, what if it's 1,300,000? You know, that's incremental. That's not going to be opening the floodgates. That's not going to be overwhelming or overrun or crisis or anything like that. But if we're okay and comfortable at this moment, why not increase a little bit and see how it goes? But there doesn't seem to be much scope for experimentation or for making changes or for tinkering. And so, you know, if there are certain programs that are really popular like H-1B, why are we stuck at 65,000 a year? Why not double that?

year. I mean, why not double that? Even so, the most powerful companies in America, Google and Apple, which are begging for more H-1B visas and I believe do a lot of activism and lobbying on that front, if they can't get it, if they can't get even just a tweak to the rules as a handout to them, some of the most powerful companies in the world, that sort of shows you how narrow the scope for any changes. And it makes my question kind of a moot one, I suppose. It feels moot to me given what's going on. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to speculate a bit about it cause I really don't know, but I'm also like, I, I'm not sure it's relevant. Like I, if we can't get from, you know, from 65,000 up on H1B, um, like why don't we start there? I guess to some extent, maybe people get inspired by big ideas and by people who are proposing radical new things. And maybe I'm a little bit too

technocratic. I am an economist after all. But, you know, I think that what we really need is a brave politician. Like you said, there's certainly no one in the Republican Party running on immigration, but there's also no one in the Democratic Party really running on immigration either. You know, there's Julian Castro, and he didn't really get anywhere. And so people are worried because they're playing defense. They think if I bring up this idea, then Tucker or someone in the Republican Party is going to say, he's opened borders, you know, he's soft on immigrants. You know what? Tucker's saying that anyways. So we should not be running scared of what someone

on the right, the far right is going to say. Instead, you know, people should be proposing common sense changes, you know, pointing out that we haven't made any change since the early 1990s. And we have a vastly expanded tech sector and that many of these companies have to then, you know, send some of their activity overseas. And we're not actually taking we're not actually doing the work here in America because we're not expanding our immigration system. It's frustrating because I feel like, you know, no one is really telling it like it is and speaking the common sense and, you know, being

more forthright. Instead, there's just a lot of defense. And I really hope that we can inspire some politicians to be out on the front lines. I hope so, too. And what it makes me wonder is what happened to the movement for immigration reform that I saw in New York, you know, almost two decades ago. Where did that, you know, where are the, you know,

the marches for that topic now? I think that's probably for a different interview. Maybe I can talk to someone who knows that political history. But let me end with this. You, first of all, I love how

careful you are to extrapolate only as far as you can from your data and how clear you are about sharing it I think this has made this an incredible interview I'm really curious, what are some major questions about immigration that you would like to answer that you don't have the answers to what are the gaps in your knowledge

that you're curious about diving into in the future well let me tell you what we've been working on this summer. You know, we're still pushing. So in the modern data, we know really clearly that immigrants commit far fewer crimes than the U.S. born. So the idea of they bring crimes, they bring drugs, that's one of those myths that's just completely blown out of the water by the data. Immigrants today are less likely to be arrested, they're less likely to be incarcerated, and some of that may have to do with this double penalty, the idea that you might be incarcerated in the U.S. and then also deported. Certainly if you're undocumented, but even if

you're a legal immigrant, there are many crimes that would actually put you in order to be deported. In the past, though, that wasn't really the case. We didn't have the infrastructure and the bureaucracy to kick people out. And we also didn't have that kind of more tenuous legal status. And so we're curious to learn more about immigration and crime in the past. So we've been looking at immigrants and the children of immigrants to see what the patterns look like historically. And so we'll be able to compare past and present there as well. And in the past, there was also all of those stereotypes, especially that the Irish committed crimes, that they were more likely to be drunk and they were likely to be in local jail, that the Italians

were involved with organized crime and mafia, just like the idea of MS-13 and gangs today. So a lot of that rhetoric was there. And there's been some work by historians and a couple of little patchy data sets that people have put together, but we're trying to look at this for the whole country. Yeah. Just what you're saying, that reminded me of a fascinating article I read a couple years ago,

and I can't remember who wrote it or where I read it, unfortunately, because that's how my brain works. But it was the theory that, you know, when you look at crime from those previous waves of immigration, you know, Italian and Irish organized crime is mythologized now as being, I mean, we make movies about it. It's honorable. And critically, you know, sure, we attempted to bust up the mafia, but we also allowed these sort of networks to go legit that, you you know if you look at the example given in this probably the new yorker was uh an example of you know a sanitation company that was like sort of grew out of a you know organized crime network and now it's just a legit garbage company but you know it like if you look

at 50 years ago it was the mob and then it went legit and that we allowed those previous waves to go legit in a way that, you know, no one's no one's going, ah, MS-13. They take care of their family and, you know, they provide a valuable role in the community. Like Francis Ford Coppola isn't making movies about him, you know. And I think that's a really interesting, interesting difference. But that, yeah. Anyway, it has been really incredible talking to you. Where where can the book is called, tell me the name of it. So the book is Streets of Gold, America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success.

And we never actually got a chance to mention my co-author, Ron Abermisky at Stanford. So the two of us wrote the book together and we've been working together for 15 years on the underlying research. Your work is so fascinating and I can't thank you enough for coming on today to talk to us about it. You can pick up the book, folks, at factuallypod.com slash books. We will put a link up there.

And where else can people find you, Leah? Well, you can find the book at Public Affairs. That's our publisher and, of course, all the other places that you like to go to buy books. Great. Thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, hopefully we'll have a chance to talk again soon. Bye, Adam. Thank you so much. Well, thank you once again to Leah for coming on the show. If you want to check out her book, Streets of Gold, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Kyle McGraw and Sam Roudman and everybody who backs this show at the $15 a month level

on Patreon. That's WhiskeyNerd88, Tyler Darich, Susan E. Fisher, Spencer Campbell, Sam Ogden, Samantha Schultz, Ryan Shelby, Robin Madison, Richard Watkins, Rachel Nieto, Paul Schmidt, Paul Malk, Nuyagik Ippoluk, Nikki Battelli, Nicholas Morris, Mrs. King Coke, Mom Named Gwen, Thank you. If you want to join their ranks, head to patreon.com. That's patreon.com. Thank you to Andrew WK for our theme song. The fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I record so many episodes of this show for you on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover,

wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time on Factually. I don't know. Star Bands Avenue, a podcast network.