Tangle - RE-RUN: A conversation with Alex Nowrasteh

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Homestretch! Our deepest dive yet; Isaac's first published audio interview for the Tangle podcast (Trevor wasn't even on the team yet). How far we've come! Original air date: Jan 29, 2021Still want the news? You can read today's newsletter here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Hey guys, Isaac here. I just wanted to drop in with a brief reminder that our podcast is taking a brief interlude until March 14th when we'll be back with our daily recordings of the newsletter. But until then, while we take a couple weeks off, we wanted to make sure you guys had some content. So we're sharing some of our favorite interviews from the Tangle Archives. I hope you guys enjoy. Archives. I hope you guys enjoy. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Tangle, one of the first ever Tangle podcast guests today. I am super thrilled to have Alex Narasta. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Did I get your last name right? Because I don't want to mess that up.

You did. It's good enough for a podcast. When people see how it's spelled in the newsletter, they'll have some sympathy for me, I think. I hope they have sympathy for me, too. I've had to live with it for 37 years. Before we jump in, I think it'd be awesome if you could just give our readers and listeners a little bit of information about where you work, some of the research you do, and what you've been up to for the last few years. So I'm the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. And so as my title implies, I focus entirely on immigration policy with about 95% of what I do focused on the United States.

So I've studied the effect of immigration on the economy, crime, terrorism, national security, cultural assimilation issues, how the government can do a better job in terms of liberalizing immigration, expanding legal immigration opportunities, and basically make it so that immigration is a much bigger win for Americans as well as the sort of the new Americans, the immigrants themselves who are coming here. Obviously, this last week has been huge. I mean, the last two weeks, really, since Joe Biden came into the office, he hit the ground running trying to undo a lot of President Trump's immigration agenda.

And we don't yet actually have any legislation which makes this a little bit tricky. But he has released at least the outlines of a massive immigration bill that, you know, essentially is an overhaul in every imaginable way and includes a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. I think maybe we should just start with, you know, from your perspective, what sticks out to you from this bill as a net positive, the things that you're seeing that sort of get you excited? I'm most excited by the scope of the amnesty or the legalization program, whatever you want to call it. Based on the outline that we've seen, and we haven't seen bill text yet, right? So this is just the summary released by the Biden administration.

They basically plan to legalize any and all illegal immigrants who are not criminal, national security or other public safety threats. So that would be somewhere around 11 million illegal immigrants, or it'd be the vast majority, almost all illegal immigrants in the United States. And that is a very bold proposal. The last several immigration reform bills, comprehensive ones that touch on every aspect of the immigration system would have only legalized small portions of the illegal immigrant population so the one in 2013 that was the closest to becoming law that would have only legalized about seven to eight million of the eleven to

twelve million illegal immigrants so this one really is big. It goes bigger than all the other ones. And that's what I sort of am most excited about. It doesn't compromise off the bat. The policy downside of this bill, according to some of your own writing, is that you don't really see a pathway for it to be passed in the Senate. I'm curious if you could maybe talk about that or if there are some other weaknesses, soft spots in the bill that you see that maybe you hope to see change when the actual piece of legislation comes out. Yeah, so I guess I'll start with some of the policy downsides I see in it. One, it doesn't do enough to liberalize and expand legal immigration. There are lots of opportunities to do this for high-skilled workers, low-skilled workers, mid-skilled workers, family immigrants, entrepreneurs. But the bill doesn't do a whole lot for that.

It does a bit for expanding skilled immigration and clearing the backlogs because there's long wait times for some of these categories, especially for family-based immigration. It does some good things there. But it doesn't do anything to increase lower-skilled immigration, which is really important if the government is going to get total control over the southwest border. To be able to channel those would-be illegal immigrants into the legal market so that they can be regulated by the government this bill really doesn't do enough for that but I think you hit on what the biggest downside is which is there's like there's like no way this bill is going to become law in any way similar to what the outline is what makes you say that I mean to, what do you think?

I'm assuming obviously your view is that maybe moderate Democrats like a Joe Manchin or Republicans are never going to buy into this. But what do you view as being the sticking points for them, for the people who are not going to get on board? So there's two sticking points. One, the outline doesn't have very much in there about border security. It has some sort of words about using technology along the border. So that might be an area where somebody like a Joe Manchin or other Republicans can come on board and push for more funding in order to gain their vote. I'm opposed to all that stuff

but that's just like the political reality of what's gonna be in there the other thing is the amnesty is just too big like Republicans are really skeptical about immigration because of the amnesty because of the illegal immigration portion and amnesty really is like a scarlet letter uh scarlet letter a um on this debate so the notion that you're going to get you know 10 republican senators to vote for a bill that would basically be a full amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants without any kind of fines just for all of them except for criminals I think is fanciful at this point like you know you and some moderate Democrats are going to balk balk at this you know Kristen Sinema from Arizona Joe Manchin as you mentioned they're not going to go for that either. So at best, this is a starting point.

This bill at worst, it just has no legs and people just won't have interest in it because there's really no chance it's going to become law in any way related to how it currently is. I'm interested by your position that you feel like the border security element of it is maybe not something that's necessary. I mean, I think a lot of people who are sort of in the middle are going to look at this and say that in exchange for, you know, 11 million undocumented immigrants getting a pathway to citizenship for border security, increased border security, whether it be technology on the border, things like drones or, you know, the most recent imaging technology they're using to track migrants crossing. I mean, that to me sort of strikes me as like a fair or reasonable proposal. What about it do you think is kind of missing the mark? so I think it's fair and reasonable from a

purely political perspective but from actually getting operational control over the border I think it misses the mark the reason why so many people try to cross the border illegally is because they can't do so legally there is no visa available for the vast majority of these people. So we can spend all we want on border security. People are still going to try to come in and break the law doing so if there's no visas available to them. Because the benefits of coming to the U.S. legally from Central America, for instance, is an increase in wages of six-fold increase, right? You go from making $5,000 in Guatemala a year to over $30,000 in the United

States with the same income, language ability, anything. So you can throw as many Border Patrol agents at the border as you want, drones, boats, along the Rio Grande, fences, whatever you want, there's still going to be a large black market of people trying to get in in multiple different ways. So if we want to actually get control of this, expanding legal immigration opportunities for these folks is what's actually going to work in the long term. That's what's worked in the past. That's what worked to decrease Mexican illegal immigration. That's what worked in the 1950s to decrease illegal immigration along the border. But I realize that is not really the political discussion going on right now, right?

It's all about walls and fences and drones and things like that versus legalization for the illegal immigrants. But I think that really misses the mark. You know, sort of in that same vein, I mean, when I hear you sort of describe that sixfold increase in wage that a migrant can make coming here from Guatemala, you know, a lot of people, I think conservatives would hear that and say, well, then let's, you know, do something to invest in Guatemala so they can stay there. Let's make their home countries a little bit safer and maybe spend less money to do something like that. What is your research shown about, you know, the efficacy of

programs like that, that sort of put money into these migrants, native countries, so they may be experiencing better situations and they don't feel like it's worth making this 2,000-mile trek by foot to get into the United States? There have been a lot of foreign development funds sent overseas by the U.S. government over the years. And the general effect is either nothing or negative. There are a few examples of these development funds actually helping people, helping economic development, but they're few and far between. And we don't, the government really doesn't know how to do that well, and I don't think they're going to figure it out. So a lot of the money spent on that is just not going to be effective, and they're frankly just not going to spend enough to

potentially make it effective. Secondly, if it is effective, because Guatemala is so poor, actually increasing their income by several thousand dollars per capita would lead to more immigration from Guatemala. Because one of the things holding people back is the fact that they're so poor. So we see this general trend around the world which is sort of out migration from a country peaks when that country's income is between about eight to ten thousand dollars per year, you know adjusted for purchasing power parity. That's the cost of living in the United States. So in some of these countries, actually

increasing income, increasing per capita GDP in the short run could actually incentivize more immigration because you're having more money go to poor people who now would have the opportunity and the means to leave because immigrating isn't cheap, right? It takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of resources, you have to take time off work, you have to pay a smuggler, you have to pay visa fees, you have to buy tickets. And so we're at this situation where, you know, increasing the income in some of these countries will actually lead to more people leaving.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

I think just, I guess, full transparency, my position on this bill and writing about this bill has been relatively positive. I mean, I think I generally support a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are here. And from reading your writing, I get the sense that you're sort of in a similar place. Obviously, I mean, just talking to you now, it's clear that the general outlines of the bill are something you think on the whole are good, even if you sort of dock at points for not being politically feasible. So I want to be conscious of the fact that a lot of Americans and a lot of my listeners and readers don't feel that way. And I'm interested to hear from you. You know, what's what's your pitch to people who are saying, look, like we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Americans are seeing the highest unemployment rates they've seen in years.

And, you know, we have this really viral disease kind of wreaking havoc on the country, opening the floodgates right now and giving mass amnesty and encouraging migrants to make the trek here. It seems like a really dangerous thing to do, not even in, you know, I don't mean to be scare tactic about it, but the fundamentals of it, the economics of it, the idea of, you know, having like an open door, quote unquote, policy on the southern border. I get those concerns. I think that they are they're fair concerns. And I'm wondering what your response to that is. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of those concerns are fair. And I think one of the roles of the government is to make sure that immigrants don't violate the rights of Americans once they're here. And that includes, I think, by spreading disease. So I think, you know, immigrants who are sick, who have diseases, maybe even during the duration of this pandemic, we shouldn't have a much more liberal immigration policy as long as this pandemic is a serious threat, as long as vaccinations aren't being rolled out. So I'm willing totally to concede that point.

But on the point of amnesty, right, I mean, amnesty is for people who are already here. So they're already working in the labor market here. They're already inside of the country. So making it legal for them to work, bringing them above board, giving them work permits, et cetera, it legal for them to work, bringing them above board, giving them work permits, etc., would allow the government to actually know who they are and to more precisely focus in on those who are the actual national security threats or the actual criminal threats, who are actually bad people who are here to violate our rights, because that's a small number of them.

So if we can shrink that pool of illegal immigrants by 90%, 95%, 98% down to the 1% to 2% to 5% who we actually don't want here, that will actually make it a lot easier to improve the quality of immigrants in the United States rather than having this policy where everyone's illegal and the government will target them sort of willy-nilly. But when it comes to sort of the economics of it, right, like the bad job situation, you know, immigrants come in their opportunities. So they don't come as much during, you know, recessions in the U.S. or depressions or things like that.

It's a self-regulated economic system in a way, just like any kind of market is, like all market economics is. And what immigrants do is they bring human capital, they bring human beings to this country who increase the amount of production. They're not just workers, they're also consumers. They buy things. By buying things here they increase demand for goods and services which increases jobs, they start businesses, they work alongside native-born Americans and increase the scale and scope of economic productivity here. So for the same reason why people are a blessing, no matter where they come from, why people are good for the economy, whether they come here by, you know, by births, by procreation or by immigration, there's not a good argument against the, you know, against the increase in the population of the United States. It's all it's all good arguments from the economic perspective. a hot topic of debate in the political scene because there's something just sort of intuitive

or it feels like common sense. Like if these people are coming here who are willing to work for a dollar less an hour under the table, then how are they not going to undermine the job opportunities of Americans who are here. I mean, it seems almost hard to believe. Yeah, I mean, I get that. And I would say the reason why they're willing to work under the table is because a lot of them are illegal immigrants. So the evidence is pretty clear that when you compare a legal immigrant to an illegal immigrant, who's the same in every other way, right, from the same country, same education, same age, same number of years in the United States. The illegal immigrant is paid about 11% lower than the legal immigrant because it's risky for the employer to employ that person.

So they have to pay them a little bit less. So the employer pays them less to compensate themselves for the risk of hiring them. What's interesting is legalizing those people gets rid of that incentive to work under the table entirely and brings their wages up to what any other person would get paid in that circumstance. So it's something where legality, bringing it above board, bringing them into the legal market will solve a lot of those problems because those immigrants once they're here you know they want to maximize their income they didn't leave their home countries their families their cultures their language their religions behind to come here and get paid less

than everybody else here you know they came here to get paid more and if they can get paid more you know a few dollars more an hour, there's no incentive for them to want to be underpaid. In the same way, there's no incentive for you or me or any other rational economic actor to want to be paid lower than anybody else. One of the things about this bill that stuck out to me and that I wrote about that I found to be an overwhelming positive was a call to expand the number of immigration judges in the U.S. And this is something that I've written about in the past that sort of always seemed like a no-brainer to me because my sense is that with fewer judges, it's harder for asylum seekers who

are here, you know, making legitimate asylum claims to make their case in front of a court. It's easier for people who might be criminals or dangerous and coming here illegally to get lost in the system. It's this sort of cyclical thing where then the backlog just grows and grows and grows. Am I right there? I mean, is that instinct accurate? Do you feel like expanding the number of immigration judges in the U.S. will have a really positive impact on the system? So I'm torn on that. It depends entirely upon the policies that the judges are actually enforcing. So during the Trump years, when he basically massively restricted asylum and you had this huge court backlog of, you know, what is it, 1.2 million, I think, by the end of the Trump administration. huge court backlog of, you know, what is it? 1.2 million, I think, by the end of the Trump administration. That backlog, I think, helped in the sense that people who were going to get their

claims denied and then were going to be removed from the United States or deported from the United States, they had several years before that would happen. And that was due entirely to the backlog. On the other hand, people who have, people who have legitimate claims to be able to be here under the law, who are waiting for that legal work authorization, who are waiting to get out from under that shadow, they also have to wait years. So it's really like this double-edged sword, right? What I would love to see is much less reason for judges to play the important role in the immigration system that they do, right? Like a simplification, an expansion, and a legalization without having to run everybody through sort of an immigration court, I think would be the best way to try to do that.

But, you know, I agree with you now, like, I think the immigration policy is going to improve over the next four years. So more judges might be a blessing in the near future. But if another president who supports immigration restrictions as much as Donald Trump gets into office, having fewer judges might actually be a blessing in disguise, even though it creates all this administrative inefficiency. When we talk about this bill and so far with you and I, we're focusing a lot, I think, on the border with Mexico, the southwestern border, you know, migrants coming from South Central America. What's your insight into how this bill is getting quite a bit of attention from the big tech industry, this market that has a vested interest in bringing in skilled workers. What do we know about the Biden plan so far as it relates to this other element of

immigration? So the Biden plan is fairly conservative on the legal immigration side for these high skilled workers. It does increase the number of green cards, which is great. But it does it primarily through recapturing green cards that weren't used in the past. So about 200,000 of them. And also by exempting the spouses and minor children of the skilled immigrants from the cap. So as it works right now, there's 140,000 green cards issued annually to high skilled immigrants,

but that also includes the immediate relatives and family members of those high skilled immigrants. So that in practice, only something like 44% of them actually go to the workers themselves and the rest are for their family members. So what the Biden plan would do is it would essentially double those numbers by exempting the family members from the requirement of getting a green card through that system and

just grant them automatic green cards. They don't come from any kind of capped category. So it basically doubles it that way. However, the bill, at least as we've seen in the outline, would not increase the number of H-1B visas, which are temporary worker visas for high skilled workers. It wouldn't do anything to increase those numbers, unfortunately. So, you know, it's sort of a mixed blessing on this regard. It does a lot to help with green cards, but not as much as other

bills. And it doesn't do anything to expand legal immigration for temporary workers. And that's really, I think, a lost opportunity. It could do a lot more in that regard. Alex, one last question and we'll let you go. You know, the next couple of weeks, obviously, everybody seems to be feeling out how this plan is being received and who's going to get on board. You know, what are you keeping your eye on over the next few weeks? Where are you going to be sort of having your ear to the ground to get an idea of what the future of immigration looks like in the U.S.? I'm going to be following Senator Bob Menendez from New Jersey, who is supposed to be in charge of this bill, to see what he says, to see what he tweets, and then to hear what

Democratic staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee and others up there and both the House and the Senate are saying about this. I suspect that a lot of it will not be very positive. We're going to see a lot of delays. But those are the people who I'm going to be watching. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. Super informative. And we'll be keeping an eye on you. For readers and listeners who want to check out your work, where's the best place to find you?

So please check out my page on Cato's website. That's C-A-T-O dot org. so please check out my page on uh kato's website that's cato.org um also uh check me out on twitter at alex narasta that's at a-l-e-x-n-o-w-r-a-s-t-e-h and you can see all of my writings research and arguments up there awesome alex thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. And thanks a bunch for having me. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul,

edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was

produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.