← Solutions with Henry Blodget
Solutions with Henry Blodget
Most Americans Support Legal Immigration. Why Can't We Enact Clear Policy?
00:40:33
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A
Where does President Trump's speech leave us with regard to where the war is headed? And it really was, to me, the story of the commander in chief who, weeks into this war is deeply uncertain about how it ends. I'm John Finer, co host of the Long Game podcast.
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This week, Jake Sullivan and I break
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down the president's speech and discuss what it's like to negotiate with the Iranians. We will also debate whether Iran should accept a deal. The episode is out now. Search and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. One of the biggest issues in the last few elections has been immigration. A vast majority of Americans view the situation at the southern border as a crisis or a major problem. A similar majority view large numbers of immigrants entering the country illegally as a critical or major threat. But at the same time, a vast majority of Americans oppose the forceful deportation of those who are in the country illegally and prefer a path to citizenship. And most Americans view immigration as a positive thing and are not worried about immigrants taking their jobs. So why can't the country enact a simple and clear immigration policy? What would that policy look like if we could? And where can we start? Our guest today believes both parties share blame for the mess that we're in. He also believes there's a way forward that will help America and Americans. Alexander Kustof is a professor of political science at Notre Dame. His book is in Our How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular. In a new piece for the Atlantic, he argues that the Democrats blew it on immigration and opened the door to ICE and the nativist. Right. So his answer to the current mess is not just getting more Democrats elected. Welcome, Alex. It's so great to have you. What I'd love to start with is just a big historical contextual setting, which is one of the things you note is that it is relatively recent in the last century or so, that democratic governments in particular have begun to really regulate immigration and say this is something we should have control over. I'd love to, if you just give us the context of that.
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B
Yeah, thanks, Henry, and thanks for having me. Yeah, I think this is a really important start to have with because I don't think a lot of people realize that if we go back in history, before the Chinese Exclusion act, we didn't really have federal immigration controls in the United States. Right. There were some kind of local controls that states could have implemented and wanted, but they didn't have to do that. And at some point the US and many other governments around the world, they decided that, you know, the goal of controlling immigration is as sort of like a paramount feature of being a nation state. And you can disagree or agree with this normatively, but I think as an empirical fact, it is just the case that now for most people around the world, it's just not possible to immigrate to the US or any other countries. I think the Cato Institute estimated that it's like for 90% of people around the world, it's just basically there is no feasible legal pathway to immigrate to the United States. Which, again, regardless of what do you think about it morally, it means that people will try to come one way or another, legally or illegally. Right.
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And so to ask the question, given that this is such a hot button issue, to ask the question another way, why have immigration at all? Because a lot of people seem to feel that why are we doing this at all? We have a country, we have a lot of people here, why should we have immigration?
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B
Yeah, I don't think that's a weird question to ask. I mean, I wrote a substack post saying exactly that, that most countries, like the US with a lot of things going on in the economy anyway, don't need immigration per se. Right. But I do think that we have to be also realistic about what it means to pause immigration. Right. We're not just, I think a lot of people, when they think about pausing immigration, you know, until we figure out what's going on, they don't really understand that what it means effectively is that your neighbors are not going to be able to reunite with their families. You're not going to, your body is not going to be able to marry that beautiful Canadian woman. Right. And it's just going to be complete chaos everywhere. Right. Businesses are, you know, a lot of businesses are reliant on foreign labor, not just cheap labor from illegal immigrants, but like, you know, they have a whole setup and pipeline going on. You know, I know that on your podcast you talk a lot about AI. Right? We only have that many people who can actually do AI meaningfully, like, you know, engineers, computer scientists, and most of them are not in the United States of America right now. To the extent that you want the US to do anything relevant AI, you absolutely have to tap into this foreign talent. Right. You really don't have a choice. Right. You can have an argument that maybe strawberries are not necessarily have to be picked by illegal aliens or whatever, or Americans can do it for 50 bucks so we can automate it. Right. But in the end of the day, there are a lot of different professions and expertise situations where you really don't have a choice but to tap into the foreign talent.
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A
And that's definitely where I'm going, which is to get to the fact that certainly economically and arguably in the United States there are great benefits to immigration. And you've just picked one that seems incredibly obvious to most people in the tech industry in particular, which is H1BS. So why don't we talk about that for a second then we can go back to the big picture, which is we have this situation with H1BS where I gather from 1990 on there's been way more demand for immigration for companies trying to hire people and bring them to the United States. And we've been very capped in the number of those. And I assume the rationale is that person is taking the job away from an American. Is that true or is there real value being created?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the rationale is at this point because you know, the numbers haven't really been updated for a long time. And you know, a lot of people criticize that. I think the problem with H1B visa is that it's really hard to defend, but it's also really hard to criticize on the merit because what I show in my research is that basically high skilled immigration is extremely popular among literally everyone. You talk to conservatives, you talk to liberals, people see the need for those things. That's what I call demonstrably beneficial policies. You really don't need to explain to folks why we need doctors and engineers and all that. They understand that those people pay taxes. Those people are going to be definitely integrated. They would speak English, they do all of those good things. And really there are almost no downsides apart from competing with them on the job market. Right. So obviously some people are going to be disadvantaged by those folks. Right? But as a country we benefit. And that's what important for a lot of folks. Right? The problem with that, the way how visa is implemented is not ideal. Right. There is a lot of documentation of abuse. It's real. But we don't have anything better than that. Right. I know that a lot of people in the tech industry right now, they're switching to the O1 exceptional ability visa because it seems like a much easier way to go about some of the really exceptional people right now. But ideally we would have a program run by the government that is actually allowing people to bring the best people from abroad that's going to be beneficial and popular to everyone. It's not happening right now because Congress is Not really doing anything. Not just on immigration, but any other issue. There is a gridlock more generally. Right. But yeah, so in this sense, I do think that sometimes people get a little bit too much into the lids of the, you know, the, the H1B debate. But I think it's important to not lose sight of the simple fact that people like high skilled immigration and it's actually very much needed according to all possible calculations you might have. That said, I should say, though, despite the fact that 80 to 90% of folks support high skilled immigration, Pew Research had this poll just before 2024 election where they zoomed in not just to conservative versus liberals, but they zoomed into Trump supporters versus Harris supporters, and they found that in both groups, more than 80% people said that they wanted to increase high school immigration.
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And so given that, because that does seem to be the case, and if you look at the number of H1B visas over time, it's basically been flat for 25, 30 years and the demand has grown. And I think the latest statistics are there's almost 10 times as much demand as there are visas issued every year. Given that support, why is it so controversial? And why is the Trump administration actually cracking down on it even more and making it even more difficult?
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B
Okay, that's a good question. I think, the way I think about it is that even though in the general population support for high school immigration is almost absolute, but it's not complete, right. It's still, you have 10 to 20% of people, as I show in my book, who oppose all kinds of immigration. You can think of those folks as like racist, nativist, whatever have you. But basically those are the people who oppose all kinds of immigration, no matter what, you know, for it can be reasons related to, you know, they just don't think the needle for those folks, they think they might be, you know, dangerous. I mean, whatever the reasons are, they just don't like any immigration whatsoever. And I think what Trump did effectively, he didn't make people more anti immigration in general or even in the Republican Party, but what he did is that he brought a lot of those folks to the Republican coalition. Right? So a lot of folks who disliked immigration previously who were voting for Democrats or those who were not voting at all, they are now part of the GOP effectively, right? So we have this kind of rising nativist coalition as a part of the Republican Party, which we never had before. And so right now, even though high school immigration is popular in the electorate more generally, if you zoom into the Republican Party, there is A big split. And I think the fact of the matter is, again, we're just talking about this with some of my colleagues, is that in social science, we have all these big theories about what determines immigration, whether the causes or the consequences, and people come up with all these big theories. But at the end of the day now, in the United States of America, there's this one single fact that explains 80% of everything that's going on is just the fact that Stephen Miller is in charge of immigration policy and he doesn't like immigration. So at the time when Trump got reelected, there was a real conversation about the tech people being dominant and kind of pushing for H1B and all that. But now it's all gone. Now, obviously the nativist faction has prevailed, and that's kind of what we have.
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Okay, so effectively, certainly countrywide, it's the tail wagging the dog. It's a very loud and powerful and very small minority. I mean, to have 80% agreement in this country is just a shocking consensus. And so if that's 20% of people and they have the power to dictate national immigration policy, is there. First of all, look, why is it such an issue? Like, what does it come down to? Some people say it's racist, Some people. There are many different explanations. What is, what does the data show? What is it that makes them so passionate about it?
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B
Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I don't think I have an easy answer for that. It's probably a combination of different things. And I mean, I feel like there can be different ways of how one can become a very kind of motivated, anti immigration person. I think racism is definitely one part of it. I don't want to deny that it doesn't exist, but I think the problem is that at least in the academic literature, that's literally the only thing that people are talking about. I do think that it's much broader than that and much more nuanced. I think there is also this idea of kind of loss aversion and going back to behavioral economics and Daniel Kahneman. Then basically the threat looms larger than the benefits, and people are just more attuned to the potential losses or the threats from immigration that are kind of probabilistic but real than the benefits. And it's just thinking about the relationship between immigration and crime. We know from, at least in the United States that immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes per capita, even if you zoom into some particular groups or whatnot. But in the end of the day, if you See someone getting killed by an illegal alien, that's very visceral and threatening. And you don't really realize that if you stop immigration of all kind, it's actually possible that you're going to make things less safe for more people. And counterfactually, more people are going to die as a result of less safe policies. It's just like people don't really think about those hypothetical. Right. People think about what's actually happening on the ground, which is understandable, but that's not how policymakers are supposed to be thinking about those things.
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And is there something about the US System that allows a very vocal, passionate minority who maybe not have the facts or the larger facts to control it that we're not seeing in other countries? Because in Canada and other countries, there seem to be just a much more coherent system that seems to work. It seems to be less passionate. Obviously, in Europe, there are much, actually even more intense disagreements about immigration.
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Yeah, I think, yeah, we can have a separate podcast about the virtues of two party versus multiparty systems and all that. But until very recently, the idea was that because you only have two parties, right, you have this kind of incentive of people to cater to the median voter. And so both Republicans and Democrats, the left and the right, they're gonna be trying to move closer to the center and be more sane. What we see, in fact, that it's not really what's happening for various different reasons. The nicest way to frame it is that just we got very, very unlucky right now.
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All right. And stepping back from this very loud, powerful, and small minority right now. When you look at the big survey results about how important is immigration and illegal immigration, and here's where we get into the legal versus illegal, which is where I would say you actually see a lot more consensus in the center that people really did perceive in the last five years that illegal immigration was becoming a huge problem. And one of the things you say very clearly in your work is that one of the things that really matters when you ask whether people support or are against immigration is the perception that the government has a handle on it. And what seems to have happened in the Biden administration in particular, it looked like the government had no handle on it, and it was a huge issue for a lot of voters and still seems to be. So is that the case? And is this perception of control over the borders as important as the surveys certainly suggest and as President Trump suggests?
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B
Yeah, so I think it's very, very important. I mean, there are some people, like, I Know my friend Alex Norusta at the Cato Institute, he has this kind of chaos theory of everything, right. That, you know, it's basically everything that we see about public opinion, immigration. So basically a function of how salient and how bad the border is in the news media. So I think there's definitely something to that. I kind of view it as just an important part of this kind of broader umbrella of people wanting immigration to be in their national interest. Right. So basically what I show, and I think Canada is one successful example of this, when most people see immigration to be handled in the national interest, economically being handled in an orderly way, basically with pre specified visa routes that everyone can understand with very little infraction of violation, and also with an immigration system that encourages migrants to integrate in terms of learning the language and the customs and all that, people are totally on board with whatever you do. But that's not where we are right now. And the problem is that I think a lot of people realized on the left is that you cannot just wish those things away by calling kind of non legal immigration pathway legal. Right? So there was this whole conversation about some folks about how should we think about asylum seekers in the US who were released into the country while waiting for their hearing? Are those legal immigrants or illegal immigrants? I think, I don't know. I think it really depends on your perspective. I think this idea of calling them quasi legal, I think that makes sense to me. But obviously I can also understand how for many folks it's not going to be satisfactory because if we don't have a provision for those folks to come, if we don't have a work visa or something that people can understand and we just give basically a ticket to enter the country to folks who just show up at the border, that's just not something that people want to have. I don't think that's necessarily a weird thing to understand. But for some reason, for a very long time during the Biden administration, people just, you know, tried to deny the whole tribe. Right. And I don't think that was, you know, useful at all.
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And one of the things you recommend, which I do think is controversial, is that it immigration should be selective, that the United States should very clearly say high skilled. Yes. Others back of the line, which I know is grating to some who are, seem to be for whatever reason, think it's very unfair. It's not inclusive. It's shafting the huddled masses who were welcome for so long. So, so talk about that. Why do you think it's important that we be selective particularly for economic contributions.
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B
Yeah, I, I do. I think that it's less controversial now than it was a couple of years ago because I think again, with Trump getting reelected again, I think a lot of people are eager to actually find comp and actually figure out how to make system better. Because I do think that in the end of the day, the most unfair immigration system is the one that is completely closed and doesn't allow anyone. Right. So to the extent that you make sure that at least some people can benefit and contribute, I would say you don't have to be completely consequentialist to think that it's a much preferable system to this, a completely closed system. I think the reason why selective immigration policies are important because those are the policies that are mostly beneficial. Right. Because again, it's very easy to explain to people why we need doctors and engineers. Right. And that's why I think the Canadian system is so popular among folks, is because it is very, very transparent. Right. It's not just people being overemphasize the importance of this kind of point based system that they have the idea it doesn't have to be about points, right. But the general kind of thrust of the system where you just have people who are more likely to come to contribute, to be integrated, to pay taxes and not be a welfare burden. I think again, it's a very simple system. You don't have to be like an economist to support this. And then it's also a matter of just ensuring that different strands of policies have just more understandable benefits. So even if you zoom into the humanitarian system, for instance, which again, at least given my work is much harder to sell to public than those high skilled policies. When you talking about ensuring that you can help and shelter refugees and asylum seekers, even within this category, you can have policies that are much better and worse. So I've been obsessed with this idea of private refugee sponsorship, for instance, that they spearheaded in Canada 40 or 50 years ago, where basically the idea is that the government is allowing private citizens and organizations to sponsor their own refugees. And those people basically are inviting refugees on their own dime. They provide shelter, they house them, they ensure that they're integrated, get a job and all that, and it's not perfect. The system cannot really help if we have a crisis, the war, and then people are trying to cross the border, it's not going to help with that. But to the extent that can redirect a lot of the other folks into this kind of more orderly system where willing individuals are able to invite immigrants on their own dime and provide for them. I think it's a really good thing, and I think we should do more of that in the US we actually had the welcome Corps program a couple of years ago that was extremely successful and very, very popular among Republicans. It only lasted for a couple of years because unfortunately, the Trump administration canceled all humanitarian mission, including that one. I don't think they, I think it was an unintended consequence. I don't actually, I would be surprised Stephen Miller might know about this system, but I wouldn't be surprised if President Trump has never heard about it. So it was kind of unintended casualty, but they could have retained it and it would be very, very popular, I would expect. It's today explained President Trump has not made a coherent case for his war in Iran. And last night he said he's not ending it yet.
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We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to
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the Stone Ages where they belong. His ally, Tucker Carlson has been making a very coherent case against the war
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because it doesn't serve American interests in any conceivable way. And, and let, let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I'd love to hear it. I haven't heard.
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On Tuesday, we asked Carlson about his break with Trump and about how the Trump coalition is splintering as some young conservatives abandon the president and embrace something darker.
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It becomes like, all of a sudden, like, hey, you kids, why you listening to Elvis Presley and that rock music is bad? Like, all of a sudden, Fuentes controls the conversation and becomes the cool kid. And the net effect is to make the Holocaust a joke today explained every
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weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant.
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And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop, a podcast that's a
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place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning.
- [22:23]
B
It's going to be fun. We rarely agree, but we almost never
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disagree, and we're always learning.
- [22:29]
B
That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for President of the United States.
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It's going to be only America First. America First.
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Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from vox. The idea of like a post Trump or not exactly Trump focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing
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is also going to cause a big split in the gop. So far it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war.
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I'm a Stead Herndon and welcome to America. Actually.
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A
So let's go back because I think the point we were talking about before where there is the everybody needs to have the perception that the government has control. The large majority of Americans who regard immigration as either a critical problem or a very important problem. It's in large part because of that it feels like it's not under control. And the other thing you say very clearly is until you have that, you're not going to have a population be very positive about very free immigration.
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B
Yeah. Can I just quickly add something to that? So I think you're right that people, those perceptions of the order are very important, but it's not just about the border. Right. So I think what happened in the last several years with the refugee crisis in New York City, in Chicago, a lot of those were kind of political stunts created by Republicans, but I think they had a point. Right. Because you clearly see that when immigration is a shock, it's not orderly, it's not managed well. It's really not just a problem at the border, it's a problem across the country. Right. And I think it's important to make sure that those situations are minimized. Right. Because again, it's never a productive thing to just send a large swath of people to a certain place without allowing them to work. I think it's the worst thing you can possibly do do. Right. Because basically it's by design creates those perceptions of people leeching on the system.
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And talk about that because you've written a great article that talks about the difference between the United States and Europe and you say the United States does it much better. And a lot of it has to do with work. The counter to what you just said is, wait a minute, wait a minute. They're refugee, you know, why should they take an American job? Why should they be allowed to work while their case is going through. So, so why should they? What is the, what's the benefit of it?
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B
Yeah, so I mean again, there can be some people like again 10 to 20% depending on how you count, who just not going to be happy no matter what you do. Right. And you know, there's this kind of meme like the Schrodinger cat migrant where like, you know, they're bad when they're like lazy and don't have a job. And then when they are, you know, productive and have a job, they're taking a job for an American. So basically, you know, some people are never going to be satisfied. Right. But I think to the extent the policymakers need to set up policy that is good for America, I think just in terms of the numbers like the fiscal benefits and costs of various migration routes, it's always going to be a better thing to ensure that people can provide for themselves. Again, there can be some good arguments that when you only allow people for a couple of months to have an asylum hearing, maybe it's not the best idea for them to have a job because employer is going to lose their candidacy or maybe they're going to take a job for someone else. But we're talking about people who are probably going to stay either legally or illegally. And in New York City in particular because of this right to refuge law that Manhattan Institute has written a lot about, those people were provided housing for a very long time on taxpayers dime and it was really just not an ideal situation from any left or right perspective. And the problem with Europe is that that's a much more common scenario. As I have written with Kelsey Piper, I think a good comparison to have when we think about the US versus European immigration is that basically what we saw happening in New York City is a more regular way of handling immigration in Europe. It's a much more European thing which again some people might push back towards that, but I think it's just not something that normally happens in America. That was a very unique situation for the United States. I think it's much more common in Europe and I do think that, I think despite all the concerns that we have about immigration in the United States, people just don't realize how good we have it here. It's not perfect, it can be better, don't get me wrong. But I do think that it's a very important thing to keep in mind that like, you know, no matter how you slice and dice the data, it's really hard to find those specific subgroups of migrants that commit More crimes than natives.
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A
Let's talk about just because so critical right now, deportation and ice. And to me, this goes again to your point about the sense of does the government have it under control? I was very struck in the Gallup poll about just the overwhelming support for what might be described as a path to citizenship and the very small amount of support for hey, let's deport everybody, which 10 years ago would have seemed crazy to talk. You'd float that say, oh, it's totally impractical, cost so much money, and yet here we are, we seem to be the solution is deport 11 or 14 million people, depending on what your number is. So what's going on there? Is that the same vocal minority wagging the whole country?
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B
Yeah. So one thing that I really want to highlight is that we've been going back and forth on immigration for like the last 10 years at least since the first Trump administration in terms of having first a backlash against immigration that helped Trump get elected. Then we had this kind of reverse backlash where Trump overreached and then the Biden administration got elected and then we had exactly again another anti immigration backlash because people were upset with what the Biden administration was doing. And now it's happening yet over again because the Trump administration overreached. And so what I'm trying to do in my research is figure out how this situation can become more stable. And I think what we see is that it's really hard to get it right for either liberals or conservatives. Right. And it's really like the idea of making immigration system popular. It's really not about any particular pro immigration goal. Right. It's people who are in the conservative governments, like the Republican Party. It's their interest to have their policies to be popular too. And they fail at this really, really badly. Right. So when Trump started in 2025, immigration was the biggest issue for the Republicans they had. The biggest advantage was a plus 20, depending on how you measure it. And now it's all underwater. And the reason for that is because instead of making productive steps in terms of again, streamlining our high skilled immigration system. So Trump on the campaign trail, he was sometimes talking about those kind of tech friendly policies about allowing more graduates to stay in the country from foreign countries and all that, none of this materialized. And I think it's a big mistake. And so instead what happened is that we had more interior enforcement in the country in places where it wasn't really needed that much. So, you know, I recently moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Indiana and we had a Big raid by the border patrol in ice. And Charlotte, which is not even like a border city of any kind of possible definition. And I can tell you people were pissed. Like, you know, when you go to like a conservative area in Charlotte where, you know, all the bank executives live, like people were really upset with the whole situation. Right. So you really don't have to be a bleeding heart liberal to like just see why none of this makes sense, any sense. I don't think people who came up with this idea, whether it was the folks at dhs, whether it was approved by the Trump administration, Svenmiller has thought it through. It was a clear political mistake. Electorally, it definitely hurt Republicans really bad. So for me, the question is why they're doing it. I think kind of going back to the start of our conversation, it is probably the case that because the nativist coalition is ruling the Republican Party right now and the White House, then I think people are just miscalculating things and this is bad for everyone. I don't know how to go about changing that. Apart from losing elections, I don't have complete hope that it's going to happen. Because my biggest worry right now, I can tell you, is that Republicans are going to be completely crushed in the midterms and potentially, you know, in the next presidential elections. And then the new Democratic administration, they're gonna like, again, do something weird on immigration, let a lot of people in and it's just gonna, you know, we're
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just gonna have the same seesaw back and forth. Yeah. And I, I don't, I mean, again, just looking very high level at the Gallup polls. It is crazy to me that the Democrats don't have a coherent strategy about saying, look, we get it, it's super important to the country. We're gon going to be under control. There aren't going to be illegal border crossings. Everyone is going to be on a path to citizenship. I mean, that seems like the most, the most reasonable solution. What has to happen for us to get there? You've talked about some of it. But if we are going to get to a reasonable, consistent immigration policy that most Americans, not the extremes, but most Americans think is sane and under control, what has to happen, happen.
- [32:49]
B
So for the US Context specifically, I think the biggest bottleneck is the Congress that doesn't really do much on any issue, not just immigration. So my kind of sense talking to people in D.C. is that it's really hard to imagine a comprehensive immigration reform anymore. Right. So it's really off the table at this point. And so I think the only thing that we can hope for at this point is those kind of very marginal tweaks to the system that are basically are approved and implemented on the bipartisan basis again. So something related to inviting high skilled immigrants, or maybe especially high skilled immigrants or something that is less controversial, the H1B visa, maybe do something on the O1 visa, exceptional ability visa, or do something special for if not stem, but even AI folks, something that really is a no brainer, that no one is opposing really and people can support and what my research shows that basically once you start doing those things and those accumulate, then people just become more supportive of the system in general. Then the government can do other things. But we have to start somewhere. And I think the most important thing is not instead of trying to do this kind of battle of rhetoric and ideas where you kind of yell at each other from both sides, you really have to think more about particular policy design ideas that can be implemented on the bipartisan basis with no backlash that's sustained where you would not have this back and forth situation going on. I really like this idea of place based visas or state based visas, which were at some point of time in the last 10 to 20 years proposed by various partisans. I remember, I think the latest proposal was by Pete Buttigieg actually with some other folks where the idea is that states or particular colonies in the US they could opt in to invite additional migrants on top of whatever we do federally. Because right now all the immigration admissions are done at the federal level, which again, and not something that is enshrined in the Constitution. Right. There is nothing illegal or weird about having localities inviting their own migrants. And in Canada and many other countries they do have provincial nomination system and basically mechanisms for particular jurisdictions to invite their own migrants. Of course you have to make sure that it's all very orderly, that people agree with that and all that. But I think to the extent that you can do some of those state based visas for the most productive industries or where you have acute clear labor shortages. So I know that the governments in North Dakota are very much looking for workers. The state is a declining population and they really need folks of all kinds. And right now they cannot really do anything because everything is decided at the federal level. But if they could at least invite some folks to help with those shortages, I think that would be a good thing. And then just go very slow and careful. So yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's a satisfying answer.
- [36:00]
A
It's depressing that that's all we can hope for. But you got to start with something that you can.
- [36:05]
B
Yeah. So I mean, immigration is always going to be there with us. It seems like it's not going to go away as an issue because it is very visceral issue for many folks, for better or worse. And I think to the extent that we can make it more boring and technical, and I can tell you, I think that's my kind of hope is that immigration just becomes a technical issue that only is concerned by the nerds in the White House or Congress where we're debating the different provisions to H1B or some other new visa category. And normal people just are completely tuned out. They don't worry about what's happening at the border. They don't see homeless asylum seekers in their parks, in their cities. And they just like, you know, are grateful that America is so popular that all those people want to come here. Right. I think one thing that people, again on the anti immigration side don't realize is that it is America's superpower to attract all those folks. Right. You would rather be in a place that is so attractive to others than the other way around. Like no one wants to come to China. And Chinese, actually I recently looked at this, they are trying to come up with a bunch of different high skilled visa policies that gives enormous number of benefits to folks who they mostly target return migrants, other Chinese born folks or people with Chinese parents who potentially are considering returning to China. But they're really trying hard and they're failing because it's like you don't want to be in China. You would rather be in the US and so in this sense, in a lot of European countries, you know, no matter what they do on immigration, like what are you doing like in Sweden or whatever, it's still not going to be attractive to the top talent because the top talent would want to come to the US and maybe like Canada or Britain or whatever. So I think we should make use of this superpower.
- [38:01]
A
Yes, Immigration has made the United States the richest and most powerful country in the world. So it's, yeah, it seems like the benefits are self evident, but yet it is very controversial. Let's end on birthright citizenship because it's very much in the news. President Trump went to the Supreme Court presumably to glare at the justices and try to intimidate them into making a decision that he likes. Give us the context on that. That's something that I would confess until a few years ago I never thought about because it was just a thing that was always There and now suddenly it's an argument and a decision. And leaving aside whether it is law or not and whether the Supreme Court's upcoming decision is correct or setting new precedent or what have you, why do we have it and is it positive?
- [38:49]
B
Yeah. So I should say I'm not a legal scholar and I also am not an expert on immigrant integration of birthright citizenship. But actually I have a lot of colleagues at Notre Dame in the Keel School of Global affairs, where some of my colleagues recently filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court to inform them about the benefits of birthright citizenship. And my understanding of it, and I can tell you again, as someone who studies immigration in a more comparative perspective, is that birthright citizenship has downsides. But it's really a very good deal in the end because what we see in countries in Europe where they didn't have it until recently, like Germany, where I spent some time, it's just really not working out well. And that's why it actually recently changed it. Now they have something like birthright citizenship, where basically in Germany you had a bunch of folks from Turkey who were born in Germany who speak perfect German, but they are not allowed to get German citizenship. And you know, there are certain problems with birthright citizens that are real, like birthright tourism. I remember there was this editorial or analysis in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times about the Chinese billionaires effectively buying surrogates in the US who will have their US Born citizen children. It's only a few hundred folks, maybe. Right. But we're talking about Chinese billionaires, so it seems like a pretty big deal. You know, it's a rival. So does it mean that we have to get rid of birthright citizenship to prevent that? I don't think so. I think we can have some provisions in the law. I think there is this beauty about this system where no matter where you're from, who your parents are, if you're born on U.S. soil, you are a U.S. citizen. And if we do get rid of it, I think it's just going to make things worse and it's going to make things worse in terms of just kind of general people's dissatisfaction with immigration system.
- [40:40]
A
Alex, it's terrific to talk to you. Thank you so much. Your work on this is incredibly helpful for understanding it. And I hope we can be a little bit more optimistic about where we ultimately get. But it's great to hear you outline some pragmatic things that there is a lot of popular support for that hopefully we can get Congress to finally move on here thank you so much for joining us.
- [41:03]
B
Thank you. I appreciate it.