🗽 America's immigration edge: My chat (+transcript) with policy expert Alex Nowrasteh

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

With the rise of American populist nationalism has come the rise of nativism: a belief in the concept of “heritage Americans” and a deep distrust of immigration. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Alex Nowrasteh about the ideology beneath this severe skepticism, as well as what Americans lose economically if we shut our doors to both low- and high-skilled immigrants.

Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of his own Substack with David Bier, as well as the co-author of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.

Read more of Nowrasteh’s work on immigration, nationalism, and other research.

In This Episode

* Illegal immigration (1:16)

* Rise of xenophobia (3:48)

* Psychology of immigration skeptics (9:20)

* The future American workforce (14:04)

* Population decline and assimilation (17:35)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Illegal immigration (1:16)

The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans . . . because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally.

Pethokoukis: Will you, in a very short period of time, give me a sense of the situation at the southern border of the United States of America in terms of immigration, how that has evolved from Trump 1, to Biden, to now? Is it possible to give me a concise summary of that?

Nowrasteh: From Obama through Trump 1, the border apprehension numbers were pretty reasonable, you were talking about somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 per year. Then came Covid, crashed those numbers down to basically nothing by April of 2020.

After that, the numbers progressively rose. They were at the highest point in December of 2020 than they had been for any other December going back over 25 years. Then Biden takes office, the numbers shoot through the roof. We're talking about 170,000 to 250,000, sometimes 300,000 a month until January or so of 2024; those numbers start coming down precipitously. December of 2024, they're at 40,000 or so, 45,000. January 2025, Trump comes in, they go down again. First full month of Trump's administration in February, they're about 8,000, the lowest numbers without a pandemic in a very long time.

What's the right number?

That's a hard question to answer? In an ideal world where costs and benefits didn't matter, I think the ideal number is zero. But the question is how do you get to that ideal number, right? Is it by having an insane amount of enforcement, of existing laws where you basically end up brutalizing people to an incredible extent? Or is it practically zero because we let people come in lawfully to work in this country. The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans, and that would bring that number down to about what it is now or even lower than what it is now every month, because the reason people come illegally is because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally.

Rise of xenophobia (3:48)

. . . I just don't think the economic argument is what moves people on this topic.

As I’ve understood it, and maybe understand it wrong, is this issue has developed that — at first it seemed like the concern, and it still is the concern, was with illegal undocumented immigrants. And then it seems to me the argument became, “Well, we don't want those, and then we also really don't want low-skill immigrants either.” And