#31 - The Truth About Immigration - An Interview with Professor Zeke Hernandez

I need to come up with a cool name for an interview series. I'm open to suggestions.

Typically, I try to approach things with a sense of balance.  I want people on the right to understand how something might look to people on the left and vice versa.  It’s not like I’m clairvoyant, but I am making a genuine attempt to understand competing perspectives, and I hope that comes through in my writing.

But today’s article is not just about an issue, but one person’s highly informed perspective—and contribution to the scholarship—on an issue.  In June, I spoke to Professor Exequiel “Zeke” Hernandez of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania about his new book, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers.  I highly recommend you read it.  

But wait—how the heck did that happen?  If you Google Professor Hernandez, you’ll see results from The Economist, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Forbes, Barron’s, and Bloomberg, all of which do generally have more cultural cache than, say, me (so far, I say, cackling in my lair/office with a guitar and a cello and books strewn across shelves, tables, and the floor).

Well, I published my first article about immigration on June 10th.  My dad’s cousin read it and directed me to a three-part series the podcast Freakonomics did on immigration this last March.  One of the main experts interviewed for the podcast was Professor Hernandez.  Though the podcast series was months old, his book had just been released—it was a sign.  I bought it immediately.

Here’s the thing about professors’ email addresses: they tend to be public.  So, figuring I had nothing to lose, I found Professor Hernandez’s faculty profile, sent him a message from my personal email address—based on my middle school baseball nickname—and told him I’d like to interview him about his book (which, incidentally, I hadn’t yet read).  I disclosed—I promise—that I had 92 subscribers.  I had zero expectation of a response.

But, for whatever reason—I have theories, but the best explanation is probably that Professor Hernandez is just a really, really nice guy who likes to talk about immigration—he responded, and we set an interview date for a few days later.  I used those few days to read the book and come up with a list of possible questions, many of which I didn’t end up asking over the course of our 40 minute phone conversation.

But enough background to the background.  I want to do two things before I get to the actual interview.  Well, three.

Two or Maybe Three Things

First, keep in mind that I haven’t done this before: this isn’t just an interview article—it’s the interview article.  I haven’t done one of these before.  So, rather than getting a coherent narrative with answers cut and spliced in as appropriate, you’re getting a full, chunky interview transcript, with edits made only for clarity and to save you from reading a bunch of written-out verbal tics.

Second, I want to introduce you to Professor Hernandez, or Zeke.  I want you to know who he is not so you do discount him but so you don’t.  I don’t want him to be just an abstract concept of a man who can either be (i) waved away the moment he contradicts your priors or (ii) accepted uncritically the moment he confirms them.  

Zeke was born in Uruguay.  The year he was born, his father began working an office job for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormon Church, that took his family from Uruguay to Costa Rica, then to Guatemala, then to Argentina, and then back to Uruguay.  From 19 to 21, Zeke served a mission in Argentina, then headed a continent to the north to Brigham Young University (which, to my great dismay, currently has a very good football team—has been a rough sports autumn, now that I think about it).  He graduated in 2006 with Bachelor and Masters degrees in accounting, then headed directly to the University of Minnesota, from which he received a doctorate in 2011 in Strategic Management and Organization (I Do Not Know What That Means But It Seems Important).  Dr. Hernandez taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 2011 to 2013, then went to Penn, where he has been ever since—a boy from Uruguay who became one of the highest rated teachers at one of the most prestigious business schools in the world.  Beyond being an Ivy League professor, he’s a committed Christian and father of five, and is not a member of either dominant political party.

And third…what does the book say?  Our focus in the interview was less about the arguments and more about convincing people of them, and I don’t expect you to breeze through a 320 page book before coming back to keep reading.

Conveniently, Professor Hernandez writes and talks about immigration a lot, and he has, in addition to a great Substack newsletter called Zekrets, a website with deep dives on questions like do immigrants steal or create jobs?, should we favor skilled immigrants or do we also benefit from unskilled immigrants?, and will immigrants undermine my country's culture?  Each deep dive comes with an explanatory video, bullets with key insights, links to case studies, questions to prompt dialogue, and a litany of citations for further reading and research.

Seven Reasons to Hire Immigrants (+ an exciting announcement)

Let me see if I can summarize his central arguments in two chunky paragraphs (he’ll read this and let me know how I did):

1. Immigrants, writ large, are neither villains nor victims.  Economically speaking, evidence going back over a hundred years in some cases demonstrates that immigrants make us more innovative.  Following the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, America’s most serious effort at immigration restriction, American scientists experienced a permanent decline of 68% in the rate at which they produced patents compared to the pre-1924 period.  Today, immigrants comprise 16% of U.S. inventors but are responsible for 36% of all patents—famous foreign-born innovators include Elon Musk and Jensen Huang, each of whom came to the U.S. long before achieving any professional success, Huang as a young child.  But the benefits don’t come just from the high-skilled innovators and those bringing investment ties to home countries—on average, the evidence strongly supports low-skilled immigration as well.  When immigrants come to America, they bring not just labor supply but demand, and they generally don’t compete with native-born Americans for the same jobs or the same positions.  Are there exceptions?  Of course.  But immigrants, writ large, follow the jobs: the states with the lowest rates of employment and labor force participation also generally have the lowest rates of immigration. 

2. But there are also questions of safety and assimilation, or, better put, integration.  Evidence going back decades indicates that immigrants, both legal and illegal, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.  That is not to trivialize immigrant crime—the crime rates aren’t zero, there’s a substantive difference between economic migrants or refugees and organized criminal syndicates expanding into new markets, and crimes by immigrants can feel preventable in a way that good old-fashioned American crimes might not—but, to date, the data just does not support the premise that immigration, on average, makes America less safe.  But it’s not just about crime—it’s about integration too.  The rate of cultural assimilation of immigrants in the United States is the same as it was 100 years ago, as measured by language acquisition, adopting native names, or the preference for living in ethnic neighborhoods.  On average, for immigrants to integrate and catch up to natives in earnings, it takes about two generations.  Cultures don’t compete—they complement.  Successful immigrants are those who integrate by preserving their original culture, enriching our national identity.  The best outcome is that immigrants adopt what is good about here while bringing what is good from there.

None of Professor Hernandez’s arguments mean open borders, but they do support a positive, optimistic outlook on immigrants and immigration.

I do not believe you should accept Professor Hernandez’s arguments as if they came down from on high, but I do think you should take them seriously.  Finding anecdotes to support your case is pretty easy.  Finding data is harder.  He comes with data, and lots of it.

But, without further ado, the very first [COOL NAME FOR INTERVIEW SERIES TO COME]. 

[COOL NAME]

NH: So, first off, at the outset, how has it felt to have the book done? How has it felt to have it out there?

ZH: Oh, yeah, it's really exciting and terrifying at the same time.

NH: When did you start writing it?

ZH: Well, you know, a few people have asked me that, and I don't know how to answer it.  I mean, in my head, a decade, but obviously that's not the best answer.  I think effective writing time was probably six months if I add up all the days and hours of writing.  But it's longer than that in terms of gathering all the source materials, organizing them, and then there's the whole process of, in my case, getting an agent and finding a publisher.  It depends on what you count as part of the writing process. I know that's maybe more than you bargained for in an answer, but there's a lot that goes into it that's much more than just the actual writing. 

NH: Interesting!  So when did you finish it?

ZH: Almost exactly a year ago today.  A publisher needs close to a year to do all the copy editing: you go through about three rounds of serious editing, and then there's a fourth and final one, and then they have to send it to the printer.  That process itself takes a good 5 to 6 months, and then they have to set up their marketing channels.  So, the point is that the publisher needs about a year of lead time to kind of set the whole process in motion.

NH: Got it.  So, you finish this manuscript approximately a year before it comes out. You feel good about it, you know, or as good as you're going to feel.  It's time to click submit, or send the email.  But some things are gonna change over the coming year.  And is there anything now that makes you think, gosh, I wish I could've changed that?

ZH: You know, thankfully not in terms of the overall message.  I think because I had been thinking and in some ways doubting and going back and forth about writing it for so long, I was quite clear on what I wanted the book to say.  So, thankfully not in terms of the crux of the book.  

I think that with a topic like this, where there's so much research being done and also so many events surrounding immigration happening, there’s going to be more you wish you could include because it’s really relevant.  So, for example, a lot of what the Biden administration has done to deal with the border issues.  That was just being talked about when I finished writing the manuscript.  So it would be nice now to have included a few things about that.  Or, for example, there's three or four research papers, like really good research papers that came out in the last year that provide important updates.  Some of the evidence makes an even stronger case for the economic benefits of immigration, so in some ways you could even say I kind of understated some things even just a year later.  But I don't have huge regrets if that's what you're asking. 

NH: Good—that's great.  So, getting to the substance of the book itself, I think you make a really compelling case that immigration—and not just immigration, but plentiful immigration—isn't just good, but necessary.  Do you think there is such a thing as an ideal level of immigration?

ZH: I don't know that I can answer that. I would say if anyone tells you [there’s an ideal level], they're probably lying to you.  I don't know that we can quantify that.  So this is one thing that I wish I'd written more clearly perhaps a year ago—I think I write it in the last chapter, but not forcefully enough—which is, we make a fundamental mistake in the way we run the American system, and this is true of most countries, a lot of countries, where we think we can answer that question, and so then every 30 to 40 years we try to set quotas that never change for the next 30 to 40 years.  Right?  We did it in 1924, we did it in 1965, we did it again in 1990, that's three times in a hundred years.  There's no way that politicians in 1990 could have set quotas that are still relevant today.  So, in some ways, and not that I'm accusing you of this, but the premise of the question is behind a lot of the way we think about it.  So I would say it's healthier to say, look, we don't know, but we do know what the economic and social outcomes of immigration are.  And then we should just, in some ways, revisit that question.  Not every three months, but maybe once a year, once every two years, no more than once every five years, right? Something like that. 

NH: That would get to why you would want to put it in the hands of an agency, not necessarily Congress, which is going to make decisions a lot more slowly and less frequently.  

But the reason I ask, and why I started my newsletter, is this idea that you have on the left a lot of people that are very skeptical of anything that comes out of the right, and, especially since Trump, think these people are nuts and can't really be reasoned with.  And then you have the mirror image on the right.  And I think that whether or not anyone on either side actually is nuts is kind of a secondary question—I think what would be healthy to see as a country, and what we would really benefit from, would be a more sustained effort to understand people on the other side and, if current efforts at persuasion are not working, re-evaluate.  And that's kind of what I write about.  And it's interesting because frankly, this book confirms my priors.  Everything you wrote seems like what I would have guessed or something close to it, and this is some great evidence to support it.  And so now the question is, how do you actually get it done?  Sadly, probably a harder question.  First off, the book has been out for only two weeks.  I know you were previewing it before—I was introduced to it via the Freakonomics podcast.  What has the reaction been from different parts of the political world since the book came out? 

ZH: You know, in some ways I wish me or my book were that influential—it's not yet a New York Times bestseller or anything like that.  So I don't think that it's well known enough that I know for sure.  I think, you know, I received a lot of positive reactions, more positive than negative so far. I have received some really nasty emails from people who are kind of reflexively anti-immigrant, but it's very clear those people did not even read it or consider it.  They just saw something that says positive things about immigrants and that's enough.  But I think that I'll be able to answer that like in a year, right? I think at that point I'll know how the book was received.

NH: Got it; makes sense. Side question on that: as a professor, let's say you don't have the public profile of, say, a congressperson, or some popular science author whose book would immediately jump to the top of the chart, but you are a professor at probably the most famous business school in the United States.  So, what does it look like when the book comes out?  What do you actually do?  Do you do like a small-scale book tour?  Do you speak to different groups that invite you?  I don't know mechanically what that looks like. 

ZH: I think because I'm a first-time author, there's a lot that I don't know, so I go with a lot of what my publisher and my agent suggest.  And what they tell me is that for a non-fiction book like this, it's more about trying to promote it through media outlets: hence, the Freakonomics podcast.  Today, the book was profiled on Marketplace Mornings on NPR.  And I did an MSNBC interview and a CBS interview.  Those have been nice.  And yeah, I’ve definitely been speaking to groups as well. So far, they tended to be small-ish groups, although in the fall, I already have lined up some bigger keynote-type events at industry association conferences and things like that. 

So yeah, I think it's an all of the above approach.  I think you just you just want as much attention on it as possible.  I've also tried to use social media a lot to generate small, short videos or small explainers, and I have a newsletter that goes out to a few thousand people where I publish articles on different topics, and so it's it's sort of a multi-channel thing.  It’s super uncertain what’s going to catch attention and go viral.

There was a way to write this book that could have like been a lot more provocative and nasty.  I chose deliberately not to do that because I think what I share with you is that I don't come from a partisan side on this. I'm not trying to advance a message from the left or a message from the right.  I'm politically independent, and I think that the evidence tells us a message on immigration that is totally nonpartisan.  It's consistent with conservative principles, it's consistent with liberal principles, because it's about what's good for us, right?  And what's good for us, I think both the left and the right have an interest in.  

And so, I made a deliberate choice not to write it in a way—I could have, I don't know, insulted more people, or been more aggressive, or played the “I'm a Wharton professor and everyone else is an idiot card,” you know what I mean?  I tried to write it in a way where I try to sincerely dialogue with both sides and the questions that people have.  I don't know whether that hurt me in being catchy, but my goal goes beyond just getting headlines for a few weeks.

NH: I completely agree with that approach.  My fundamental point with a lot of this stuff, and what inspired me to write this, is partially this question of what your goal is: if you're just trying to make money, you can absolutely make a lot of money by inflaming partisan tensions.   Your side—your choir—is gonna give you a bunch of money because they love hearing what you're saying.  It's fantastic, and you make your in-group feel awesome, and you cast a lot of aspersions at the out-group, but you're not actually growing your in-group.  You're not actually getting more votes.  And even if you can get enough votes to win an election, we're on a pattern right now where each party has got two out of every eight years to get something done.  That seems, from either party's perspective, really suboptimal.  I don't know why people don't make more sincere efforts to increase their coalitions, and I think a necessary predicate to doing that is not acting like everyone that doesn't agree with you already is insane or evil, even if you genuinely think they are insane or evil. 

ZH: Yeah, I think something I've realized, and I talk about this at the very beginning of the book, that in some ways a lot of the motivation came from speaking to audiences from all different backgrounds about this topic and realizing that there was a lot of misinformation and desire to know the truth.  I think that a lot of people who are skeptical about immigration or immigrants actually have really good questions. Like, I would say that people who tend to lean anti-immigrant or immigrant-skeptical actually are asking the better questions. The people who are pro-immigrant, perhaps because they already are favorably inclined, are not really asking the best questions.  The problem is that the immigration skeptics tend not to be willing to listen to the answer.  So they're asking the right questions, they just don't want the right answers.  And so, in some ways, I'm addressing a lot of the questions of the skeptics, because they're good questions. They're good questions.

NH: Yeah.  No, I, and it's interesting.  In speaking to people close to me that are skeptical about immigration, especially illegal immigration, one of the underlying issues, once you really get down to it, seems to be a concern about change and then, for lack of a better word, a general belief in order, which kind of makes a lot of sense.  So, something like illegal immigration is prima facie offensive, even if, as you allude to in the book where you're talking about speeding laws, the underlying laws don’t make a lot of sense.  In terms of specific issues, you look at crime: whatever people's reactions to specific anecdotes are, the overall data is really compelling over a really long period.  And then, there's concerns about culture change. I think the answer on that is a little bit tougher, because you want the addition, you want the integration that comes with immigration, rather than the full assimilation.  National security is an issue too, although I know less about that.

ZH: Yeah, I think that what I find sometimes dismaying, but perhaps also encouraging is that we can all agree on the outcomes.  I think there's both a conservative and a liberal case here.  I don't want chaos either, right?  I don't want crime either.  I want national security as well.  I think that where it's so important to have an informed conversation is that continuing to peddle a lot of the same tropes, like the only ever solution to the border crisis is enhanced enforcement, is self-defeating.  The evidence is telling us that that is not going to lead to the very outcome you want.  It's not to say that enforcement shouldn't be a plank, but if we don't fix the underlying laws, we're creating more chaos. And by enforcing laws that don't make sense, we're making the chaos worse.  And so, I hope to get to a point with the dialogue where we can say look, I'm totally with you on the outcome.  Let's talk about how to get there. And my hope is that there is room for that. I believe that most Americans are willing to go there. There's going to be a minority who are not, but yeah.

NH: Yeah.  That's interesting.  Can I pressure test just a couple of things in the book? 

ZH:  Go for it. Yeah, of course. 

NH: So one of the really interesting anecdotes you use, and where there is some resulting data, iss with the mass influx of immigrants to Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift from, where 125,000 Cubans make their way from their homeland to Florida.  It seems like a reason that you don't see a resulting harm on native workers with no other positive impacts is that you are increasing demand at the same time you're increasing the supply of workers, so you kind of balance out the impact on the economy.  You also wrote about Czech day laborers going over the border into Germany to work during the day and then just going back home.  In that situation, you only get the increase in labor supply, so you only see the downsides, at least with respect to wages for lower-income workers.  Would you be willing to extrapolate that a little bit further to say day laborers generally, where you increase the labor supply but don't increase the demand, are going to have just that negative impact?  Or primarily that negative impact? 

ZH: I think that's uncertain because increasing demand is just one mechanism why more immigrant workers don't lower wages.  But there's another key mechanism, which is that immigrants are just different, right?  They bring different skills, they have different specialties, they want different kinds of jobs—this idea that “the worker is a worker is a worker” just doesn’t hold up.  And so I don't know that the single study on day laborers in Germany tells us everything—there could have been other factors as well.  I'm speculating here, but perhaps the reason there we saw the negative only was that those Czech workers were very similar to the German workers, whereas in other cases if a day laborer is doing work that is really different from the work a native is doing, or requires a different skill set, maybe the downside would be mitigated.  My point is that I would be hesitant to go to a politician and say, okay, you should ban foreign day laborers just based on that one study.  I would need to probe other conditions there before coming to that conclusion.

NH: Got it.  Not to mention that, in the American context, hard to get very far from the border in a day.

ZH: Yeah, exactly (totally laughed here at my hilarious observation).  

NH: But we do in the US have seasonal workers, right?  Not sure how many we have relative to how many we used to have.

ZH: Absolutely.

NH: And I think a lot of these seasonal workers come without their families.  If you’re trying to increase demand, it seems like it might make more sense to make it easier for them to bring their families? I don't know if that's right. 

ZH: When you look at all the benefits, there could be something to that.  I think temporary workers are doing two things. They're providing their labor and they are, while they live here, spending their paychecks, which is making the market larger.  But you're right that by not being here permanently, there's a lot of other things they might not be able to contribute, like, I don't know, starting a business or paying more taxes or something like that.  So, again, does that mean that there is no room?  I'm trying to refrain here from concluding that there's no room for day laborers or that we should ban them all.  I think my take on this is that in a complex economy, there's room for all kinds of migrants, including temporary migrants, and they often play an important role.  And the truth is like a lot of people just simply don't want to live permanently in a foreign country. They're perfectly fine with working, I don't know, a quarter of the year and saving up enough money and going back home.  And I think there's room for that.  This is very common, for example, in the Middle East and Asia, and it's a win-win. 

Actually, that's an interesting example, because in this case we don't see that temporary farm workers in the US or temporary workers on H2B visas compete with natives.  Those programs exist to fill job shortages, so that that's one case where it's not the demand side benefit as much as it's that the immigrants are doing work that native workers simply do not want to do: farm work, landscaping work, hotel cleaning work—native workers just will not do it.  Right?  I mean, I'm sorry, but there's no other way to say it: they will not do it.  And so there you're just plugging hole in the labor market, which keeps hotels open, keeps farms running, keeps landscaping businesses going.  And if you didn't have that, you would lose even more jobs, because now the landscaping company has to close altogether instead of remaining open, right?

NH: Right. Yeah. Yeah.  Well, it’s interesting: you'd make this kind of small counter-argument from really either side of the political aisle that if you decrease the supply of workers to the point where employers are forced to increase wages, you could find some Americans to work these jobs.  But while it'll get to a point where you could find people, you couldn't sustain a business.

ZH: Yeah, you just can't.  I mean, if you pay me $200,000 a year to change beds in hotels, I'll do that.  But there's also a market reality that that's just not possible.  Hotels in the US would just close down.  So there is also a market logic operating here. Even as a business school professor, I'm not so blind as to say that businesses don’t sometimes try to get away with underpaying—I'm sure they do.  But there is there is kind of a real market.  There is a real ceiling placed by the market on how much you can pay for certain skill sets. And I know and we have we have evidence of that, like in some of the other studies I cite in that chapter, like when the Bracero program [a seasonal worker program in placed from 1942 to 1964 that allowed Mexican agricultural laborers to take temporary work in the United States] ended, it's not like farmers went out and hired a whole bunch of natives at really high wages.  For one, they weren't willing to do the work at the prevailing market wage.  It would have meant closing the farm if they paid a lot more than they were already paying.  So what did the farmers do?  They invested more in automation.  And so, when you try to artificially push wages above their reasonable market value, businesses are going to do other things.  They reorganize, they innovate, they use more technology.  So that's also a reality that you have to face.  You can't ask a business to operate unprofitably, right? 

NH: Right.  That’s where you get into a little bit of the free market side where it's like, the more interventions that the government makes, the more interventions that are required to kind of counteract the impact of the initial interventions.

ZH: Yeah, yeah. And I understand that what I just said could be resisted by someone who tends to be skeptical of markets, who would say, oh, well, that's just businesses being greedy.  And I could say, look, even if we account for greed, there's going to be a threshold beyond which, whatever your favorite business is, it just can't operate.  I think even a skeptic like that would rather have a business remain open in their community than have it close all together, right?

NH: Here's, okay, so two final questions. And by the way, thank you so much. You've spoken to me for a half an hour. That is very kind. It's very kind.  And hopefully, you know, the right person will read my newsletter and the book will blow up.  It's, I will say, not super likely, but we can hope.  [Note to readers—here’s the link again to buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Immigration-Successful-Societies/dp/125028824X] 

So, some of the numbers you cite, you note that over the short term, and I'm not sure exactly how long the short term is—some number of years, a couple decades—but the net impact of immigrants on the economy over that short period tends to be a little negative. But then over the...

ZH:  On taxes you mean? Fiscal, fiscal effect?

NH: Yes. Yeah, okay. But then over the long haul, the arrow moves the other direction and you end up with a positive impact on average of something around $1,700, I think it was.

ZH: That's at the state level.

NH: Okay, at the state level. At the federal level, we're a lot more positive for a lot longer.

ZH: That's correct.

NH: So is that number at the state level discounted to present value, or is that just kind of a hard number?

ZH: Yeah, that's net present value. The estimates come from a 2017 National Academy of Science study. To recap the numbers at the state level, a first generation immigrant costs the state, in net present value terms, $1,600. The primary driver of that cost is educating the children of immigrants.  But then when you add up the tax contributions at the state level from the second and third generation, then they they contribute together $3,000—$1,700 second generation, $1,300 third generation.  This is all in net present value terms, so if you account for the descendants of the initial immigrant, the ROI is a two to one, right? Because you pay $1,600, you get $3,000 back. 

But, in the short term, the mayor and the governor have to balance the budget, so they have a legitimate point when they're saying, hey, the taxes of the children and grandchildren aren't coming immediately. But here's where I said there were a few studies that have come out since that I wish I'd known about.  One of them that I think is really insightful notes that these estimates focus only on the taxes paid or services used by the immigrants or their children directly.  One of the things that gets severely underestimated is that businesses are employing these people, right?  And businesses are paying corporate taxes. So, you see another benefit when the local landscaping company or the local tech company is able to hire these immigrants and grow and pay more taxes because it's more profitable or it makes more revenue.  Adding all that, every type of immigrant makes a positive contribution, including the least skilled of immigrants because of the corporate taxes.  That's something I wish I had learned because it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

NH: Right. That's interesting.  Oh—do you know the numbers for native-born persons over the same period?

ZH: Yeah, you know, I don't off the top of my head. It's not in the book either. If you send me an email, I can probably dig it up from the report for you.

NH: Okay, I'll do that.  Final, final question.  You make a lot of very strong financial arguments in favor of immigration—a lot of other arguments as well, but let's say that people are focused primarily on these financial impacts.  Is there a risk that you end up inadvertently bolstering arguments to prefer immigrants from certain countries?  Like, you make a very strong case that you don’t only get positive benefits from Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs' dad—that low-skill immigrants provide a ton of the benefits, too.  But is there a risk that the book bolsters an argument for more immigration from tech-heavy or other advanced countries? 

ZH: Sure, maybe.  Call them culturally compatible countries, or slice it however you want.  Look, I think that in most immigrant-receiving countries, it's remarkable how well immigrants do for and in those countries, even when they have backgrounds that are really unique and different.  I don't want to go too far the other way and say I can predict success no matter where immigrants come from, but I think to me it's remarkable how little evidence we found of damages even when immigrants come from places that are really scary for natives at the time of arrival.  I was just talking about Italians in the US today with someone else.  Italians were, like, absolutely terrifying!  It's kind of funny in hindsight now, but the terror about Italians was real. 

And so, let me answer the question more directly, or perhaps in a way that is more conceptual.  A lot of the benefits of immigration that the evidence shows don't come just because of the greater quantity of people or the greater quantity of, say, investment, innovation, or taxes.  There is a quantity effect, but a lot of it also is a variety effect, meaning that the variety of backgrounds is really important to create that soup of different ideas and networks and sources of capital and products and services that are the basis for a lot of the benefits.  That's why the benefits of immigration don’t just come from attracting individuals who are really bright, but from attracting a critical mass of people from different backgrounds.  I think one of the inadvertent reasons the US has benefited so much from immigration is that it has attracted a great variety of people.  This is not a moralistic diversity argument—this is more hard-nosed, like, without a variety of inputs in an economy, you just don't get as much vibrancy both on the supply side and demand side.  That's why I would say it might be self-defeating to try to manipulate the system so that you get a lot of immigration from one particular origin that seems desirable.  

What's hard about talking about immigration is that we know the benefits, but we can't say they will arise from this specific person or this specific group.  And so you almost have to kind of allow the system to do its thing, kind of trust the process. Which I know is hard for someone like a politician or a skeptic who's like, no, but I want to know. I want to know that it's going to be these Indian engineers or these German skilled laborers. And it's like, no, the whole point is that you don't know.  I guess what I'm saying is that it's not just quantity, but variety.

NH: That's really interesting.  I’ve made a similar argument for years—I really buy into the idea that everyone only has a slice of the full picture, and the more different people you get, the fuller the picture gets.  But I will let you go. I really appreciate it, and thanks for talking to me on a Friday evening. 

Fin.

Random Fact

American cheese, basketball, and blue jeans were all invented by immigrants: James L. Kraft, inventor of American cheese, and Dr. James Naismith, inventor of basketball, were Canadian, and Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis were from Bavaria and Latvia, respectively.

Random Recommendation

Don’t move from sea level to 4,700 feet and expect to adjust immediately.  Woof.