november 19th and 20th. our coverage includes author discussions and call-in programs featuring senator bernie sanders, dana perino and national book award finalist, coal son whitehead. for more information about the book fairs and festivals book tv will be covering to watch previous coverage college the book fairs tab on our web site, booktv.org. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies. and is brought to you today by you cable or satellite provider. harvard university economist george borjas is next on the "after words" program. and examines the impact of immigration top the u.s. economy throughout history. >> welcome to our viewers.

i am delighted to be here with you today. i have been working on immigration issues for many years. though not a for as many years as our distinguished guest today. but i think it would probably be fire say for both of us that we are bit astonishinged at the attention that immigration issues are receiving currently, not just in the united states but in many other countries. according to survey biz the pew research center, immigration has been one of the top six issues in the u.s. presidential election and among to the reporters of the republican candidate donald trump it is among the top three most important issues. certain flow previous election in recent memory in which immigration has factored quite so importantfully the campaign. our guest today is one of the country's preeminent economists, studying the impact of immigration to the united states. we are here today to discuss his

new book. we wanted workers, unraveling the immigration narrative. it is a very accessible and readable account of what he has learned from his more than three decades of rae search into immigration economics. and as we will talk about today, his work and the work of other immigration economists has had tremendous impact in washington on affecting how policymakers think about these issues and shaping the sort's policies they debate and perhaps ultimately adopt. so, welcome, professor borjas. i want to start by asking you to tell our viewers how you became interested in the topic of immigration economics. immigration was not particular lay hot field in economicsed when you getting your ph.d. how was it that you came to gravitate to this surge subject. >> guest: great we to start

with. i was born in cuba, so i'm an immigrant, and dime the u.s. just before the missile crisis in 1962. i went to graduate school of columbia and immigration was not in even in the back waters of interest at the time. the mid-1970s. but at that time there was actually the -- an economists name barry chestwick, who began too write about assimilation issues and how immigrants assimilated. as the graduate school at columbia attend one of his seminars and i was predisposed to be interested in issue. eventually i moved to california, some in california this is the early '80s i gap to see visually the everyday change that a very large migration flow was having on the

labor market in southern california, and my memory went back to that september anywhere went -- back at columbia in the mid-70s when i was a student and that's one of the spark that led to my interest in immigration economics. so, i began to analyze and actually my cuban experience had a lot to do with it in the following sense if happened to leave cuba just about a week before the missile crisis closed down the door for many years. this was the paper i referred to earlier. basically offend that immigrants who lived in the u.s. a long time fare much more than immigrants in the u.s. to the short time. and you look at the data bright now, you clearly sense pattern new arrivals are much more soft economically that then early arrivals and he enter ted that assimilation, and my history, my historical background, which was

that this cuban mights migration that wasdroply ending right before the missing crisis, gave me an idea that the reason that the immigrants today were just --ern a little less than the one's arrived years ago mute not be bought after asim police but the different with as of immigrants. it was well known the immigrants that arrive before the missile crisis were different, more professional, more trip entrepreneurial, and than those of the missile crisis and my first paper was to address the palestine howl to you m.r.i. assimilation in world with different waves of immigrants tend to have different skills. we. >> host: well drill back down on the questions of assimilation which as you point out is central to this argument you make in your book but i want to start by using you kind of

larger conceptual question. you standard off in the book by challenging the conclusions that we often hear from immigration economists there are enormous economic gains to be had from opening the united states more to immigration. my colleague in full disclosure i worked with him on a project recently michael clem are clemmons, talked about trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk there to be picked up if only the united states would just open its door more widely to the world. whoa due you found find these arguments unpersuasive? >> guest: let me start from a broader perspective, okay? there is actually no data whatsoever that would allow anyone in this world to estimate what the impact on global gdp will be for example to open up the borders. all the previous historical experience about mass migration

have been due to cataclysmic events, major wars, disasters so on. both histories, even those who find data that tell tests whats happened don't apply today's setting where we want to relax immigration restrictions and let anymore and cross the border whenever they want. so all these trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk are not public to all by economists and by work ought mathematical model. you set up a model and then grind out numbers for the model. any model involves many, many, many assumeses. and whenever an assumption is a little off, the estimate of the ink will beatle off. so my argue. with those estimates is really twofold. number one is even if you were to upset the model they claim produced the trillion dollar bills, that model actually applies to many other things and the many other things they imply are usually left out of the

discussion. for example, the same model that implies that if you open up borderses howal get a gay dane've world gdp chase lot of may, that the same model will impry that there will be over 5 billion people moving across the countries, if we open our borders. now, once you realize that you have a very different perspective as to what is going on in terms of the policy decision. the model also implies if you worked out all the numbers that there would be huge preredistribution of wealth. it is true that the people in the poorest countries will benefit greatly but also true that the workers in the developing countries, will be much worse off and also that firms, capital lists over the world will be running and laughing they'll way to the bank. my first model tends to ignore and tend to downplay everything other than the fact that there

are huge gains to be had. and more honest interpretation of these models would look at the whole set of implications that the mathematical mod wool have. that's number one. number two if you really go to have five billion people moving across countries its hard to imagine that the infrastructure of the countries -- by infrastructure, i mean much more than just the capital stuff and stuff like that. right? i mean, the political infrastructure, the cultural infrastructure, the way that things get produced in countries, will remain responsibility that's a fundmental mathematical responsible. you have to manufacture -- those trillion baylor bills economists have to say a seem that you get five billion beam moving and nothing happens. so somehow the people who leave

the poorer countries, the only bring with them their labor and we know that immigrants are more than just robotic workers. they're people that bring more than just their labor. they bring in their culture and their language and political ideas and their social interactions, and all those things will upset the structure and not difficult to cook up an aden document to the mod what to turn all those trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk into negative gains for the developed world. so, my point is not really that we shouldn't believe the models completely. my point is that we should take them with a grain of salt. these models that manufacture all these trillion dollar bills also imply all kinds of things that tend to be ignored and they're extremely sensitive to assumptions tike he assumption that immigrants don't bring anything other than lab -- labor

and that's just false. >> host: we're not going move into a world where five billion people are mover hearing in the united states. we admit roughly one million immigrants legally every year, and a lot of your research and the work on this book is focused on those immigrants, the much smaller number, though not an insignificant number who are coming here. so let's talk about this concept of assimilation, that is so central to your book. i think the gains to be realized from the million people here both for themselves and for the united states, depends an awful lot on how well they do in the economy, and i think we as a americans historically have had a lot of faith in the idea of me of the melting pot, the power of assimilation, that people will quickly become full members, full contributing members of society. you suggest that the assimilation process is not as automatic as a lot of us are led to believe.

what are the difficulties and dhal challenge with assumption that all is working that worked well in the early parts of the 20th century where millions came. you're not so sanguine that assimilation is working as well as it perhaps once did. >> guest: so, there's not enough dat to actually look at the assimilation patterns of immigrants who arrive over the last 100 years search know which immigrants did very well after arrival and him immigrant it did. no. you look at the research of explain others that shown that the immigrants who arrive, say, after 1980-85, don't to end asim lat in an economic sense, and let's make it very clear. we're talking about economic assimilation, which is immigrants becoming more like natives in economic sense in terms of earnings so they catch up economically.

so the immigrants back to 1980 are not catching up as fast as the immigrants who arrived, say in the '50s, of '6 sod and '670s and we believe the people who came back in the early 1900s did end incredibly well. research of historians from stanford university look at the new plan uscript from the old censuses and tracked individual immigrants back know early 1900s and that we're look death data also tends to suggest that those immigrants didn't really assimilate all that quickly either. so what you have is a really fascinating pattern over the entire 20th century. as you though the 20th century sort of book-ended by two major mass migrations. that one that occurred before the 1920s, and that one that occurred after 1970s, in the

1980s and '90s, and what you see is that the people who arrive before the 1920s didn't really assimilate vary quickfully terms of economic status. the people who arrived after the 1980s are not assimilating very good either in terms of economic status. people who arrive in the middle between the 1920s and the 1970s, that experience of assimilation, that happens also to be the period where there was a law in the number of immigrants the u.s. was receiving. so you tend to find a remarkable pattern that the immigrants who arrive in mass migration don't tend to catch up to natives as quickly as the immigrants who arrive in a period where there's less immigration, and that really races a very interesting question to me. which is why? and one -- that's where e the point you made earlier, that immigration -- that

assimilation might not be a universal experience, comes in. assimilation is expensive. and immigrants are rational human beings like everybody else. and when somebody is very expensive they tend do do less of it. when something is cheaper, they assimilate. so, just think about the process of what it takes to assimilate. to asimulate means you have to learn the language, which takes time and effort. it mean crowd might have to move away from anth anything enclave into the country where you have fewer friends and fewer familiar faces and that's costly as well. so, when immigrants come into -- in a period of mass migration you can conjecture more or less that is it very easy or two them to find large ethnic enclaves that are very welcoming and provide a really nice entree into the economy. the local economy. but the problem is that showeds

back acquiring acquiring the lae skills, acquiring the incentive to move to a broader question and sell their labor to everyone else as opposed to just a captive labor market, which is what the ethnic enclave is. and that is part of what might be going on right knew, that the growth of ethnic enclaves might actually, even though it's very nice for the immigrants in the term of social kind of sense, also might actually be hampering the assimilation process by cutting down the incentive to learn inning accomplish incentive to acquire skills that could be sold in a broader marketplace. >> host: let me just following up. as i read your research and the others, it doesn't seem to me that there's a tremendous amount of evidence of slowing of language acquisition but there has been a slowing of the economic gains that you talk about, that new generations of immigrants north catching up as quickly as the older generation so you suggest one variable may

be numbers, if there more the process of catching up economically becomes slower, but you superintendent other variables as well, such as levels of education. what their different things that seem to affect how quickly it is that immigrants catch up to natives in termites their economic performance? >> the two things i've looked at carefully are basically the -- bads the ethnic enclave which basically has a hampering effect on assimilation the other is the school level of the. population. immigrant's who are skilled tend to catch up quicker, more educated catch up quicker to the native population, and the usual argument that economists make to sort off rationalize is that people who are skilled to begin with just find it easier to acquire skills. if you already are very

well-outside indicated it's not that difficult for you come and acquire whatever skillouts need make nit u.s. labor market. you,lash the language faster and jobs and opportunities faster, and that is something that all seems to by pretty important. so, the people -- the immigrant groups that tend to lag behind are the groups that tend to be less skilled in terms of education levels and also the group that tend to have very large ethnic onclarifies live -- one lives livering in the u.s. i'm sure there are many others but not as much research has been done on those in the economic framework. >> host: it would be fair to say that compared to some of the other large immigrant rereceiving countries, canada or australia, the percentage of immigrants come into the united states who have fairly low levels of education and skills are rather high, is it not, fired other countries?

>> guest: that's exactly right. both canada and australia have -- they basically literally grade applicants to give them points for how much immigration they have, how old they are kind of occupation they have and so on. we don't really have that kind of point system. to a large extent -- i forthget the exact up in bus something like 70% or something in that range -- 70% of our legal immigrants are coming into the family preference system. coming in because there's a family connection to somebody already in the u.s. and all those family referenced immigrants enter with without any kind of skill filter which is the complete opposite of australia and canada. >> are so you're saying not necessarily that family preference am minimum can'ts might beth not be hide skilled but it depends on whether they have a relative here who can sponsor them to join them in the country, whereas in in other places like canada and central,

the skills filter, kind of test for immigration. >> guest: that's exactly right. beginning in '65 we set up a policy in place today. that's really the major change in immigration policy, regulating legal nims the u.s. happened become in '65 and that was the enamount of act. of the family preference still. so the way the system works is that if you are -- you have a close relative in the u.s., spouse, parent, or -- i'm sorry -- if you happen to be a close relative of someone in the u.s., a spouse, parent or child, you can come in basically automatically. because you have a family preference visa, and it actually extends to even more distant family relationships. it includes siblings, and so the family preference have quite an impact on the kind of immigrant we get. and that is what we have. employment visas are available as well, but they're really a

vary very small part of the legal immigration system we have right now, where in canada and australia the main way they filter immigrants out is we look at the family and throat to do with skills and when i teach this policy kind of distinction in my classes, i actually go to the web site in canada or australia, and take the test in class and see whether i could qualify to enter canada or australia, given their point system, and the problem is that once you reach a certain arch i instant doesn't matter much anymore but a they don't want you. it's not that difficult for people over the age of 50 are so to fail the test to be able to get into canada or australia. >> host: if it's any comfort i would fail, too. i wanted to -- actually just one point again for our viewers. here in washington, the debate

is over comprehensive immigration reform there have been proposals going back a decade or more now to change that balance so the united states would admire more high-skilled immigrants and cut the family preference categories, in particular the ability to sponsor your brothers and sister are sisters to join you in united states would bee eliminated but those proposals are broadly popular in congress, have been tied up in the inability of congress to move forward on any broader package of comprehensive immigration reform legislation. i want to turn back to cuba for a moment and to talk about the -- a kind of unique incident in which the dictator fidel castro briefly lifted the ban on cubans traveling abroad, and 125,000 or so prompt live did too from the cuban port, in the early 1980s. and nearly all of them, is a understand, settled in miami. there will networks there; is in

provided again as i understand your work in the work of others, a rare sort of natural experiment in which there was this sudden shock to the labor market in miami of the introduction of 125,000 cubans who hadn't been there more or less the previous week or the prefer month and those kinds of natural experiments are rare in the real world ask the economist david card was the first to look at that experience and say, this gives us a chance to try to evaluate the economic impacts of migration on native worker. so we've been talk hearing about how. the immigrants do. the questions is what effect do the new immigrants have on the wages and job opportunities for americans. cards work, is a understand it, signatured that this huge influx of marry litos had little impact on the native workers in miami

you. have changed these conclusions and indeed your most recent research has been defend indicated to taking a second look at the impacts of this. so telephone us about the incident. why was it so important to your profession and to our understanding in this country about immigration, and what your research tells us about what may actually have happened. >> guest: that's a great question. let me tell you why in the experiment is such an important thing to too look at. the way economists think about the labor market is really best described -- even though we have mathematical podle behind imwe want to tell the story of what we have in mind. the is something like they. a helicopter floating all over the country overnight. all of a sudden the helicopter open upped the doors and people take off. and they land in different cities and it's like a plealy random shock. the nose e nest morning the

people wake up and the question is, what happened to the labor enactor overaisling few whole bunch of people arrive. what happened to lane york enactor? mariel comes very close to exceed that ideal random shock. all of a sudden fidel castro, opened the bordered and 12,000 people migrate literally within a matter of weeks so that miami -- the number of workers in miami increased like eight% within a matter of weeks, and it would be very fascinating to look at miami before and after and see what happened as a result of the eight% question. and that's what david card did a beautiful paper back in 1990. he claims that not much happened. and when i was writing this book i had a comment from several people looking at this particular chapter which involved all kind offered models and involved the kind of work people do in the absence of very

clean natural experiment, and they kept saying whyant do something simpler like mariel so i decided to actually go back on mariel and the one thing that i've learned over the 25 years is that marryol study was --ed it's really crucial if you're going to start looking at the effect on immigration you have to look at the people which most affected. it turns out that about two-thirds of the mariel refugees were high school dropouts so that would steam make a very sensible argentinament that perhaps the people look at if you want to see what happened to miami, is look at the high school dropouts who were in miami at that time. let's focus on what happened to the economic opportunities of high school dropouts. remarkly nobody else had done that in the last 25 years. and that is what actually extends all of summers 2015 doing. revisiting the mariel experiment by looking specifically at high

school dropouts. its turns out that a specific look at that example and narrow down the people who you think would be most affected, people who you can track over the -- between the, say, the late 1970s and late 1980s you track a group of people that resemble the population over that ten-year period that are high school dropouts, you see a remarkable drop in the weight of high school dropouts in miami and that's where my mariel revision came about and that actually the thing i discuss in the book. and when you look at it in that -- when you look at it by looking specifically at the people who are most effected you find the labor market impact is precise live what you expect and whan common sense tells you. a lot more low skill workers, and the low skilled workers in miami worked as a result of that. >> host: one very being thing about there is -- die work on

international trade and you suggest in books, in some ways there are parallels in both cases, growing global markets or growing immigration put mesh american workers in competition with other workers, whether they're in china or mexico in terms of import's or in terms of immigration and certainly basic economics would lead toddes believe that more competition would have a downward pressure on wages, but there's been an awful lot of research and this is wart of what you calling length here -- both in trait grade immigration that makes a different argument that suggests that flights that, the effect wed would be led logically to believe are not in fact what is going on. why is this such an enormous fight within the immigration economic field?

>> it has been over the last ten years or so that economists have begin to document the negative impact of trade on works the u.s.a. market. before the last ten years it was said to be very small and very sort of numerically relevant and now it's nobody -- showing that trade as an impact and some people, some americans have ends up behind by trade. this immigration is part of the trade. there's a couple of reasons wife it has so difficult and why it is -- why the debates still going on and -- for the next few years. immigrants are not unlike that helicopter experiment i just described, immigrants do not land randomly in different cities. immigrants choose where to live. and any rational human being, whether immigrant or not, would rather live in a high-wage city. immigrants come their work and they want to make a high wage --

warrant to have other high wedge level so they're going to set until cities that offer relatively high wages. look at what that means. because they're choosing where to live. that creates a curious positive correlation between immigration and wages. higher wages, attract more immigrants. that make is is very, very hard to detect the impact that immigrants are actually having -- that potential negative impact that immigrants could be having on the labor market. ...

so there are some big issues in and the nonrandom placement of immigrants. and then the native response.

and that is why it's such an export miami population was actually the cuban-americans actually had to rent boats or by boats. and then bring them to the port in cuba and bring the refugees back. and that was very different. number two the diffusion makes it very difficult to compare cities. it was a short phenomenon. just before and after.

after any kind of reaction they need to offer less to hire that can of worker. i will say one thing. at absolutely did for me. it was to make me even more skeptical than i already was about a lot of economic research. i often read these papers. there is a lot of laypeople that do. i kind of skip over the math and the methodology. i was persuaded that if you're not able to dive into the map you should be suspicious of the conclusions. there are a lot of assumptions that go into that and reaching the policy action conclusions out of economic research. i want to challenge you on a couple of points.

you raise in passing this argument we hear a lot about there are a lot of jobs that americans don't want to do and that's why we need low skilled immigrants. you hear most in care most in agriculture and other sectors as well. you say what we hear is that they pay more than americans would be willing to do your work. i wonder how broadly applicable that is. if you are a farmer in california. and you raise the wage to $20 an hour your argument lose market share almost inevitably to imported strawberries. isolating immigration from a large global economic contest how easy is it to say it's a false problem only if employers would pay more.

or do they actually have a point that in some cases they really are in a bind if they don't have the lower wage work force workforce there to go out of business. >> that's a very good point also. the fact of the matter is that employers can adjust to the lack of low surprise labor. they can wage it or investing capital. if the work is not available i think all kinds of technologies that would arise to make sure that they could do what they want to do with the workers they have. the way i think about it. they don't want to do that at the going wage. it would be sampling that and it was rated in 2006. and it's a chicken processing plant.

a lot of very low school documented workers. immigration authorities came in one weekend and removed 75 percent of the workforce. and what does the firm do. they don't close down? they put an ad in the paper and it's the ad that they actually have a copy of in the book. they advertise jobs at higher wages. and that's what happens in a lot of cases the wages are so high that employers have to start looking at other mechanisms by which they can produce output to meet the demand for their product. and that involves a lot of capital as well. i know very little about this. but i read several papers that claim in the u.s. we are actually lagging behind in technological advances in agriculture simply because your employers in that field have such a limitless supply

of low school labor. to take whatever they are producing. when we came to an earlier point you made that the book may be a little skeptical that's actually something i wanted to do on purpose. all of these results people tend to look at the introduction and something like you said. they skip all of the details in the middle. details matter. they could drive the data one way or another it's actually a very important point. your point about the labor supply for agriculture, we may be on the cusp of another natural experiment it we have seen it reduced quite dramatically. it will be interesting to see how the agricultural economy adjusted that. one other challenge and fairly

quickly on that one as well. you talk in the book about the impact of immigration much like trade people come in different ways. where the arguments are in favor of trade. clothing is cheaper. we get our apple iphones assembled in china. is there a similar effect for immigration. are they lower than what they would be and who benefits from that? >> there's no doubt about the fact when immigrants come in they do all kinds of things in the economy. they reduce the weight of people that look at them. that wage reduction creates gains some of the lower wage

is someone else's higher profits. people who use them benefit dramatically. and the question that they usually look at what happens for this economic pie in total when you have immigration. it's also true some people gain. if you look at the native population the people that lose lose lesson they gain according to the people who gain so that the native economic pie actually increases slightly. a fluency and this is actually another area where the devil is in the details. as long as we speak for the provisional way that they model the able market in the u.s. you can get a gain in an increase in the size of economic pie that goes up about $50 billion and that

involves that. it's very easy however to come up with other stories that will make those numbers irrelevant. and those stories that they come up with his their nationalities. they come in high skilled immigration can create many benefits above and beyond what the standard models would allow for. they can teach us how to produce better products and produce them faster. they complement us in that way they can actually increase productivity. that number could be much greater. on the other hand it could be that low stimulants come in any change all kinds of things in society. and that would reduce the

game. when we talk about the gains for immigration in that system it's actually based on a very narrow point of view which we will ignore everything in the united states and just look at what happens with the productivity of the labor market. and there is a gain. the national economy accruing will expand right about $50 billion per year. having said that you need to compare the number with whatever fiscal impact they have before they can conclude that. let's actually turn then to that question of the fiscal impact. give a chapter in there. another fascinating exploration of how numbers get used. there is a lot of debate on immigrants that are paying taxes but they're also collecting benefits of various sorts. we drill on one aspect of this.

in other benefits. i was really fascinated in this chapter. you have a chart it's roughly the same as it is by natives in the united states already. and then you draw the chart another way and it appears to show that in fact immigrant families are using far more in terms of welfare that was very interesting to me. explain to them. how you do you come up with different results that's great. i really love that. it shows you how important it is before you start making policy decisions based upon what economists say to look at the details. we have data.

that goes back to 1984. that basically tells you which families use welfare in the u.s. we know where the people are born. there is a chart in the book where i used this data. it's like let's make a deal. i use exactly the same data. the immigrants and natives basically look the same in terms of welfare use. they are much more heavy recipients of welfare use. when you look at the data you can actually go to a think tank report. and things that you used to read. it will lead to a different charge. they don't quite tell you all of the details that go underneath.

think of an immigrant woman that comes the u.s. today. suppose that in the next few years she meets significant other. and has children. and then she's left is a single mother. women immigrant family composed of a single woman and two children and one way to look at the data which is away the way most social science and research looks at data because welfare products are usually allocated at the family level is to make that the unit. the family unit. and supporters the family is poor. with the mother and two children and that tally when you want to count households that particular household would enter the tile he wants. another way of doing it was to say let's look at the personal level. and now becomes three people.

one immigrant into native born children receiving that. and they are there with the trick. breaking it up to the personal level you're basically saying they're taking charge of what that family did and allocating the welfare use. it makes a huge difference. the national academy just put out a report a couple weeks ago they're very careful about this. they do a sensitive thing. what you really want is you want to consider the family level the immigrants have of the household . and that as a is a unit that policy should be thinking about. when they see think tank reports claiming all kinds of

things in welfare. i know deep inside of me that they're just trying to have an ax to grind. the trend they're trying to spin in a particular way that nobody can be convinced by then actually be very honest about what they're doing. >> i understand that's a nice segue. give any axes at all to grind in the book. you are careful about trying not to draw for the most part specific policy conclusions from your economic research. you mentioned thinks tanks in washington and others we make plenty of use. as i say you're quite careful here. but your final chapter it does have a very provocative title. in the title of the chapter is who are you rooting for. and that kind of reminded me of the old union song which side are you on.

why did you choose that the title for your final chapter. to make a great question. i told -- i chose that totally title it has to answer the question first. let me tell you why. to the immigration policy that makes everybody better off. for example all of the other chapters in the book basically show that. that if we want a higher pie because of immigration some people lose in some people gain. you really are making a decision about how much you care about natives as compared to immigrants. and how much you care about this particular group of natives versus that particular one.

before we go ahead and say i should have more of this. you want that program. he find all of the stories of those. our those people better off. probably not. you think back most likely not. maybe if the people came in. you could start innovating at. we have to make a decision. who are you rooting for. and that's why they chose the title for the last chapter i think it's actually the first step that we have to address before we start discussing this. it's very easy for people to argue let's get ready of the

family preference. they never quite tell you what one was driving your choice. i hoped it was to make it very clear that it is a little dishonest this particularly policy shift without first telling everybody what is it that you really want to accomplish. who is it to you really want to help. because every single policy proposed let them. let me push you on this a little bit. i think one of the most challenging things in public policy and maybe it's kind of a pipe dream. one of the phrases you hear so often this is a win-win policy the notion that you can design

a policy that everybody ends up better off. the choices we make on immigration some people are going to be winners and some people are going to be losers. are there ways to design immigration programs to minimize that. the layoffs at disney in florida. those are workers who i think are at best monetarily skilled. it is outsourcing companies where they come in. they are not the microsoft programmer with the highest skilled and. are there ways to design program so maybe the united states it gets more of the benefits and a little less of the negative cost that you talk about. or is it the zero some sort of trade-off.

it will all depend on what the numbers look like. let's take them at face value. they indicate due to immigrant confusion increases by $50 billion per year. the national academy of sciences reports that in the short run the fiscal burden for immigration in which is a lost skill is at least 50 billion. the have a lot of distribution. that is really the crux of the problem. would we be here right now. if we have an immigration over

the last 20 or 30 years where every american was made better off that the fact of the matter is no. they'd be made better off by immigration. will be very happy with the whole scheme of things that we developed over the last few decades. it's a fact that some people are left behind the needs to be addressed. in the last chapter of the book we are looking at the policy discussions. nothing is win-win unfortunately. immigration is like manna from heaven. if you want to keep the kind of immigration you had right now. into the future a lot of high school immigrants.

it was the innovation. it helped pay the bills. and those tend to be costly. they get together there. but then you have to start asking who are you rooting for. i'm not actually completely open . i happen to think of this country as that kind. one thing that makes it so exceptional we need to provide incredible hope for millions of people they come in and make life at themselves. i really want to keep that. so the question as from my point of view it is not really

so far-fetched. we have a mixed skilled policy or skills policy or we try to do good by giving them a chance of the american dream. we also try to find immigrants to pay the bill. and maybe that's the right mix. it's not that we are admitted that the native workers and we don't really care about what happens to native workers. it's the hope of immigration. they are left behind in both high skill and low skill. really skilled native workers. and then they're better off. they're much more soft. there's something about that. they are coming in and making those skills.

hispanic or black americans. it's make them better off also. let's not let all the gains let's actually start thinking a policy in a much broader context. until now we basically said it was those parameters. which immigrants to admit. i propose that we have a third parameter for that. the policy that we pursue. if it's really true that immigrants may be slightly increasing for the economic pie. bill gates claims that microsoft created for new jobs for every single h1 the visa that microsoft gets.

they are generating thousands and thousands of dollars of profit for each of these. let's make it there. let's make microsoft -based. we can use that payment to compensate the people left behind due to that program. >> you would actually be surprised by how much employers are willing to pay if you set up that position. if you want to import a guest worker you actually had to pay into the government 20% of the guest guestworkers salary every single month. and somehow they do that

because clearly they are benefiting a lot. to make sure that the debate over immigration policy is conducted on a more even scale. right now had people benefiting a lot and of course they are like that. but they're also left behind and that's part of the political debate right now that we are having. feeling paid much attention to the people left behind in the last 20 or 30 years. >> for those of us that work on immigration policy here in washington i think it is potentially a really interesting set of suggestions here. it provides benefits to some american workers who lose their jobs. microsoft several years ago put out a proposal that said they were really to pay an additional $10,000 for some visa that they got provided

that it was plowed back into computer science education. they said we can't find enough highly trained peter science now $10,000 might be enough in your economist colleagues sometimes talk about creating an oxygen system. they are very interesting public policy approaches that come out of your work. we are running down to the end of our time so i just want to ask you is there any kind of a final take away from your book that you want the viewers to be aware of before we close this out. >> the final take away is the trade-offs. every thing else in life everybody is happy. some people tend to gain some people tend to lose. for far too long to both in his great debate.

we send it to others to simplify. the academics in general tend to be guilty of this. they tend to downplay all of the cost of immigration and just emphasize the benefit from global it's also true that there are costs. and we want to avoid the kind of political site and conflict that we have for immigration today just think of how much simpler the discussion would be if we could ensure that the gains have opened up the borders from immigration and actually prove to people who are more than just that. right now there is a very small group of people.

i want to change that. it was good to have you here on c-span. inky sir. -- thank you sir. c-span where history unfolds daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies in is brought to you today by your cable and satellite provider. he is next in book tv. he involves himself in sheltering billions of dollars for american clients. >> good evening ladies and gentlemen.