i think as i mentioned, if we were to overhaul programs to put incentives in place and also maybe even some help for training and job placement, that might work even better than oliver twist. ..

[applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> have been working on immigration issues for many years not as many as ours distinguished guest bed i think it would be fair to say for both of us that we are a bit astonished that the attention immigration

issues are receiving currently not just in the united states but did many of their country's according to surveys from the research center immigration is atop six issues and among those of the republican candidate donald trump is the top three most important issues there is note previous election in recent memory that emigration pest factor quite so importantly in the campaign our guest today is one of the preeminent economists studying the impact of immigration to the united states we are here to discuss the new book on what is very accessible account of what he has learned from his three decades of research into economics and as we will talk about today his work in the work of other immigration economist

have tremendous impact in washington affecting how policy makers think about the issues to shape policies that a debate and adopt so welcome professor i want to start by asking you to tell our viewers how you became interested in the topic of immigration economics that was not a hot field when you were getting your ph.d. so how is it you came to gravitate to this particular subject? >> great question to start with. i've been in a grant will from cuba i came to the u.s. just before the missile crisis 1962 per by went to graduate school in columbia and immigration was not even of professional interest at the time in the '70s but at

that time there was an economist that began to write about it and how they assimilated and it interested me because of the issue eventually i move to california in the '80s i began to seek a visually the everyday changes of the very large migration flow was having on the isle labor market in southern california and my memory wet back from the mid-70s and that is the spark that led to my a interests of immigration economics also with my cuban experience i

happen to leave cuba about one week before the missile crisis close the door down for many years so basically we found that immigrants that live in the u.s. for more than those that berger there a short time. the new would clearly phalange a pattern so they enter that as assimilation. with that historical background to abruptly ending to give you an idea the reason is the immigrants today may not be because and the assimilation but they

would not rise right before the missile crisis were different so that difference was be intellectual spark and that is to address that puzzle of assimilation of the world of immigrants. >> we will drill back down on this question that is essential to the argument is in your book but with a large herd conceptual question you start by challenging the conclusion that we often hear from the immigration economist there are gains to be had from one opening to immigration my colleague i work done a project recently talking

about trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk to be picked up if only the united states would open its doors to the world. so whitey find these arguments unpersuasive and? >> let me start from a broader perspective to this. there is no data to that goal cpg to open up the borders. so with mass migration so those histories applied to today's setting to cross the border whenever they want by

working on this mathematical model. any that you know, takes many assumptions. johnson then the estimates of the gains are a little of so my argument is those types of arguments of day except the volatile that implies many other things. it is usually left out of the discussion so that same model that implies if you opened the borders of the world gdp is a lot of money but that mathematical model implies over 5 billion so

once you realize that gutted a perspective to what is going on and also applies through the distribution of wealth that the people in the port countries will benefit greatly from the workers in the developing countries but they would be much worse off that they are laughing all the way to the bank as a capitalist. and then we tend to downplay other then there are huge gains to be had. with a more honest interpretation looking at the whole set of implications of that mathematical model. if you have 5 billion people moving across the country by

infrastructure i mean the up political infrastructure the way that things are introduced in the country's of that mathematical assumption that to them with these trillion dollar bills the economist have to assume you get 5 million people moving but nothing happens. so those still leave the core countries so we know they are more than just robotic workers they bring in their language and their political ideas and all the

things with the infrastructure from areas of an addendum to that model of the with those negative gains for the development world. so really isn't that we should not believe but take it with a grain of salt. but also implies all kinds of things in to be very extremely sensitive and that is false of lifting other than labor. >> host: so we will not move into a world roughly 1 million immigrants legally every year with a lot of your research is focused on those immigrants of a much smaller number who are

coming here so talk about the concept of assimilation that is so central so the gains to be realized depends on how well they do in the economy and a starkly we have had a lot of faith of the of melting pot the power of assimilation bebel become full contributing members of society. if we suggest that is not as automatic as a lot of us are led to believe. water the difficulties or the challenges with the assumption when millions came in millions more have come you are not so sanguine it is working as well? >> barrett is not enough

data for iran's to arrive over the last 100 years in reno which immigrants did not not just my research but the research of others that shows the immigrants who arrived after 85 don't assimilate and economic sense we are talking economic assimilation. in terms of their earnings so they don't catch up as fast as those that came in the '50s through the '70s so they did incredibly well over time with research and

then to look at those menus groups and looking at that data so you really have that fascinating pattern and with those mass migrations. and what you see for the twenties and then not assimilating very quickly. between dutch 20s in the

'70s that experience of assimilation. there was the role of the immigrants. and with those mass migration and that raises a very interesting question and that is the point that you made earlier. when that experience comes in. with the rational human being. and and when something is very expensive and when they assimilate.

and then to learn the of language. and that is costly as well. and with the mass migration that it is very easy for them in that provide a nice entree into the local economy to acquire the of language skills into a broader e economy. live that is what is going on right now. but actually with the

immigrants and then to cut down on the incentive to be sold in a broader market place. >> as i read your research it doesn't seem there is a tremendous amount of evidence the slowing of economic gains that you talk about. with the process of catching up economically. but what i'd the different things that seem to affect how quickly that day catch up to natives greg. >> basically besides the

ethnic enclave. because that would catch up quicker. to the native population. so as they rationalize a correlation so if you are well educated to acquire whenever skills that i need you can learn a opportunities faster and that seems to be pretty important so the immigrant groups clear those that

tended to be less skilled at also enlarge ethnic enclave and i'm sure there are many others in the economic framework. >> so compared to some of the others of canada or australia they have low levels of education compared to some of the other countries. >> guest: exactly. they will literally brady applicants. matter the occupation like them. so to the large extent

something like 70 percent because of that family connection that family preference for this is the complete opposite. >> host: so not necessarily so it depends on the relative so that test for immigration. >> exactly right. so that is the major change of the immigration policy. and that was the enactment of the family preference

system. if you have a close relative in the u.s. as a spouse or a parent or a child one into have a preference be set. ha so there was quite impact and that is what we have. on and the very small part of the illegal immigration system. and has a lot to do with skills.

to actually go to use the of website but the problem is who doesn't matter much anymore. soleil is not that difficult for people to get into canada or australia home now >> host: but just 1.for our viewers with the debates over comprehension hot immigration reform going back decade or more to change that balance is more that would cut those categories to sponsor your brothers are sisters but those proposals are broadly

popular and have been tied up in the inability of that broader package for legislation. >> so to go back to cuba that was a unique instance for fidel castro briefly lifted -- lifted the ban on cubans traveling abroad so this was in the early '80s and nearly all of them settled in miami with the networks there. so this provided with the work of others the natural experiment of a sudden shock to the labor market when there were there the previous week or the

previous month and the economist to let that economic of immigration we are talking about. so what effect with the americans. with this huge influx of impact on those workers who are already there in miami. you challenged these conclusions in your most recent research so why was this all-important with this country and immigration but

let me tell you the lady economists think is best described that mathematical problem behind it is day helicopter that all of a sudden people take off it is completely random but the question is what happens to the political market corrects but then that comes very close to achieving that idea.

so the number of workers increased by 8%. and then came back again 1990. i had comments for several people so well paid to in the absence so what could you do something if it is all simpler? or but how the one thing that i have learned over 25 years is that it is crucial

for what is the most effective. so that seems to make it very sensible if you want to see what happened in miami with a high-school dropouts to focus on what happened because remarkably so i spend all summer 2015 specifically looking at the high-school dropout. and then to narrow down the people between the '80s are the '90s that they were separated with that

high-school dropout ecl drop in this is what i discuss in the book. looking specifically those under the most affected you see exactly what you would expect cement one of the interesting things i do a lot of work with international trade and use suggest there are parallels with the growing immigration to put american workers in competition with others like china or mexico are directly of the united states and

that with the dust to believe more competition would have a downward pressure of wages bearishness some research in trained immigration one. >> that we would be less to believe of what is going on. . .

and why this would continue to go on for the next few years. it's like the experiment i just described. immigrants do not land randomly in different cities. any rational human being would rather live in a high wage city. they are coming here to work and want to make a -- they want to have a high wage level so they will settle in the city's have high wages. but look at what that means. it creates a coalition between immigration and wages.

it makes it very hard to detect the impact on the potential negative impact immigrants could be having on the market because you've already got the date of isaiah sinisaiah sing it in a ws to be in high wage places it's not actually one difficulty that's been very difficult to get around. the second difficulty is when they come into the town and change it, if they do, which would happen over the long term is people who are competing with the immigrants are going to take it and move out so the people that are competing might move to a town that didn't receive many but when they do that, they are essentially defusing the impact

from the city that received the immigrants to the cities that didn't end in the end every city was affected because they basically diffused the national economy and that makes it very hard. so these are the placements across the u.s. mainly in the high wage cities and then the native response from the towns in two other towns that make it difficult to use the data to observe something and that is another reason it is such an important experiment because that is truly something that the cuban-american population in miami was actually involved in

the entry. they had to rent a boat or by a boat and bring the refugees back and that's very different than saying they go to the high wage places. that's exactly where they were living and that's number one. number two, it makes it difficult to compare cities over a long period. you can look at miami and before any kind of reaction is taking place, more workers compete in the sam same group and employers think to offer less. >> host: i will say one thing the book absolutely did for me

is to make me even more skeptical than i was about economic research. i have a lot of respect for economists to read these papers as a lot of people do i look at the introduction, i look at the conclusion and i kind of skipped over the math and the methodology. i came away from reading this persuasion that if you're not able to dive into the methodology you should be suspicious of the conclusions because there are a lot of assumptions that go into putting and reaching for policy actionable conclusions out of economic research. i want to challenge you quickly on a couple of points. you raised in passing this argument we hear a lot about a lot of jobs americans don't want to do and that's why we need for skilled immigrants. you hear it most and agriculture in some other sectors as well. we hear if employers paid more than americans would be willing to do the work.

i wonder how applicable that is if you take agriculture for instance if you are a farmer in california growing strawberries and raised the wage to attract american workers and you're going tto me you'regoing to lose almost inevitably. so i wonder isolating immigration from the economic context how easy is it to say that is a false problem if only they would pay more there would be more americans willing to do the work or do they have a point that in some cases they really are in a bind if they don't have that lower wage force they are going to go out of business? >> that is a good point also. look, the fact of the matter is employers cannot trust to -- they can invest in the capital and if they are not available in

all kinds of technologies that would arise to make sure they can do what they want to do with the workers they have. all this takes time. what i said in the book but it's not completely right, what they mean by that is the following. the way to think about it is they do jobs they just don't want to go to the wage. as the markets adjust in the short run, the firm in georgia is a processing plant and they used a lot of low skilled documented workers dot immigration authorities came in one weekend introduced 75% of the workforce. what do they do, they don't close down and they put an ad in the paper and it is the ad we have a copy of in the book. it's advertising jobs at higher wages and that is what happens

in a lot of cases. over the long term it may be that the wages are so high that employers have to start looking at other mechanisms which they can produce output and meet the demand for their product and that involves a lot of capital investment style. i've read several papers that claim in the u.s. we are lagging behind in technological advances in agriculture simply because employers in the field have such a limitless supply. they have little incentive to invest to take whatever product they are producing. an earlier point you made use of the book is skeptical and if it is actually something i've wanted to do on purpose.

all these results people tend to look at the introduction into skip over the details in the middle. details matter and assumptions come in that can drive the data one way or another and that is an important point. point. >> your point about the labor supply for agriculture, we may be on the cusp of a natural experiment because the flow of undocumented workers reduced quite dramatically but it will be interesting to see how the agricultural economy adjusts to that. one challenge quickly on this one as well. you talk about the impact of immigration primarily on wages and employment opportunities for americans, but much like trade. workers are also consumers and one of the arguments in favor of trade is imports are cheaper, clothing is cheaper, television set.

we get our apple iphone's assembled in china. they are a lot cheaper than they would be. our hotel bills lower than they would be and who benefits from that? >> guest: is no doubt about the fact that when they come and they do all kinds of things in the economy. one thing is they affect wages by basically reducing the wage. the wage reduction itself, think about the somebody's lower wage is somebody else's higher profit. people who use immigrants vary dramatically and the question they try to look at is what happens to the slice of economic pie in total when you have immigration? in these economic models if you look at the native population, the people who lose lose less

than the people who gain so in the economic pie is actually increases slightly and increases along $50 billion a year. this is another area where the devil is in the details as long as we stick with the traditional way that economists model the u.s., you are going to get an increase in the economic pie that goes through native and 50 billion but that involves also a distribution of wealth in the hundreds of billions from workers to firms. it's very easy however to come up with other stories that will make those numbers at your event and the stories one can easily come up with is the externalities in other words high school immigration can create many benefits on what the

standard models that allow for. hi school immigrants can come in and teach us how to produce better products, how to produce them faster. and in that way high school immigration can speed up innovation dramatically. the numbers could be greater. on the other hand it could be low skill immigrants come in and change all kind of things in society. the political equilibrium, make it more physica difficult for te transactions to take place. so, when we talk about the games for immigration people often throw around, that is based on a very narrow point of view which is learning more in the united states and look at what happens in terms of productivity in the labor market.

no doubt about it the national economy according to natives would expand $50 billion a year. having said that, you need to compare the number with whatever fiscal impact they have on the site before you can conclude if it is a plus or a negative. >> another fascinating exploration of how the numbers get used because there's a lot of debate that immigrants are paying taxes but also collecting benefits of various sorts and you drill on one aspect of this, welfare and food stamps and other benefits and i was really fascinated in this chapter you have a chart and you draw it one way and it seems to show welfare used by immigrants is roughly the same as it is by native americans in the united states already, then you draw the you t abovthecharge on other way and t

appears to show in fact immigrant families were using far more in terms of welfare then the american family. explain to the viewers how you dice up the numbers to come up with different results in which one you find more credible. >> that's great because i really love that it's sort of shows you how important it is to start making decisions based on what economists say to look at the details. we have data that goes back and basically tells you which families use welfare and we know where the people were born so we can classify them as native.

choose curtain number one or a curtain number two. i used the same to create the two curtains. they are basically the same and it's much more heavy recipients. if you look at the debate you can actually go to the think tank report and depending on the think tank you choose to lead, you will find the conclusions cs the theater of the different charts. they don't quite tell you they go underneath and think of an immigrant woman that comes into the u.s. today and supposed this is a young woman and in the next few years she needs a significant other and gets pregnant a couple of times and has children and then is left a single mother. so now we have an immigrant family and one look at the date

on which is the way that most science research and data is to make that the family unit and supposed the family is poor. if we wanted to count households now one immigrant family on welfare. another way to do that is to say ththat three-person households w becomes three different people and of the nativeborn children therein lies the trick to basically say you were taking part of that family did and

allocating the welfare used. the national academy to a report a couple weeks ago. you want to consider at the family level to look at the unit that involves them. it's claiming all kinds of things about welfare but also a personal level. they could be honest about what they are doing.

>> if you have any axes to grind in the u.s. certainly very careful about trying not to draw certain conclusions from your economic research. we make plenty of use of the research. your final chapter has a very provocative title and the titlist who are you rooting for and that reminded me of the old pete seeger song. anything possible to the policy x. anybody better off.

to choose a policy you are making a decision about how much you care into much of this group of natives versus the group so before we go ahead and say it's important to ask who you are rooting for. we find the stories of people

and if they are better off probably not most likely not begin you have to make a decision who you are rooting f for. that is the first step we have to address before we start discussing what do this and let's do that. one of the purposes of my book was to make it very clear that it's dishonest for this

particular or that particular policy shift without first telling me you're telling everybody else what is it that you want to accomplish. every policy with effect some sense why you have to tell me who you are rooting for. >> may be one of the phrases you hear so often this is a win-win policy you are sharply challenging day in the choice as we make on immigration are some will be winners and some will be losers. are there ways to design immigration programs to minimize that? you take the layoffs at disney in florida that my friend at

"the new york times" wrote about so well. they are moderately skilled working for outsourcing companies where they come and take over full contracts. they are not the microsoft programmer that we think about. this is an answer to the previous question. >> it all depends on what the numbers look like. let's take the numbers available at face value. the numbers available basically indicate that th is due to confusion in the labor market increased by $50 billion a year.

the academy of sciences reports in the short run the fiscal burden so it is actually a wash. even other primates with the much bigger or smaller that is the problem. if we had immigration the last 20 or 30 years where every american was better off we probably wouldn't be debating at all so the fact some people are left behind needs to be addressed.

the last chapter of the book that's what i want to stress. the world is not that simple. some people are going to win and some people are going to lose. what i would suggest is if we want the policies that we have in place right now in the future, and the kind of policies we have right now is a policy that is made can be very productive and who could create a sense but we also hope more low skilled immigrants. you can get rid of the low skill altogether and concentrate on the high school immigration but then you ask who are you rooting

for and in the book i confess i'm not open to the idea of getting rid of the closed school immigration. i think of it as a fully functional country and one of the things that makes us exceptional is history should provide incredible hope for millions of people all over the world but have no hope whatsoever to make a life for themselves and that is the kind of country i want to keep. so then what we are doing now we have a mixed skills policies where we try to do good by admitting them into giving them a chance at the american dream. what's wrong with the policy is

we forget the fact they have an impact on native workers and we don't really care what happens to the native workers. if they are left behind both high skilled and low skilled in the moderately skilled native workers are being replaced and they are not much better off. close the workers that are coming in are making it worse off also and many have been to be either previous immigrants are hispanic or black americans. let's not let them only a crew to employers. let's think of it in a broad context but for now it's

basically in terms of two parameters. i would propose we have a third parameter in that and that is how do we ensure that gains and losses from the policy that we pursue our more evenly distributed if it is true that immigrants slightly increase the prize may not distribute the wealth around to ensure people don't get left behind for example bill gates claims that microsoft creates for new jobs for every single visa, for every single each one be that microsoft gets. i don't know if that is true or nonot let's take at face value. that must imply that microsoft is generating thousands and thousands of dollars of profit for each one that it gets. if that's true let's make them pay for new visas. if it's profiting that much as

he claims in generating more, let's make microsoft pay for those visas and we can then use the payment to compensate the people left behind and we might be surprised by how much they are willing to pay if we set up a system. in singapore for example which is a regulated kind of immigration policy, if you want to import a guestworker, you have to actually pay into the government 20% of the guestworker salary every single month and somehow, employers do that. it's transfer thbut transfer the u.s. to make sure that the debate on the immigration policy is conducted on a more even scale. right now we have people benefiting a lot and of course there are more immigrants but it's also people left behind and that's part of the political debate we're havin we are havinw

and we haven't paid much attention to the people left behind in the last 20 or 30 years. >> for those of us that work on the immigration policy i think this is potentially a really interesting set of suggestions you talk about the policy of the justice assistance program to mir for the program that provides benefits to some american workers who lose their jobs to defend microsoft a little bit, microsoft several years ago put out a proposal but said they were willing to pay an additional $10,000 for every visa they got provided that it was plowed back into computer science education for american high school students because they said we can find enough highly trained computer scientists so let's try to do that in a way that benefits both sides. $10,000 may not be enough. it might be that the right figure is 20 or 30 and the colleagues sometimes talk about

creating an option syste systemt all of these are potentially very interesting sort of public policy approaches that come out of your work. we are running down to the end of our time here, so i am just going 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 comple? >> guest: the final take of vegas and the trade-offs. like everything in life, not everybody is happy when something is done. some people tend to gain and some people tend to lose. for far too long we have tended to oversimplify. economists in particular seemedo be guilty of this. they oversimplify and spin in a particular direction and downplayed all the costs and just emphasize the globalization in