2024-02-08_Solving_the_Immigration_Crisis_in_the

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00:00:28.600 | >> Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:33.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:37.160 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host.

00:00:41.240 | Today on the show, I want to talk about something with you that is going to sound more political.

00:00:47.480 | It does have personal finance implications and impact. The basic concept that I'm going

00:00:54.760 | to drive at from a personal finance perspective is that as you build wealth, your sense of security

00:01:02.040 | and your actual security of your person, your effects, etc., your home, these are fundamental

00:01:08.600 | things. As somebody builds wealth, one of the first things that they will do in applying this

00:01:13.240 | wealth is to move from an unsafe neighborhood to a safe neighborhood because security is of primary

00:01:18.680 | importance, and this is a good use of money. That's the personal finance angle that I'm going

00:01:23.720 | to use to tie this into appropriate content for Radical Personal Finance, but I do confess up here

00:01:29.880 | and up front that this episode, that that connection is looser than I usually will permit,

00:01:36.200 | and that's because this episode is coming from a request from a listener. A listener writes in and

00:01:42.280 | sends me a couple of articles, which I'm going to read to you and comment on, and asks for my

00:01:47.240 | commentary on this subject, specifically regarding immigration. We see in the United States significant

00:01:54.120 | issues regarding immigration, an enormous battle taking place. The listener wrote to me and talked

00:01:59.640 | about the arguments between Texas Governor Abbott and the Biden administration about the ability and

00:02:05.320 | the right of the Texas Guard to secure the border with Mexico by placing barriers to stop the flow

00:02:11.320 | of immigration. We see immigration as a primary political topic all across Europe, all across the

00:02:16.680 | world, etc. And so I feel justified in talking about it today with you, and I think that those

00:02:22.600 | of you who are interested in thoughtful, nuanced discussion on difficult topics will enjoy this

00:02:27.560 | show. However, those of you who are looking for just standard kind of personal finance fare,

00:02:32.200 | you'll want to skip this episode and move to a different one because there'll be more of just

00:02:37.560 | kind of basic nuts and bolts of finance. The other reason I'm doing this is that I've been

00:02:40.920 | buried in finishing up my consulting appointments and also preparing for a new live event, which I'll

00:02:48.600 | be announcing hopefully in the next day or two. And I can do this topic fairly straight off the

00:02:54.200 | cuff, ready to go without a ton of preparation. It's been over a week since I've been on the

00:03:00.200 | microphone. So let's begin with this. I'm going to begin by reading the article that my listener

00:03:06.360 | wrote to me about and asked me to comment on. And this article was written in 2014 by now dead Gary

00:03:14.680 | North. The article is called "Immigration Control, Federal Social Engineering." I'm going to read the

00:03:19.560 | article without comment and then come back and comment upon it. "Central planning by the federal

00:03:26.440 | government is officially opposed by conservatives until you show them a marker that says 'United

00:03:32.120 | States' on one side and 'Mexico' on the other. Then, 'Congress needs to build a fence.' The

00:03:39.880 | believers in fences offer many arguments. Some of them say this, 'Those people want to get free

00:03:45.080 | government welfare. We cannot afford it.' The defender of liberty replies in two ways. First,

00:03:51.320 | these programs should be abolished. They are based on government planning and coercive wealth

00:03:56.040 | redistribution. They are the main problem, not any immigrants who may sign up. Second, the sooner

00:04:02.520 | they go bankrupt, the better. Let immigrants sign up. The problem is this. Most conservatives approve

00:04:08.360 | of these welfare programs in theory and practice. The big ones are Social Security, Medicare, and

00:04:14.360 | tax-funded education. Conservatives do not want these programs defunded. They see them as part

00:04:20.200 | of the American way of life. Second, the conservative says this, 'These immigrants will

00:04:26.440 | undermine our social way of life. They're just too different. The American way of life cannot

00:04:31.160 | survive open immigration. Change will overwhelm the American way of life.' The defender of liberty

00:04:37.400 | responds, 'The free market changes America every day. Innovations undermine our way of life moment

00:04:43.720 | by moment. Innovation makes our lives better.' Second, he replies, 'Why do you think Congress

00:04:49.560 | can pass a law restricting freedom of travel and freedom of contract and thereby preserve the good

00:04:55.320 | parts of our way of life? Why do you trust the federal government's good judgment in matters

00:05:00.200 | social and economic? Why have you become an apologist for central planning? Why have you

00:05:06.280 | become an advocate of social engineering by federal politicians and bureaucrats?'

00:05:10.840 | Conservatives remain silent. They have never thought of this, and they don't want to have

00:05:17.160 | to rethink what they say they believe in, namely that Congress cannot safely be trusted on matters

00:05:22.680 | economic. They are saying that Congress can provide a Goldilocks solution. Not too much

00:05:28.440 | social change, but not too little. The defender of liberty asks, 'When has Congress ever legislated

00:05:34.440 | a Goldilocks solution? When has the federal bureaucracy ever enforced it as written,

00:05:40.520 | let alone as justified by members of the voting bloc in Congress that passed it?'

00:05:45.960 | Third, the conservative says this, 'Immigrants will get jobs here. They'll take jobs away from

00:05:50.680 | Americans.' I want to focus on this argument, for it is the most common one. It invokes nationalism

00:05:58.120 | over liberty. It equates nationalism with restrictions on the freedom of contract.

00:06:03.320 | It says, 'Not everyone should have the legal right to bid on jobs inside our borders.

00:06:07.800 | Only those who are legally inside our borders already, or who will be born to those already

00:06:12.360 | inside our borders, should possess this right.' It says, 'Our ancestors got here before there were

00:06:17.880 | any immigration laws. We deserve the right to bid. Outsiders don't. It's first come, first served.'

00:06:24.040 | May we help? This attitude is in direct opposition to both Christianity and the free market. A

00:06:32.680 | fundamental principle of Christianity is the principle of 'service to God by service to

00:06:38.840 | our fellow men.' This is made clear in Matthew 25, 'Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have

00:06:45.560 | done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Verse 40.

00:06:51.320 | The context is the final judgment. The principle of service is also basic to free market economics,

00:06:58.120 | which teaches that income derives from service to the customer. This goes back to Adam Smith in

00:07:04.600 | The Wealth of Nations, 1776. "But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren,

00:07:11.800 | and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to

00:07:16.920 | prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own

00:07:22.360 | advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind

00:07:28.040 | proposes to do this. 'Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want,' is the

00:07:33.960 | meaning of every such offer. And it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far

00:07:39.320 | greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the

00:07:46.040 | butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own

00:07:51.080 | interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never

00:07:56.520 | talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend

00:08:03.160 | chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens." The fundamental economic principle

00:08:09.880 | of immigration control is that service must be made illegal in order to protect the above-market

00:08:16.200 | incomes of producers inside a nation's borders, thereby reducing the availability of services to

00:08:22.520 | customers inside the borders. The job holders form a cartel with a goal to keep out competitors,

00:08:29.320 | thereby keeping their wages above market. The job holders prevail on Congress to post this sign

00:08:34.920 | facing outward on the border, "No. Help. Wanted." Not wanted by whom? By members of the job holder's

00:08:43.000 | cartel. It is now illegal for customers to post this sign, "Help. Wanted." The earliest manifestation

00:08:50.280 | of this mindset in America was the retailers' hostility to Chinese immigrants in California.

00:08:56.440 | It started with the Gold Rush of 1849, the year after the federal government completed President

00:09:01.560 | Polk's theft of one-third of Mexico, which included California. Chinese workers worked

00:09:07.240 | long hours at far lower wages. They were price-competitive. This hostility by retailers

00:09:13.560 | got worse over the next quarter century. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first

00:09:19.240 | example of a federal law excluding specific nationals. It was not repealed until 1943,

00:09:25.800 | when China was an ally in the Pacific War. The president who signed the 1882 bill into law

00:09:32.200 | was by far the most appropriate president in American history to have done so, Chester Arthur.

00:09:38.120 | Before becoming vice president, and then president after the assassination of Garfield, Arthur had

00:09:44.200 | been the head of the Port of New York, the government's most lucrative customs house.

00:09:49.880 | It was known at the time as being a major source of political kickbacks to the Republican Party.

00:09:55.400 | The stink got so bad that President Hayes removed Arthur from the position.

00:09:59.160 | We are not taught the following in history courses. Not until 1948 was it legal in California for

00:10:06.680 | whites or blacks to marry Asians. The California State Supreme Court overturned the law. The vote

00:10:12.840 | was four to three. That was the first state to overturn laws against interracial marriage,

00:10:18.840 | by one vote. We look back and we are amazed. Why would anyone have believed that state politicians

00:10:25.560 | had the wisdom to assess accurately the collective social benefits and liabilities of interracial

00:10:31.400 | marriages? This was social engineering by state politicians. Most conservatives today,

00:10:38.040 | but not in 1947, reject such a suggestion. Yet most conservatives believe today that federal

00:10:45.800 | bureaucrats can be trusted with this same power with respect to immigration. Conservatives quote

00:10:52.120 | Ronald Reagan, quote, "A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation." Conclusion,

00:10:57.720 | from 1788 to 1882, the United States was not a nation. Silly, isn't it? Then why do conservatives

00:11:08.600 | quote it? This historically silly slogan assumes that passing a law is the same as achieving the

00:11:15.080 | law's official goal. We have immigration laws on the statute books today. We also have 10 million

00:11:21.080 | illegal aliens, maybe 20 million, maybe 30 million. The government cannot even count them.

00:11:26.520 | It would cost at least $23,000 each to deport them. Each case must be tried in a court. It

00:11:32.760 | would tie up the US court system. They cannot, will not, be deported. Fact, the USA does not

00:11:40.040 | control its borders. This control is only symbolic, a token to placate the voters.

00:11:46.040 | Are we therefore a token nation? Should we trust social engineering by politicians? Why?

00:11:53.720 | Borders, badges, and guns. A brief history.

00:11:58.520 | Federal restrictions on immigration in 1917 applied to various kinds of social behavior.

00:12:05.160 | But immigration restrictions from 1882 up until World War I mainly had to do with keeping Chinese

00:12:12.120 | out of the country. The Immigration Act of 1924 extended this to many nations.

00:12:17.240 | Wikipedia summarizes, quote, "The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act, including the

00:12:24.040 | National Origins Act and Asian Exclusion Act, enacted May 26, 1924, was the United States

00:12:31.160 | federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country

00:12:34.840 | to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in

00:12:40.200 | 1890, down from the 3% cap set by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, according to the Census

00:12:47.320 | of 1890. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was primarily aimed at further

00:12:54.200 | restricting immigration of Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans. In addition, it severely

00:12:59.640 | restricted the immigration of Africans and prohibited the immigration of Arabs, East Asians,

00:13:04.920 | and Indians. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, the purpose of the

00:13:09.960 | act was, quote, "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity. Congressional opposition was minimal."

00:13:17.160 | End of Wikipedia quote. The tradition of immigration control lasted from 1924 to 1968,

00:13:23.800 | when Teddy Kennedy's Immigration Act of 1965 was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. A sign of

00:13:30.200 | freedom prior to World War I was this. There were no passports anywhere in the West. Wikipedia says,

00:13:38.440 | quote, "A rapid expansion of rail travel and wealth in Europe beginning in the mid-19th century

00:13:44.040 | led to a unique dilution of the passport system for approximately 30 years prior to World War I.

00:13:50.360 | The speed of trains, as well as the number of passengers that crossed multiple borders,

00:13:54.360 | made enforcement of passport laws difficult. The general reaction was the relaxation of

00:13:59.400 | passport requirements. In the later part of the 19th century and up to World War I,

00:14:04.600 | passports were not required, on the whole, for travel within Europe, and crossing a border was

00:14:09.960 | a relatively straightforward procedure. Consequently, comparatively few people held passports.

00:14:16.280 | During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for

00:14:20.360 | security reasons and to control the emigration of citizens with useful skills. These controls

00:14:26.040 | remained in place after the war, becoming standard, though controversial, procedure.

00:14:31.000 | British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs

00:14:36.360 | and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a, quote, "nasty dehumanization."

00:14:42.200 | End of quote and end of Wikipedia quote. "Your papers, please." World War I brought us that

00:14:49.160 | grim phrase. The conservative tradition in America, 1788 to 1882, was open borders.

00:14:57.480 | So was the liberal tradition. The constitutional tradition in America was open borders. Only in

00:15:04.280 | 1882 did this begin to change. It escalated in 1924. If you listen to the proponents of

00:15:10.760 | immigration restriction today, you would think that George Washington and James Madison in 1787

00:15:16.600 | persuaded the Constitutional Convention to authorize congressional restrictions on immigration.

00:15:21.880 | You would think that this was part of the American constitutional tradition,

00:15:25.720 | but the U.S. Constitution has no reference to any such restrictions.

00:15:30.680 | Anytime somebody says that there have to be some sort of social criteria beyond non-criminal

00:15:38.360 | judicial status in order to gain residence in the United States, he is saying that politicians

00:15:43.720 | in Congress and permanent tenured bureaucrats in the executive are competent in understanding what

00:15:49.640 | America needs today and what America will need in the future. Conservatives don't believe this

00:15:55.640 | in many areas of life, but with respect to two things, imported goods and imported people,

00:16:02.440 | they believe that Congress knows better and the tenured executive bureaucracy knows best.

00:16:07.960 | This is the default mode of thinking for most conservatives. They believe with all their

00:16:13.000 | hearts that Congress can be trusted and tenured executive bureaucrats protected by civil service

00:16:18.280 | laws are in effect a kind of priesthood. These people know what America needs.

00:16:23.720 | Why should anyone believe this? Hispanics are going to break up America. Recently,

00:16:30.920 | I was sent this email, "It's true that for much, perhaps even most of our history,

00:16:35.480 | we had practically no immigration restrictions at all. We also had a nation consisting of a

00:16:40.920 | landmass begging for inhabitants, workers, farmers, inventors, educators, etc. But we insisted,

00:16:47.560 | if not legally, then as a practical matter, that these new arrivals learned our language,

00:16:52.440 | conformed to our laws, and consider themselves citizens of their adopted nation."

00:16:58.040 | Who were "we"? How did "we" do this? By letting people alone, judicially speaking.

00:17:05.720 | The federal government said nothing. The federal government was not regarded as having any say

00:17:09.880 | in the matter. Continuing now the quoted letter, "A few could not and sometimes returned to the

00:17:16.120 | old country, but most stayed and became passionately loyal Americans. What's profoundly

00:17:21.400 | disturbing is that many of the new arrivals, particularly the Hispanics, appear to have

00:17:25.800 | little or no intention of assimilating, and in some cases of even learning or using our language.

00:17:31.400 | If continued, this will become a surefire formula for societal disaster, most likely in the form of

00:17:36.760 | the country simply breaking up, just as did the seemingly impregnable old USSR. I'd bet more than

00:17:44.280 | even odds that this will happen in the fairly near future. Once it starts, it'll proceed with

00:17:48.760 | the speed of a massive seismic shift." End quote of the letter. What the author of the letter did

00:17:55.880 | not say is the following, "I trust the Congress of the United States and the permanent civil

00:18:01.240 | service bureaucracy employed by the executive to make decisions regarding social stability

00:18:06.280 | in the United States today and in the future." If he had been willing to do this, I would have

00:18:12.520 | acknowledged that at least he had thought through the implications of his position.

00:18:16.680 | At least he was willing to say what is implied by his view of immigration. He believes in

00:18:22.360 | congressional social engineering with respect to immigration. He also believes that the federal

00:18:28.280 | bureaucrats have both the ability and the moral responsibility to make decisions about who should

00:18:34.520 | live here and under what circumstances. He is saying, inevitably, that federal bureaucrats

00:18:41.160 | have the ability to make accurate social forecasts about how specific non-criminal

00:18:47.480 | and physically healthy immigrants are going to affect American society in the future.

00:18:51.640 | I do not share his faith. He doesn't trust Hispanics. He thinks Hispanics are going to

00:18:58.360 | speak Spanish all their lives. He thinks they won't integrate into the country.

00:19:02.520 | Where is the evidence that Hispanic kids who were born in this country, and who have attended public

00:19:07.880 | schools, and who watch American television and listen to rap music cannot speak English?

00:19:12.600 | They can even speak rap. I don't speak rap. I cannot understand what those people are saying.

00:19:18.200 | But Hispanic teenagers are fluent in rap. I guess we can call them trilingual.

00:19:24.200 | I don't notice that Hispanics riot very often. People in La Raza march in groups carrying

00:19:30.200 | placards with slogans, but they're smart enough to have the slogans in English for the television

00:19:34.680 | evening news. The fact that Hispanic parents, some of whom do not speak English, demanded and

00:19:40.840 | got their own high school in Los Angeles, right next door to all-black Jefferson High, should

00:19:46.680 | come as a surprise, only in this sense. The school board voted for this. That the parents demanded a

00:19:52.360 | dress code is also no surprise. It is called Nava College Preparatory Academy. All the students

00:19:58.680 | speak English. Most of them speak rap. Most immigrants who came from Eastern Europe and

00:20:07.000 | Central Europe in the late 19th century and the early 20th century could not speak English. We

00:20:12.440 | don't know what percentage of them learned to speak English, but there were whole sections of

00:20:16.040 | New York City in 1900 that spoke Yiddish and other Central European languages. But the children

00:20:22.280 | learned. They mastered English. They did the translating for the parents. There was nothing

00:20:26.840 | odd about this. There is even a sociological pattern about immigrants. The recent immigrant

00:20:32.200 | parents want to maintain the old country's traditions. They want the children to maintain

00:20:36.440 | these traditions, but they also want them to be successful. Their children steadily abandon the

00:20:41.560 | parents' traditions. They want to be integrated. They want to be like their friends at school.

00:20:46.680 | They want to be seen as Americans. Their children assimilate even more completely.

00:20:51.080 | It is difficult for people over 12 years old to learn a foreign language if they never have before.

00:20:56.280 | A few adults have the knack, but most people don't. There is nothing odd about this. It is

00:21:01.480 | probably genetic. Stages of development. Small children master languages at incredible rates,

00:21:06.600 | meaning incredible rates for older people. Multilingual children who grow up in multilingual

00:21:11.400 | environments are common. My father, who was stationed in Egypt during World War II,

00:21:15.880 | said that boys in the streets could speak German, Italian, and English with ease. They had been

00:21:20.120 | selling services to various invading armies, and they got along just fine. People adjust. They

00:21:26.440 | respond to incentives. If there are economic incentives and opportunities to assimilate,

00:21:32.040 | the children of immigrants do. Eight words that define America.

00:21:37.160 | There are eight words in the English language which generally define Americans, as long as

00:21:43.400 | they are not in Congress. These eight words are central to understanding the American character.

00:21:50.040 | They have been basic to the American character for over 300 years. Here they are. Live and let live.

00:21:59.080 | Let's make a deal. When civil governments get involved in the affairs of men, then these two

00:22:06.600 | sentences get compromised. The anti-immigration forces are opposed to this one. Live and let

00:22:12.440 | live. The protectionists are opposed to this one. Let's make a deal. Quite frequently,

00:22:19.160 | we find people who are committed to both positions, and they call themselves conservatives.

00:22:24.680 | Conservatives love to see customs houses. They love to see customs agents. They love to see

00:22:33.000 | immigration control officials. They trust Congress. They trust the bureaucracy,

00:22:39.080 | but only at national borders. In other areas of life, they insist that they believe in the

00:22:43.400 | principles of limited government, but show a conservative a national border and he abandons

00:22:48.680 | his principles. He substitutes trust in the federal government as soon as he sees a national border.

00:22:54.040 | Keep this in mind. Residency is not the same as citizenship. Conservatives confuse the two

00:23:00.280 | concepts. Americans did not begin making this mistake until World War I.

00:23:08.200 | Thus concludes my reading of the article. In the original version, linked in the show notes,

00:23:15.800 | there was an additional paragraph with a commentary linking to a YouTube video,

00:23:20.840 | but the YouTube video has been removed and I don't know what it was. There is also

00:23:24.680 | a link to Gary North's detailed study of immigration theory called The Sanctuary

00:23:30.600 | Society and Its Enemies, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1998.

00:23:35.240 | And so, if you were interested in those, follow the link in the show notes.

00:23:38.840 | Thus concludes Gary North's article. What I always appreciated, I learned an enormous amount from

00:23:43.960 | Gary North over the years. I first stumbled upon him with regard to his commentary on economics,

00:23:49.720 | because I was interested in his biblical commentaries on economics, but I just enjoyed

00:23:54.200 | his writings on social theory, etc. I always found them so thought-provoking that I was always

00:23:59.240 | having my ideas challenged by him. I was a subscriber to his website for many years

00:24:03.080 | until his death and just really appreciated how he always challenged my ideas.

00:24:08.360 | There was one thing that was always true with North, is that if you were going to tangle with

00:24:12.360 | him, you better know what you believe and why you believe it and be able to defend it.

00:24:16.600 | That makes you a stronger person. He was a formidable opponent. When you disagreed with

00:24:22.920 | him, he was just a formidable guy in every way. Let's now turn to the issues of the day.

00:24:29.400 | It would be my guess that no more than, say, two or three percent of the listening audience

00:24:36.440 | would agree with everything that North has written in that article or the implications

00:24:42.200 | of what he stated, because in general, the U.S. society, as well as most societies around the

00:24:50.440 | world, are firmly and completely split on these two issues. And North's position is that one or

00:24:58.760 | both of these things has to fall. Now, I've defended this myself. I broadly agree with

00:25:03.720 | North, with his commentary. But as I see it, a society can have two things in existence,

00:25:12.760 | excuse me, have one of these two things in existence. Either a society can have what

00:25:18.280 | we'll call for now open borders, which we'll define in just a moment, or a society can have

00:25:23.880 | a welfare state. But I do not believe that a society can have both of those things and function.

00:25:30.920 | And a society is going to choose which of those things it's going to have.

00:25:34.600 | As for me, my preference is to have a society that has open borders and no welfare state.

00:25:42.200 | But I seem to be in the extreme minority on that preference. And in general,

00:25:48.440 | most of the societies in which we live have chosen to have a welfare state

00:25:54.200 | and then to restrict immigration, although until now that is basically disappears.

00:26:02.200 | Let me explain why I believe this is at the heart of the issue, at least in the U.S. American

00:26:06.920 | context. I do not believe that, broadly speaking, that most Americans are in any way racist. And

00:26:14.680 | I'm going to use the traditional version of that term, not the modern Ibram Kendi version of that

00:26:20.840 | term or definition of the term racist. What I mean is that in the modern society, especially U.S.

00:26:26.520 | Americans, U.S. Americans do not care about the race of someone with whom they are interacting.

00:26:33.720 | They don't care about the color of the skin. They don't care about someone's ethnic heritage,

00:26:38.680 | their cultural background, etc. Americans broadly believe in live and let live.

00:26:43.880 | They don't really care. What they care about is service. What they care about is convenience.

00:26:49.240 | What they care about is service one to another. And so when Americans criticize people,

00:26:56.120 | they don't criticize based upon the color of someone's skin. They criticize based upon the

00:27:04.120 | expression of someone's culture. And there are certain cultures that are extremely distasteful

00:27:10.040 | to Americans, which they tend to criticize quite broadly. But it's not due to any outward

00:27:17.000 | appearance or due to any kind of ethnic background. It's due to a culture that does not

00:27:25.320 | fit well with the American culture, broadly speaking. If you ask most Americans, especially

00:27:31.960 | the most anti-immigration Americans, if they care what color of skin their next door neighbor has

00:27:37.080 | or what color of skin or what ethnic background the mayor of their town has, broadly speaking,

00:27:44.280 | they don't generally care, as long as the person is not trying to force it upon that individual

00:27:49.640 | American. But when you bring the welfare state into it, now it drives that frustration very,

00:27:56.840 | very high. The welfare state basically says, "Listen, what I'm going to do is I'm going to

00:28:02.840 | steal money from you because you are a producer, you're a worker. I'm going to steal money from

00:28:07.640 | you, and I'm going to give it to other people who need the money more than you do." And when

00:28:13.800 | there is a system where the need is clearly defined – so, for example, if your average

00:28:19.560 | American working man sees that his money is being stolen from him in the form of taxes,

00:28:25.000 | and it's going to support an old folks' home that's kind of a community outreach where he

00:28:28.760 | can see that, "Look, these people are broke and indigenous, and if they weren't there,

00:28:31.880 | they'd be on the streets," etc., he's not going to resist too harshly. But when you bring

00:28:37.560 | immigration into it, and when you paint the idea in his mind, regardless of its truthfulness,

00:28:43.560 | that those people are coming in here, and those people are, you know, taking advantage of our

00:28:48.440 | free healthcare and our hospitals, and those people are coming in here, and they're taking

00:28:52.680 | advantage of our free government schools, and those people are coming in here, and they're

00:28:56.520 | being handed debit cards, etc., that makes the average American's blood boil pretty significantly.

00:29:02.840 | And so, as I see it, you can have one or two of these things. If you got rid of the welfare state,

00:29:09.160 | I think, and there were no redistribution of wealth, but rather Americans were reminded that,

00:29:15.160 | "Hey, what you make is yours to keep. We're not going to steal it from you." There may be

00:29:20.600 | some small tax system to support a national military or something like that, but no welfare

00:29:25.000 | taxes. "What you make is yours to keep. You got a deal. You got to go out into the world to make

00:29:30.200 | it." And all those immigrants that are coming in, they're doing exactly the same thing. There's no

00:29:34.600 | welfare state for them. They're not being given free debit cards. They're not being given free

00:29:38.600 | health care. They're not being given free education or anything like that. They got to make it.

00:29:43.880 | Then, generally speaking, it's my instinct as a born and bred American that most Americans broadly

00:29:50.280 | would be willing to accept that deal. I have tested this theory in person with many of my

00:29:57.160 | friends, the most ardent Trump supporters, the most ardent anti-immigration people,

00:30:03.640 | and also my liberal left-wing friends. And in general, I have not yet – no, not in general.

00:30:10.600 | I have not yet found anyone to whom I have made this proposition who would reject it.

00:30:15.640 | Again, the most anti-immigration people with whom I've interacted personally, when I have said to

00:30:20.440 | them, "Listen, would you be willing to have open borders if you knew that you were not having

00:30:27.880 | money stolen from you in the form of taxes to give any kind of handout to other people?" But in fact,

00:30:35.160 | all of those immigrants are coming of their own dime, and they're just coming to compete

00:30:39.720 | honestly in the labor force with you. They're not getting any handouts. Would you accept that?

00:30:44.280 | To this day, I have not had any person to whom I've had this conversation reject that scenario.

00:30:51.480 | So I believe that, however, when you have a welfare state, I don't think you can have open

00:30:57.320 | borders because it creates such an enormous conflict of interest for people coming to the

00:31:03.480 | country. So not only do you get people who want to move to a country for the opportunities,

00:31:08.760 | but rather you also get people who want to move to the country because they can get an easy life,

00:31:14.520 | a free and easy life in the country. And so you have the problem of who the immigrants are.

00:31:20.840 | It changes the basic character of the immigrants when they know they're going to get free stuff.

00:31:25.160 | And then secondarily, it changes the experience of the people living in that country.

00:31:31.320 | And so I believe you can either have a country that has open borders or you can have a country

00:31:37.880 | that has a welfare state, but you cannot have both for the long term. And ultimately,

00:31:44.680 | a country that has both is going to make some enormous change in one direction or another.

00:31:51.240 | Now, I have a few more points I want to make on this, and then we're going to move to personal

00:31:54.760 | finance application. But before I do so, I wanted to find the term open borders. You will notice

00:32:00.280 | that or an astute listener would notice a couple of specific restrictions that North in his essay

00:32:09.560 | passed. And I believe that these potential restrictions are important. So what does open

00:32:14.920 | borders mean? Does open borders mean that a country has no checkpoints or security control

00:32:21.800 | at its borders? Does open borders mean that a country doesn't have fences, that a country

00:32:26.920 | doesn't have immigration at its airports, et cetera? My answer is it might, but it's not

00:32:33.080 | strictly necessary. So there are two things that North pointed out. He said non-criminal immigrants,

00:32:41.160 | and he also said healthy immigrants or non-ill immigrants. And these are two things that I think

00:32:46.680 | are completely compatible with open borders. So here would be an example of the kind of system

00:32:51.720 | that I myself would be happy to support if it were feasible in any world, which it's not in

00:32:57.560 | today's world, any world that I can find. Maybe Mars or something like that, or maybe it's the

00:33:01.640 | world a century from now, but it's not feasible. Is it okay for a country to have some form of

00:33:07.240 | checkpoint control? Because one of the things that North didn't address in his essay that you

00:33:11.560 | often hear modern anti-immigration or anti-illegal immigration people, however they want to style

00:33:16.680 | themselves, talk about is, well, all the terrorists are coming in, all the criminals

00:33:20.200 | are coming in. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for a government to have some

00:33:25.000 | system in place of checking for a person's criminal background. As I see it, I do not

00:33:33.720 | believe that any government in the world has the right to control the physical movements,

00:33:39.160 | physical geographical movements of any non-criminal person. So I do not believe that

00:33:46.120 | the state, let's say I live in the state of Florida, I do not believe that the government

00:33:49.160 | of the state of Georgia has the right to control my access to the state of Georgia from the state

00:33:55.480 | of Florida across the state line as long as I am a non-criminal person. In the same way,

00:34:02.200 | I do not believe that the government of the United States or the government of Mexico has

00:34:08.200 | the moral right or authority to control the physical geographic movement of any non-criminal

00:34:14.040 | person. People can travel around the world as they want, and as long as someone is not

00:34:19.480 | a criminal person, I do not believe that a government has control over their body. Why

00:34:25.640 | should they? Why should any government have control over someone? To believe in that is

00:34:30.280 | to believe in tyranny, in absolute tyranny, to say that a government can arbitrarily decide

00:34:35.880 | who they control. Now, what is this and who can go where in the world? It's insane.

00:34:42.200 | It's an insane concept that has become utterly normal in our modern society, but it's crazy

00:34:47.640 | when you actually stop and think about it. Why should any government have the right to control

00:34:51.800 | the physical movement of a non-criminal person? And look at COVID as a perfect recent example

00:34:57.400 | of what the world experienced. How stupid was it to believe that the government had the right to

00:35:02.440 | say, "You have to stay in your zone. You can't go out and walk your dog. You can't go to the

00:35:06.200 | state park and ride your skateboard and dump it. We're going to dump it full of sand." Utterly

00:35:10.200 | ridiculous. They arrested people on the beach. Insane tyranny everywhere. And even there was

00:35:17.560 | more justifiable in case of a public health emergency and an infectious disease pandemic,

00:35:23.800 | which we'll go to in a moment, of a diseased person. But let's deal with criminality first.

00:35:28.520 | Who does government have authority over? My answer is government has authority

00:35:36.120 | over criminal persons. That is the basic central role of government.

00:35:41.560 | God has appointed the existence of government on earth to deal with the behavior of criminal

00:35:50.600 | persons. A government has one task, and that is to constrain the evildoer and to eliminate evil

00:35:59.400 | from the earth. Evil people who commit evil actions must be removed from society,

00:36:05.480 | and that is the basic function of government. Now, there are enormous and extremely important

00:36:11.080 | restrictions on the exercise of that right by government powers. There must be multiple

00:36:17.560 | witnesses. There must be a legal system. There must be abundant evidence. There must be due

00:36:22.840 | process. There must be presumption of innocence, etc. An accused has the right to face his accuser,

00:36:29.000 | etc. So there can be no kind of nighttime raids by thugs in helmets and bulletproof vests who

00:36:35.320 | swoop in in the early morning and arrest people out of their beds. No, not a chance.

00:36:39.080 | There can be no secret courtrooms with no cameras, etc. All judicial proceedings should be public,

00:36:45.000 | and there should be a presumption of innocence, and there should be due process in all judicial

00:36:48.840 | proceedings. But at its core, the basic function of government is to restrain the evildoer.

00:36:55.240 | And there is a component as an expression of that whereby a government official could do this

00:37:02.520 | in the context of open borders. And so would it be allowable to have a government that has

00:37:08.040 | open borders and say that there's a government official to whom you have to present your

00:37:13.080 | identity documents, to whom you have to present a federal background check of some kind or a law

00:37:18.840 | enforcement check, etc., to make certain that a country or a city or a state is not allowing

00:37:24.680 | criminal persons into their midst? My answer is I would be okay with that. I would be willing to

00:37:29.640 | accept that. But here we see the other fundamental flaw in the modern immigration debate, is that

00:37:35.080 | simultaneous with the enormous flow of immigrants across the border, without any meaningful

00:37:42.280 | checkpoints or restrictions, simultaneous with that, we have the enormous end the police movement.

00:37:48.120 | And while I'm sympathetic to a lot of the arguments of the, you know, the defund the police

00:37:52.440 | movement and the – broadly speaking, these are two things that I do not believe can coexist.

00:37:59.800 | Because as people are finding more and increasing criminality expressed in their community,

00:38:04.920 | the fear is rising. And one of the basic ways that a government retains its power and its

00:38:12.760 | authority in society is to maintain security, is to maintain peace. Yesterday in my children's

00:38:20.600 | homeschool, we were talking about feudalism. We were talking about the feudal system,

00:38:24.360 | feudal structure of society and feudalism and how it worked. And what I think is often mistaken by

00:38:30.360 | people who are broadly sympathetic to the serfs working for the lord of the manor, etc., is the

00:38:36.280 | basic reason that this structure existed in the first place, which was due to attack by roving

00:38:43.400 | bands of marauders across Europe. And so what the lords and the serfs did in the feudal system was

00:38:48.520 | they made a deal. The deal was this. The lord of the manor and the lord of the countryside would

00:38:54.200 | develop a private army of knights and dukes and earls, etc., nobles. This private army would

00:38:59.640 | defend the people and keep the peace. That way, the peasants, the serfs, could till their land

00:39:05.880 | in peace and not worry about being murdered and raped in their beds, not worry about having their

00:39:10.600 | harvest stolen by bands of marauders. And the portion of their harvest that they had to turn

00:39:15.240 | over to the lord and the serf in the form of – sorry, the lord of the manor, the dukes and the

00:39:19.480 | earls, etc., the nobility system, the portion of their harvest they turned over in the form of taxes

00:39:24.760 | was a better deal than having their produce stolen by bands of marauders. If you look back at the

00:39:32.040 | history of humanity, there were societies in which people hunted and gathered for themselves.

00:39:39.160 | But the instant you had a transition to a stable farming society, then you had rise to increased

00:39:45.880 | levels of violence because people who didn't want to do the backbreaking work of tending to their

00:39:50.600 | own farm and keeping their own crops, etc., realized, "I can go over to my neighbor there,

00:39:55.960 | who he's doing the work all the time, and I can just show up at harvest time. And with a sharp

00:40:00.440 | spear or a bow and arrow or my own physical size and a club or whatever tool of war I happen to

00:40:06.520 | have, I can intimidate him and I can steal his crops and I can steal all of them from him."

00:40:11.240 | And so you have increased needs for security to protect crops, and this makes an enormous

00:40:15.480 | difference in the history of nations and the history of individuals as well. So whenever

00:40:21.560 | there is insecurity in a society or even perceived insecurity, the people will call out and respond

00:40:30.840 | favorably to somebody who can provide that security. Let me tie in now a modern event.

00:40:37.400 | Over the past few days, the president of El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele,

00:40:43.320 | won his presidential re-election campaign in an absolute landslide. I don't have the specific

00:40:50.840 | figures of his initial victory, but as I recall, it was a close election. When he came into office,

00:40:57.240 | he faced significant opposition. But over the course of his most recent presidential term,

00:41:02.200 | he has taken certain actions in the country that resulted in him receiving an absolute

00:41:07.800 | landslide of the vote, something like 85% of the vote. And it's one of the most stunning

00:41:14.840 | victories by any political candidate, at least in my lifetime.

00:41:20.760 | Now, what led to that? Well, if you don't follow Latin American politics, you might have at least

00:41:24.760 | some idea of the fact that, historically speaking, El Salvador has been an extremely unsafe country

00:41:31.160 | in Latin America. El Salvador was the one country in Latin America that I myself was scared to go to

00:41:37.560 | in the past. I've traveled a lot in Latin America. The one country I never went to and I was scared

00:41:43.320 | to go to was El Salvador, due to an absurdly high murder rate in the country. Putting the story very

00:41:51.480 | short, Bukele came into office. He marshaled the military forces, built enormous prison,

00:41:57.880 | built an enormous prison, went out of the streets, and arrested, on a wide scale,

00:42:04.200 | arrested all of the gang members in the country, identified by their having gang tattoos,

00:42:09.880 | primarily. Imprisoned them all in an enormous prison complex, an enormous prison complex,

00:42:19.720 | created cinema-quality advertisement promotional materials for this movement, and cleaned up the

00:42:27.640 | streets of El Salvador in a completely unprecedented way, leading to, over the course of, what is it,

00:42:34.120 | a couple of years, something like that, El Salvador going from the country with basically

00:42:38.360 | the highest murder rate in the world to, if not the lowest murder rate in the world,

00:42:43.720 | a lower statistical murder rate than, I don't know, the United States, currently speaking.

00:42:49.080 | And this has had an absolutely transformative effect on the El Salvadorian society, on the

00:42:57.080 | country, on the commerce, the business, etc. Previously in El Salvador, due to the gang

00:43:04.360 | control and gang warfare happening across the country, you didn't let your children go to the

00:43:09.080 | park, families stayed in their homes, you didn't go to that next block over because it was controlled

00:43:13.960 | by a rival gang, etc. Well, today, the country is totally transformed. The people feel safe,

00:43:19.000 | they go out and they play. And what's happening is there's enormous flows, not only of money,

00:43:23.560 | to the country, and there are other things as well. He's embraced various things. He's working

00:43:28.920 | hard to build the infrastructure in the country and improve the highways. He's made radical moves,

00:43:34.440 | such as embracing Bitcoin as an official currency, etc. But enormously also due to the

00:43:42.360 | increase in safety, there is an increase in tourism to El Salvador. But more importantly,

00:43:50.120 | there's an increase in El Salvadorians who are from the diaspora, who had gone abroad,

00:43:55.880 | now returning home more regularly to visit their friends and families and looking and saying,

00:43:59.720 | "How could we bring money back? How could we invest into this country? It feels like a new country."

00:44:04.120 | And so at its core, the basic point I want to make is that when a politician can create

00:44:11.640 | peace in the streets and can create a society of comfort—sorry, of safety, and what I'm

00:44:20.680 | deriving of comfort is not only actual safety but perceived safety, that politician will receive

00:44:26.520 | broad levels of support. And if a politician allows increases in crime, increases in insecurity,

00:44:34.520 | for example, homeless people camping on your front lawn, things like that, which may or may

00:44:39.800 | not be associated with crime, but it certainly is associated with perceived insecurity and perceived

00:44:45.640 | decay—if a politician cannot see to that basic order, the politician or the political party or

00:44:51.480 | whomever is going to lose support. But if the people feel secure, then they will have support.

00:44:57.240 | And everything else is secondary to that. So if you go throughout political history and you look

00:45:01.480 | at the feudal system or you look at the modern world, you look and see, "Why do the mafia have

00:45:09.320 | control? Why are the Taliban so popular in Afghanistan?" Well, the answer is they see to

00:45:14.760 | the needs of the people. And ISIS can come into your village, but if ISIS can get you clean water

00:45:19.880 | and secure streets for you to walk around, etc., then people are going to wind up supporting ISIS

00:45:24.840 | because at its core, that's what we want from government. We want government to work. And the

00:45:29.000 | core basic function of government working is get rid of the criminals so that honest people can live

00:45:36.040 | and not be in fear of their life. Now, interestingly also, what does the U.S.

00:45:42.360 | Society do? Well, here is an editorial from Today in the New York Times, guest editorial

00:45:50.120 | by Dr. Will Freeman and Lucas Pereyo. I never know how to pronounce things in the

00:45:58.520 | Spanish accent or English accent. I go back and forth. "Why Nayib Bukele's anti-crime model for

00:46:04.360 | El Salvador won't work in other countries." Here are a few paragraphs. "Voters in El Salvador this

00:46:08.360 | week gave their tough-on-crime president a sweeping mandate. Keep going. While votes are

00:46:13.240 | still being counted, President Nayib Bukele claims he won re-election by a landslide with more than

00:46:18.040 | 85% of the vote. If those results hold when the official count is announced, not even Latin

00:46:23.240 | America's best-known populist presidents like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Bolivia's Evo Morales

00:46:28.680 | will have come close to winning election by such margins. Mr. Bukele's unparalleled rise

00:46:33.560 | comes down to a single factor, El Salvador's stunning crime drop. Since he took office in 2019,

00:46:39.800 | intentional homicide rates have decreased from 38 per 100,000 in that year to 7.8 in 2022,

00:46:48.360 | well below the Latin American average of 16.4 for the same year. The crackdown Mr. Bukele has led

00:46:54.840 | on organized crime has all but dismantled the infamous street gangs that terrorized the

00:46:59.720 | population for decades. It also exacted a tremendous price on Salvadorans' human rights,

00:47:05.240 | civil liberties, and democracy. Since March 2022, when Mr. Bukele declared a state of emergency

00:47:10.760 | that suspended basic civil liberties, security forces have locked up roughly 75,000 people.

00:47:16.680 | A staggering one in 45 adults is now in prison. Other leaders in the neighborhood are taking

00:47:21.800 | notice and have debated adopting many of the same drastic measures to fight their own criminal

00:47:25.640 | violence. But even if they wanted to make the trade-off that Mr. Bukele's government has,

00:47:29.880 | making streets safer through methods that are blatantly at odds with democracy,

00:47:33.960 | they aren't likely to succeed. The conditions that enabled Mr. Bukele's success and political

00:47:38.200 | stardom are unique to El Salvador and can't be exported. And it goes on and talks about how,

00:47:44.440 | how, I'll just read it, "Walking the streets of the capital, San Salvador, in the days before the

00:47:49.160 | election, we saw firsthand how families with children have returned to parks. People can

00:47:54.120 | now cross formerly impassable gang-controlled borders between neighborhoods. The city center,

00:47:59.160 | which for years was largely empty by sunset, is now lively late into the night. But El Salvador,

00:48:05.080 | which transitioned to democracy in the 1990s, has veered off that path. Mr. Bukele now controls

00:48:11.240 | all government branches. The nation of 6.4 million is run as a police state. Soldiers and police

00:48:17.080 | officers routinely whisk citizens off the streets and into prison indefinitely without providing a

00:48:21.880 | reason or allowing them access to a lawyer. There are credible reports that inmates have been

00:48:26.440 | tortured. Government critics told us they have been threatened with prosecution and journalists

00:48:30.920 | have been spied on. Even last Sunday's vote is under a microscope after the transmission system

00:48:35.800 | for the results of the preliminary vote count collapsed in a highly unusual manner." And they

00:48:40.920 | go on and talk about things in Ecuador and what was unique about El Salvador, etc. The point is

00:48:46.040 | that what I find fascinating about that paragraph is there are a lot of people of basically any

00:48:51.720 | country in the world, the United States, the country I know best, but many other countries

00:48:56.280 | who, if I read that paragraph and simply transposed the name of my own country,

00:49:03.000 | my own native country to that, then it wouldn't be too far off the mark. Now, I think that a lot of

00:49:10.280 | that is just perception rather than reality, but perception is ultimately what matters. I have

00:49:16.440 | friends who have been whisked off into prison, and they were ultimately provided with access to a

00:49:22.280 | lawyer, but they were in prison with no charges made for an enormously long period of time.

00:49:27.240 | And all of us are now in the United States accustomed to finding out there's some early

00:49:32.040 | morning raid. We're accustomed to having closed courtrooms where we don't know the—we can't see

00:49:37.080 | what's happening. We don't know what's happening in the argument. We can't even see who the jurors

00:49:41.400 | are. Even when we can find a camera feed from a courtroom, which obviously doesn't happen in

00:49:49.080 | federal courtrooms where they really need them the most, at least most many state courtrooms,

00:49:52.600 | we have camera feeds now, but we can't even find out who the jurors are, which is insane.

00:49:58.680 | And so the voting process under a microscope for unusual results when the preliminary vote count

00:50:05.400 | collapsed in a highly unusual manner, these are the things that are common to many of our

00:50:10.120 | experiences. And so, as I see it, no political system can stand if it doesn't provide for the

00:50:18.040 | basic needs of the people. And that was true about feudalism. It's true about modern democratic

00:50:23.720 | systems. If modern democratic systems can't provide these basic needs of the people,

00:50:29.320 | security—if our communities do not feel safe and they're not actually safe, then it erodes trust.

00:50:36.760 | And the problem with democracy is that for those who are in the minority, if their needs are not

00:50:42.840 | met, it feels just as tyrannical as if your country is run by a dictator. And if you go

00:50:50.760 | around the world and you look at different political systems, a government that is run

00:50:55.160 | by a noble tyrant, a nobly-minded dictator, is often an extremely attractive form of government.

00:51:03.880 | You see that in a place like Singapore. One of the most incredible transformations in modern

00:51:10.760 | society, one of the most successful advanced modern states, etc., was run by an extremely

00:51:15.960 | powerful, extremely heavy-handed—I'm not insulting him to say it—but quasi-dictator.

00:51:21.880 | And we see that around the world, is that I would be happy to live under a dictator if the

00:51:26.520 | dictator's interests are aligned with my own. That experience is far preferable to living under

00:51:33.320 | control by a tyrannical mob whose interests don't align with my own. And they control my life

00:51:40.520 | exceedingly, and yet I'm in the minority. It doesn't feel any better than it does to live under

00:51:46.840 | a dictator whose interests are aligned with my own. Now, hear me clearly, there is another way,

00:51:52.760 | and that's what we've been trying to work on for a long period of time. And that, I think,

00:51:57.560 | was the beauty of the American system, which was a system where the interests of—sorry,

00:52:04.920 | the control of government was restricted to the local level where democratic expression

00:52:10.360 | is more appropriate, and the power of the state on any level is severely weakened

00:52:17.000 | just to the most essential of elements. But I don't want to go any further into political theory.

00:52:22.120 | It makes me sad to see what my own country has become. But let's deal honestly with some of the

00:52:28.680 | issues. And so let me bring clarity to a few of these points. Number one, when you're dealing

00:52:34.440 | with an immigration issue and an immigration crisis, as the United States is clearly dealing

00:52:39.240 | with, you have a choice between open borders or a welfare state. And the fact that the United

00:52:44.840 | States is currently embracing a welfare state, a very broad welfare state, and open borders

00:52:51.880 | is poisoning the conversation enormously. I see no solution to this problem, by the way. I have

00:52:58.280 | no solutions whatsoever. I don't believe that Americans are ready to give up on either of those

00:53:03.080 | things at the moment. Ironically, even those who have voted, for example, for immigration controls,

00:53:09.480 | many of the voters who voted for President Trump in the year—when was he elected? 2020.

00:53:15.160 | A prime issue of their voting for him was to end illegal immigration and to build a wall.

00:53:24.040 | As I understand, according to Peter Zeihan, what is ironic about that effort is that previously,

00:53:31.240 | the United States had a fairly effective wall on its southern border, just like it has a fairly

00:53:36.280 | effective wall on its northern border. The wall on much of the northern border is an enormous

00:53:40.840 | wilderness. On the southern border, it's an enormous desert. And that desert was famously

00:53:45.400 | very difficult to cross until the construction of a border wall, which required the installation

00:53:51.160 | of roads for the contractors to be able to build the wall. And so now there's a network of roads

00:53:57.320 | crossing a previously impassable desert, which makes it easy for people who are transporting

00:54:02.840 | immigrants to drive them most of the way, and then they just have to walk a little bit and

00:54:07.880 | get picked up by another car. Whereas previously, there was a natural defense of a desert.

00:54:13.240 | I find that an interesting analysis, as far as I know it's true, but I have not been there

00:54:17.960 | to walk the wall myself to see exactly to the extent of its truthfulness. So it's just ironic

00:54:25.880 | that here's this thing that's supposed to reduce immigration, building a wall, and meanwhile it

00:54:32.120 | winds up enabling easier immigration across the border because of the construction methodology.

00:54:39.240 | Similarly, of course, there's plenty of places where the wall is climbed over and it's cut

00:54:43.080 | through, etc. Just a dumb idea. Doesn't work, didn't work, no point in it, etc.

00:54:48.600 | But we're in an insolvable crisis. I don't see how these two things can be reconciled. So as

00:54:53.960 | best I can tell, things are going to continue as they are, back and forth, back and forth,

00:54:57.800 | until we see some kind of broad-scale collapse of the system.

00:55:01.800 | The second point I was making is that you could have a version of open borders,

00:55:06.840 | while also having some form of checkpoints, identity verification, criminal verification,

00:55:12.040 | or verification of non-criminality, etc. And then related to that, you could also have

00:55:17.640 | verification of healthfulness. So let's say that what I would love to see would be,

00:55:23.640 | I would love to see all visa restrictions abolished so that anybody who wants to move

00:55:29.240 | to the United States could move to the United States. All they have to do is come. But when

00:55:34.760 | coming, I would love them to have to bring a certificate from the police background of their

00:55:42.120 | own state and present that certificate of non-criminality. Here's a federal background

00:55:47.880 | check. This shows that I'm not a wanted criminal, etc. This is, by the way, a standard procedure

00:55:51.560 | for all immigration programs. Every time I get a residency or apply for some kind of government

00:55:57.000 | thing, I have to bring a federal background check from the FBI, etc. So that's standard procedure.

00:56:01.640 | There's a well-proven system in place for that. And then also, a medical check showing I don't

00:56:08.200 | have any infectious diseases run by a doctor, etc. And again, this is also a standard part of

00:56:14.680 | many countries' immigration systems that you have to have a certificate of health.

00:56:18.680 | And so this kind of thing, to me, would be great. I would be thrilled if somebody would do this.

00:56:25.320 | Because this is the point I think that most conservatives miss, the point that North made

00:56:29.640 | quite strongly, is that why do you think that a government bureaucrat can somehow figure out

00:56:36.440 | how many workers we need for a X, Y, Z visa class? How many tech workers we need? How many

00:56:42.760 | farm workers? How many of this worker? How many of that worker? You don't have a clue.

00:56:46.520 | And what I find fascinating is that one of the great challenges that every businessman I know,

00:56:52.760 | including many in very menial trades, in agriculture, etc., as well as many in tech and

00:56:59.160 | kind of high-level businesses, they can't get enough workers. And so they have to go through

00:57:04.840 | all these quota programs and apply for a certain number of workers, etc., and it's an enormous

00:57:09.640 | problem with paperwork. And if the United States would simplify this system, nay, eliminate any

00:57:15.240 | restrictions, then the country would have an enormous competitive advantage and would be able

00:57:19.880 | to attract some of the world's greatest immigrants, which would be an incredible

00:57:24.360 | boon to the country. It would be an incredible boon to the country's economy. More people

00:57:30.680 | makes for a much more vibrant economy. It would lower the average age in the country,

00:57:35.240 | which would lead to increasing vibrance. And I think that for all of the problems that the

00:57:39.080 | United States has, I think the United States is better at assimilating immigrants into the nation

00:57:44.600 | than any other country in the world, because our culture is one of a creed rather than an ethnicity.

00:57:53.240 | Our culture is very, very inclusive of anybody from any place as long as they buy into the

00:57:59.480 | national creed, the basic set of beliefs that compose the civil religion of the United States.

00:58:05.240 | And if those people buy into that, then we accept them as Americans no matter what. This is why it's

00:58:11.160 | very common for Americans to have a friend who just moved over from the UK or Somalia or Japan,

00:58:20.200 | etc., and two years later, an American will make a comment like, "Man, you're an American through

00:58:26.360 | and through. You're totally American." And it has nothing to do with immigration status. The person

00:58:31.240 | may or may not have a visa. The person may or may not be a U.S. citizen. It has to do with culture,

00:58:36.440 | because if somebody embraces the American culture, regardless of accent, regardless of language,

00:58:41.160 | etc., then Americans accept them. This is very different than other nations that are primarily

00:58:47.240 | a nation due to an ethnic identity of some kind or your family's history here, etc.

00:58:55.880 | So I think it would be an incredible boon to the country to have that kind of system.

00:59:00.520 | And I understand that people want to protect their stuff. It always seems better to go and

00:59:09.400 | form a cartel to protect your industry and protect your occupation. And the free market

00:59:13.960 | ultimately systematically tears those things down. So not only is it morally repugnant to me

00:59:20.520 | to build cartels to protect your industry from outsiders just because so you can get all the

00:59:25.240 | money, but it's just philosophically dumb. It's a dumb way to live, and it hinders human progress

00:59:32.360 | and human advancement. Those would be some expressions of what I would love to see as an

00:59:37.160 | ideal system, an orderly system. I would be fine with checkpoints, etc., and I think it would be

00:59:42.040 | a great benefit to the country. What do we think about the current system? Well, it's absolute

00:59:48.360 | chaos, and it is fundamentally – it is horrific what is happening right now. The mass transfer of

00:59:58.600 | people across the southern border with very few checks, and the checks that are happening are

01:00:05.080 | fake. As far as I see it – I try to be careful with the use of the word "immoral," but they're

01:00:14.040 | really, really bad. And it's bad for multiple reasons, and I believe that the current

01:00:19.160 | crisis is bad for all three parties. So first and foremost, the current crisis is bad for immigrants,

01:00:28.040 | and the reason it's bad is because they are heading into a situation that is going to be

01:00:35.000 | terrible for decades. What I mean is there's not – the system I described that I would love to see

01:00:41.320 | happen doesn't exist in the United States. It doesn't exist, and it's not going to exist,

01:00:47.240 | as far as I can tell, for a very long period of time. And so, when immigrants are coming to the

01:00:52.200 | United States, they're primarily coming in because they're applying for asylum. We're not exercising

01:00:58.360 | any kind of significant checks as to the claims of fear that someone makes in their demand for

01:01:04.840 | asylum. We're just broadly handing out court dates, and these court dates are years in the future.

01:01:10.680 | And right now, for every immigrant that I know to the United States system,

01:01:16.840 | the entire U.S. immigration system is completely – I don't even know what adjective to use. It's

01:01:25.960 | just totally screwed up. It doesn't work. It's terrible. I have friends who are going through

01:01:30.920 | the system, have followed every law, have tried to do everything, and they just sit in limbo

01:01:36.600 | forever. And court system here, and it gets kicked out there, and et cetera. And so, going into the

01:01:42.760 | U.S. immigration system is a nightmare, where you just sit and sit and sit and sit, and there's no

01:01:49.080 | serious attention being given to the lives of the people who are sitting there. And so, I would never

01:01:54.840 | want to get involved with the U.S. immigration system if I didn't have to. It's not that it can't

01:02:01.320 | be done. There are some people, and if you can have a highly desirable job and your company can

01:02:05.480 | afford a great lawyer, et cetera, they can grease the skids and get something resolved. But you will

01:02:10.680 | spend years just waiting and waiting and waiting. And so, all of these people, poor people who are

01:02:15.640 | coming into the United States, trying to build something for themselves, they're going to be

01:02:20.760 | stuck into a system where they're second-class citizens, and they can't get legal status,

01:02:27.000 | they can't get legal standing, et cetera. And this is terrible also for their children.

01:02:32.280 | If their children are not born in the United States, it puts their children into enormous limbo.

01:02:37.240 | And if they leave the United States, they can't come back because of the very restrictive system

01:02:41.880 | that the United States has on travel. The only way to come in and out is to cross the border

01:02:46.040 | illegally, because the whole system of getting into the United States with a highly restrictive

01:02:50.520 | visa system is utterly screwed up. And so, I believe that it's a moral wrong to create these

01:02:57.880 | expectations for the immigrants. Number two, it's a moral catastrophe for the existing citizenry of

01:03:06.120 | the United States, because what they are seeing on a day-to-day basis is chaos. And let me just

01:03:11.720 | do the third one next. It's a moral catastrophe for the government itself. What you have right

01:03:16.440 | now in the United States, forgive me if I'm ranting, I know I'm ranting, but if you're

01:03:19.960 | listening, I assume it's useful to you. The current system of the United States

01:03:27.080 | and what the government is doing to itself is a catastrophe. Because when I, as a law-abiding

01:03:34.440 | citizen, see that the government is not enforcing its own laws in any meaningful way,

01:03:39.000 | and it's clearly visible with hordes of people walking across a river, and that the Border Patrol

01:03:48.200 | is non-functional in terms of actually – I mean, poor guys. I have a friend of mine who I

01:03:57.560 | talked to about this sometime, former Border Patrol agent. I cannot even imagine trying to

01:04:01.960 | work in that government agency. Got to be the lowest morale across any government agency right

01:04:07.080 | now. And so, you're creating a system in which you are watching people flout your laws. And that

01:04:15.000 | is a bad pathway to go down. Because as law-abiding citizens watch you as the government

01:04:22.440 | allow, be permissive of people flouting your laws, disobeying your laws with impunity,

01:04:29.400 | nay, you're even encouraging it in every way possible, then that causes ordinary law-abiding

01:04:37.320 | citizens to say, "Why am I taking the trouble to follow the laws? Why am I doing that?"

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01:05:11.240 | data. Start your journey at cloudera.com/trust. And then, instead of having a citizenry that is

01:05:17.880 | highly respectful of the law and who police themselves based upon their respect for the law,

01:05:25.080 | you are breeding discontentedness and disrespect for the law, which is going to make your job as

01:05:31.240 | a government much more difficult in the future. Because people say, "Why should I obey a law that

01:05:35.880 | he's not obeying?" And I would compare it to this. I haven't seen this personally,

01:05:39.640 | but I've heard this described by a couple of people. But let's say that it's opening morning

01:05:44.520 | of fishing season. And what I've heard fishermen say sometimes, let's say that fishing season for

01:05:50.040 | XYZ fish opens at 8 o'clock a.m. on June 1, and you'll be down at the river, and it's 7.45 a.m.,

01:06:00.840 | and everyone is sitting there waiting. They're all lined up. You can see all your fishermen. It's 7.45,

01:06:05.720 | and everyone's waiting, and waiting until 8 o'clock. But then around, say, 7.54,

01:06:10.760 | Joe Schmo tosses a line in the water. And all of a sudden, the guy next to Joe says, "Well,

01:06:16.440 | I'm going to do it." And he tosses his line in the water too. And at 7.57, everyone's got their lines

01:06:22.520 | in the water, except for the 10% of highly committed, law-abiding people. They're going

01:06:29.480 | to wait until 8 o'clock. They're going to wait that extra three minutes. Meanwhile, they watch

01:06:33.480 | all their friends pulling the fish out, and they feel, "Why am I the sucker? I'm the sucker who's

01:06:37.800 | sitting here obeying the law. Why am I the sucker?" This has been something for years that has bothered

01:06:42.440 | me enormously, is that I aspire to be a law-abiding person. I aspire to be a model citizen. I'm not

01:06:49.800 | always, but I want to be. I would compare it to things like welfare programs. My aspiration has

01:06:57.960 | always been to be somebody who is not on welfare, to always be somebody who is a producer, not a

01:07:04.120 | consumer. I want to help my neighbor. I want to be a supporter. Those are the ideals and the civic

01:07:11.080 | virtues to which I aspire. And half the time, I live my life as a sucker. And it's like, "Well,

01:07:16.520 | everyone else is taking advantage of that program. Why don't you?" And when you look around and you

01:07:20.280 | see all the immoral and unethical people getting rich, it makes it very, very hard for you to

01:07:26.920 | stand up and say, "No, I believe this," even though it doesn't. And when you create that

01:07:31.400 | kind of society, that makes things really bad. And that's where we're at. The governmental—so,

01:07:37.400 | you know, a government that does it this way, that pursues illegal means to get its end,

01:07:45.960 | I have zero respect for. Be straight about what you want. Speak the truth about what you want.

01:07:53.480 | Be willing to stand behind your convictions and do it properly in the public view.

01:07:58.520 | And if you say, "This is what we're going to do," then say it so that people can vote on it,

01:08:02.360 | if you're going to believe in democracy. Or at least do it. Don't do it by hiddenness and by

01:08:08.600 | non-enforcement, etc., because you destroy trust and confidence in your government. And I think

01:08:14.520 | that is what is happening to the U.S. government. And finally, I mentioned it's immoral to the

01:08:19.160 | citizens, because what they're getting is not what they voted for. And you could say, "Well,

01:08:26.440 | people get what they vote for. You know, President Biden won the presidency, so people should have

01:08:30.040 | known." Yeah, but President Biden didn't say, "This is what I'm going to do." At least I don't

01:08:33.960 | remember. Maybe he did, and I just was ignorant. But I'm not aware of him saying, "I'm going to

01:08:40.280 | eliminate all imposition of law so that people can—so tens of thousands of people can cross

01:08:44.840 | the border illegally. We're going to destroy the definition of what it means for asylum seekers.

01:08:49.640 | We're not going to ask for any verifiable evidence. What we're going to do is we're

01:08:52.840 | going to give people a court date that's a few years down and get as many people into the country

01:08:56.440 | as possible." There is no way you can look at the current system and see that it's anything except

01:09:01.720 | intentional. But it was not stated by candidate Joe Biden when he was running for president,

01:09:07.080 | nor was it stated by anybody else who's doing it. It's all being done. And so this is immoral

01:09:11.720 | to the citizenry, because the entire point of a democratic system is that the people can vote for

01:09:21.240 | what they want. And so the politicians say, "Here's what we'll do for you," and then the people vote

01:09:27.000 | for that. And so when you have that, it makes people feel like their voices are heard, okay?

01:09:33.320 | And this has been fundamental to the American fabric of society. All right, I lost. I lost

01:09:40.840 | on that issue. But that's okay. It was a free and public vote. The majority has it or the plurality

01:09:46.520 | has it, whatever the case may be. I lost. That's okay. I'm happy to lose. And after all, we're all

01:09:51.400 | Americans here. And I can go along and I'll just fight next time in the political system. But you

01:09:57.080 | see that that confidence and trust is breaking down. So is it a temporary thing? Is it a permanent

01:10:03.240 | thing? I have no idea. I hope it's just temporary, but it makes me sad because the current chaos is

01:10:10.600 | deeply immoral. It's at least counterproductive, and I think it's wrong. It's wrong. It's not the

01:10:19.400 | way that it should be done on any level. It's not an honest debate, and it's going to lead to

01:10:24.040 | increasing levels of unrest, increasing levels of discontentedness, increasing levels of vitriol.

01:10:32.920 | I don't see a solution in the political space that is going to have an impact.

01:10:39.480 | All the rest of the stuff, there's minor things about terrorists are coming. All that stuff is

01:10:44.360 | dumb. If a terrorist tries to sneak into the country across the southern border and blow up

01:10:50.200 | a bomb, you shoot him. We're a country of gun owners. We just shoot people. It's no big deal.

01:10:55.880 | There's no meaningful risk of terrorism or Chinese infiltrators, etc. It's an enormous

01:11:05.160 | benefit. The last comment – I want to move to the personal application and personal finance – but

01:11:09.880 | the last comment is simply that, as a Christian, I am amazed. So I'm trying to present – clearly,

01:11:19.560 | what I'm describing comes from theological conviction of open borders, what I've advocated

01:11:27.640 | for, etc., and then care for people. But on the whole, I'm just amazed that the Christians in the

01:11:33.800 | United States, broadly speaking, are not paying attention to what's happening. There's an enormous

01:11:38.600 | fear that people have that the immigrants are going to come to the United States and they're

01:11:41.720 | going to change our way. Go back to the Russians. The Russian spies are going to come in and they're

01:11:46.680 | going to sow problems and they're going to change the society. The Russians couldn't keep any of

01:11:50.920 | their spies employed. They'd send them to the United States and all their spies would defect.

01:11:54.920 | And so it's the same thing. Muslims can barely hang on to their Muslim identity when they go

01:12:00.440 | to the United States. And people from all around the world, the American culture is so strong and

01:12:05.880 | it's an enormous opportunity. And I wish that – just a personal thing, I guess – but I just wish

01:12:12.760 | that Christians would open up and pay attention. As far as I'm concerned, God is sending the entire

01:12:17.080 | world's masses to the country, which is a lot easier to engage in good missionary service and

01:12:22.600 | evangelism with your neighbors around the block than it is to pay to send people overseas in

01:12:28.280 | precarious situations. And so kind of the broad anti-immigration stance of so many evangelical

01:12:35.800 | churches drives me nuts. I think they should be affirming what I have said about affirming that

01:12:43.400 | the chaos is unacceptable and that it's hurting people, it's hurting, as I said, the immigrants

01:12:48.600 | themselves, it's hurting the Americans who are already in the country, and it's hurting the

01:12:54.360 | government. And so the chaos is unacceptable. But the broad kind of anti-immigration stance

01:12:59.560 | is, to me, crazy. But that's probably the most inflammatory thing I've said so far.

01:13:05.160 | Let's move now to the personal applications of this. And I want to make two applications. Number

01:13:08.760 | one, if you are an immigrant or considering immigrating to the United States – don't have

01:13:14.440 | too many of those in my audience – or if you are already living in the United States and you don't

01:13:20.280 | have legal status in the country, what should you do? Well, first of all, I think that generally

01:13:26.680 | speaking, most people should not use this pathway to try to immigrate to the United States. This is

01:13:32.120 | a bad pathway. So recently on a Q&A show, I had a caller who called in and said – I think it was

01:13:37.720 | German – said, "I'd like to move to the United States." You cannot be – even as tempting as it

01:13:42.440 | may be – to say, "I'm going to fly to Mexico and I'm going to sneak across the border and make an

01:13:45.640 | asylum application." I do not see any fruitful benefit there in that. When you are an illegal

01:13:52.920 | immigrant to the United States, you are a genuine second-class citizen. Everything is closed to you.

01:13:58.920 | I guess I should have said you are a metaphorical second-class citizen, because you're not a

01:14:04.600 | citizen. You're a second-class person. Everything is closed to you. There are a few places you can

01:14:09.400 | get a driver's license, etc., but you will spend all of your time looking over your shoulder.

01:14:13.800 | Now, you don't have to worry generally about an immigration officer sweeping you up.

01:14:18.760 | What you have to worry about is you have to worry about an employer not being able to hire you,

01:14:25.400 | because this is what governments do, is they use functionaries to enforce their rules.

01:14:31.640 | So let me give you an example, okay? Why does everybody go across the U.S. border with Mexico

01:14:37.320 | instead of flying into New York City? The reason is due to the American visa system, that there are

01:14:43.880 | only, what is it, 30-something countries that have... There's one country's citizens who can

01:14:50.760 | travel to the United States without a visa and without prior authorization. That country is

01:14:55.400 | Canada. So Canadians can travel to the United States without a visa. U.S. immigration officers

01:15:01.000 | still can turn away Canadian citizens, of course, and they routinely do if they find any intent to

01:15:09.400 | immigrate to the United States. And so if you show up at the Canadian border with your car

01:15:13.800 | packed full of gear and you're going down to "spend some time" with your girlfriend in Los Angeles,

01:15:20.760 | you're probably not going to make it into the country, because U.S. immigration officers

01:15:24.760 | would view that as intent to immigrate. Unless you have an immigration visa processed in advance,

01:15:29.640 | not going to happen. Other countries of the world who come from a list of whose citizens have a

01:15:37.960 | generally high acceptance rate for tourist visas can travel to the United States with an electronic

01:15:44.280 | travel authorization. So if you're from the UK or from France or from Germany or from, you know,

01:15:50.040 | Japan, etc., then you can... I think Japan. You can travel to the United States using the ESTA

01:15:55.080 | program, the Electronic Secure Traveler Act or something, but it's an electronic pre-admission.

01:16:00.440 | And as long as you have that done, they'll let you board the plane and then again you'll probably be

01:16:04.120 | able to get into the country. The immigration officers will still turn you away at the airport

01:16:09.240 | if they think that you have intent to immigrate to the United States and you don't have an

01:16:13.800 | immigration visa pre-existing. Everyone else around the world has to apply for a visa to travel into

01:16:20.840 | or even to pass through the United States. And that visa system is extremely onerous.

01:16:27.960 | The visa costs, I think, is $160. You have to pay it regardless of whether you are accepted

01:16:35.160 | or denied. It's just a payment no matter what. You have to bring a mountain of paperwork and

01:16:39.720 | basically you have to prove to the immigration officer in the U.S. embassy abroad that you don't

01:16:45.960 | have immigrant intent to the United States, that in fact you are highly connected to the place that

01:16:51.560 | you live and you don't have the intent to move to the United States and overstay your tourist visa.

01:16:56.680 | And it's quite an onerous process. Even all of the formalities of getting the appointment

01:17:01.080 | are often difficult. Some embassies you can't even get an appointment for a year or two.

01:17:04.520 | And then you say, "Well, I want to move to the United States with some kind of immigration visa."

01:17:08.840 | Good luck. They are very, very difficult to get unless you are highly sought after.

01:17:14.440 | And so what is the solution? Well, the solution for many people around the world who have zero

01:17:19.640 | hope of proving to an immigration officer that they can pass these checks, etc., is to go to

01:17:26.760 | the physical border of the United States, to come in across a sea border on a boat of some kind and

01:17:33.000 | land on the beach or to come across the southern border. And so that's what people are doing,

01:17:37.160 | largely from Central and South America, walking in some cases through the Darien Gap,

01:17:43.720 | using the bus system and local transportation, getting transportation to the border and then

01:17:48.040 | walking across the border. And they're doing it because they can gain easier access into many of

01:17:52.920 | these countries, even if they have limited documentation. They at least have visa-free

01:17:58.520 | access if they have a passport or they accept their cedula or whatever it happens to be,

01:18:02.120 | and then they cross the border across from Mexico. And they can do that.

01:18:08.440 | So what I'm saying, though, is that you shouldn't do that if you're listening to me.

01:18:12.600 | Because once you're in the United States – sorry, to make the point – in flying to the United

01:18:17.960 | States, the U.S. uses that visa system to restrict the access of immigrants, potential immigrants.

01:18:26.120 | But they're not doing it with U.S. border officials. Yeah, there's immigration officials

01:18:33.400 | at the airport, but they're doing it with airline employees. The airline employees won't let you

01:18:38.040 | board the plane if you don't have the appropriate visa. So they're using a system like that to keep

01:18:42.920 | you out. Now, the same system applies inside the United States, is that the United States won't

01:18:48.360 | penalize you as an illegal immigrant for working if you don't have work authorization. They will

01:18:53.960 | penalize your employer for hiring you, and the penalties can be steep. And so what the Immigration

01:19:00.520 | and Customs Enforcement Agency does is they do some high-profile raids routinely, and they basically

01:19:05.720 | instill fear in employees. And so if you go to the United States, you're not going to find that it's

01:19:10.360 | a land of flowing with milk and honey. You're going to find that you have very limited employment

01:19:15.800 | opportunities if you don't have proper employment authorization with a genuine immigrant visa

01:19:22.920 | opportunity. You have very limited employment opportunities. And then when you pass into those

01:19:27.560 | limited employment opportunities, you are going to be taken advantage of, broadly speaking,

01:19:32.200 | and you're going to be abused. Because unethical employers who are willing to hire undocumented

01:19:39.240 | workers know that they can get away with greater forms of abuse than if they are hiring documented

01:19:45.000 | workers. And while all people have legal rights in the United States, you will be very embarrassed

01:19:52.920 | to exercise those rights due to your status of non-belonging. When I'm in the United States,

01:19:59.000 | I can throw my weight around freely. A cop walks up to me on the street, asks me questions.

01:20:03.640 | I turn to him and say, "Officer, I don't answer questions." When I pass through immigration in

01:20:07.400 | the United States – this didn't turn out well one time, but I did it. I did it.

01:20:11.240 | When I travel to the United States and an immigration official starts asking me questions

01:20:17.640 | about where I've been, I just say, "I'm sorry, officer. I don't answer questions." And I can

01:20:22.360 | routinely throw my weight around because I'm confident not only in my citizenship status,

01:20:28.440 | but I'm confident in my knowledge of the culture, my knowledge of the law. I know what laws the

01:20:35.000 | police are under, et cetera. When you travel as an illegal immigrant to the United States

01:20:40.680 | and you're interacting with a police officer, you will have none of that confidence because

01:20:45.560 | the structure of legal requirements in the United States is very different than where you're from,

01:20:49.960 | and you're going to feel extremely vulnerable. So you feel vulnerable to everybody, which makes

01:20:54.520 | you slower to go for help, which means that when somebody robs your house or steals your cash or

01:20:59.240 | whatever it is that they take from you, you don't go and file a police report because you're scared

01:21:03.880 | of them calling ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. You're worried about how the

01:21:08.520 | cops are going to treat you. You're worried about all this stuff, and so you live your life as a

01:21:11.960 | second-class citizen. This is true even if you have linguistic skills, and unfortunately, you

01:21:18.040 | probably don't. Well, I guess if you're listening to the show, you do. But there's a lot of people

01:21:23.480 | who get abused because they don't learn the language, and so they wind up living in a

01:21:28.360 | completely different reality. And can it work? Sure, it can work. It's just really, really brutal.

01:21:35.800 | And all across the United States, this is true. And so you're going to be a second-class citizen,

01:21:40.920 | and it's not going to be fun. It might be better than where you're from. If I were a Venezuelan,

01:21:45.960 | I would be in the United States as an illegal immigrant, doing everything I could to feed my

01:21:51.000 | family back home, sending money back home on remittances, and doing everything I could to

01:21:54.200 | get my family with me. Not a question in my mind. If I were from Haiti, I would absolutely have gone

01:22:00.280 | in through Brazil. I would have emigrated up across the Darien Gap. I would absolutely have

01:22:05.160 | gone to the United States as an illegal alien. Absolutely no question in my mind that I would do

01:22:10.440 | that. But that's if you have any kind of professional capacity. If you're understanding

01:22:16.120 | the words that I'm speaking to you right now as whatever we're, an hour and 20 minutes into a very

01:22:21.240 | detailed, very kind of high-level philosophical conversation in English, then you shouldn't do

01:22:28.680 | this because you'll have better opportunities elsewhere. And if you come to the United States,

01:22:33.080 | you have to come on a legal pathway so that you can have some chance of things working out in the

01:22:38.200 | long run. I have known a few people who have made it in the United States as illegal aliens and then

01:22:44.280 | went abroad. I have some friends of mine who lived in the United States. They lived there for about

01:22:48.760 | 15 years. They invested in real estate in the United States. They became wealthy.

01:22:53.160 | They little by little got their money, about three-quarters of a million dollars or about

01:22:57.560 | half a million dollars, their life savings that they made primarily with real estate investment.

01:23:02.600 | They little by little got it out of the country, and then they left the United States, moved abroad

01:23:07.480 | where they did have citizenship status, and basically they're barred from ever going to

01:23:11.320 | the United States again. That's the best I can imagine. That does not happen frequently,

01:23:15.480 | and so I don't think people should take this pathway to the United States.

01:23:19.240 | If you're in the United States illegally, I'm going to give you here the same advice that I've

01:23:23.720 | given, is that I think you're wasting your time. Unless you are a very low-level worker, which

01:23:30.200 | you're not because you're listening to me right now for all the reasons I said,

01:23:33.720 | then you're wasting your time in the United States. And this insecurity and sitting around

01:23:39.400 | and waiting, you're going to wait another decade to wait on some political change that somehow

01:23:44.840 | they're going to pass a bill that gives amnesty to illegal immigrants or to the children of illegal

01:23:49.400 | immigrants, et cetera. I see no way that happens in the next decade. Too polarized, and both camps

01:23:56.280 | in the political system, they're not willing to listen to each other. Could some kind of

01:24:00.760 | compromise bill be worked out? Like I said, would I myself vote, if I'm in Congress, would I vote for

01:24:08.680 | a bill that gives open borders and automatic amnesty to all illegal immigrants in the United

01:24:13.080 | States in exchange for ending the welfare state? I would. I'd vote for that. And it's laughable to

01:24:19.480 | think that that has any chance of happening in the next 10 years. We've all got our heels dug in way

01:24:25.480 | too deep on any of this stuff. And so remember, I'm out here in, I don't think it's philosophical

01:24:30.600 | la-la land, but it's purely philosophical what I'm saying. It has zero practical impact.

01:24:35.160 | There's no feasible structure in which any kind of this thing happens. And that's why my entire

01:24:41.720 | life as a paying attention to politics, since about mid-90s, it's been exactly the same thing,

01:24:49.240 | a never-ending debate, and nothing changes about it, because the positions are too locked in.

01:24:55.000 | The Republicans have decided to be the anti-immigration party. They couch it in rule

01:25:02.920 | of law. That's why we're opposed to amnesty bills, and we're not going to institute meaningful

01:25:08.280 | immigration reform. And the Democrats have dug in their heels and are unwilling to listen to

01:25:13.000 | any Republicans' concerns on any issue. And so they just fight, and they fight, and they fight,

01:25:18.120 | and they fight. And the government is impotent. So when you stay in the United States in that

01:25:23.400 | status, you're not going to get ahead the way you could if you went back home, wherever you have

01:25:29.640 | legal status, and started over again. And if you've got money, then use that money to restart

01:25:35.080 | yourself with legal status somewhere where you can use money to buy yourself a residency visa,

01:25:39.240 | buy yourself a citizenship, et cetera, and start over. America is no longer a country. America,

01:25:45.160 | the ideal, has spread around the world. And there are a lot of places outside of the United States

01:25:50.360 | that are far more American, even in the country of my birth. And so we're living in the age of

01:25:55.560 | digital revolution, digital connectivity, and you don't have to be in the United States to make it

01:26:01.240 | rich. If you're listening to my voice, you have the skills to succeed in any corner of the world.

01:26:05.960 | And so if I were in the United States under that status, and I were no longer kind of the

01:26:11.000 | penniless immigrant who just had nothing but manual labor to offer the world,

01:26:15.080 | then I would make as much money as I could in a short period of time, and I would make a plan for

01:26:20.120 | a new place to go where I could exercise that, and I would go there, because I'm convinced that

01:26:25.480 | there's plenty of opportunity around the world for smart, intelligent people, even to access the U.S.

01:26:30.120 | economy without being physically there and spending your life in limbo. And now the final point I

01:26:34.840 | want to make, and this is where it gets very financial. Recognize always that your security

01:26:44.040 | matters more than anything else. If you do not feel secure, and if you are not actually secure,

01:26:53.080 | you're going to spend all your money to try to get security.

01:26:56.440 | So if you're living in a neighborhood right now, and you don't have, and there's crime increasing

01:27:02.360 | in your area, and you haven't figured out how to get your police department to do their job,

01:27:05.960 | etc., you need to move to a gated neighborhood. You need to start spending more money on your

01:27:10.920 | security. You need to get guards on your block. You need to increase your security. You need to

01:27:15.240 | start changing your living patterns so that you yourself are not, don't face a crime wave.

01:27:20.520 | I'll skip some of the many stories I could say, but recognize this as your primary priority.

01:27:28.600 | If you do not have economic opportunities where you live, recognize that this is going to be a

01:27:34.600 | primary thing. And so you want to make sure that you're never put in a situation of being

01:27:40.520 | an illegal immigrant. And so cultivate the economic opportunities that you have,

01:27:46.360 | and then cultivate some more for your children in other places. This is one of those things why I

01:27:51.560 | did my international stuff. Looking at a country that seems to be unraveling at the seams,

01:27:56.680 | optimistically, I hope that we can pull it together. I hope it's just a temporary

01:28:02.920 | time of difficulty, but I don't live my life on hope. Hopium is dumb. I live my life on plans,

01:28:09.960 | and so make some backup plans for other places that can be gone to, et cetera. And recognize,

01:28:14.920 | don't ever allow yourself to be in a situation which you can't feed your family.

01:28:18.200 | About half of the audience, when I said a few minutes ago that, you know, if I were from Haiti,

01:28:25.240 | I would absolutely go to the United States as an illegal immigrant, you probably sucked your breath

01:28:29.960 | in. "Joshua, I thought he was a conservative guy. Why wouldn't he obey the rule of law?"

01:28:34.600 | Are you telling me that you would obey a stupid law saying where you can and can't go

01:28:41.160 | if your children are dying of starvation? I mean, most of us would become thieves,

01:28:48.200 | only a tiny percentage of us. I would love to think, I would hope that I'm in that percentage,

01:28:53.000 | but I'm not that confident in my own ability to not even be a thief. We would steal to feed

01:28:58.280 | our children, let alone some imaginary lion on sand saying you can or can't work. First of all,

01:29:07.000 | I have no moral repercussions about it. I encourage illegal immigrants in the United States to work

01:29:11.720 | without any fear of failure, because what's the alternative to work? Stealing? You're going to

01:29:17.480 | force a man to be a thief because you won't let him work? Who would ever grant a government the

01:29:24.360 | right to say that you can or cannot work? I'm somehow supposed to not be able to work to feed

01:29:32.200 | myself and feed my family? I'm not going to go out into the marketplace and voluntarily negotiate

01:29:41.000 | with people for wages for a day's labor so that I can have food and a place to live and a safe

01:29:46.680 | place to be at night out of the cold? That's an insane law, and immoral laws should be disrespected

01:29:53.560 | and disobeyed because they are immoral. And so immigration restrictions on a man's right to work,

01:29:58.520 | etc., should be disobeyed by all people because they're immoral. You don't have the right to tell

01:30:05.400 | a man that he can't work. That's like the flip side of the immorality of slavery. You neither

01:30:10.760 | have the right to steal a man's labor from him by enslaving him, nor do you have the right to steal

01:30:16.840 | a man's ability to labor by passing a law saying that he can't work. Both of those are immoral,

01:30:21.640 | and they're wrong. A man has the right to go out into the world, make a voluntary free exchange

01:30:26.520 | with someone of labor for income in whatever form it takes. Now, the government can make

01:30:30.680 | it difficult, and they can pass, you know, do that stuff. But my point is that put yourself

01:30:34.440 | in that situation. If those are your convictions, you say, "No, I would obey the law, and I wouldn't

01:30:39.000 | go where it's illegal for me to go." Put yourself in that situation. Do you really mean to say that

01:30:44.680 | you would not work if your family were in need, if you were suffering violence where you're from?

01:30:51.400 | Of course you would. And then the third thing is just recognize how a country can change.

01:30:58.520 | The country of the United States today is not the country of my birth, and so your country also can

01:31:05.720 | change. If you're listening to me from France, there's a good chance that you look around and

01:31:10.600 | say, "The nation of my birth is not the nation of today." And change is going to happen. I prefer

01:31:16.920 | to embrace it. I want to embrace it, but I also want to recognize that sometimes change can get

01:31:21.400 | out of hand, and it may not go in the direction that you want it to go. And so as a sovereign

01:31:25.480 | individual, you owe it to yourself to be prepared to thrive in any kind of circumstance, and that's

01:31:30.120 | what you can do. So cede to your physical safety. Live in a safe place. If you're living in a

01:31:34.440 | dangerous neighborhood, move. If you're living in a dangerous city, move. If you're living in

01:31:38.680 | a place where you don't have economic opportunity, move. Because at the end of the day, it's this

01:31:43.560 | kind of physical movement really is one of the few things that governments ever listen to, and

01:31:49.480 | that's what's happening in the immigration scenario. So I would assume that I've said enough

01:31:54.520 | in this show to find some area of agreement with you and some area of disagreement with you. And

01:32:00.840 | I think that this show probably still, if it's not too much personal finance in this particular

01:32:06.840 | episode, at least we can reclaim the moniker of radical, at least in some of these things.

01:32:11.640 | I fully acknowledge that these are interesting philosophical discussions. I don't have any

01:32:16.200 | practical application of any of this other than what I have ended the show with. I can't tell

01:32:22.200 | you how to vote. I don't want to vote for Republicans or Democrats. I understand if you

01:32:26.680 | vote for a likely Republican candidate, Donald Trump, I understand. I get you. You don't have

01:32:31.320 | to defend it to me. If you vote for a likely Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, I understand.

01:32:37.160 | You don't have to defend it to me. If you vote for someone else or you don't vote at all, I

01:32:41.720 | understand. I don't have any kind of practical Democratic outworking of this for reasons that

01:32:47.560 | are probably obvious at this point in time. I can't tell you any way that I see this resolving.

01:32:52.760 | Someone else's crystal ball may work better than mine, but to me, these things are just too far

01:32:58.040 | removed to see much change. And while people can change on some things, I only see it happening

01:33:04.920 | kind of if there's a philosophical imperative. And as I see it, most people are stuck on the

01:33:11.160 | horns of a dilemma caused by their own philosophy. So the Republicans – I don't need to go into

01:33:16.120 | politics. You get it. But the point is, we're on the horns of a dilemma, and we can't – these

01:33:20.680 | things are irreconcilable. And so my best guess of the future is that basically we muddle along

01:33:26.680 | until we see something happen. So my guess is that no political change is really going to happen

01:33:34.600 | on immigration, but I think the flow of immigrants is going to dry up. The world of Latin America

01:33:41.480 | just probably doesn't have that many young people to contribute anymore. And anybody who wants to

01:33:47.160 | immigrate to the United States using this cross-border crossing is probably there by now,

01:33:52.840 | or at least is on the way. And so that process of flying from Uganda to Brazil and then walking and

01:34:01.560 | bussing your way up, that's a multi-month process, but it's not a two-year process. And so I don't

01:34:07.960 | expect an enormous horde of immigrants to continue. I think that what you're seeing right now is

01:34:13.560 | whatever was pent-up demand caused by various issues, and it's probably about at its limit.

01:34:19.480 | And so I would expect – and it's just my best guess. We'll put it here in public so I can come

01:34:24.440 | back and check on this in five or ten years. But my best guess is that it'll probably just die down.

01:34:30.040 | Maybe it'll be a political movement for a while, but there's not going to be any significant

01:34:33.880 | resolution. The U.S. Congress basically seems incapable of legislating anymore,

01:34:37.800 | even on important issues where they should be legislating. And so

01:34:41.320 | gridlock it is. And as Gary North himself was fond to say, "Highlight gridlock,

01:34:48.840 | because at least they don't get in my way." I don't think it's always good, but

01:34:52.120 | unfortunately that's the situation. And people will continue to be upset about things, and then

01:34:57.640 | probably 15 years from now, most of this will have kind of slid into the dustbin of history,

01:35:05.160 | kind of like duck and cover and Russian spies and all the propaganda of the past as well. That'd be

01:35:11.560 | my best guess on what happens. In the meantime, you got to see to yourself, you got to see to

01:35:15.080 | your family, and you got to make good decisions so that you don't wind up in a vulnerable situation.

01:35:21.000 | I would just simply say, I guess what I would prefer to share my heart on in a closing manner is

01:35:27.480 | this. Laws that exist do not need to affect your personal actions. And I would beg you, if there

01:35:43.560 | are immigrants near you, especially illegal immigrants, especially recent illegal immigrants,

01:35:49.480 | please help them. These men, primarily men, some women, but these people face enormous

01:35:58.200 | difficulties in life. You have no concept of the world in which these men live.

01:36:05.160 | I was talking to a friend of mine recently who worked in an airport, and he was telling me about

01:36:09.720 | the African guys who work at a lot of the airports across the United States.

01:36:15.800 | And he didn't have much money, had to fly recently, and he said to me in passing he

01:36:21.400 | had to go sleep in the airport before an early morning flight. He said, "Well, I just went and

01:36:24.440 | found all the African guys and laid down with them." And basically, as he told me the story

01:36:29.800 | from his experience, is that you have all these guys from Africa, at least the ones around him,

01:36:35.240 | all these guys come over from Africa. They get a job working at the airport. Usually they get two

01:36:41.080 | jobs on two different shifts, so an early morning shift with one restaurant and a late afternoon

01:36:46.200 | shift with another. They live at the airport. At night, generally speaking, they don't go home

01:36:54.760 | because they don't really have a home. They're here by themselves. Their family is back home.

01:36:59.480 | And they work these two jobs, and they go and they sleep in the airport every night and then go to

01:37:05.160 | work. And then when they have a day off, there's usually one apartment that somebody has rented

01:37:10.760 | that's basically the apartment. And they go to the apartment, they lay down a sleeping bag,

01:37:14.760 | and sleep next to whoever happens to be off that day. And you have 30 guys who will sleep

01:37:19.800 | at that apartment when there is a day off. And I just want you to imagine you living that

01:37:26.600 | lifestyle. I want you to imagine yourself being that guy. Imagine you've got a wife and children

01:37:36.680 | at home. You've moved across the world. You're working a fairly low-paying wage.

01:37:42.680 | Thankfully, it's decent financial planning for those guys in the sense that they've basically

01:37:47.720 | limited every expense except food. They wind up spending an enormous amount of money on food

01:37:53.960 | because they have to buy all their food from the airport concessions, which is high-priced,

01:37:58.040 | and then generally unhealthy, which of course creates health issues. But other than that,

01:38:03.720 | they've limited all their other expenses. So, they can send significant amounts of money home

01:38:07.000 | to support their wife and their children with the dream of being reunited with them someday.

01:38:11.160 | But just imagine you're living that lifestyle. Imagine that you're working two eight-hour jobs,

01:38:17.480 | working 16 hours a day, and that you sleep on an airport floor, on an airport bench in a little

01:38:22.760 | corner back in the middle of nowhere at night. What would you give for somebody to come along

01:38:29.080 | and give you an encouraging word? What would you give to be invited to someone's, you know,

01:38:36.360 | Thanksgiving dinner? What would you give for someone to help you to connect with the culture

01:38:41.800 | that you're living in but not really living in? What would you give for a friend? What would you

01:38:47.800 | give for someone to invite you to church? What would you give to make a difference in someone's

01:38:54.600 | lives? The fact that someone has crossed a border does not make anyone less human,

01:38:59.880 | any more than the fact that someone has stolen a loaf of bread

01:39:04.680 | makes them less deserving of care and consideration. Go back and I would say read,

01:39:13.640 | but it's a hard book to read. Watch Les Mis by Victor Hugo for one of the ultimate wrestlings

01:39:21.000 | with this. Go and read Count of Monte Cristo, my favorite novel. Go and deal with these situations,

01:39:31.240 | and don't harden your heart to people just because you think, "Well, that guy doesn't

01:39:35.400 | deserve my love and attention because he doesn't speak my language," etc.

01:39:38.920 | I would assume that there's probably, I don't know, who knows, maybe there's 50 terrorists

01:39:49.240 | who have come into the United States. There probably are. I don't have any idea.

01:39:52.520 | But every single immigrant that I have interacted with personally on a personal basis in the United

01:40:00.680 | States has been the kind of man that I would be proud to have as my neighbor, and I think you

01:40:08.360 | would too. Don't let language barriers stand in your way. Learn Spanish and go and practice it

01:40:18.600 | on immigrants. Learn Somali if you're in Minnesota, and go and get to know your Somalian neighbors.

01:40:24.280 | These people who are immigrants to the United States are abused, broadly speaking, by society

01:40:33.800 | because of their second-class status, and you have the opportunity to change that.

01:40:37.960 | And it's actually really fun. A number of years ago, my wife and I hosted, we have some friends

01:40:45.720 | who are Nigerian immigrants to the United States, and we hosted them for Thanksgiving dinner,

01:40:52.120 | and it was super fun because here we are as the born-and-bred Americans making Thanksgiving dinner.

01:40:59.480 | Nigerians don't have a clue about Thanksgiving dinner. They don't know

01:41:02.440 | anything about it. And I've got, I think it was three Nigerian families. I've got 16,

01:41:11.800 | something like 15 or 16 Nigerians all packed into this little apartment. We hosted it at our

01:41:17.560 | friend's apartment. So you've got Joshua and his wife and family. We're the only white people in

01:41:22.680 | the place. Every other one of them is longing for their, I forget what they call it, their

01:41:28.200 | traditional bean dish. I forget the name that they use for it. But they're longing for their

01:41:31.880 | own food while I'm carving the turkey and showing them the mashed potatoes and the gravy and

01:41:37.240 | everything. And it's just so fun to share that stuff. And these are the experiences that you're

01:41:45.400 | missing out on if you don't go and engage with your neighbors. I know I'm preaching at you,

01:41:50.280 | but I beg you that go and engage. And this is one of the things I have an enormous bone to pick

01:41:58.280 | with my generally Republican and conservative groups from which I primarily issue. It's that

01:42:09.800 | it's amazing to me how opposed many Republicans are to Latin American immigrants is that most of

01:42:19.080 | these people are the exact kinds of people that you say that you want in your country.

01:42:25.800 | For example, what kind of man gets up, travels for months with nothing,

01:42:33.800 | sleeping on the street corner to go to a place that he can go and get a job?

01:42:37.560 | What kind of man braves the terrors of the Darien Gap?

01:42:43.960 | I have spent a lot of time talking with immigrants who have walked through the Darien Gap. I've spent

01:42:51.240 | a lot of time feeding people who are sleeping on the street. You want these people as your neighbors

01:43:01.800 | because they are men and women who are determined to build a better future.

01:43:07.720 | That's why they're going through this hell of leaving their families and going elsewhere.

01:43:16.360 | In addition, a huge percentage of them are extremely Christian, extremely conservative.

01:43:25.160 | If they're not Christian, they're at least broadly religious, which is

01:43:30.280 | a much easier place to start than people who don't care. And they're coming to you.

01:43:38.280 | They're coming to be your neighbor, to be your co-worker, to sit in your church pew with you,

01:43:44.280 | etc. And I just beg you, you don't have to solve any of these political issues. As I see it,

01:43:50.200 | they're insoluble. But you do have a responsibility to love your neighbor and to work with them.

01:43:55.800 | Now, love of neighbor primarily starts with those closest to you. Only a fool would say

01:43:59.480 | that you owe the same duty of care to an unknown guy on the other side of the world as you do

01:44:03.880 | for your own son in your home or your literal next-door neighbor. Obviously, there's a variation.

01:44:09.400 | But if God privileges you and brings a community of immigrants across your path,

01:44:13.880 | go and get involved and help them, hire them into your company, help them get established,

01:44:19.480 | have some language courses, invite them to your church, etc. And what you'll find is that there's

01:44:24.840 | an energy and there's an enthusiasm there that you're missing in your daily life.

01:44:29.480 | I love immigrants to the United States because they get rich like four times faster than Americans

01:44:35.240 | do. They work harder. They get rich faster, etc. And this is basically a self-selection bias.

01:44:41.560 | It's not, in my opinion, that there's anything fundamentally different about somebody from one

01:44:47.080 | country or another. But it's the fact that the people who are coming are coming because they

01:44:52.200 | want something different. They want something better. That's the only reason you leave your

01:44:56.120 | family. That's the only reason that you leave your community. That's the only reason you leave what

01:45:01.400 | you know to go to something unknown. It's because you want something better. And this is probably

01:45:07.160 | going to turn out to be a huge competitive advantage for the United States in years to come.

01:45:12.360 | If we can get over some of the social instability, if we can make sure that we lock up all the

01:45:17.320 | criminals and deal with them in a strong way and get rid of them, then it's going to be an enormous

01:45:25.720 | benefit because it's going to bring youthful enthusiasm. And in all the previous waves of

01:45:30.280 | immigration to the United States, you've seen the same cycle play out again and again and again.

01:45:35.640 | So this is a personal plea to you is get involved wherever you have opportunity. Get to know your

01:45:41.720 | neighbors. Welcome them to the country. Make friends with them. Invite them to Thanksgiving

01:45:46.280 | dinner. It's super fun. You're going to enjoy it. And you'll have an opportunity to affect

01:45:52.760 | the future of someone's family in a really powerful way. Thank you for listening. I

01:45:57.480 | appreciate it. I'll be back with more distinctly personal finance content very soon.

2024-02-08_Solving_the_Immigration_Crisis_in_the_USA