>> Andrea Bocelli, in concert. Presented by Stiefel. March 11th, Yamaba Theater. Conducted by Steven Mercurio. The world's most romantic voice. Andrea Bocelli, in concert. On sale now at yamabatheater.com or the casino box office. >> Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Today on the show, I want to talk about something with you that is going to sound more political. It does have personal finance implications and impact. The basic concept that I'm going to drive at from a personal finance perspective is that as you build wealth, your sense of security and your actual security of your person, your effects, etc., your home, these are fundamental things.

As somebody builds wealth, one of the first things that they will do in applying this wealth is to move from an unsafe neighborhood to a safe neighborhood because security is of primary importance, and this is a good use of money. That's the personal finance angle that I'm going to use to tie this into appropriate content for Radical Personal Finance, but I do confess up here and up front that this episode, that that connection is looser than I usually will permit, and that's because this episode is coming from a request from a listener.

A listener writes in and sends me a couple of articles, which I'm going to read to you and comment on, and asks for my commentary on this subject, specifically regarding immigration. We see in the United States significant issues regarding immigration, an enormous battle taking place. The listener wrote to me and talked about the arguments between Texas Governor Abbott and the Biden administration about the ability and the right of the Texas Guard to secure the border with Mexico by placing barriers to stop the flow of immigration.

We see immigration as a primary political topic all across Europe, all across the world, etc. And so I feel justified in talking about it today with you, and I think that those of you who are interested in thoughtful, nuanced discussion on difficult topics will enjoy this show. However, those of you who are looking for just standard kind of personal finance fare, you'll want to skip this episode and move to a different one because there'll be more of just kind of basic nuts and bolts of finance.

The other reason I'm doing this is that I've been buried in finishing up my consulting appointments and also preparing for a new live event, which I'll be announcing hopefully in the next day or two. And I can do this topic fairly straight off the cuff, ready to go without a ton of preparation.

It's been over a week since I've been on the microphone. So let's begin with this. I'm going to begin by reading the article that my listener wrote to me about and asked me to comment on. And this article was written in 2014 by now dead Gary North. The article is called "Immigration Control, Federal Social Engineering." I'm going to read the article without comment and then come back and comment upon it.

"Central planning by the federal government is officially opposed by conservatives until you show them a marker that says 'United States' on one side and 'Mexico' on the other. Then, 'Congress needs to build a fence.' The believers in fences offer many arguments. Some of them say this, 'Those people want to get free government welfare.

We cannot afford it.' The defender of liberty replies in two ways. First, these programs should be abolished. They are based on government planning and coercive wealth redistribution. They are the main problem, not any immigrants who may sign up. Second, the sooner they go bankrupt, the better. Let immigrants sign up.

The problem is this. Most conservatives approve of these welfare programs in theory and practice. The big ones are Social Security, Medicare, and tax-funded education. Conservatives do not want these programs defunded. They see them as part of the American way of life. Second, the conservative says this, 'These immigrants will undermine our social way of life.

They're just too different. The American way of life cannot survive open immigration. Change will overwhelm the American way of life.' The defender of liberty responds, 'The free market changes America every day. Innovations undermine our way of life moment by moment. Innovation makes our lives better.' Second, he replies, 'Why do you think Congress can pass a law restricting freedom of travel and freedom of contract and thereby preserve the good parts of our way of life?

Why do you trust the federal government's good judgment in matters social and economic? Why have you become an apologist for central planning? Why have you become an advocate of social engineering by federal politicians and bureaucrats?' Conservatives remain silent. They have never thought of this, and they don't want to have to rethink what they say they believe in, namely that Congress cannot safely be trusted on matters economic.

They are saying that Congress can provide a Goldilocks solution. Not too much social change, but not too little. The defender of liberty asks, 'When has Congress ever legislated a Goldilocks solution? When has the federal bureaucracy ever enforced it as written, let alone as justified by members of the voting bloc in Congress that passed it?' Third, the conservative says this, 'Immigrants will get jobs here.

They'll take jobs away from Americans.' I want to focus on this argument, for it is the most common one. It invokes nationalism over liberty. It equates nationalism with restrictions on the freedom of contract. It says, 'Not everyone should have the legal right to bid on jobs inside our borders.

Only those who are legally inside our borders already, or who will be born to those already inside our borders, should possess this right.' It says, 'Our ancestors got here before there were any immigration laws. We deserve the right to bid. Outsiders don't. It's first come, first served.' May we help?

This attitude is in direct opposition to both Christianity and the free market. A fundamental principle of Christianity is the principle of 'service to God by service to our fellow men.' This is made clear in Matthew 25, 'Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Verse 40.

The context is the final judgment. The principle of service is also basic to free market economics, which teaches that income derives from service to the customer. This goes back to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, 1776. "But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only.

He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind proposes to do this. 'Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want,' is the meaning of every such offer.

And it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens." The fundamental economic principle of immigration control is that service must be made illegal in order to protect the above-market incomes of producers inside a nation's borders, thereby reducing the availability of services to customers inside the borders.

The job holders form a cartel with a goal to keep out competitors, thereby keeping their wages above market. The job holders prevail on Congress to post this sign facing outward on the border, "No. Help. Wanted." Not wanted by whom? By members of the job holder's cartel. It is now illegal for customers to post this sign, "Help.

Wanted." The earliest manifestation of this mindset in America was the retailers' hostility to Chinese immigrants in California. It started with the Gold Rush of 1849, the year after the federal government completed President Polk's theft of one-third of Mexico, which included California. Chinese workers worked long hours at far lower wages.

They were price-competitive. This hostility by retailers got worse over the next quarter century. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first example of a federal law excluding specific nationals. It was not repealed until 1943, when China was an ally in the Pacific War. The president who signed the 1882 bill into law was by far the most appropriate president in American history to have done so, Chester Arthur.

Before becoming vice president, and then president after the assassination of Garfield, Arthur had been the head of the Port of New York, the government's most lucrative customs house. It was known at the time as being a major source of political kickbacks to the Republican Party. The stink got so bad that President Hayes removed Arthur from the position.

We are not taught the following in history courses. Not until 1948 was it legal in California for whites or blacks to marry Asians. The California State Supreme Court overturned the law. The vote was four to three. That was the first state to overturn laws against interracial marriage, by one vote.

We look back and we are amazed. Why would anyone have believed that state politicians had the wisdom to assess accurately the collective social benefits and liabilities of interracial marriages? This was social engineering by state politicians. Most conservatives today, but not in 1947, reject such a suggestion. Yet most conservatives believe today that federal bureaucrats can be trusted with this same power with respect to immigration.

Conservatives quote Ronald Reagan, quote, "A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation." Conclusion, from 1788 to 1882, the United States was not a nation. Silly, isn't it? Then why do conservatives quote it? This historically silly slogan assumes that passing a law is the same as achieving the law's official goal.

We have immigration laws on the statute books today. We also have 10 million illegal aliens, maybe 20 million, maybe 30 million. The government cannot even count them. It would cost at least $23,000 each to deport them. Each case must be tried in a court. It would tie up the US court system.

They cannot, will not, be deported. Fact, the USA does not control its borders. This control is only symbolic, a token to placate the voters. Are we therefore a token nation? Should we trust social engineering by politicians? Why? Borders, badges, and guns. A brief history. Federal restrictions on immigration in 1917 applied to various kinds of social behavior.

But immigration restrictions from 1882 up until World War I mainly had to do with keeping Chinese out of the country. The Immigration Act of 1924 extended this to many nations. Wikipedia summarizes, quote, "The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act, including the National Origins Act and Asian Exclusion Act, enacted May 26, 1924, was the United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, down from the 3% cap set by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, according to the Census of 1890.

It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was primarily aimed at further restricting immigration of Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans. In addition, it severely restricted the immigration of Africans and prohibited the immigration of Arabs, East Asians, and Indians. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, the purpose of the act was, quote, "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.

Congressional opposition was minimal." End of Wikipedia quote. The tradition of immigration control lasted from 1924 to 1968, when Teddy Kennedy's Immigration Act of 1965 was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. A sign of freedom prior to World War I was this. There were no passports anywhere in the West.

Wikipedia says, quote, "A rapid expansion of rail travel and wealth in Europe beginning in the mid-19th century led to a unique dilution of the passport system for approximately 30 years prior to World War I. The speed of trains, as well as the number of passengers that crossed multiple borders, made enforcement of passport laws difficult.

The general reaction was the relaxation of passport requirements. In the later part of the 19th century and up to World War I, passports were not required, on the whole, for travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively straightforward procedure. Consequently, comparatively few people held passports. During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons and to control the emigration of citizens with useful skills.

These controls remained in place after the war, becoming standard, though controversial, procedure. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a, quote, "nasty dehumanization." End of quote and end of Wikipedia quote. "Your papers, please." World War I brought us that grim phrase.

The conservative tradition in America, 1788 to 1882, was open borders. So was the liberal tradition. The constitutional tradition in America was open borders. Only in 1882 did this begin to change. It escalated in 1924. If you listen to the proponents of immigration restriction today, you would think that George Washington and James Madison in 1787 persuaded the Constitutional Convention to authorize congressional restrictions on immigration.

You would think that this was part of the American constitutional tradition, but the U.S. Constitution has no reference to any such restrictions. Anytime somebody says that there have to be some sort of social criteria beyond non-criminal judicial status in order to gain residence in the United States, he is saying that politicians in Congress and permanent tenured bureaucrats in the executive are competent in understanding what America needs today and what America will need in the future.

Conservatives don't believe this in many areas of life, but with respect to two things, imported goods and imported people, they believe that Congress knows better and the tenured executive bureaucracy knows best. This is the default mode of thinking for most conservatives. They believe with all their hearts that Congress can be trusted and tenured executive bureaucrats protected by civil service laws are in effect a kind of priesthood.

These people know what America needs. Why should anyone believe this? Hispanics are going to break up America. Recently, I was sent this email, "It's true that for much, perhaps even most of our history, we had practically no immigration restrictions at all. We also had a nation consisting of a landmass begging for inhabitants, workers, farmers, inventors, educators, etc.

But we insisted, if not legally, then as a practical matter, that these new arrivals learned our language, conformed to our laws, and consider themselves citizens of their adopted nation." Who were "we"? How did "we" do this? By letting people alone, judicially speaking. The federal government said nothing. The federal government was not regarded as having any say in the matter.

Continuing now the quoted letter, "A few could not and sometimes returned to the old country, but most stayed and became passionately loyal Americans. What's profoundly disturbing is that many of the new arrivals, particularly the Hispanics, appear to have little or no intention of assimilating, and in some cases of even learning or using our language.

If continued, this will become a surefire formula for societal disaster, most likely in the form of the country simply breaking up, just as did the seemingly impregnable old USSR. I'd bet more than even odds that this will happen in the fairly near future. Once it starts, it'll proceed with the speed of a massive seismic shift." End quote of the letter.

What the author of the letter did not say is the following, "I trust the Congress of the United States and the permanent civil service bureaucracy employed by the executive to make decisions regarding social stability in the United States today and in the future." If he had been willing to do this, I would have acknowledged that at least he had thought through the implications of his position.

At least he was willing to say what is implied by his view of immigration. He believes in congressional social engineering with respect to immigration. He also believes that the federal bureaucrats have both the ability and the moral responsibility to make decisions about who should live here and under what circumstances.

He is saying, inevitably, that federal bureaucrats have the ability to make accurate social forecasts about how specific non-criminal and physically healthy immigrants are going to affect American society in the future. I do not share his faith. He doesn't trust Hispanics. He thinks Hispanics are going to speak Spanish all their lives.

He thinks they won't integrate into the country. Where is the evidence that Hispanic kids who were born in this country, and who have attended public schools, and who watch American television and listen to rap music cannot speak English? They can even speak rap. I don't speak rap. I cannot understand what those people are saying.

But Hispanic teenagers are fluent in rap. I guess we can call them trilingual. I don't notice that Hispanics riot very often. People in La Raza march in groups carrying placards with slogans, but they're smart enough to have the slogans in English for the television evening news. The fact that Hispanic parents, some of whom do not speak English, demanded and got their own high school in Los Angeles, right next door to all-black Jefferson High, should come as a surprise, only in this sense.

The school board voted for this. That the parents demanded a dress code is also no surprise. It is called Nava College Preparatory Academy. All the students speak English. Most of them speak rap. Most immigrants who came from Eastern Europe and Central Europe in the late 19th century and the early 20th century could not speak English.

We don't know what percentage of them learned to speak English, but there were whole sections of New York City in 1900 that spoke Yiddish and other Central European languages. But the children learned. They mastered English. They did the translating for the parents. There was nothing odd about this. There is even a sociological pattern about immigrants.

The recent immigrant parents want to maintain the old country's traditions. They want the children to maintain these traditions, but they also want them to be successful. Their children steadily abandon the parents' traditions. They want to be integrated. They want to be like their friends at school. They want to be seen as Americans.

Their children assimilate even more completely. It is difficult for people over 12 years old to learn a foreign language if they never have before. A few adults have the knack, but most people don't. There is nothing odd about this. It is probably genetic. Stages of development. Small children master languages at incredible rates, meaning incredible rates for older people.

Multilingual children who grow up in multilingual environments are common. My father, who was stationed in Egypt during World War II, said that boys in the streets could speak German, Italian, and English with ease. They had been selling services to various invading armies, and they got along just fine. People adjust.

They respond to incentives. If there are economic incentives and opportunities to assimilate, the children of immigrants do. Eight words that define America. There are eight words in the English language which generally define Americans, as long as they are not in Congress. These eight words are central to understanding the American character.

They have been basic to the American character for over 300 years. Here they are. Live and let live. Let's make a deal. When civil governments get involved in the affairs of men, then these two sentences get compromised. The anti-immigration forces are opposed to this one. Live and let live.

The protectionists are opposed to this one. Let's make a deal. Quite frequently, we find people who are committed to both positions, and they call themselves conservatives. Conservatives love to see customs houses. They love to see customs agents. They love to see immigration control officials. They trust Congress. They trust the bureaucracy, but only at national borders.

In other areas of life, they insist that they believe in the principles of limited government, but show a conservative a national border and he abandons his principles. He substitutes trust in the federal government as soon as he sees a national border. Keep this in mind. Residency is not the same as citizenship.

Conservatives confuse the two concepts. Americans did not begin making this mistake until World War I. Thus concludes my reading of the article. In the original version, linked in the show notes, there was an additional paragraph with a commentary linking to a YouTube video, but the YouTube video has been removed and I don't know what it was.

There is also a link to Gary North's detailed study of immigration theory called The Sanctuary Society and Its Enemies, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1998. And so, if you were interested in those, follow the link in the show notes. Thus concludes Gary North's article. What I always appreciated, I learned an enormous amount from Gary North over the years.

I first stumbled upon him with regard to his commentary on economics, because I was interested in his biblical commentaries on economics, but I just enjoyed his writings on social theory, etc. I always found them so thought-provoking that I was always having my ideas challenged by him. I was a subscriber to his website for many years until his death and just really appreciated how he always challenged my ideas.

There was one thing that was always true with North, is that if you were going to tangle with him, you better know what you believe and why you believe it and be able to defend it. That makes you a stronger person. He was a formidable opponent. When you disagreed with him, he was just a formidable guy in every way.

Let's now turn to the issues of the day. It would be my guess that no more than, say, two or three percent of the listening audience would agree with everything that North has written in that article or the implications of what he stated, because in general, the U.S. society, as well as most societies around the world, are firmly and completely split on these two issues.

And North's position is that one or both of these things has to fall. Now, I've defended this myself. I broadly agree with North, with his commentary. But as I see it, a society can have two things in existence, excuse me, have one of these two things in existence. Either a society can have what we'll call for now open borders, which we'll define in just a moment, or a society can have a welfare state.

But I do not believe that a society can have both of those things and function. And a society is going to choose which of those things it's going to have. As for me, my preference is to have a society that has open borders and no welfare state. But I seem to be in the extreme minority on that preference.

And in general, most of the societies in which we live have chosen to have a welfare state and then to restrict immigration, although until now that is basically disappears. Let me explain why I believe this is at the heart of the issue, at least in the U.S. American context.

I do not believe that, broadly speaking, that most Americans are in any way racist. And I'm going to use the traditional version of that term, not the modern Ibram Kendi version of that term or definition of the term racist. What I mean is that in the modern society, especially U.S.

Americans, U.S. Americans do not care about the race of someone with whom they are interacting. They don't care about the color of the skin. They don't care about someone's ethnic heritage, their cultural background, etc. Americans broadly believe in live and let live. They don't really care. What they care about is service.

What they care about is convenience. What they care about is service one to another. And so when Americans criticize people, they don't criticize based upon the color of someone's skin. They criticize based upon the expression of someone's culture. And there are certain cultures that are extremely distasteful to Americans, which they tend to criticize quite broadly.

But it's not due to any outward appearance or due to any kind of ethnic background. It's due to a culture that does not fit well with the American culture, broadly speaking. If you ask most Americans, especially the most anti-immigration Americans, if they care what color of skin their next door neighbor has or what color of skin or what ethnic background the mayor of their town has, broadly speaking, they don't generally care, as long as the person is not trying to force it upon that individual American.

But when you bring the welfare state into it, now it drives that frustration very, very high. The welfare state basically says, "Listen, what I'm going to do is I'm going to steal money from you because you are a producer, you're a worker. I'm going to steal money from you, and I'm going to give it to other people who need the money more than you do." And when there is a system where the need is clearly defined – so, for example, if your average American working man sees that his money is being stolen from him in the form of taxes, and it's going to support an old folks' home that's kind of a community outreach where he can see that, "Look, these people are broke and indigenous, and if they weren't there, they'd be on the streets," etc., he's not going to resist too harshly.

But when you bring immigration into it, and when you paint the idea in his mind, regardless of its truthfulness, that those people are coming in here, and those people are, you know, taking advantage of our free healthcare and our hospitals, and those people are coming in here, and they're taking advantage of our free government schools, and those people are coming in here, and they're being handed debit cards, etc., that makes the average American's blood boil pretty significantly.

And so, as I see it, you can have one or two of these things. If you got rid of the welfare state, I think, and there were no redistribution of wealth, but rather Americans were reminded that, "Hey, what you make is yours to keep. We're not going to steal it from you." There may be some small tax system to support a national military or something like that, but no welfare taxes.

"What you make is yours to keep. You got a deal. You got to go out into the world to make it." And all those immigrants that are coming in, they're doing exactly the same thing. There's no welfare state for them. They're not being given free debit cards. They're not being given free health care.

They're not being given free education or anything like that. They got to make it. Then, generally speaking, it's my instinct as a born and bred American that most Americans broadly would be willing to accept that deal. I have tested this theory in person with many of my friends, the most ardent Trump supporters, the most ardent anti-immigration people, and also my liberal left-wing friends.

And in general, I have not yet – no, not in general. I have not yet found anyone to whom I have made this proposition who would reject it. Again, the most anti-immigration people with whom I've interacted personally, when I have said to them, "Listen, would you be willing to have open borders if you knew that you were not having money stolen from you in the form of taxes to give any kind of handout to other people?" But in fact, all of those immigrants are coming of their own dime, and they're just coming to compete honestly in the labor force with you.

They're not getting any handouts. Would you accept that? To this day, I have not had any person to whom I've had this conversation reject that scenario. So I believe that, however, when you have a welfare state, I don't think you can have open borders because it creates such an enormous conflict of interest for people coming to the country.

So not only do you get people who want to move to a country for the opportunities, but rather you also get people who want to move to the country because they can get an easy life, a free and easy life in the country. And so you have the problem of who the immigrants are.

It changes the basic character of the immigrants when they know they're going to get free stuff. And then secondarily, it changes the experience of the people living in that country. And so I believe you can either have a country that has open borders or you can have a country that has a welfare state, but you cannot have both for the long term.

And ultimately, a country that has both is going to make some enormous change in one direction or another. Now, I have a few more points I want to make on this, and then we're going to move to personal finance application. But before I do so, I wanted to find the term open borders.

You will notice that or an astute listener would notice a couple of specific restrictions that North in his essay passed. And I believe that these potential restrictions are important. So what does open borders mean? Does open borders mean that a country has no checkpoints or security control at its borders?

Does open borders mean that a country doesn't have fences, that a country doesn't have immigration at its airports, et cetera? My answer is it might, but it's not strictly necessary. So there are two things that North pointed out. He said non-criminal immigrants, and he also said healthy immigrants or non-ill immigrants.

And these are two things that I think are completely compatible with open borders. So here would be an example of the kind of system that I myself would be happy to support if it were feasible in any world, which it's not in today's world, any world that I can find.

Maybe Mars or something like that, or maybe it's the world a century from now, but it's not feasible. Is it okay for a country to have some form of checkpoint control? Because one of the things that North didn't address in his essay that you often hear modern anti-immigration or anti-illegal immigration people, however they want to style themselves, talk about is, well, all the terrorists are coming in, all the criminals are coming in.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable for a government to have some system in place of checking for a person's criminal background. As I see it, I do not believe that any government in the world has the right to control the physical movements, physical geographical movements of any non-criminal person.

So I do not believe that the state, let's say I live in the state of Florida, I do not believe that the government of the state of Georgia has the right to control my access to the state of Georgia from the state of Florida across the state line as long as I am a non-criminal person.

In the same way, I do not believe that the government of the United States or the government of Mexico has the moral right or authority to control the physical geographic movement of any non-criminal person. People can travel around the world as they want, and as long as someone is not a criminal person, I do not believe that a government has control over their body.

Why should they? Why should any government have control over someone? To believe in that is to believe in tyranny, in absolute tyranny, to say that a government can arbitrarily decide who they control. Now, what is this and who can go where in the world? It's insane. It's an insane concept that has become utterly normal in our modern society, but it's crazy when you actually stop and think about it.

Why should any government have the right to control the physical movement of a non-criminal person? And look at COVID as a perfect recent example of what the world experienced. How stupid was it to believe that the government had the right to say, "You have to stay in your zone.

You can't go out and walk your dog. You can't go to the state park and ride your skateboard and dump it. We're going to dump it full of sand." Utterly ridiculous. They arrested people on the beach. Insane tyranny everywhere. And even there was more justifiable in case of a public health emergency and an infectious disease pandemic, which we'll go to in a moment, of a diseased person.

But let's deal with criminality first. Who does government have authority over? My answer is government has authority over criminal persons. That is the basic central role of government. God has appointed the existence of government on earth to deal with the behavior of criminal persons. A government has one task, and that is to constrain the evildoer and to eliminate evil from the earth.

Evil people who commit evil actions must be removed from society, and that is the basic function of government. Now, there are enormous and extremely important restrictions on the exercise of that right by government powers. There must be multiple witnesses. There must be a legal system. There must be abundant evidence.

There must be due process. There must be presumption of innocence, etc. An accused has the right to face his accuser, etc. So there can be no kind of nighttime raids by thugs in helmets and bulletproof vests who swoop in in the early morning and arrest people out of their beds.

No, not a chance. There can be no secret courtrooms with no cameras, etc. All judicial proceedings should be public, and there should be a presumption of innocence, and there should be due process in all judicial proceedings. But at its core, the basic function of government is to restrain the evildoer.

And there is a component as an expression of that whereby a government official could do this in the context of open borders. And so would it be allowable to have a government that has open borders and say that there's a government official to whom you have to present your identity documents, to whom you have to present a federal background check of some kind or a law enforcement check, etc., to make certain that a country or a city or a state is not allowing criminal persons into their midst?

My answer is I would be okay with that. I would be willing to accept that. But here we see the other fundamental flaw in the modern immigration debate, is that simultaneous with the enormous flow of immigrants across the border, without any meaningful checkpoints or restrictions, simultaneous with that, we have the enormous end the police movement.

And while I'm sympathetic to a lot of the arguments of the, you know, the defund the police movement and the – broadly speaking, these are two things that I do not believe can coexist. Because as people are finding more and increasing criminality expressed in their community, the fear is rising.

And one of the basic ways that a government retains its power and its authority in society is to maintain security, is to maintain peace. Yesterday in my children's homeschool, we were talking about feudalism. We were talking about the feudal system, feudal structure of society and feudalism and how it worked.

And what I think is often mistaken by people who are broadly sympathetic to the serfs working for the lord of the manor, etc., is the basic reason that this structure existed in the first place, which was due to attack by roving bands of marauders across Europe. And so what the lords and the serfs did in the feudal system was they made a deal.

The deal was this. The lord of the manor and the lord of the countryside would develop a private army of knights and dukes and earls, etc., nobles. This private army would defend the people and keep the peace. That way, the peasants, the serfs, could till their land in peace and not worry about being murdered and raped in their beds, not worry about having their harvest stolen by bands of marauders.

And the portion of their harvest that they had to turn over to the lord and the serf in the form of – sorry, the lord of the manor, the dukes and the earls, etc., the nobility system, the portion of their harvest they turned over in the form of taxes was a better deal than having their produce stolen by bands of marauders.

If you look back at the history of humanity, there were societies in which people hunted and gathered for themselves. But the instant you had a transition to a stable farming society, then you had rise to increased levels of violence because people who didn't want to do the backbreaking work of tending to their own farm and keeping their own crops, etc., realized, "I can go over to my neighbor there, who he's doing the work all the time, and I can just show up at harvest time.

And with a sharp spear or a bow and arrow or my own physical size and a club or whatever tool of war I happen to have, I can intimidate him and I can steal his crops and I can steal all of them from him." And so you have increased needs for security to protect crops, and this makes an enormous difference in the history of nations and the history of individuals as well.

So whenever there is insecurity in a society or even perceived insecurity, the people will call out and respond favorably to somebody who can provide that security. Let me tie in now a modern event. Over the past few days, the president of El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, won his presidential re-election campaign in an absolute landslide.

I don't have the specific figures of his initial victory, but as I recall, it was a close election. When he came into office, he faced significant opposition. But over the course of his most recent presidential term, he has taken certain actions in the country that resulted in him receiving an absolute landslide of the vote, something like 85% of the vote.

And it's one of the most stunning victories by any political candidate, at least in my lifetime. Now, what led to that? Well, if you don't follow Latin American politics, you might have at least some idea of the fact that, historically speaking, El Salvador has been an extremely unsafe country in Latin America.

El Salvador was the one country in Latin America that I myself was scared to go to in the past. I've traveled a lot in Latin America. The one country I never went to and I was scared to go to was El Salvador, due to an absurdly high murder rate in the country.

Putting the story very short, Bukele came into office. He marshaled the military forces, built enormous prison, built an enormous prison, went out of the streets, and arrested, on a wide scale, arrested all of the gang members in the country, identified by their having gang tattoos, primarily. Imprisoned them all in an enormous prison complex, an enormous prison complex, created cinema-quality advertisement promotional materials for this movement, and cleaned up the streets of El Salvador in a completely unprecedented way, leading to, over the course of, what is it, a couple of years, something like that, El Salvador going from the country with basically the highest murder rate in the world to, if not the lowest murder rate in the world, a lower statistical murder rate than, I don't know, the United States, currently speaking.

And this has had an absolutely transformative effect on the El Salvadorian society, on the country, on the commerce, the business, etc. Previously in El Salvador, due to the gang control and gang warfare happening across the country, you didn't let your children go to the park, families stayed in their homes, you didn't go to that next block over because it was controlled by a rival gang, etc.

Well, today, the country is totally transformed. The people feel safe, they go out and they play. And what's happening is there's enormous flows, not only of money, to the country, and there are other things as well. He's embraced various things. He's working hard to build the infrastructure in the country and improve the highways.

He's made radical moves, such as embracing Bitcoin as an official currency, etc. But enormously also due to the increase in safety, there is an increase in tourism to El Salvador. But more importantly, there's an increase in El Salvadorians who are from the diaspora, who had gone abroad, now returning home more regularly to visit their friends and families and looking and saying, "How could we bring money back?

How could we invest into this country? It feels like a new country." And so at its core, the basic point I want to make is that when a politician can create peace in the streets and can create a society of comfort—sorry, of safety, and what I'm deriving of comfort is not only actual safety but perceived safety, that politician will receive broad levels of support.

And if a politician allows increases in crime, increases in insecurity, for example, homeless people camping on your front lawn, things like that, which may or may not be associated with crime, but it certainly is associated with perceived insecurity and perceived decay—if a politician cannot see to that basic order, the politician or the political party or whomever is going to lose support.

But if the people feel secure, then they will have support. And everything else is secondary to that. So if you go throughout political history and you look at the feudal system or you look at the modern world, you look and see, "Why do the mafia have control? Why are the Taliban so popular in Afghanistan?" Well, the answer is they see to the needs of the people.

And ISIS can come into your village, but if ISIS can get you clean water and secure streets for you to walk around, etc., then people are going to wind up supporting ISIS because at its core, that's what we want from government. We want government to work. And the core basic function of government working is get rid of the criminals so that honest people can live and not be in fear of their life.

Now, interestingly also, what does the U.S. Society do? Well, here is an editorial from Today in the New York Times, guest editorial by Dr. Will Freeman and Lucas Pereyo. I never know how to pronounce things in the Spanish accent or English accent. I go back and forth. "Why Nayib Bukele's anti-crime model for El Salvador won't work in other countries." Here are a few paragraphs.

"Voters in El Salvador this week gave their tough-on-crime president a sweeping mandate. Keep going. While votes are still being counted, President Nayib Bukele claims he won re-election by a landslide with more than 85% of the vote. If those results hold when the official count is announced, not even Latin America's best-known populist presidents like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Bolivia's Evo Morales will have come close to winning election by such margins.

Mr. Bukele's unparalleled rise comes down to a single factor, El Salvador's stunning crime drop. Since he took office in 2019, intentional homicide rates have decreased from 38 per 100,000 in that year to 7.8 in 2022, well below the Latin American average of 16.4 for the same year. The crackdown Mr.

Bukele has led on organized crime has all but dismantled the infamous street gangs that terrorized the population for decades. It also exacted a tremendous price on Salvadorans' human rights, civil liberties, and democracy. Since March 2022, when Mr. Bukele declared a state of emergency that suspended basic civil liberties, security forces have locked up roughly 75,000 people.

A staggering one in 45 adults is now in prison. Other leaders in the neighborhood are taking notice and have debated adopting many of the same drastic measures to fight their own criminal violence. But even if they wanted to make the trade-off that Mr. Bukele's government has, making streets safer through methods that are blatantly at odds with democracy, they aren't likely to succeed.

The conditions that enabled Mr. Bukele's success and political stardom are unique to El Salvador and can't be exported. And it goes on and talks about how, how, I'll just read it, "Walking the streets of the capital, San Salvador, in the days before the election, we saw firsthand how families with children have returned to parks.

People can now cross formerly impassable gang-controlled borders between neighborhoods. The city center, which for years was largely empty by sunset, is now lively late into the night. But El Salvador, which transitioned to democracy in the 1990s, has veered off that path. Mr. Bukele now controls all government branches. The nation of 6.4 million is run as a police state.

Soldiers and police officers routinely whisk citizens off the streets and into prison indefinitely without providing a reason or allowing them access to a lawyer. There are credible reports that inmates have been tortured. Government critics told us they have been threatened with prosecution and journalists have been spied on. Even last Sunday's vote is under a microscope after the transmission system for the results of the preliminary vote count collapsed in a highly unusual manner." And they go on and talk about things in Ecuador and what was unique about El Salvador, etc.

The point is that what I find fascinating about that paragraph is there are a lot of people of basically any country in the world, the United States, the country I know best, but many other countries who, if I read that paragraph and simply transposed the name of my own country, my own native country to that, then it wouldn't be too far off the mark.

Now, I think that a lot of that is just perception rather than reality, but perception is ultimately what matters. I have friends who have been whisked off into prison, and they were ultimately provided with access to a lawyer, but they were in prison with no charges made for an enormously long period of time.

And all of us are now in the United States accustomed to finding out there's some early morning raid. We're accustomed to having closed courtrooms where we don't know the—we can't see what's happening. We don't know what's happening in the argument. We can't even see who the jurors are. Even when we can find a camera feed from a courtroom, which obviously doesn't happen in federal courtrooms where they really need them the most, at least most many state courtrooms, we have camera feeds now, but we can't even find out who the jurors are, which is insane.

And so the voting process under a microscope for unusual results when the preliminary vote count collapsed in a highly unusual manner, these are the things that are common to many of our experiences. And so, as I see it, no political system can stand if it doesn't provide for the basic needs of the people.

And that was true about feudalism. It's true about modern democratic systems. If modern democratic systems can't provide these basic needs of the people, security—if our communities do not feel safe and they're not actually safe, then it erodes trust. And the problem with democracy is that for those who are in the minority, if their needs are not met, it feels just as tyrannical as if your country is run by a dictator.

And if you go around the world and you look at different political systems, a government that is run by a noble tyrant, a nobly-minded dictator, is often an extremely attractive form of government. You see that in a place like Singapore. One of the most incredible transformations in modern society, one of the most successful advanced modern states, etc., was run by an extremely powerful, extremely heavy-handed—I'm not insulting him to say it—but quasi-dictator.

And we see that around the world, is that I would be happy to live under a dictator if the dictator's interests are aligned with my own. That experience is far preferable to living under control by a tyrannical mob whose interests don't align with my own. And they control my life exceedingly, and yet I'm in the minority.

It doesn't feel any better than it does to live under a dictator whose interests are aligned with my own. Now, hear me clearly, there is another way, and that's what we've been trying to work on for a long period of time. And that, I think, was the beauty of the American system, which was a system where the interests of—sorry, the control of government was restricted to the local level where democratic expression is more appropriate, and the power of the state on any level is severely weakened just to the most essential of elements.

But I don't want to go any further into political theory. It makes me sad to see what my own country has become. But let's deal honestly with some of the issues. And so let me bring clarity to a few of these points. Number one, when you're dealing with an immigration issue and an immigration crisis, as the United States is clearly dealing with, you have a choice between open borders or a welfare state.

And the fact that the United States is currently embracing a welfare state, a very broad welfare state, and open borders is poisoning the conversation enormously. I see no solution to this problem, by the way. I have no solutions whatsoever. I don't believe that Americans are ready to give up on either of those things at the moment.

Ironically, even those who have voted, for example, for immigration controls, many of the voters who voted for President Trump in the year—when was he elected? 2020. A prime issue of their voting for him was to end illegal immigration and to build a wall. As I understand, according to Peter Zeihan, what is ironic about that effort is that previously, the United States had a fairly effective wall on its southern border, just like it has a fairly effective wall on its northern border.

The wall on much of the northern border is an enormous wilderness. On the southern border, it's an enormous desert. And that desert was famously very difficult to cross until the construction of a border wall, which required the installation of roads for the contractors to be able to build the wall.

And so now there's a network of roads crossing a previously impassable desert, which makes it easy for people who are transporting immigrants to drive them most of the way, and then they just have to walk a little bit and get picked up by another car. Whereas previously, there was a natural defense of a desert.

I find that an interesting analysis, as far as I know it's true, but I have not been there to walk the wall myself to see exactly to the extent of its truthfulness. So it's just ironic that here's this thing that's supposed to reduce immigration, building a wall, and meanwhile it winds up enabling easier immigration across the border because of the construction methodology.

Similarly, of course, there's plenty of places where the wall is climbed over and it's cut through, etc. Just a dumb idea. Doesn't work, didn't work, no point in it, etc. But we're in an insolvable crisis. I don't see how these two things can be reconciled. So as best I can tell, things are going to continue as they are, back and forth, back and forth, until we see some kind of broad-scale collapse of the system.

The second point I was making is that you could have a version of open borders, while also having some form of checkpoints, identity verification, criminal verification, or verification of non-criminality, etc. And then related to that, you could also have verification of healthfulness. So let's say that what I would love to see would be, I would love to see all visa restrictions abolished so that anybody who wants to move to the United States could move to the United States.

All they have to do is come. But when coming, I would love them to have to bring a certificate from the police background of their own state and present that certificate of non-criminality. Here's a federal background check. This shows that I'm not a wanted criminal, etc. This is, by the way, a standard procedure for all immigration programs.

Every time I get a residency or apply for some kind of government thing, I have to bring a federal background check from the FBI, etc. So that's standard procedure. There's a well-proven system in place for that. And then also, a medical check showing I don't have any infectious diseases run by a doctor, etc.

And again, this is also a standard part of many countries' immigration systems that you have to have a certificate of health. And so this kind of thing, to me, would be great. I would be thrilled if somebody would do this. Because this is the point I think that most conservatives miss, the point that North made quite strongly, is that why do you think that a government bureaucrat can somehow figure out how many workers we need for a X, Y, Z visa class?

How many tech workers we need? How many farm workers? How many of this worker? How many of that worker? You don't have a clue. And what I find fascinating is that one of the great challenges that every businessman I know, including many in very menial trades, in agriculture, etc., as well as many in tech and kind of high-level businesses, they can't get enough workers.

And so they have to go through all these quota programs and apply for a certain number of workers, etc., and it's an enormous problem with paperwork. And if the United States would simplify this system, nay, eliminate any restrictions, then the country would have an enormous competitive advantage and would be able to attract some of the world's greatest immigrants, which would be an incredible boon to the country.

It would be an incredible boon to the country's economy. More people makes for a much more vibrant economy. It would lower the average age in the country, which would lead to increasing vibrance. And I think that for all of the problems that the United States has, I think the United States is better at assimilating immigrants into the nation than any other country in the world, because our culture is one of a creed rather than an ethnicity.

Our culture is very, very inclusive of anybody from any place as long as they buy into the national creed, the basic set of beliefs that compose the civil religion of the United States. And if those people buy into that, then we accept them as Americans no matter what. This is why it's very common for Americans to have a friend who just moved over from the UK or Somalia or Japan, etc., and two years later, an American will make a comment like, "Man, you're an American through and through.

You're totally American." And it has nothing to do with immigration status. The person may or may not have a visa. The person may or may not be a U.S. citizen. It has to do with culture, because if somebody embraces the American culture, regardless of accent, regardless of language, etc., then Americans accept them.

This is very different than other nations that are primarily a nation due to an ethnic identity of some kind or your family's history here, etc. So I think it would be an incredible boon to the country to have that kind of system. And I understand that people want to protect their stuff.

It always seems better to go and form a cartel to protect your industry and protect your occupation. And the free market ultimately systematically tears those things down. So not only is it morally repugnant to me to build cartels to protect your industry from outsiders just because so you can get all the money, but it's just philosophically dumb.

It's a dumb way to live, and it hinders human progress and human advancement. Those would be some expressions of what I would love to see as an ideal system, an orderly system. I would be fine with checkpoints, etc., and I think it would be a great benefit to the country.

What do we think about the current system? Well, it's absolute chaos, and it is fundamentally – it is horrific what is happening right now. The mass transfer of people across the southern border with very few checks, and the checks that are happening are fake. As far as I see it – I try to be careful with the use of the word "immoral," but they're really, really bad.

And it's bad for multiple reasons, and I believe that the current crisis is bad for all three parties. So first and foremost, the current crisis is bad for immigrants, and the reason it's bad is because they are heading into a situation that is going to be terrible for decades.

What I mean is there's not – the system I described that I would love to see happen doesn't exist in the United States. It doesn't exist, and it's not going to exist, as far as I can tell, for a very long period of time. And so, when immigrants are coming to the United States, they're primarily coming in because they're applying for asylum.

We're not exercising any kind of significant checks as to the claims of fear that someone makes in their demand for asylum. We're just broadly handing out court dates, and these court dates are years in the future. And right now, for every immigrant that I know to the United States system, the entire U.S.

immigration system is completely – I don't even know what adjective to use. It's just totally screwed up. It doesn't work. It's terrible. I have friends who are going through the system, have followed every law, have tried to do everything, and they just sit in limbo forever. And court system here, and it gets kicked out there, and et cetera.

And so, going into the U.S. immigration system is a nightmare, where you just sit and sit and sit and sit, and there's no serious attention being given to the lives of the people who are sitting there. And so, I would never want to get involved with the U.S. immigration system if I didn't have to.

It's not that it can't be done. There are some people, and if you can have a highly desirable job and your company can afford a great lawyer, et cetera, they can grease the skids and get something resolved. But you will spend years just waiting and waiting and waiting. And so, all of these people, poor people who are coming into the United States, trying to build something for themselves, they're going to be stuck into a system where they're second-class citizens, and they can't get legal status, they can't get legal standing, et cetera.

And this is terrible also for their children. If their children are not born in the United States, it puts their children into enormous limbo. And if they leave the United States, they can't come back because of the very restrictive system that the United States has on travel. The only way to come in and out is to cross the border illegally, because the whole system of getting into the United States with a highly restrictive visa system is utterly screwed up.

And so, I believe that it's a moral wrong to create these expectations for the immigrants. Number two, it's a moral catastrophe for the existing citizenry of the United States, because what they are seeing on a day-to-day basis is chaos. And let me just do the third one next. It's a moral catastrophe for the government itself.

What you have right now in the United States, forgive me if I'm ranting, I know I'm ranting, but if you're listening, I assume it's useful to you. The current system of the United States and what the government is doing to itself is a catastrophe. Because when I, as a law-abiding citizen, see that the government is not enforcing its own laws in any meaningful way, and it's clearly visible with hordes of people walking across a river, and that the Border Patrol is non-functional in terms of actually – I mean, poor guys.

I have a friend of mine who I talked to about this sometime, former Border Patrol agent. I cannot even imagine trying to work in that government agency. Got to be the lowest morale across any government agency right now. And so, you're creating a system in which you are watching people flout your laws.

And that is a bad pathway to go down. Because as law-abiding citizens watch you as the government allow, be permissive of people flouting your laws, disobeying your laws with impunity, nay, you're even encouraging it in every way possible, then that causes ordinary law-abiding citizens to say, "Why am I taking the trouble to follow the laws?

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Because people say, "Why should I obey a law that he's not obeying?" And I would compare it to this. I haven't seen this personally, but I've heard this described by a couple of people. But let's say that it's opening morning of fishing season. And what I've heard fishermen say sometimes, let's say that fishing season for 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., and everyone is sitting there waiting. They're all lined up. You can see all your fishermen. It's 7.45, and everyone's waiting, and waiting until 8 o'clock. But then around, say, 7.54, Joe Schmo tosses a line in the water.

And all of a sudden, the guy next to Joe says, "Well, I'm going to do it." And he tosses his line in the water too. And at 7.57, everyone's got their lines in the water, except for the 10% of highly committed, law-abiding people. They're going to wait until 8 o'clock.

They're going to wait that extra three minutes. Meanwhile, they watch all their friends pulling the fish out, and they feel, "Why am I the sucker? I'm the sucker who's sitting here obeying the law. Why am I the sucker?" This has been something for years that has bothered me enormously, is that I aspire to be a law-abiding person.

I aspire to be a model citizen. I'm not always, but I want to be. I would compare it to things like welfare programs. My aspiration has always been to be somebody who is not on welfare, to always be somebody who is a producer, not a consumer. I want to help my neighbor.

I want to be a supporter. Those are the ideals and the civic virtues to which I aspire. And half the time, I live my life as a sucker. And it's like, "Well, everyone else is taking advantage of that program. Why don't you?" And when you look around and you see all the immoral and unethical people getting rich, it makes it very, very hard for you to stand up and say, "No, I believe this," even though it doesn't.

And when you create that kind of society, that makes things really bad. And that's where we're at. The governmental—so, you know, a government that does it this way, that pursues illegal means to get its end, I have zero respect for. Be straight about what you want. Speak the truth about what you want.

Be willing to stand behind your convictions and do it properly in the public view. And if you say, "This is what we're going to do," then say it so that people can vote on it, if you're going to believe in democracy. Or at least do it. Don't do it by hiddenness and by non-enforcement, etc., because you destroy trust and confidence in your government.

And I think that is what is happening to the U.S. government. And finally, I mentioned it's immoral to the citizens, because what they're getting is not what they voted for. And you could say, "Well, people get what they vote for. You know, President Biden won the presidency, so people should have known." Yeah, but President Biden didn't say, "This is what I'm going to do." At least I don't remember.

Maybe he did, and I just was ignorant. But I'm not aware of him saying, "I'm going to eliminate all imposition of law so that people can—so tens of thousands of people can cross the border illegally. We're going to destroy the definition of what it means for asylum seekers. We're not going to ask for any verifiable evidence.

What we're going to do is we're going to give people a court date that's a few years down and get as many people into the country as possible." There is no way you can look at the current system and see that it's anything except intentional. But it was not stated by candidate Joe Biden when he was running for president, nor was it stated by anybody else who's doing it.

It's all being done. And so this is immoral to the citizenry, because the entire point of a democratic system is that the people can vote for what they want. And so the politicians say, "Here's what we'll do for you," and then the people vote for that. And so when you have that, it makes people feel like their voices are heard, okay?

And this has been fundamental to the American fabric of society. All right, I lost. I lost on that issue. But that's okay. It was a free and public vote. The majority has it or the plurality has it, whatever the case may be. I lost. That's okay. I'm happy to lose.

And after all, we're all Americans here. And I can go along and I'll just fight next time in the political system. But you see that that confidence and trust is breaking down. So is it a temporary thing? Is it a permanent thing? I have no idea. I hope it's just temporary, but it makes me sad because the current chaos is deeply immoral.

It's at least counterproductive, and I think it's wrong. It's wrong. It's not the way that it should be done on any level. It's not an honest debate, and it's going to lead to increasing levels of unrest, increasing levels of discontentedness, increasing levels of vitriol. I don't see a solution in the political space that is going to have an impact.

All the rest of the stuff, there's minor things about terrorists are coming. All that stuff is dumb. If a terrorist tries to sneak into the country across the southern border and blow up a bomb, you shoot him. We're a country of gun owners. We just shoot people. It's no big deal.

There's no meaningful risk of terrorism or Chinese infiltrators, etc. It's an enormous benefit. The last comment – I want to move to the personal application and personal finance – but the last comment is simply that, as a Christian, I am amazed. So I'm trying to present – clearly, what I'm describing comes from theological conviction of open borders, what I've advocated for, etc., and then care for people.

But on the whole, I'm just amazed that the Christians in the United States, broadly speaking, are not paying attention to what's happening. There's an enormous fear that people have that the immigrants are going to come to the United States and they're going to change our way. Go back to the Russians.

The Russian spies are going to come in and they're going to sow problems and they're going to change the society. The Russians couldn't keep any of their spies employed. They'd send them to the United States and all their spies would defect. And so it's the same thing. Muslims can barely hang on to their Muslim identity when they go to the United States.

And people from all around the world, the American culture is so strong and it's an enormous opportunity. And I wish that – just a personal thing, I guess – but I just wish that Christians would open up and pay attention. As far as I'm concerned, God is sending the entire world's masses to the country, which is a lot easier to engage in good missionary service and evangelism with your neighbors around the block than it is to pay to send people overseas in precarious situations.

And so kind of the broad anti-immigration stance of so many evangelical churches drives me nuts. I think they should be affirming what I have said about affirming that the chaos is unacceptable and that it's hurting people, it's hurting, as I said, the immigrants themselves, it's hurting the Americans who are already in the country, and it's hurting the government.

And so the chaos is unacceptable. But the broad kind of anti-immigration stance is, to me, crazy. But that's probably the most inflammatory thing I've said so far. Let's move now to the personal applications of this. And I want to make two applications. Number one, if you are an immigrant or considering immigrating to the United States – don't have too many of those in my audience – or if you are already living in the United States and you don't have legal status in the country, what should you do?

Well, first of all, I think that generally speaking, most people should not use this pathway to try to immigrate to the United States. This is a bad pathway. So recently on a Q&A show, I had a caller who called in and said – I think it was German – said, "I'd like to move to the United States." You cannot be – even as tempting as it may be – to say, "I'm going to fly to Mexico and I'm going to sneak across the border and make an asylum application." I do not see any fruitful benefit there in that.

When you are an illegal immigrant to the United States, you are a genuine second-class citizen. Everything is closed to you. I guess I should have said you are a metaphorical second-class citizen, because you're not a citizen. You're a second-class person. Everything is closed to you. There are a few places you can get a driver's license, etc., but you will spend all of your time looking over your shoulder.

Now, you don't have to worry generally about an immigration officer sweeping you up. What you have to worry about is you have to worry about an employer not being able to hire you, because this is what governments do, is they use functionaries to enforce their rules. So let me give you an example, okay?

Why does everybody go across the U.S. border with Mexico instead of flying into New York City? The reason is due to the American visa system, that there are only, what is it, 30-something countries that have... There's one country's citizens who can travel to the United States without a visa and without prior authorization.

That country is Canada. So Canadians can travel to the United States without a visa. U.S. immigration officers still can turn away Canadian citizens, of course, and they routinely do if they find any intent to immigrate to the United States. And so if you show up at the Canadian border with your car packed full of gear and you're going down to "spend some time" with your girlfriend in Los Angeles, you're probably not going to make it into the country, because U.S.

immigration officers would view that as intent to immigrate. Unless you have an immigration visa processed in advance, not going to happen. Other countries of the world who come from a list of whose citizens have a generally high acceptance rate for tourist visas can travel to the United States with an electronic travel authorization.

So if you're from the UK or from France or from Germany or from, you know, Japan, etc., then you can... I think Japan. You can travel to the United States using the ESTA program, the Electronic Secure Traveler Act or something, but it's an electronic pre-admission. And as long as you have that done, they'll let you board the plane and then again you'll probably be able to get into the country.

The immigration officers will still turn you away at the airport if they think that you have intent to immigrate to the United States and you don't have an immigration visa pre-existing. Everyone else around the world has to apply for a visa to travel into or even to pass through the United States.

And that visa system is extremely onerous. The visa costs, I think, is $160. You have to pay it regardless of whether you are accepted or denied. It's just a payment no matter what. You have to bring a mountain of paperwork and basically you have to prove to the immigration officer in the U.S.

embassy abroad that you don't have immigrant intent to the United States, that in fact you are highly connected to the place that you live and you don't have the intent to move to the United States and overstay your tourist visa. And it's quite an onerous process. Even all of the formalities of getting the appointment are often difficult.

Some embassies you can't even get an appointment for a year or two. And then you say, "Well, I want to move to the United States with some kind of immigration visa." Good luck. They are very, very difficult to get unless you are highly sought after. And so what is the solution?

Well, the solution for many people around the world who have zero hope of proving to an immigration officer that they can pass these checks, etc., is to go to the physical border of the United States, to come in across a sea border on a boat of some kind and land on the beach or to come across the southern border.

And so that's what people are doing, largely from Central and South America, walking in some cases through the Darien Gap, using the bus system and local transportation, getting transportation to the border and then walking across the border. And they're doing it because they can gain easier access into many of these countries, even if they have limited documentation.

They at least have visa-free access if they have a passport or they accept their cedula or whatever it happens to be, and then they cross the border across from Mexico. And they can do that. So what I'm saying, though, is that you shouldn't do that if you're listening to me.

Because once you're in the United States – sorry, to make the point – in flying to the United States, the U.S. uses that visa system to restrict the access of immigrants, potential immigrants. But they're not doing it with U.S. border officials. Yeah, there's immigration officials at the airport, but they're doing it with airline employees.

The airline employees won't let you board the plane if you don't have the appropriate visa. So they're using a system like that to keep you out. Now, the same system applies inside the United States, is that the United States won't penalize you as an illegal immigrant for working if you don't have work authorization.

They will penalize your employer for hiring you, and the penalties can be steep. And so what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency does is they do some high-profile raids routinely, and they basically instill fear in employees. And so if you go to the United States, you're not going to find that it's a land of flowing with milk and honey.

You're going to find that you have very limited employment opportunities if you don't have proper employment authorization with a genuine immigrant visa opportunity. You have very limited employment opportunities. And then when you pass into those limited employment opportunities, you are going to be taken advantage of, broadly speaking, and you're going to be abused.

Because unethical employers who are willing to hire undocumented workers know that they can get away with greater forms of abuse than if they are hiring documented workers. And while all people have legal rights in the United States, you will be very embarrassed to exercise those rights due to your status of non-belonging.

When I'm in the United States, I can throw my weight around freely. A cop walks up to me on the street, asks me questions. I turn to him and say, "Officer, I don't answer questions." When I pass through immigration in the United States – this didn't turn out well one time, but I did it.

I did it. When I travel to the United States and an immigration official starts asking me questions about where I've been, I just say, "I'm sorry, officer. I don't answer questions." And I can routinely throw my weight around because I'm confident not only in my citizenship status, but I'm confident in my knowledge of the culture, my knowledge of the law.

I know what laws the police are under, et cetera. When you travel as an illegal immigrant to the United States and you're interacting with a police officer, you will have none of that confidence because the structure of legal requirements in the United States is very different than where you're from, and you're going to feel extremely vulnerable.

So you feel vulnerable to everybody, which makes you slower to go for help, which means that when somebody robs your house or steals your cash or whatever it is that they take from you, you don't go and file a police report because you're scared of them calling ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

You're worried about how the cops are going to treat you. You're worried about all this stuff, and so you live your life as a second-class citizen. This is true even if you have linguistic skills, and unfortunately, you probably don't. Well, I guess if you're listening to the show, you do.

But there's a lot of people who get abused because they don't learn the language, and so they wind up living in a completely different reality. And can it work? Sure, it can work. It's just really, really brutal. And all across the United States, this is true. And so you're going to be a second-class citizen, and it's not going to be fun.

It might be better than where you're from. If I were a Venezuelan, I would be in the United States as an illegal immigrant, doing everything I could to feed my family back home, sending money back home on remittances, and doing everything I could to get my family with me.

Not a question in my mind. If I were from Haiti, I would absolutely have gone in through Brazil. I would have emigrated up across the Darien Gap. I would absolutely have gone to the United States as an illegal alien. Absolutely no question in my mind that I would do that.

But that's if you have any kind of professional capacity. If you're understanding the words that I'm speaking to you right now as whatever we're, an hour and 20 minutes into a very detailed, very kind of high-level philosophical conversation in English, then you shouldn't do this because you'll have better opportunities elsewhere.

And if you come to the United States, you have to come on a legal pathway so that you can have some chance of things working out in the long run. I have known a few people who have made it in the United States as illegal aliens and then went abroad.

I have some friends of mine who lived in the United States. They lived there for about 15 years. They invested in real estate in the United States. They became wealthy. They little by little got their money, about three-quarters of a million dollars or about half a million dollars, their life savings that they made primarily with real estate investment.

They little by little got it out of the country, and then they left the United States, moved abroad where they did have citizenship status, and basically they're barred from ever going to the United States again. That's the best I can imagine. That does not happen frequently, and so I don't think people should take this pathway to the United States.

If you're in the United States illegally, I'm going to give you here the same advice that I've given, is that I think you're wasting your time. Unless you are a very low-level worker, which you're not because you're listening to me right now for all the reasons I said, then you're wasting your time in the United States.

And this insecurity and sitting around and waiting, you're going to wait another decade to wait on some political change that somehow they're going to pass a bill that gives amnesty to illegal immigrants or to the children of illegal immigrants, et cetera. I see no way that happens in the next decade.

Too polarized, and both camps in the political system, they're not willing to listen to each other. Could some kind of compromise bill be worked out? Like I said, would I myself vote, if I'm in Congress, would I vote for a bill that gives open borders and automatic amnesty to all illegal immigrants in the United States in exchange for ending the welfare state?

I would. I'd vote for that. And it's laughable to think that that has any chance of happening in the next 10 years. We've all got our heels dug in way too deep on any of this stuff. And so remember, I'm out here in, I don't think it's philosophical la-la land, but it's purely philosophical what I'm saying.

It has zero practical impact. There's no feasible structure in which any kind of this thing happens. And that's why my entire life as a paying attention to politics, since about mid-90s, it's been exactly the same thing, a never-ending debate, and nothing changes about it, because the positions are too locked in.

The Republicans have decided to be the anti-immigration party. They couch it in rule of law. That's why we're opposed to amnesty bills, and we're not going to institute meaningful immigration reform. And the Democrats have dug in their heels and are unwilling to listen to any Republicans' concerns on any issue.

And so they just fight, and they fight, and they fight, and they fight. And the government is impotent. So when you stay in the United States in that status, you're not going to get ahead the way you could if you went back home, wherever you have legal status, and started over again.

And if you've got money, then use that money to restart yourself with legal status somewhere where you can use money to buy yourself a residency visa, buy yourself a citizenship, et cetera, and start over. America is no longer a country. America, the ideal, has spread around the world. And there are a lot of places outside of the United States that are far more American, even in the country of my birth.

And so we're living in the age of digital revolution, digital connectivity, and you don't have to be in the United States to make it rich. If you're listening to my voice, you have the skills to succeed in any corner of the world. And so if I were in the United States under that status, and I were no longer kind of the penniless immigrant who just had nothing but manual labor to offer the world, then I would make as much money as I could in a short period of time, and I would make a plan for a new place to go where I could exercise that, and I would go there, because I'm convinced that there's plenty of opportunity around the world for smart, intelligent people, even to access the U.S.

economy without being physically there and spending your life in limbo. And now the final point I want to make, and this is where it gets very financial. Recognize always that your security matters more than anything else. If you do not feel secure, and if you are not actually secure, you're going to spend all your money to try to get security.

So if you're living in a neighborhood right now, and you don't have, and there's crime increasing in your area, and you haven't figured out how to get your police department to do their job, etc., you need to move to a gated neighborhood. You need to start spending more money on your security.

You need to get guards on your block. You need to increase your security. You need to start changing your living patterns so that you yourself are not, don't face a crime wave. I'll skip some of the many stories I could say, but recognize this as your primary priority. If you do not have economic opportunities where you live, recognize that this is going to be a primary thing.

And so you want to make sure that you're never put in a situation of being an illegal immigrant. And so cultivate the economic opportunities that you have, and then cultivate some more for your children in other places. This is one of those things why I did my international stuff.

Looking at a country that seems to be unraveling at the seams, optimistically, I hope that we can pull it together. I hope it's just a temporary time of difficulty, but I don't live my life on hope. Hopium is dumb. I live my life on plans, and so make some backup plans for other places that can be gone to, et cetera.

And recognize, don't ever allow yourself to be in a situation which you can't feed your family. About half of the audience, when I said a few minutes ago that, you know, if I were from Haiti, I would absolutely go to the United States as an illegal immigrant, you probably sucked your breath in.

"Joshua, I thought he was a conservative guy. Why wouldn't he obey the rule of law?" Are you telling me that you would obey a stupid law saying where you can and can't go if your children are dying of starvation? I mean, most of us would become thieves, only a tiny percentage of us.

I would love to think, I would hope that I'm in that percentage, but I'm not that confident in my own ability to not even be a thief. We would steal to feed our children, let alone some imaginary lion on sand saying you can or can't work. First of all, I have no moral repercussions about it.

I encourage illegal immigrants in the United States to work without any fear of failure, because what's the alternative to work? Stealing? You're going to force a man to be a thief because you won't let him work? Who would ever grant a government the right to say that you can or cannot work?

I'm somehow supposed to not be able to work to feed myself and feed my family? I'm not going to go out into the marketplace and voluntarily negotiate with people for wages for a day's labor so that I can have food and a place to live and a safe place to be at night out of the cold?

That's an insane law, and immoral laws should be disrespected and disobeyed because they are immoral. And so immigration restrictions on a man's right to work, etc., should be disobeyed by all people because they're immoral. You don't have the right to tell a man that he can't work. That's like the flip side of the immorality of slavery.

You neither have the right to steal a man's labor from him by enslaving him, nor do you have the right to steal a man's ability to labor by passing a law saying that he can't work. Both of those are immoral, and they're wrong. A man has the right to go out into the world, make a voluntary free exchange with someone of labor for income in whatever form it takes.

Now, the government can make it difficult, and they can pass, you know, do that stuff. But my point is that put yourself in that situation. If those are your convictions, you say, "No, I would obey the law, and I wouldn't go where it's illegal for me to go." Put yourself in that situation.

Do you really mean to say that you would not work if your family were in need, if you were suffering violence where you're from? Of course you would. And then the third thing is just recognize how a country can change. The country of the United States today is not the country of my birth, and so your country also can change.

If you're listening to me from France, there's a good chance that you look around and say, "The nation of my birth is not the nation of today." And change is going to happen. I prefer to embrace it. I want to embrace it, but I also want to recognize that sometimes change can get out of hand, and it may not go in the direction that you want it to go.

And so as a sovereign individual, you owe it to yourself to be prepared to thrive in any kind of circumstance, and that's what you can do. So cede to your physical safety. Live in a safe place. If you're living in a dangerous neighborhood, move. If you're living in a dangerous city, move.

If you're living in a place where you don't have economic opportunity, move. Because at the end of the day, it's this kind of physical movement really is one of the few things that governments ever listen to, and that's what's happening in the immigration scenario. So I would assume that I've said enough in this show to find some area of agreement with you and some area of disagreement with you.

And I think that this show probably still, if it's not too much personal finance in this particular episode, at least we can reclaim the moniker of radical, at least in some of these things. I fully acknowledge that these are interesting philosophical discussions. I don't have any practical application of any of this other than what I have ended the show with.

I can't tell you how to vote. I don't want to vote for Republicans or Democrats. I understand if you vote for a likely Republican candidate, Donald Trump, I understand. I get you. You don't have to defend it to me. If you vote for a likely Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, I understand.

You don't have to defend it to me. If you vote for someone else or you don't vote at all, I understand. I don't have any kind of practical Democratic outworking of this for reasons that are probably obvious at this point in time. I can't tell you any way that I see this resolving.

Someone else's crystal ball may work better than mine, but to me, these things are just too far removed to see much change. And while people can change on some things, I only see it happening kind of if there's a philosophical imperative. And as I see it, most people are stuck on the horns of a dilemma caused by their own philosophy.

So the Republicans – I don't need to go into politics. You get it. But the point is, we're on the horns of a dilemma, and we can't – these things are irreconcilable. And so my best guess of the future is that basically we muddle along until we see something happen.

So my guess is that no political change is really going to happen on immigration, but I think the flow of immigrants is going to dry up. The world of Latin America just probably doesn't have that many young people to contribute anymore. And anybody who wants to immigrate to the United States using this cross-border crossing is probably there by now, or at least is on the way.

And so that process of flying from Uganda to Brazil and then walking and bussing your way up, that's a multi-month process, but it's not a two-year process. And so I don't expect an enormous horde of immigrants to continue. I think that what you're seeing right now is whatever was pent-up demand caused by various issues, and it's probably about at its limit.

And so I would expect – and it's just my best guess. We'll put it here in public so I can come back and check on this in five or ten years. But my best guess is that it'll probably just die down. Maybe it'll be a political movement for a while, but there's not going to be any significant resolution.

The U.S. Congress basically seems incapable of legislating anymore, even on important issues where they should be legislating. And so gridlock it is. And as Gary North himself was fond to say, "Highlight gridlock, because at least they don't get in my way." I don't think it's always good, but unfortunately that's the situation.

And people will continue to be upset about things, and then probably 15 years from now, most of this will have kind of slid into the dustbin of history, kind of like duck and cover and Russian spies and all the propaganda of the past as well. That'd be my best guess on what happens.

In the meantime, you got to see to yourself, you got to see to your family, and you got to make good decisions so that you don't wind up in a vulnerable situation. I would just simply say, I guess what I would prefer to share my heart on in a closing manner is this.

Laws that exist do not need to affect your personal actions. And I would beg you, if there are immigrants near you, especially illegal immigrants, especially recent illegal immigrants, please help them. These men, primarily men, some women, but these people face enormous difficulties in life. You have no concept of the world in which these men live.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently who worked in an airport, and he was telling me about the African guys who work at a lot of the airports across the United States. And he didn't have much money, had to fly recently, and he said to me in passing he had to go sleep in the airport before an early morning flight.

He said, "Well, I just went and found all the African guys and laid down with them." And basically, as he told me the story from his experience, is that you have all these guys from Africa, at least the ones around him, all these guys come over from Africa. They get a job working at the airport.

Usually they get two jobs on two different shifts, so an early morning shift with one restaurant and a late afternoon shift with another. They live at the airport. At night, generally speaking, they don't go home because they don't really have a home. They're here by themselves. Their family is back home.

And they work these two jobs, and they go and they sleep in the airport every night and then go to work. And then when they have a day off, there's usually one apartment that somebody has rented that's basically the apartment. And they go to the apartment, they lay down a sleeping bag, and sleep next to whoever happens to be off that day.

And you have 30 guys who will sleep at that apartment when there is a day off. And I just want you to imagine you living that lifestyle. I want you to imagine yourself being that guy. Imagine you've got a wife and children at home. You've moved across the world.

You're working a fairly low-paying wage. Thankfully, it's decent financial planning for those guys in the sense that they've basically limited every expense except food. They wind up spending an enormous amount of money on food because they have to buy all their food from the airport concessions, which is high-priced, and then generally unhealthy, which of course creates health issues.

But other than that, they've limited all their other expenses. So, they can send significant amounts of money home to support their wife and their children with the dream of being reunited with them someday. But just imagine you're living that lifestyle. Imagine that you're working two eight-hour jobs, working 16 hours a day, and that you sleep on an airport floor, on an airport bench in a little corner back in the middle of nowhere at night.

What would you give for somebody to come along and give you an encouraging word? What would you give to be invited to someone's, you know, Thanksgiving dinner? What would you give for someone to help you to connect with the culture that you're living in but not really living in?

What would you give for a friend? What would you give for someone to invite you to church? What would you give to make a difference in someone's lives? The fact that someone has crossed a border does not make anyone less human, any more than the fact that someone has stolen a loaf of bread makes them less deserving of care and consideration.

Go back and I would say read, but it's a hard book to read. Watch Les Mis by Victor Hugo for one of the ultimate wrestlings with this. Go and read Count of Monte Cristo, my favorite novel. Go and deal with these situations, and don't harden your heart to people just because you think, "Well, that guy doesn't deserve my love and attention because he doesn't speak my language," etc.

I would assume that there's probably, I don't know, who knows, maybe there's 50 terrorists who have come into the United States. There probably are. I don't have any idea. But every single immigrant that I have interacted with personally on a personal basis in the United States has been the kind of man that I would be proud to have as my neighbor, and I think you would too.

Don't let language barriers stand in your way. Learn Spanish and go and practice it on immigrants. Learn Somali if you're in Minnesota, and go and get to know your Somalian neighbors. These people who are immigrants to the United States are abused, broadly speaking, by society because of their second-class status, and you have the opportunity to change that.

And it's actually really fun. A number of years ago, my wife and I hosted, we have some friends who are Nigerian immigrants to the United States, and we hosted them for Thanksgiving dinner, and it was super fun because here we are as the born-and-bred Americans making Thanksgiving dinner. Nigerians don't have a clue about Thanksgiving dinner.

They don't know anything about it. And I've got, I think it was three Nigerian families. I've got 16, something like 15 or 16 Nigerians all packed into this little apartment. We hosted it at our friend's apartment. So you've got Joshua and his wife and family. We're the only white people in the place.

Every other one of them is longing for their, I forget what they call it, their traditional bean dish. I forget the name that they use for it. But they're longing for their own food while I'm carving the turkey and showing them the mashed potatoes and the gravy and everything.

And it's just so fun to share that stuff. And these are the experiences that you're missing out on if you don't go and engage with your neighbors. I know I'm preaching at you, but I beg you that go and engage. And this is one of the things I have an enormous bone to pick with my generally Republican and conservative groups from which I primarily issue.

It's that it's amazing to me how opposed many Republicans are to Latin American immigrants is that most of these people are the exact kinds of people that you say that you want in your country. For example, what kind of man gets up, travels for months with nothing, sleeping on the street corner to go to a place that he can go and get a job?

What kind of man braves the terrors of the Darien Gap? I have spent a lot of time talking with immigrants who have walked through the Darien Gap. I've spent a lot of time feeding people who are sleeping on the street. You want these people as your neighbors because they are men and women who are determined to build a better future.

That's why they're going through this hell of leaving their families and going elsewhere. In addition, a huge percentage of them are extremely Christian, extremely conservative. If they're not Christian, they're at least broadly religious, which is a much easier place to start than people who don't care. And they're coming to you.

They're coming to be your neighbor, to be your co-worker, to sit in your church pew with you, etc. And I just beg you, you don't have to solve any of these political issues. As I see it, they're insoluble. But you do have a responsibility to love your neighbor and to work with them.

Now, love of neighbor primarily starts with those closest to you. Only a fool would say that you owe the same duty of care to an unknown guy on the other side of the world as you do for your own son in your home or your literal next-door neighbor. Obviously, there's a variation.

But if God privileges you and brings a community of immigrants across your path, go and get involved and help them, hire them into your company, help them get established, have some language courses, invite them to your church, etc. And what you'll find is that there's an energy and there's an enthusiasm there that you're missing in your daily life.

I love immigrants to the United States because they get rich like four times faster than Americans do. They work harder. They get rich faster, etc. And this is basically a self-selection bias. It's not, in my opinion, that there's anything fundamentally different about somebody from one country or another. But it's the fact that the people who are coming are coming because they want something different.

They want something better. That's the only reason you leave your family. That's the only reason that you leave your community. That's the only reason you leave what you know to go to something unknown. It's because you want something better. And this is probably going to turn out to be a huge competitive advantage for the United States in years to come.

If we can get over some of the social instability, if we can make sure that we lock up all the criminals and deal with them in a strong way and get rid of them, then it's going to be an enormous benefit because it's going to bring youthful enthusiasm. And in all the previous waves of immigration to the United States, you've seen the same cycle play out again and again and again.

So this is a personal plea to you is get involved wherever you have opportunity. Get to know your neighbors. Welcome them to the country. Make friends with them. Invite them to Thanksgiving dinner. It's super fun. You're going to enjoy it. And you'll have an opportunity to affect the future of someone's family in a really powerful way.

Thank you for listening. I appreciate it. I'll be back with more distinctly personal finance content very soon.