In this compelling episode, Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies joins us for the second installment of our four-part series on legal and illegal immigration. As a nationally recognized expert, Mark dives deep into the complexities of U.S. immigration policy, exploring its impact on American workers, housing affordability, public safety, and the economy. From the controversial Optional Practical Training (OPT) program to the effects of mass immigration under the Biden administration, this discussion uncovers critical insights you won’t find in mainstream narratives.
We also tackle hot topics like E-Verify, sanctuary cities, and refugee resettlement—plus, Mark shares his bold take on why current policies might be doing more harm than good. Whether you’re a student researching immigration or just curious about how these issues affect everyday life, this episode is packed with data-driven analysis and thought-provoking perspectives.
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Don’t miss Part 1 of this series, and subscribe for Parts 3 and 4!
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Immigration Policy and Expertise 02:52 Mark Krikorian's Journey into Immigration Advocacy 05:29 The Role of Immigration Policy in Protecting American Interests 08:03 Impact of Immigration on Job Creation and American Workers 10:50 E-Verify and Employment Practices 15:38 The Optional Practical Training (OPT) Program 17:35 Legal Immigration Statistics and Trends 23:08 The Economic Impact of Immigration on American Workers 24:34 Housing Affordability and Immigration 26:26 Understanding American Immigration Policy 28:31 Sanctuary Cities and Public Safety 32:58 The Rights of Citizens vs. Non-Citizens 34:19 Controversial Perspectives on Immigration 40:36 The Morality of Refugee Resettlement
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:53):
Hey, babe, how are you doing?
Doing great.
We've got another great show and another guest, the second part of our four part series onlegal and illegal immigration.
So we'd like to introduce everyone to Mark Krikorian of the Center for ImmigrationStudies.
Thanks for joining us, Mark.
(01:13):
I'm glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Yes, absolutely.
So you're obviously a nationally recognized expert on immigration.
You've committed your career to immigration and immigration policy.
tell us a little bit about that and how you got into it and some of your successes alongthe way.
Well, I don't know.
I think like most people, I just kind of dumbed into it.
(01:34):
I mean, I sort of fell backward into this.
was a, after graduate school, I got a master's degree in international relations.
Instead of getting a job, I was able to go to, I'm Armenian, and so they had a deal to goto Soviet Armenia as a student.
This was back in the mid-80s.
The Soviet Union was still around.
So I spent a couple of years doing that.
(01:55):
Came back.
And kind of what got me into the issue was not immigration initially, but bilingualeducation, bilingualism, that kind of thing.
I grew up speaking Armenian as a kid.
My parents, I was born here, my parents were born here, but they spoke English to eachother, Armenian to us.
And, you know, I learned English in kindergarten, just like anybody, any other kid,regardless of where they're from or anything else.
(02:19):
so it always kind of annoyed me to have bilingual education in school.
thought it was bad for...
immigrant kids bad for the country.
So I went to a group called US English.
I don't even know if it's still around anymore, but they were like an official Englishgroup.
I said, hi, I have no skills whatsoever, but I can speak English.
So what's the story?
They said, well, we don't have any openings, but there's this place upstairs that works onimmigration that we heard they're looking for a newsletter editor.
(02:46):
This is back when they had, you know, physical paper newsletters.
That was a group that dealt with immigration.
wasn't CIS, but
Anyway, so that's how I got the bug.
And so I've been doing this ever since.
He's the second person.
We've interviewed two people and he's the second one.
It was like, I just kind of fell into it.
kind of made it my life's work, so we try to look at things from all angles.
(03:07):
So how do you respond to critics who say that the Center for Immigration Studies focusdownplays the personal stories of immigration?
And, I think we're going to get into this a little bit more I think your philosophies I'veread is that,
we're taking talent and treasure away from other countries when we have, we take the bestand brightest from every country to have them immigrate here.
(03:33):
Well, the general point about, do we focus on, the personal stories of immigrants?
Does that get lost in kind of a cold-blooded analysis of numbers and statistics and stuff?
And I'd say there's a saying in, I think it's economics, but a lot of social sciences,they say the plural of anecdote is not data.
(03:57):
In other words, individual stories don't necessarily tell you anything, except in a senseit's not really true because anecdotes do add up to data as long as you look at a
representative sample of different stories.
See, that's the thing.
And when people say, you need to consider these individual stories, they're talking aboutcurated specific stories usually selected by immigration lawyers.
(04:25):
and seized by reporters to send a particular message rather than look at the broad exampleof personal stories, both of immigrants, some of their stories are successful, some
aren't, but also of Americans who are affected by immigration and their personal storiesand kind of put all of that together.
(04:45):
And in a sense, that's sort of what we try to do rather than just focus on a handful ofsob stories that the New York Times
want you to talk about.
So how can immigration policy protect American interests?
Well, in a sense, the whole purpose of immigration law is protecting Americans.
(05:08):
In other words, that's why you have it.
Otherwise, I don't know, why not just let anybody move here?
The basic, the first point is who are we protecting?
does the, do Americans, the people in America, the territory of America, warrantprotection more than other places?
(05:29):
And obviously the government of the United States, the whole reason it exists, and I readthis in the Constitution right at the beginning there, so I'm pretty sure this is right,
we the people formed the Constitution in order to protect American interests, Americanwelfare, American jobs, American physical security.
(05:51):
And so immigration does that in a whole bunch of ways.
By setting limits on the number of people who move here,
we prevent American workers from having to compete with every other worker everywhere inthe world on an equal basis.
And that's just not right.
Conditions are different everywhere.
(06:12):
Our cats are at home.
They're not in the office.
They're afraid.
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
He will sleep until he hears my voice and then it's like, okay.
The limits on immigration also protect our social safety net.
And in a modern society, whether you're conservative or liberal or middle of the road,nobody's getting rid of our social safety net.
(06:34):
Some people want it to be tighter, looser, different rules.
All of that's true.
All of that's a legitimate debate.
It's not going anywhere, And as Milton Friedman said, you can't have open immigration in awelfare state.
And so if we're going to tax ourselves to help our fellow citizens, we need to limit who'scoming in and has access to that.
(06:57):
And then finally, physical security, because most people everywhere in the world are justnormal people.
But there's plenty of bad guys.
We've got seven billion people outside the United States.
don't have to, 0.01 % of them still is a whole lot of bad guys.
And so,
The point of immigration is to keep out criminals, keep out terrorist threats, all of thatstuff.
(07:21):
And so again, it functions as a kind of almost like the skin on your body is designed tobe sort of a membrane to protect you.
It doesn't mean nothing gets through, obviously, but it is a kind of protection andimmigration's law, immigration policy serves the same function.
Excellent.
I'm so impressed with your website that I'm getting ready for this.
(07:46):
I spent hours and I learned things, but it's just so there's overwhelming informationthere.
If you're a college student and you want to write a paper on immigration policy, yourwebsite's the place to go.
CIS.org, don't forget, I always plug it, CIS.org.
CIS.org, we'll make sure we put it in our show notes and let people know, because therereally is a wealth of information there.
(08:11):
But I found that you highlight costs.
How do you argue with immigration, job creation, and particularly for low skilled Americanworkers, how does immigration impact
job creation and the impact on American workers.
(08:31):
Immigration, like any policy, creates costs.
It creates benefits.
There are winners.
There are losers.
The thing is that the losers are disproportionately Americans at the bottom of the jobmarket.
In other words, if you're, say, upper middle class, your family, you know, your familyincome is a quarter million a year, something like this,
(08:57):
immigrants probably aren't competing with you all that much and at the same time,immigration probably means that you have an easier time hiring a cheap landscaping
service.
And maybe if you have a cleaning lady or something, it's cheaper than if there was noimmigration.
So some people benefit, but the flip side of that is that people who are in less demand inthe labor market lose out.
(09:22):
Because what immigration does is it loosens the labor market.
In other words, it has more people chasing jobs.
obviously, immigration, the presence of immigrants creates more jobs itself.
There's no question about that.
Nonetheless, it loosens the labor market and creates a situation where instead ofemployers having to hustle to find workers, the opposite happens.
(09:47):
where workers have to hustle to find jobs.
And government policy is going to do one or the other of those two things.
And so, and obviously there needs to be some balance.
You don't want to make it too hard to find workers.
But in a country of a third of a billion people spans an entire continent.
I'm not too worried about getting so far out of balance.
(10:11):
need to start letting more people in.
What I'm worried about is kind of
around the 50 yard line, if you will, where's the balance?
Does policy mean that employers have to hustle to find workers by offering more money ordifferent benefits, or they have to look for workers in places they wouldn't have looked,
that kind of thing?
Or does immigration policy mean there's more workers chasing jobs and they have to kind ofhustle to find the jobs?
(10:38):
I think it's responsible to
Again, around the 50 yard line make it a little bit harder for employers to find workersso they have to go out of their way and offer more money and all of that.
that's kind
like that, I like that analogy because one of our largest employers here in Sarasota is awindow maker, window manufacturing.
(10:59):
As you can imagine with hurricanes that that's a very lucrative business here.
But they've had to do things like provide onsite daycare, onsite healthcare, onsite, theyhave...
everybody, nearly everybody in that company goes to the company doctor because they cankeep them on site and it makes it more efficient.
(11:21):
The kids are there, the doctor's there, and those are quality of life issues that ifemployers have to keep employees happy versus, like you said, the other way around, you
end up with these additional benefits.
And it's even more than just benefits.
That's clearly part of it.
But it depends on the situation.
But think about workers themselves.
(11:43):
Which workers have a better chance of getting hired at all?
If you're an ex-con, look, the odds are 50-50 you're a dirtbag and are going to end upback in jail.
But what about the other 50?
You know what I mean?
In other words, it's a lot easier for them to get a hearing from some employer if there'snobody else.
(12:03):
that they can hire.
Let's say there's a American kid with Down syndrome, not very serious.
He can work, but he needs a little bit of oversight and management and handling.
And you're the manager of the Walmart and you want to hire somebody to go and get theshopping carts from the parking lot.
You could hire that kid or you could hire the adult immigrant who doesn't need anyhandholding, doesn't need any real supervision.
(12:29):
Who are you going to hire?
The manager of that Walmart is not a bad guy for hiring that immigrant.
Congress is the problem because they created the situation that they put that manager in.
Or even just to give a last example, say you're a single mom.
Your kid gets home from work at 3 PM.
You need to be home at 3 PM.
But you're applying for a job that says you need to be there till 5 PM.
(12:50):
If there's five other people in the waiting room applying for that job,
Employers gonna say look, you know, I'd love to hire you but I just can't and it's the jobis till five o'clock Sorry, if there's nobody else in the waiting room applying for that
job in managers like okay crap Oh, I'll I'll cover the last two hours.
You're hired.
You know what I mean?
In other words it empowers people with them with the least power economically in oursociety and that should be a goal that we as Americans want to achieve for our fellow
(13:22):
citizens
So how does it work now that, because I mean, throughout my career history, you've alwaysneeded a social security number in order to work.
So how do they get around that?
Well, mean, legal immigrants on behalf of Social Security numbers, I mean, illegalimmigrants, they borrow, steal or make up Social Security number information, ID
(13:43):
information in general.
There are people who are brokers who sell fake numbers or sell real numbers they havestolen from some kid in Puerto Rico, And so then you become that kid's name, but he's four
years old and you're not.
So anyway, there's all kinds of ways to do this and then obviously your employers who arejust hiring people for cash and are breaking the law so but Most illegal immigrants
(14:07):
believe it or not work on the books they have a fake or stolen or borrowed social securitynumber and that's why a System that DHS runs called e verify Just like it sounds it
electronically verifies your information so that when somebody
When a company hires you, they then have to submit the payroll information, know, socialsecurity, IRS.
(14:33):
Well, they then go to a site, e-Verify site, and they put in the name, number, and date ofbirth.
And if they're real and they match, you get a green light back.
And if they're not, you don't.
And the problem is, it's voluntary.
So only about half of new hires go through this system.
It's one of the most important objectives.
It's not a silver bullet, but it's
(14:54):
probably the lowest hanging fruit in immigration enforcement is to make that a standardpart of the hiring process, just like submitting the payroll information to Social
Security.
Well, while we're on, go ahead.
No, I was just curious as to why is it voluntary?
because neither the left nor the corporate right wants it to be mandatory.
(15:16):
The folks on the left oppose immigration enforcement and they think that anybody who wantsto move here should move here.
And then corporate, the sort of lobbyist folks on the right want their clients to be ableto hire anybody they want.
So there's always been this resistance.
Now in Florida even, Governor DeSantis twice now has tried to make it
(15:38):
mandatory for all hiring, which states can do on their own as a condition of getting abusiness license.
The Supreme Court has ruled that.
In both cases, Republicans in the legislature fought him and he got something, but hedidn't get, in other words, it's now mandatory for certain employers, but it's not
universal for everybody.
And it's not because the Democrats stopped him, although I assume they worked with thebusiness lobbyists, but it's mainly because Republicans in his own legislature stopped.
(16:07):
So this is one of those, this is just another indication of how immigration isn't reallypurely a right left thing.
It's more like an up down thing.
And you see that in this E-Verified.
I like to say a lot of these issues aren't right or left, they're circular.
It's kind of like, where are you on the circle?
one policy question we're going to ask everyone, then Jennifer has a couple of questions.
(16:32):
But if you could get Congress to wave a magic wand and change one thing and have it becomelaw, what would be your one piece of advice in whether it's legal or illegal immigration?
Like what would be the one law?
thing I picked that actually could happen would be making e-Verify a universal part ofhiring.
(16:57):
Sort of my more blue sky one thing that I would want would be cutting legal immigration inhalf.
Because we take 1.1 million legal immigrants every year.
Nobody intended for this to happen when they changed the immigration law in the mid-60s.
Nobody thought that they were restarting immigration, and yet they did.
(17:17):
And so we've been doing this for 50 years.
We need a breather.
And so that would be, in a sense, that's sort of our longer-term goal here at the center.
But as far as like one 10-word law, something like that, yeah, mandating e-verify for allnew hires.
Okay.
Can you explain the optional practical training and how it impacts the economy and collegegraduates?
(17:42):
Sure, it's optical practical training, it's shorthand is OPT, is one of those phonybaloney statuses I referred to that are supposedly temporary but really aren't.
So it's part of like a procession of statuses.
It's for foreign students.
You come here as a foreign student.
So you don't have, you're not an immigrant, you don't have a green card, you have whatthey call an F1 visa.
(18:04):
And you're, the whole point of it is you're studying somewhere to get a degree.
Well,
The tech companies said, we need to come up with a way of getting more of these people tostay and Congress won't give it to us.
let's come up and the Bush administration first, the second, the George W.
(18:25):
Bush administration is the one they pitched this to.
Let's take this thing, this little bit of wiggle room in the law where after you graduate,
you're permitted to do a little bit of an internship, even though you're finished withyour classes, as long as it's directly related to your studies.
They said, let's turn this into a work visa.
(18:46):
And so that's what it is now.
If you have, if you're a foreign student, you get to stay for a year working anywhere youwant on any kind of job with no tax withholding because you're a student.
And if you were in a tech field, you get to work for a total of
three years in this supposed internship status, which is what OPT is.
(19:09):
And again, not only do you not pay social security taxes, your employer doesn't even haveto pay social security taxes on you because again, you're a student supposedly.
So we are literally subsidizing the employment of new foreign student grads over newAmerican grads.
our graduates at a real disadvantage.
(19:31):
extreme.
It's I mean, it's and again, the employers again over and over again, the employers aren'teven the bad guy here.
Why was this ridiculous system even allowed to exist?
If you're an employer, you kind of have a responsibility to use this abusive and frankly,in my opinion, illegal program because Congress didn't create it even this was done
(19:54):
through regulation and nobody's stopped it.
There have been attempts in the courts.
to stop it.
And the Supreme Court may be taking up a case related to this.
We'll see soon.
So if Donald Trump is doing a lot of executive orders, we won't get into those, but isthis something that he could change with an executive order?
He could have gotten rid of it two months ago and hasn't.
(20:16):
And that's my, that's, you know, there's no reason this should exist.
It's totally made up.
It has no basis in law or it, mean, it's not illegal.
I think it probably is illegal, but it's not, Congress didn't create this.
And so, and the law says a foreign student visa is only for when you're studying for yourdegree.
So I actually would say it is illegal.
(20:37):
The problem is, and the reason the courts haven't struck it down,
is the issue of standing.
This is, you don't want to get into a whole show about that, but you have to show in orderto sue that you have a specific harm that warrants the court taking the case.
And so they call that standing.
And courts have just said, yeah, nobody has standing.
(20:59):
Nobody.
Doesn't matter, it's illegal, but so what?
a US citizen who graduates from college immediately have standing if they, I'm not alawyer, but they're at a disadvantage.
Their resume is going to the bottom of the pile compared to an illegal immigrant.
You would think we haven't gotten there yet, although we're considering trying somethinglike that ourselves, but so far it's failed.
(21:22):
So the guy that was arrested for protesting Hamas, if he was under this, could that begrounds to be like, this is just not working?
certainly.
But he had a green card.
I mean, he was beyond that because when people have this OPT status, they're doing itbecause they want to stay here as long.
(21:45):
They want to stretch out their period of staying here as long as possible.
And they're applying for what's called an H1B visa, which is a whole other show basicallyused by tech companies.
And it's supposedly a temporary visa, but your employer can petition for you, apply foryou to get a green card.
So OPT is like part of this process where people who come in as students want to end upwhere that Columbia guy was, which is with a green card.
(22:15):
So that's a different question.
there is actually very wide authority to revoke somebody's green card and throw them outof the country.
It's not used very often.
And the bar is higher than if you're just a tourist because we've
you have a little more, you know, skin in the game.
But if the state secretary of state says your presence here is, you know, contrary to theforeign policy interests of the United States, they can just yank it because until you
(22:43):
become a citizen, until you raise your hand and say, you know, I, you know, renounce allprevious allegiances and you become a citizen, you're just a guest here, even if you're a
green card holder.
So, going back to OPT, when you said that they don't pay, the worker doesn't pay taxes fora period of up to three years, does that include federal income tax or is that just Social
(23:08):
Security tax?
pay income tax, they don't pay any of the payroll tax.
So that's social security, Medicare, and unemployment.
And again, if they're not going to be collecting, you can see, okay, well, maybe theyshouldn't be paying, but the employer also doesn't have to pay.
And so that's an enormous advantage or disadvantage for Americans trying to compete with.
(23:30):
Wow.
So how does immigration influence the availability and affordability of housing?
the if you've got more people chasing the same number of houses, prices are going to goup.
There's just no way around it.
And obviously, there's always homes being built, too.
(23:51):
But what immigration does, especially if it's very rapid as it is now, is it outstrips theability of the economy to build enough houses for people.
And that makes housing costs go up.
There's just no way around that.
And
when you add on top of that all of the regulations that limit the ability to build houses.
(24:14):
mean, in California, I don't even know if you can build houses any place.
know, you've got to, mean, they've spent a hundred billion dollars or whatever it is on arailroad from one dusty mid valley town to another, and they still haven't connected
Bakersfield to Merced.
And so how they going to build houses?
You know what I mean?
So.
(24:34):
And again, this is all a matter of scale.
If immigration were lower, the sort of the housing market would more easily be able todeal with new arrivals.
under President Biden, you know, the number, net number of immigrants in the country.
And so this includes people who left as well as who came in.
(24:56):
So you add the plus and the minus was more than two million a year on top of
You know, Americans looking for houses, housing construction can't keep up with that.
so housing prices go up.
There's no way around that.
then we've seen this in Australia and Canada and elsewhere.
It's the same phenomenon.
(25:18):
Mass immigration makes it hard for people to afford housing.
newcomers are a lot more likely to be willing to live.
five and six people and eight people to a residence rather than Americans.
And even worse on top of that, what we found pretty, and I've seen this a number of times,local authorities are simply less willing to enforce residency, what do they call it,
(25:44):
occupancy limits if immigrants are involved than if Americans are involved.
In other words, if there's eight Americans, unrelated people living in a house,
local suburban occupancy limit and rules will be enforced against them.
There's eight immigrants sleeping in shifts on beds.
They're like, no, no, they're a protected class.
It would be discriminatory if we enforce the law.
(26:06):
So yeah, there's a whole bunch of ways this is not good, especially for young peopletrying to start out and get a house.
So if you knew that this podcast episode was gonna go out to the entire world, what is onething that you would want everybody to know about immigration?
That's a good question.
(26:27):
It is going out to the entire world, I hope.
I think the first thing to understand about American immigration policy is that it's agovernment policy that can go up and down.
We've had a lot of immigration in the past.
We've had times when we've had very little immigration.
It's not like it's the zero-with amendment to the Constitution that everybody in the worldhas to come here.
(26:53):
tax policy or military policy or anything else that you can turn the dials on.
And my take on this is not that we need zero immigration.
We're never going to have zero.
We never should have zero immigration.
But we need to, we need to breathe it.
We need to take a break after 50 plus years of extremely high immigration.
(27:16):
And we just released a report on the, this is on our
website, but it's up at the top.
So it'll be easy to find that we now have a higher percentage of immigrants in ourpopulation than ever has ever been recorded higher, even than during the Ellis Island
period.
And one of the reasons that big wave of immigration, which created a lot of its ownproblems, but it's worked out was because we stopped it and allowed kind of the country to
(27:45):
sort of digest the millions and millions of people we'd taken in.
We need some kind of pause like that again.
Have you seen any economic data that suggests that things are either better or worse insanctuary cities just from an economic standpoint due to their immigration policies?
Yeah, I don't know that it would be hard even to measure that.
(28:07):
answer is no, I don't think so.
Because not because of sanctuary policies, just how do you separate out that fromeverything else?
You know what I mean?
And how do you separate all the problems they have from everything else?
In other words, yeah, well, that's a complex question that I'm not, I mean, my sense is Idon't even think you could disentangle all those things.
(28:27):
The sanctuary policies have real effects
But the biggest effects they have are on public safety because the whole point of asanctuary policy is to protect criminals, literally by definition.
That's not they say this is protecting our immigrant friends or whatever.
No, the only thing a sanctuary policy does is protect criminals because the whole point ofit is to make sure that people who are arrested for
(28:58):
non-immigration related crimes.
They're driving drunk, selling drugs, beating their girlfriends, whatever it is, that whenthey're processed and Homeland Security now gets that along with the FBI, they get
everybody when you fingerprint somebody that goes to Homeland Security as well as to theFBI.
(29:19):
And if ICE says, hey, this person's illegal or we deported him two years ago and comingback after you've been deported is a felony,
The sanctuary city says, yeah, it's too bad.
We're not handing him over to you.
We're not telling you about him.
We're not telling you when we're going to release him.
They basically don't cooperate because the point of a sanctuary policy is to make surepeople who have been arrested for crimes are able to return to the same communities they
(29:47):
committed the crimes in.
So my point here is that its effects are mainly in related to public safety, I think.
I don't understand what is the benefit for cities to do this.
And I know that Florida, you know, we rolled that out, but what is the benefit?
It's a, it stems from a political belief that even if you're a criminal, excuse me, andyou should, you know, serve whatever sentence you serve.
(30:12):
If, if the prosecutors in your city even want to prosecute you, that when you're, when thecriminal justice system is done with you, you shouldn't have to go back to your home
country.
You should be able to just return to your life as usual because
And the basic kind of premise here is that there's no difference between citizens andnon-citizens, between being legally here and illegally here.
(30:39):
That's what drives the whole idea of sanctuary cities.
And in a sense, arguing to people who believe in that, that there are public safety harms,is kind of irrelevant to them, because they're not doing it for some benefit that they're
going to yield.
They're doing it because they reject the idea.
that American citizens are different from non-citizens, that legal residents are differentfrom illegal residents.
(31:06):
They just don't believe that those distinctions are morally defensible.
I know, yeah, well, I shake my head too, but I've been shaking my head for 30 years, so.
That's one of the things that it always amazes me, you know, the number of people who pushback on social media, who are friends of mine, not just, you know, social media trolls or
(31:27):
anything like that, who happen to be more liberal, really have no sense of what it meansto be an American and that as Americans, we have constitutional rights and people who are
visiting here do not have constitutional rights.
And somehow we've allowed people who are visiting here, whether it's with a green cardstatus or illegal or tourists, that they somehow have the right to come on our soil and
(31:55):
protest our country.
And I can't imagine going to Germany and protesting their country.
I just can't imagine going on a vacation to protest.
And the fact that people who are here as guests
feel like they have that right is baffling to me and that Americans are supporting thatand have no idea that we, that's what makes us American is that we are, we have this thing
(32:23):
called the constitution that applies to us and us only.
Yeah, I mean that's...
Yeah.
about it.
That's why they feel they have the right.
Sure, I mean, I had a boss who once said, teach people how to treat you, and we'reteaching people to conduct themselves in this way.
And it really does get to the core problem or the core disagreement maybe in immigrationpolicy is, does everyone in the world have the right to move here or not?
(32:49):
And I posed the question that way, and it's like, well, that sounds like a stupidquestion.
Obviously not.
And yet, that is the basis of the sort of at
ground level, the disagreement over immigration because much of the left and thelibertarian right thinks that everyone in the world has a right to move here with certain
(33:09):
exceptions we make for terrorists and criminals.
Whereas everyone else in the world believes that no one has a right to move here, but weextend with exceptions certain people.
In other words, is it a right or is it a privilege?
And immigration clearly is a privilege that the American people extend to you.
much of our policy is driven by people who either consciously or maybe even they've neverreally thought about it think immigration is a right rather than a privilege.
(33:37):
And that's really kind of the issue that you need to kind of force people to confrontbefore you get to issues of is OPT a good idea or what have you.
You know what I mean?
If we have no right to say no to somebody coming to our border, then everything, all therest of it's irrelevant.
That's a great, that'll make a great clip, So you've authored a couple of books andthey're not without controversy.
(34:08):
I guess, when you've written books, what did you write that became controversial that youmaybe didn't expect or that caught you off guard that it was so controversial?
Well, I don't know.
think it was, I fully expected it to be controversial and it was.
mean, the book I wrote in, wait, it's old now and I got to think about maybe doing a newversion of it.
(34:30):
But it's the new case against immigration, both legal and illegal.
And the, it was kind of, the one thing that did surprise me was that it was controversialenough inside Penguin that when my editor left to have a baby and didn't come back, they
pulled the plug on the book and even the Kindle you can't get now.
I mean, they have hard copies you can get, anyway, I'm not bitter.
the point I tried to make in there, and this is something that think is still a kind ofbasic unified field theory, if you will, of immigration limits, is that people often will
(35:05):
be concerned about immigration.
They'll say, you know, the effect on the job market or effect on welfare, effect onsecurity, or assimilation.
The argument I made in the book is that they're all the same thing.
It's like blind men touching different parts of an elephant, you know, the saying and theythink they have different things.
Somebody grabs the tail and says, this is a broom.
know, somebody bumps into the leg and they say it's a tree.
(35:26):
It's all the same elephant.
Immigration's the same thing.
All of the things we're concerned about stem from the fact that mass immigration is notcompatible with the goals and characteristics of a modern society.
in a way that was less true 100 or 200 years ago.
We have a post-industrial knowledge-based economy.
We have a welfare state we didn't have in the past.
(35:49):
The world has shrunk because of transportation and communications, and that's good in awhole bunch of ways, but it also makes assimilation and security functions of assimilation
of immigration more difficult.
So the point here is it's all one thing.
And I kind of
It was pretty, I guess it'd be pretty controversial.
I wish more people were outraged and would start arguing about it because I think it isactually at the base of a lot of what we're talking about.
(36:15):
It's not controversial enough.
That's my problem.
I've argued in my sub stack of the same name reasonable arguments that the liberals havekind of hurt themselves on things like gun control because of their immigration policy,
because more Americans now realize that they have to protect themselves.
And so there's these adverse impacts of their super liberal policies, you know, that haveimpacted that are making
(36:43):
American saying, Hey, listen, I don't really think I need 30 rounds in a rifle, but mygosh, I need a rifle.
And so, and even the most liberal people who are like, Hey, I don't need 30 rounds.
Now I argue that you need 30 rounds because, you know, people say you don't need a weaponof war.
I say, well, you don't need a weapon of war until the war is in your driveway.
(37:04):
And, and so, that's a whole different topic, but I think there's some, some, impacts.
of this mass immigration that Biden especially implemented that are really going to turnliberals on their head on many other issues, affordable housing or some.
I'm not asking you to get into the gun issue.
You're more economics and things like that.
(37:26):
But I was just kind of pointing out that none of this happens in a vacuum.
Yeah, I don't have 30 round mags for my AR or for my 9 millimeter, I'm afraid.
But I mean, I've never had to use either one except at the range.
So I'm OK so far.
to take your point, I'd actually say that it's Biden's immigration policy that got peopleto think about immigration policy as well.
(37:50):
In other words, it's not even so much the knock on effects.
It's that four years of Biden essentially not
enforcing or refusing to enforce much of the immigration law has actually hardened opinionabout immigration in general.
It basically shown the public, look, this is, it's kind of like proof of concept for openborders.
(38:11):
It's like, here you are.
They gave it their trial run.
What do you think?
Well, what people thought was, my God, let's elect Donald Trump again and have him comeback.
So in a sense,
I don't want to get into debate about the last 2020 election or anything, but he lost.
Look, he lost.
But it's good he lost, in my opinion, because there's a Russian, Lenin used to say, theworse, the better.
(38:34):
In other words, things have to get really bad before you can make progress on some issues.
And I think Biden's unbelievably bad immigration policies were
actually kind of necessary to get to move the issue forward.
I wish it weren't that way, but it is.
I think it's ironic that people get so upset about, you know, the dismantling of USAID andthings like that, but yet there's 300,000 kids that are missing that nobody even talks
(39:03):
about.
I think that it's just amazing the hypocrisy of it all.
and frankly, most of those kids are probably just with their illegal alien parents and theparents don't want to answer a phone call from DHS, you know what I mean?
But some of them aren't.
And if this was under Trump, there were 300,000 kids that Health and Human Servicescouldn't find.
You'd be hearing about it every day, everywhere.
(39:24):
The New York Times would be issuing multiple issues every day just so could cover thefront page with stories about it.
And yet under Biden, it was like, ho hum, we don't care.
So Mark, let our listeners know about your podcast and what it's all about.
We have a weekly podcast called Parsing Immigration Policy, like parsing a sentence, youknow, in grammar class.
(39:46):
Probably, I mean, I'm not sure my staff thinks it's the greatest name, but I came up withit, and so that's what we have.
But I mean, we do it every week.
have, often it's our staff talking about one of the issues, but we also have a number ofguests.
We've had congressmen, senators, and what have you on it.
It's in all the usual podcast places or it's on our website, cis.org.
(40:10):
I think it's pretty, you know, it's 30 to 40 minutes.
We don't overwhelm you.
I try not to be too wonky.
But if you want to know what's going on with immigration, I highly recommend it.
And we don't sell mattresses or anything during the podcast.
There's no ads.
There's no nothing.
(40:31):
Well, what did we miss that you would like to finish up with?
I don't know, you were talking about something, whether I got controversy on it.
think refugee resettlement maybe is something.
I mean, it's a specific issue, but I wrote a piece arguing that refugee resettlement isimmoral, is morally wrong, because it costs 12 times more to resettle a refugee than it
(40:57):
does to take care of him back where he is.
So what we're doing,
is let's say there's 11 people floundering in the water instead of throwing each of them alife vest, which isn't great, but at least you won't drown.
We sent a yacht to pick one of them up and leave the rest of them there.
There's no excuse for refugee resettlement.
It's pure virtue signaling.
And so if I wanted to provoke people, that's sort of what I try to lead with.
(41:21):
Refugee resettlement except in emergency cases.
And there are some of those, but there's not very many.
is morally wrong and that really sort of gets the go to a lot of the people who areinvolved.
when you explain it, just seems apparent.
It just seems like that's common sense.
It sure is, but it's hard to get, like much of the immigration debate, it's hard to getpeople to the point of actually listening to what you're saying sometimes because they're
(41:49):
thinking about grandma from Minsk or something they saw on TV, poor kid drowned orwhatever, and that just stops.
It's like a force field goes up and they don't hear anything else.
So that's the challenge we've been always deal with in immigration.
Excellent.
So is there another one?
(42:09):
I don't know.
no, I could be you.
The only thing I would say is that for people who have a taste for snark and sarcasm, I'mon Twitter at Mark S as in Stephen, Mark S.
Krikoria.
And it's spelled X, it's, yeah, it's spelled X, but it's pronounced Twitter.
So least that's the way I pronounce it.
(42:32):
So remember Mark.
going to steal that one.
That one I'm going to steal.
Mark S.
Precori and a lot of it's on immigration, but I tweet on anything that pops into my head.
That's wonderful.
Jennifer, do you have anything else?
All right, well, we'll have a little outro and then if you'll hang out with us for just aminute.
(42:53):
Happy to do it.
Thank you, Mark.
Hey, babe, how are you doing?
Doing great.
We've got another great show and another guest, the second part of our four part series onlegal and illegal immigration.
So we'd like to introduce everyone to Mark Krikorian of the Center for ImmigrationStudies.
Thanks for joining us, Mark.
(01:13):
I'm glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Yes, absolutely.
So you're obviously a nationally recognized expert on immigration.
You've committed your career to immigration and immigration policy.
tell us a little bit about that and how you got into it and some of your successes alongthe way.
Well, I don't know.
I think like most people, I just kind of dumbed into it.
(01:34):
I mean, I sort of fell backward into this.
was a, after graduate school, I got a master's degree in international relations.
Instead of getting a job, I was able to go to, I'm Armenian, and so they had a deal to goto Soviet Armenia as a student.
This was back in the mid-80s.
The Soviet Union was still around.
So I spent a couple of years doing that.
(01:55):
Came back.
And kind of what got me into the issue was not immigration initially, but bilingualeducation, bilingualism, that kind of thing.
I grew up speaking Armenian as a kid.
My parents, I was born here, my parents were born here, but they spoke English to eachother, Armenian to us.
And, you know, I learned English in kindergarten, just like anybody, any other kid,regardless of where they're from or anything else.
(02:19):
so it always kind of annoyed me to have bilingual education in school.
thought it was bad for...
immigrant kids bad for the country.
So I went to a group called US English.
I don't even know if it's still around anymore, but they were like an official Englishgroup.
I said, hi, I have no skills whatsoever, but I can speak English.
So what's the story?
They said, well, we don't have any openings, but there's this place upstairs that works onimmigration that we heard they're looking for a newsletter editor.
(02:46):
This is back when they had, you know, physical paper newsletters.
That was a group that dealt with immigration.
wasn't CIS, but
Anyway, so that's how I got the bug.
And so I've been doing this ever since.
He's the second person.
We've interviewed two people and he's the second one.
It was like, I just kind of fell into it.
kind of made it my life's work, so we try to look at things from all angles.
(03:07):
So how do you respond to critics who say that the Center for Immigration Studies focusdownplays the personal stories of immigration?
And, I think we're going to get into this a little bit more I think your philosophies I'veread is that,
we're taking talent and treasure away from other countries when we have, we take the bestand brightest from every country to have them immigrate here.
(03:33):
Well, the general point about, do we focus on, the personal stories of immigrants?
Does that get lost in kind of a cold-blooded analysis of numbers and statistics and stuff?
And I'd say there's a saying in, I think it's economics, but a lot of social sciences,they say the plural of anecdote is not data.
(03:57):
In other words, individual stories don't necessarily tell you anything, except in a senseit's not really true because anecdotes do add up to data as long as you look at a
representative sample of different stories.
See, that's the thing.
And when people say, you need to consider these individual stories, they're talking aboutcurated specific stories usually selected by immigration lawyers.
(04:25):
and seized by reporters to send a particular message rather than look at the broad exampleof personal stories, both of immigrants, some of their stories are successful, some
aren't, but also of Americans who are affected by immigration and their personal storiesand kind of put all of that together.
(04:45):
And in a sense, that's sort of what we try to do rather than just focus on a handful ofsob stories that the New York Times
want you to talk about.
So how can immigration policy protect American interests?
Well, in a sense, the whole purpose of immigration law is protecting Americans.
(05:08):
In other words, that's why you have it.
Otherwise, I don't know, why not just let anybody move here?
The basic, the first point is who are we protecting?
does the, do Americans, the people in America, the territory of America, warrantprotection more than other places?
(05:29):
And obviously the government of the United States, the whole reason it exists, and I readthis in the Constitution right at the beginning there, so I'm pretty sure this is right,
we the people formed the Constitution in order to protect American interests, Americanwelfare, American jobs, American physical security.
(05:51):
And so immigration does that in a whole bunch of ways.
By setting limits on the number of people who move here,
we prevent American workers from having to compete with every other worker everywhere inthe world on an equal basis.
And that's just not right.
Conditions are different everywhere.
(06:12):
Our cats are at home.
They're not in the office.
They're afraid.
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
He will sleep until he hears my voice and then it's like, okay.
The limits on immigration also protect our social safety net.
And in a modern society, whether you're conservative or liberal or middle of the road,nobody's getting rid of our social safety net.
(06:34):
Some people want it to be tighter, looser, different rules.
All of that's true.
All of that's a legitimate debate.
It's not going anywhere, And as Milton Friedman said, you can't have open immigration in awelfare state.
And so if we're going to tax ourselves to help our fellow citizens, we need to limit who'scoming in and has access to that.
(06:57):
And then finally, physical security, because most people everywhere in the world are justnormal people.
But there's plenty of bad guys.
We've got seven billion people outside the United States.
don't have to, 0.01 % of them still is a whole lot of bad guys.
And so,
The point of immigration is to keep out criminals, keep out terrorist threats, all of thatstuff.
(07:21):
And so again, it functions as a kind of almost like the skin on your body is designed tobe sort of a membrane to protect you.
It doesn't mean nothing gets through, obviously, but it is a kind of protection andimmigration's law, immigration policy serves the same function.
Excellent.
I'm so impressed with your website that I'm getting ready for this.
(07:46):
I spent hours and I learned things, but it's just so there's overwhelming informationthere.
If you're a college student and you want to write a paper on immigration policy, yourwebsite's the place to go.
CIS.org, don't forget, I always plug it, CIS.org.
CIS.org, we'll make sure we put it in our show notes and let people know, because therereally is a wealth of information there.
(08:11):
But I found that you highlight costs.
How do you argue with immigration, job creation, and particularly for low skilled Americanworkers, how does immigration impact
job creation and the impact on American workers.
(08:31):
Immigration, like any policy, creates costs.
It creates benefits.
There are winners.
There are losers.
The thing is that the losers are disproportionately Americans at the bottom of the jobmarket.
In other words, if you're, say, upper middle class, your family, you know, your familyincome is a quarter million a year, something like this,
(08:57):
immigrants probably aren't competing with you all that much and at the same time,immigration probably means that you have an easier time hiring a cheap landscaping
service.
And maybe if you have a cleaning lady or something, it's cheaper than if there was noimmigration.
So some people benefit, but the flip side of that is that people who are in less demand inthe labor market lose out.
(09:22):
Because what immigration does is it loosens the labor market.
In other words, it has more people chasing jobs.
obviously, immigration, the presence of immigrants creates more jobs itself.
There's no question about that.
Nonetheless, it loosens the labor market and creates a situation where instead ofemployers having to hustle to find workers, the opposite happens.
(09:47):
where workers have to hustle to find jobs.
And government policy is going to do one or the other of those two things.
And so, and obviously there needs to be some balance.
You don't want to make it too hard to find workers.
But in a country of a third of a billion people spans an entire continent.
I'm not too worried about getting so far out of balance.
(10:11):
need to start letting more people in.
What I'm worried about is kind of
around the 50 yard line, if you will, where's the balance?
Does policy mean that employers have to hustle to find workers by offering more money ordifferent benefits, or they have to look for workers in places they wouldn't have looked,
that kind of thing?
Or does immigration policy mean there's more workers chasing jobs and they have to kind ofhustle to find the jobs?
(10:38):
I think it's responsible to
Again, around the 50 yard line make it a little bit harder for employers to find workersso they have to go out of their way and offer more money and all of that.
that's kind
like that, I like that analogy because one of our largest employers here in Sarasota is awindow maker, window manufacturing.
(10:59):
As you can imagine with hurricanes that that's a very lucrative business here.
But they've had to do things like provide onsite daycare, onsite healthcare, onsite, theyhave...
everybody, nearly everybody in that company goes to the company doctor because they cankeep them on site and it makes it more efficient.
(11:21):
The kids are there, the doctor's there, and those are quality of life issues that ifemployers have to keep employees happy versus, like you said, the other way around, you
end up with these additional benefits.
And it's even more than just benefits.
That's clearly part of it.
But it depends on the situation.
But think about workers themselves.
(11:43):
Which workers have a better chance of getting hired at all?
If you're an ex-con, look, the odds are 50-50 you're a dirtbag and are going to end upback in jail.
But what about the other 50?
You know what I mean?
In other words, it's a lot easier for them to get a hearing from some employer if there'snobody else.
(12:03):
that they can hire.
Let's say there's a American kid with Down syndrome, not very serious.
He can work, but he needs a little bit of oversight and management and handling.
And you're the manager of the Walmart and you want to hire somebody to go and get theshopping carts from the parking lot.
You could hire that kid or you could hire the adult immigrant who doesn't need anyhandholding, doesn't need any real supervision.
(12:29):
Who are you going to hire?
The manager of that Walmart is not a bad guy for hiring that immigrant.
Congress is the problem because they created the situation that they put that manager in.
Or even just to give a last example, say you're a single mom.
Your kid gets home from work at 3 PM.
You need to be home at 3 PM.
But you're applying for a job that says you need to be there till 5 PM.
(12:50):
If there's five other people in the waiting room applying for that job,
Employers gonna say look, you know, I'd love to hire you but I just can't and it's the jobis till five o'clock Sorry, if there's nobody else in the waiting room applying for that
job in managers like okay crap Oh, I'll I'll cover the last two hours.
You're hired.
You know what I mean?
In other words it empowers people with them with the least power economically in oursociety and that should be a goal that we as Americans want to achieve for our fellow
(13:22):
citizens
So how does it work now that, because I mean, throughout my career history, you've alwaysneeded a social security number in order to work.
So how do they get around that?
Well, mean, legal immigrants on behalf of Social Security numbers, I mean, illegalimmigrants, they borrow, steal or make up Social Security number information, ID
(13:43):
information in general.
There are people who are brokers who sell fake numbers or sell real numbers they havestolen from some kid in Puerto Rico, And so then you become that kid's name, but he's four
years old and you're not.
So anyway, there's all kinds of ways to do this and then obviously your employers who arejust hiring people for cash and are breaking the law so but Most illegal immigrants
(14:07):
believe it or not work on the books they have a fake or stolen or borrowed social securitynumber and that's why a System that DHS runs called e verify Just like it sounds it
electronically verifies your information so that when somebody
When a company hires you, they then have to submit the payroll information, know, socialsecurity, IRS.
(14:33):
Well, they then go to a site, e-Verify site, and they put in the name, number, and date ofbirth.
And if they're real and they match, you get a green light back.
And if they're not, you don't.
And the problem is, it's voluntary.
So only about half of new hires go through this system.
It's one of the most important objectives.
It's not a silver bullet, but it's
(14:54):
probably the lowest hanging fruit in immigration enforcement is to make that a standardpart of the hiring process, just like submitting the payroll information to Social
Security.
Well, while we're on, go ahead.
No, I was just curious as to why is it voluntary?
because neither the left nor the corporate right wants it to be mandatory.
(15:16):
The folks on the left oppose immigration enforcement and they think that anybody who wantsto move here should move here.
And then corporate, the sort of lobbyist folks on the right want their clients to be ableto hire anybody they want.
So there's always been this resistance.
Now in Florida even, Governor DeSantis twice now has tried to make it
(15:38):
mandatory for all hiring, which states can do on their own as a condition of getting abusiness license.
The Supreme Court has ruled that.
In both cases, Republicans in the legislature fought him and he got something, but hedidn't get, in other words, it's now mandatory for certain employers, but it's not
universal for everybody.
And it's not because the Democrats stopped him, although I assume they worked with thebusiness lobbyists, but it's mainly because Republicans in his own legislature stopped.
(16:07):
So this is one of those, this is just another indication of how immigration isn't reallypurely a right left thing.
It's more like an up down thing.
And you see that in this E-Verified.
I like to say a lot of these issues aren't right or left, they're circular.
It's kind of like, where are you on the circle?
one policy question we're going to ask everyone, then Jennifer has a couple of questions.
(16:32):
But if you could get Congress to wave a magic wand and change one thing and have it becomelaw, what would be your one piece of advice in whether it's legal or illegal immigration?
Like what would be the one law?
thing I picked that actually could happen would be making e-Verify a universal part ofhiring.
(16:57):
Sort of my more blue sky one thing that I would want would be cutting legal immigration inhalf.
Because we take 1.1 million legal immigrants every year.
Nobody intended for this to happen when they changed the immigration law in the mid-60s.
Nobody thought that they were restarting immigration, and yet they did.
(17:17):
And so we've been doing this for 50 years.
We need a breather.
And so that would be, in a sense, that's sort of our longer-term goal here at the center.
But as far as like one 10-word law, something like that, yeah, mandating e-verify for allnew hires.
Okay.
Can you explain the optional practical training and how it impacts the economy and collegegraduates?
(17:42):
Sure, it's optical practical training, it's shorthand is OPT, is one of those phonybaloney statuses I referred to that are supposedly temporary but really aren't.
So it's part of like a procession of statuses.
It's for foreign students.
You come here as a foreign student.
So you don't have, you're not an immigrant, you don't have a green card, you have whatthey call an F1 visa.
(18:04):
And you're, the whole point of it is you're studying somewhere to get a degree.
Well,
The tech companies said, we need to come up with a way of getting more of these people tostay and Congress won't give it to us.
let's come up and the Bush administration first, the second, the George W.
(18:25):
Bush administration is the one they pitched this to.
Let's take this thing, this little bit of wiggle room in the law where after you graduate,
you're permitted to do a little bit of an internship, even though you're finished withyour classes, as long as it's directly related to your studies.
They said, let's turn this into a work visa.
(18:46):
And so that's what it is now.
If you have, if you're a foreign student, you get to stay for a year working anywhere youwant on any kind of job with no tax withholding because you're a student.
And if you were in a tech field, you get to work for a total of
three years in this supposed internship status, which is what OPT is.
(19:09):
And again, not only do you not pay social security taxes, your employer doesn't even haveto pay social security taxes on you because again, you're a student supposedly.
So we are literally subsidizing the employment of new foreign student grads over newAmerican grads.
our graduates at a real disadvantage.
(19:31):
extreme.
It's I mean, it's and again, the employers again over and over again, the employers aren'teven the bad guy here.
Why was this ridiculous system even allowed to exist?
If you're an employer, you kind of have a responsibility to use this abusive and frankly,in my opinion, illegal program because Congress didn't create it even this was done
(19:54):
through regulation and nobody's stopped it.
There have been attempts in the courts.
to stop it.
And the Supreme Court may be taking up a case related to this.
We'll see soon.
So if Donald Trump is doing a lot of executive orders, we won't get into those, but isthis something that he could change with an executive order?
He could have gotten rid of it two months ago and hasn't.
(20:16):
And that's my, that's, you know, there's no reason this should exist.
It's totally made up.
It has no basis in law or it, mean, it's not illegal.
I think it probably is illegal, but it's not, Congress didn't create this.
And so, and the law says a foreign student visa is only for when you're studying for yourdegree.
So I actually would say it is illegal.
(20:37):
The problem is, and the reason the courts haven't struck it down,
is the issue of standing.
This is, you don't want to get into a whole show about that, but you have to show in orderto sue that you have a specific harm that warrants the court taking the case.
And so they call that standing.
And courts have just said, yeah, nobody has standing.
(20:59):
Nobody.
Doesn't matter, it's illegal, but so what?
a US citizen who graduates from college immediately have standing if they, I'm not alawyer, but they're at a disadvantage.
Their resume is going to the bottom of the pile compared to an illegal immigrant.
You would think we haven't gotten there yet, although we're considering trying somethinglike that ourselves, but so far it's failed.
(21:22):
So the guy that was arrested for protesting Hamas, if he was under this, could that begrounds to be like, this is just not working?
certainly.
But he had a green card.
I mean, he was beyond that because when people have this OPT status, they're doing itbecause they want to stay here as long.
(21:45):
They want to stretch out their period of staying here as long as possible.
And they're applying for what's called an H1B visa, which is a whole other show basicallyused by tech companies.
And it's supposedly a temporary visa, but your employer can petition for you, apply foryou to get a green card.
So OPT is like part of this process where people who come in as students want to end upwhere that Columbia guy was, which is with a green card.
(22:15):
So that's a different question.
there is actually very wide authority to revoke somebody's green card and throw them outof the country.
It's not used very often.
And the bar is higher than if you're just a tourist because we've
you have a little more, you know, skin in the game.
But if the state secretary of state says your presence here is, you know, contrary to theforeign policy interests of the United States, they can just yank it because until you
(22:43):
become a citizen, until you raise your hand and say, you know, I, you know, renounce allprevious allegiances and you become a citizen, you're just a guest here, even if you're a
green card holder.
So, going back to OPT, when you said that they don't pay, the worker doesn't pay taxes fora period of up to three years, does that include federal income tax or is that just Social
(23:08):
Security tax?
pay income tax, they don't pay any of the payroll tax.
So that's social security, Medicare, and unemployment.
And again, if they're not going to be collecting, you can see, okay, well, maybe theyshouldn't be paying, but the employer also doesn't have to pay.
And so that's an enormous advantage or disadvantage for Americans trying to compete with.
(23:30):
Wow.
So how does immigration influence the availability and affordability of housing?
the if you've got more people chasing the same number of houses, prices are going to goup.
There's just no way around it.
And obviously, there's always homes being built, too.
(23:51):
But what immigration does, especially if it's very rapid as it is now, is it outstrips theability of the economy to build enough houses for people.
And that makes housing costs go up.
There's just no way around that.
And
when you add on top of that all of the regulations that limit the ability to build houses.
(24:14):
mean, in California, I don't even know if you can build houses any place.
know, you've got to, mean, they've spent a hundred billion dollars or whatever it is on arailroad from one dusty mid valley town to another, and they still haven't connected
Bakersfield to Merced.
And so how they going to build houses?
You know what I mean?
So.
(24:34):
And again, this is all a matter of scale.
If immigration were lower, the sort of the housing market would more easily be able todeal with new arrivals.
under President Biden, you know, the number, net number of immigrants in the country.
And so this includes people who left as well as who came in.
(24:56):
So you add the plus and the minus was more than two million a year on top of
You know, Americans looking for houses, housing construction can't keep up with that.
so housing prices go up.
There's no way around that.
then we've seen this in Australia and Canada and elsewhere.
It's the same phenomenon.
(25:18):
Mass immigration makes it hard for people to afford housing.
newcomers are a lot more likely to be willing to live.
five and six people and eight people to a residence rather than Americans.
And even worse on top of that, what we found pretty, and I've seen this a number of times,local authorities are simply less willing to enforce residency, what do they call it,
(25:44):
occupancy limits if immigrants are involved than if Americans are involved.
In other words, if there's eight Americans, unrelated people living in a house,
local suburban occupancy limit and rules will be enforced against them.
There's eight immigrants sleeping in shifts on beds.
They're like, no, no, they're a protected class.
It would be discriminatory if we enforce the law.
(26:06):
So yeah, there's a whole bunch of ways this is not good, especially for young peopletrying to start out and get a house.
So if you knew that this podcast episode was gonna go out to the entire world, what is onething that you would want everybody to know about immigration?
That's a good question.
(26:27):
It is going out to the entire world, I hope.
I think the first thing to understand about American immigration policy is that it's agovernment policy that can go up and down.
We've had a lot of immigration in the past.
We've had times when we've had very little immigration.
It's not like it's the zero-with amendment to the Constitution that everybody in the worldhas to come here.
(26:53):
tax policy or military policy or anything else that you can turn the dials on.
And my take on this is not that we need zero immigration.
We're never going to have zero.
We never should have zero immigration.
But we need to, we need to breathe it.
We need to take a break after 50 plus years of extremely high immigration.
(27:16):
And we just released a report on the, this is on our
website, but it's up at the top.
So it'll be easy to find that we now have a higher percentage of immigrants in ourpopulation than ever has ever been recorded higher, even than during the Ellis Island
period.
And one of the reasons that big wave of immigration, which created a lot of its ownproblems, but it's worked out was because we stopped it and allowed kind of the country to
(27:45):
sort of digest the millions and millions of people we'd taken in.
We need some kind of pause like that again.
Have you seen any economic data that suggests that things are either better or worse insanctuary cities just from an economic standpoint due to their immigration policies?
Yeah, I don't know that it would be hard even to measure that.
(28:07):
answer is no, I don't think so.
Because not because of sanctuary policies, just how do you separate out that fromeverything else?
You know what I mean?
And how do you separate all the problems they have from everything else?
In other words, yeah, well, that's a complex question that I'm not, I mean, my sense is Idon't even think you could disentangle all those things.
(28:27):
The sanctuary policies have real effects
But the biggest effects they have are on public safety because the whole point of asanctuary policy is to protect criminals, literally by definition.
That's not they say this is protecting our immigrant friends or whatever.
No, the only thing a sanctuary policy does is protect criminals because the whole point ofit is to make sure that people who are arrested for
(28:58):
non-immigration related crimes.
They're driving drunk, selling drugs, beating their girlfriends, whatever it is, that whenthey're processed and Homeland Security now gets that along with the FBI, they get
everybody when you fingerprint somebody that goes to Homeland Security as well as to theFBI.
(29:19):
And if ICE says, hey, this person's illegal or we deported him two years ago and comingback after you've been deported is a felony,
The sanctuary city says, yeah, it's too bad.
We're not handing him over to you.
We're not telling you about him.
We're not telling you when we're going to release him.
They basically don't cooperate because the point of a sanctuary policy is to make surepeople who have been arrested for crimes are able to return to the same communities they
(29:47):
committed the crimes in.
So my point here is that its effects are mainly in related to public safety, I think.
I don't understand what is the benefit for cities to do this.
And I know that Florida, you know, we rolled that out, but what is the benefit?
It's a, it stems from a political belief that even if you're a criminal, excuse me, andyou should, you know, serve whatever sentence you serve.
(30:12):
If, if the prosecutors in your city even want to prosecute you, that when you're, when thecriminal justice system is done with you, you shouldn't have to go back to your home
country.
You should be able to just return to your life as usual because
And the basic kind of premise here is that there's no difference between citizens andnon-citizens, between being legally here and illegally here.
(30:39):
That's what drives the whole idea of sanctuary cities.
And in a sense, arguing to people who believe in that, that there are public safety harms,is kind of irrelevant to them, because they're not doing it for some benefit that they're
going to yield.
They're doing it because they reject the idea.
that American citizens are different from non-citizens, that legal residents are differentfrom illegal residents.
(31:06):
They just don't believe that those distinctions are morally defensible.
I know, yeah, well, I shake my head too, but I've been shaking my head for 30 years, so.
That's one of the things that it always amazes me, you know, the number of people who pushback on social media, who are friends of mine, not just, you know, social media trolls or
(31:27):
anything like that, who happen to be more liberal, really have no sense of what it meansto be an American and that as Americans, we have constitutional rights and people who are
visiting here do not have constitutional rights.
And somehow we've allowed people who are visiting here, whether it's with a green cardstatus or illegal or tourists, that they somehow have the right to come on our soil and
(31:55):
protest our country.
And I can't imagine going to Germany and protesting their country.
I just can't imagine going on a vacation to protest.
And the fact that people who are here as guests
feel like they have that right is baffling to me and that Americans are supporting thatand have no idea that we, that's what makes us American is that we are, we have this thing
(32:23):
called the constitution that applies to us and us only.
Yeah, I mean that's...
Yeah.
about it.
That's why they feel they have the right.
Sure, I mean, I had a boss who once said, teach people how to treat you, and we'reteaching people to conduct themselves in this way.
And it really does get to the core problem or the core disagreement maybe in immigrationpolicy is, does everyone in the world have the right to move here or not?
(32:49):
And I posed the question that way, and it's like, well, that sounds like a stupidquestion.
Obviously not.
And yet, that is the basis of the sort of at
ground level, the disagreement over immigration because much of the left and thelibertarian right thinks that everyone in the world has a right to move here with certain
(33:09):
exceptions we make for terrorists and criminals.
Whereas everyone else in the world believes that no one has a right to move here, but weextend with exceptions certain people.
In other words, is it a right or is it a privilege?
And immigration clearly is a privilege that the American people extend to you.
much of our policy is driven by people who either consciously or maybe even they've neverreally thought about it think immigration is a right rather than a privilege.
(33:37):
And that's really kind of the issue that you need to kind of force people to confrontbefore you get to issues of is OPT a good idea or what have you.
You know what I mean?
If we have no right to say no to somebody coming to our border, then everything, all therest of it's irrelevant.
That's a great, that'll make a great clip, So you've authored a couple of books andthey're not without controversy.
(34:08):
I guess, when you've written books, what did you write that became controversial that youmaybe didn't expect or that caught you off guard that it was so controversial?
Well, I don't know.
think it was, I fully expected it to be controversial and it was.
mean, the book I wrote in, wait, it's old now and I got to think about maybe doing a newversion of it.
(34:30):
But it's the new case against immigration, both legal and illegal.
And the, it was kind of, the one thing that did surprise me was that it was controversialenough inside Penguin that when my editor left to have a baby and didn't come back, they
pulled the plug on the book and even the Kindle you can't get now.
I mean, they have hard copies you can get, anyway, I'm not bitter.
the point I tried to make in there, and this is something that think is still a kind ofbasic unified field theory, if you will, of immigration limits, is that people often will
(35:05):
be concerned about immigration.
They'll say, you know, the effect on the job market or effect on welfare, effect onsecurity, or assimilation.
The argument I made in the book is that they're all the same thing.
It's like blind men touching different parts of an elephant, you know, the saying and theythink they have different things.
Somebody grabs the tail and says, this is a broom.
know, somebody bumps into the leg and they say it's a tree.
(35:26):
It's all the same elephant.
Immigration's the same thing.
All of the things we're concerned about stem from the fact that mass immigration is notcompatible with the goals and characteristics of a modern society.
in a way that was less true 100 or 200 years ago.
We have a post-industrial knowledge-based economy.
We have a welfare state we didn't have in the past.
(35:49):
The world has shrunk because of transportation and communications, and that's good in awhole bunch of ways, but it also makes assimilation and security functions of assimilation
of immigration more difficult.
So the point here is it's all one thing.
And I kind of
It was pretty, I guess it'd be pretty controversial.
I wish more people were outraged and would start arguing about it because I think it isactually at the base of a lot of what we're talking about.
(36:15):
It's not controversial enough.
That's my problem.
I've argued in my sub stack of the same name reasonable arguments that the liberals havekind of hurt themselves on things like gun control because of their immigration policy,
because more Americans now realize that they have to protect themselves.
And so there's these adverse impacts of their super liberal policies, you know, that haveimpacted that are making
(36:43):
American saying, Hey, listen, I don't really think I need 30 rounds in a rifle, but mygosh, I need a rifle.
And so, and even the most liberal people who are like, Hey, I don't need 30 rounds.
Now I argue that you need 30 rounds because, you know, people say you don't need a weaponof war.
I say, well, you don't need a weapon of war until the war is in your driveway.
(37:04):
And, and so, that's a whole different topic, but I think there's some, some, impacts.
of this mass immigration that Biden especially implemented that are really going to turnliberals on their head on many other issues, affordable housing or some.
I'm not asking you to get into the gun issue.
You're more economics and things like that.
(37:26):
But I was just kind of pointing out that none of this happens in a vacuum.
Yeah, I don't have 30 round mags for my AR or for my 9 millimeter, I'm afraid.
But I mean, I've never had to use either one except at the range.
So I'm OK so far.
to take your point, I'd actually say that it's Biden's immigration policy that got peopleto think about immigration policy as well.
(37:50):
In other words, it's not even so much the knock on effects.
It's that four years of Biden essentially not
enforcing or refusing to enforce much of the immigration law has actually hardened opinionabout immigration in general.
It basically shown the public, look, this is, it's kind of like proof of concept for openborders.
(38:11):
It's like, here you are.
They gave it their trial run.
What do you think?
Well, what people thought was, my God, let's elect Donald Trump again and have him comeback.
So in a sense,
I don't want to get into debate about the last 2020 election or anything, but he lost.
Look, he lost.
But it's good he lost, in my opinion, because there's a Russian, Lenin used to say, theworse, the better.
(38:34):
In other words, things have to get really bad before you can make progress on some issues.
And I think Biden's unbelievably bad immigration policies were
actually kind of necessary to get to move the issue forward.
I wish it weren't that way, but it is.
I think it's ironic that people get so upset about, you know, the dismantling of USAID andthings like that, but yet there's 300,000 kids that are missing that nobody even talks
(39:03):
about.
I think that it's just amazing the hypocrisy of it all.
and frankly, most of those kids are probably just with their illegal alien parents and theparents don't want to answer a phone call from DHS, you know what I mean?
But some of them aren't.
And if this was under Trump, there were 300,000 kids that Health and Human Servicescouldn't find.
You'd be hearing about it every day, everywhere.
(39:24):
The New York Times would be issuing multiple issues every day just so could cover thefront page with stories about it.
And yet under Biden, it was like, ho hum, we don't care.
So Mark, let our listeners know about your podcast and what it's all about.
We have a weekly podcast called Parsing Immigration Policy, like parsing a sentence, youknow, in grammar class.
(39:46):
Probably, I mean, I'm not sure my staff thinks it's the greatest name, but I came up withit, and so that's what we have.
But I mean, we do it every week.
have, often it's our staff talking about one of the issues, but we also have a number ofguests.
We've had congressmen, senators, and what have you on it.
It's in all the usual podcast places or it's on our website, cis.org.
(40:10):
I think it's pretty, you know, it's 30 to 40 minutes.
We don't overwhelm you.
I try not to be too wonky.
But if you want to know what's going on with immigration, I highly recommend it.
And we don't sell mattresses or anything during the podcast.
There's no ads.
There's no nothing.
(40:31):
Well, what did we miss that you would like to finish up with?
I don't know, you were talking about something, whether I got controversy on it.
think refugee resettlement maybe is something.
I mean, it's a specific issue, but I wrote a piece arguing that refugee resettlement isimmoral, is morally wrong, because it costs 12 times more to resettle a refugee than it
(40:57):
does to take care of him back where he is.
So what we're doing,
is let's say there's 11 people floundering in the water instead of throwing each of them alife vest, which isn't great, but at least you won't drown.
We sent a yacht to pick one of them up and leave the rest of them there.
There's no excuse for refugee resettlement.
It's pure virtue signaling.
And so if I wanted to provoke people, that's sort of what I try to lead with.
(41:21):
Refugee resettlement except in emergency cases.
And there are some of those, but there's not very many.
is morally wrong and that really sort of gets the go to a lot of the people who areinvolved.
when you explain it, just seems apparent.
It just seems like that's common sense.
It sure is, but it's hard to get, like much of the immigration debate, it's hard to getpeople to the point of actually listening to what you're saying sometimes because they're
(41:49):
thinking about grandma from Minsk or something they saw on TV, poor kid drowned orwhatever, and that just stops.
It's like a force field goes up and they don't hear anything else.
So that's the challenge we've been always deal with in immigration.
Excellent.
So is there another one?
(42:09):
I don't know.
no, I could be you.
The only thing I would say is that for people who have a taste for snark and sarcasm, I'mon Twitter at Mark S as in Stephen, Mark S.
Krikoria.
And it's spelled X, it's, yeah, it's spelled X, but it's pronounced Twitter.
So least that's the way I pronounce it.
(42:32):
So remember Mark.
going to steal that one.
That one I'm going to steal.
Mark S.
Precori and a lot of it's on immigration, but I tweet on anything that pops into my head.
That's wonderful.
Jennifer, do you have anything else?
All right, well, we'll have a little outro and then if you'll hang out with us for just aminute.
(42:53):
Happy to do it.
Thank you, Mark.
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