Daniel DiMartino calls balls and strikes on the ongoing, highly partisan debate over immigration, legal and illegal. The border ought to be secure, and asylum limited to those who have a genuine need for it, he argues. But border policy ought always to be bound by law. When it comes to legal immigration, according to DiMartino, we do well to avoid an economics of nostalgia and should welcome the kind of immigration that adds to American life. DiMartino also recalls a recent run-in with the residual cancel culture at Columbia University.

Related Links

Daniel DiMartino on X
Daniel DiMartino, “I’m an Immigrant and I’ve Done the Math. Here’s How to Fix Our Immigration System“

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson and our guest today is Daniel DiMartino. He’s a PhD candidate economics at Columbia University, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Focuses on immigration policy. He’s originally from Venezuela, so he is motivated to address the problems that come from socialism and the way that it distorts the common good or the pursuit of the common good and political freedom.

His work has appeared in Fox News, CNN, USA Today, National Review, The Hill and the New York Post. He’s received fellowships from the Institute of Humane Studies and the Job Creators Network. He’s written on the subject we’ll be discussing today, that is immigration. But before we get to that, Mr. DiMartino, why don’t you tell us about a meeting you had at Columbia University?

Daniel DiMartino:

It’s funny, with everything going on at Columbia, them being on the public eye, because of the issues of both allowing discrimination against Jewish students, them discriminating against Jewish students and them discriminating in admissions against whites and Asians, as the Supreme Court case led to the changes in this affirmative action practices, they chose to call me into a mandatory meeting because I had been reported. I learned later multiple reports over what they allege was discriminatory harassment by me in the campus.

And what that actually meant, I asked them what that was, what was the accusation? They didn’t tell me. They said we needed to meet. We did, and it was all over just posts on X. One of the posts reads, and I can tell you, “God does not teach us that we can change our gender. Period.” How harassing of me to state the truth. That was, by the way, responding to this female pastor that, at the inauguration was lecturing about transgenderism against President Trump and Vice President Vance.

They said that it was excluding to other people to say that the decline of Christianity is because of the rise of secular ideologies like CRT, DEI, and even ethno-nationalism. It was wrong of me to praise Nikki Haley and Mike Pence for opposing gender surgery for minors. Oh, and it was of course also wrong for me to complain that gender-neutral bathrooms don’t have urinals, and therefore men have to wait longer in line. This really practical and normal opinions that I think 90 percent of the population perhaps agrees with me and certainly in the world, and this is what they chose to do.

This is what they do with their new anti-discrimination policy. They go after conservatives. They’re not going after the people who are causing problems on campus, as you would expect, really from these institutions because they have been discriminated against us for decades. And you know what? I think that they chose the wrong time to do that. And so I am not going to silence myself. I told them what I believe, that I stand by what I said. I, by the way, I’m totally open to have said something that I don’t believe in or wrong. And I did tell them that, but after they showed me the allegations, I was like, “I mean, I really have nothing to change. These posts, are my opinion, are perfect.”

James Patterson:

Oh, I’m very sorry to hear you deal with that. We’ve had an interview with Ilya Shapiro at the law school at Georgetown. His book came out detailing how he had made a single post on X that got him in tremendous amounts of trouble.

Daniel DiMartino:

Oh, I know.

James Patterson:

Is this the story now, where there’s a kind of surveillance state on conservatives that managed to find their way into elite institutions and attempt to denigrate them?

Daniel DiMartino:

It is perhaps worse because it is based on anonymous reports. So essentially there is a witch hunt where all the members of the community, even people not affiliated with the university, are allowed to report members of the university for, in this case, what they consider to be hate speech. Right? Because remember, these are people who believe hate speech or whatever they call that is not covered by the First Amendment.

And to be fair, Colombia is a private university, but it is a private university that receives federal funding. And the Trump administration has made it clear rightfully that they need to stop discriminating against conservatives and against Jewish students and of course against racial groups that they discriminated in hiring and admission and they need to stop doing all the DEI stuff that they were doing. And that’s not what Colombia did.

In fact, I know Ilya well, he’s a colleague at MI and he helped me. He was one of the first people I called after I received that email from Colombia, and so he’s been very supportive. And it’s a shame, right? Because if these institutions just let us be, and I even told them to the Colombia staff in this meeting, “I just want to live my life. You just go and live your life. Let us be, we’re not harming anyone.”

James Patterson:

That’s sort of the nature of speech is that it’s different from harm and the attempt to conflate the two has made it so that you can weaponize these policies. But I think you’re right that this policy has kind of already peaked and maybe this is an effort to kind of bring back, or maybe they feel as though they’ve kind of slipped past on this issue or that you wouldn’t say anything. But what is it that you benefited from? I saw that you also reached out to the Fire. Have they been good for you on this?

Daniel DiMartino:

Yeah, they actually sent a preemptive letter even before the meeting to Colombia, because I already knew it was about some X post because I am very mindful of my in-person interactions. I knew it had nothing to do with anything I had done. And I was right indeed after the meeting. It was all about my posts on the social media X, and Fire sent them a letter to tell them to not retaliate against me for my speech. They did tell me in the meeting they were not going to take any disciplinary action. Maybe they’ll retaliate now after my article. I don’t know. And I understand that’s a risk I took by writing that.

But what can they do to me? Expel me? Make the matters worse for them? I’m really tired. I know that this is a phrase you and I don’t like because it’s like a very non-con thing, like that they don’t know what time it is, but Colombia really doesn’t know what time it is. They don’t understand who is in power in the White House and the priorities of the administration when it comes to religious freedom, when it comes to racial discrimination, and when it comes to education. And so the best thing all these institutions can do for themselves is instead of fighting, they just need to stop discriminating against conservatives against people based on their race and uphold law and order. It’s really not that much that we’re asking for.

James Patterson:

And it’s not as though you were addressing yourself directly to a trans person in a classroom in an aggressive or challenging way. Right?

Daniel DiMartino:

Correct.

James Patterson:

This is just opining on X.

Daniel DiMartino:

Correct. I just said that I don’t believe men can become women and women can become men, essentially. And I repeated it in their faces to the staff because it is the truth, and I’m a student, that’s all I am. They said that people could feel afraid of walking on campus because of the opinions I have. And it’s funny to me because what share of the world’s population shares my opinion? Then they need to feel afraid of walking everywhere in the planet Earth because they overwhelming majority of people in the world, perhaps actually even higher shares outside the United States, believe that men cannot become women or vice versa.

It was really all about that issue. And also one post about how I said that facial tattoos should actually mean you should be screened if you’re crossing the border illegally because that could indicate you’re a gang member. And I was talking specifically about the case of a woman who was a child sex trafficker indeed from Venezuela. And I said that you just had to see her to know she was dangerous. And I very much stand by my comments, and anybody who sees her picture of this criminal would agree with me.

James Patterson:

You have experience, being from Venezuela. How many of the people in the room that were on Colombia’s side seemed to have been from Venezuela?

Daniel DiMartino:

That is a good point.

James Patterson:

I don’t know if they quite have the expertise. You do.

Daniel DiMartino:

Yeah, that’s a good point. I just wish they were, these people were normal. It’s like they lived in a parallel world where saying these things is controversial. I almost feel like a joke saying that this is what got me into trouble because it’s a stupid thing to get into trouble for. People should not be getting into trouble for saying that men or women are different and cannot become each other. This has been the truth for thousands of years.

So, well, it is what it is. Let’s see what they do. I hope they don’t do anything. And I hope that the Trump administration addresses, when they’re negotiating with these universities, the fact that conservatives in academia have been discriminated for a long time. And I’ve seen some people post on X that, especially Libertarians, that this is just DEI for conservatives. And I disagree. I disagree because this is not about them telling them that they need to hire conservatives, but universities have imposed DEI statements for hiring, for example. That’s effectively excluding conservatives, but it is by putting racist ideology as a litmus test to hire people.

I don’t think if you receive federal funding, that complies with the Civil Rights Act, right? And if the Democrats like their Civil Rights Act, then they need to uphold these things in private institutions.

Daniel DiMartino:

Then they need to uphold these things in private institutions too. So that’s, on the one hand, the DEI statements. And then the other is it’s also about religion. If you cannot be hired by a university or admitted because you believe men and women are different, then there is no religious freedom in the United States. As simple as that.

Anybody who is on the right, that’s a way to discriminate against people on the right, because that’s a belief that all of us have against people who are pro-life, against so many beliefs. And if they want to be able to do that, either they need to stop receiving federal funding or they need to repeal the Civil Rights Act.

James Patterson:

Very well said. And I hope that justice is done on your behalf rather than this continued star chamber treatment. I thought we were moving past this, but apparently not. I guess we’ll have to see. So let’s move on to the issue of immigration.

There’s been a firestorm this week already in the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador. And Garcia had been here as, I believe, an illegal immigrant, but had received, is it a special status? Right?

Daniel DiMartino:

Yeah, I can explain. So he first was ordered deported.

James Patterson:

Yes.

Daniel DiMartino:

He entered illegally. He remained illegally. Yes, it’s true, he married a US citizen and has US citizen kids. But after 1996, if you entered illegally the country, you cannot fix your status even if you marry an American. Before 1996, you could.

However, so he was arrested in an operation in which other people were arrested. He’s alleged to be an MS-13 gang member, and that’s what was entered in immigration court. There is no definitive proof. I can’t tell you if it’s true or not.

But what I can tell you is that he ended up being granted, this is very curious, ended up being granted something called withholding of removal, which means he should still be deported, but he can’t be deported to El Salvador specifically, but he can be deported 20 other country, because the delegation is that he will be tortured in El Salvador specifically.

But finally, the reason that they allege he could be tortured is because they would believe he’s an MS-13 member. But the law in the US did say that he could not be legally sent to El Salvador. They did send him. That was breaking immigration law. That is true. And the administration admitted it in their court filings.

However, what they’re arguing now, and in El Salvador, after he was sent, he was indeed put in a prison without trial. And he could potentially remain there for the rest of his life without trial too. I will say if he’s indeed an MS-13 member, I have no problem with that. The question is whether he is an MS-13 member.

And if he is, maybe they should do a trial. And if they do a trial in El Salvador, I would feel totally comfortable with him being there. Now, my concern is not as much with him as a person specifically, but more with the principle that the federal government is arguing in court to say that they cannot return him.

They’re saying that because he’s outside the US, not because he’s a non-citizen, the US has no jurisdiction to force him to return. Does that mean that if an American citizen is deported to another country wrongfully, oops, there is nobody who can force the federal government to return him? That is a dangerous precedent to set.

James Patterson:

And the example of MS-13 members and a lot of Venezuelan immigrants, they travel through the Darien Gap, really dangerous on foot traveling, which requires a lot of encounters with other gang or organized crime activities, how representative of the American immigration is that? Or is there another side to American immigration that doesn’t get put on the front page?

Daniel DiMartino:

So this is another problem and it’s a concern that I have with all the reporting that’s been happening by the media on immigration. They’re highlighting a lot of cases that were also happening in the past, but they’re just doing it now because it’s a Trump administration.

And so for example, I am very much sympathetic to the cases where there’s been a mistake. This happened a few weeks ago. They thought the media reported this case of this Lebanese national on an H-1B visa coming back from Lebanon on the airport or from France. And then she was deported and her visa was revoked.

And then everybody immediately said, “Oh, this is Trump. It’s an attack.” Turns out she admitted in the port of entry to the CBP officer, this was not a government, Trump ordered or Stephen Miller. No, this was an individual government employee who was told by this individual that she went to Lebanon to mourn the death of the Hezbollah leader.

That’s what she said. She volunteered the information. And then they took her phone after she said that and they found all the evidence that that was indeed the case. And so they returned her. Wow, common sense for the guy in the airport to return her, it sounds to me.

But it’s a story that was then put in the media to scare legal immigrants. That is not a representative case of what’s happening. So I’m open to mistakes happening and wrong things happening. I just think that a lot of the things the media is reporting are misleading people and we need to get to the truth.

For example, maybe El Salvador should hold a trial for Abrego. And if they held a trial that was fair and open and then they determined that he was an MS-13 member, I feel like most people would be comfortable. But instead we have democratic US senators who are saying, “I’m going to go to El Salvador, I’m going to return him home.”

No, it’s bad optics when the guy you’re standing up for in immigration fight is potentially an MS-13 member. There’s so many good cases that you could stand up for.

James Patterson:

Plus if you’re a sitting US senator, you actually have the opportunity to legislate on these issues and perhaps challenge Trump with that legislation. I know it would be quite an uphill battle for them, but it doesn’t seem as though this is why we elect senators to go to Central American countries on behalf … So we have ambassadors for that.

So the impression that you get from these stories is that immigration is primarily an invasion of violent foreigners and that their attempt to enter the country puts a drain on our law enforcement and our judicial institutions. Is that the right way to look at immigration to the United States?

Daniel DiMartino:

Of course not. And obviously, the average immigrant is very different from all of this. Most immigrants are law-abiding, on average, more than native born Americans. And I can explain why. That doesn’t mean that immigrants commit no crimes or illegal immigrants, all of them should remain. Not at all.

But one under-discussed aspect of why immigrants commit less crimes than natives is because the criminals get deported and they can’t commit crimes again. The native born get released from jail and then they keep committing crimes. So that’s why the immigrant crime rate is lower, because of the good policy of deporting criminals.

And more of them should be deported. Ideally, all of them. But the overwhelming majority of immigrants have never committed a crime, never will. They are, on average, paying much more into taxes than they receiving government benefits, especially legal immigrants, especially young, especially highly educated ones, especially people on H-1B visas.

So I have a lot of research on that. I’m continuing to do research on that. I think, though, that where the Trump administration might be misguided in the immigration approach is, for example, they fired some immigration judges. You need more immigration judges so that you can issue deportation orders.

But they still gave them the DOGE retirement option, and so a bunch of them took it early retirement because they just sent the email to all the employees by mistake. Perhaps they’re not thinking about this long term. This is the problem with doing things too fast and not thinking. So that’s one example of a mistake from the administration in my view.

Also revoking the legal status of people en masse because Biden did it. For example, temporary protected status for Haitians and for Venezuelans, the parole programs, all of those decisions have been stopped by courts.

What had happened was that Biden gave Venezuelans and Haitians who were here before a certain date, legal status temporarily. It had been extended until October 2026. After that date, they could have let it expire. The Trump administration, specifically Secretary Noem, decided to end those things early.

That is the first time in the history of this program that’s ever done. It’s probably illegal, and that’s what a US court found. And now this whole thing is stuck in a legal fight that, in my opinion, is totally unnecessary because they could have just waited until the expiration and let it go and not renewed it, but they chose to do something unprecedented.

Same thing with the parole process. The Republicans in Congress criticized that Biden, to alleviate pressure on the border, allowed Americans to sponsor Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans on their own dime to fly into the US for a two-year legal state period.

And half a million people did this on the Biden administration. Now, all the Cubans end up getting legalized under the Cuban Adjustment Act. Anyway, many of them ended up getting TPS, the Haitians and the Venezuelans.

The Trump administration decided to say, for the people whose two-year period hadn’t expired, we’re going to end it in 10 days. You have 10 days to leave the country.

Daniel DiMartino:

… That in 10 days, you have 10 days to leave the country, when they could have just let the two-year period expire and then them be deportable if they didn’t obtain another legal status. So I think perhaps they’re just trying to push the limits, judicially do things faster, but I think they could have just saved all these legal fights and court losses by simply waiting until things expire on their own.

James Patterson:

So about the Haitian and Venezuelan exceptions that you see here, we have a distinction between people who immigrate to the United States legally and we have a distinction of people who immigrate here illegally, and then there are people who come here for purposes of asylum. A big part of the problem that I know the Trump administration, a lot of Republicans have had is the abuse of the asylum process. How much of the asylum process is really just the result of dysfunction for the other two categories?

Daniel DiMartino:

Well, a lot, but I think the Trump administration in its first months really showed that it is indeed overwhelmingly unnecessary and fraudulent the asylum immigration that the US had under Biden. We just received the March numbers for the border crossings and they’re among the lowest in US history. They kept coming down after the January slump when Trump got inaugurated, it’s still going down. It was only, I think, 7,000 people crossed the border in the entire month. There were some months under Biden that it was over 300,000.

James Patterson:

So words out?

Daniel DiMartino:

So words out. And all of this, by the way, is mostly not because change in border policies, it’s because of rhetoric. That is powerful. And so Trump has been very effective at securing the border because he is Donald Trump. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. Signaling works. Now, my concern lies in that it’s true that Biden might have done, certainly did, many things wrong, letting in people into the country, but those people didn’t do anything wrong if they entered under the legal program that Biden set up, it wouldn’t be fair in my view to punish them or end what they were promised early legally.

When they’re working, they’re not committing crimes, let them go through the legal process, and if they end up getting order deported, then deport them, and if they don’t leave voluntarily. So that’s how I view it, especially because deportation has costs unlike securing the border, this signaling that Trump did has been free. Yes, some things have changed at the border better, they’re rebuilding the wall, continuing what Biden had stopped, that’s all good, not as costly, but each costs at least $50,000.

So the question that you need to ask yourself when you’re going to deport someone, especially somebody who was allowed in legally in the first place, even if you think it was wrong, is it worth it 50,000 plus or even perhaps over $100,000 to go through the deportation process of this person, or does this person contribute more to society than what they receive? Are they in a migrant shelter in New York City receiving free housing and free healthcare and free food? If so, get rid of them. You can’t allow the world to come to your country and then turn yourself into the welfare of the world. So that’s how I view this decision making should be.

James Patterson:

Do immigrants take American jobs?

Daniel DiMartino:

I would say that’s, no, not in general at all. I think that there are economic effects on the labor market by immigrants, but they don’t express themselves in employment but in wages. That is a very important distinction. When there was a huge influx of women into the labor market, that did not steal jobs from men. When you have a baby, does more fertility mean that the current people lose their jobs? Therefore, we should have no children. What an excellent extinction strategy. But we will have all the jobs, there’ll still be 300 million jobs even if we have 200 million people. That makes no sense.

So we will be working each one and a half jobs. We’ll just work more hours. This has no sense when you take it to its extreme, which shows you that it’s a false premise. But what does happen is that if there is a sudden influx in the labor supply, of course in a specific profession and sector and location there will be a decrease in wages, but in that specific profession, and that will lead to actually an increase in wages for everyone else. There are benefits and costs. For example, if I told you, James, that America is going to create this new visa program for one million new Uber drivers that will come to America, what do you think is going to happen to the price of Uber rides?

James Patterson:

I don’t know. Go down?

Daniel DiMartino:

It’s going to go down. It’s going to go down massively. Now, who does that harm? The current Uber drivers, but who does it benefit?

James Patterson:

Consumers,

Daniel DiMartino:

Everyone else who is not an Uber driver. So that’s how immigration affects the labor market. So if all the immigrants coming look a lot like the people already here, there’s really no effect on the wages. And if the immigrants are very low skilled, they will harm the low skilled Americans and benefit the high skilled ones. But on the contrary, if immigration is very highly skilled, meaning physicians, engineers, doctors, or people with PhDs in STEM, that will benefit poor Americans who don’t compete. A construction worker isn’t competing with a physician for jobs. They’re in a different labor market. Somebody in California is generally not competing with someone in Maine. So all of these things are connected. It’s like trade and other things, there is redistribution of some sorts, which is why I’m so supportive of high skilled immigration because it benefits the poorest Americans the most.

James Patterson:

Growing up in Houston, it didn’t occur to me as a kid but it now makes sense that a lot of my Nigerian friends were high skilled immigrants that worked in petroleum and those were some serious kids, they were extremely academically competitive and went off to really great schools. But a large number of immigrants, many of them illegals, seemed to work in what we would consider unskilled. The work is actually very skilled when it comes to doing things on farming and construction. Are these immigrants displacing of the American worker, or is there something about the compensation in those fields that makes it so that American citizens don’t want to do them?

Daniel DiMartino:

Okay, so there is another distinction here, especially on the low skilled end, so that all the listeners understand, I don’t mean to diminish skills or anything like that that different professions have.

James Patterson:

I didn’t mean to apply that either. I’m sorry.

Daniel DiMartino:

I usually use this term because it’s the common term used in the immigration literature in economics especially, but really I’m talking about high income versus low income migration, high education versus low education migration, but really talking about income, because Mark Zuckerberg is a college dropout, but you wouldn’t consider him to be a low skilled immigrant. But this is why it’s really not necessarily about education, even though education on average does predict earnings. So there are some industries that it’s not that the wages would go up if fewer immigrants were working, it’s that they would disappear, because you could make it abroad. Those are the industry’s in tradable goods.

If you suddenly have fewer Uber drivers or construction workers or, say, hairdressers, you still need haircuts, you still need to construct, you still need restaurants, you still need all these services that are localized, the cost will just go up. But for farming, for example, or for manufacturing washing machines, if the wages go up beyond a certain level, it will simply become cheaper to farm corn in Mexico than in the United States. So if you don’t allow guest workers for farms, the farms will simply go broke, they’re not going to hire Americans because they will need to pay 50 bucks an hour for people to move to the middle of a farm to work there, and the farms simply would find it cheaper to make it in another country and then bring it here.

And I guess some people will tell you, “Well, then we need to put tariffs on the imports so that they don’t move abroad,” but then you’re just going to increase the cost of things and decrease our quality of life. If there is a finite number of people, you can’t say that we’re just going to make more things in America if you don’t have more people. It’s simply like that. Unless you believe in massive automation and you can create some sort of technology, and maybe that works, but that’s not going to give jobs to Americans who didn’t go to college. Automation is going to benefit more Americans who did go to college and other highly educated people.

So you do need some immigration in the low skilled end as long, in my opinion, as its guest workers, meaning they return so that they don’t collect welfare benefits ever, because that’s the problem really with low skilled immigration in general is that they stay, then they get social security and Medicare, and they end up receiving more benefits than they paid in taxes. But legal guest workers on, for example, the agricultural visa, the H-2A, they go back to Mexico and Central America where most of them are from, and they come seasonally and they never collect any dime of taxpayer dollars, so it’s amazing.

James Patterson:

The vision that I think a lot of people have of America, its golden age, is in a period when there was still a fair amount of manufacturing, maybe even agriculture to a much lesser degree back in maybe the middle of the twentieth century. What is it about immigrants that makes …

James Patterson:

About immigrants that makes them easy targets for why that’s changed versus, say, what you were talking about with the issue of tradable goods is that it’s harder to pin that down than it is to say this person, there’s these populations that come to this country that are different from me and they weren’t here before.

Daniel DiMartino:

Well, but the thing is, if it weren’t for even illegal immigration, probably manufacturing would be even more expensive in America and we would have less manufacturing. So if you believe that the jobs went to China because it’s cheap labor, then having less cheap labor in America means less manufacturing. Right?

James Patterson:

Yeah. That was the case. There was a Turkey processing plant in Central Virginia, and I think every single person who worked there was either like a seasonal worker or maybe even had fraudulent documentation, but none of them were American citizens. And it’s rough work. It’s not the kind of thing that people would want to do instead of a regular office job.

Daniel DiMartino:

So I think people romanticize the past. So let’s talk about the past. In the past, in the fifties and early sixties, there was what was called the Bracero Program, an unlimited guest worker program legally, where people could come and it was very thorough, the vetting for diseases and things, but millions of people came, especially from Mexico legally, and it was Kennedy who ended it on the pressure from the unions because the unions never liked immigration because the immigrants don’t join unions.

It’s really that simple. And so it is a problem. I think that the key to manufacturing in the US is understanding what is the comparative advantage of America. It is high-tech industries, it is high productivity, and if you want to increase productivity, you have to focus on bringing the immigrants, who will do that? Who are those? If you want to manufacture chips, you don’t need the CHIPS Act with hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize rich companies. You need to bring in the Taiwanese engineers who actually made chips in Taiwan. And I’m not talking about a lot of people. I’m talking about a few thousands, really. And if you do that with industries across the spectrum, believe me, we are going to manufacture all the top technology in the planet here in America. We need the knowledge, right? Knowledge is what drives productivity, and that’s what increases wages, people who invent new things. And so you don’t really need as much low-skilled immigration as people think if you have these high skilled, and at least that’s my theory. Yeah.

James Patterson:

Re-shoring American manufacturing would probably not entail the scale or the sheer volume of workers that it once did. If we were even able to re-shore because of perhaps more prudently implemented tariffs, the industries that would come here wouldn’t necessarily employ millions of people. When it comes to chip manufacturing, that’s not a high scale assembly line, like screwing and bolts kind of work, right?

Daniel DiMartino:

Absolutely. No. What manufacturing in America looks like more likely today is Boeing and Tesla, and that means a bunch of engineers who are college educated, who are making a lot of money, by the way, and who are making designs. It’s a lot of people who work in software too. That’s what manufacturing looks like today in the United States, and that’s the comparative advantage. Those are America’s exports. It’s those high-tech things. It’s not making T-shirts from cotton. That’s what we bring from Bangladesh. That’s what we bring from Vietnam. And that’s okay. That’s their comparative advantage. We get cheap shirts because of that. I would not want to pay $200 for a T-shirt in order to make it here. And what people don’t understand, it’s not just about what you pay, right? It’s that in order to make it here, you will need to move somebody from a different job to that job.

So you’re going to make less of the things that we’re good at to make more of the things that we’re bad at, and it’s going to make us all poorer. It’s this misunderstanding. The misunderstanding about immigration usually shares the same misunderstanding about trade. And so that’s why usually nativism comes hand in hand with protectionism and then isolationism, but that’s a different monster. But related.

So we have to lean in to America’s advantages, and that is being the world’s knowledge superpower. And to maintain America’s edge as the world’s knowledge superpower, we need high skilled immigrants. Remember, it’s not just about the immigrants, it’s about their children. The children of really intelligent people tend to be really intelligent. And if you brain drain China, if you brain drain Russia, if you brain drain other nations, America will guarantee being the world’s superpower forever.

James Patterson:

Just on a final note, there are a lot of Americans here that are concerned about upward mobility, and I still think that there’s always this problem when it comes to immigration where it is a visible problem, but the issue at work here is really more invisible, which is that it’s harder to move to a lot of places where the jobs are because those places have a lot of land use regulations that increase rents. And there’s also a lot of barriers to entry into trades through licensing processes, and it just doesn’t seem to really have the same level of punch. Not sure why that is, but that should really be the area of concern, I think, for people who want to be upwardly mobile, they should want to see deregulation of land use and opportunities in the service economy, right?

Daniel DiMartino:

Absolutely. We’re talking about environmental regulations that are terrible, and I think Lee Zeldin is going to do a really great job at the EPA on that. It’s also, I would say, a big disadvantage America has relative to other developed countries is on some basic quality of life issues like crime, like trash, and it’s because of bad policing. And we talk a lot about this at the Manhattan Institute, but the reality is that a lot of people who are antisocial is a really small number of people in every city of a couple hundred. If they were just put in prison, you would solve half of the crimes in the entire urban area. Serial shoplifters, serial assaulters, people with mental illness that need to be institutionalized, these kinds of cases.

And that is a big drawback for the United States in the competition for labor in opening new factories. Then you mentioned land use regulations. I would also add, especially for upward mobility, licensing for professions, America is one of the most licensed developed countries. You need a license to do everything, and especially I criticize the left because they all want to be like the Nordic countries, but then they don’t want to actually implement the policies of the Nordic countries. They don’t have all these licensing restrictions. They have much more free trade with the world, so the inputs for manufacturing are cheaper, right?

If you tariff steel at 25 percent, it’s going to be more costly to build a new factory in America. Perhaps you should be tariffing the final product, not the input to make the final product here in America. At least that would make more sense. So we need to focus on supply side policies. How do we increase supply? How do we become richer? Not how we redistribute resources necessarily inside the country.

James Patterson:

Well, thank you so much for talking to us about this issue. I had an entirely different way that I was going to do this, but both because of time constraints and because of this dramatic moment that you just had, we kind of had a different one, so we had a more compressed discussion about immigration, but I’m hoping that you’ll finish your PhD soon. I think a lot of people are asking for your time, so that almost gets put onto the weekends and evenings. People like me are getting in the way.

Daniel DiMartino:

No, no, no. Thank you so much for having me, James. This is always a pleasure.

James Patterson:

Thank you for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.