In this episode of the podcast, Tucker sits down with economics professor David Friedman to talk about the impact of immigration on the United States, the UK, and the rest of the world. They talk about how immigration affects the economy, why it s bad, and what it means for the future of the country.
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00:00:39.000So you travel more than anybody I know.
00:00:41.000You spend more days out of the country and have for more years than literally anyone I know.
00:00:46.740The countries that seem to be moving backward the most quickly, this is my perception, are the white Christian English-speaking countries, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, UK, United States.
00:01:13.160But I certainly think that England, the UK more generally, but England in particular, is really in a difficult position now.
00:01:27.880And I think that the diagnosis that English people generally are coming to is that they've had too much immigration.
00:01:38.420It seems like they've been overwhelmed by immigration, but you may have a better handle on the numbers.
00:02:03.380How much immigration has the UK had-ish?
00:02:05.800Well, I think that they're up around, you know, the country is, the country, well, most recent, the country's had a lot of immigration since, you know, since the Second World War.
00:02:23.620It had a huge wave of migrants from both the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent in the years right after the war.
00:02:35.320And by a huge wave, you know, one, you know, it's a couple hundred thousand.
00:02:40.200But more recently, we've had even larger numbers.
00:02:46.200And in fact, one of the things that has made Brexit so contentious in England is that the big promise of Brexit, the primary promise of Brexit, was to limit immigration.
00:03:01.200Immigration, that's what most English people thought it was for.
00:03:06.200Now, Brexit was delayed between the referendum and 2020.
00:03:11.900And when Britain finally got Brexit, it had COVID.
00:03:15.660And so it had a period of zero immigration for a while.
00:03:19.140But then something really interesting happened, which is the people who had managed to get Brexit, that is the government of Boris Johnson, sort of looked at the numbers and they were very frightened that the economy was going to continue slow after COVID.
00:03:39.800And due to the way the British government scores economic predictions, immigration comes out as, by definition, a benefit to the economy.
00:03:54.240So seriously, so they decided to just loosen immigration for a little bit.
00:04:02.380And the result was really extraordinary.
00:04:05.200They got, I think, 4.5 million immigrants between 2021 and 2024.
00:04:18.720And so we're talking about, in three years, we're talking about an immigration that is 7% of the country's population.
00:04:29.780And that immigration, because Britain had left the European Union, was not European immigration.
00:04:39.860It was 80% of it came from outside of Europe.
00:04:43.520So it was a profoundly foreign immigration and the largest Britain it ever had.
00:04:49.480And it was brought about by the very people whose entire reason for being in government was to stop immigration.
00:04:59.900And it's had an extremely destabilizing effect on the politics of the country.
00:05:07.240So they, according to the way British economists score the economy, more people, almost always from poor countries, make you richer or something?
00:05:29.920And there's not really a sufficient, without going into the economic details, there's not sufficient reckoning done of the fact that these people will age, they'll form families, and they will collect the generous and perhaps overly generous state benefits that they've been brought in to.
00:05:49.680To, you know, to, you know, to help defray.
00:05:54.540I mean, is there in the history of the world, a country that's had like that level of immigration from poor countries that got richer because of it?
00:06:05.180The United States, but it's a very special case because we were, you know, we were, we had laid claim to a, you know, a continent-wide landmass,
00:06:18.020although we didn't always do that explicitly, and we had only a very few millions of people with which to claim it.
00:06:27.300And so we really needed people, and they generally came from societies that were, or let's say they came from,
00:06:35.260they might have come from societies that were richer than ours, but they came from the less fortunate parts of those societies.
00:06:41.220So I think it did enhance the United States while we had, you know, a more or less virgin territory.
00:06:49.160I understand that the Indians were there, but a lot of the territory was virgin and ripe for development.
00:06:55.520As long as we were in that position, it was a benefit to us.
00:07:00.760The mistake that other countries in the world have made, and Europe more than anyone, has been to assume that if they get mass immigration,
00:07:11.820it's going to work the way it did under the very special circumstances of 19th century North America.
00:07:20.860But instead what's happening is it's, it's working more like the circumstances of 17th century North America.
00:07:29.580That is the, the people who are arriving from abroad are becoming the, the core group.
00:07:38.720They're replacing the indigenous population.
00:08:28.120But they're mostly of, uh, they're mostly ones that you would recognize from, you know, the Trump campaign.
00:08:35.480They have, a lot of them have to do with deportation, you know.
00:08:39.340Um, uh, there are, there's a lot of discussion of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights
00:08:47.820and from the UN, um, you know, refugee treaty, um, from the 1950s.
00:08:55.560I, the, the, the, the UN, um, has a refugee convention from the, the 1950s that governs a lot of, um, rights of asylum.
00:09:05.080And the, uh, Tony Blair government in the late nineties and the early part of this century, um, passed something called the Human Rights Act,
00:09:14.160which made, um, which, uh, uh, made European human rights law and the authority of the, uh, European Convention of Human Rights binding on the UK.
00:09:27.000So there is talk about, about, um, exiting those agreements and, and to not just talk.
00:09:34.180I mean, this is the sort of thing that, that, that whenever it's brought up in a Western country,
00:09:38.840it's described as extreme right wing and fascist and, and, and, and, and that kind of thing.
00:09:43.660It's not just being talked about in England, it's being talked about by, I would say, the three main forces on the English right,
00:09:52.240which are Nigel Farage, who's in the Reform Party, uh, Kemi Badenoch, who is the leader of the, um, of the Conservative Party,
00:10:01.260and Robert Jenrick, who's the main sort of, like, radical, let's, let's just say,
00:10:06.000the conservative alternative within the Conservative Party.
00:10:10.740All of them are talking about getting Britain out of the European Convention of Human Rights
00:10:16.140to, to the extent where you, you think if there is ever a conservative government again, it will happen.
00:10:23.020I mean, it's no, it's no less believable than Brexit was before Brexit happened.
00:16:26.620That's exactly the question, and I don't understand it.
00:16:28.660And it's a funny thing because you and I have lived through the deepest part of that transformation,
00:16:34.420and it's still kind of a mystery to us.
00:16:36.780So if anyone's watching this 100 years from now, you know, I hope they can see how confused we, in fact, were.
00:16:46.120But, I mean, I think that in the wake of World War II, something happened in the middle of the 20th century,
00:16:54.600and it's really tough to say what it was.
00:16:57.080It might be a coming to, you know, to consciousness of, you know, after the horrors of the two world wars.
00:17:03.860It's like, you don't want to, you know, this is maybe too moralistic an explanation,
00:17:12.280but, you know, people began to understand that there were bad things could happen if you were too judgmental about other peoples or inimical.
00:17:22.380But there are other factors, such as just the technological factors, the sort of the visibility of alternative places to live through television.
00:17:34.080And that, I think, is, I think it's, I think the technological are, is, you know, oh, and the fact of easy travel through airplanes,
00:17:44.160and the fact that you, that the telephone, the television, and finally the internet enable you to go someplace without being cut off from your ancestral homeland.
00:17:57.760So it makes the decision to travel abroad much lower stakes, you know.
00:18:03.200I mean, the people who came to the United States in the 19th century from Sicily, they were gone.
00:18:08.660They got on, you know, for the most part.
00:18:11.140Yeah, well, you know, in fact, in the Italian migration, a lot of them did go back.
00:18:17.360But it was a, in general, it was a big decision.
00:18:21.040And in the case of the Irish, I think they were usually here for good.
00:18:25.840Anyhow, I think it's a combination of, you know, at the statesman, at the level of statesman,
00:18:31.840I think it's a discomfort with any kind of expression of hostility or lack of hospitality towards other peoples.
00:18:42.060But at the, just the operational level of the individual migrants, I think technology had a lot of, had a lot to do with it.
00:18:50.540So it's impossible, but I mean, yeah, technology for sure.
00:18:56.140But, you know, I don't know, Victorian England had, you know, the ability to move people around the world to control, you know, the world's biggest navy and all that.
00:19:07.000They didn't want millions of non-English living in England because they were proud of England and they thought it was distinctly English.
00:19:12.720I guess what I'm getting at is, it's so strange to me that the self-confidence of Western Europe collapsed after winning the war.
00:19:24.700I think that's so, Germany's a different case.
00:19:26.900But I mean, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, I mean, these are all countries that, like, had nothing to be ashamed of from my perspective.
00:20:04.500So, France had collaborated, part of France had collaborated, and there was a tremendous amount of soul searching, and there was a tremendous amount of guilt.
00:20:18.200Spain and Portugal had kind of resolved their own civil war in the 1930s, and they were kind of out of the picture.
00:20:24.120It would seem that Britain had a record that it could really be proud of, but it was dismantling an empire.
00:20:31.480And so the two main victorious non, you know, the main victorious powers were the United States, Britain, and Russia.
00:20:41.440Russia was communist and had its own project to propagandize.
00:20:47.400But the United States and Britain, they also had reasons for self-examination.
00:20:54.480There was, you know, I think there was plenty of triumphalism after the Second World War.
00:21:01.700It's a very, it's a very tough thing to read.
00:21:04.140I think that the America I grew up in was really quite proud of its, its role in the Second World War.
00:21:10.980Even as it was re-examining its own history, you know, of racism and slavery and, and, and, and, and even the, you know, the settlement and the, and the wipeout of, of the Indians, you know.
00:21:24.280So it was a mix of, it was a mix of impulses.
00:21:28.180So I'm not sure that they were, I'm not sure these countries were, were as self-doubting as we, as we think.
00:21:36.880Well, the effect was to just collapse.
00:21:39.380I mean, especially in the case of the UK.
00:21:42.380So is there any getting back to what it was even 35, 40 years ago?
00:21:49.120I heard a member of the Reform Party saying that what people, what people really long for in England is a return to the status quo anti-Tony Blair.
00:22:04.520That is, you know, Britain had a lot of, of migration.
00:22:09.320There was one wave in the 40s and 50s.
00:22:11.600There is another one that kind of coincided with our, the beginnings of our latest wave, which has never, which has gone on unabated.
00:22:19.440But they had a wave in the 70s and 80s, the British did.
00:22:22.760But the, but the, the biggest one was just, was intentionally started by Tony Blair.
00:22:28.560And the, so the Reform, this one member of the Reform Party says, if we could just go back to the status quo anti-Blair, that would be fine.
00:22:40.360So, but in fact, the amount of change has been so tremendous.
00:22:45.140And it's not just the, that the numerator of, of migration is changed.
00:22:51.520It's also that the denominator of the, of the, of the total population of Britain has changed.
00:22:58.660That is, Britain is a very, very slow growing demographic.
00:23:03.640So they're not really producing a lot of new children.
00:23:08.240And so the, a disproportionately large amount of the, of the British people in years to come are going to be the product of, of immigration.
00:23:18.700So, no, I don't see any, any, in general, there's no way short of like cataclysmic developments to, to, to reverse any of that.
00:23:30.600So, we're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.
00:26:21.540In some places, they were able to settle these areas.
00:26:26.700In other places, like India, they were sent home, you know, after a long period of exploiting the place.
00:26:33.420But there were other nationalities that tended to colonize by mixing more.
00:26:42.420And so there is a sort of a mix of cultures becomes possible.
00:26:48.760The cultures that mixed into what we now think of as, you know, different Latin American cultures were earlier on quite separate.
00:27:00.380There still is a degree of separation in South America between these different strains of like the European culture and the native culture.
00:27:08.400But I mean, in most of Latin America, you can say that there's such a thing as Brazilian culture.
00:27:15.620There's such a thing as Mexican culture.
00:27:18.160And there will be, you know, I trust such a thing as English culture in, you know, in 50 or 100 years.
00:27:26.940But it will be a very different thing than the English culture that we recognized over the last 500 years.
00:27:39.800What happens to the, I mean, at some point, do the politics get radical?
00:27:44.840Well, that I think is the interesting.
00:27:46.220Because it makes me feel radical hearing about this.
00:27:48.640Well, that I think is what's happening in England now.
00:27:51.480And it's one of the reasons I went to England.
00:27:53.540And it's why I think it's really, it bears watching in the next few years.
00:28:00.140They had a huge, they had a lot of riots last summer.
00:28:06.360I mean, there was an episode in which, you know, the British-born child of Rwandan immigrants, who sounds like he was kind of a crazy man, went to a Taylor Swift dance party that was being held for a bunch of, you know, little girls.
00:28:28.340And he stabbed a dozen of them and killed three of them.
00:28:32.980And the town in which he did it just blew up.
00:28:37.080And the protests spread across the country.
00:28:43.260And you had like a wave of really quite spontaneous public uprising.
00:28:50.480And that was last, that was just about a year ago in August.
00:28:54.380The government, which had just entered office, the Starmer, the government of Keir Starmer, the labor government, chose not to view it as a spontaneous uprising.
00:29:04.780They described it as the, you know, a reaction to misinformation and that sort of thing.
00:29:09.900That did not convince the public very much, though.
00:29:14.540And I think it contributed to the, in general, low popularity the government has enjoyed since then.
00:29:23.040It's a strange, just as an aside, it's a very strange situation in Britain where they have a landslide, this labor government has a landslide majority, although they've won only a third of the votes.
00:29:34.940So that in itself is very stabilizing.
00:29:37.720But I think the events that we've just been, let's see, the developments we've just been discussing have made, have contributed to make Britain susceptible to radicalization.
00:29:53.240I mean, Germany's also been completely transformed by immigration, but that's a society with less free even than Britain and people can't even say it out loud.
00:30:02.100They've been taught to hate themselves and to keep that stuff inside.
00:30:05.300But you wonder at some point, did Germans say, you know, just had enough?
00:30:10.900Well, you know, I think it's worth remembering that, you know, that we had a lot to do with that, you know, German culture of denazification and sort of, let's say, German, the critical German approach that they take to their past.
00:30:32.860And so Germany was not, Germany has never been a real free speech society.
00:30:40.840It's not a, it's not a, a value that is held to quite the high degree that we hold it in our First Amendment.
00:30:50.900Very, in fact, no other culture on earth really has that absolutist idea of free speech that we treasure, I think rightly.
00:30:59.220Um, but so working with that German culture, which is not a pure free speech culture, I think that we reasoned, you know, the United States, partly because of the circumstances of the Cold War, wanted to reintroduce Germany into the family of citizen, of civilized nations very fast.
00:31:25.960I mean, we were talking about rearming them in the 1950s, you know, we were talking about creating, building a European army around Germany in, in like 1955.
00:31:38.720It was as an alternative to that, that the European Union was created, because that prospect really freaked the French out.
00:32:13.820There's, um, um, so yeah, Germany had Germany's, Germany's free speech was, was a little constrained.
00:32:24.800You know, um, it might've been constrained anyway, but it also had this highly critical idea of, of, of, of German history.
00:32:35.480And again, it's understandable, but there's a lot of great stuff in German history too.
00:32:42.120I mean, um, the Reformation comes out of Germany.
00:32:45.460Germany was the most cultured country in the world with the, you know, with the arguable exception of, of Britain at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th.
00:32:55.360And it's, it's, I mean, I don't have to go through the, through the list.
00:32:59.020It was only a matter of time before Germans said, well, like, can't we talk about the good things in our, in our culture too?
00:33:06.900I thought that that moment actually was coming around the time of the Iraq war.
00:33:14.260And I think that that was a, to a, to a, you know, Gerhard Schroeder, I mean, at the time it was fashionable to blame France.
00:33:24.560For the European opposition of, uh, uh, to the American adventure in Iraq, in which, in which, you know, Europe has been spectacularly vindicated, I think.
00:33:36.680But in fact, I think it was Germany as much as France that was, that was driving that, you know, rebellion.
00:33:43.780And it was Gerhard Schroeder who said, you know, who is then the chancellor of Germany, he said the, you know, the foreign policy of Germany is going to be made in Berlin and only in Berlin.
00:33:53.940Um, I thought that that was happening then at any rate for a long time, people really lacked the institutions through which to express that German, you know, I, I wouldn't even call it pride.
00:34:13.100It's just, it's the, it's the desire that, it's partly pride, but it's just the desire that German, Germany be treated like a normal country again, you know?
00:34:23.020And I think now, 80 years after the war, that, um, 80 years after the war and confronted by certain problems that actually require a certain amount of national pride to address.
00:34:39.420I mean, the Germans are beginning to talk that way again.
00:34:43.980They're beginning to say, you know, we need to be Germans again.
00:34:47.260So the people trying to wreck our civilization want you to be passive.
00:34:52.000They want you weak so they can control you.
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00:37:41.600It's a, you know, it's, it's an interesting situation.
00:37:45.640I mean, the German, the German, I'm not sure where in the Grundgesetz it is, in the basic, German basic law, but, but the German, the German constitution permits something called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to monitor parties to make sure that they're not dangerous right wing.
00:38:14.980And the goal of having that in the constitution was to prevent any recrudescence of, of Nazism.
00:38:25.860Now, there are parties all across Europe that had certain antecedents, whether in the institution itself or in certain, just personnel, you know, the way for the, the way, for example, Mussolini's fascist party was ended at the end of, of World War II.
00:38:48.640But a lot of its members went and they joined the MSI, the Italian social movement, and that sort of continued after the second world war.
00:38:57.480And then there was, there, there were offshoots of it.
00:39:00.000Many of the people in it became left wing.
00:39:02.200Georgia Maloney started a new party, but it had some people who were in the MSI.
00:39:10.100So if you want to trace a genealogy from, to, you know, from mid 20th century fascism to certain European leaders, you can.
00:39:21.020And, and, and people do that as a way of sort of gaining talking points against Maloney.
00:39:26.780However, the interesting thing about, about the AFD though, is that the AFD is not one of those parties.
00:39:33.740The AFD was founded in 2013 by a bunch of academic macroeconomists who were worried that the European Union by guaranteeing the, the debts of Greece and other failing countries was in an invisible way taxing Germany.
00:39:57.200So it was, it was, it was, it was built around a very recondite complaint, you know, and not a hate filled complaint.
00:40:05.200And I remember interviewing the head of the party at the time, who was an economist named Bernd Luka.
00:40:15.820He's left, I think he's left the party since, but the party underwent two transformations.
00:40:23.700The first came in 2015 when Angela Merkel invited immigrants, you know, from fleeing the, the Syrian civil war to come to Germany.
00:40:35.860And they began streaming overland into Europe and were then joined opportunistically, as you may remember by a lot of Pakistanis and Iraqis and Iranians and Afghans and just a whole huge human wave.
00:40:51.820And a woman in the party, a very charismatic sort of like mother of many children named, named Frauke Petri said, you know what, we are the alternative for Germany.
00:41:06.980No, no party is arguing, arguing for an alternative immigration policy and that has to be us.
00:41:15.480And so it became the, the anti-immigration party.
00:41:22.020But at the same time, it had, it had for similar but less noticeable reasons, it had attracted people who wanted a change in Germany for all sorts of things, including, you know, what we would call culture warriors.
00:41:37.160People who wanted to change the school curriculum to, so that it denigrated Germany less.
00:41:44.040And then it became a whole big grab bag of parties, of, of, of tendencies, which it is today, although they are a much more united party than I think a lot of people think.
00:41:56.320And they're now, you know, they're, they're, they, they got 20% in the last election and between elections, they tend to pull much higher.
00:42:06.660They have at, at times in the last, in the last few months since the elections in January, I believe, they have been the largest party in, in Germany in terms of opinion polling.
00:42:19.940So if the, if you have a country that calls itself, advertises itself a democracy, a country, you know, run by the people who live there, and over time the establishment excludes parties that represent the majority of the people, then don't you get a revolution at a certain point?
00:42:37.640Maybe, you know, I think I got a little off track.
00:42:39.680There's one piece I forgot to, to explain.
00:42:42.180So, so there is the, there exists in the German constitution, this idea of, of banning parties.
00:42:51.060And it's, I think that then when people understood it, it was something that was supposed to be done in like 1948, whenever like a gang of people, you know, got together in one city.
00:43:05.300And that's why, like, there have been parties banned since the second world war, not in a very long time.
00:43:12.840And they tended to be, you know, tended to be, you know, tiny little groups of what we would call jackbooted thugs.
00:43:20.700The idea that, that this mechanism could be used to ban the largest party in the country, and, and furthermore, one that was founded, one that was founded two generations after the second world war in 2013, is not what the constitution envisioned.
00:43:41.220Nonetheless, you can see the appeal of it for two formerly big national parties that are now shriveling up and want to get those votes back or want to keep from being swept away, you know?
00:43:57.740It's just such a violation of the core principle of a democracy that I just don't think, you know, either you have to change the name of the system.
00:44:05.220It's just, you know, it's an autocracy run by people with power and everyone else shuts up, or you have to stop doing that.
00:44:13.740I mean, you, well, you have, you know, you have, you've interviewed Callan Georgescu on this show.
00:44:25.260If you look at what happened in, in Romania and the elections last, you know, last November, where he was simply disqualified because someone in the government asserted without presenting proof that, that there had been a Russian campaign to, to elect him.
00:44:43.020And, and, and, and, and, and managed to head off the next, you know, his replacement in the second round of that election, which was delayed for many months and got a member of the establishment into, into the Romanian government.
00:44:59.000It didn't really work like, like, like, like a democracy.
00:45:03.400And yet when it happened, people said, well, we've defended democracy.
00:45:07.220We've defended democracy against the voters.
00:45:09.520So it's the sort of kind of, it's the kind of thing that, that Bertolt Brecht would, would make a joke about.
00:45:15.860Um, and, and, and yes, it's not small D democratic, but people have chosen to call this, this form of government, which is, uh, you might call it like state of emergency liberalism, which is basically the, I think the most accurate description of what it is for, for, uh, they, they, they, they claim, they claim the term democracy, but I don't think they're doing so very successfully.
00:45:43.360And the, the, the parties that, that, that, that, that represent this state of emergency liberalism do not do terribly well.
00:45:52.240It just seems like the spread between what people want and what they're getting grows wider every year.
00:45:58.580People seem to hate mass migration everywhere in the world.
00:46:02.400I don't think there's a single person who likes mass migration really.
00:46:08.940I think people have an expectation of sovereignty, which almost no country has, like a country gets to make its own decisions, but that's not in practice happening anywhere with only, again, a few exceptions.
00:46:22.700And so there's so much frustration about that, that I just, I'm wondering what's the point where it bubbles up into something unmanageable?
00:46:29.660Well, a couple of things I don't, I'm not sure that the, I think that the gap between what people want and what they're getting is, is wide, is wide, but I'm not sure that it's widening.
00:46:42.840I mean, the, the, the election of Trump was certainly a, was certainly a call for more action against mass migration.
00:47:02.660There have been, you know, certainly the rhetorical stance of the, of the administration is against migration.
00:47:08.880I mean, Trump may disappoint his voters on other things, but on that one thing, which I think we agree is like a really central issue, actually the, the will of the, the, the people and the actions of the government have kind of converged.
00:47:24.760If the, if there were to be, as I've just described, a conservative government in England and the, and it abolished the, the Human Rights Act, which would allow Britain to act in a fully sovereign way, then the way would be wide open to deporting people who did not have the right to be there.
00:47:47.860And certainly to stopping the ongoing traffic of, of small, small boat migration in England.
00:47:56.220So I think that that's, I think it is, I think it's possible things are getting better from a democratic point of view.
00:48:06.140You also said, okay, so at what point does this explode?
00:48:09.420I'm not sure it does because one of the things that makes things explode is the, is the, is discontent in, in numerous and dynamic classes.
00:48:25.400And that's why, you know, the, the Arab world was so unruly throughout the, the 1980s and the 1990s, because you had, this was a part of the world in which people were having like six or eight or 10 kids and there was no place to put these young men.
00:48:42.260And, and, and, and there was a lot of, there was a lot of martial dynamism in the, in these societies.
00:48:50.980And, um, uh, when, in fact, wherever you have a lot of young people, if you look at the United States in the, in the sixties and seventies, you have a lot of disorder and rebellion, but we're not societies like that anymore.
00:49:04.840We are top heavy societies full of old wobbly people and, and, and not, these are not the kind of societies that, that say, darn it, I've had enough.
00:49:16.560These are people who need, I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the demographic heart of, of our societies is in the, in, in people who are of an age where they need care, not where they're going to run out into the street shaking their fists.
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00:52:14.740When the children of the latest wave of migrants to the United States are 18, so that'll be in 15 years, then you're going to have a really dynamic society.
00:52:30.080You're going to have a lot of people born in this country to immigrant parents who feel like they want a piece of it and you're going to have massive change, wouldn't you think?
00:52:41.840Absolutely. And that, I think, is, that's why I've tended to look at this, you know, what's happening now with arguments over the border and with, you know, with Trump as part of a process that will come to resemble about a century later, the process that led to the New Deal.
00:53:04.260I mean, because I think the New Deal was the consolidation of a new governing system in a way that took account of the waves of migration that had changed the country between 1880 and 1920, you know.
00:53:20.820And, you know, we are, we look at our present demographic change and we say, oh my goodness, things are really, you know, what country has ever faced anything like this?
00:53:33.280And it's, it's really, there really is a, there are really a lot of points of contact between what has happened with us and what happened to the country between 1880 and 1920.
00:53:46.360You have, you know, people from, you know, the initial argument is, look, you know, it's all well and good to receive people, but this country is about a certain set of values.
00:53:56.920It's about, you know, it's historically determined, these people who are coming know nothing of our, of our country.
00:54:03.700How are they going to ever, you know, assimilate into it?
00:54:07.620It's exactly the same arguments that you got in the 1880s, 1890s.
00:54:12.080Then you get demands for, you know, like closing the border and it just doesn't happen and doesn't happen and doesn't happen until 1924 when it suddenly happens.
00:54:24.100And then suddenly the only people who can come here are the people who are already here.
00:54:29.940You know, I mean, let's see, the only Americans are the ones who've already arrived.
00:54:33.880And that's why, you know, if you look at it, it's why there are so many Italians in Argentina.
00:54:40.260They came after 1924 when the Italians could no longer go to, to, to New York.
00:54:46.200Um, and so from there, these people had no choice but to mix together into a new kind of American.
00:54:57.340And, and, and the people who said these people will never be able to adapt to the old American ways, they were wrong, but they weren't totally wrong.
00:55:06.300I mean, they sort of like the, the country did change to reflect the identity of the new, of the new immigrants.
00:55:13.060And then in 1932, when Roosevelt came to power on the heels of an event that discredited the old elites, which is the crash, then he claimed the authority to basically reorganize the country in the name of this new mix of the, you know, of the settled Americans, the new immigrant Americans.
00:55:40.220And it, it, it knit the country into one people so effectively that by the 1950s and 1950s and 60s, young Americans were sort of like complaining about how boring and homogenized the United States was.
00:56:00.180Will there, um, after Trump leaves in three years, will there be like a series of Trumps or will the party revert to what it was?
00:56:14.720Oh, you will be, will the Republican party revert to what it was before Trump?
00:56:18.340Oh, um, first of all, I, I think Trump is such a, an unusual person that I don't think he can really be replicated, even if, um, no matter how hard anyone tries.
00:56:35.360He, he, he was, uh, he, he was, uh, I, I, I, I, I, I, I mean, he, he, he came to prominence because he had an incredible amount of, you know, what used to be called brass at a time when brass was, was what, what was required.
00:56:55.620There are other people who have sort of, sort of, who seem to have more of the, you know, more of the qualifications that, that a politician would require.
00:57:08.560That is like patience and, and like an understanding of policy and things like that.
00:57:13.920You had people like Ron DeSantis seem to be offering that to the Republican party for a while, but it's not what the country felt it needed.
00:57:40.980I mean, it's, I mean, I think, I mean, this is something you know a lot more about than I do, but I, I, I, I mean, if I look at Trump one,
00:57:50.320I would say that, that, that it was an almost utter failure on Trump's own terms.
00:57:57.580That is, I mean, he, he used that list that Leonard Leo and, and others had given him to, to, to, to fortify the Supreme Court as a, you know, a, a more or less conservative
00:58:15.180force and, and, and, and he nominate a lot of judges.
00:58:21.380He, but I don't think that he ever understood the, where the actual levers of power in the government were.
00:58:30.880And so the, the same deep state that he had complained about went on, was as strong on the day he left office as it was on the day that he arrived.
00:58:41.500And so one had the impression that he'd learned absolutely nothing.
00:58:46.500And so what has happened in, under Trump too, is one of the most astonishing surprises in the history of American politics.
00:58:58.420Now, in Brexit, you had a guy who was kind of a genius in the workings of British government named Dominic Cummings, who was be able to, was able to say, well, no, you don't need to win a, a majority in parliament on this one.
00:59:13.940You just need to control the, the, the cabinet office, et cetera.
00:59:17.580Um, Trump never had such a person, but apparently, and the details are still not clear how, apparently he acquired one or several in the course of, um, in the course of his four years out of power.
00:59:32.720I think Steve Bannon is correct to say that the four years out of power were in, in Trumpian terms were, were a great blessing for him.
00:59:41.820So there's someone, I mean, maybe Steve Miller is an, is a candidate for this, who has the most tremendous Machiavellian understanding of what can be done inside government.
00:59:57.520I mean, the speed with which, um, you know, USAID was, was dismantled, which in, in what seems to me, it was not really a cost saving operation.
01:00:11.140It was like a purge of a, of a certain tendency in, in, in government was really, you know, whatever you think of it as an ideological operation.
01:00:21.720It was a tremendously expert, um, operation in terms of, you know, government rejiggering, um, the, the executive orders that he has, you know, canceled and the new ones that he has passed.
01:00:37.760In order to give a new reading to affirmative action.
01:00:41.840And I would say that the, that affirmative action was in many ways, the key institution of American government of the last half century to render it inoperative.
01:00:55.060Even if, even if he hasn't fully killed it, is a, is a, is a constitutional revolution.
01:01:02.640So, yeah, this is, I mean, things are still in progress.
01:01:07.080It's, it's, it's very difficult to see whether for, uh, whether an operation like say deportations, whether that is going to accelerate or whether Trump is really running out of gas.
01:01:19.520And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and this is going to, but it's, it's, it's hard to see how it will proceed from here, but it's been a huge change.
01:01:26.380He's turned out to be a very significant president.
01:01:32.720How was affirmative action, the key institution in American government?
01:01:36.140Well, I, you know, I've always thought, and we've, we've talked about this, that, that the passage of the, um, Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the, you know, it created a, a new constitution that was, was really at odds, a de facto new constitution that was at odds with what we thought of as our real constitution.
01:02:03.780And as, you know, uh, you know, what it basically tried to do was sort of like create a more, you know, create a society in the South where, you know, blacks could live as equal citizens to, to whites, um, you know, in, in public and in, in large companies and, and, and, and that sort of thing.
01:02:26.560But it wound up to be a, wound up being an incredibly, um, versatile tool.
01:02:34.160You could use it for anything, um, once you had declared a sort of national emergency.
01:02:41.000So like getting women onto, you know, like corporate boards or getting, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, bilingual education into schools, getting, you know, protecting, you know, transgender story hour.
01:02:57.100I mean, it just, it just ramified into every corner of American life.
01:03:02.100And, um, um, anybody could be made, any, anybody was under suspicion, um, and, you know, let's, let's just say incorporation, it worked publicly and privately in corporations, anyone who ran a, a company that was, you know, larger than a few dozen people was understood to be under, you know, the government's watchful eye.
01:03:27.820Um, you could, you could, you could, you could avoid being sued really only by establishing a, an affirmative action program.
01:03:39.600And so it became, it became the, the means through which the government could approach any institution, public or private and say, you know, we'd like to have a look at your hiring practices.
01:03:52.420We'd like to have a look at like how you, you know, how you've been behaving for the last, you know, um, for the last year and your board meetings.
01:04:01.100We'd like to know if there's anyone you're hiring who has kind of an, an animus against black people or women or gays or, or immigrants.
01:04:08.680And so it had a very chilling effect at every level of government and at every level of, of society.
01:04:17.900It is for now, except we now have a culture in which for 50 years, people, even in the most private, you know, conversations sort of have been trained to ask themselves, you know, can I say this or, or is this okay?
01:04:40.720Or, or, or, you know, like, um, you know, I'm not homophobic, but you know, um, and, and, and, and so you have a, you have a, you have a society that has really been trained to be scared.
01:04:54.160So a lot of this, you know, yes, I think, so, so I think that institutionally it's over, but, but culturally we are really not a, a people that has sort of like learned to use freedom.
01:05:34.460Um, it feels like the term racist has lost its sting, like almost completely.
01:05:39.220Um, yeah, I, well, I would expect that to happen.
01:05:46.480I'm, I'm, I don't, I haven't really gathered any evidence about it, you know?
01:05:50.640I mean, for one thing, it's harder to, you know, sue a person when you're, you know, the government has announced that it's not enforcing affirmative action, that kind of thing.
01:06:01.860So, I mean, if you can, it used to be that if someone could just, if you could just successfully attach the word racist to a person, um, you know, whether through a lawsuit or a, or a, or a, or a public relations campaign, no one could hire him.
01:06:24.100It was a real, um, and it, and it, and it was sort of like, it was not as different from the, the Chinese social credit system, which we liked to deplore as we like to think.
01:07:28.800I mean, I think that, that you can't expect, um, a person who's had these very self-protective habits beaten into him over, over decades to give them up in the same way that, you know, like, you know, people who lived through the depression maintained their habits of frugality for 60 years after that.
01:07:53.620Yeah, I remember when banks introduced ATM cards, they couldn't get people who grew up during the depression to use them.
01:08:18.440And I, and, and actually, when people described the, um, the first, um, really mentioned in the wider public of so-called political correctness was, I think, in the winter of 1990 to 1991.
01:08:35.800Um, and shortly thereafter, you know, you had the Clarence Thomas, um, hearings for the Supreme Court, which introduced the idea of, of sexual harassment.
01:08:46.340Um, and I, I got the feeling that things were changing very, um, quickly right then.
01:08:53.700Um, there were a couple of incidents, um, then, um, and, and, and, and one that I, I, I remember very clearly was there is a, there was a, a, a Dodgers, uh, an, an executive for the Los Angeles Dodgers of, named Al Campanis.
01:09:12.020Who got invited on, um, on, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Ted Koppel's show Nightline to talk about Jackie Robinson 40 years after, um, you know, he'd entered the, you know, big leagues.
01:09:25.960And, and, and Al Campanis had been, um, you know, he was, he was, not only was he not a racist, he was, he had been Jackie Robinson's roommate and he was one of his defenders.
01:09:36.100He was great, but he said a few things kind of the wrong way, you know, like he gave a wrong answer to the question of why aren't more blacks managers.
01:09:48.300This is a guy who had like fought to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues.
01:09:53.220But I mean, you know, you had, um, he, he lost his job.
01:09:57.820And I remember Maxine Waters, who was the, uh, who was already in, I don't think she was yet in Congress actually, but she was a very active in, in California politics already.
01:10:08.460So she wanted to, so she wanted to be sure that he wasn't, you know, secretly being given any benefits by, by the Dodgers of any kind.
01:10:15.920And I mean, he was just like, he was just destroyed this, this, this kindly old man who had been a friend of Jackie Robinson's.
01:10:25.180And it was clearly something was, something was, was happening there.
01:10:30.840Um, and I think that what was happening is that these enforcement possibilities, which are in the civil rights act, that, that lawyers were getting, were getting more adept at using them for a growing number of things like saying, well, of course you have freedom of speech.
01:10:51.160But if you say that in the company you own, you will create a hostile environment for your, your employees and therefore they'll be able to sue you for this much money.
01:11:02.460So basically without, without banning speech, you were able to make speech very uncomfortable for people.
01:11:13.700Did that just play out with, I mean, is it just impossible for people to live this way forever?
01:11:24.920And the, and the, um, the, the removal, the lifting of the executive orders that, that, that, that order, um, affirmative action, um, by Trump was an absolutely necessary step.
01:11:41.680The decision not to enforce affirmative action, um, was a necessary step.
01:11:48.780Um, by the way, it was preceded, it was preceded by a Supreme Court case that appeared in its mealy mouthed way to say negative things about affirmative action programs in universities.
01:12:03.100But it's clear that universities were proceeding, um, were proceeding as, as best they, they could to, to maintain it.
01:12:16.300It's, uh, it's, uh, uh, uh, uh, this affirmative action, political correctness woke this whole constellation of authoritarian and even totalitarian seeming rules.
01:12:34.720They are not the result of, you know, a lot of people deciding we really ought to be nicer to trans people.
01:12:43.040They're, they are enforced by the fact that, that if you fall afoul of these, uh, of, of, of, you know, of, of civil rights laws, it can cost you your business and your reputation and everything else.
01:12:57.860What, what, what's the real purpose of them?
01:13:00.340I, I sense that social justice is not actually the, uh, the, the goal.
01:13:04.600Well, I, no, I, you know, uh, you know, I, and, and I should add that, that, that, you know, the, this is just a, well, let's, let, let, let's deal with this.
01:13:16.720I think that, that solving the age old race problem in the United States was the original goal of civil rights.
01:13:27.400But the tools that, that were given to solve that problem included ways to overturn, um, democratic, democratically made decisions in, in, in the South.
01:13:44.220That tool, that ability to, to circumvent a democratic mandate from the American people, from any people is such a valuable thing for politicians to have.
01:13:59.520And so they started using it for everything, as I say, you know, um, um, you, you know, under representation of women, under representation of immigrants, under representation of Hispanics, all these things become, become crises.
01:14:16.520And social justice actually was the name that was given to this, but it was always, and you can call it anything you want, but it always was a way of, of using the government to sort of order society.
01:14:33.940And that's, and that's, and the danger of it was that you could do that at a really, really micro level, you know, I mean, you can do it at the level of like what signs people hang in the doors of their shops, you know?
01:14:46.480And so it became kind of like the world that, you know, Václav Havel describes in his, um, and that's why everyone started reading Václav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn again, because our society felt like those Eastern Europe, European societies at the time of.
01:15:10.640I like the, to, to draw the distinction that, that Hannah Arendt does at one point.
01:15:16.740A lot of people use totalitarianism to mean like a really, you know, I mean, Mussolini originally used it to mean, you know, like the state can, you know, like can be all competent.
01:15:28.840And a lot of people in our time use it to mean like a really, really, really bad dictatorship.
01:15:34.540But the way Hannah Arendt uses it means like the state gets into the totalitary, the totality of your, of your life.
01:15:55.840And, and, and listening in on you, you know, the state wants to be, you know, on your route to work and make sure, you know, it, the state wants to be everywhere.
01:16:04.380They're with you in everything you do.
01:16:39.920But there, there, there might be a confrontation.
01:16:42.360I mean, as long as Trump hasn't, um, you know, removed these laws from the books, which he hasn't, um, he's merely sort of like suspended the enforcement of them.
01:16:53.780And he's unwritten some executive orders, which can be re, you know, reissued.
01:17:02.500So the interesting thing would be what would happen if, you know, how would the, the public respond with, you know, four years of living more freely if those freedoms were suddenly withdrawn?
01:17:17.240And this includes, you mentioned young people.
01:17:19.700This includes people, you know, who've had, who've never had any experience of, of having political, politically correct censorship at work or, or that sort of thing.
01:17:32.080You were saying last night at dinner that people often say the democratic party, when it takes power again, as it will at some point will be a lot more radical, but you were saying maybe that's not correct.
01:17:43.980I don't know what they will have the capacity to do.
01:17:49.360You know, I don't, you know, you say, well, you know, how will people respond if president Ocasio-Cortez says, you know, we're going to have, you know, affirmative action and, and drag queen story hour again.
01:18:06.580Yes, I do think the democratic party is, is probably, um, is probably going to, you know, uh, it's going to find something to, you know, some way to radicalize.
01:18:19.240At what point do economic debates like reemerge?
01:18:26.840And notice we've, you know, as we've been talking about drag queen story hour and race and sexuality and all this stuff, there's been in a way that would have been weird 40 years ago, but almost no conversation of like macroeconomics in public.
01:18:40.800Like all the oxygen is taken up by that, this, the political correctness stuff.
01:18:46.680I, and I, I, I think it's, it's a very welcome thing that economics is coming back.
01:18:51.800You hear a bit of it when we talk about the tariffs, you know, a very interesting, I mean, but Trump is, um, Trump has really confounded a lot of the, of the categories.
01:19:03.440I think that, that everyone has the habit of like saying, you know, talking about tax cuts for the rich and, and, and all that kind of thing to tie this to what we've been saying with immigration.
01:19:17.900Immigration is a very important part of this economic, um, question.
01:19:22.660Trump, an interesting thing about Trump's first term is that as best we can measure it, it was a highly egalitarian period.
01:19:35.240And, um, you know, we really only have accurate undistorted numbers for the first three years of it because the final year of it was, was COVID.
01:19:45.400Um, but it really appeared that the, that the bottom quintile of, um, of, of earners advanced, uh, against other quintiles for the first time since the 20th century.
01:20:05.180And this is in the, the, the feds numbers that came out at, towards the end of the, the Trump administration.
01:20:11.400If you look at total economic performance, like the way we tend to measure it, okay, we tend to measure it by the mean, that is the GDP per capita.
01:20:24.520Economic performance was much better, or it was better under the Obama administration than it was under Trump.
01:21:09.660When you have high immigration, high immigration is like a direct transfer payment from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants, you know.
01:21:31.420So, um, when we talk about Trump and immigration, that's, that, that's, I think an important thing to keep in mind.
01:21:38.560Um, and, and, and, and that is why, um, a lot of people were really surprised, um, by the shift in votes, um, among, particularly among black and Hispanic males to Trump in, in, in 2024.
01:21:55.240And people have sought to explain it through these cultural, you know, factors that we've been discussing earlier today.
01:22:03.580Oh, it was a Trump's, you know, endorsement by this rap hip hop star or whatever.
01:22:08.760But I think it might just be that people, you know, people at that part of the economy, you know, who tend to be, you know, that, that, that benefited from Trump one, tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic.
01:22:23.020And it might just be a direct, a case of, of, of people just devoting their direct economic interests.
01:22:29.800It's a little weird if you go through the Congressional Black Caucus, um, certainly among the people whose names you've heard, like the famous black political leaders in this country, they're all for open borders.
01:22:40.720Huh. Well, I think that that is largely intersectionality and, you know, people talk about, people in, in, in universities talk about intersectionality.
01:22:54.940Like, like, it's a, a, a theory about, you know, the, how, you know, um, different types of lack of privilege intersect.
01:23:03.940Like, you know, am I, am I more, um, discriminated against because I'm a black woman or because I'm a lesbian and, and that kind of thing.
01:23:12.160Um, um, or because I'm foreign or whatever, but actually what intersectionality is, you've, you, you've used the term on your, on your show, but I, what I think it really is, is just coalition building.
01:23:24.460The civil rights regime created a, a system in which you, um, you could do almost anything you wanted.
01:23:35.000Um, a minority could do almost anything that he wanted with government.
01:23:39.800You could do almost anything you wanted with government in the name of minorities, but minorities remained minorities.
01:23:46.060You couldn't get the, the majority to do that.
01:23:49.800So what happens is minorities wind up make the beneficiaries of minority government wind up making a, an alliance.
01:23:58.720You know, you can't vote against immigration because you're a woman and, you know, women's rights are immigrant rights.
01:24:05.000And immigrant rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.
01:24:08.840And, and they're all wrapped up together.
01:24:11.120So, and that's where the, you know, like the, the much mocked non sequiturs of intersectionality come from like, like gays for Gaza and, and, and, and that, and that kind of thing.
01:24:27.200But really you're just describing the democratic party that, that this is just like a theoretical overlay to justify retroactively a coalition.
01:24:35.000The democratic party is the party of the beneficiary, beneficiaries of the civil rights act of 1964.
01:24:43.360The democratic party is the party of beneficiaries of the civil rights act of 1964.
01:24:49.960And the Republican party is the party of the victims of the civil rights act of 1964.
01:24:54.200Or those who have objections to it on, you know, I mean, if you count among the victims, those who feel their liberties constrained by it.
01:25:13.840Well, as I say, I think it's, it's in abeyance now, but, um, but, you know, to, if, if, if, if I could say another thing about, about immigration and the economy, there is a kind of a longer term.
01:25:31.960Um, there's a kind of a longer term process sort of working itself out as we create this, um, as we create through border enforcement, a tightening of the labor market on the bottom of the income distribution.
01:25:51.760It should do some very good things for the, for the country.
01:25:56.320If you believe, as I think you probably should believe that, that inequality is one of the biggest problems confronting the country, it's going to alleviate that somewhat, but it's going to do it in a kind of a, it's going to do it in a way that is going to hurt in places.
01:26:16.320I mean, I think those economists who say that, that, that immigration, that curtailing immigration is inflationary are right.
01:26:26.020And it's inflationary in a lot of ways that affect the, not just the upper middle class, but also the middle class lifestyle, like the great proliferation of, um, of really nice restaurants.
01:26:41.340The idea that, you know, the idea that, you know, when this experiment in mass immigration in, in a nearly open border, you know, with Mexico began in, in the 1970s, there weren't a dozen sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh, you know?
01:26:58.720I mean, people didn't, there were no sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh.
01:27:03.120This stuff, we tend to think that, that this is, that these amenities have developed because of our, you know, improving taste that we're just so much more discerning than our parents were.
01:27:15.820But the difference I think is this source of, of, of just plentiful, bountiful, really cheap labor for people who can, can, you know, work in back kitchens and things like that.
01:27:28.940So there's no doubt, when I worked in a restaurant as a dishwasher 40 years ago this summer, it was a diner in New England.
01:27:41.860But so when you, when you, when you tighten up that labor market and suddenly you have to pay your dishwasher a dollar more, $2 more, $3 more, the, the, the, the meals in your restaurant are going to get more expensive.
01:27:56.400So there aren't going to be, you know, like sandwiches, gourmet sandwiches for $11.99 anymore.
01:28:03.900They're going to be like $28.99, you know, and people are going to say, I'm going to bring my sandwich to, to work, you know, I'm going to, and, and then the restaurant is going to close.
01:28:14.500And the country is going to become much more like it was, like what you saw the tail end of, um, in your diner in New England.
01:28:26.180It's going to have, uh, you know, things are going to, there's going to be a lot more sameness.
01:28:30.100That's, that's the, that's what the world of a, of a, of a, of a low immigration, less free market, where there's less of a free market in labor.
01:28:42.440That's what a society like that looks like.
01:28:52.220Everyone gravitates towards the middle class, right?
01:28:55.060And institutions, economic institutions begin to serve the middle class.
01:28:59.940That is, you have a, a, a, a shrinking of, of gourmet restaurants and, and a, and a concentration of restaurants in the middle of, you know, the middle of the road category.
01:29:12.460So the middle class was the dominant, um, you know, was the dominant portion of the country.
01:29:56.680I mean, it has, it affects the most changes?
01:29:58.560George Borjas, the Harvard economist, has said that, you know, immigration, people always talk about, you know, is immigration good for the economy or bad for the economy?
01:30:09.480And basically, whenever you measure it, it's tough to get an effect on the economy that's more than like 1%.
01:30:18.600I, I, I, I mean, but what the huge effect is, which is like dozens of times larger than the effect on the economy as a whole, is the transfer effect.
01:30:28.600The sort of loss of jobs by people who need $15 an hour to wash dishes to those who will do it for $8 an hour, okay?
01:30:39.680And the benefit to people who used to be paying their gardener, you know, $30 an hour, but now find it can be done for $6 an hour.
01:30:49.100Or, more likely, they pay a guy who's got a team on his truck, and they pay him, you know, $30 an hour and let him sort out how this is done.
01:30:59.900And he does it much quicker, and they save money.
01:31:17.460So, that would explain why rich people in, these are broad strokes, but in general, hate any conversation about immigration.
01:31:27.440Immediately go to motive, you're a racist, and just aren't at all interested in talking about it at all.
01:31:33.800And why working class people really resent it.
01:31:36.440There may be other reasons, too, but that seems like a big reason.
01:31:39.820Yes, those are broad strokes, but I think they're roughly accurate.
01:31:42.600There's a, you know, I, I, I, there's a French sociologist named Christophe Giloui, who's written books about how this has worked in France, and his thinking has really clarified mine on this.
01:31:58.860But, you know, you basically, in France, you have 20 cities that are like nodes of the global economy.
01:32:05.980And they like, you know, like in, in Toulouse, you have Airbus, and where the, you know, where there are engineers and executives at Airbus, they have, you know, you know, African gardeners, and, and, and there are nannies, and there are all sorts of people there.
01:32:23.760When you get out into the countryside, none of that stuff touches anything.
01:32:28.200It's basically people, the economy consists of like returning, you know, cans to the, you know, to the grocery store.
01:32:35.740Um, this explains why, you know, if you live in a place like Washington, D.C. or, or Berkeley, California, and, and, and, or Boston, people are like sincerely puzzled.
01:32:53.320I don't know anyone who voted for him, you know, and they say, they'll say something like, no, really, I've talked to people of all classes.
01:33:00.000I didn't vote for him, you know, my mother didn't vote for him, my nanny, you know, and, you know, in, you know, from Jamaica didn't, you know, who's not naturalized and didn't vote, she didn't vote for him.
01:33:11.420And the answer is, the, the dividing line is, is not between rich and poor.
01:33:16.760It's between the beneficiaries of, and the excluded from, the global economy, right?
01:33:23.420That's the dividing line in the politics.
01:33:25.600So, when you give up open borders, you're really giving up, like, a whole way of life.
01:33:35.660You give up the solidarity between classes in your country.
01:33:42.600As soon as I said it, I realized that what, you could look at it in a, in a separate, in a different way.
01:33:48.080I mean, you, you give up a dynamic that brings the classes close together, you know, which is that the, the ability of, of working class people to withhold their labor for more money.
01:34:07.080They become, they become, it's why trade unions, when they were actual industrial unions and not arms of the Democratic Party, you know, were, you know, they, they equated immigrant labor with scab labor.
01:34:27.020So, um, so you give up that dynamic, you know.
01:34:30.580Um, it's, but it's very tempting, you know, it's, there, there are other ways to look at it, but yeah, I think that's basically, that's basically the, the best way to look at it.
01:34:40.960Will China ever decide, um, is it, as it's, you know, economy matures and it, and cools inevitably, that it needs mass immigration to China?
01:34:51.860Um, you know, I don't know much about China.
01:34:56.920I know, I know a little more about, about Japanese.
01:34:59.360You know, China, China has had a, China's had a tremendous amount of, of internal labor migration, which it is just, which is just about to come to the end of.
01:35:12.900Um, and, and, and so its labor costs are going to rise.
01:35:17.620Um, I don't know how it's going to react.
01:35:19.660It's very interesting that Japan has chosen, um, you know, a tightening economy over a diversifying society.
01:35:30.720That is, they've, they've kept out immigrant labor for the most part.
01:35:35.080And where they've admitted it, they've tended to do, tended to do it on a temporary basis.
01:35:39.940You know, you get a few Filipino nannies and you, they send them home at the end of their, of their, of their term.
01:35:46.880The only mass migration they've had in the last hundred years has been from Korea, um, which they controlled until 1945.
01:35:56.120And then the Koreans who stayed kind of pretend they're Japanese.
01:36:08.580I mean, the United States is constantly, the United States has brought tremendous pressure on Japan to, to admit immigrants.
01:36:18.440And this is one of the things that I find, exactly, this is one of the things I find quite mysterious.
01:36:23.340But if you look at the pressure that the United States, this is one of the things that I think that USAID did.
01:36:28.800It's, I mean, it's sort of an ideological arm of the country.
01:36:32.220But if you look at not just programs, but, but people in the United States diplomatic or in the State Department were always sort of like browbeating, um,
01:36:43.400Victor Orban in Europe, for instance, for not, for not being more welcoming of immigrants.
01:36:50.640But I, so I think we're at the point now where we're in a moment of, of transition, but I, I, you know, Japan is, is deeply in debt.
01:37:01.700I believe they have the largest per capita debt in the world, although it is all to themselves, you know, so it's the, it's debt to the, so it, it should be, it should be.
01:37:13.400It should be workable, but there's still a Japan.
01:37:17.080And, um, you know, as we've discussed, Japan decided that it valued its cultural continuity more than European, um, countries did.
01:37:30.960And so Japan, if you go there, you'll discover it's still, I think the Japan that people who went there 20 or 30 years ago, remember it as.
01:37:40.780So that, I mean, they seem like the only smart country, like in the world, because that does seem, no one's starving in Japan.
01:37:48.960Actually, Japan is infinitely nicer than New York, for example, sorry.
01:37:53.560And Tokyo is, and even though it's bigger and more crowded.
01:38:27.460Are you hopeful about the United States?
01:38:32.600Yeah, you know, but I, I, I'm not sure that's saying much.
01:38:36.160I, I, I tend to, to, to want to be hopeful and, and, and, um, the United States has some, um, tremendous strengths.
01:38:46.300You know, it's got, um, the United States has, something has happened since the, I'm, I'm using Europe, which I think is the best, you know, frame of comparison here.
01:38:59.060You know, the United States has got a lot richer than Europe in the last 15 years.
01:39:06.600And the two societies seem to be converging up until, you know, roughly the time of the, the, you know, the, the, the, the financial crisis of 2008 and then the Euro crisis that followed it.
01:39:20.320And since then, the United States has peeled away by like, I don't know, 20, 20 or 25% from, from European standards of living.