Leah Boustan on Immigration: Then and Now

foreign [Music] hi I'm Bill Crystal welcome back to conversations I'm very pleased to be joined today by Leah bustan professor of Economics at Princeton an economic historian also done important work in labor economics and urban economics maybe that was before a little before the economic history or they came together and they've come together actually into a very important work on immigration which uh I guess the public face of it as opposed to what's written for fellow economists and in in economics journals is her co-authored book from last year very well received deservedly so streets of gold America's untold story of immigration success and I would say personally what I'm impressed by is I'm always intimidated by economists and but therefore I've looked for reasons not to you know read them too too much is I'm impressed by Leah's Yusuf social science and history and and sort of real the real depth and richness of her use of materials outside restricted economics to supplement her economic uh history of immigration in the U.S so Leah thanks for thanks for joining me thank you so much for having me and let's get right to it and discuss immigration um maybe just I'll just play devil's advocate here for a while and against those who say immigrations did a good thing and more importantly is a good thing and more of it would be a good thing for the US and I think a lot of people admit that of course part of the U.S success America's success over the centuries has been immigration but but it's different now the new immigrants and the new waves of immigration are different than the old ones the country into which they're coming is different welfare state identity politics whatever you want so why don't you maybe begin with that and then we'll get into a whole bunch of related topics on immigration today and and in the past some ways I think that people are right that immigration today is different so as a share of the population 15 of the population roundabout is foreign born today and the same thing was true 100 years ago so in that way there's a lot of commonality but then if we think about the countries of origin of immigrants today they're quite different it used to be that 90 of our immigrant stock was born in European countries and now we have immigrants coming from all over the world um from the Americas from Asia from Africa Middle East and so if you look at the development level of countries that send immigrants to the U.S today it's also quite different in the past the U.S was richer than the countries that were sending immigrants by a ratio of two to one and today if we take our top sending countries the U.S is richer than those countries by a ratio of ten to one so you know there's reason to to think well things might be different these days but what really struck us when we looked at the data is actually how similar immigrants are faring today compared to the Past in terms of how much they're earning in terms of how quickly their earnings grow after they arrive in the country and especially in terms of how well their children are doing um in in their own upward mobility and earnings and then even in terms of their cultural outcomes um you know I certainly came into my work thinking well in the past immigrants sort of had pressure to conform and become Americans and that these days it's more acceptable to kind of hold on to your ethnic identity and be a hyphenated American but actually immigrants are are making all kinds of steps to become American at the same Pace now as in the past so let's talk about which order to go and think of the most so interesting the cultural and the economic side and of course they're related but let's let's do economics so I mean the old days whatever the Irish Italians came over and they started off poorer than the people the country to which they were immigrating um I made it up the ladder I don't know did they make up with the ladders fastest we now imagine or did it take them a couple of generations but how does that compare to the Asian and Latin America let's just say immigrants today and then we can talk about the cultural assimilation too we started we started our work with this rags to riches story in our minds that you know if you go back to the Ellis Island generation immigrants started out with just a few dollars in their pocket not speaking English you know just fresh off the boat and then very quickly made it up into the middle class and it turns out that that view of the past is wrong in two different ways first of all a lot of immigrants from Europe 100 years ago arrived already earning more than the U.S born and this is particularly true of immigrants from Western Europe from the UK from Germany and so on and they arrived with um a greater set of skills maybe apprenticeship and training maybe more years of education and so they already arrived if you think of Rags to Riches already arrived with some riches and they didn't have to make it in the U.S but there are also other groups like you're mentioning that did arrive poor and did arrive earning less than the US born and what we've been able to do is follow those immigrants over time in a way that hasn't been possible in the past so we don't want to just follow a few people and tell their stories we want to follow as many immigrants as we can why wasn't it possible what's the sort of social science thing that you have that others didn't have well what we have is really coming out of the computer Revolution so the U.S Census records that we use have always been sitting in the library and then eventually were microfilmed but if you wanted to look up an individual you'd have to do that by hand so it's more like a genealogy project when you're looking up your individual family our kids did that I think at the Library of Congress 20 years ago or something when they were in school I'd get to go and use the microfiche or whatever exactly and a lot of people we've talked to about about our work say well I've done that too but these days you do it on ancestry.com on a website and you can type in your grandparents names so that's actually where we started was on ancestry.com and typing in names by hand and then getting a little bit greedy and saying well maybe we can program like a web scraper that will scrape some data from ancestry and ancestry eventually called my co-author the lawyers had a cease and desist order for us because we were we were using their website too much such that they even had a a meeting at the company saying well why is our product suddenly so popular and they realized it was coming from just a few uh accounts and when we told them that we were academics and we really were just trying to follow immigrants and learn more about the Immigrant story they developed a research partnership with us and and now with other academics as well and so we have access to the underlying data that's underlying the ancestry website and that was all typed in actually by volunteers from the church of Latter-day Saints from the Mormon church um and so it's millions and millions of Records but it's in a digital form now and what we've added is this ability to follow people over time because you know if you look up William crystal in 1900 how do you know that it's the same William crystal in 1910 there might be two or three people with the same name so we can differentiate them by their age and by their state or country of birth and just we've been working on some algorithms to follow people and once that's in place then we can put together millions of immigrants and also millions of the US born and Trace them over their career and their kids I suppose yeah so when we see them living at home with their kids you know if you've looked up your great grandparents you might see them living at home with your grandparents and their siblings and so we know um a lot about childhood household of children of immigrants we can see what their parents were doing and where they were living how many siblings they had and then we can follow those same people when they enter the labor market and see you know have they moved up the ladder relative to what their parents were earning and so you know sort of coming back to this question of well how are the the poor immigrants who arrive and earn less than the U.S born how well are they doing in the past well it turns out that they do move up faster than the U.S born so everyone moves up over their career hopefully everyone starts out at the lowest rung and then achieves promotions as they learn on the job and so on and immigrants do that too and they do that a little bit faster than the U.S born maybe they're learning English for example as they spend time in the labor market but they don't move up fast enough to close the gaps in earnings with the U.S born and that is true today and it was also true 100 years ago the Gap still exist after immigrants have spent their lifetime in their careers in in the U.S labor market but where the real Mobility takes place is between the immigrants themselves and their children so even though their children are being raised in households that are below average in earnings their children are reaching the U.S average they're catching up to the children of the U.S born um so typically in one generation even in one generation and at the same Pace in the past as today and that's what really blew our minds I mean I think back into history we have this impression of like Children of the Irish Children of the Italians going to public schools in in New York and Chicago and making it in manufacturing jobs or even moving into the professions but I think we have a sense that today that process has slowed down for whatever reason and you know I think that is a very shared feeling both on the left and the right but maybe people have a different explanation for what's going on you know either it's the immigrants themselves and the immigrants that we get these days aren't as good as the immigrants we used to get or it has something to do with the economy and it has something to do with discrimination that immigrants might face but it turns out that the facts are just quite different from The Impressions that we have and did it I'm just curious on this did being the the child of a poor immigrant did they catch up to the children of the wealthier immigrants so you know the Irish and the Germans or whatever would be the I'm sure I'm stereotyping here I'm sure not all Germans were wealthier but whatever the kind of comparison would be well it's still the case that your parents income does predict your own place in the income distribution in adulthood so there still is um the fact that if you're being raised in the richest households you're you're going to be earning more than if you're being raised at the poorest households but there is also convergence to the mean so um everyone's moving a little bit closer to the average over time so I don't think that the children of the poorest immigrants are catching up to the children of the richest but both of those groups are getting closer to the average by the Next Generation and these days and in the past uh children of immigrants are are catching up to the average for the U.S born and so that's and that hasn't changed much and there it doesn't depend much on which groups you're looking at but either historically which groups or or today which groups of immigrants origin so um there are some groups that start out with very large gaps and that's true for for example immigrants from the Caribbean it's true for immigrants from Mexico and their children are um catching up almost completely so for those groups I just mentioned there's still a small second generation gap but the degree of Mobility has really been enormous and then there's other groups that start out with gaps that aren't as large but are still present so for example many groups from the rest of South America and from other poorer parts of Asia as well and those gaps disappear so there is difference across country of origin for sure one thing that we're able to do with linking parents to children though that I think is really special is that we can look at households that start out with the same income level so everything we've been talking about so far is is looking at kind of the raw averages and with some groups that start out with larger gaps than others but it's also the case that we can find households from every country of origin at every point in the income distribution I mean there is variation across people so one metric that we think is really interesting is take households that start out at the 25th percentile of the income distribution sort of the Working Poor could think of two parents who are working full-time minimum wage jobs that would put you at the 25th percentile and then look at the 45 sending countries today that have large enough data that we were able to produce averages and compare them to the U.S born and particularly compare them to the white u.sborne because in a way that's sort of stacking the deck against finding children of immigrants experiencing rapid social Mobility because when you look at the white u.sborne that's the group that's going to be doing the best in upward mobility and there we see that children of immigrants are achieving more Mobility more growth in income than Children of the white U.S born on average but you also can see a lot of variation within different sending countries so for example if you're being raised in a household at the 25th percentile and your parents are from Hong Kong China India Pakistan those children are faulting over the median and getting up to the 65th percentile the race of the 25th and they're all the way up to the 65th in adulthood children whose parents are from Central America um they're getting up over the median as well but they're only up to the 53rd percentile in adulthood so you can see a lot of variation by country of origin but still the overall pattern of success is there um and if you sort of take a step back and look at immigrants as a whole no that's so interesting because I guess the conventional certainly the conservative anti-immigration view which you say can be put into you know it could be a sincere worries about the opportunities they have or or they're not ready for America or America's not ready for them or whatever you know or it could be not so nice a kind of motives um certainly would you know accept I think at this point that East Asia and South Asians seem to be doing pretty well but are aren't there too many for Mexico Central America isn't there too much homogeneity among them or they clustered in certain areas they don't seem to the geographical mobility of others and all those things allegedly it's sometimes argued you know slow down their their uh both their cultural assimilation we'll come back to that in a minute but also their economic prospects but you're saying really the data I mean different groups do are different don't always do the same but that basically the kids and the grandkids presumably if we have that data are doing fine while they're doing fine actually and their kids are doing really fine that that's exactly what the data they're doing I mean first of all when it comes to Children of Asian parents I think a lot of people have the impression that Asian parents are already arriving and earning a lot that they're in high tech that they're doctors Etc and and that's certainly a large group but we're we have enough data that we're able to look at children of Asian parents who are raising their kids at the 25th percentile of the income distribution so they're restaurant workers um they're they're engaged in child care Elder Care um and their kids are doing remarkably well so I think that's an interesting group that we don't often talk about and then when we look at Central American and and Mexican parents those are groups that are very much in the news I mean for Mexicans since the early 90s or before and for Central Americans more recently um I think one of the sincere worries is well people are arriving at the border and there's no orderly process there's no attempt to to screen people out on the basis of skills or what kinds of jobs will parents be holding and so we might worry it's not just the first generation the parents themselves but maybe the kids who will be trapped in some kind of permanent underclass maybe the parents don't have enough time to be home and providing um help to the kids in school maybe they'll be living in neighborhoods that are unsafe or where Public Schools aren't of high quality and so we're going to be not just worrying about right now but we're worried about 20 or 30 years from now what will happen with the kids and I think that the data shows really resoundingly that the Immigrant story that we're used to the Immigrant story from our past is actually repeating itself and that the children of immigrants from Mexico and Central America are doing remarkably well yeah it's interesting this is kind of I suppose a sidebar but I'm sort of curious about this partly because of your earlier work was on internal migration and black Americans coming north and they benefited from doing so um how much is that does that remain how much is it the case that immigrants benefit from a sort of geographical their willingness to be mobile within the US they present we don't have great attachment to any one area they could if their relatives there I suppose but um then they start off somewhere often where they have relatives I think but I mean has that decreased I think one of the worries is also the concentrations of Mexican Americans or Mexican immigrants in in one or two areas and same with Central Americans I would just say it was a sign incidentally I mean the idea that the uh Asian Americans were wealthy when they came I mean you have to this is a northern Virginia thing where I live but of course we have we had one of the main location spots for the Vietnamese and cambodians mostly Vietnamese both people in the 70s who were as poorest you could get when they got here if we you know and just and who uh whose kids seem to have who did well themselves whose kids seem to have done extremely well so I don't yeah it's these are not wealthy Hong Kong business people coming over and you know who already well educated and speak English you know no you're absolutely right um so geography matters a tremendous amount what we can say with a strong certainty is about our historical data because that comes from the Census records that we've already discussed meaning that we know really everything there is to know about these households and so um what we were able to do is um try to assess how important is geography in the upward mobility of the children of immigrants and we found that geography in the past explains almost all of the children of immigrant Advantage for two reasons one immigrants did not move to the U.S South at the time that the population was 15 foreign born in 1900 The South was only two percent foreign born and why would you move to the South which was highly rural agricultural cotton growing and what we know from other people's work now is that it was not a place of high upward Mobility certainly for black Americans but even for white Americans and so immigrants avoided the South and that was part of their advantage and another part was outside the South they were more likely to move to cities than to rural areas in fact the one group that predominantly moved to rural areas are Norwegians and there the group where the children are not moving up as quickly as other immigrant groups in the past which I always find so ironic because I don't know if you and your listeners would remember the the closed door meeting where it was alleged that President Trump said you know we don't need immigrants from countries like this you know redacted but we wish we had more immigrants from Norway yeah and it turned out that I wonder what I wonder why he had that image in mind you know right so in that particular case you're like well it certainly doesn't fit with the economic data because immigrants from Norway were incredibly poor they had for the parents themselves for the first generation slow rates of upward mobility and even for the second generation but that's not something that we you know can blame Norwegian culture in fact it's really a matter of geography that Norwegians were primarily engaged in farm labor and and moved not just to rural areas and Farms but specifically to the Upper Midwest in places where there wasn't a lot of upward Mobility at the time so geography was tremendously important historically today we know a little bit less about the underlying mechanisms because I haven't really discussed the modern data but the modern data is under lock and key the way for us to link parents and children comes from tax records so if you sit down to file your own taxes and you have kids you'll write down your children's social security number as a tax dependent and then Flash Forward 20 30 years and your kids will be filing taxes themselves and that's the way that links can be created between a parent and a child but of course that's highly highly secure data and so we have not been able to look at the other aspects of these households in the modern data yet though I think there's potentially some chances for that to happen in the future so we've used other data sets that are smaller and less precise to try to assess some of these mechanisms geography matters today but it's not the full story the way it was in the past immigrants do tend to move to Growing areas today but I also think probably with the high housing prices in some of our most productive cities these days it's just very hard for poor people whether they're born abroad or whether they're born here to move to some of the most dynamic areas in a way that wasn't true in the past so then when we think about the underlying mechanisms it's likely that it has something to do with education educational values and parenting in a way that was not as important historically when many of these kids would have been working in manufacturing you know so now that we have a more service-based knowledge-based economy immigrant parents and U.S born parents who are both at the 25th percentile may be running their households very differently they may be providing more educational opportunities for their kids and that's certainly what we hear from the more qualitative evidence and so we conducted our own survey in writing the book and asked people about their families immigration stories and what we heard from both children of Asian parents who were raised in poor households and from Children of Mexican parents raised in poor households is that their parents you know absolutely prioritized the kids education um and that might be one of the important differentiating factors these days yeah so the lesson for that would be if you want immigrants to move up have good public education presumably this parochial I guess too but I mean most of them so we're using public education and then and have affordable housing in growth areas right I think that's absolutely right it's a bunch of Native Americans too so that's right for everyone I mean it would be a win-win policy for everyone um and you know there's there's actually nothing particularly special about people who are born abroad what we find in the data is that also U.S born households where that we know that the parents moved and we can trace that when we look at state of birth relative to state of residence right so if you're born in West Virginia if you're born in Alabama but we pick you up living in Seattle well that's an internal move and we see that the children of internal migrants look much more like the children of immigrants than they do like the children of U.S born who stay put so just being willing to leave home is something that immigrants have signaled already like we know that they were willing to break Family Ties and move often in search of Economic Opportunity I mean of course some immigrants are also fleeing persecution but for many immigrants they're moving in search of Economic Opportunity and the fact that the parents are willing to do that means that they're finding themselves you know in better labor markets they're moving to labor markets where they're going to find good economic opportunities for themselves and their kids and it's an indication of Their Own values and their own willingness to take make steps take efforts to provide opportunity for their kids yeah and I would guess that the risk taking and the just the kind of willingness to to go through a lot to even Escape persecution uh even though there's more of a push list of a pull you might say than in some other immigration situations itself correlates probably somewhat with you know kind of a a lot of entrepreneurial is not quite the right word but let's uh you know a willingness to to to to to do more than just accept the benefits of a welfare state once you get to the place you're you you've fled to right and fleeing from and fling and and making something of yourself when you get to the place your Fleet you fled to probably correlates somewhat I should think you know um I think you're exactly right I mean but is there data that shows that people come in I guess this would be more reason as refugees let's just say as opposed to as just standard applicants for to be an immigrant do they do particularly differently or is it pretty similar well that's actually a great question um we have been able to put together some data on refugees in the past even though the modern Refugee system that we know now only started in 1980 so having a Visa that indicates that you arrived as a refugee is a modern phenomenon before that going back to 1948 after World War II there were a series of Acts that were designated to particular groups so there was displaced persons from the war Cubans Vietnamese other Eastern Europeans fleeing communism Etc but before 1948 there was no Refugee legislation at all and so the way that we've been able to pick out immigrants who are likely refugees is from this really fascinating set of oral histories that the Ellis Island Foundation collected it's not a huge data set I mean we've been talking so far about millions of Records in this case it's only 1 500 people but that's big enough that we can make some progress on it and we have classified the stories that the immigrants tell about why they moved into fleeing persecution versus coming for Economic Opportunity and around a quarter of the data set back then were refugees by that definition and then we've been able to look at two interesting outcomes for this group one is because we have around an hour of speech for each person we have classified their English ability in a way that's really detailed we have their vocabulary choices their syntax and we even hear their accent because it's a an audio file as well and then secondly we can't link them up to the census to to look at their income and occupation and what we find is that refugees actually assimilate faster they learn English more readily and they earn more than non-refugees and we are able to do this while adjusting for religion and country of origin because certainly Jewish immigrants were more likely to be refugees by this definition but we can say within the set of Jewish immigrants within the set who were leaving from Poland or from Russia some people were coming to you know join their Uncle who said hey I have a job for you at the local Factory and some were fleeing persecution and refugees are more likely to integrate and succeed by you know from what we're finding and that fits very well with what people have been finding for U.S data in the modern period as well and it kind of makes sense if you think about it if you're a refugee you know that you're moving to the U.S as a new permanent location and that you need to make adjustments and really get to know the new culture the new language on the other hand economic migrants both in the past and today a good chunk of them go home around a third of immigrants return and you may not know whether you're going to return or not and so you're thinking yeah I'll just be here for a few years I'll save up I'll go home buy land build a house I'll get married you know I'll use my savings at home but then things change you meet someone you end up staying but that means that those first few years that you're here you're not really fully invested and that's what we think is going on in terms of refugees ability to learn English more quickly that's interesting um well let's just stick on the economics here for a few more minutes then we'll get to the sort of cultural social side of things um so that's all very nice the immigrants have done well but someone might argue that's at the expense of native born Americans earnings wages uh that's obviously a very common argument very been a very common argument the last 20 30 years I guess with some backing from some economists and based on some studies uh maybe some short-term studies so how true is all of that and and also relatedly well I'm thinking of it I mean one argument that's made is you know the greatest times for the American economy were I guess 50s and 60s at least middle class wages and that came on the heels of serious immigration restrictions in the 20s and therefore less immigrant heavy uh population and Workforce so doesn't that all suggest that this is a nice story you've been telling about immigrants doing well but it's at some expense to to the native board well I think that's a really compelling story because if you look at this simple framework it makes sense right so if you just think of immigrants as workers they arrive nothing else has changed so that means labor Supply is larger and so wages must go down that's basic econ 101 and so I think that's a really easy story for people to understand it makes sense and then if you think about like you're saying the time series well when immigrant numbers were low that's when American wages seem to be high and growing and now that immigrant numbers are going back up again especially lower skilled U.S born are not doing as well so that also seems compelling but if you look a little bit deeper and you know the reality is a lot is more complex both in terms of the model and the basic economics as well as the empirical work and what people are finding in the data so if you think about the model I mean first of all immigrants are not just workers they're also consumers so when they show up in a new city they need a place to live someone has to build them a house maybe they're arriving with kids or they have kids a few years later someone has to be their teacher their doctor and so they're generating a lot of local labor demand as well immigrants also are more likely to start businesses um now not just at the very top not just the high-skilled immigrants who are arriving and starting Tech businesses but all the way down the ladder so there's some new work by Pierre azoulay an economists and co-authors that's showing that very convincingly um and another thing that's going on is that immigrants create markets that just wouldn't exist without some low paid manual labor so if you think about like hand-picked lettuce versus machine harvested iceberg lettuce I mean when I was a kid in the late 70s early 80s we didn't have the like vast array of hand-picked fruits and vegetables everything was like harvested by a machine and so there's all sorts of products that we have access to now think about like someone doing your nails in a mint in a salon versus you do your nails at home and you you know buy nail polish at CVS that that's what we used to do in the 80s and now we have all sorts of markets and services that immigrants create and so it's not like if we kicked all the immigrants out today we would still have these salons and the hand-picked fruits and vegetables and the Landscaping on our Lawns outside but that the work would be done by the U.S born I mean my guess is that those sectors would just shut down and we would end up doing a lot of the work ourselves you know if it comes to child care if it comes to taking care of our elderly parents and if it comes for to all of these kind of personal care services we would do it ourselves because we're willing to buy that stuff out in the marketplace at a certain price but not if the price is double what it is today um so that's all kind of on the um on the model and kind of making the model a little bit more complex but it doesn't show up on a bumper sticker it's not like you can say well yes immigrants are workers and they're consumers and there Etc and and somehow the voters are with you for that whole discussion I think it gets too intricate um and then if you because the model could go either direction it really becomes an empirical matter and you have to look at the studies and you're right that there are a few studies um by economists suggesting that when immigrants arrive wages go down but there are many many other studies that actually kind of surprisingly to us as economists found the opposite or found basically that when immigrants survive there's not much of an effect at all on wages or employment so I don't think we should be in the business of just counting up the studies and saying oh there's five on this side and there's a hundred on that side and so we're done but we need to think a little bit more carefully about what exactly these studies show and how they're constructed so I'm happy to talk more about that um yeah I know I mean it is I've been down the strap a little bit myself and it could be somewhat rabbit-like but my impression is like the famous one of the Mario Boat Lift being you know to print I mean yes if you dump I mean presumably let's just say 50 000 people suddenly of working age suddenly show up somewhere it's probably going to depressed the equivalent you know wages the wages of equivalent uh native born people for for a while but it might also be the case that that would be quite brief that that effect because as you say these people that are consumers they start other businesses a whole new Industries or show up they it's not like the people who run nail salons don't also consume they buy things from native born Americans right so I mean is that I think my Impressions some of the Studies have shown that that if there's a short that it's quite a short and it's a surprisingly short short-term effect it seems like sometimes in depressing wages and that net net you end up uh everyone ends up better off it's or at least as well off or maybe better off fairly quickly is that a fair summary of what what some of the studies show well one thing I think is interesting is that studies are that are conducted with the same approach but look at wages on or look at housing prices and rents actually come to different conclusions um so you're right that in the case of Mariel Boat Lift into Miami um there may have been a very short run uh depressed effect on wages but people um do quickly adjust to that in various ways some U.S born workers move out of town and move elsewhere um some businesses um expand now that there's low skilled labor available and in the case of Miami at the time decide not to implement various um computerized or machine-based approaches like so the self-checkout grocery store type of thing instead use low skilled workers so on the wage side it seems like even in the case of Marielle there's not much long-term effect on wages at all but there does seem to be an effect on housing prices and rents um so you have new people move in to an area they need a place to live and our construction sector is just not fluid enough to adjust so this is not something that has to be true but it does seem empirically as something that has been true uh over the past few decades and so it occurred to me given that inflation has been so much in the news over the past year that maybe this is what people are objecting to more so than waiters employment um you know it seems like the studies are finding very little in long-term effect on wages or employment and even so would be concentrated like you said in similarly skilled U.S born workers and these days um High School dropouts are a very small share of the U.S born labor force and so perhaps what's going on is that when immigrants move to areas we're just not Nimble enough to adjust in the housing sector and so rents go up and we can you know we don't have to be stuck in this equilibrium I mean we can respond um with um more open policy on housing construction but since we haven't done that it seems reasonable then as a local person to say well wait a second why are my rents higher and then to put some of that blame on population growth and immigrants being a large chunk of population growth and my impression also is that a lot of studies show and I think this is common sense honestly that the the downward pressure on wages there has been some of in the last 20 30 years was only um comes so much more from technology which isn't stopping one way or the other or Outsourcing which isn't going to stop unless we we in the rest of the world go quite protectionist than from whatever number of immigrants show up here and what could even make the case that the immigrants showing up here are allowing jobs to stay here that would otherwise would go to go abroad so don't you want to import the immigrants rather than export the jobs absolutely right I mean so when we started by talking about the time series okay immigration's been increasing and the pay of lower skilled U.S born has been stagnating but that's not the only thing that's been going on in the past 20 or 30 years it's not just that immigration is increasing and I think that um the work by Economist has showed that Automation and trade and Outsourcing have been a much bigger force in lowering pay for low skilled Americans than immigration has um you know you can fault the studies that look at immigration for various aspects of their research design but the fact is that the studies of Automation and the studies of trade and Outsourcing have very similar research design and yet they're finding that there is a an association between trade technology and wages in the same types of approaches where people are not finding an association between immigration and wages and so you know on balance if the evidence seems to be very supportive of of the story that you're telling and I think that we need to think about um what's the menu of options that firms have so if we take immigrant workers off the menu it's not like the only other option on the menu is hire us-born workers and get it all done domestically because it seems like Outsourcing is a very prominent option on the menu and there's been a lot of new work oh just over the past few years showing that there's a strong relationship between immigrants and Outsourcing if immigrants disappear firms take the option of moving the jobs abroad and if we move the jobs abroad we're not going to get those local labor demand benefits that we were just talking about you know the fact that immigrants themselves are going out to eat and are um you know need need teachers for their kids and so on and so I think that our communities are going to be stronger if we get if we you know import workers so to speak rather than exporting jobs yeah that's so interesting it just it just seems to be kind of commonsensical that the combination of China and I guess India and other nations entering the the labor for the world labor force plus the ability to Outsource uh plus technology big technological breakthroughs with swamp any any even slight negative you know effective more immigrants here competing for certain jobs just it seem like such so much more massive you know Auto auto plants employ 500 people now not five thousand that has nothing to do with immigrants you know so some people are out of work in in former in in Auto former Auto heavy areas and auto related areas in the midwest but I mean yeah that's that seems like a very different phenomenon than for immigrants or immigration gets blamed somewhat though um also isn't I guess just one which is on the economics it's just two more points I do want to get to the assimilation cultural kind of issues um immigrants and so forth they come in a kind of working age I guess I mean just from a strictly economic point of view are an advantage right I mean I mean people are sort of cost the country cost at least the government a lot I guess but maybe the economy I lost when they're little kids or when they're old you know and when they're working they're adding resources you know to the economy and paying taxes in addition to having jobs you know a huge majority of them of course so in a funny way having a lot of immigrants who are 25 years old is kind of a very good thing to have right you haven't paid for their education it's not you know crude about it in a way but I mean you haven't paid for their education and now you get them as workers and taxpayers you know you're absolutely right um the National Academy of Sciences had a report uh five or six years ago um and they showed that the immigrants themselves the first generation um they do cost the system more than they put in but only because we're paying for the public schooling of the kids um and once the kids grow up and become the second generation and remember they're the group that has the rapid upward Mobility they more than pay for the debts of their parents so when immigrants are arriving and they are doing um manual work they're gardeners they're working in restaurants and they're agricultural workers they're paying in in taxes but given that their pay is low it doesn't compensate for our coverage of public schooling but we need to scale back from one generation to think about a two or three generation investment and it turns out that by the time the kids are themselves in the labor force they've already paid the debts of the parents um so I don't think we should take a short-sighted view here interesting and maybe finally in the economics I people often argue High School immigrants good you know computer programmers don't send the kids home the phds MIT home to their native country that seems reasonable of course but low-skilled problematic and I mean address that some from an economic point of view that we can get to also maybe a kind of cultural point of view but is that really true or is it actually not particularly the case or well high-skilled immigration is is good that is true um and we already um get the advantages of a very productive worker right away and the children of high school this education has been paid for abroad presumably yeah right I mean maybe they have their PHD here um and that might be somewhat expensive to the federal government but it certainly pays for itself in terms of new innovation um and Science and Technology and then the children of high-skilled immigrants do quite well if you look we've been talking about the children who are raised at the 25th percentile what about the children raised at the 75th percentile there we actually don't see much of a gap between children of white U.S born and children of immigrants all those kids are doing well and they're doing equally well so certainly high-skilled immigration is a huge win-win and we should be doing more to encourage and allow um immigrants who are educated here to stay um so there was a short period um under Clinton and Bush where we expanded the H-1B visa option and then that sunsetted and never increased again so we're basically now at the same number of Visa entry slots for H1B which is high tech and science um as we were in 1990. even though the population is 30 percent larger so we're only allowing 85 000 entrance a year and so there's a lot we could do there and I think if we're going to be expanding immigration we could be expanding in the high skill Direction but I don't think it should be Zero Sum I don't think we should be expanding in the high school Direction and cutting from the low skilled because if we look at low-skilled immigrants they're filling in a whole set of services that there's where there's strong Demand on the part of U.S consumers and so agriculture we've already talked about the markets that exist now that didn't exist before because of agricultural workers construction and particularly the child in Elder Care and then all these personal services and Hospitality right I mean you I mean there's a labor short I mean is it too simple matter to say there's a labor shortage and there's inflation and letting in more low skilled immigrants would help with both so why why is this like what's the downside at this point of just of having an awful lot more people to work at everything from child care and elder care to restaurants to hospitals to Construction exactly and I think one of the concerns is about the children one of the concerns is about are we going to be letting in this permanent underclass and I think that our work shows that that concern is really unfounded another concern I suppose is like well if we have the high wages as a signal for long enough time then somehow U.S born workers will respond to that we need to give it time so that these jobs can be taken up by the U.S born but it doesn't seem to be that the U.S foreign low skilled are responding to at least yet to the wages as they currently exist so there was a a really interesting recent study by Michael Clements and Ethan Lewis where they're looking at h 2B Visas so these are not the high skilled H-1B but these h2b could be in all sorts of low-skilled kind of Industries something like a Timber Mill or something like a landscaping company and the company applies to hire a worker from abroad for a particular job and they were able to look at firms that won or lost this Lottery so you might think that the firm that lost the lottery and was not able to hire a lower skilled work from abroad might turn around and hire a U.S born worker instead no somehow those those Farms ended up just in some cases shutting down or in some cases just persisting on but with lower revenue and they did not end up hiring a U.S born worker so whatever the current constellation of issues are that lead low-skilled u.s-born workers not to take these jobs it's not because there's immigrants flooding in here we have a firm that lost the lottery was not able to hire a foreign-born worker and yet they're not turning to a u.sborne worker in response so that's really fascinating I think we we desperately need to understand what's going on with U.S born low-skilled workers but the answer does not seem to be that they're just being out competed by immigrants got a lot of them have jobs since we have low unemployment and I know we have some you know absence from the workforce of other part of some people but even so with three and a half percent unemployment you don't have that much you know that many low skilled workers foregoing opportunities or if they're forgotten them they're forgotten them for entirely other reasons than pure economic ones I mean I have an issue with like men like prime age men who are out of the labor force right so they're not going to show up in the unemployment statistics because they're not looking for work right and that is definitely a change I mean it used to be all through um the 20th century up to around 1990 that if you were 25 to 54 uh man then 95 percent were in the labor force including in the Great Depression because you're in the labor force whether you're working or whether you're looking for work and then starting around 1990 this has changed but I don't think we need we can put this on the backs of immigrants yeah and and you know that's that's that that's interesting um well let's get from you mentioned sort of the fears about their kids and which gets to sort of assimilation and let's talk about that more more on the kind of cultural side that they're obviously related to the economic side and the cultural side well one last thing on the low side for low-skilled immigrants have can have high school kids right and this is another thing that annoys me about the high skilled thing it's as if we don't all know zillions of examples from American history both Mac both in magnitude of numbers but also individually know people who yes the grandparents were you know one of my grandfathers was a tailor but his his son and daughter and son-in-law were in daughter-in-law were high you know much more High skilled and I mean so that's that's extremely common for both native Warren and immigrants so they people treated as if these low-skilled immigrants are only going to have low skilled children which I suspect is not the case well that's exactly my own family and then put it up in touch with the data and we see that like the stories that we tell from our own families actually matches with the the the data that come from millions of families I mean the same story is true in in my family and my great grandfather immigrated um and he never moved up the ladder um and his oldest kids actually did have to leave school to help support the family but his youngest two he had eight kids his youngest two became a doctor and a lawyer um and so you know if it's just one family story it's my family it's your family we could start collecting these anecdotes and eventually we get data and that's what the data shows and it's not just historically it's also today so another cultural and social side I'd say the biggest fear is assimilation to put it simply I mean sort of that we used to be good at assimilating Melting Pot et cetera et cetera and now we have whatever reasons structural or ideological almost it doesn't or just where people are from and where they're now living uh they don't assimilate the way they used to so what's the truth about that well that was certainly the um stereotype that Ron and I had in going into this work we thought well these days you can FaceTime with your family back home you can get TV channels from home and there's also more acceptance of multiculturalism now in fact it's even cool um in certain circles like the academic circles that we travel in to have like a kid who has an exotic name or is bilingual well it turns out that like you can't just introspect about what's going on in academic circles and learn about what's really happening and so we were quite Blown Away by how common the pattern of cultural assimilation is now with the past so there are four or five measures that we can use that we can compare 100 years ago to today learning English is absolutely the most important one but also moving out of immigrant neighborhoods or enclaves where you're surrounded by other people from your home country for immigrants who arrive in the U.S single who do they marry do they marry someone else from the same home country or did they marry either an immigrant from another country or a U.S born spouse and then finally one of the measures that we really like is the names that immigrant parents choose for their kids and the reason why we like that is because you can actually get multiple measures of the same person maybe they have a kid after a year or two in the U.S and then another one three years later and that allows you to trace out how they're learning about U.S culture or embracing us culture are they choosing really ethnic sounding names or are they choosing names that are also often given by U.S born moms and on all of these measures we just found resounding similarity um we found that you know the pace of learning English the pacing of moving out of immigrant neighborhoods or of marrying people from other cultures is if anything a little bit higher today than it was in the past and for the name patterns as well of course immigrant moms give their children more ethnic names on average but that Gap is really large when an immigrant mom has a child after a year or two in the country and then it closes over time it doesn't completely close either now or in the past but the closure is an indication of families learning about U.S culture and embracing it I think we got this idea you know originally from my co-author Ron's family himself you know he's an immigrant from Israel and his two oldest have names that are just very hard to pronounce and for his third child his third child's name is Tom so Tom is a name that turns out it works in Hebrew and it works in English um but he just said I you know what um first of all we're here to stay initially they thought they might return um and I see that it's challenging on the playground it's challenging with teachers to have a name that doesn't really fit in so third child is Tom and I think exactly that pattern is showing up in the Big Data as well and what was striking to us is just it's just as important now as it was a hundred years ago despite the fact that we're more Global and despite the fact that we can still access you know home culture when we're in the U.S people want to become American and they're taking the steps to do that yeah the country becomes a little more tolerant of exotic names that's not the worst thing either I suppose in the world but it's interesting you should say the parents actually despite that sort of don't you know they they don't want to risk it as it were and they they do go for the more uh the Americanization of Emily kind of kind of thing I mean the language thing I came to Washington 85 to work in the education department and for Bill Bennett and we were concerned based on some I think empirical data and just anecdotal mostly about bilingual education not because we were culturally hostile this really was genuine I think in our case we wanted it Hispanic kids would not do well if they didn't learn English very well and here and there was a big push then to educate them in Spanish they didn't yet know English and allegedly it was just for a year or two till they got comfortable in English but some in some cases maybe there's a fewer cases that we thought honestly but because of the kind of strident sea of some of the Advocates we thought it was more you know they're going to just be speaking Spanish for 12 years and never going to learn English I think that turned out not to be true anyway we pushed for ESL English the second language more and immersion and a little bit against the pure bilingual uh whether I think we weren't wrong to do that and I think a lot of fact people have moved in an ESL sort of Direction and last 20 30 years but it's also the case that it now looks a little laughable honestly I mean really do we know is there anyone who's 30 years old who grew up in America who is English isn't awfully good because you know finally got taught in Spanish for a few years while they were catching up you know but I don't know I feel like the the simulation seems to work on the level of language um as you said very well and more maybe it's a it was what has the impression in Iowa in 1870s and 80s there were lots of German kids who actually were still speaking German in the same maybe in the second generation it's true I mean up until World War one there there were German language public schools in a number of Midwestern states and then it was during World War one that some States passed English only um laws that were targeting German Americans um and turned out that those English only laws backfired so one of Ron's colleagues at Stanford has done work on this the German families that were in those States if you compare them to neighboring families just across the border in the states that did allow for German language instruction to continue those families really doubled down on German culture at home and so they were more likely to give their kids German names the kids were more likely to marry other kids who had German parents and they were less likely to volunteer for World War II so the thing is is like there's the public sphere and the private sphere when it comes to passing along culture to your kids and so if you're too hostile in the public sphere to immigrants retaining some of their culture then they can double down at home and so somehow the US has achieved a really good balance on cultural assimilation and I think we have to try to protect that Heritage actually and um we haven't yet done systematic studies comparing the US to Europe and comparing the US to the UK and to Canada but that's something that we're moving into right now with our research and I don't know yet if I can say for sure that America has this Special Sauce you know and that it's not just an immigrant story but um from you know anecdotally what we see um the US does a very good job at culturally and economically assimilating immigrants and we should not take that for granted because we can make some certain tweaks that might change and tip that balance I suppose I mean marriage is the ultimate private decision in almost all cases we have had laws against obviously interracial marriage and but not much not many restrictions otherwise I don't think we didn't try to stop Irish remaining Italians or Jews from American Christians or whatever um and I I I gather the rate well tell me so is the rate of intermarriage or out marriage however you want to say it I mean the similar to what it has been or are people uh if that is a guarantee pretty much a guarantee isn't it of of a simulation I mean it's it's similar today than the past and if anything they're stronger rates of marrying out group so if you go into the past Italian Americans into the second generation 90 of them were married to other Italian Americans that's the one group that stands out in the past is having um the strongest in-group marriage and the weakest out group and I think that the highest rate today is like 83 percent so there's no group today that's 90 percent marrying only within their own country of origin so there's more tolerance and acceptance of of Crossing some of these group lines today and that is also spilling over into immigrant communities yes we never had laws against an Italian Marrying an Irish person but certainly like the moms and dads when you brought home um someone from the other community someone from across the tracks or from a different church that there was very little acceptance of that at home 100 years ago and I think these days there's a rise in intolerance of marrying from other groups and a no decline in willingness of the Immigrant group to marry out and including with Mexicans Central Americans and so forth certainly not with Asians I think anecdotally at least it's pretty obvious there's massive out marriage if that's the right word or among most of those immigrant groups including groups that were very I mean it's amazing we locked up Japanese 150 000 I think in in detention camps and less than 100 years ago during World War II and I think now I don't know I may have this wrong but a majority of Japanese American Japanese-American kids don't marry other Japanese American Kids a very very other other races and other ethnicities so the assimilating effect of the Melting Pot if that's the right term I know people don't like that term maybe anymore but that one hand it was like let's work for wrote a book beyond them I'll take a Beyond The Melting Pot so I guess whatever it is but it still seems to work pretty well here in the US it still seems to work the social and cultural forces I guess it's just so strong the uh you know let's make it closed I wasn't really intended to do this on the international website I've got two country thoughts about it and tell me which if any either you suspect is right should say you maybe some of this work you haven't quite finished doing yet or whatever but you've suddenly read a ton about it um so on the one hand I feel like it's except America's exceptional it's it is a nation of immigrants it's pretty extraordinary when you think about it and our greatness is so much dependent on our growth just a literal population growth and also power and wealth so dependent on these waves of immigrants who were not restricted at all for many decades centuries really of American history and then not restricted restricted a bit somewhat but then we opened up the the spigot again so on the one hand we are the nation of immigrants very few other countries call themselves exactly a nation of immigrants you know I guess Israel would be kind of a partial exception to that um but uh so we're exceptional and that's great and I'm perfectly happy if it turns out that we are exceptional and that that's been a part of our recipe of reasonable success as a nation that on the other night is part of me looks at other countries and thinks I don't know maybe other nations also they don't talk about it as much but they do let in a fair number of immigrants actually and seem to benefit from them quite a lot so I'm looking at you know there's I mean I was in Britain in college over this first few weeks in the summer very long right at the height it was just after the height of alarm at all the uh pakistanis and Indians South Asians who came in I guess as a result of them having Commonwealth status and they were sort of allowed to enable to come kind of and there's big reaction obviously in British politics Enoch Powell and all that and great concerns at the time these were these are the hardest people to assimilate I mean we're Britain we're an island it's you know it's always been England and all this kind of thing and here are these people of a different color a different religion either in Muslim or Hindu uh I don't know who's the prime minister of Britain it seems like they're simulated fine honestly I'm sure there were there were bumps along the way and some did better than others it's also a good contrary I'll just tell this one quick story a good contrarian story of I believe and I have never really checked on this my memory from being there in 72 of us is that people were more worried about the assimilation of Indians and pakistanis that there was this kind of fashionable well fashion was unfair this cultural sense that Pakistan the British always liked the pakistanis a lot and used them in the military much more and stuff and B they were a fellow abrahamic religion if they were Muslims they kind of you know sort of similar it was different but it was you know uh to Christianity or Judaism for that matter whereas the Hindus that was just a kind of odd Eastern religion it led to passivity there were these kind of fancy cultural arguments why they would never make it which is sort of funny I think in the sense that I think the Indians the actual Hindus have done extremely well in Britain and um you know this has not been a big problem anyway just a long way of saying that I wonder if one did if you have a sense of what how much we are exceptional in this and how much we are the most visible example of something that might internationally be true that basically if you want to have a vigorous country and a strong country and a strong economy you probably should be letting in a fair number of immigrants well the U.S is actually um in the middle or even on the lower end of oecd countries in terms of share foreign born these days is that right um so you know being at 14 15 percent um most European countries now are getting closer to 20 but I think it's a little hard to compare because you could be foreign born but within the EU and right you have free Mobility right so um that's a different type of immigration but it's immigration nonetheless and and often of people who speak a different language um and and so um we're really entering this um Strange New Territory where a whole set of countries that had been immigrants sending countries 100 years ago are now immigrant receiving countries for the first time and so I do think it's been harder uh for European countries um to adapt to this free mobility and especially to immigrants who are coming from outside of Europe and there's been a lot of um government oversight and how immigrants are supposed to be incorporated and received so many are coming officially as refugees they come to Refugee processing centers they're not allowed to work for 18 months or for in two years they have to take special language classes and I that model um is not working very well so they're in the realm of refugees there has been cross-country studies and the U.S is doing the best in assimilating refugees if you look at earnings unemployment growth and the European countries are not doing as well despite the fact that they say well we're providing housing we're providing language support Etc but in the US we've had a model for over 100 Years of your own ethnic Community provides the support and there's also been an overlay of non-profits often religious non-profits Catholic Charities highest and Lutheran Outreach that have been involved with Refugee resettlement as well so it's not like refugees arrive and oh you're on your own like you're entering the American capitalist system good luck to you as an individual no there's been like community support and there's been religious support and so it seems like that strategy has been working well in the U.S I on at the moment we don't have great studies in terms of incorporating economic migrants but we may find that the US is doing better on that margin as well there's been work for in Canada versus the US and in Canada they have this vaunted point system right people say well they allow in immigrants who are higher skilled you have to have a ba you have to show that you've that you um speak English already um but you know there's Bas and there's Bas right I mean there's a lot of places where you can get a degree and it's that that checks the box for the Canadian point system but in the U.S if you're entering in the high skilled as a high school Democrat you're often coming in as a student so there's been a real um institution of higher education in the U.S then says yes we'd like to admit you as a student and then after your student time you have at least um 18 months sometimes three years on opt which is the optional practical training and you have to have a firm hire you in order to take advantage of opt so now we have various groups whether it's corporate or whether it's the non-profit higher ed sector that's selecting entrance rather than checking a set of government boxes and it seems like high-skilled immigrants in the U.S again have stronger earnings growth have higher employment rates than high skilled immigrants in Canada so just from those various points of comparison it seems like the US is doing well you know a sort of across the board in in assimilating immigrants um and so there I don't know at the moment this is just you know talking about hypotheses and what we're you know going to find over the next few years as we do this work but I won't be surprised if we find that there is some element of American exceptionalism here that comes from our history um that we've been an immigrant receiving country for a long time um that you know we've made mistakes but we've learned from the mistakes and we have really strong and robust immigrant communities here at that support newcomers and even if you're in a Heritage Community like an immigrant community that no longer is really sending immigrants you still have that memory of your family's story that might lead you to reach out when there are immigrants coming in in your local areas so yes there are very very loud anti-immigrant voices these days but actually if you compare to the past there are far fewer of these very loud anti-immigrant voices now than there were in 1920 or than there were in 1900 or 1880. um So eventually this anti-immigrant group was successful historically at shutting the Border they tried four times eventually they were successful on the fourth try and so that meant they had to actually override a presidential veto can you imagine anything these days that would generate enough support that could you know get a super majority in the house in the Senate right so there was incredibly strong anti-immigrant sentiment now and these days while we certainly have some loud voices they're not the majority at all yeah now we just have more just uh you know inability to move ahead on immigration policy as opposed to Chinese Exclusion Acts or or 1924. restrictions tax well that's a good point I'm curious you want to move closer this you wrote the book the book came out about a year ago I think and you've been talking to a lot of people about immigration uh I know do you are there is there are there reasons to be if you're for a more liberal immigration policies as I am I think you are I mean are there any reasons to be cheerful is there do you have a sense beneath the surface that the debate's changing a little bit or or is it pretty much what it's been for the last decade or so well first of all let's be cheerful that um that this the status quo survives I mean there were efforts um 2017 raise act for example to to cut legal slots um and that was rebuffed um there was some success at cutting you know Refugee entry slots but um that is slowly rebounding um so we should be grateful that the system Still Remains and is it the case that President Biden I have the impression been sort of beneath the surface is actually letting in has figured out ways to let in more people legally without uh Congressional legislation is that is that so we will actually have more legal immigrants this year than we did two or three years ago is that right well I think there's interesting experimentation with this idea of um humanitarian parole um which it's um I mean we already have something like TPS temporary protected status and so parole has some common features with that uh where um there there are various ways to try to create um temporary legal status and maybe use um Community sponsors individual sponsors to allow in refugees from particular countries so that was very successful with Ukraine um it was successful with Afghanistan and then that model is being rolled out to other groups as well so there's a little bit of experimentation on the margins there but I think that there is a strong appetite right now for um trying to address High skilled immigration stasis you know we talked about how H-1B visas never has not expanded since 1990 there are long green card backlogs for people who are waiting who were born in China or India for example and they are in line for a green card but might be a 10-year wait um and I think the frame of competition with China and competition for Global Talent semiconductor industry um that's a frame that might work uh on a bipartisan basis and it ha there has to be willingness on the part of the Democrats to break out that piece of immigration separate from the other components what would be otherwise comprehensive immigration reform and I I don't know how optimistic we should be that that will happen but there is like a blueprint and a pathway forward on high-skilled immigration reform and I also think that it would be a mistake on the part of the Democrats to imagine uh that um we need to accept the frame of um chaos at the border crisis at the border is something that only Republicans will talk about or should should discuss and worry about I think everyone wants a more orderly and um streamlined system at the border that even if you're the strongest of supporter of immigrants and of low-skilled immigration as well I don't think that there's anyone who is um in favor of the chaos that we currently see so there may be as well a pathway forward on Asylum reform and providing more resources to the Asylum system so that people's cases can be heard and that they can have Justice for their rightful claims rather than waiting sometimes for a year or more to have their cases heard yeah that's like more Pathways to Legal immigration even if it's temporary or partial is one way to relieve the pressure the actual pressures at the Border in terms of Bob's kind of assembling and so forth and there's some we'll see maybe that's happening a little bit now with Biden's attempt to open up some of those Pathways at the same time as uh title 42 I guess goes away or whatever but stuff gets kind of complicated I mean on the other hand not not letting the not not legalizing the dreamers just seems basically nuts at this point and the fact that they can't even do that on a bipartisan basis is maybe grounds for not being too too cheerful way now I mean that's just they hear they're working you know I mean they want to stay here so what you know there's a lot of evidence they're doing fine right so what do we what do we even talking about with Arabic no absolutely I mean there's certainly a lot of reason for pessimism across the board I mean we're having um you know inability to move forward because of polarization on many different topics and immigration is is not alone there um so it's it's not like I have a lot of faith in our current system but I I do think that there are um ideas uh that will get us there so um there there are conversations that are happening there are strategies whether we have the political will to make that happen um I don't know and maybe not entirely optimistic on that front but at least we we have some areas of agreement and some some good ideas of how to go forward well and we have your work and work of colleagues and uh which is you know serious historical and economic and social science work which I think provides much more of a basis for moving ahead uh with some more confidence perhaps than you know 20 or 30 years ago when people sort of wanted to do the right thing but weren't sure that you know what the cost might be or the downsides and so forth so I really think this you're not just the book but the work of you and your colleagues really is important in this respect so thank you which this conversation is a small part so uh uh Leah thank you for for joining me here on on conversations thank you so much for having me I really appreciate it no I really I thought I enjoyed it and benefited from it I'm sure our listeners and viewers did us well and uh so thank you Leah bustan and thank you all for joining us on conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

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Length: 81min 46sec (4906 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023