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Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, discusses immigration policy with Russ Roberts in this EconTalk episode, arguing that moral presumption should favor freedom of movement. Caplan begins from a foundational principle: restricting someone's ability to move to a wealthier country inflicts serious harm, so the burden of justification falls on those proposing restrictions, not those defending openness. He then works systematically through the standard objections to immigration — wage effects, fiscal burden, crime, cultural loss, political risk, and congestion — showing that empirical estimates of these harms are either small, contested, or can be accounted for by complementary effects and non-rival public goods that current analysis overlooks.
Rather than treating these concerns as grounds for exclusion, Caplan proposes that each has a less harmful alternative. If wages for low-skilled workers face downward pressure, charging immigrants entry fees or surtaxes and using the revenue to compensate losers through earned income tax credits preserves both economic benefit and fairness. If welfare abuse is feared, temporary or permanent benefit ineligibility for non-citizens addresses the problem without barring entry. For cultural or political concerns, he marshals historical evidence: fears about past waves of immigrants (Eastern Europeans around 1900) proved unfounded, and second-generation immigrants assimilate linguistically and politically despite what stability bias might suggest. The conversation includes specific findings: Caplan cites George Borjas's estimate that even the most anti-immigration researcher puts wage losses for high school dropouts at roughly 5 percent, while immigrants contribute more in taxes than they draw in benefits when the welfare state's structure (heavy on elderly support) is properly analyzed.
Caplan argues there is a strong moral presumption against immigration restrictions, and that none of the standard objections (wages, welfare, culture, politics, congestion, crime) is strong enough to overcome it, since each is either empirically overstated or addressable by cheaper, more humane policies than exclusion.
- Preventing someone from moving to a richer country inflicts an enormous harm, so restrictions require strong justification, not the reverse.
- Empirical estimates of harms (wage effects, fiscal burden, crime, cultural loss) are small, contested, or reversed when complementarity and non-rival public goods are accounted for.
- For every legitimate concern there exists a less harmful alternative (entry fees, surtaxes, benefit exclusion, screening) than outright exclusion.
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Ethnically homogeneous countries (like traditional Scandinavia) tend to have larger, more generous welfare states because citizens see recipients as 'their own kind' and trust them not to abuse it; therefore increasing ethnic heterogeneity through immigration actually undermines native support for the welfare state, meaning immigration's net political effect on welfare-state size may be negative.
“countries that have the most generous welfare states they generally are ones that are ethnically homogeneous... everyone in denmark sees where all danes here”
Almost everyone thinks it would be wrong for the U.S. government to deny a citizen the right to return from Haiti without giving reasons, which establishes that restricting movement requires justification — there is a moral presumption against it, and the burden falls on those who would restrict.
“the point of thought experiment is not to say that this proves that restricting immigration is wrong but rather to say look there's a presumption against it it's not the kind of thing that you can just do and say i don't have any reasons”
Comparing the U.S. to Australia, which had much stricter immigration restrictions and roughly 10% of America's population and total output, illustrates the unseen cost of restriction: had the U.S. restricted similarly, it would have missed being '10 times as awesome' — all the people, inventions, ideas, and lives that immigration made possible but which are invisible because they were never realized.
“australia which uh had much stricter immigration restrictions... what we missed is being 10 times as awesome we missed 10 times as many people getting to enjoy the quality of life that we have here”
Adding population to a city brings agglomeration benefits (a thicker market that makes more jobs, consumption choices, and niche activities possible) alongside congestion costs, and economics predicts that if congestion dominated, rents would fall — yet the most congested places remain the most expensive, proving agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion.
“when you go and move to new york uh you don't consider i'm going to make it easier for people to find a chess partner”
Because immigrants typically have different skills than natives (being relatively better at non-language jobs), they are complements rather than substitutes for native labor; redoing Borjas's model with this assumption yields a positive effect on American wages, as both groups specialize and trade like in international trade.
“immigrants and natives have different skills so you wind up getting not only a smaller effect on american wages you actually wind up getting a positive effect so basically americans go and specialize in areas where where americans have what economists call community advantage immigrants specialize in the other areas”
If immigration genuinely harms some low-skilled Americans, the cheaper and more humane remedy is to charge immigrants an entry fee or income-tax surtax and use the proceeds to compensate the losers (e.g., via earned income tax credit), rather than excluding immigrants entirely.
“charge an entry fee so that in order for an immigrant to come they have to pay some some cash amount up front and then use that entry fee to compensate americans who lose”
Estimates of whether immigrants are net fiscal drains are only mildly negative at worst and sometimes positive, because much of what government provides is non-rival (e.g., national defense can serve double the population at the same cost), so adding immigrants does not proportionally increase those costs.
“a lot of what government does is what economists call non-rival this means that the government can provide the service to a very large number of people for about the same costs”
The U.S. welfare state is mainly about the elderly (Social Security and Medicare), not the poor, so since immigrants tend to be young and already had their education paid for by their home countries, they pay taxes for a long time before drawing benefits, making them net taxpayers especially at the federal level.
“the group that actually gets the most money from the welfare state which is the elderly”
Open borders would not produce a sudden flood of a billion people because the same market forces that allow free internal U.S. migration without chaos — rising rents in desirable areas and falling real wages for low-skilled workers as population surges — would automatically ration and slow the flow over time.
“there are some very similar market forces that are at work right now that allow us to have free mobility within the united states without chaos”
Even if immigrants are somewhat less pro-freedom, status quo bias means they tend to accept the existing political arrangements of their new country rather than trying to recreate the politics they fled, so the fear that immigrants will vote to turn the U.S. into the country they left is overstated.
“we can actually count on what psychologists call status quo bias which just says that people tend to think that whatever it is is okay”
Around 90% of second-generation Mexican immigrants speak fluent English (a figure even immigration critic Huntington concedes), so the fear that immigrants won't learn English is empirically unfounded, and market forces give strong incentives to learn the host country's language.
“even huntington who's one of the people who is most concerned about the effects of emergency culture will admit that 90 percent of mexican second generation mexican immigrants speak fluent english”
Immigration raises demand for housing and therefore real estate prices, and since American real estate is mostly owned by Americans, immigration increases the wealth of American real estate owners; expelling Mexican immigrants from Los Angeles would cause a massive decline in real estate values borne almost entirely by Americans.
“immigrants require housing and when they come here they raise the demand for housing which means that real estate prices increase”
Illegal immigrants are fiscally the best for American taxpayers because they often pay payroll taxes on Social Security numbers from which they will never collect benefits, and are too frightened of getting caught to apply for benefits Americans would claim.
“illegal immigrants are probably the best because they often will pay taxes on... social security numbers taxes they're never going to get any benefit for”
Even according to George Borjas, the most anti-immigration respectable researcher, the long-run effect of recent decades of immigration on the wages of American high school dropouts is only about a 5% reduction, with a much smaller average effect on all American wages — too small to justify excluding people who otherwise earn a dollar a day.
“his estimate for the long-run effect on the wages of american high school dropouts of all the immigration of recent decades is that it's reduced their wages by about five percentage points by about five percent not 50”
The U.S. had near-open immigration around 1900 amid the same fears voiced today (immigrants won't assimilate, won't learn the language, have high crime, take jobs), and the same warnings were made about Eastern Europeans then as about Latin Americans now; virtually no one today thinks that era's immigration was a mistake, suggesting current fears will prove equally unfounded.
“when they came from eastern europe we heard the exact same things that we hear now about how they're not going to assimilate they're not going to speak their language they have high crime rates”
The belief that immigrants have high crime rates stems from availability bias — memorable individual crimes by immigrants stick in mind and are generalized, whereas equally heinous crimes by natives are not generalized to all Americans; the mainstream academic literature finds immigrants actually have a considerably lower crime rate than native-born Americans.
“whenever an immigrant commits a crime people remember that it's an immigrant and they hold it against immigrants in general whereas when an american commits an equally heinous crime they don't think well americans are violent”
Today immigrants are roughly half above the median income because highly skilled immigrants find it easier to enter legally, with figures like Sergey Brin (Google) and Andy Grove (Intel) exemplifying high-value immigration, so much hostility is really directed at poor and low-skilled would-be immigrants rather than immigrants in general.
“about half the immigrants who are here are you know earn above the median income because it's easy for what you know highly skilled immigrants find it easier to get here legally”
Children of poor, non-English-speaking immigrants generally thrive financially relative to their parents and become indistinguishable Americans whose outcomes depend on education and effort rather than country of birth, so the claim that immigrant parents would sabotage politics to keep their kids poor ignores why people immigrate in the first place.
“immigrants who come here uneducated who can't speak english give birth to children who end up speaking english... do better than their parents and eventually do as well or better than than native americans”
Government job training programs have a poor track record, so simply giving displaced workers money is a better policy than subsidizing job training.
“the record for at least you know government created job training programs is not very good so... the case for just giving people money rather than subsidizing job training is probably... a winner”
If welfare abuse is the concern, the cheaper and more humane solution is to make immigrants (and possibly their children) ineligible for benefits for a set period or in perpetuity, which Caplan believes is constitutional since non-citizens have no constitutional right to such benefits, rather than barring them from entry.
“immigrants are not eligible to get these benefits... you can come here but you have to pay taxes but you can't collect benefits for a certain period of time or you can't collect benefits ever”
The U.S. states and regions with the richest, most dynamic culture (New York, California) have high foreign-born populations, while low-immigration states (the Dakotas) are not culturally exceptional — most clearly demonstrated in food, which is the form of culture Americans most genuinely appreciate.
“the places where they have the most culture in the united states they are clearly placed at a very high foreign-born percentage of their population”
Portland residents who restrict growth are making a financial mistake because development would raise their real estate values; the restriction reflects existing-resident voter preferences (not special-interest rent seeking, since special interests are typically a pro-development force), and the humane alternative would be allowing growth with a tax compensating long-time owners.
“special interests are a pro-development force so basically special interests are... the people who want to do something new”
Academia is effectively the one U.S. industry with open immigration, so university professors like Caplan and Roberts are among the biggest financial losers from open borders — they compete directly with foreign-born professors yet capture few of the consumption benefits, undercutting the charge that pro-immigration academics are merely self-interested.
“if there's any industry in the united states that currently it does face open immigration and full competition from every worker in the world it's academia”
Much hostility to immigration arises because every successful immigrant is a reproach to every native-born American who did less with greater advantages — someone who arrived not speaking English and rose from the bottom raises the uncomfortable but fair question of why natives with free education and native fluency should be more worried than admiring.
“on some level a lot of hostility immigration is just that every immigrant is reproach to every native born american who didn't do more with his life”
If cultural assimilation is the concern, the cheaper and more humane remedy is to require an English fluency test (or even a cultural literacy test) for entry rather than excluding people altogether.
“if you're worried about them speaking english we require english fluency to come into the country give a test of english fluency if you pass it you can come in”
Within the European Union there is now open borders among member countries, a situation not so different from open immigration in 1900 America, showing that something like the proposed policy already exists in the modern developed world.
“within most countries in the eu you now have open borders as well... in the european union which is not such a... not so different from like 1900 america”
The argument that 'it's easy for you to say, Bryan, you have tenure' is an attempt to disqualify pro-immigration views as self-interested.
“easy for you to say brian you have tenure you're not really in competition with any of the immigrants we're talking about”
Immigration is a very lively and contentious topic.
“our topic today is immigration which is a very lively topic”