#it's a podcast though so it's lighter on citations than I would like

[tanadrin]

CHRIS HAYES: We all understand that a country that stops its people from leaving, say North Korea, is just definitionally tyrannical. You can leave if you want to go, right? But then there's like, "Well, okay, well, if you leave you've got to go somewhere, right?" There's also embedded in that document the right to petition for political asylum. There isn't quite the right to go anywhere you want. Should it be the case that it is a universal human right to pick up and move to the country of your choice?

SUKETU MEHTA: But that's the question of open borders. Does the nation have the right to control who comes in, how many they let in? It's a very complex issue. I'd like to first point out that this whole question of borders and passports and visas is only about 100 years old. In the long history on the planet, we human beings have only started thinking about these questions about a century ago. Before that in the age of mass migration from the middle of the 19th century to around 1914, fully one quarter of Europe up and moved to the United States. What happened? The Republic did not collapse.

CHRIS HAYES: No, in fact the opposite. It was part of what converted it from sort of a colonial backwater into a super power.

SUKETU MEHTA: Exactly, the U.S. eclipsed Europe at the pinnacle of world wealth and power because of it had an open border policy.

CHRIS HAYES: Not only that. This is my favorite fact, and you write about this in the book. When people say, "Well, my ancestors came legally." It's like we had open borders. They came legally because literally there was one rule: no Chinese.

SUKETU MEHTA: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: It's called the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it had a quota on the Chinese and everyone else, it was like, "Come on down."

SUKETU MEHTA: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: That was the legal posture of American immigration policy for decades.

SUKETU MEHTA: So, in my book I also considered these arguments by serious philosophers, not just crackpots, who say that any kind of collective has the right to define rules for membership, or there's this lifeboat here. The United States is a lifeboat in an ocean, and there are lots of people swimming around. If too many people get on the lifeboat, then everyone sinks — both the newcomers on the lifeboat and people who've been there before. And so, I've considered these arguments, but I really can't find any evidence that, if tomorrow we were to suddenly open up our borders, and there's a lot of people who'd like to move to the United States.

Well, first of all, GDP would increase enormously. There's a statistic that if the world had open borders, then world GDP would increase by $78 trillion a year. When people move, everyone benefits. If the United States were to adopt a policy, let's say, short of open borders. For every one million people that we bring in, the GDP will increase by 1.15 percent. So, there's just no doubt that immigration benefits the countries that the immigrants moved to, particularly the rich countries because we're not making enough babies, and we need young motivated immigrants to work because the United States by the middle of the century is going to be a nation of geezers. As the baby boomers retire, there's not enough working age adults to pay for the pensions of the old people.

CHRIS HAYES: If you want to see the future of America, go to a big facility for seniors, particularly in a metro area like New York, assisted living where it is like old white folks being cared for by 30-year-old immigrants and people of color. That's it. That's it. That's the future of the country in many respects.

SUKETU MEHTA: That's it. Look, the replacement rate is 2.1 babies per woman. The United States' replacement rate stands at 1.7 babies per woman. You see this around the world, Japan. Under 4 percent of the Japanese population is foreign born. It's ridiculous.

CHRIS HAYES: It's one of the most closed off society to immigration of any, probably it is the most closed off to immigration of any First World country.

SUKETU MEHTA: Exactly, yeah, because they want to keep their culture pure. As a result, the economy has stagnated, and in the villages of the north, there's only old people left because all the young people have moved to the cities in the south. They've been invaded by wild boars from the mountains. So, it's a common sight to see these old men and women being chased by wild boars in the villages. The Washington Post had this fascinating article about this, where old Japanese people are being menaced by wild boars because there's not enough young people to chase off the wild boars.

Is this what we want for our country? Wild boars chasing our old people? Bring in the immigrants. Well, the Japanese also have realized that they need more immigrants because they need labor. So, they're actually very cautiously opening up their doors. They're trying to recruit high-skilled immigrants, but not enough people want to move there because they feel it's a hostile atmosphere for them.

CHRIS HAYES: But I have to say that the economic argument always leaves me a little cold, right? It just sort of feels like it's a hard thing to persuade people of. It always feels a little like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying to sell me on something when I hear this argument, which I think is backed up by the vast majority of economists and wonks with a small dissenting group of economists and wonks.

SUKETU MEHTA: Yeah, there's basically one man, George Borjas at Harvard.

CHRIS HAYES: George Borjas, who's the famous contrarian on precisely this. He's the guy that you will see cited in every bit of literature and pamphlets from this anti-immigration coalition. I guess what I'm trying to get back around to is the basic moral principle. There are times when I think to myself it seems possible to me there's two things I feel it's about, eating meat and immigration, where it seems possible to me that in 100 years people will look back on the current policies as like obviously barbaric.

That it just makes no sense that just the natural lottery of where you happen to be born essentially determined all your life outcomes, and like if you're born in a slum in Bangladesh, like, "Too bad. Got to stay there. Can't go to the United States, because you’re SOL buddy." At some level it's like that's morally indefensible. Why is that the case? It shouldn't be that way, and yet it's crazy and radical to say like, "No, they should be able to come here because then where we have a billion people who move to the U.S., right?" There's all these sorts of catastrophizing thoughts we have about what that would look like. But I don't know, maybe that's right. I don't know.

SUKETU MEHTA: The central point of my book is a moral argument that all these people, and you're right, the greatest inequality in the world today is the inequality of citizenship, a disadvantaged lottery. I can predict a person's life depending on the passport that he or she holds. But the question I ask is, "Why is it that Bangladesh is in the state it's in right now?" The nation that's caused Bangladesh's misery, the United Kingdom and Europe, and the United States because of climate change.

Why is it that these Bangladeshis have to endure what they're enduring, which is the possible extinction of their country by the end of the century because of climate change. It's not their fault. They are coming here because we were there. The British went into South Asia, stayed there for 200 years, and destroyed the economy. When the British arrived in India at the beginning of the 18th century, by India I mean all of South Asia, India's share of world GDP was 23 percent. By the time they left, 200 years later in 1947, India’s share was four percent of world GDP.

So, basically the colonial empire will run for the benefit of England and France, who together made the 40 percent of all the borders in the world. Bangladesh is in its current condition, because first, the British looted it, prevented it from building up its industries. Now, we're worried about four million Syrians going into Germany because of the law. What happens when Bangladesh get flooded, and 400 million Bangladeshis have to find dry land? Where are they going to go?

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CHRIS HAYES: But the level of migration between developing countries and refugee populations at developing countries are constantly asked to take in, and the burden they bear from Jordan to Colombia to India to all across the developing world, for the First World to be like, "No, this is outrageous," it's crazy. It is crazy.

SUKETU MEHTA: Exactly. The vast majority of world migrants, 85 percent, moved from a poor to a slightly less poor.

CHRIS HAYES: That's right.

SUKETU MEHTA: We think that there's always the right wing — if you're to look at Fox News you'll think, "Oh, my God, we're so generous. We let in a million migrants.” We rank 23rd in the world in terms of how many immigrants we let in as a percentage of our population. If we tripled our intake, we won't even be in the top five. Even among developed countries, Australia, Canada, they take in far more immigrants than we do. Germany takes in far more immigrants than we do as a percentage of the population.

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Look, New York City's exhibit A in showing that immigration works: New York City is now at historically unprecedented levels of number of immigrants it takes, even as a percentage of its population is approaching the highs of the early 20th century. Two out of three New Yorkers are immigrants. New York has never been richer. New York has never been safer.

There's no evidence that these alleged waves of immigrants are actually disturbing the peace, or else making people poorer.

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