I was once hired at Cato to be part of a "climate change" red team. But was fired right as I was supposed to begin, because they 'discovered' my public statements against "same sex marriage."
I came here to ask that very question. CATO reminds me of their libertarian guests on C-Span shows in the 1990s and 2000s. Now they’re explicitly and blatantly an open-borders lobby. These “studies” they put out must be produced like movie scripts, i.e. they’re complete fiction, and they’re well-aware they’re making fiction.
Similar to the “safe & effective” slogan for vaccines, I always wonder if these people are not that smart & true believers in these garbage studies or if it’s more nefarious. I assume someone knows what they’re producing is a lie & they surround themselves with dummies.
Even if illegal immigrants were net two trillion dollars to the US economy, I would still want them to be removed. Of course, the is not remotely the case.
Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569
M.F. Hansen, M.L. Schultz-Nielsen,& T. Tranæs, ‘The fiscal impact of immigration to welfare states of the Scandinavian type,’ Journal of Population Economics 30, 925–952 (2017), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1
Libertarianism is the overt expression of the money project. The most pernicious act libertarians (and neoliberals generally) commit is the use of money as the measure of all things. It's the first principle of all discourse. That's why it's pointless to argue with them since we don't agree on first principles.
Even JP Morgan thought money had a human purpose beyond the amassing of more of the same. It's only in this hyper-scientistic age devoid of community, spirituality and culture that the libertarian can even admit his existence without shame.
Of course, and as you display so succinctly here, they shamelessly lie about economics with every "study" they release. However, the real horror is moral.
Libertarianism, by subsuming all human concerns beneath the bullshit of economics (I'll discuss political economy but there is no such thing as "economics"), is a purely antihuman project. You can feel the emptiness when they speak: like cybernetic units caught in a loop of "line go up" forever and ever.
No, they are just incredibly meticulous about understanding rights in a way amenable to resolutions based on temporal reason and nothing else. That means PROPERTY. They take that logic to its extreme. So they talk about a body being trespassed (as opposed to assaulted). They are huge nerds for it. All kinds of non-rich shlubby academics and autodidacts like Roderick Long couldn't care less about some kind of gaudy excessive money-grubbing 80s lifestyle or ethic. That's not what's animating them.
I find the easiest way to do this is to model a theoretical Hispanic family, median income $70,000. Then calculate the lifetime net contribution assuming standard lifecycle of childhood, working years, and retirement.
Roughly speaking, and I think these deficits are conservative on the low end (they would be much higher in blue states due to higher social spending amongst other assumptions), I get a net lifetime fiscal contribution of negative $1M per person from entitlements (education, retirement, healthcare) alone. If we include an even per capita burden of non-entitlement spending (infrastructure, military, police, etc) then it becomes around negative $1.5M. Again, we could argue larger numbers but I think this works "directionally."
Keep in mind that's for a median income employed household that is too high income for most hardcore welfare (medicaid, etc). Given the bell curve, Hispanics are going to have a higher concentration of those households and a lower concentration of the kind of higher income households that generate most of our tax surplus.
This shouldn't come as a surprise BTW. True cost of health insurance alone for that family of four is equal to half their income. Public education for their two children equals more then half their income (and exceeds their income in much of the northeast).
You might say this calculation makes a lot of native Americans fiscal sinks too, which is true. But what of it. I'm both morally (they build this country and they have an equity stake in it) and pragmatically (they have the vote and citizenship rights so its not like I could expel them if I wanted to) have a right to be here. Immigrants not so much.
This says more about our insanely wasteful educational and medical systems, and productivity-punishing tax laws, than it does about Hispanic immigrants.
Hispanic immigrants vote for Democrats largely on the basis that they want free healthcare and education. This is empirically true as well as on issue polling.
In 2012 Mitt Romney got 59% of the white vote, which would have been a landslide victory in the America of Reagens day. Instead he lost because Hispanics voted over 70% for Obama. The main issue of the campaign was the rugged Reagan individualism of Joe the Plumper vs "you didn't build that so I'm taxing you and I'm giving free healthcare disproportionately to brown people." Without immigrants it's a mathematical fact that we would not have the Obamacare today.
The state of California used to be very red. It passed Port 184 in 1994 to try and restrict welfare to illegal immigrants. It got held up in court and immigrants overwhelmed the state with their votes turning it into what it is today (and were illegal immigrants can get free healthcare).
This does not explain very well the swing towards Trump of Hispanics. You can say Trump is more pro-redistribution, but he criticized the ACA constantly and his party has repeatedly voted to cut the benefits from it.
And the point about proportion of the white vote is misleading, because since the 1960s there has been a significant fertility difference between liberals and conservatives. White Americans today are not the same group of people as white Americans in the 1980s, and the selection effect described is one way this is true.
Trump broke from Romney in abandoning entitlement reform and balanced budgets. This plus his obviously caudillo communication style explains his resonance with Hispanics. He never mentioned the ACA much during his 2016 campaign and never actually did anything about the ACA as president.
What's ironic is that his second term he's actually been a huge hawk on healthcare spending. ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare have all seen huge cuts. UHC stock is down 50%. And you know how many "fiscal conservatives" have given him credit for this. Zero.
He probably should have just let the money spigot flow on healthcare (politically, it's morally wrong). I expect him to be punished in the midterms for doing the right thing.
He's going to be punished in the midterms for the ICE stuff, which is both stupid and evil. I assume you don't need me to tell you this, but if he actually wanted to have a lasting effect on the number of illegal aliens in the US he'd be prosecuting employers of them and championing mandating E-Verify. (I mostly disagree with that as a goal, but that's the right levers to pull to do it.)
As for scare-quote fiscal conservatives not giving him credit, I don't know if that's true, and to the extent it is it's just political tribalism; if your whole thing is being an anti-Trump Republican you can't praise him, any more than MAGA Republicans can ever admit Trump made a mistake about anything.
The fight over ACA subsidies pre-dated ICE stuff. As did tariffs, doge, etc. I’m an “it’s the economy stupid” on what drives elections.
While I support e-verify, even Matt Yglesias writes that it wouldn’t actually do anything (people will just pay cash or use fake ids). If someone if violating employment law you need to still have someone go out there and do something about it.
Prosecuting employers would both work (Singapore canes people who employ illegal immigrants) and be even more unpopular than ICE.
At the end of the day the only way to stop illegal immigration is to have agents physically apprehend illegal immigrants and physically deport them. That’s a a stone cold fact. Eisenhower had to physically round up millions of Mexicans and physically deport them.
That’s never going to be popular, but doing the right thing costs political capital.
The public’s desired immigration policy is like its desired fiscal policy, a free lunch. No immigration and no enforcement. When you get the immigration you punish incumbents. When you get the enforcement you punish incumbents.
It’s the same with the ACA subsidies and Medicare advantage rates. It’s the right thing to do, but it costs political capital. Unlike illegals all those old people that got a rate increase can vote.
The Cato Institute, The Heritage Society, Reason Magazine, and National Review were three libertarian-conservative institutions that I grew up with, that have all abandoned their principles in persuit of financial comfort. Ie., they sold out.
The things that people value most are not quantifiable with money. This means that even if immigration did make economic gains happen the loss of national identity would be resented by the population, but you can't calculate that loss so its effectively a null factor in their formula.
Distribution patterns of wealth are more determining of people's welfare than absolute dollar figures anyway - this goes for between and within nations.
I was once hired at Cato to be part of a "climate change" red team. But was fired right as I was supposed to begin, because they 'discovered' my public statements against "same sex marriage."
Who funds CATO? Follow the money.
I came here to ask that very question. CATO reminds me of their libertarian guests on C-Span shows in the 1990s and 2000s. Now they’re explicitly and blatantly an open-borders lobby. These “studies” they put out must be produced like movie scripts, i.e. they’re complete fiction, and they’re well-aware they’re making fiction.
Nicely done. Cato should be ashamed of itself. We should never trust any of their studies, unless they repudiate this one.
Sociopaths don't feel shame. They're not normal humans.
Similar to the “safe & effective” slogan for vaccines, I always wonder if these people are not that smart & true believers in these garbage studies or if it’s more nefarious. I assume someone knows what they’re producing is a lie & they surround themselves with dummies.
Beautiful writing, and powerful.
Even if illegal immigrants were net two trillion dollars to the US economy, I would still want them to be removed. Of course, the is not remotely the case.
Love the footnotes and Intro / Framing. Banger.
European studies have very different results.
Jan van den Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, ‘Borderless Welfare State - The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances,’ 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371951423_Borderless_Welfare_State_-_The_Consequences_of_Immigration_for_Public_Finances
Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569
European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en
M.F. Hansen, M.L. Schultz-Nielsen,& T. Tranæs, ‘The fiscal impact of immigration to welfare states of the Scandinavian type,’ Journal of Population Economics 30, 925–952 (2017), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1
Libertarianism is the overt expression of the money project. The most pernicious act libertarians (and neoliberals generally) commit is the use of money as the measure of all things. It's the first principle of all discourse. That's why it's pointless to argue with them since we don't agree on first principles.
Even JP Morgan thought money had a human purpose beyond the amassing of more of the same. It's only in this hyper-scientistic age devoid of community, spirituality and culture that the libertarian can even admit his existence without shame.
Of course, and as you display so succinctly here, they shamelessly lie about economics with every "study" they release. However, the real horror is moral.
Libertarianism, by subsuming all human concerns beneath the bullshit of economics (I'll discuss political economy but there is no such thing as "economics"), is a purely antihuman project. You can feel the emptiness when they speak: like cybernetic units caught in a loop of "line go up" forever and ever.
No, they are just incredibly meticulous about understanding rights in a way amenable to resolutions based on temporal reason and nothing else. That means PROPERTY. They take that logic to its extreme. So they talk about a body being trespassed (as opposed to assaulted). They are huge nerds for it. All kinds of non-rich shlubby academics and autodidacts like Roderick Long couldn't care less about some kind of gaudy excessive money-grubbing 80s lifestyle or ethic. That's not what's animating them.
Does money or economics matter at all? Or is it vibes all the way down?
Nope. Not at all. Not one single cent.
You may not care about economics but economics cares about you.
I find the easiest way to do this is to model a theoretical Hispanic family, median income $70,000. Then calculate the lifetime net contribution assuming standard lifecycle of childhood, working years, and retirement.
Roughly speaking, and I think these deficits are conservative on the low end (they would be much higher in blue states due to higher social spending amongst other assumptions), I get a net lifetime fiscal contribution of negative $1M per person from entitlements (education, retirement, healthcare) alone. If we include an even per capita burden of non-entitlement spending (infrastructure, military, police, etc) then it becomes around negative $1.5M. Again, we could argue larger numbers but I think this works "directionally."
Keep in mind that's for a median income employed household that is too high income for most hardcore welfare (medicaid, etc). Given the bell curve, Hispanics are going to have a higher concentration of those households and a lower concentration of the kind of higher income households that generate most of our tax surplus.
This shouldn't come as a surprise BTW. True cost of health insurance alone for that family of four is equal to half their income. Public education for their two children equals more then half their income (and exceeds their income in much of the northeast).
You might say this calculation makes a lot of native Americans fiscal sinks too, which is true. But what of it. I'm both morally (they build this country and they have an equity stake in it) and pragmatically (they have the vote and citizenship rights so its not like I could expel them if I wanted to) have a right to be here. Immigrants not so much.
They are also affirmative action beneficiaries and have captured entire industries under Griggs v. Duke Power (1971).
This says more about our insanely wasteful educational and medical systems, and productivity-punishing tax laws, than it does about Hispanic immigrants.
Hispanic immigrants vote for Democrats largely on the basis that they want free healthcare and education. This is empirically true as well as on issue polling.
In 2012 Mitt Romney got 59% of the white vote, which would have been a landslide victory in the America of Reagens day. Instead he lost because Hispanics voted over 70% for Obama. The main issue of the campaign was the rugged Reagan individualism of Joe the Plumper vs "you didn't build that so I'm taxing you and I'm giving free healthcare disproportionately to brown people." Without immigrants it's a mathematical fact that we would not have the Obamacare today.
The state of California used to be very red. It passed Port 184 in 1994 to try and restrict welfare to illegal immigrants. It got held up in court and immigrants overwhelmed the state with their votes turning it into what it is today (and were illegal immigrants can get free healthcare).
This does not explain very well the swing towards Trump of Hispanics. You can say Trump is more pro-redistribution, but he criticized the ACA constantly and his party has repeatedly voted to cut the benefits from it.
And the point about proportion of the white vote is misleading, because since the 1960s there has been a significant fertility difference between liberals and conservatives. White Americans today are not the same group of people as white Americans in the 1980s, and the selection effect described is one way this is true.
Trump broke from Romney in abandoning entitlement reform and balanced budgets. This plus his obviously caudillo communication style explains his resonance with Hispanics. He never mentioned the ACA much during his 2016 campaign and never actually did anything about the ACA as president.
What's ironic is that his second term he's actually been a huge hawk on healthcare spending. ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare have all seen huge cuts. UHC stock is down 50%. And you know how many "fiscal conservatives" have given him credit for this. Zero.
He probably should have just let the money spigot flow on healthcare (politically, it's morally wrong). I expect him to be punished in the midterms for doing the right thing.
He's going to be punished in the midterms for the ICE stuff, which is both stupid and evil. I assume you don't need me to tell you this, but if he actually wanted to have a lasting effect on the number of illegal aliens in the US he'd be prosecuting employers of them and championing mandating E-Verify. (I mostly disagree with that as a goal, but that's the right levers to pull to do it.)
As for scare-quote fiscal conservatives not giving him credit, I don't know if that's true, and to the extent it is it's just political tribalism; if your whole thing is being an anti-Trump Republican you can't praise him, any more than MAGA Republicans can ever admit Trump made a mistake about anything.
The fight over ACA subsidies pre-dated ICE stuff. As did tariffs, doge, etc. I’m an “it’s the economy stupid” on what drives elections.
While I support e-verify, even Matt Yglesias writes that it wouldn’t actually do anything (people will just pay cash or use fake ids). If someone if violating employment law you need to still have someone go out there and do something about it.
Prosecuting employers would both work (Singapore canes people who employ illegal immigrants) and be even more unpopular than ICE.
At the end of the day the only way to stop illegal immigration is to have agents physically apprehend illegal immigrants and physically deport them. That’s a a stone cold fact. Eisenhower had to physically round up millions of Mexicans and physically deport them.
That’s never going to be popular, but doing the right thing costs political capital.
The public’s desired immigration policy is like its desired fiscal policy, a free lunch. No immigration and no enforcement. When you get the immigration you punish incumbents. When you get the enforcement you punish incumbents.
It’s the same with the ACA subsidies and Medicare advantage rates. It’s the right thing to do, but it costs political capital. Unlike illegals all those old people that got a rate increase can vote.
Correct, because that analysis works for any median income $70,000 family. We should just as well get rid of the native born poor too!
Other hard data linked below.
https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2024-01/camarota-testimony-1-11.pdf
I believe Cato also understates immigrant welfare costs by putting spending on anchor babies in the non-immigrant column.
The Cato Institute, The Heritage Society, Reason Magazine, and National Review were three libertarian-conservative institutions that I grew up with, that have all abandoned their principles in persuit of financial comfort. Ie., they sold out.
Boil it down to if you have a golf course with 400 hundred members and add 500 new members who really cannot pay, this metaphoric boat sinks.
Excellent work
The things that people value most are not quantifiable with money. This means that even if immigration did make economic gains happen the loss of national identity would be resented by the population, but you can't calculate that loss so its effectively a null factor in their formula.
Distribution patterns of wealth are more determining of people's welfare than absolute dollar figures anyway - this goes for between and within nations.
"They cloak this radicalism in the language of “liberty,” but it is a hollow, atomized, soulless, liberty that ignores...a coherent culture."
I already like the Cato Institute, you don't have to persuade me any further.