America’s Immigration Puzzle, Iran Strikes (Out) – And 60 Is The New 40

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, April 18, 2024. And welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whelan, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow. I'll be your moderator today. I'm happy to report that we have our full complement of GoodFellows with us today, the three wise men of the Hoover Institution.

And those wise men are the historian Neil Ferguson, economist John Cochran and former presidential national security advisor, historian, geostrategist, all around good guy, lieutenant general, HR McMaster, Neil, HR and John are all Hoover senior fellows by the way. Gentlemen, we're gonna do two segments today, in our second block we're going to talk about Iran and Israel and what happens next in the Middle East.

But first, we're gonna take a look at immigration, something we haven't done in three years. And joining us making his return to GoodFellows, Reihan Salam. Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute, a research and advocacy group that advances opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in America and its great cities.

He's also the author of the Melting Potter Civil War, published in 2018. That book makes the case for skills based immigration policy. Reihan, welcome back to GoodFellows.

>> Reihan Salam: It's a great honor and pleasure to be here with several of my favorite thinkers. Thank you for having me.

>> Bill Whalen: So you were on the show almost exactly three years ago.

It was April 28, 2021, and it's now April 18, 2024. What's happened in the three years since with regard to immigration in the United States? Well, migrant encounters at the us border reached a record high at the end of 2023, 300,000 such encounters. You look at the current year, they measured this on fiscal federal years, not calendar years.

The United States is on pace for about 2.7 million encounters in this current fiscal year, Reihan, which is about a million more than 2021. What else has happened in the three years since immigration reform? Comprehensive immigration reform, I might add, apparently has crashed and burned, though House Republicans yesterday trotted out a new border bill, which Senate Democrats will not care for.

What else do we have going on? President Biden is under pressure to do something as he looks at his poll numbers, Donald Trump is doing what he did eight years ago. He is evoking the memory of a woman who was killed by a border trespasser. Now we have one of two ways to go in the segment, Reihan, we can either talk about everything that is wrong with this system, what is wrong with the border, what is wrong in terms of processing what is right and what is wrong.

Let us instead look at it differently, and let's talk about rebuilding immigration in the United States from the ground up. So I'm gonna turn it to you, given the choice of how to rebuild, and you can start anywhere you want to. You can start at the border, you can start in Congress.

You can start on the question of who gets priority to come in the country, who gets benefits and services. Where would you start Reihan?

>> Reihan Salam: Well, I'd start with the insight that in the United States, we have birthright citizenship. This is actually quite profound when you think about the comparative context of how different societies approach immigration policy.

Birthright citizenship is something that is now very much a western hemisphere phenomenon. You don't actually find it in other market democracies typically. It is something that I think is broadly embraced. I think it's a pretty entrenched part of our constitutional settlement. But the implication of birthright citizenship is that we necessarily have to think about migration differently than, let's say, Qatar in the Gulf.

Qatar is a country that welcomes vast numbers of foreign workers, and those foreign workers do a tremendous amount. In fact, foreign workers represent an overwhelming majority of workers in Qatar. It also means that we need to be thoughtful about the fact that the reason immigration is so contentious, the reason it's so fraught, is actually not so much because of the newcomers themselves.

It's because of the idea that these newcomers are implicitly being welcomed into our society. Because of those newcomers have children of their own, those children are citizens. There are a lot of clever ideas about, ideas that I'm not unsympathetic to about temporary worker migration and what have you.

But for those immigration systems to work, you need to actually be willing to enforce them. There are countries that we think of as being very benign, having very expansive and generous approaches to immigration, Canada being a paradigmatic example. Canada admits about three times as many immigrants as we do in the United States relative to population.

But these countries typically have very stringent rules around enforcement. So what I would urge people to do is think about that. Think about the long term context. If there was a guarantee that immigrants to the United States, that migrants to the United states would never have children, that they would be perfectly content to be laborers.

That they would be perfectly content to enrich the wider society without ever demanding anything in return, whether that's in the form of social benefits, whether that's in the form of recognition and respect and political inclusion. I think the immigration debate would be very, very different. That's why it's different in authoritarian countries.

So that's the thing that is really, that is, to some folks, disconcerting, disorienting. It's trying to balance those considerations. My view is that I don't think we ought to have a restrictionist approach. I think that we are a country that is blessed to be a very desirable place to live, a society that's really opportunity rich, and we're a society that can really augment a strengthen, enrich our country with newcomers.

But we need to be really deliberate and thoughtful about what that means. And we also need to recognize that basically, immigration today, in the mid 2020s, is actually different than what it was in the 1920s or the 1880s or you name it, it is really quite different. So that's why what I would favor is basically an approach that is very open to folks who are skilled, that embraces this idea of temporary to permanent migration.

That is the idea that we admit folks maybe initially on a provisional basis, and once they demonstrate that they are able to make a contribution, they're able to support themselves and what have you, then we basically move them into permanent. And I think that this is something that is pretty time tested.

There are other societies that have embraced an approach like this that has actually worked pretty well. I think that it actually resonates with the gut level intuitions that a lot of Americans have. And it would be markedly different from what we have now, which is this bizarre situation in which if you walk across the border and are willing to make a baseless asylum claim, you're able to gain access to the country.

So that's my big picture perspective.

>> H.R MASTER: Reihan, one of the things that bothers me is when people conflate and illegal immigration with legal immigration, or refugees with migrants and so forth. Could you maybe clarify for our viewers these different categories and tell us where you think they're connected?

For one thought that I had and tried to advance in the Trump administration with zero success, was that what if we opened 40 consulates in this hemisphere and did exactly as you're suggesting. Encourage those to apply for visas who were qualified and filled a need in our society.

The idea was that that would pay for itself, just the visa fees alone. But think about also the taxes. Think also about the remittances sent back to those communities. That would alleviate some of the pressure, and then maybe people would be lining up at US consulates instead of lining up with coyotes.

But could you maybe just talk about the categories and how they get conflated. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that idea about how to vastly expand access and expedite visas and to maybe as a way to alleviate some of the pressure anyway, on the southern border.

 

>> Reihan Salam: Well, HR, I'm grateful to you because you're clarifying what might be the crux of a disagreement, and one where I don't have a rigid view, but I do have a view that might be somewhat different. There is a credible, serious view, which holds that the problem with illegal immigration is that our legal pathways aren't wide enough, full stop.

And that we have a dynamic market economy in which basically, there's an enormous appetite for labor. And in the absence of stringent regulation, you're going to see the emergence of new business models. If you have folks with, by our standards, quote unquote, limited skills, we will be able to make use of those folks, provided we don't have high minimum wages.

Provided we don't have other regulations that basically inhibit the ability of people to take on different roles, we'll have a more labor intensive economy. I think that that is a credible and serious view, and I think that there are skilled folks who benefit from the complementarity with less skilled workers, all of that, I believe that.

The reason why I don't actually fully embrace that perspective, the reason why I actually do believe in a somewhat more restrictive approach. Is because, for better or worse, I think that there is an implicit egalitarianism in contemporary American political culture. And by that, I mean I don't actually think people are all that comfortable with the idea of newcomers who are at a standard of living.

That might be a radical improvement relative to where they were in Bangladesh or El Salvador or what have you. But that actually would put them very much at the bottom rung in US society. Now, there's another serious argument that over a three or four generation period, they will become part of that larger American mainstream.

They and their descendants, I should say, will become part of that larger mainstream. I think that's a totally credible argument. But actually, politics operates on a much shorter time scale. And so I guess my view is similar to a view that was champion during the Trump administration. There's an old provision of us immigration law called the public charge.

And the idea here, and it's an idea that's contested and it's meant different things. But the basic idea that if you are a refugee or an asylum seeker, we don't expect you to be able to meet your own needs. If you are an immigrant coming through the mainstream process, whether as an employment based immigrant or a family based immigrant.

We expect that you are going to be someone who is going to be able to navigate the American market economy in such a way that you will not require social services. You will not require redistribution, you will not require public assistance. Now, much has changed over the last hundred years, and a much broader swath of the American working and middle class is enmeshed in various conditional safety net benefits, right?

So it's a bit of a moving target. And there's a debate around what public charge ought to mean in this context. But my view is that it's actually reasonable to say when it comes to newcomers, we have an abundant supply of folks who actually would meet that test.

And we ought to orient our system towards people who will be able to kind of enter the mainstream economy. And not be people where frankly, folks on the progressive left can turn around and say, well, these folks are desperate. They need snap, they need Medicaid, they need X, Y and Z.

And then the response from some libertarian folks would be, well, no, you just borrow them from those things. Well, American political culture is such, when you say, hey, we've got a lot of black and brown folks who look like Raihan who can't feed their kids. I think that, like it or not, that's an aspect of our political culture that's difficult to get around.

So we can say we should pivot a little bit more in this direction. We should be a little bit more inclusive or a little bit less inclusive. But I think to make immigration policy politically sustainable, I would say this. They're folks we admit on a humanitarian basis, and we have a kind of budget for that.

It costs more to meet your humanitarian needs in El Segundo than it does to meet your humanitarian needs in Bangladesh, where you have over a million Rohingya migrants, okay? So when you're thinking about it from the perspective of the US as a great power. Sometimes it could be more cost efficient to meet the needs of people who are fleeing ethnic violence, let's say, in a lower caste society.

But also sometimes we do admit those folks because that's our value system and that can be appropriate. But let's do it in a thoughtful, balanced, measured way that is sustainable. And with other migrants who are not coming in on an explicitly politically self conscious humanitarian basis, the expectation should be you're gonna be in a position to fend for yourself.

And I think that we could have more.

>> Niall Ferguson: Reihan, can I ask a history question. It's conventional in discussions of this sort for somebody to say, the United States is a nation of immigrants. There's always been immigration, and that's all you need to know. And that's not quite true, is it?

Because there have been ebbs and flows and significant variations in the system, with an enormous dip for example, in the interwar period. What period is our period most like, would you say? And what can we learn from past periods of quite high migration into the United States?

>> Reihan Salam: Niall, that is, I'm so glad you asked that question.

It's something I think about quite a bit. So first, I'll briefly say that I'm a student of Sam Huntington. He was someone who was a mentor to me and a great friend and someone who made arguments that I think have been misinterpreted and what have you. But he did some challenging arguments on immigration.

And one of his observations was that if you think about this nation of immigrants trope. Which is something that is really from the 1960s, it neglects the fact that there's a difference between a settler and an immigrant. When you think about the kind of British settlers who came to North America.

That was very different from the experience of being an immigrant who's being incorporated into an existing, established society. And then when you think about the settlers who moved into the American west, it is quite different and significantly different. So I think that when you think about, you made a great point that if you look at the 1920s era immigration restrictions.

This, in a way, was a response to the fact that during the first World War, immigration levels were dampened during that time for the obvious reason that Europe was chaotic and violent. And then there was a real anxiety about what's going to happen in the wake of the war.

So that was part of the context for what happened there to more directly answer your question. So some people say that, aha. If you look at the foreign born share of the US population, the closest parallel would be to the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

But there was a difference, which is that during that time, native fertility was drastically higher than it is today. And one reason that matters, so to immigration advocates, one takeaway from that is that, well, Raihan. That means that we need all the more inward migration to accommodate the fact that we have an aging population and what have you.

Now, as it happens, actually, because of our immigration laws, we don't particularly prioritize youth, number one. Number two, we have an unlimited supply of green cards for the parents of US citizens who tend to be the parents of naturalized citizens. And so what that's meant is that actually our inward, our permanent immigration pool is actually aging.

So it's actually, we're not using immigration in a strategic, thoughtful way to actually address some of these demographic challenges. That's kind of one thing that's kind of funny. And I mentioned the native fertility also because it affects the cultural context. If you have very low native fertility and inflows that aren't even that high by historical standards, what you have is actually this drastic change, this drastic intergenerational change in which Canada's a good example.

I mentioned to you earlier on that Canada's inflows are about three x hours. Canada also has even lower fertility than we do, which I think is very sad, but we'll bracket that for the moment. Now, by the early 2040s, Canada is going to be 49% first and second generation.

That is a staggering number, and what it means is that, to use some uncomfortable language, the gap between the new stock and old stock populations will be markedly different. The newcomer populations are typically concentrated in four metropolitan areas in Canada. So the United States, it's not as pronounced, but it is a kind of different version of that.

That is something that is very unusual because of the scale of the fertility collapse. So that's I'm cheating a bit, there are some parallels, however, historically, to that era for this reason. The restrictionist movement of the 1920s was not just a restrictionist movement of folks like you, Neil, people of kind of Scottish stock, right.

It wasn't a people with incredibly deep roots in North America, but you don't have it wasn't just the descendants of Brits, right. It was also the descendants of Germans and Irish, the people who caused the immigration panics of an earlier era. Their children became part of, call it the immigration panic of the 1920s.

So in the kind of mid 19th century, you had a panic about catholic newcomers and what that would represent. But the restrictionist movement of the 20s, one reason why that movement was so successful is because they were able to incorporate the kind of Catholics who are now better integrated into wider American society, because then.

Let's say in California in the late 19th century, the fight for Chinese exclusion, the presence of these new, culturally different newcomers, created new solidarities. And so the historical parallel I will introduce, Neil, is that right now, I believe what you're seeing is that Mexican Americans and Mexico, as you know, is aging more rapidly in the United States.

Mexican inflows are a smaller share of the total. I think that what's happening right now is that massive post bracero Mexican migration is being integrated into the American mainstream. It is now a 2nd, 3rd, 4th plus generation population, it is a somewhat intermarried population. And what you're seeing is that that population is again part of the American mainstream, and also starting to think, hey, wait a second, we have Africans who are coming across the southern border.

We have many migrants from South Asia elsewhere who are coming across the southern border. And wait a second, that's a different story, and we are concerned about the potential chaos. We are concerned about potentially the cultural difference, but also the economic implications. You're seeing this new restrictionist coalition that is much more diverse.

And by restrictionist I don't mean necessarily, hey, let's go to zero, it's not the kind of populist hard right position, but it is a position that is different from the kind of cosmopolitan position of the progressive left. And some folks like our friend John Cochran, who have very intellectually credible, serious reasons for being much more laissez faire about this.

And that is something that is going to be very big, and the question is how do you capitalize or how do you approach that restriction of sentiment? Do you do it in what I would argue would be a smarter way that reflects what HR is talking about and what I think I'm talking about.

Or is it going to be a much more extreme form of restriction that actually cuts us off from the talent that can help strengthen America and great power competition, help drive our economy forward?

>> Niall Ferguson: Okay, John.

>> John Cochran: Yes, thank you. I want to celebrate where you mostly started, which is let's talk about the right thing to do, not what's politically expedient, not what will satisfy the passions of a slice of the electorate.

I get to roughly where you are, but from a very different background, I wanna push back a little on some of the things you said. But just for background, for all our listeners, let's emphasize one thing we all agree on, our current system is insane. The primary way you get in is by walking and then claiming asylum.

So we have an asylum system, says anybody in the world who has a claim, like most of China, all you got to do is walk across Central America, show up and you can get into the US. But we don't fund the system enough, if we're gonna do that, at least you could fund the system enough, but we don't.

Hundreds of billions of dollars for student loans, but not for immigration judges to actually operate the system that we put in legally. Now you mentioned that letting in referees refugees for humanitarian, that you have to be prepared to take care of them. And I wanna push back on that a little because of course, what we do is we let people in, but we don't give them work permits.

As a matter of fact, most of them are really economic migrants, they want to work. They want desperately to come to work, and we say, you can come in, but you're not allowed to work. Well, duh, then we worry about them being costly on the public charge, if you're gonna let them in, allow them.

Something we touched on, but important for background, it is people say, we want legal immigration. It is essentially impossible to migrate legally to the US. If you live in Mexico or India and you're kind of smart, you wanna come be a software engineer, or even if you wanna be a gardener and you wanna do it legally, the wait time is literally hundreds of years before you can have any chance of getting it.

So do it legally, that system is also completely broken. There's an interest and one last of the many things going wrong. By blocking entry, we also block exit. Most immigrants, you were very good at immigrants versus settlers, most immigrants want to come and then go home and come and go home, especially with travel cheap.

But once you get into the US, if you ever leave, you can't get in again. So even though there would be a lot of voluntary, temporary migration, by making it hard to get in, you make it impossible to get out and make that system even worse. One thing we kind of agreed on, and I wanna say explicitly, economic migrants are good.

The idea that we need to keep people out, to keep up wages for Americans is simply false. People come in and, well, maybe there's not enough houses for them, great. Half of them are construction workers worker houses. This country has plenty of room and plenty of capital for people to come and contribute to America, start new businesses and pay taxes and pay off our Social Security.

Economic migrants are good, we need to say that out loud. If we have a problem, we have an assimilation problem, not an immigration problem. And I think we should focus on that fact, which is part of us being unwilling to say, we have a decent culture and you can join us.

But what we want is people, we want economic migrants who come but will learn to speak English, learn to be part of our culture and throughout the world. When you look at the resistance to immigration, it's not the person who comes from Mexico and starts a 711 or South Korea and starts a 711 in a bad neighborhood, serves their, country well and their kids go on to do well.

It's the cultural problems, now, this is particularly acute in Europe, letting in single men only who walk. Not allowing them a work permit and not integrate and then putting them all in the same place, it's just a guarantee of disaster. So we should call it the assimilation problem.

But certainly what immigration wants is people who want to come join our society, put out the effort and do it now. That's not gonna appeal to anybody political, I think that's where you ended up. There's an issue of how do you handle the refugees? But it's a smaller issue, especially if you could have a reasonable system for people who want to come join America to do so, and lots of them go home and come back again.

That's certainly where we need to go. Good luck, politically.

>> Reihan Salam: John, you are incredibly generous in seeking to reconcile our divides. Also, you are all so frighteningly brilliant that it's very intimidating to ever disagree. But what I would argue is that I believe there's such a thing as the Cochrane equilibrium, and the Cochrane equilibrium I actually think, could be relatively healthy and positive.

And the Cochrane equilibrium is one in which you do embrace more transitory migration. You have a more laissez faire approach, you have greater openness to economic migrants. And basically the way the economy is reshaped is that there's something that you got to see happen to some degree, even under the status quo.

But you have business models that adapt to the endowments of labor and capital that you have available to you. And so it could be that in a country that is more open in this respect, we have more labor intensive business models. And also it enriches the skilled people who are the natives in a given country, the more affluent natives, you have cheaper childcare and what have you.

I think that that Cochrane equilibrium is not, in fact, a nightmarish one. And I say this as someone who is kind of not a kind of social democrat, not an egalitarian by instinct, right? Where we disagree is that I think that, like it or not, the political culture of the market democracies is a little bit resistant to some aspects of that Cochrane equilibrium.

You see this happen in Canada as a paradigm case where you have a country that has for a long time had a really strong, robust, pro immigration consensus. And then what's happened is that the Trudeau government has drastically ramped up both the permanent flows but also the temporary flows.

And the temporary flows, these are folks who really are economic migrants, but the numbers there just increased dramatically. And what's happened is that Canada's housing markets like ours are pretty dysfunctional, particularly in those areas that are the economic engines of the country that are the places that the migrants wanna be.

Those are the places that are opportunity richest. Those places, first there's land use regulation, and they haven't been able to build enough housing, right? Look, John, you and I are both, hey, let's deregulate zoning, right? Let's deregulate everything. But the reality is that that operates on a different timescale, and there's been a really intense backlash now against.

Certainly against temporary, the surge in temporary migration and against immigration writ large. You see this in Ireland as well. Ireland is a country that had a very strong, robust pro immigration consensus for a long time that is now breaking down partly because of the interaction with housing, but also, ta da.

These are societies that have socialized medicine and you have rationing and you have long lines, right? So I think that under the Cochrane equilibrium, we deregulate everything. We're okay with the fact that richer folks get access to some things, but poor folks get access to some things, too.

And there are business models that are segmented and serve different folks, and it works out over the long term, and everyone gets richer. I'm very synthetic to them, but again, in these societies where there are misgivings about these broken, inefficient public systems interacting, and you talk about the assimilation problem.

One manifestation of that assimilation problem is the intersection between ethnic diversity, ethnic resentment and inequality over a kind of politically relevant period of time. Over a century, over a thousand years, those things might not be relevant, but over a politically relevant piece of time, I think that those things can be really tricky.

And that's why I am more reluctant to embrace that much more permissive vision.

>> John Cochran: Let me just push back quickly, please. We're not allowed to, we can't help ourselves from, we can't stand poor people around us. We seem to stand illegal immigrants around us who are very poor, who are mistreated by their workers, who live very difficult lives compared to just those people being legal.

You mentioned housing supply and medicine. These people are construction workers. Medicine, the NHS doctors are mostly immigrants. If you let them be immigrants, we have a big problem with elder care. This will actually, it's the one thing that could save that kind of disease.

>> Reihan Salam: The British public is happy for doctors and nurses to come, John.

 

>> John Cochran: Because we can't stop ourselves from restricting building supply so that. Because we can't let people build houses, come on.

>> Reihan Salam: Well, this is the narcissism of small differences here. I mean, so what I'm trying to convey with my Cochrane equilibrium is that I think that there actually is a world where this all makes a lot of sense, I'm not disputing that.

What I am suggesting is that given that we live in this tragic world, I think what you'll find, and you'll find this in Britain and Ireland and Canada, too. If you're saying we're bringing in people who are going to expand these kind of restricted domains of provision in a kind of thoughtful, planned way.

I'm not a planner, I don't love planning. But I think that we've kind of backed into the fact that politically you're going to have a much sharper anti immigration backlash unless you try to think about the 80 20 rule, okay? Among the newcomers, who are the people who are going to provide the most bang for your buck, in terms of political dissension.

But who are going to be the biggest bang for buck in terms of immediate revenue contribution, immediate contribution to easing bottlenecks here we have.

>> John Cochran: And I think that that's software engineers. Anybody who gets a college degree, unlimited H1B, come on, this is ridiculous that we don't allow that.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, very quickly, because we're almost at the time, Ryan, is there a country that is getting it right? We seem to have talked about countries that have problems with their immigration policy, even Canada, which is often held up as an example. You've convinced me that falling fertility, and this seems to me a subject worthy of a show in its own right, changes the nature of the impact of large scale migration.

I think this is a very, very important point, and it's true just about everywhere, because fertility is falling just about everywhere. So who's getting it right? Is there a model that we can learn from? Maybe one of the European countries, maybe, is it Australia? You show us a, give us the global perspective.

 

>> Reihan Salam: I'd say that Canadian immigration policy under Stephen Harper, under the previous government, was balanced, thoughtful, shrewd. And I also think that that conservative government had a very thoughtful approach to the assimilation challenge as well. I think that they got it roughly right. I'd say that Singapore is a country that is so markedly unlike us that it's almost irrelevant.

But it's just to make the point that for their willingness to be really stringent with enforcement, they'll literally deport you if you're a temporary worker who becomes pregnant. I mean, they're willing to go there for them, given their expectations and norms, they have a good approach. I would argue that the kind of Stephen Harper approach in Canada is something that can make sense for a North American society that is more small and liberal.

I think that that's something that we could actually operationalize with some challenges, but I think that's much more achievable for us.

>> Bill Whalen: Let me close the segment with this question. Every president comes to office and promises comprehensive immigration reform. Every president quickly dies on that hill. It's hard to see the winner of this election getting anything done.

They will be a lame duck. You look at the lineup of Congress, they just don't wanna do this. It's been almost 40 years in this country since we've done comprehensive immigration reform. What's it gonna take to break the log jab? Are we talking just some president coming in with a ridiculous mandate and a ridiculous lineup in Congress, or is it gonna take some cataclysmic event at the border which makes us re-examine how we let people in the country?

What do you think changes things Rohan?

>> Reihan Salam: Well, we've already had a breakthrough, which is that you had a bipartisan agreement that, again, I had my disagreement with, I'm sure we all did. But where you actually had Democrats say, we're gonna leave Amnesty to the side and we're going to actually come up with some kind of settlement.

That was a really interesting development which I think reflects, I would argue, rising restriction of sentiment among core democratic constituencies. That's something to look to. The other answer is that I actually believe, and if you, this is gonna sound so ridiculous to you guys, I'm sure, and to many in your audience.

But if you had another Donald Trump presidency, but this time where the former president just decides, I want to leave a legacy, I want to be thoughtful, magnanimous, I want to cement a new coalition, then I think that there would be interesting room, because I think that Democrats, there are so many interesting fractures there.

And I think that for better or for worse, he has such intense devotion from the rightward edge of the Republican Party that I think that he is someone who is an unusual position to strike a bargain. So again, the idea that he would be thoughtful, strategic, deliberate, magnanimous, those are things that don't immediately come screaming to mind when we think about the former president.

But I think that he actually is someone who could do things that Joe Biden or any number of other political figures who don't have that kind of same rock solid connection couldn't do.

>> Niall Ferguson: If you make the immigration reform bill against China, you've got the votes. You just have to reframe the issue in terms of national security and you get it through both houses of Congress.

If Trump does that, you're right, that can happen.

>> Reihan Salam: I strongly agree. And also, Bill, I'll just make one more point. And I wrote a piece a couple of years ago in which I was arguing that the context of immigration, the immigration debate is changing partly because for folks on the right, there has been this huge anxiety that the diversification of the American electorate, specifically the increasing representation of folks of Latin-American origin, is a political catastrophe for the right.

And what's happening now is that the right is politically competitive among Hispanics, has gained major ground with Asian-Americans. So when you're looking at that post-1965 cohort, those generations, folks like me, I was born in the US. My parents are immigrants from South Asia. Once you see that, actually, no, that's not a lost cause, that's actually a bit of a myth that these coalitions are moving and changing.

I think that that could also have a downstream effect on how folks on the right think about immigration. I think the argument I want them to take is don't just have a kind of full stop reflexive opposition. Be strategic and thoughtful. Who are the folks that you think are gonna enrich American culture, society, our economy, and who might be more politically open to your perspective?

You might call that cynical, but I think that's the right kind of cynicism, as opposed to a blanket cynicism that says that a Mexican-American or a Taiwanese-American is never gonna vote for me.

>> H.R MASTER: Brian, just one quick specific question. Are there any kind of measures we could take now, we being an administration, that wouldn't require legislation?

I'm thinking, for example, special benefit parole, our family sponsored a fantastic family of five who were American citizens and wonderful people. And it seems like that is a great way to bring in talent into the country and people who, I think some of our most patriotic Americans are immigrants, and strengthen our society.

 

>> Reihan Salam: I do think that the Biden administration is using many tools at their disposal to try to find ways around the legislative impasse, many of which I might disagree with, but some of which are credible and have serious arguments behind them.

>> John Cochran: I would just add, immigration reform is only one of many dumpster fires requiring fundamental reform.

The tax system is out of control. The basic fiscal reform question, the energy and environmental policy is completely out of control. Fixing Social Security, fixing our open-ended promises to health care. These are all issues that are dumpster fires needing sort of sit down. Any obvious bipartisan coalition could come up with a plan that wouldn't be perfect in this group but would be much better than we have now.

Such moments happen, such moments of reform happen, and they'll probably happen together or not.

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, we're gonna leave it there. Rohan, thanks for coming on. GoodFellows, thanks for coming back. And let's not wait three years next time.

>> Reihan Salam: It's such a pleasure to be with you all.

I'm such a big fan. And thank you for having me.

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, on to our second segment. That is Iran and Israel and what happened over the weekend. Over the course of 5 hours, Iran launched about 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and about 120 ballistic missiles into Israeli territory.

At least they tried to. Apparently none of the 170 drones crossed into Israeli territory. The same for the cruise missiles. Only five ballistic missiles got through it all. So Iran struck. But in regards, Iran also struck out. Let's go to you. This was an odd attack. We can agree it was an announced attack.

It was fed to us live. This was not Pearl Harbor or 911. Can you explain what the Iranians were up to here? I know there are people who wanna say the Iranians did not intend to do any damage. Was this symbolic? But do you buy that?

>> H.R MASTER: I don't buy it at all, Bill.

I mean, when you launch 300, your combination of drones and missiles in a country, I believe that the Iranians thought that a good number of those were gonna get through and they were gonna be able to inflict significant damage. I think what you've seen is really the result of decades of work of developing an integrated air defense system across the Gulf and Levant.

And that's an effort of US central command going back to the 1970s and 80s. Will those conditions remain where you would have all that degree of international cooperation? Would you have that same degree of US assets in place for Iran to do this again? That's not a given.

I mean, think about how Ukraine has had a really difficult time in sustaining its layered and tiered air defense capabilities. So I think this was a serious attack. It should be taken seriously. I think the Israelis are doing the right thing if they're considering this reaction based on, what if they had gotten through?

So I think it's kinda crazy to say that you can always shoot the missiles down. You can't go back to the source of those missiles. In any kind of effective air defense, we saw this with the Houthis too. Remember initially, well, we don't wanna strike the Houthis, we'll just shoot down the missiles.

You gotta be able to shoot down the arrows and kill the archer to have an effective air defense capability. And they've gotta impose some costs on the Iranians so they won't continue this and other forms of attack that they've been conducting going back to 1979, Bill. One of the things that really bugs me is this framing of, this was in a retribution attack by the Iranians based on the strike on the consulate in Syria.

Hey, this was a continuation of the four decade plus war that Iran has been waging on the United States, on Israel, and its Arab neighbors. So I think it should be seen in that context.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall noticeably absent from this attack, Hezbollah.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, well, they'll feature in a future episode of this series, I'm pretty confident.

I think the Iranians made a huge blunder here. And the way to think about it is that they validated what Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying for years, that there is an octopus whose tentacles stretch throughout the Middle East, but the octopus's brain is in Tehran. And the tentacles include Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, but it's Iran that is the foe.

And the Biden administration, after October 7th made believe that it was nothing to do with Iran that Hamas had attacked Israel. And that fiction has finally just crashed and burned, because the Iranians came out into the open and for the first time in what has been a protracted cold war directly fired missiles from Iran and sent drones from Iran against Israel.

This has salvaged the situation for the Israeli government. It's just a few weeks ago that Joe Biden, and Antony Blinken, and Chuck Schumer were trying to get rid of Bibi Netanyahu. Now they've had to step in and support Israeli air defenses, and I think restore much of the political capital that had been eroded during the campaign in Gaza.

So I think the Iranians have blundered on a huge scale here and it gives options to Israel now, options as to where to retaliate. They certainly are gonna retaliate, they can't allow Iran to get away with this. And so we can expect attacks against Iranian targets, not in Iran itself but perhaps in Syria.

And I think we should also expect that the Israelis will say to Washington look, now you understand what we're up against. Presumably you'll have our back when we go after Hezbollah, which we must, cuz we can't leave Hezbollah sitting in Lebanon with all these missiles pointed at Israel.

So I think this has changed the strategic balance significantly back in Israel's favor.

>> H.R MASTER: If I can just jump in, Joe, on that last point. I think the IDF is gonna into southern Lebanon this summer.

>> John Cochran: I agree with that.

>> H.R MASTER: They'll create some kind of a buffer zone that will allow them to bring the people back who are displaced, maybe up to 70,000 people.

There are some practical pressures there, right. I mean these are families who want their kids to go back to their schools, for example. And so I think regardless of what happens in this cycle with Iran and Israel, you're going to see a major operation into southern Lebanon by the end of the summer.

 

>> John Cochran: Let me add a couple comments here on what happened here. One of the big surprises was how well the Israeli Arrow system worked, which had barely been tested, and that actually kept a lot of the missiles out. And of course, the other surprise was even the Saudis helped out.

My worry here, of course, is the Iranians now see exactly how the air defense system works. And their job next time is to get the one big one through, and you know the big one I'm talking about, and that kind of worries me. They will learn, too, from what it takes to get some more rockets through.

I'm, of course, a little bit sad at the parallel with Ukraine. We know how to shoot down all the rockets if we want. Meanwhile, Russia is successfully getting all sorts of stuff through on Ukraine. Who has been deterred? The US is allowing, the US apparently could stop any rockets at once from going to Ukraine.

But we're so worried about Russia, not only won't we do anything offensively, we won't contribute to exactly the same kind of stopping rockets from destroying now the energy supplies of Ukraine. I'm a little worried about the relative cost, the numbers I saw was that this cost $500 million to Israel alone.

A Patriot battery turns out to cost $1 billion, 100,000 Hezbollah missiles, how long can this go on before Israel runs out of missiles or money? So just cuz this one worked out. The game of let rockets go, we'll shoot them all down and ignore it and pray for the best, that ended October 7th.

And I'm kinda shocked that the Biden administration doesn't realize that take the win, ignore it, go away.

>> H.R MASTER: John, it's like you're a boxer and your coach tells you, hey, get in the ring. You can block all the punches you want, but you just can't throw any punches yourself, I mean it's crazy.

 

>> John Cochran: Exactly, also they immediately told Israel don't respond. Biden wants to be a Roosevelt. I don't think Roosevelt on Pearl Harbor said here's the list of things we're not going to do in response to Pearl Harbor. And by the way, don't, I think, goes down with lying in the sand in America's deterrent capacity, which that's what we just learned is gone, Iran was not turned.

Last, I just want to emphasize what HR said, when you respond, and this is where I'll turn to a question, where's two kinds of wars. There's a war when what we wanna do is we wanna invade, take over, we have a political end, what is the political end here?

It seems to be settle down, we're not trying yet for regime change in Iran, just deterrence don't do this. But do you want to impose costs, show how tough you are, kinda like the shoving match at the bar. Or doesn't it make sense, exactly what you said, that Israel should respond, and in a little more focus this way than it did in Gaza, with targeted, reduce their capability to do this.

Yes, rocket launchers, rocket production facilities, things that actually degrade their ability to do.

>> H.R MASTER: Drone factories.

>> John Cochran: Drone factories, the transport systems that bring, every ship that brings missiles across to the Houthis. What's going on here, why are we not allowed to do that? But it seems that going narrowly after things that really degrade the capacity to do this rather than something showy is the way to go.

But that seemed to be where you were going, and I wanted to get a little deeper on why.

>> H.R MASTER: Just a quick comment, you're absolutely right about that. So you have to really base any kind of response on what the objectives are. So the objectives might be, I would say that I would cause problems for the entire Iranian threat network, not just limited to strikes inside of Iran but also go back to the source, you mentioned some of these targets.

But the overall objective would be to dramatically degrade Iran's ability to continue to operate and export its drone missile strike complex. Yes. But I wanna go back to the first point you made, John, cuz this is really important I think, Niall, I'd like to hear your comments on this.

Well what we're not talking about right now is Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon. And the Begin Doctrine is still in place in Israel, which is that Israel will not tolerate a hostile state having the most destructive weapons on Earth. And hey, after this attack, with good reason, as John pointed out.

So I think what we're gonna see in the near term, as we've been discussing, is some kind of a strike back. I think what we're gonna see in the summer is an operation in southern Lebanon. But hey, a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, it's coming, it's coming and it's just a question of when I think.

 

>> H.R MASTER: The United States is gonna have Israel's back or be involved in this.

>> John Cochran: We cannot go on with hundreds of thousands of cheap rockets, and we spend millions to shoot each of them down, and Israel spends millions, that can't go on either.

>> H.R MASTER: There are low cost solutions too, but they have to be used in a complementary way.

So with these really high cost ones, John, what they do is basically they say we're going to protect this facility, this area with these. With these high cost weapons. And if it's gonna fall in the desert, they just don't engage those rockets and missiles. But you can also have point defenses, which are like the old ship defenses, like Gatling guns that just put out a lot of rounds, the phalanx system, for example.

So what you need is you need a whole range of solutions that are integrated into a tiered and layered defense system, and there are lower cost. And then once you get to directed energy, which is coming, by the way, the British Navy's about to put some directed energy anti drone weapon systems on their destroyers, I think, in the next year or so, so that you're gonna get to low cost.

It's this interaction of technologies is what you're seeing now.

>> John Cochran: I also just wanna add one last point. Ronald Reagan was right and Joe Biden was wrong in the 1980s about Star wars being a good idea. Thank goodness for missile defenses.

>> Bill Whalen: And Niall, why don't you close out the segment?

And you started this by calling this a series. Why don't you tell us what the next episode of the series looks like?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I agree with HR. There's gonna be the Hezbollah episode, the Lebanon border episode, probably this summer. But he also made a hugely important point.

There's a danger that the non-proliferation regime breaks down completely in the 2020s. And we see a scramble for nuclear weapons, not only in the Middle east, but in other parts of the world. After all, what's the takeaway from the war in Ukraine? That Russia benefits greatly from possessing nuclear weapons, and Ukraine gave them up and left itself highly vulnerable.

So I worry that the Iranians are now increasingly emboldened to make the dash for nuclear weapons. And that's a three month dash, which, again, gets us the summer. So I think this is gonna be a hot summer in the Middle east, and not just in terms of temperature.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, we'll leave it there. To be continued. Now onto the lightning round. Lightning round.

>> Bill Whalen: Actually, there is no lightning round this week because we have a matter of profound importance to the Hoover GoodFellow's existence. And that is because today, April 18, 2024, happens to be Niall Ferguson's 60th birthday.

Niall, happy birthday.

>> Niall Ferguson: Thank you very much indeed, gentlemen. I can't think of a better way. Wait, I gotta get the whole.

>> Bill Whalen: That's all you're getting, by the way.

>> Niall Ferguson: Hey, I'll take those Scottish flags.

>> H.R MASTER: Go HR.

>> Bill Whalen: General is the one person not prepared, unbelievable.

Well, Niall, I wanna get your thoughts on turning 60. Obviously, it's a big deal for you. Why else would you bother to lose the beard and shave. But first, a few people wanted to send in their birthday wishes to you. If our very talented producer Scott immigrant could go to the video.

Let's see who all said hello to Niall.

>> Andrew Roberts: Niall, we've been friends for over 30 years and in all that time I've said that you're the most brilliant historian of your generation. But then, of course, you're much younger than me. I think that your skiing might be a metaphor for your personality because you're willing to risk anything in all weathers alongside your friends.

It's also a metaphor for your intellect in that you're much slower than I are. And the rest of us. Happy birthday.

>> Bari Weiss: I'm in the back of an uber heading to a speaking gig, which is how my friend Niall Ferguson spends most of his waking hours, I'm convinced.

So this feels fitting. I wanted to wish my good friend Niall, or as his very close friends tend to call him, Niall. Don't think that's right. A very, very happy birthday. He is the person I know that knows the most about Kissinger the Rothschild, but isn't actually a jew himself, which would typically put him on my watch out for this guy list.

But in Niall's case, it's a rare exception. Niall, you're an incredible friend. Not just to me, not just to the jewish people, but really to civilization. I feel lucky to call you my friend. I feel smarter every time I get to be around you. You make me feel illiterate, which is the highest compliment I can pay you.

Happy birthday. I know it's a really big one. Love to you, Ayan, and your whole family.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Hi, Niall. I hear you're finally going to make it to 60. To the other side, as we call it. Now, I can tell you that you're gonna be in rooms and you're gonna start wondering, is anybody in here actually older than I am?

That's one of the awful things about turning 60. The other thing is you get wiser. So I assume that you're finally going to come to understand and love American football. Happy birthday.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Happy birthday, Niall Ferguson. I will say six words for six decades. Brilliant, especially with language.

Niall coins words like chimerica to describe geopolitics to Ayarnia to tease me. Niall is bold. He likes big projects. From his big move to the United States and writing the biography of Henry Kissinger or the Frauthchilds to starting UATX here is diligent. 16 books ongoing. Niall is also dedicated.

Everybody who knows him, family, friends, colleagues at work, everyone will tell you just how dedicated Niall is. But Niall is also funny. I know that in the middle of fights with him, he can just throw out a word and then I am laughing, giggling helplessly. And then finally Niall is frantic.

Anyone who has ever done anything with Niall just knows he has this crazy energy. He's always on an airplane. We go out to the family and he says, we're going to six museums, three palaces, we're going to swim, we're going to hike, we're going to do all of that in less than 10 hours.

So that's him. Brilliant, bold, diligent, dedicated, funny and frantic. Happy 60th birthday, darling.

>> Bill Whalen: So our viewers should know that Niall is the last of us to join the sixties club. So, John and HR, would you like to say a few words to your young friend?

>> H.R MASTER: Hey, Niall.

I'll just carry on with what Barry said. You make all of us smarter. I've learned a great deal from you. It's great to have a fellow historian friend here at Hoover and quite an accomplished historian. And I just also want to highlight, we did this episode on immigration today and you becoming a us citizen has strengthened our country tremendously.

And happy birthday to a great fellow American.

>> John Cochran: I just want to say thank you. So, Niall, happy birthday. Welcome to old age. It is, as the French actor said, I forget which one. A lot better than the alternative. One of the most important things Niall has done is teach me how to pronounce Cochrane correctly, or at least.

But that leads me to a fear that perhaps our clans have a feud that we don't know of over a stolen sheep back in 1252 or something of the sort. We are so fortunate that what we do allows one to continue to be productive. In fact, more and more so into our later years.

You two are so lucky that you were not good enough to be professional rugby players or you would have retired at 35. And one thing that happens in my sixties is many of my non-academic friends are starting to retiree and I can't quite figure out how they fill their days.

Our retirement plan in this wonderful profession we've chose is I'll retire when they pull my cold, dead hands from the keyboard. I wish that to both of you as I wish it for myself.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, you've conjured up in my mind, John, the image of dead fellows. I can't imagine a better way of celebrating turning 60 than hearing those lovely tributes from some truly spectacular people, including a couple younger than us.

Let's acknowledge that Ayan and Barry are still on the side of youth, but it was glorious to hear from them, from Lord Roberts, from our glorious leader, Condi Rice. It's been a real privilege to be a good fellow in the last four years of my fifties. And long may we continue.

I mean, good fellows at some point will be old fellows and then eventually dead fellows, but may that be many, many years away. Thanks, everybody, and I really appreciate the good wishes.

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you, Niall. Thank you, John. Thank you, HR. Two programming notes. We'll be back in early May.

Our guest is gonna be Hoover senior fellow, Amy Zegart. We're gonna talk about cybersecurity. Amy does not like James Bond and she doesn't like Jason Bourne, so we're gonna have to talk about that, among other things. And our guest later in May is the one and only Stephen Kotkin.

So please stop writing us and telling us to get Kotkin on the show. He'll be on the show. We're gonna do historical counterfactuals. That should be kind of a fun show to do. On behalf of my colleagues, John Cochrane, HR McMaster and the newcomer to the sexagenarian club, Niall Ferguson.

We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. We'll be back soon. Till then, take care. Thanks again for watching.