One billion Americans: Is it a good idea? | Matthew Yglesias | Big Think Live

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Anybody can look at their craft, their profession, their passion, and become better. It's about finding that edge. Hi, I'm Charles Duhigg, a writer at The New York Magazine and the author of "The Power of Habit," and I'm delighted that you're joining me today. We're going to be talking with Matthew Iglesias here at Big Think, and today's topic is "1 Billion Americans: Is It a Good Idea?"

Because Matt just wrote a book named "1 Billion Americans," and for those of you who don't know Matt, he is a co-founder of Vox with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell, which they founded in 2014, Vox.com. He's currently the senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy and co-hosts "The Weeds" podcast twice a week. This is actually his third book, "1 Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger," which was released earlier this month. We hope that you have a lot of questions for us. We're going to open it up to your questions, but in the meantime, Matt, thanks so much for joining me this morning. Where are you dialing in from?

I am here in my basement in Washington, D.C. I don't have quite as good a creative background as you do. You know, I've been doing my best in these challenging times. It's an interesting time to do a book tour because it’s a lot of Skypes and Zooms, and you can actually do more stuff than on a normal tour.

Yeah, although I find it to be exhausting to do all these Zoom calls and spend so much time on one screen without being able to actually move around or meet people. I imagine: are you finding it hard to get the word out? I mean, you can tell I mean exhaustion-wise, right? There’s something about the way our brains work that these video conferences are close enough to talking to people face to face, but somehow different.

Like, it’s more taxing. You know, I could talk; I could go to three meetings in a day and not have it stress me out that much, but you do these video conferences and it’s something weird about them. It’s just exhausting.

Okay, so but let's talk about your book because that's what we're here to talk about. Okay, so your book makes an argument that the United States should be much, much bigger, at least when it comes to the number of people inside our national boundaries. Explain that to me.

Yeah, so the book is titled "One Billion Americans." The idea is that we should aim to grow our population to have about one billion Americans. You can do this through immigration, you can do it by supporting people who want to have more children. I sort of gather evidence that in both cases, there's a lot of people who would like to come here but who we don't allow, and there's a lot of people who say they would like to have more children, but they're having trouble affording it.

In both cases, I think the general perception in the United States is that it would be very costly to do these things, that it would make us worse off, and I argue that that's not true. We would be better off with a denser population, with a bigger country, and then it would also help us as a nation in the international arena. The reason China is poised to overtake us as the world's number one economy is that they have a much larger population than we do, and that historically, the reason the United States of America is a great power and Canada is a kind of friendly neighbor but nobody really cares about them is that we cultivated a much larger population than they have.

That's a spirit that I think we should continue with; it would make us a stronger country but also a more prosperous country. In some ways, it could make us a better country that gets more in touch with what's best in our values and best in our aspirations in the world.

And you're actually drawing on a strong strand of American history that's very similar. Teddy Roosevelt actually would go out and tell women that they should have more babies, right? There is an aspect of Americana which is very focused on this.

There is an aspect of Americana which is focused on this. There's also, of course, a tradition of racism in the United States that I think Teddy Roosevelt probably partook of to some extent. Yeah, I think he was only telling the white women that they should have a lot of babies.

This is a concern you hear in some quarters. There’s a sort of alt-right concept called the great replacement, in which their view is that liberal elites are discouraging people from having children—white people—and are instead going to replace the population with immigrants. I want to be clear; I support neither a great replacement by immigrants nor a racist paranoia about this. I just think we should do more to support people with having children.

I mean, I think if you look at it because the white population is older on average than the black and Latino population, doing more to financially support parents and young kids would disproportionately benefit people of color. So you shouldn't like associate this with racist narratives. At the same time, there’s no either/or. Like Steve King, he had this thing you know, we can't save our culture with other people's babies or something.

But America has always had lots of other people's babies, you know. One of the great strengths of the United States as a country is that, for all our problems, which are real, we have a sort of open civic culture. Our anti-immigrant president is married to an immigrant; Barack Obama had a foreign-born father; Kamala Harris has two foreign-born parents.

You know, immigrants are very rapidly incorporated into mainstream American life, and that's something that's good about this country and is something that I think we should take more advantage of rather than being defensive about.

Yeah, and I mean another president, Roosevelt, FDR, would start speeches by saying my fellow immigrants. Which, of course, neither he nor many people in the audience had been born overseas. But the point being that we have been an immigrant nation since the founding of our nation, and that immigration has played a huge role.

But let me push back a little bit because obviously, let's set aside for a second increasing birth rates in the US and look at immigration because this is not an uncontroversial topic right now. I mean, what's interesting to me is that there has been this real formation on the right around this idea of being anti-immigration. As you were reporting for this book and as you were talking to folks who represented that perspective who are arguing against you, like what is the genesis of this anti-immigration?

Are the people who are rapidly anti-immigration people whose lives have been impacted by immigration? Is it because it's a dog whistle for other issues? Like why is this strain so strong and historically has been strong in America?

You know, there's a lot of different things going on. What I thought was most interesting is that one thing that's going on is you hear people who say, look, I don't have a problem with immigrants; I don't have a problem with immigration. I don't understand why you people on the left paint us that way. I'm talking about illegal immigration.

President Trump is talking about illegal immigration, and I went and looked at it, and it's a sort of interesting phenomenon where President Trump is typically talking about illegal immigration when he talks about immigration. He's drawing a sort of law-and-order argument, but then when you look at what he's doing, he's quite indiscriminately cutting down on almost every form of legal immigration.

The one kind of legal immigrant that he seems to like is agricultural guest workers because he employs some of them on his vineyards and has supporters who believe in that. I think that's a great program too, by the way. But I think the lowest-hanging fruit is that I would challenge conservatives to live up to what they say they are doing in that regard.

If we want to be harsher on undocumented people, that's maybe not to my taste, but I don't think it's a completely unreasonable idea. But if you're supportive of legal immigration, make it possible for more people to come here legally.

I mean, we see that people will go to extraordinary lengths to come here without proper documentation. I mean, they will try really hard. It's not easy. If we create things that you can do to qualify to live and work in the United States, if we say here’s the bar, now go hit the bar, people will try to do that.

Right? We can take advantage of our ability to shape a legal process to get people who are trained to be dental hygienists, people who are trained to be medical doctors, people who have specialized skills in the building trades, I mean, whatever it is we need, we've got to actually do that.

Now, obviously, you also have another group of people who are just like, I don't know, they're mad that you have to press one for English on some phone lines, supposedly. They don't like being around foreigners, and you often see anti-immigrant politics in places that have gone from having no immigrants to a few.

Right, so it's not necessarily the people who are most impacted by foreign-born people, but it's people who went from being totally unimpacted to having a little bit of impact. It's a shock, right?

So, okay, so let me sort of segment a little bit because I think that when we talk to folks who do say we should have more immigration, there's a couple of big arguments that come up. One is folks saying this is a humanitarian issue. The United States has a great quality of life; we ought to offer that quality of life to more people because it would increase the health of the world.

Another argument that you hear a lot is from people who say, look, like the H-1B visa program, for instance, brings in immigrants who have started these amazing programs, not just H-1B but what we think of as the qualified immigrant. Right? The person who comes in by virtue of merit.

Then it makes sense that a lot of them would bring in their families because it's unfair to ask someone to move here, no matter how talented they are, to not leave their family. But if we got to one billion Americans, we would have to be much less discriminate, and let me say this as someone who loves immigration, would open up our borders immediately, has had members of my family who are undocumented living in the United States. So I am a fan of immigration.

But I do think that when I hear that argument from folks saying, look, we should be much more measured in who we're bringing into our country, we should try and bring in the cream of the crop, however you define that, because we think it's to the benefit of America instead of just to the benefit of the world.

I think that argument makes a lot of logical sense. If we had one billion, we would be opening up our borders much more indiscriminately. I think there's an argument for that, but how would you make that argument? Because we would be bringing in a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily objectively be adding to the benefit of the nation as much as creating just new citizens that we need to service.

Well, you know, to be clear, I'm not thinking we get 600 million people next year, right? We're talking about raising the population growth rate over the course of the century, right? It's a goal to get the country back on track to growth, and I think we can expand without becoming indiscriminate.

Right now, there's a lottery to get an H-1B visa, right? So many more people who qualify don't get them, even though they meet the criteria. So we can just lift that cap, right? We can take people of equal quality that we're just currently rejecting now, and let them come in.

Student visas are another sort of famous example of this, right? There are people right now who come to the United States on a student visa because they've got admitted to a selective higher education program. Then they graduate, they maybe stay a year or two on this J-1 practical training kind of thing. Trump has made those harder to get, and then we send them packing, right?

But if you're good enough to get into a good American college, you know, why shouldn't you be invited to stay? We can just expand the pool while focusing that expansion on people who have solid credentials.

I think a particular area for this is medical personnel, where we are paying some of the highest prices in the world, and we generally don't let you qualify abroad to practice medicine in the United States. Now, we're not going to get a billion foreign-born doctors, but you know we've got a lot; tens of thousands would be helpful.

But let me get to the harder argument because I don't think it’s hard to say that if there are a bunch of smart people in the world, we should get them to live in the United States of America, right? I think most thinking people who don't have some ulterior motive would say, yes, we should go. I mean, I wish we could; like, let's do it if it's so agreeable.

But let me ask this question: we know that two other things will happen, whether you want it to or not. Number one, they will bring their families over, and that oftentimes simply being smart yourself doesn't mean that your large extended family is as smart and productive as you are.

And number two, and we know that this is true, is that as you raise the rate of legal immigration, we also see higher rates of illegal immigration, which we can prevent through costly measures and sometimes inhumane measures, but they do go hand in hand. Right? That when we see one, we see the other.

And I think that people who argue against the H-1B visa program and student visas, what they say is they say, look, first of all, it's not quite as discriminate as you would make it out to be. Right? So a lot of people get by who wouldn't otherwise be; maybe they're not getting into Yale or Harvard; they're getting into some fly-by-night school where they're going to learn English.

And number two, we do know, and the Reagan years kind of prove this out, that we know that when we raise immigration or we have an amnesty program, we see higher rates of illegal immigration. And actually, I'm someone who's not necessarily opposed to illegal immigration.

But folks who are, and I think there's a strong argument to be made as to why a nation would want to cut down on illegal immigration—a say one goes hand in hand with the other.

What would you say to that?

Well, I somewhat disagree with you on the illegal point. But, I mean, I think to the broader point, one of the most interesting things that I looked at in the book is there's this kind of long-running academic dispute about the Mariel boatlift, which was an incident that happened around 1980 when the Cuban government, trying to sort of stick it to the United States, told a whole bunch of people—some people out of prison, some people who were disaffected political dissidents—just a bunch of people, they said, okay, go to Miami, we're not going to stop you because normally the Cuban government will penalize your family if you defect.

But they kind of opened the doors, and exile groups in the United States were very enthusiastic about this, and they sent boats over there to help facilitate people coming in. The Cubans were trying to overwhelm the American political system to sort of teach us a lesson about our own anti-Castro policies, and on a political level, it worked.

There was huge political backlash against this influx of people. It was a big problem for Jimmy Carter; it was a huge political problem for Bill Clinton in Arkansas; he was governor at the time, and a lot of the refugees were sort of interned there in Arkansas. So eventually it came to a stop, right? The US government worked with the Cuban exiles; we worked with the Cuban government; we cut off the flow of people.

So then scholars have looked back and said, well, okay, well what actually happened here behind the politics? David Card, a researcher at Berkeley, found that wages for native-born Americans went up; they didn't go down, despite an incredible—it was something like a 15% increase in the size of the labor force in the Miami area, you know, so like a catastrophic, you know, way more immigration than anybody would ever have politically speaking.

So then there's another guy, George Borjas. He's an economist at the Kennedy School, and anti-immigration people love him. The Trump administration has cited him in a lot of their documents in very immigration skeptical, sometimes in comical ways.

So he looked back at Card’s research, and he said, no, no, he’s got it wrong; he’s got to look more specifically at less-educated people. And so he finds that non-Cuban Hispanic men who didn't graduate from high school saw their wages go down because there’s a perfect substitute in the new immigrant who’s just arrived.

That was his own, and so then there’s a huge academic back-and-forth about this. Other people say, look, he’s using Current Population Survey data, and there are only 17 people in the sample who fit the criteria.

Okay, non-Cuban native-born Hispanic men without a high school degree. So that could be anything, right? There can be a 17-person sample with any characteristic. But my point is that that’s incredibly specific, right? Even the big anti-immigration scholar, right, looking at a crazy incident that was designed to be deliberately destructive, finds that it was fine for most people.

Right? This is only one very specific subgroup, so it makes me think we should just be, our baseline level of optimism about this stuff should just be much higher. The political backlash kicks in way before the actual practical problem arises for most people.

And so the main thing that we have is, like, it’s just back to the fact that some people, you know, I grew up in New York; I love Miami; I like those kinds of places. Some people don’t, though. And like tastes are just going to differ.

You can’t make people decide they like it when lots of foreigners are showing up in their neighborhood, and that’s the issue that we have. You know, it’s to persuade people that the objective harms are just not there.

And if they have an aesthetic preference for fewer immigrants, I mean, that’s fine, but that’s a costly choice. And that makes a ton of sense to me. But let’s talk about the implications of what the nation would be if it had a billion people in it.

It would take some time. I don’t think it’s fair to write a book and say, well, a century from now. But let’s say it takes at least a couple of decades, right? You got—you have to own the consequences of this sometimes.

Oh, I do. So I think that, have you ever lived abroad? Have you lived in—?

Yeah, okay. Okay, so I’ve lived in Cairo; I’ve spent time in very population-dense places. I imagine you have to. You use China as sort of an example of a superpower that’s gaining—you argue a lot of its strength and power from the fact that it does have a large population.

One of the notable differences between the United States and China is the political system, which many of the Chinese elite argue, with a population of that size, that you must have more repressive politics, which is a little self-serving.

But we’ll take them at their word for a moment. But also that the quality of life is impacted oftentimes by population density in a lot of these cities and a lot of other things. So take me through a US—we’re at what, 350, 370 million people right now?

330, give or take.

Okay, okay. So we’d be three times as large if we were at a billion. That would certainly create a lot more density, not necessarily across the entire country, but in big cities. We would see a lot more people; that would have implications on how we live our lives and quality of life on the politics of those areas.

I mean, how do you make the argument to the average American that they should embrace having three times as many people in their town, regardless of who those people are?

Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of the book is about dealing with the specific fallouts from this because on an obvious level, right, the reason I say you need a little bit of a timeline is that if you had 600 million more people, like they would need houses, right?

So I talk about policy ideas to get the houses, to get the transportation infrastructure. But of course you can’t build 300 million houses overnight. But we’re thinking about, is this too much of a burden, right? And if you look up at, like, you know, countries by population density, you see the densest country in the world is Bangladesh, and that starts to look really scary, right?

Bangladesh is a country with low living standards, fourth world nations in the world. But if you look at, okay, if we tripled the population, how dense would the United States be? The answer is we would be about as dense as France. We would be about half as dense as Germany, about a third as dense as the United Kingdom.

And you know, you can say what you want to say about those countries, but they're not like teeming slums, right? I mean, you've been to Paris; it's a nice city. There's like, you know, you could travel around France; they’ve got vineyards; they’ve got some nice small towns, a lot of farms.

Germany, you know, it is, I think if you eyeball it, more urbanized than the United States. They’ve got like one big forest area, and we have several. But at the same time, like their cities, you know, it’s not like if you go to Düsseldorf or Munich, you’re like, oh my god, what's happening. They're not shantytowns; these are nice modern cities.

And they, in fact, have better infrastructure than we do, right? And some of that is because, you know, they’re Germans and, you know, we like to be engineers and things like that. But some of it is that it’s actually easier to maintain a high quality of infrastructure if you have people, right?

So over the summer, you know, I thought I was going to be very clever. I’m doing all my work remotely, so let me decamp to coastal Maine, and that'll be really nice. And it’s like a writer's dream, but then I'm out there, and the internet is terrible, right?

And I would like record podcasts, and I couldn't upload the episode for my house. I would have to drive 25 minutes to a Dunkin’ Donuts and sit in their parking lot like some weird sad case. And you can’t find any decent bagels, and I’m not even getting into the bagels.

But just the basics, right? It’s hard when there are very few people living someplace to economically support laying fiber optic cables.

No, I agree. I agree. So I think that makes a lot of sense. As somebody who lives in cities and loves cities, like I love density. Like when I travel, I want to go to other dense places because the density means that there are just more interesting things to see.

But there would be a political consequence to this, right? And it’s a political consequence that would disadvantage the people who are already most anti-immigration, right?

We would see many more people stream into cities, so we would see cities get a larger voting base, and a lot of the people who came in would probably be people who end up voting what is now the Democratic Party, right?

Twenty years, thirty years from now, like the republicans might be the democrats, and everything might change as they look for new coalitions. But right now the people who stand the most to lose are these rural states who are somewhat depopulated compared to other places.

And they tend to be red. They tend to be conservative and republican right now. So how do we make this argument to, I mean, I think if you went to, you know, to DNC, they’d say, like sign us up. We’re ready. We see a bunch of voters we can register.

But of course, we actually have to convince like Montana that this is a good idea too. Make that case to Montana that it’s in their self-interest to welcome 600,000 new residents over the next decade who are coming from other countries.

Yeah, I mean, you know, look, if people just feel there’s a sort of partisan political imperative to not have immigrants in, you know, that’s gonna be tough. Something interesting I found, you know, doing this tour this fall is that after all these protests this summer, after all these arguments about the 1619 project and all these other things, I found a lot of conservatives are actually thinking a little bit differently about immigration and how they like actually, the sort of patriotic message of the immigrant story in the United States, you know, and the idea that like lots of people want to come here.

Like America is actually a good place, right? Like people abroad are not looking at the United States and saying, ah you know, it’s like they’re all so racist there, and I never want to go visit. So that’s one sort of line that you get here.

But what’s interesting, and I try to talk about the book, is the opportunity of population growth for some areas in the heartland, right? Because you can talk about—we can sort of stereotype America as like everything is either New York or it’s West Virginia, right?

But so much of the country is places like Toledo, Ohio, right? Or places like Buffalo, New York, right? Urbanized in the northern half of the country started losing population because cars were invented, then de-industrialization struck, and now they’re in this kind of downward spiral where, because of population growth, because of population loss, they don’t have a tax base to, you know, pay their old pensions.

They keep going through different rounds of bankruptcy; there’s been a lot of sort of local political tensions. But now people look around, and they say, look, you know, lots of people live in Wisconsin, right?

They’ve got all different lifestyles—suburban people, rural people, small-town people. But the fact that Milwaukee has declined from being a sort of important manufacturing center to now a city that’s just really in big trouble, it’s damaging to the whole state.

Like people want to have, you know, pro sports teams to root for, be able to take an occasional day trip into the city, see the museums, things like that, and they worry about these declines. We have a chance to try to grow the country but also spread some of that growth around and try to repopulate places that have lost people and actually revitalize them with new jobs and new opportunities and new residents.

In the book, I know that you have a bunch of case studies where you sort of look at specific reporting. I mean, tell me about like those communities where we have seen the immigrant population come in and revitalize things.

Yeah, so there are a number of interesting cases. A lot of times they deal with refugee resettlement because refugees wind up in odd places for slightly odd reasons.

So Lewiston, Maine, for example, has had a large influx of people from Somalia. I mean it’s not that large, but it’s large relative to Lewiston. And if you look at it, you know, it’s not without its political controversies, right? There’s a big backlash in Maine against refugees among people who don’t like them for one reason or another.

But if you visit Lewiston versus—this is a town; it used to have a lot of paper mills in it, now it doesn’t anymore. There are a lot of towns in Maine that have that basic characteristic. They’ve lost either paper mills or furniture factories, and all the other ones are really kind of sad and depressing because it’s like that’s what the town was there for.

You know, you don’t want to tell people like it’s horrible to just tell people, hey, give up on your community; go move away. But if you look at it, if you do not have an emotional connection to Millinocket, it’s like, well, what’s this town here for if the mills closed down?

Right? Whereas Lewiston, you go to it, and it’s like a nice place, and it’s like the only place in Maine, one of the only places in America where you can get certain kinds of restaurants and shops.

Because people are occupying it, like it’s not that everything is Somali; it’s just more customers for the gas station. You know, it means the school is not closing down because they have overall demand goes up, and so as a result there’s a lot of supply of different kinds of demand.

Right, exactly, and there’s just stuff going on there. And that’s a hard case though because I support refugees, but refugee admittance really is an act of charity—like by definition, the idea of a refugee is you are a true hard-luck case, and that’s why we’re selecting you.

But the fact that refugees, when they come in, are an asset to communities like that, or you look at Hmong from Southeast Asia in the Minneapolis area, a similar kind of story. Those kinds of immigrants wind up being a sort of benefit to depressed communities.

And if we could do more to, you know, have a more sort of positive selection of people, right? To say, instead of just having visas for skilled workers that are sponsored by particular companies, the US Conference of Mayors put together a proposal to say let cities sponsor visas for skilled workers.

That’s interesting, and so this is an interesting idea. Like I didn’t come up with it; it hasn’t been discussed, I think, as much as it should have been. But the mayors of Akron and Dayton were sort of real leaders in it.

A guy named Adam Ozamek, who’s an economist and a business owner, and he lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which I just—I live in this town. I want to get 150 new coders from Estonia here because I can help attract a new company to come found.

Can be founded here.

Exactly, and either—I mean they might start up their own things, or a company, right? Like right now, a lot of people will contract with Accenture, and Accenture will send it work to an office in India, right?

But when Accenture can bring people over to the United States, they prefer to do that. So if you said, yeah, like open an office in downtown Akron, open in Dayton, open in Binghamton, and you could bring people over there?

But then the immigrants wouldn’t necessarily be tied to that company, right? If they wanted to leave, start something with their friends, they have some economic mobility and job mobility in that, which was—is a healthier labor market.

Yeah, and you know, we don’t know, right? I mean, how many cities would say yes to that? Not everyone, but some of them would, and if it worked, more of them might want to, and you know it’s—it’s one of these things that languish out there in politics.

I think it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people when they hear the idea, but if you go to Congress, the mentality in Congress right now is any program to expand the number of visas has to take visas away from somebody else, right?

So if you say we should let cities sponsor visas, a Republican will say, well then let’s cut the diversity lottery. And so when you say that, the Congressional Black Caucus will say, oh no, no, no, we can’t do that because that’s the main way that people from Africa and the Afro-Caribbean come here.

But what’s the problem, right? Like if it’s a good idea to let cities sponsor additional visas for skilled workers, why not just let them do that? Like why take any visas away from?

It’s a completely artificial constraint.

No, absolutely, and everybody knows Congress is dumb, and this is just one of a million dumb things about Congress.

I’m not sure I’d agree with Congress; Congress is dumb, but okay, so let me—and I think that most of them work hard.

Okay, so we’re going to open it up to questions in a second, and to the administrators, I have my private chat window open. I don’t know if that’s where you guys put the questions, but if that’s wrong, let me know before we go to questions.

Okay, let me ask this other question, which is—so what’s interesting about the argument you’re making, and you mentioned China a lot, right? That the rise of China is something that we need to take seriously.

It is a genuine superpower; you root a lot of the argument of why it’s become a superpower in its population size, that its sheer number of people gives it a power that we can’t match right now.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that because we’ve seen variations on that argument for hundreds of years—that was Teddy Roosevelt’s argument—is that in many ways, you know, China has been larger than the U.S. for a long time, right, for like hundreds and hundreds of years?

And for a great period of that, they were not a real rival to us. Why should we equate population size with the capacity of a country rather than looking at like the respective productivity and intelligence and patent numbers filed by a smaller number of citizens?

Yeah, well, I mean, there are two factors, right? I mean, there’s the number of people, and then there’s the sort of per-person output. For the longest time, China was just so poor that there could be a billion Chinese people, and it didn’t really matter.

But now we’re at a point where China has about the per-person wealth of Mexico, right? And now Mexico, you know, it’s okay; it’s a middle-income country. Nobody worries about like Mexico in the international domain, you know, unless you’re moving tacos.

The amazing tacos in Mexico City are like amazing, you guys.

Well, they’ve got, you know, they've got good stuff going on. But China at Mexico's level of living standards has become, in purchasing power parity terms, the number one economy in the world.

They’re behind us in some other measures still, but they’re catching up, and so this gives them real clout and things, right?

So Pen America did this report in August about how Chinese movie censors now sort of dictate to Hollywood what they can and can’t put in movies. So you know they told Disney you can’t have a Tibetan character in Doctor Strange, and Disney complies, right?

And if, you know, if a little country, right, if Honduras tried to tell them what kind of movies they could make, you know, they’d tell them to get lost because who cares?

But a market that big has influence. We saw there was this—I’m a big NBA fan, and you know normally sort of unwind from politics there, but there was this really frightening incident when Daryl Morey did a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong, and so they took the Houston Rockets off Chinese television.

All these athletes and league executives were like, well, he shouldn't have said that, right? And it's a small thing, but I don't think anyone—I don't think anyone in America wants to live in a world where you have to worry that your boss is going to yell at you for saying something critical of this terrible authoritarian government that just increasingly throws its weight around in these kinds of ways.

And the fact is as long as they have four times as many people as we do, they can be half as rich as we are and still count for more in the world. And this is why, you know, I think we need to think about growth and population size.

Okay, now that makes a lot of sense.

Okay, so we’re going to move to questions. I do have one more question for you before we move to the audience’s questions.

And the audience, if you want to submit a question, you can do so over YouTube or Facebook or Big Think Edge. Please feel free to input your questions for Matt and for me.

So okay, with all this being said and the amount of time you’ve spent thinking about this and talking to supporters and critics,

What is the most compelling argument you’ve heard to the alternative? What is the argument when people say we should actually not be opening up our borders to more immigrants? We should not be encouraging higher birth rates, which is the argument that you have the most trouble sort of saying, I think you’re wrong.

I mean, obviously, there are no good arguments against me at all.

No, so you know something that does give me pause is looking at the state of the American political system, right, over the past several months and to some extent over the past several years. Right?

You don't want people to come into a completely dysfunctional polity that is likely to kind of just blow up, right? So I have this idea in the book, and you know it's like there at the end, and I psych myself up about it, that having a good sense of mission and national purpose can help sort of heal some of the disastrous culture war politics that divide us.

But you know for most of the book, I have like good footnotes that cite academic evidence that really backs up what I’m saying, and this idea about like curing the national soul is like pure—I think it's true, but like I can't prove it, you know what I mean?

If you want to tell me, look, raising our aspirations is only gonna make us melt down in like a more severe way, you know, who knows, right? Like I, like everyone else, did not predict five years ago that this is the place we would end up politically, and you know it worries me. I mean I worry a lot about what will happen over the next five weeks and what the implications of that for the next fifty years are.

Yeah, I agree.

Okay, so let's turn to some of the questions from the audience, and again, feel free to put them on YouTube or basically wherever you're watching. If you type a question in, we’ll get it.

So okay, so Free Think asks, how do you think we can reduce the environmental impact quickly so that our emissions don’t spike? And this is a good question because you know until basically 20 years ago, one of the main planks of the environmental movement was actually cutting down on population growth because each additional human being on this planet creates a new environmental burden.

So given that we want a green planet and a healthy planet and that we know that population growth is somewhat at odds with that, how would you answer Free Think's question?

Yeah, you know, so the environmental movement has really moved away from this kind of population control viewpoint. I've been interested to learn, you know, as I tour toward the world virtually, that a lot of people have not quite moved away from it.

But you know, I think there's a variety of different ways you can sort of answer this question, but one of them is that if you look at the impacts of climate change on the world, it’s very spatially uneven, right? And the biggest harms are anticipated to fall in countries that are located near the tropics, in countries that have large numbers of people engaged in subsistence agriculture, in countries that have, you know, very long levels of coastal flood zone.

And the United States is actually one of the best situated countries to sort of survive climate change. I think Canada is number one because they have just like a ton of water in Canada, but America is in pretty good shape.

Letting more people into the United States actually mitigates the harms of climate change rather than accelerates the underlying causes.

Now that being said, look, obviously, America is one of the richest countries in the world. We have reduced emissions a fair amount over the past ten years, but they’re still really high on a per-person basis.

And so when people move here from Nicaragua or Haiti or Nigeria, their emissions go up quite a lot, largely because their incomes go up quite a lot. I don’t think that saying, well we need to keep people trapped in poverty is a real solution to climate change.

You know, like that’s not—it’s not gonna fly. Among other things, like the government of Vietnam is not gonna stop developing just because it would be convenient for us if they did so.

If we are going to solve this problem, right, fundamentally, America needs to not just reduce our emissions but like lead the world in showing that you can build and deploy clean energy, in innovating in some of the spaces where good solutions don't exist right now around concrete and steel and agriculture.

Like we're either going to contribute to solving this problem on a technical and intellectual level or we're not, right? But limiting the size of the United States is not gonna get it done.

Like we're not the world's number one emitter anymore; we're gonna be overtaken by India; we're number two pretty soon, and that’s not because we’re so great or because they’re so evil; it’s just because the reason so many of these countries have low emissions is that they’re so poor, right?

And they’re not gonna stay poor. Like we need to find ways to make affluent societies sustainable, not just like build a gate around our little affluent society and say, oh nobody else is coming in.

Yeah, I think that’s a great point.

So Nuno Santos asks, what about successful countries like Iceland, Norway, and Sweden? Places where we see low populations, we see high rates of economic productivity—not as high as the United States—but we do see high rates of economic productivity, and we see a high quality of life, and frankly, a large resistance to open immigration policies because of a fear that it will lower the quality of life.

So how do we fit those countries into your model of explaining why this is a good idea?

Yeah, so, you know, I don't—I'm not here to give other countries advice about what they should go ahead. Come on, you know, a country that I think about a lot that I’ve spent some time in and spoke to government officials there was Finland, which is a great country, very high quality of life, very low population density, plenty of room in Finland.

But it’s right there in the name, right? Finland is the land for Finns. And if they feel that it’s the land for Finns and they don’t want Kurds moving there, they have a Kurdish refugee community, if somebody says that, it’s like I can’t tell them that they’re wrong, exactly.

I mean, I’m not Finnish at all, so you know, what’s it to be? America, though, is not like that, right? Like America is a country that has always prided itself on the idea of being a destination for people all around the world.

That is our culture. People coming here doesn’t erase our culture; it sort of constitutes it. In living standards terms, I mean, it's worth saying the United States is richer than all of those Nordic countries.

They’re nice countries; like I give them the thumbs up, but we are still doing better than they are. And to an extent—not so much Sweden—but especially Iceland and Norway, they kind of free ride on technologies and startups that exist elsewhere in the world, right?

So Iceland picks up tourists, and they sell fish to the globe, and then they just sort of import all the technology that they use to do everything, right? There are no giant Icelandic companies.

Norway, a little bit more advanced economy, they’re selling oil and gas to the world, right? They’re the world's leader in electric car usage because their government just had, I think, pretty visionary policy. They weren’t encouraging people to buy EVs, but they’re buying Teslas, and they’re buying what’s it called, the GM one—

Is that the—?

Yeah, the Chevy Volt.

The Chevy Volt.

Yeah, yeah.

Because America is the country that has like created the electric vehicles, right? And it’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with Norway in its way, right? But America provides some unique advantages as a home of innovation, right?

And that has a lot to do with being a big place. It’s like, it’s not the fault of Icelanders; it’s like how could you possibly launch a high-growth startup in a country that has 300,000 people?

No, I think that’s right. Half of whom are fishermen, so really ambitious people from Iceland move, right? They move to London or Berlin or New York.

And I will say that among my friends, I don’t hear a lot saying like, you know, where I really want to move to is Iceland; I just can’t wait till they approve my immigration visa. You know, it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous.

So okay, so Jim Beau has this question, which is, which I think is a really good one, which is how much expansion of infrastructure, cities, and changes in methods of transportation would be necessary to support this kind of growth?

So instead of debating whether it’s a good idea, let’s imagine we’re 20 years into the future. Matt Iglesias has been nominated; he has been named the minister, the secretary of immigration.

And so as a result—but the borders are open? Like do we see a spread across the entire country? Are they moving into rural areas? Are they moving into cities? Are cities changing dramatically?

I mean, there's already a huge debate over whether we should have more urbanization and what we should do about, you know, housing prices in those urban areas.

What do we know, based on looking at models from the past of immigration, how it actually played out about how those people would actually distribute themselves and the impact it would have on everyday life?

Yeah, so you know, I mean, it depends a little bit on the policy choices that we make. As I said, I mean, I do think that's whatever policy—you're the secretary of the world.

No, no, I’m laying it out. So I do think we should try to direct people to our sort of population decline cities. That should be one priority because we have underutilized infrastructure in those places.

But we also have to look at increasing the housing supply and increasing the infrastructure provision in our sort of big immigrant gateway cities, right? And that means changing the transportation mix.

Although in some ways, it facilitates things that we say we want to do. So you look at Los Angeles, right, which is a huge immigrant gateway city, lots and lots of people from abroad move there.

Cool city, a lot of fun stuff going on. They’ve spent a ton of money over the past 20 years on building the LA Metro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And almost nobody rides it. And if you look at why almost nobody rides it, it’s that the frequency of the trains is really terrible.

And then if you ask them, it’s like, well, why don’t you run the trains more frequently? They say, well, our ridership is so low that it’s really costly to run the trains frequently, and that’s just a terrible idea, right?

I mean, if you think about how trains work, it’s supposed to be a really large upfront cost—like building a subway tunnel under a city is expensive. But once it’s there, like you just want people to use it, right?

You collect the fares; you go do it. But they haven’t changed the land use around their stations, right? So they haven’t zoned even adjacent to the metro stations to have big apartment buildings around them.

So of course, if you live in a little house and you have a garage and you have a car in it, like of course you don’t want to take an infrequently running train to go places, right? Like it just, it doesn’t work that way.

You would have to—what they wanted, right? What was in the minds of Angelenos when they paid for this is, well, somebody else worked in the subway, and then I’ll keep driving, and I’m gonna get rid of the traffic jams.

But transportation systems don’t work like that, right? Like you have to build best transit looking cities around your stations.

But we clearly can do that, right? If we’re going to have more immigrants come in, we build the apartment buildings we use, the transit we have, we can expand the systems.

I talk—my favorite part of the book, my—it was obscenely long in the first draft; my editor was like we don’t need so much of this—was about how we could take the commuter rail networks that we have in our East Coast cities, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and make them more like the RER they have in Paris or the S-Bahn they have in Berlin.

Where you basically connect the tunnels on either side of the city, you run the trains through it. Instead of having conductors, you can have fare gates; you can run them really frequently.

But basically speaking, right, when I was talking before, I said, you know, a billion Americans is the population density of France. So if you want to know how would the transportation infrastructure have to be different, it would be more like French infrastructure, right?

Which is pretty good infrastructure. Like that’s nice infrastructure. It’s good. And, you know, of course, lots of French people have cars and drive around, but they have more trains than we do.

Because trains are a really good way to move a large number of people through a finite span of space. In America, we have a lot of people on the left who have a sort of emotional affiliation for trains, but we actually don’t have a population that supports their use in a lot of ways.

You know, I mean, New York obviously does, but much of the country doesn’t.

So we would move more in that kind of French direction.

So we have about nine minutes left, and I want to take a couple more questions.

But let me ask this one thing that I think is an inevitable part of this conversation, whether we like it or not, which is that the history of immigration and of population growth or population decline has always been tied up in some, to some degree, with racist arguments and with issues of racism, right?

Even the fact that we have immigration quotas right now that are based on countries—there’s an institutional racism that’s at play, at that that we just see quotas that favor white people and disadvantage people who are not white.

And obviously you’re not making any arguments that are racist; in fact, I think what you’re arguing is, yeah, I want to be clear about that.

I think what you’re arguing is race-blind or very progressive. But as this conversation, if your book—if everyone reads your book and this conversation becomes a national conversation, and we talk more about immigration,

There will be these elements of it that have to do with people’s fear about losing cultural identity, which is oftentimes a stand-in for ideas that can become racist very easily and sometimes unintentionally.

I mean, as you think about that, we mentioned Theodore Roosevelt, who was like basically—was making the same argument you were but was explicitly racist in how he was making it.

How do we have this conversation going forward in a way that even with our best intentions does not become something where we start talking about which—who are the good people and the bad people, and who do we want to let in, and who do we not want to let in?

It seems like a petri dish for identity and race discussions.

This was a big part of my inspiration for starting to think about this topic was, you know, I’m looking at Trump and I’m looking at these MAGA hats, and I have such a negative emotional reaction to this whole thing that’s going down, right?

And part of what it is to me is that I think there’s always been tension in American political culture between, you know, American nationalism, like Abraham Lincoln, and this kind of white ethnic nationalism, you know, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee—some of President Trump’s favorite American historical figures apparently.

And I want to challenge people who say they are interested in American national greatness to take that idea seriously and think about what it means seriously that they are pushing to me this kind of little America agenda that is nationalistic in the sense that it is fearful of foreigners.

And I want an agenda that’s patriotic in the sense that it values America and it values the best in America and it wants to build on that.

And to actually make our country as great as it can be, and I think that the small-mindedness of racism holds us back in that regard.

I mean, it holds us back in terms of immigration policy, but it also holds us back in terms of having a cohesive nation, right? In terms of alienating so many people from the national spirit by telling them that they’re excluded or that they don’t matter or that they are not valued.

You know, it’s interesting because I think that this issue has been with America the entire time, right? Even in the Constitution, the fact that we say that the president can only be someone who is essentially native-born, right?

And in the 1800s, you saw a lot of conversations between people who were themselves first-generation Americans, had been born to immigrant parents, but who fought recent immigrants and declared themselves nativists simply by virtue of the fact that they had been born on this shore as opposed to the shore of their parents.

So as a last question, let me just ask: why is this such a big deal?

Like we don’t—we don’t talk about so many other issues. Drug policies, we don’t really talk about with this heated emotion. Even health care, as heated as that gets, doesn’t become this litmus test for who we are as a country the way that immigration does.

Like as you’ve spoken to people who’ve spent their lives thinking and talking about this, why is immigration still such a huge point of discussion, given that for most Americans they don’t bump into that many immigrants? Or if they do, they’re people whose immigration status has been resolved a long time ago?

You know, I mean, immigration is controversial in every country where it goes there, but the reason I think it cuts particularly close to the bone in the United States is I was at the Gettysburg battlefield over the summer with my son. He’s become a weird five-year-old Civil War buff, so I drove him up there, and I was thinking about the Gettysburg Address and the idea of the United States as a country that is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

And the notion of equal citizenship, you know, has become a commonplace one in a lot of countries, but there is a real sense in which the United States is dedicated to that idea in a unique way. It’s like it’s there in our founding documents. It isn’t like, hey, we’re of a different ethnic group than you English people, so you shouldn’t rule over us, right?

It’s like says that we’re created equal; we have these inalienable rights. And that’s America, which has always meant it’s deeply woven in the idea that any place can be America.

Like America used to be small; it didn’t include Oregon or Hawaii, but you can plant the flag anywhere, and that’s America. Now you can be a state, and people can come here from anywhere and be Americans, and that’s great, but it’s also really weird.

It’s a historically weird idea, and it cuts against a lot of instincts about what a nation is. And there’s a constant impulse, including famously by the man who wrote that document, to think of humanity in ethnic or racial terms and to conceive of the nation in those kind of terms.

And that kind of thinking is so natural to all people everywhere, but it’s also this profound challenge to the underpinnings of America as a country.

And we go back and forth about this topic really throughout our history in different ways—how seriously do we mean that American universalism?

And you know, I think we should mean it quite seriously. I think there are really good ideals and that at our better moments in history, we have come closer to them.

I agree. That's a great place to stop. Thank you to all of you who tuned in; this is a fantastic conversation. Thank you for your questions.

Every single one of you should go buy Matt's new book, which is called "One Billion Americans." You can find it everywhere books are sold—probably some places books aren't even sold; they’re still gonna have copies of it.

And you can find Matt online at Vox.com or on Twitter or basically anywhere—I feel like I see you pop up all the time in places I don’t even expect.

And you should definitely tune in to Big Think next week for a webinar with Kurt Anderson, who is the writer and the host of NPR Studio 360. He’s going to be discussing his latest book "Evil Geniuses."

I’m going to let you guess who it’s about. It’s not Joe Biden. It’s a—that’s Thursday, October 8th, at 1 o'clock, 1 PM EST, and it’ll have a live Q&A.

And thanks so much, stay safe, and Matt, thanks for—