TRANSCRIPT: Dick Lamm

Fred de Sam Lazaro, TPT: Do we have an overpopulation problem in the United States in your opinion?

Lamm: Given our lifestyle, given our use of resources, given the impact that we have on the ecosystem I would raise the question as could the ecosystem support another 300 million consuming Americans? So my answer would be yes. I think there’s definitely, when you look at the impact that we make on the environment I think there’s a substantial question whether or not we may not be overpopulated as it is right now. Can we really have 283 million Americans maintaining any kind of decent lifestyle on a sustainable basis? I would suggest to you that’s a much closer question than most Americans think about.

FdSL: Is it a question of population however? Or is it a question of lifestyle?

FdSL: So the 100 people who emigrate from China to America consume a lot more than they would were they living back in China?

Lamm: Yes, and I think that — I think every nation has a new public policy question that it has to ask itself. And that’s sort of what is our demographic destiny? That’s a question that was never asked. For a million years humankind never asked that. I mean we spend so much of our human existence just trying to hold on to existence on this earth. Even in the United States we had this empty continent. And when the Statue of Liberty was built there was 79 Million people in America. We’re trying to fill up an empty continent. But now I think that the question of immigration has to be looked at as what is in our national interest? So it isn’t so much a question of how many people we can hold. I turn around the question and say why immigration? Do we need more people? Do we have too much open space? Are our schools under populated? So I turn it around and say look, is there any way that the United States, through its immigration policy, could be much of a help to third world poverty? We take almost twice as many immigrants as all the rest of the world combined. But I would ask myself let’s say we double the amount of immigrants and take 2 million immigrants a year? There are 75 million new babies born in a given year. So Americans maximum generosity in its immigration is not going to dent the world poverty situation. I don’t think this is an ethical question in terms of just the numbers of people. It well may be an ethical question in terms of economic development. I think the United States comes very close to the line of having a non-ethical foreign policy because we give, of all the developed countries we give among the least percentage of our wealth in terms of foreign aid. But I don’t think that — I think that most people are going to have to bloom where they’re planted. And instead of taking a few people and having them come to the United States, I think the United States should try to succor as many people as they can in other places. Immigration is not a particularly good policy in terms of trying to alleviate world poverty.

FdSL: But that isn’t the goal of immigration. I mean it isn’t really altruistic. I mean there’s an economic imperative. We need immigrants in our economy simply because — I mean the record will show most of them come here to find work. Or we really actively recruit them whether it’s in health care or software engineering, what have you. So is there an economic imperative that’s driving immigration that’s sort of inescapable here?

Lamm: I don’t think so. I think some of the fastest growing economies are places, which have stabilized population. I think that you look at other places. I don’t think there’s — I think that population growth and economic growth are not Siamese twins. But nevertheless I think that there is a further argument that I would really make. If we really are going to go down the line that you’re talking about aren’t we still going to need immigrants 50 years from now, 70 years from now, 100 years from now? Where are we going to stop? Are we going to have an America of 2 billion people, 3 billion people? I would argue that look, the world environment, the ecosystem has got to be considered here. Our climate is warming. Our oceans, our fisheries are disappearing. Our icecaps are melting. Something, Fred, is going on out there. And it seems to me that I’m trying to suggest a whole new way of thinking. And that’s the fact that we shouldn’t double the size of the world. And we shouldn’t double the size of the United States. I think the world and the United States should both try to achieve stable population stabilization. Is this going to cause some economic difficulties and adjustments? Yes, but we’re going to have to do them anyway unless I follow you down the road of saying well, we’re going to have to have immigrants all of our future to make sense. I don’t want to leave my children an America of a billion people. It seems to me that’s a very substantial question. And yet that’s where we’re headed. At our current immigration rates, my grandchildren at the end of this century will have an America of a billion people. And I got interested in this subject when I went to India in 1967. And I think I know what it’s like to be in a country of a billion people. And I can’t imagine anybody in Minnesota, anybody that wants to double the size of Minnesota. I don’t know anybody in Colorado that wants to double the size of Colorado. And yet that’s what’s going to happen under our current immigration laws.

FdSL: A lot of people will tell us on this very program that you can as much as multiply Minnesota by 12 times and you won’t achieve the population of Britain. And they say they live very well in Britain and many parts of Western Europe with much more population density. It’s just a matter of choices that we make. So how do you respond to that? What’s wrong with developing a little more vertically than horizontally?

FdSL: There are a number of people who will say, academics that we’ve talked to on the other side of this issue who will say it’s matter of our choices. The Europeans live with far more density. They’re far more eco-friendly than we are living in our — the Twin Cities is an extremely sprawled metropolitan area. And therein, they would say, lies part of the problem, the choices that we make. We could stand to be much larger than we currently are without it diminishing our quality of life.

Lamm: Immigration policy to me is run by special interests. And whatever the equation might be, immigration policy in the United States is run by the business community that wants cheap labor and liberals that want cheap causes. I mean it’s open border liberals and the economic people. 82% of Americans, Fred don’t want the kind of level of immigration that we have right now. So all I’m arguing is what I think most Americans want. We don’t want to double the size of America. Whatever theoretically we could do by living in high rises and eating hydroponics may or may not be an issue. I am saying that a country has to ask itself. Now it well may be that your number would be larger than my number. But I would argue that it is not good for the ecosystem. At some point we’ve got to be very cautious here. Because the environment is signaling us some very substantial signals that we are stressing the environment. And I think that the United States should go into a debate of exactly the kind of question that you’re asking right now. How many people do we want to leave in America for our grandchildren? That really should be the question not how many theoretically does somebody say that we can support? I would give my vision of America would be that we should try to stabilize America’s population as soon as possible. I think that it would for lots of different reasons. I can’t imagine trying to run Colorado with 12 million people. So I would just put that out as a vision. And give you the fact that you can get people that will say, "Well, you can support 12 million people in Colorado." Then I say would say, "But why do it? Why impose it?" It’s just almost like the same question that American families made on themselves. The fertility cycle of an average couple could give them 8, 10, 12 children. And most American couples say, "Wait a minute. I don’t want that." And so they have much smaller families. I think the same thing that a nation has to do. How big does our national family want to be? Fred, I don’t want a billion people to leave to my grandchildren.

FdSL: Have we ever been altruistic in our immigration policy? Was the alleviation of third world poverty ever part of the equation of letting people in?

Lamm: No.

FdSL: It’s always meeting an immediate need whether it’s for meatpackers in the Midwest or lettuce pickers in the West.

Lamm: Yeah I believe that’s politics. Immediate need, I say no. I don’t agree with that but I think an immediate need as somebody has defined it. It’s like our hotels.

FdSL: The special interest you were talking about?

Lamm: Yeah. It’s our hotels that say, "Well, we can’t anybody to clean the rooms at $6 an hour." Well, the question isn’t what wages they want to pay. I think the economic evidence is now overwhelming. George Borhas at Harvard and everything else like that. The average American family is now paying very heavily for immigration, anywhere from $5,000 to $9,000. In California it’s even more than that. Because when — there’s a big price to immigrants that we also don’t see. But one of the prices is that if you are a blue-collar worker you’re wages are being held down. So you had meatpackers that were making $18 an hour here in Colorado. And they’re now all of a sudden they bring in a bunch of illegal immigrants or even legal immigrants and they’re now making $7 an hour. So I think that part of this is simply the question that the business community in Minnesota, the business community in Colorado will always use all the cheap labor you can get them. But the question is is this really good for other people. An immigrant isn’t going to take your or my job. But it’s going to take a job of somebody that’s living very close to the margin. That’s really who’s really being impacted by immigration.

FdSL: In total there are a lot of people who will take the larger view of immigration as a whole. We continue to hear — many economists will say it’s a huge plus for America. Anybody who’s been to an inner city and seen it revived by immigrants. We have them in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Anybody who’s been to a rural community, been treated by a doctor from the third world, anybody who’s been to Silicon Valley will tend to agree that in total immigration is an economic plus for this country. Where do you see -?

Lamm: The studies really don’t show that though. I mean this is now been — you’ve got the Rand Study. You’ve got the Natural National Resources Study that really shows that at the maximum they’re talking about is a $10 million net increase for immigration, which in a $7 trillion economy is a drop in the barrel. I think some immigrants are a plus. And I think you mentioned a couple of the categories of them. And I think that when you look I don’t you should, from a public policy standpoint there is vastly a difference between trying to get somebody that comes into Silicon Valley that has a dream and capital behind them and is a skilled physicist to create something. And the average immigrant that comes in I think we’ve really got to understand that most immigrants that come into the United States now no longer have above the educational level, which the immigrants used to have. They rely much more on welfare. They’re much more of a drain on the community. We’re still living in the past when immigration was when you had an empty continent and all you needed is a mule team and a plow to haul. So I think that what we’re doing is in our immigration I would — I think Barbara Jordan is right. You should cut our immigration in half. And we should take people because of the skills that they have not because the business community wants cheap labor.

FdSL: How do we finesse that morally and comfortably given that most of our roots are from immigrants, are in different countries from around the globe? Most of our foreparents came from other countries. And how do we say that we’re going to pick people, we pick the cream of the crop, which we do anyway? But how do we formulate policy? How do we promulgate policies?

Lamm: Important question. If I could leave anything over at the State Capitol after my 12 years it would be beware of policies that are appropriate to the past that are disastrous to the future. It used to be — I love my kids so I still think that as a matter of ethical, that I only had two children. I would have loved to have more children but I consider there’s a new reality. That I can in fact argue for birth control even though I have children. I can argue against air pollution even though I drive a car. I can argue against immigrants even though my great-grandparents came here as immigrants. The other side to that is do we have a moral duty to allow anybody to come here? And if that’s the case get ready for 2, 3 billion people. The statistics, again the polls show in South Korea the polls show that 60% of the people in South Korea would like to come to the United States. There’s a similar story about Mexico. Unless you’re prepared we’re going to have to choose. The question isn’t choosing. The question is really how many. Now I don’t care whether you run the American immigration policy. You are going to set the number. So the question isn’t can everybody come here or how do we morally choose. We’re going to have to choose. The question is how many. And I think that we can just as easily justify a half a million a year as we can a million a year. There’s no moral difference in that. If you’re going to set a million a year, why not say there’s 75 million people born out there each year, we should take 75 million? It’s not a moral question. It’s a public policy question. Ever since America was founded at some point there has been a number set. There has been a — there hasn’t been a policy. That’s wrong. That’s wrong because when America was an empty continent you didn’t have an immigration policy. And the immigration policy then at some point was trying to reach out and get immigrants. But the point being is that always public policy had the ability to choose. And now it has got a very big public policy to say look how many. I can’t morally, I don’t think you can morally justify setting the limit at one million, which is where it is approximately now than you can at a half a million or 2 million. The question is what’s good for America. That I think is the question.

FdSL: There are critics. And you doubtless have heard them. And we spoke to one just last week who say many of these issues, most of the anti-immigrant groups are masking the real issue, which is who in fact are these people coming in? And race is an issue here. How do you respond to that?

Lamm: There’s a lot of truth in the fact that the history of American immigration concern has been a history of xenophobia and racism. It’s pretty hard to deny that. I think now that the immigration movement and I’m very much deeply into this is run by environmentalists who are raising environmentally related questions. My first job out of law school was a civil rights lawyer. My family marched in Selma. I luckily don’t have to — anybody that wants to call me a racist has to look at my whole career. I think that there is racism in this issue. But I think that overall the people that are really running the concern about immigration, Father Hesberg, Alan Simpson. I think that you really look at the kind of people that now are raising immigration I think that the racism charge is keeping a lot of people who realize that immigration has become in many cases counter productive for America from speaking out. 82% of the Americans are somehow cowed because of this charge of racism. You want to call me a racist that’s fine. But explain then how I spent part of my career working as a civil rights lawyer.

FdSL: It does make it difficult to talk about this issue though obviously.

Lamm: It makes it difficult but my point is that is such a —

FdSL: It makes it a political hot potato.

Lamm: We have so inoculated ourselves, appropriately against racism in this country that now people are afraid to speak out on a bunch of very important issues because they’re afraid of being called a racist. I think that this is a real mistake. I think America has to speak on these issues very candidly and very openly. There is a very big difference by taking a skilled engineer or computer expert or even a computer technician from someplace in the world than taking some uneducated immigrant. I think that the United States — even though my grandparents when they came here were uneducated. I mean the glory of America is people that came here, the average Jewish family came to America — Harry Golden says, "And only in America with $14 worth of assets — zoom." But the question I think that we really have to have is in a world that is filled with 6 billion people and we’ve got our choice of immigrants, should we not take people that makes sense to American labor policy? It may be Filipino nurses. I mean I don’t know what it is. But it should fit in with our labor policy. We should take immigrants not because of who they’re related to, not because of nepotism reasons, but for reasons of what makes sense in our economy.

FdSL: What’s our responsibility to the rest of the world, to the 5.75 billion out there?

Lamm: I suspect that you and I would find some agreement on that. I think that the United States — we do live in a globe. We share an environment. And I think we do face a whole series of problems. I don’t think immigration is an answer to those problems. Rather than taking, I mean I’ve spent a lot of time in the third world. My wife and I went and worked in a refugee camp in Cambodia. We spent some time in Cambodia. And so while I was governor and the killing fields were on. I really came back from that experience and I was named Humanist of the Year, by the way for our work in that. The question really is is immigration, take a few people from a hungry world and allow them to come here. Is that much of an answer to the question that you’re raising? It’s not. It’s really not. I think it is instead of taking a few immigrants in that we should really do something like foreign aid to help. Let’s take Mexico. I think the United States has a great stake in Mexico. We share a continent with them. But I don’t think that immigration is the answer to Mexico. Mexico is going to have to solve Mexico’s problems. And somehow to allow a few people to immigrate to the United States I think sends really the wrong signals, like there’s still a continent out there that you can have for the excess population of the world. I don’t think the United States is any along that.

FdSL: I meant a broader, a more broad context than just immigration in the United States in terms of the U.S. role in the global — I mean let’s begin with the quid pro quo, the exchange from taking the cream of the Filipino nursing crop and medical graduates from India, software engineers from Pakistan. Poor countries whose best people you would argue are better suited to our economy here. What do they deserve in back payment for that?

Lamm: A good question. I think that there’s a real question as to whether we should take 25% of Pakistan and the Philippines medical school and have them come to the United States when there’s such need in those local countries. I mean it is a question. I guess I’m looking at that from the United States’ national interest when I say if we’re going to take immigrants we should take them for their skills and our labor needs. I think that if we do it at that level and you see the kind of money that goes back to these other countries when people come here and are successful I would venture that that is probably not a bad, ending up not being a bad deal. Somebody comes here from Pakistan or the Philippines, becomes a radiologist. I suspect that enough of that money goes back to be roughly — although I’m not at all sure of that.

FdSL: I’ll give you a fact or two that will surprise you of that. I’ve studied this in a couple of different contexts. In India, which exports a lot of labor at all levels, it has been found by huge margins the average street sweeper who goes to Dubai and Kuwait sends back, that group sends back far more money to the Indian economy than the 30,000 physicians who practice in North America because they find Wall Street much more, a much better investment frankly for them in terms of the money going back to the original treasury.

Lamm: Wow! That’s significant.

FdSL: Mexican immigrants who are working in our meatpacking plants send more money back in total than or pretty close to the amount that Mexico takes in in petro-dollars in terms of economic impact. So if we were to leave open this question and say well we shouldn’t leave it to the immigrants to provide the economic stimulus to the countries from whence they came. That as a policy the U.S. government ought to give something back to them. That’s where I was coming from with this question. What is our role? What should we give to the developing world? But let me ask you this question again in the broader sense of can the U.S. provide leadership as a superpower, as an economic superpower in curbing the global population?

Lamm: One of the things that I’m most embarrassed about about American public policy is the right wing and much of the fundamentals have gotten involved in our foreign policy. And when you look at family planning and you look at the kind of help that there was being done by the United States in terms of this question, America is very negligent in its leadership. It used to be very good in terms of providing the information and the money to help population related matters. It’s just been a disaster recently. So I think yes, the United States, that is a political problem within the Republican Party, the right to life movement has gotten an unhealthy hold on the Republican Party. And I think that the family planning issue has gotten all involved in the abortion debate. And I think that the whole leadership of the United States in terms of population — I myself feel that that’s — I think that population is a very interesting question because this is going to be one of the great issues of the future. Because there’s 60 countries that have got sub-replacement fertility, most of Europe and Japan. So what you’re going into is if there’s 144 million people in Russia their average life expectancy and their birth rate means that they’re going to lose a third of their population at the current rates. Now what do you do when you’ve got a billion and a half Chinese on your border? And you’ve got a million, 144 million people and you’re losing population. I think there’s some fascinating questions here that are coming up that we’re on the threshold of. It well may be that the United States would be at stability. We actually are, our American birthrate is largely run by the immigrant birthrate. And so you really have some fascinating question of how do we retire the baby boomers? There’s no question that our social security system and Medicare system absolutely are chain letters to the future. Some people say well we need a whole bunch of immigrant to do that. The difficulty here is that you can’t fix a Ponsy scheme by pouring more people into a Ponsy scheme. We have an inherent problem in social security and Medicare that is not going to be solved by having more people added to the system who themselves are going to be retired down the road. So a lot of people throw out some of these things. I don’t think that immigration is an answer to retiring the baby boomers. But basically I come down to the fact that really is some — I mean very clearly any thoughtful persons have to recognize there’s lots of arguments on both sides of this. And when you say that we could have twice as many people in Colorado I suspect that you are right. But whether or not we could have on a sustained basis, consuming the resources we have right now, you still have the question — my trump card in this is the environment. I think that we have to come to grips with the fact that the ecosystem is giving us all kinds of warning signals that there are problems out there. There are problems just in terms of the human activity and economic activity that is going on and what it is doing to the ecosystem. There’s a whole new series of ethical issues that have to be raised. I go back to a very interesting metaphor that just haunts me. In Christian theology there’s the story of Martin of Tours. Martin of Tours was, in the 13^th century, going down a cold and rainy road outside the city gates. And he came across a cold and starving beggar. In an act of Christian charity that actually got him sainted 300 years later he cut his cloak in half, cut his dinner in half and gave it to the cold and starving beggar. Now Bertolt Brecht in one of his plays raises this question, which I would suggest to you is the metaphor for at least how I see the future. Bertolt Brecht said, "What instead of one cold and starving beggar there were 50 or 100 cold and starved beggars? Now what is the ethical person supposed to do?" It doesn’t make any sense to divide your dinner and divide your cloak in 50 or 100 different directions. I think America faces a whole new series of problems of choosing. And I don’t think, I think the only way that I can make sense of this is to say look, if everybody is my brother and sister, nobody is brother and sister. You have to have some limits to where your primary fidelity is. I would argue that the United States cannot solve the problems of the whole world and that we really have to start doing some hard thinking about what our national interest is. And primary among that is the question about what is our demographic destiny. It ought to be. It is now a matter of public policy choice. Do you want to live in an American of 2 billion people? We can do that. Do you want to have American somewhere stabilized at the current level? We can also do that. What do people want to do?

FdSL: Well, one side of us wants to preserve our lifestyle, our standard of living, our ecosystem. Can we do that insulated from the rest of the world in an age when we’re preaching globalization to the rest of the world?

Lamm: I think the United States is going to have reduce its lifestyle. I don’t — I think that no, I don’t think we can. I think that’s the other part of this thing. I think that we haven’t talked about. I think that you can’t have an island of plenty in a sea of misery. I think that the United States has a great stake in the development of the rest of the world. And I think the best thing the United States can do for them is to be symbol. The statue of liberty doesn’t stand for immigration. The statue of liberty stands for liberty. And that’s what it was given to the United States for. It was years later that they added the idea of immigration. And I think liberty; the best statue of liberty that I can think of is to show how a free and market system can run. And I think that’s got to be the salvation of a number of other places. It was of Taiwan. It was of South Korea. It was of Hong Kong. It was of Thailand. I think that the more your look at how other places have developed, you really see increasingly that people have to own their own problems. And that immigration is not a large-scale solution to this.

FdSL: The final question has to do with what is our role as individual living in the affluence of America today? And this is going to ring very true in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, which as I said is one of the more sprawled metropolitan areas of the country. Is this sustainable long terms in the larger scheme of things living at the level of consumption that we have in this country.

Lamm: I do not think that the real meaning of America is two cars in every garage or an electric door opener on that car. I think that we really do, one of the most intriguing issues in this whole issue to me is that. Is to what degree do Americans have to adjust their lifestyle to itself fit the ecosystem that we’re talking about? Because the impact on the ecosystem of the United States is not the 283 million Americans as near as much as it’s its lifestyle that it does. The amount of garbage it throws away, the amount of energy that it uses, the amount of how high we eat on the food chain —

FdSL: Where we choose to live?

Lamm: And drive. I think that our grandchildren are going to blame us for the idea that we used petrochemicals, we used oil, petroleum, one of the most important in all the assets of the world to drive to see our neighbors that we could have walked to. I think that there’s a number of different issues. I think the United States has to stabilize its population. And at the same time we have to start entering into this dialog. We are making too big a footprint on this earth. And we’re going to have to reduce our lifestyles also. We’re going to have to turn inward. We’re going to have to — this is not bad news. To me, this word is really good news. This is one of the things that an awful lot of religious leaders throughout the ages have told us. That to turn inward rather than outward you really — and I think Americans should think very seriously about developing alternate lifestyles because the one that they’re on right now is not sustainable too far into the future.

FdSL: Well, Governor Lamm, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thanks very much.