#1573 - Matthew Yglesias

Joe Rogan (0:15)

We don't record an intro for Spotify anymore, so tell me who you are and what you do.

Matthew Yglesias (0:21)

I'm Matthew Yglesias, I'm the host of The Weeds podcast, the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm also the author of the Slow Boring Newsletter and a book, One Billion Americans.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

And that's what I want to talk to you about. Pull the sucker up so it's like one fist away from your face. All right, perfect.

One billion Americans.

So explain, if you could, give us the cliff notes of what the concept of one billion Americans is.

Matthew Yglesias (0:46)

Okay, so the concept is that there should be a billion Americans.

I like to keep it simple. Now, so here's the idea, right? So we got China, it's growing out there. There's a lot of concern, you know, internationally about America's role in the world. We've also got a lot of polarization in our politics, a lot of sort of gridlock, deadlock, kind of stagnation and infighting.

And I'm a politics guy, I live in DC, cover Congress. I wanted to write a book that kind of elevates beyond that, thinks about America's role in the world and says, the way we are gonna meet this challenge of rising international competition is the way we became such a great power historically. And that's by growing our population with more openness to immigrants, doing more to support parents and young families, and then everything that comes downstream from that, where are people gonna live, how are we gonna get around, how are we gonna solve those problems.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

How much pushback have you gotten from this idea? Because it seems like a lot of people think that overpopulation is a giant problem.

And then when you say we should triple plus the amount of people in the United States we wanna compete with the rest of the world, I would imagine a lot of people are like, what are you smoking Matthew Yglesias?

Matthew Yglesias (1:59)

No, I mean, the book's really good. So everyone who reads it, it's just like, oh, you convinced me.

Joe Rogan (2:03)

At least you're humble.

Matthew Yglesias (2:04)

There's no pushback at all.

No, yes, there is concern about overpopulation. That's something that, so there's people from the right, they don't like immigrants, they don't like immigration. Why is that?

Joe Rogan (2:17)

Let's start with that. Because this is a country of immigrants. It's a very strange thing to have a country that is entirely comprised of people who came from somewhere else other than Native Americans, right?

Entirely comprised. And yet, there's a giant population that doesn't like immigrants.

Matthew Yglesias (2:37)

Yeah, I mean, look, some of it's a question of taste. People like different places. People like different kinds of things. I think the best parts of America are places that have a lot of people from different places. To me, whether that's Austin, where we are, New York, where I'm from, it's like, it's cool. That's America at its best.

Some people don't like it.

There's also the legality question, though. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, we built up a substantial group of people who were living here illegally. I'm for, you know what?

Joe Rogan (3:07)

It started in the 80s? Is that when it really started?

Matthew Yglesias (3:09)

Yeah, I mean, that's when it really took off.

Joe Rogan (3:11)

Was it because the regulations were made more stringent?

Matthew Yglesias (3:14)

Well, so what happened was in 1996, they changed the law. They, IRERA is the acronym for it. And they made it a lot harder for people who had come here without papers to quote unquote get legal.

So even if you put roots down, even if you were married to an American citizen, there was no way to obtain legal status. They also made it harder to cross the border. So it used to be people would come over, they'd pick vegetables in California for a season, and then they'd just go back, right? They'd go back to Mexico, take their money with them, get a nice house. They made it harder to cross the border so people would stay. And people who stayed had no way to get a legal status here.

So unauthorized population, it built up, it built up, it built up. There's a movement on one side to say, well, we should create a path to citizenship for those people. Most of them, they're living here peacefully, they're working hard, they're not doing anything. That's where I stand.

But there's people who say, look, they broke the rules, we gotta be harsh. So we've been arguing about that unauthorized immigration so viciously. And I think we've lost sight of the fact that we can just create legal pathways for people to come. Some people will say, well, my grandparents, my parents, whoever, they came the right way. They did it when it was legal.