This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 30, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Freeing immigration globally could dramatically boost worldwide GDP, but would the large shift

in populations weaken institutions?

Alex Narasta, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute discusses the debate.

Harvard Professor George Borjas is the most well-regarded economist who works in immigration

today and he admits that if there were global

open borders that GDP of the world would double or more than double as a result

of workers being able to move to different countries and be more productive.

However, he has a caveat and that is if all these people moving

affect the institutions and countries that receive them by

say hurting property rights, by restricting contract rights, by voting for

other big government policies, or somehow creating them,

then that could destroy a lot of the long-run

economic gains of immigration by an essence killing the goose that laid the

golden egg by weakening American or other countries economic institutions.

Do we have evidence from, I mean obviously we have had big influxes of immigrants in American

history.

Do we have evidence about what happened with respect to those

inflexes? So we have some evidence from the modern time period. I've been working on a

working paper with a few professors on this topic called

does immigration impact economic freedom? And we look globally and what we basically do for the

...