This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 29th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As important as the economic impacts of immigration may be,

immigration's impact on American institutions

is also worthy of study.

Ben Powell is a professor of economics at Texas Tech University.

He discussed some of the various impacts of immigration at the Cato Institute earlier this month.

For about a decade now I've been giving talks on immigration around the country.

And what's striking to me is that the debate among social scientists about the impacts of

immigration is just vastly different than what it is throughout Capitol Hill or

public radio across the country.

The degree of difference among the scholars

is like this compared to the degree of difference

in the population like this.

And the idea was not to show that all economists

or social scientists agree about optimal immigration

policy.

It's to show what are the finer points they debate,

and then in the second half,

how would they differ in policy in light of that then maybe?

And it's just vastly different than what we see in other parts of society.

So what I'll do with my remarks today, I think is go through at first some of the economic impacts where the debates among

...