This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 29th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders takes a decidedly nationalistic tone when it comes to immigration.

His concerns for low-income Americans may be genuine, but his understanding of what makes an economy

grow seems decidedly stunted.

Alex Narasta is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. We spoke yesterday.

Bernie Sanders seems to not want more legal immigration to the United States,

and is very concerned that a free immigration system

would impoverish the United States in the world.

Okay, so specifically, he has rather pointed criticism for the notion of open borders, which of course we don't have in the United States.

So as No, that's a Koch Brothers proposal, unquote.

And Ezra's response was really.

And so it sort of started this discussion and disagreement

where Bernie seems to think that open borders would destroy the United States make everybody poor and he doesn't

care that it would help the poor people of the world.

He's just concerned about it potentially competing with American jobs.

His concern specifically is lower income Americans.

His concern is that lower income Americans, the poorest of which are about in the 86 percentile

of world income, will compete against poor immigrants and lose.

Ignore the fact that almost all the economic evidence says there's almost no competition

between poor immigrants and poor Americans.

It's quite an admission for a self-described

...