This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 24th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There was a great deal of talk about how to deal with immigrants arriving illegally in the United States,

but less in the United States about what's appropriate for legal immigration.

So how many legal immigrants is the right number.

Tim Kane is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

We spoke this week.

So many discussions about immigration immediately leap to illegal immigration, and then those discussions immediately devolved

to securing the border, what kinds of process or do people who cross the border illegally,

are these, is this a humanitarian crisis?

And sort of what are the, how do we treat people here illegally?

But of course we have lots of legal immigration. I think some people here at the Cato Institute might argue it's not free

enough and perhaps there aren't enough immigrants who want to come to the United States who

are able to do so. So the question is then, what is the right number of legal immigrants?

Kalo, I think that's a great way to start the conversation and you and I have been in DC for many years.

I've been here for 10 years working and often supporting the idea of comprehensive immigration

reform both when Bush was president and with President Obama now in office.

And I've lost faith in the idea that we can do comprehensive.

So let's back up a little bit, at least that's the approach that my colleagues

and I at the Hoover Institution have taken and think about incremental reforms and

simpler questions and that one what's the right number of immigrants has really been interesting.

We posed it to 38 expert members of our working group.

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