Unless you think jamming between 100 and 600 million people [1] into favelas is a good idea, you will want some kind of restriction on immigration. It's fairly hilarious that he claims the current situation is "closed borders".
And it's also particularly difficult to take Lee seriously when he says that "it’s difficult to find any serious social scientist who believes immigration increases crime rates", or bemoans the lack of research on immigration, IQ, wages, and economic growth, considering what happens to people like Jason Richwine who actually attempt to study the issue.
If 99.9% of serious social scientists believe immigration does not increase crime rates, and 0.1% do, then in any situation which tries to be "balanced", like a news program, or a debate, then the people in the minority position become much more known, because it's always the same people.
So you're talking about it not being difficult to find one, out of all the serious social scientists. While I think the comment means that if the serious social scientists are picked at random, then it will be hard to find one that expresses that belief.
As far as I can tell, that's true. Here are some papers I found on the topic, by serious social scientists, who say that immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than citizens, in the US Canada, and Europe:
> "Although a host of reasons exists to expect that immigrants are high-crime prone, the bulk of empirical studies conducted over the past century have found that immigrants are typically underrepresented in criminal statistics. There are some partial exceptions to this finding, but these appear to be linked more to differences in structural conditions across urban areas where immigrants settle rather than to the cultural traditions of the immigrant groups." - https://www.ncjrs.gov/criminal_justice2000/vol_1/02j.pdf
> "First, new immigrants do not have a significant impact on the property crime rate, but with time spent in Canada, a 10% increase in the recent-immigrant share or established-immigrant share decreases the property crime rate by 2% to 3%. Neither underreporting to police nor the dilution of the criminal pool by the addition of law-abiding immigrants can fully explain the size of the estimates. This suggests that immigration has a spillover effect, such as changing neighbourhood characteristics, which reduces crime rates in the long run." - https://ideas.repec.org/p/ubc/clssrn/clsrn_admin-2014-20.htm...
> "Researchers studying the relationship between immigration and crime frequently note the discrepancy between actual rates and public perceptions of criminal behavior by immigrants (Hagan and Palloni 1999; Sampson 2008). A growing body of literature shows that immigrants are less likely to engage in crime than U.S.-born citizens (Butcher and Piehl 1998; Martinez and Lee 2000; Morenoff and Astor 2006; Desmond and Kubrin 2009), and that areas with growing immigrant populations have seen decreases in crime rates (Ousey and Kubrin 2009; Stowell et al. 2009; Wadsworth 2010)." - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tsq.12039/full
> Yet, despite evidence to the contrary, public opinion surveys suggest that a large number of Americans believe that continued immigration will lead to higher levels of crime (Kohut et al. 2006).1 This is particularly true when surveys emphasize the (il)legal status of immigrants. For instance, a 2006 Time Poll found that over 70% of respondents were “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” that “illegal immigrants” “increase the likelihood of terrorism in the U.S.” and “increase the amount of crime,” while a 2006 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll found that 75 percent of respondents were “concerned” that “illegal immigration” could “lead to an increase in crime” (PollingReport.com 2010). - Ibid
> [Europe] There is no simple link between immigration and crime. Most studies find that larger immigrant concentrations in an area have no association with violent crime and, overall, fairly weak effects on property crime. However, immigrant groups that face poor labor market opportunities are more likely to commit property crime. But this is also true of disadvantaged native groups. The policy focus should therefore be on the crime-reducing benefits of improving the functioning of labor markets and workers’ skills, rather than on crime and immigration per se. There is also a case for ensuring that immigrants can legally obtain work in the receiving country, since the evidence shows that such legalization programs tend to reduce criminal activity among the targeted group. - http://wol.iza.org/articles/crime-and-immigration
"It's fairly hilarious that he claims the current situation is "closed borders"."
Most of the people who want to migrate are prevented from doing so by law. That's close to "closed borders". And he makes it pretty clear in the first paragraph that he's talking about restrictive immigration policies (including current ones), so the semantics on "open" vs. "closed" borders aren't the most relevant point.
Regarding suppression of research: Richwine didn't have tenure. Prof. George Borjas hasn't been fired (or censured), but he has numerous influential publications on immigration and he calls for more restrictive policies. There are a lot of studies on the fiscal impact of immigration, and while many are positive or near zero, some are negative. If there's strong evidence of publication bias, I would be genuinely interested in seeing it.
For what it's worth, I don't think Richwine should have been fired just for anti-PC stuff on IQ. But that's just Heritage's PR decision.
IMO a more likely explanation is that economists have a consensus in favor of immigration liberalization as a pro-market policy. There is plenty of research on the issue that does indicate positive effects of immigration:
Re favelas: Okay, it depends what you prefer, to be honest. If you care a lot about avoiding visible poverty in the First World, having open borders is a bad idea. If you care about reducing absolute global poverty, it's probably a very, very good idea. If you wanted some kind of compromise, one option would be to let them enter the country but have restrictive zoning laws to keep the slums outside of existing major cities (and just build new cities where immigrants move to).
Nothing about adding a few hundred million people to the US population (and keep in mind, they would probably trickle in at first at a slower rate) would be inherently catastrophic. Scary-looking numbers aside, it's the truth. The US has low population density by most standards, and it wouldn't be difficult to build some new cities. If anything, it would raise the values of American's homes, which could benefit people quite a lot. And if there really were an issue with some scarce resource (water, maybe), there's a price system to handle that.
"Migration controls serve as a blindfold, enabling Americans to ignore most of the poverty, deprivation, and vulnerability that exist in the world by keeping it physically at a distance. In the past, people lived without this blindfold. The wealthy lived amidst poverty, sometimes engaging in generous charity to the poor, sometimes learning, perhaps callously, to ignore them.
Citizens of a modern welfare state, by contrast, feel that the state should coerce people to give to the poor so as to remove from the streets the kind of visible poverty that would make them feel obliged to give, allowing them to feel conscientious and affluent at once. The price of this moral complacency is paid by would-be immigrants who are not allowed to come to America to better their condition by honest labor, lest their poverty trouble the consciences of affluent Americans."
And it's also particularly difficult to take Lee seriously when he says that "it’s difficult to find any serious social scientist who believes immigration increases crime rates", or bemoans the lack of research on immigration, IQ, wages, and economic growth, considering what happens to people like Jason Richwine who actually attempt to study the issue.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea...