For the latest episode of Econception, my American Institute for Economic Research podcast, I talked to Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute about his new paper on the fiscal impact of immigration. In one sense, immigrants are good for the federal budget because they provide more working people to pay for benefits due to a growing population of retirees. In another sense, they’re bad for the federal budget because they increase the strain on the services government provides. Di Martino looks at the lifetime fiscal impact of immigration and comes to several different conclusions, at least one of which you’ll likely find surprising.

I also talk about how the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) works, as an example of how unions work in general. Unions don’t want to spread their benefits to more people. To be effective, they want to restrict them to their own members and tightly control who becomes a member.

The roughly million-dollar compensation of ILA president Harold Daggett brought union-boss pay into the headlines. It’s true that many national union bosses are highly paid, but it’s also true that many CEOs are paid much more. I go through the differences in how unions work versus how corporations work in considering whether the outrage over Daggett’s compensation was unfair.

For the Paper of the Episode, Di Martino selected “The Economic Consequences of Hugo Chavez: A Synthetic Control Analysis,” by Kevin Grier and Norman Maynard. It compares Venezuela’s economic performance under Chavez to that of other countries that started off at a similar point. (Spoiler: It didn’t do well.)

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