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This week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks with CATO Institute research fellow Trevor Burrus about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen and its implications for an individual’s right to carry a fire arm in states such as Massachusetts.
WATCH:
Guest:
Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and in the Center for the Study of Science, as well as editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy. His academic work has appeared in journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty, the New York University Annual Survey of American Law, the Syracuse Law Review, and many others. His popular writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, Forbes, The Huffington Post, The New York Daily News, and others.
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. The second amendment of the United States constitution reads quote a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed deciding whether the right to bear arms was indeed a fundamental right, was the issue at hand in the recently decided Supreme court case of New York state rifle and pistol association versus Bruen the 6-3 majority held that while a licensing process may qualify and exclude certain applicants from firearm purchase possession and carry the state cannot require eligible applicants to demonstrate a special need to carry before being granted that fundamental, right? While this decision will have little impact on states, such as Vermont, that have very few limits on gun ownership, it will substantially disrupt the permitting process in shall issue states like Massachusetts, in which officials had reserved the prerogative to issue only to those with a special need to possess and carry.
Joe Selvaggi:
How does this case comport with the historical legal precedent of gun ownership in the United States and with the backdrop of recent school mass shootings and the tragedy of more than 40,000 us annual gun deaths all be the likely effects of a more permissive system on public safety. My guest today is Trevor Burrus, research fellow at Cato. Institute’s Robert A. Levy center for constitutional studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme court review. Mr. Burrus has written extensively on the history of gun policy in America and will share with us how the Bruin case fits with past Supreme court gun, right decisions, what impact the decision is likely to have on so-called may issue states like Massachusetts and how a more permissive gun regime may affect the rates of gun violence in the United States. When I return, I’ll be joined by Cato Institute research fellow, Trevor Burrus.
Joe Selvaggi:
Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by Cato Institute research fellow, Trevor Burrus. Welcome back to Hubwonk, Trevor, always a pleasure to be here. All right. So we’re getting near the end of the term of this Supreme Court term and some of the bigger decisions are coming down and we’re, we’re gonna be talking about the most recent decision just came down very recently. It’s being labeled the broad decision. What we’re gonna talk about our gun rights and laws restricting guns. This is an issue top of mind, independent of the decision largely because of both the tragic shooting eval de Texas, which we’ve all learned all the horrible details, but also in our country, we have more than 40,000 gun related deaths each year, and that number’s are rising. So it’s an issue that I think is top of mind for many of our listeners. So let’s, let’s start at the beginning. This decision just came down for our listeners. Tell us what are the facts in this particular case?
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, so the case is called New York state rifle and pistol association versus Bruen. And it came from sort of three plaintiffs, 1, 2, 2 individuals who wanted to geta carry permit in the state of New York and the association that they also belong to the New York state rifle and pistol association. Now New York is, is like six states that has a, what was called a may issue, carry law. So that meant in order to get a carry permit, you not only had to a pass the objective kind of stuff that is common to every state that issues permits, which is every state to some extent, which is, you know, safety training, shooting lessons, learning about the law of self defense, that kind of stuff. But you also had to demonstrate a particular subjective need for carrying a gun. So this was not a danger to you, and it had to be a danger to you specifically.
Trevor Burrus:
So in essence, you had to convince a bureaucrat. It was often like a local sheriff or sometimes a judge that you had a specific threat against you. And this allowed an amazing amount of discretion on the part of officials who essentially never granted these permits to people, except for really wealthy people who, who course often have bodyguards or the occasional person who, who was threatened specifically. So if you were a, you know, five foot woman who worked at a bar late at night, and every night, you had to walk home through a really dangerous neighborhood where muggings are quite common and you wanted to apply for one of these they, they would say no, hat question was actually asked of the New York solicitor general at oral argument would such a person apply. And they say, he said, no, that’s a generalized threat, not a specific threat.
Trevor Burrus:
So that’s how kind of onerous the restriction was. And what the court was asked to hear was whether or not that aspect of the discretionary permitting scheme was on constitutional and a six, three ruling written by justice, Clarence Thomas, they ruled that it was unconstitutional and were very specific to say that this was all, they were striking down discretionary permitting systems, where you have to show a particularized threat all the states that have permitting systems for carrying that are objective, that don’t have such criterion. Those were okay. And they went outta their way to say, that’s okay, this wasn’t about what type of guns can be banned or magazine restrictions or what kind of even people can be banned from having a gun. It was just about that. So you’ll hear a lot of sort of sky is falling as always happens when these gun cases come down. But this applies only to six states who will all then have to become like the other states that have had the, the shell issue, the objective test for carrying a gun.
Joe Selvaggi:
So Massachusetts is one of those six states that you mentioned. And so that’s why this is particularly relevant to our, our listeners. So I just wanna make sure and put some you know, finer point on what the point you made rather than let’s say we see our second amendment right to I’ll read it for our listeners a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. So in this case, one did not really have a right to as I would say, bear arms, one in a sense had to demonstrate a need to bear arms and a particular need to bear arms based on a a definable threat to one’s life. Is, is that what you’re saying
Trevor Burrus:
Precisely? And it’s important to realize there’s a lot of important language in the opinion that will apply to other gun restrictions. It’s important to realize, and this is one thing justice, Thomas went out of his way to point out, and he has in the past, how Abre this the way the second amendment is treated compared to other rights that are enumerated in the bill of rights. So they, I let’s say that there was a rule in some municipality that, you know, you could throw a protest or a rally but you had to first convince someone that what you were going to say was worth being said, because we all in first amendment law, we have a general rule that, you know, you can put limits on a protest or a rally that are called time place and manner restrictions that are kind of objective in the sense of, you know, you can only go between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM.
Trevor Burrus:
You can’t block traffic. This is how loud your speakers can be. All those have nothing to do with the content of the speech. But if you add another thing where, and the sheriff will determine whether or not, what you have to say is worth saying, it would be blatantly unconstitutional. It wouldn’t survive. The, the lowest court review it’d be struck down in a microsecond, but nevertheless, this restrictions were on the second amendment. Right. And so it’s very important that the court came in and said, we’re gonna treat the second amendment, like the other amendments in the constitution, like the first, or say the fourth where we’re gonna read it in terms of history and tradition and ask the question, is this the kind of regulation that the people who ratified the min would’ve been not okay with or okay. With, and we’re not gonna do these weird balancing tests. We’re gonna make the second amendment, not a second class. Right.
Joe Selvaggi:
So in other words, we don’t need to make the case for free speech. We don’t have to say my speech is worth speaking. We just are granted that right to speak though that it can be constrained in time and place and manner. All right. So let’s dive into the the opinion you said it was a six, three opinion. You already mentioned justice Thomas as being in the majority. What else do we know? I know this is a relatively recent decision. What else do we know about where the chips fell? Is it a classic right left or conservative, progressive divide. And if so, is there any disagreement amongst, let’s say the majority
Trevor Burrus:
It’s exactly what you’d expect. A six Republican appointed justices versus the three Democrat appointed justices, justice Breyer pinned the dissent. The whole thing is quite long. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion is over 60 pages long in all the, all the opinions are 135 pages. And it’s an interesting, so we did have we did have some concurrences from Justice Alito and justice Kavanaugh joined by the chief justice just to address some points that they wanted to be clear about in terms of what the decision was saying and what it wasn’t saying. Justice Alito wrote separately also to criticize justice Breyer’s dissent. I think very rightfully so, because Justice Breyer’s dissent, as he has wanted to do is essentially a policy brief which is not the way we should be deciding constitutional law questions. When the question is, what does the second amendment mean?
Trevor Burrus:
And so that was an interesting dissent from, or concurrence from Justice Alito. But in terms of the opinion, it’s what you’d expect from Justice Thomas, it’s a lot of originalist analysis of looking at what the history was in terms of how many laws were there, say in the founding era or perhaps in the reconstruction era when the 14th amendment was passed that regulated or prohibited people from carrying guns and going through the history of that and saying, you know, sometimes there were regulations that prohibited carrying of guns, but they, they usually said something like causing terror or mayhem. So it wasn’t, it was, it was, it was prohibited to carry a gun in a way that causes terror or mayhem. It didn’t just say it’s prohibited to carry a gun. And of course, you know, you could imagine in the American west in the 19th century, carrying guns was quite common.
Trevor Burrus:
And so the overview of the history gives for justice. Thomas says, no, this, this is not a longstanding or traditional prohibition. In addition to the fact, which is, must be first looked at that the second amendment says the right to keep and bear arms in the Heller case in 2008, when the court first decided that the second amendment conveys an individual, right, that was kind of about keep and in the now 14 years, since that decision we’ve been waiting on the meaning of bear. So this, this decision was also analyzing that term, what it meant what it meant to bear arms in the context of the second amendment. And since we already had decided in Heller that the second amendment is not necessarily tied to a militia, which was kind of the big question in that case the bear, the interpreting the word bear also, shouldn’t be tied to a militia like a militia, right?
Trevor Burrus:
It’s an individual, right. That people have presumptively. And yes, we could say that felons are not allowed to bear arms and other prohibited persons. And we could get into what the limits of this are. It’s not unlimited at all, but what it means is that for people, for guns that are in common use for self defense of which no one denied that handguns are such a gun then a law abiding person who can own that gun legally cannot be unduly prohibited from carrying that gun with sort of irrational or unconstitutional constraints on carrying.
Joe Selvaggi:
So you anticipated my couple of my future questions. I wanted get to Heller but I also wanna address the dissent. But I think it’s very important that you point out in the case that at the time of the Constitution’s ratification, you know gun ownership was fairly ubiquitous, right? That we like saying, you know, you have a right to have a dog. You know, it, it almost is unnecessary to, to, to enumerate, but nevertheless it is a fundamental, right. And it seems, again, we, I don’t wanna do all too much on Heller, but the militia clause seems also to be superfluous in so far as you can’t have a fundamental right, that ultimately if the government decides who’s in that militia, he, you don’t, that’s not your right. So if you only have a gun in the context of a militia and the government can restrict who’s in the militia it’s the opposite of a fundamental, right? It’s a, a granted right. Based on your participation in a government sanction organization, right?
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s important to remember too, like who the militia was at the time which was pretty much every able bodied male between 18 and 64 or even 16 and 64. And also that they had just won a war against the British, that very much depended upon citizen soldiers and never forget what the first action, the first battle of that war was at Lexington and Concord, which was the British deciding to go get the guns. And that’s what caused the war to break out. So there was no, there’s really no questioning that the, what was on the minds of the framers and the ratifiers of the second amendment. And one of the reasons we didn’t see a second amendment case for a very long time. There’s a lot of ones, but one of ’em is, is that gun ownership was broad.
Trevor Burrus:
It was, it was sort of not divided between red and blue states and people in state protection of right to keep and bear arms was pretty robust. And so there was really no need to start going after suing about gun rights until around the 20th century. I mean, there were different sort of state based examples, but federally suing about gun rights. Like wasn’t a, wasn’t really allowed, but there was no real need to do that until gun restrictions started coming in, especially federal ones. And we didn’t have a federal gun law until 1934. So all of this is fairly new and, and would be kind of strange to the framers.
Joe Selvaggi:
So if, but let’s say our let’s say Democrat appointed judges tend to take a more creative view of the constitution and perhaps weight less, the original intent and more towards sort of the practical consequences. So let’s talk about the dissenting opinion. I don’t know if you’ve had time to read that, but what is the essence of why, what would we seem to be in violent agreement of why this decision to bear arms is comports with the meaning of the constitution? What was the opinion of the dissenters?
Trevor Burrus:
Yes. Justice Breyer’s a very, very nice man. And he’s, he’s written some very, very good opinions. This is no last term on the court to be replaced by judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. But he, I mean, and sometimes he doesn’t act like a judge. And I would say his dissenting opinion is not really acting like a judge because it’s a policy brief and it’s very important for some judges. So they say, you know, the, the, there are things, you know, there’s decisions that are made by legislators about whether or not this should be the policy, or this should be a policy. And that’s and judges make different types of decisions is what is the law? What is the constitution to say? The second amendment by itself by being in the constitution is saying that it’s putting gun rights above the costs of gun ownership, which of course, they, they knew at the time that guns could be used for mayhem and violence, but they decided to say, this is how we’re balancing this guns, gun rights, go above the cost of having guns.
Trevor Burrus:
They did the same thing with the first amendment. They said that that political speech, which can be harmful and other types of speech that can be harmful. We’re putting that above the regulation or that speech, or when they give rights to accused criminals in the bill of rights. We’re saying we’re putting these rights where they could even get out of jail, or they could go away. Scott free if we give them rights. So there’s cost to these rights or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This, you know, hampers law enforcement, it might be easier to catch criminals if they couldn’t enforce these, right? So these rights have costs and what the judge should be doing, or what a justice should be doing is trying to interpret the constitution and say, what does this mean? Justice Breyer is just saying, here’s how many people died of guns here?
Trevor Burrus:
My here’s how many people died with suicides? Here’s how many people mass shootings there were. And I am not diminishing that at all. Like, it’s very seriously. We could talk about what policies I think could affect positively the rates of gun deaths in the country, but in terms of his job to make a judicial decision based on this, and also to bring in, I mean, there’s a lot of misstatement of facts in his opinion, but there’s also things that are completely irrelevant. He asks for a trial, he says, this should have been decided with a good record, where we had a good data about how this law works and how many acts of violence it prevents. Well, if that trial would’ve occurred, his entire opinion, would’ve been essentially nullified because bringing up suicides, which are two thirds of gun deaths and her serious problem, but, but what does this law that allows someone to that had only allowed someone to carry a weapon outside their home?
Trevor Burrus:
If some officials said that they had a particularized threat against them, what does it have anything to do with suicide whatsoever? And it’s just sort of head scratching. Gun accidents is another thing he brings up. And another thing that this law would be completely irrelevant toward. And so his opinion, yeah, it reads like the something who was, if he were a legislator, it’s the reasons why he would vote against a, a may issue, a, a shell issue law for caring like that. That’s what that he, if he was a legislator and he could, you know, retire from the court and join the New York state legislator, maybe not, he’s probably not a citizen of New York, but he joins a legislator. And then he can decide whether he likes the law or not like the law. He clearly doesn’t like this law and he thinks it causes harm, but it’s not his job as a justice to, to make decisions on such basis. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve been told by some of the justices appointed by Republicans, you know, that they say, you know, I don’t, it’s not my job to review policy in, in many of these cases, I don’t want a policy brief. I don’t want you to tell me, you know, all these things, it’s my job to interpret the constitution. The policy of keeping bearing arms was chosen by the framers. And now we have to figure out what it means.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. I, you know, I’m, I’m not an attorney. I know you that you are. But I do try to think deeply about this to me, the notion of a judge sort of interpreting the law or reading it as it is it, for my money, it has to be that way otherwise, what does it mean to be a good judge? If not that you understand and apply the law, as it’s written, as you say, you’re either a legislator or sort a super legislator or you’re, you know, a, a star chamber of wise men that sort of are hired, I suppose, or chosen because you have opinion the right opinions rather than the wisdom to apply the law as it’s written.
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, every, every judge should be asked, every judge gets nominated for a state, or especially if federal court should be asked the question, tell me a law that you think is constitutional, that you think is a bad idea. And tell me a law that you think is unconstitutional that you think is a good idea, because if you can’t make a distinction between your policy preferences and your interpretation of the constitution, then you don’t really believe in constitutions. You believe in your policy preferences as the law of the land. And unfortunately, again, I like justice Bres and me he’s written some many good opinions, but too many times justice Breer is behaving as a legislator who cannot separate the fact that he doesn’t like peep guns in private hands, comparatively speaking to the interpretation of the second amendment, like, and there are people out there, unfortunately, people are generally bad at separating their policy preferences from their constitutional interpretation, but someone like AKI, Lamar, who’s one of the great constitutional law scholars in the country at Yale. He explicitly says, I don’t like guns. I don’t think they should be as what broadly owned and used as they are in America. But the second amendment definitely protects that. So he’s able to separate his policy preferences and his constitutional interpretation. And I just wish there were more of that.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed, indeed. So we, I wanna sort of just address Heller one more time and say that, you know, in 2008, that was handed down and that was defined as you mentioned, the right to individually keep arms, not bear arms. Did you see this new ruling as necessary in other words was well obviously it was necessary if we had these owner’s laws in, in New York, but why doesn’t keep and bear mean the same thing, meaning I can keep it wherever I like. Why, why does bay mean I mean, was the essence of Heller to defend sort of home and, and hearth as opposed to oneself where everyone goes is, is that the spirit of the Heller decision?
Trevor Burrus:
Well, Heller was very strategic and, and my colleague Clark Neely was one of the attorneys who came up and litigated that case along with the know, my, my mentor, Dave Copel was an attorney who sat at the Supreme court table during oral argument. And it was strategic to try and get the court to do something that had never done before. And when you try to do that, you’re going for a very narrow question for the court to answer a very narrow question, cuz that’s the way the court likes to, to do things. So you want, you first say, okay, interpret the meaning of the word keep. And they went after a DC’s extremely onerous regulation of all guns, especially handguns since 1976, that essentially made it impossible to have a gun. And if you could get a permit to get a gun, and this is just to have one in your house, it had to be essentially, you know taken apart and put in a different room.
Trevor Burrus:
So it made it functionally unusual. And so the, the court ruled there in a five to four decision that, that, that law, that completely onerous regulation essentially prohibiting the keeping of a gun in your house was unconstitutional. And since that time there hasn’t been another major gun decision until this, this one came down recently. So, and that, and there’s been a lot of attempts to try and get some regulate, some cases to the court, many of which I’ve been involved in about different things, because some, some lower courts I have been taking Heller and saying the only thing it applies to is a law that is similarly as restrictive as DC’s was and saying that’s Heller is limited to its facts. Pretty much any other gun regulation is fine, you know, and we, we, we went offer a bunch of ’em like for example, there was, we almost got a case taking a very narrow question of California’s 10 day waiting period to buy a gun as applied to people who already own guns.
Trevor Burrus:
We were trying to get them like, tell me a reason why that would make any sense whatsoever. You own 50 guns in every, when you buy the 51st, you have to wait 10 days. And, and that, and the court didn’t take that there was a dissent from justice Thomas and the court not taking that case, but that’s the kind of cases that were trying to be brought to get a little bit more meat on the bones of the Heller decision, which has sort of a famous paragraph in it that explains that it’s not undercutting or overturning a bunch of existing gun regulations. And so today, not only did the court rightfully strike down this carry provision, but it did, it went kind of above and beyond to clarify more than it needed to kind of our brief in the case, CAS brief in the case, asked them to do this. And they followed, they followed us and others other briefs saying, you know, definitely strike this down, but also clarify Heller and the second amendment and how low court are supposed to interpret the second amendment and give them some guidance on that when other gun restrictions come up. And so that now it’s this history tradition test, which we’ve been pushing for rather than some balancing test that is very judge empowering and has let judges uphold many, many gun restrictions.
Joe Selvaggi:
So that’s a perfect segue to my next question. This is a a federal case. We have 50 states and some broad range of restrictions from New York to our, our neighbor we’re I’m in Massachusetts, our neighbor to the north. I think Vermont has almost no constraints, no laws limiting gun use usage or ownership. So wide range, we are closer to New York than, than Massachusetts than than Vermont. As far as our laws, how much does this I guess we’ll talk about the 14th amendment, how much do does a the federal ruling have an impact on the prerogatives of state state’s rights?
Trevor Burrus:
It’s gonna be interesting to see now. I mean, first off all the six may issue states, you know, they’re all in the same boat as New York, and none of those restrictions are constitutional about, but what we’ve seen in cities’ district of Columbia most recently, where they’ve actually had their may issue provision joined since 2017, we’ve seen them try and do as much as they can to keep gun ownership to a minimum and especially carry permitting. And so expect more of this from states like New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York Illinois Hawaii. So expect California. So expect more of this in the sense that, that the legislators of those states will go back to the drawing board and say, all right, we’re gonna have object. We’re gonna have an objective criteria test because the Supreme court says we have to have a shell issue thing, but we’re gonna require 27 hours of shooting classes, three days of classes on the law of self defense five days on, I don’t know, triage medicine for gunshot victim, just some very, very long list of things and say, you know, there’s no longer a subjective component to this.
Trevor Burrus:
There’s no may issue part of this. If you do, you know, all of these things, and it probably costs a few thousand dollars, you can totally carry a gun. And then we’ll be like back to the courts and say, no that, you know, try and get courts to be like, this is unreasonable. This is not how things worked. And so there’ll be of course, much more litigation in, in the future about these things and other regulations not related to carrying what kind of guns can be banned in different states and what kind of, you know, magazine restrictions, things like this. But we now have a clearer test for the lower courts to imply when, when applying it to any gun regulation whatsoever. And so what we’ll we’ll have to see but I think it will be better in terms of gun rights in the future than it is, but do expect these states to do everything they can to, to try and undercut the ruling in a practical sense.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes, I, I, I’ve heard let’s say pros restriction advocates compare owning a gun to, let’s say, driving a car, you know, licensing at what point does the licensing requirement, if we wanna call the sort of a regime of, of, of guiding who can you know, what, what it takes to own a gun in, in Massachusetts, can you make it so expensive? So honors, so time sent, you know, 30 months you know, and $30,000 and, and you know a thousand dollars renewal license, you know, something that has the effect of, of limiting guns, where does it enter into the realm of unconstitutional constraint?
Trevor Burrus:
I think now sooner than before, you know, like it in terms of what you could do it’s, it’s sooner now that, but again, you’re gonna hear a lot of chicken, little sky is falling. I’ve already seen it on Twitter. This is a radical opinion. It’s not a radical opinion at all. It means it, it interpreted the word bear in the second amendment to mean the word bear. And so, but going forward, like, it’s, we will have, there’s still many, many regulations the states can put on guns. And even from my point of view, things that I think are constitutional that even under my interpretation of second amendment, I may not think they’re a good idea. But I think they’re probably constitutional take magazine restrictions. I think you could probably go to like 10 round magazine restrictions, even though maybe 15 maybe let’s say 20 let’s I’ll go to 2020 is let’s say they could ban all magazines above 20 rounds.
Trevor Burrus:
Well, the question in the second amendment, the, the philosophical question is what it does is it protects a preexisting, right? To self-defense a natural right to self-defense, that’s what it does. And when you interpret it, you go, okay. So what does that entail? What it entails effective means to self defense. That’s what, that’s, what the, and in the same way that the first event protects a preexisting, right? To speak your mind that you have as a, as a human being what does it entail then? Well, it entails effective means of communication. So that means that you can start a radio station and you can buy pins and paper, and you can print books and you can do all these things that if they start banning printing paper, or they put a tax on paper that is a thousand dollars a page it’s an onerous regulation of, of speech.
Trevor Burrus:
And so similar when we think about a magazine restriction, does a, does a 20 round magazine restriction really impair the right to self defense, not, not a huge amount, I’ll admit. So that’s probably constitutional under my interpretation. I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I, I think it would be extremely difficult and bad. It wouldn’t do much for gun violence, and there’s a lot of 30 round magazines out there. And you don’t wanna turn all those people into felons overnight, but is it constitutional? Hmm, I’ll go with, yes. Other things like background checks different people who are prohibited from a owning a firearm, different places where you can’t bring a firearm. Those are, those are many of those could be constitutional too. So this is not in any way saying that there’s no room for regulation. It just means that we have to look at the second amendment, like seriously as serious constitutional scholars and intellectuals, and read the words and say, what does it protect?
Trevor Burrus:
And what did they choose in night, 1791 to protect. And I think that they chose essentially that people were allowed to have the kind of guns that are in common used for self defense that are used by both the government and the people. So like I would argue that an, an assault weapon quote, unquote, assault weapon is in common used for self defense. But an assault weapon with a hundred round magazine, probably not a 50 callable sniper rifle. You know, that could be an interesting question if that ever came up to the court rocket propelled grenade, launcher I mean, pretty good for self defense, but it’s kind of other bunch of other problems to it, a tank. Well, that one’s easy. People always say, oh, Trevor, you know, why can’t you just own a tank? Well, if we’re interpreting the second amendment, you can’t bear a tank, so that’s not really applied. So, so that’s the kind of questions we have going forward. And it’ll be much clearer, thankfully, cuz I’ve been beating my head against low court opinions that just made no sense for too long. So we’ll see where they go next.
Joe Selvaggi:
What about, what does this imply for here, Massachusetts? It’s actually the chief of police who grants these sort of licenses and says, okay, you, you, you can have one or you can have a gun and you can’t, which creates this interesting patchwork, which I would imagine is sort of, it’s an uneven application of the law regarding a fundamental, right. But also it makes it easy to run a foul. If I’m bearing my weapon and driving from one town to another, I may run a foul of, of some sort of, you know, town level limit. Will this have any bearing on a state like Massachusetts?
Trevor Burrus:
It should those kind of restrictions, you know, now you’re applying things where other provisions of constitutional law, like how much leeway does the state or municipality have in sort of creating felonies of which people are not aware. And like can’t be aware and suddenly become felons. I think that that’s an under, under theorized, but increasingly important part of constitutional law. And then of course, when you have that in a second amendment context then it’s a different question because we’ll think about this way, like the state could, let’s just say this microphone that I’m speaking into the state to tomorrow made it a felony to own one and you’d be, and, and this would seem to have some problems to it with all these people who just became felons. So yeah, there could be many different constraints, you know, ultimately as you’d hope that Massachusetts would try and rectify this stuff between the municipalities. So they aren’t creating felons out of nowhere, but in, in my experience, gun controllers are not terribly sympathetic to people who suddenly become felons and who are completely law abiding gun owners. So but so this is a good chance for people in Massachusetts to speak to their legislator and say, Hey, don’t make me a felon for no good reason.
Joe Selvaggi:
Right? So let’s, let’s move away from this, the constitutional issue. And I know that’s where your expertise lies, but you also have some expertise in sort of imagining a world where there’s say fewer gun deaths. We all wish for that. Let’s just think about the fact that there’s, I think more than 40,000 gun related deaths in the United States that number’s going up also there’s 400 million guns in the United States. So what would you say to those people who see this correlation if they infer causation by this correlation, meaning lots of guns means lots of gun deaths. What would you say to those folks?
Trevor Burrus:
Well, I totally understand. I mean, first of all, I think that gun rights supporters are often sort of flippant about gun deaths in a way that is not good from both humanity standpoint or a messaging standpoint. I understand the desire to do something. I just wish that we spent more time looking at where the actual majority of gun deaths are, who is dying, what guns are being used. Instead we play political theater all the time because it’s basically gun policy is a huge partisan signaling device as you’re well aware. But you know, first thing is to understand the gun deaths and where they are coming from. So two thirds are suicides. As I mentioned before, this fact is rarely brought up, but one things that you need to pay attention, if you’re a, you know, astute political observer is anytime the New York times or V or anyone talks about gun deaths versus the amount of guns pay attention to whether or not they’re using the word gun deaths versus gun homicides like interpersonal gun victimization, because there is no correlation internationally or in the states between the number of guns and the number of interpersonal gun shootings.
Trevor Burrus:
It’s a complete random scatter shop plot. If you try to put plot those things, nor is there internationally, you could go to a place like Ireland, which seems to have we don’t, we never, it’s hard to figure out how many guns there are, but Ireland seems to have about half as many guns as Germany. And it has about double the homicide rate. And it’s just a scatter shot plot all over the place. But if you bring in suicides and now you call ’em gun deaths, you will see a correlation between the number of guns and the number of gun deaths because of suicides. And that makes sense to some extent, because if you don’t have a gun, you can’t commit a suicide by gun. And so one, one thing we should be doing is looking at suicides very strongly, especially for men between the ages of 25 and 64, which is the huge amount of those gun suicides and understanding that literally no policy that’s gets discussed all the time would have any effect on it.
Trevor Burrus:
Magazine restrictions, banning AR fifteens and assault weapons. People are not shooting themselves with these you know, maybe waiting periods that we could talk about that there’s some data on that, but background checks probably not. So this is, this is where the confrontation should be. And also pistols are killing the majority of people in homicides especially inner city, black youth like connected to the drug war. And so my frustration is always having a conversation that is bigger than guns. Sometimes I joke and say, you know, like they, the gun controllers like to say, oh, gun rights supporters are obsessed with guns. And I say, well, it seems to me that you are obsessed with guns because the number one thing that you wanna talk about when you have a mass shooting when you have new numbers on homicides is the gun and not, you know, mental health, not policing, not the drug war, not the question of why people are killing or doing mass shootings but just whatever gun it was.
Trevor Burrus:
And you’d think that like, you know, if you talked to Diane Feinstein and you’d said, here’s a magic button and you can eliminate, you know, one type of gun just entire like a puff and a puff evaporations disappears that she’d press it to eliminate assault weapons, which would be irresponsible to say the least in many, many different ways from her own, from her own point of view. I remember when Elizabeth Warren was running for president still, she had put out a, I think 32 point comprehensive plan to reduce gun deaths by 80%. And only one of those had anything to do with suicide. I mean, and that’s just cuz you could you, if she eliminated every homicide, she’d only eliminate 30% of gun deaths, like 33% of gun deaths. So she couldn’t even get close to 80% without addressing suicide. And so that’s the, that’s the thing that frustrates me a, they talk about they conflate homicides and suicides and talk about the same policies to address both, which if, obviously that’s not true, very different policies to address homicides and suicides.
Trevor Burrus:
And B you just start talking about which gun like which guns are actually killing the most people cuz sometimes the totality of the wisdom of many gun controller’s policies is if they found out that last year, you know, 50% of gun deaths were with black guns and then they ban black guns and they think that next year there’ll be 50%, fewer, fewer deaths. And of course that’s not going to happen because brown guns are readily available. And for most times people use guns for most of the things it will suffice just as well as a black gun. So really it’s just about having a serious conversation and I, again, around where most of the gun deaths are occurring and not just focusing on the gun.
Joe Selvaggi:
So I’m already seeing, you know, over my, my newsfeed graphs that show a relationship between the number of deaths gun deaths, as you say, and the most restrictive states, the states that, you know, the six or seven that we’ve mentioned in this podcast is having the most restrictive gun related deaths. If, if I, I just wanna put a finer point on your argument, if you were to factor out there, there clearly seems to be correlation between gun deaths and gun regulation, but taking out the suicide, the two thirds of the gun deaths that are suicide and just talking about violent deaths, homicides, it would be a scatter shot. All 50 states would fall about equal regardless of their gun laws. So that this is essentially lining with statistics,
Trevor Burrus:
Right? Yeah. And it’s highly concentrated. You know, I said the gun, the drug war creates situations that engender violence when you have those SP of shootings in Chicago or Baltimore, Philadelphia, you know, which are exceptionally violent cities and have strict gun control laws. If you, if you have these spade of shootings, when they say, you know, 12 people died over the weekend, it’s often this back and forth where it’s like, oh, he killed my guy cuz they were fighting over a drug corner. So we wouldn’t kill one of their guys and they wouldn’t kill one of our guys. And so that’s why you have this common waves. So again, the drug war would do more. Any of the drug war would do more to mitigate interpersonal gun violence than any gun law you could feasibly imagine passing. And as you pointed out 400 million guns in the country, I, I often ask, you know, that when I give lectures and stuff, I ask this question of one who is disgusted by guns.
Trevor Burrus:
And depending on the group, like often student groups, a lot of people raise their hands and say, I am disgusted by guns. Okay. I get that. You don’t want one. You don’t like being around them. You’ve never really been around them. That’s fine. You probably shouldn’t make policy off of disgust. But but that’s fine. And then the second question is who here thinks that like a more civilized society will have fewer guns in private hands, in like a star Trek kind of way where everyone’s saying, oh, remember how violent we were 200 years ago. And then we evolved. And a lot of people say yes to that. And I get that too. But here’s the thing not gonna happen, just not gonna happen. Like you could take, you could eliminate 50% of guns in America. You still have 200 million guns. It’s just unrealistic. And so again, the, the conversations are much more about signaling and posturing than they are about actually doing something that could, could make a difference.
Joe Selvaggi:
If we’re going down this road towards talking about, you know, common arguments for restrictions, one of the common arguments for a gun advocacy is that the best thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And, and a lot of people have challenged that statement in that, you know, good guys with the guns will, I don’t even need to talk about Aldi. There was a theoretically, a professional good guy with a gun who stood by and did nothing. So it’s not, it may be necessary, but certainly not sufficient in many cases. But what do we have for statistics? Do, do good guys with guns, stop crime. Do you have that data or do we have even, oh yeah.
Trevor Burrus:
Oh yeah. They, they really do. When I first got into this, I, I’m not a big gun person myself. I didn’t even own a gun until about five years ago, but I’ve been doing this policy area for, for over a decade. And when I first got into it, I was doing research for Dave Copel and I was sort of astounded that the, the reasonable guess for how many times people defend themselves a gun a year guns a year, a conservative guess is a million. A, a one that is aside in the opinion is 2.5 million. There’s a lot of studies that they all kind of come up between one and 2 million. So let’s just say one and a half million. And when I first learned that I was stunned, cuz you’d think you’d hear about it more. Well, not necessarily cuz people who do that often, maybe not allowed to have the gun themselves, which is a different issue, but they still might be defend themselves.
Trevor Burrus:
And most of the time when someone defends themselves with a gun, they don’t fire it. Which is one of the big virtues of this. They, they just show the gun and then that dissuades crime. And we know that criminals think about where guns will be and whether or not someone will have guns when they commit a crime. And we could just, you know, we, we have it from surveys. We have it from data. Imagine if we took a given 10,000 person town and I, I brought 5,000 guns and I gave it to a random assortment of houses and said, all right, half the houses now in this town have guns. Okay. Criminals will this affect their behavior? And yes, it absolutely will affect their behavior. So there you have positive externalities of gun ownership. There’s also also of course, negative externalities. So yeah, that’s we do know and it’s, it’s a shockingly high number that cannot be downplayed.
Trevor Burrus:
That’s one thing I think is very important here from the gun control point of view, when you bring up how many times people defend themselves with guns a year, they don’t like this fact. And I know why I understand. They think it’s encouraging and endorsing a wild west mentality. They think it’s uncivilized to have that many people defending themselves with guns a year. They think the only reason they’re defending themselves with guns is because the criminals have guns to like the guns of the whole problem. But of course, most say robberies in this country are not committed with a gun. They’re mostly committed with knives and strong arm tactics. So they don’t like it. And I get it, but if you’re not gonna be, you know, if you’re gonna be talking about abolishing the police or defunding the police or how much you hate cops or all this kind of stuff.
Trevor Burrus:
And look, I have many, many problems with cops, but if you’re gonna be doing that and saying, you know, we’re gonna take away the cops money and resources to defend you and take away your ability to defend yourself. You’d you better choose one, at least on those things and, and great. I agree. It’d be nice to have, you know, fewer cops kicking down doors, you know, executing search warrants on drug offenders and more people just armed and protecting themselves in a responsible law abiding way. That’s, that’s fine with me. Other people may have a different view, but again, let’s approach the real world and the constitution as it is and not some sort of Star Trek fantasy.
Joe Selvaggi:
So we’re running out of time. You you’ve been very generous with your time. I just wanna then you, you alluded to this fact early in the top of the show that you have some ideas for reducing a gun desk, gun violence. I hope our listeners are unanimous in their desire to want to reduce gun violence and gun death. So let’s say you’re king for day. And we wanna honor the constitution as well. So we wanna, it wants to pass muster with the constitution. What do you think would be effective in reducing gun deaths and you know, all the things we all talk about, these red flag laws and, you know, mental health, give us a laundry list of where you’d like to see our efforts constructively applied to reducing gun death.
Trevor Burrus:
Well, I mentioned one in the drug war and I probably sound like a libertarian broken record and I work on drug war issues extensively, but it’s, it would be the number one thing. And then the next one is suicide and there we’re gonna have to be very careful, but very, very caring about this. Most people who ever commit suicide and survive a suicide attempt, regret it. Now most people who commit suicide with a gun don’t survive it. Those decisions are often rash and instantaneous, but also most people who commit suicide reach out to someone in the weeks or months before they do this. And that’s the point where as community, as friends as loved ones not so much as, as law enforcement, I would say. But people, when you say, Hey, you know, I know you’re super depressed and you own a bunch of guns.
Trevor Burrus:
Can I just keep those for a bit with the red flag laws, those have some possibilities of flagging or identifying shooters but at the same time they could dissuade people from seeking mental health which is really bad. We have some data that that’s what happened with veterans which is very bad because again, gun suicide is, is most of the gun deaths. So focus on those two things. There are other things that may make a difference safe storage laws seem to in one study, make a difference. If you have people stealing guns or someone like the killer in Sandy hook who, you know, took his mom’s guns, but if they were locked up and he didn’t know the combination that could have done something and it’s possible that waiting periods could do something a little bit for suicide, but we still need be better data on that. And those need to be well constructed and sensibly constructed. So yeah, there are things that can be done if we are thinking about it correctly.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. So again, we’re coming to the end of our show. I, I wanna, again, I know you’re a, I dunno if you’re an amateur or professional philosopher, but I wanna get to this sort of, this, this gun issue setting aside the, the, the statistics of how many people die at the hand of hands of guns. I think it reveals more about our society than merely our, a view of guns. And what I’m referring to is that two fundamental views of what a government is here for and a divide right down the middle. It seems that we either see the government’s role as keeping us safe, presumably from ourselves and others, or keeping us free, which is free from coercive power including that of the government. Do you see this sort of being as much a symbolic question, gun control as it is a, a practical or legal question
Trevor Burrus:
It’s definitely in the more symbolic thing, it, it kind of depends upon which side you’re talking about because some groups flip on one thing and, and they’re not consistent. I mean, as a libertarian, I try and be consistent, but so you know, the gun rights supporters maybe tend to be more anti-immigration because they think that immigrants are making us less safe. And there’s a very big commonality between how pro immigrant anti-immigrant and anti-gun arguments are very similar. And both of them feel like both of these sides feel like that something is making the country less safe and in some sense, like polluting it. I do think that the, the gun control people think that guns are like a pollutant, which is why they don’t want them on say college campuses, even if they’re innocuous, because it’s something it’s like stinking up the joint.
Trevor Burrus:
And of course, people who are anti-immigrant often have similar types of attitudes also anti-immigrant and anti-gun people tend to believe wrongly that there are like no gun laws in the country, and you can just buy a machine gun at Walmart, which is laughably false or B there’s like no immigration laws and, and everyone can just come in and we have open borders. So, so the question of what is making you feel less safe or less free is I think often contingent upon partisan BS and a bunch of stuff like that. But I do think it does when people don’t feel like they’re in control and it’s super wild out there. And, and when it comes to guns, you know, we have this very big problem that, you know, at least half of Americans, if you ask them, was America more dangerous 20 years ago, they’ll say, no, and this is really wrong.
Trevor Burrus:
Most people don’t know that gun violence has precipitously declined since 1992. It has uptick the last two years, but it’s still at about 1968 levels. And so if people don’t know that because these often these high profile shootings, they just think it’s a complete mad house out there. Well, I invite them to go to New York in 1982 and, you know, walk around and see how safe they feel. So, so knowing, you know, what, what you should be afraid of, and I’ll tell you, it’s not immigrants or guns would be important to this kind of distinction you’re talking about.
Joe Selvaggi:
Wonderful. Well, okay. That’s a great way to end our show. I think, you know those in our audience who, or, or in our country who feel some level of discontent, it’s easy to use the the government as our object of our scorn depending where you stand it’s either because it’s too big or because it’s too small it makes a great scapegoat for, for everyone. So thank you very much for joining me, Trevor. I think we’ve gone deep on this subject. It’s hot off the presses, and I appreciate you. You making yourself available,
Trevor Burrus:
Always a pleasure to be here.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. If you enjoy today’s episode, there are several ways to support the show. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to hub won on your iTunes podcaster, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find Hubwonk. It’s great. If you offer a five star rating or offer a favor review, we’re always grateful. If you wanna share Hubwonk with friends, if you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
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Massachusetts has among the highest standards of living in the US and the economy is booming, so why are people leaving? In 2020, the state lost thousands of residents to states like Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Related: Get Pioneer’s new book, Back to Massachusetts? How the proposed constitutional tax amendment would upend one of the best economies in the nation.
In 2020, Massachusetts had a net loss of over 20,000 residents and about $2.6 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) to other states, according to IRS data made available by the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery tool. The IRS tracks the changes based on the income tax returns Americans file every year.
The biggest destination states in 2020 were Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine, which all received significant net migration from Massachusetts. Net migration to New Hampshire was 5,922 people, Florida received 4,306 people, and Maine welcomed 2,315.
Figure 1: A map of the United States showing the net flow of AGI dollars in 2020 from Massachusetts to each other state respectively. Florida and New Hampshire receive the highest AGI amounts from Massachusetts and New York sends the most AGI dollars to Massachusetts. The map was generated using the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery Tool.
These emigrants (people moving from MA) took their salaries with them. Florida received the most AGI dollars with $955 million. New Hampshire received $870 million in AGI, and Maine received $327 million.
The Discovery Tool also shows the average AGI for people who moved from MA. The astounding fact about these numbers is that the average net AGI per migrant to Florida is about $133,000. New Hampshire’s average is $109,000, and Maine’s is $110,000. The average AGI numbers are significantly higher than the MA median household income of $84,000 (US Census, 2020). This shows that Massachusetts’ emigrants to Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine have significantly above-average incomes.
The majority of the inflow of salary dollars (about 64 percent) from New York State come from New York County, better known as Manhattan. The average person moving from New York State to Massachusetts has a salary of $117,000, which is one of the highest averages of any state sending people to Massachusetts. The Commonwealth also received far more net AGI from New York than any other state at $570 million (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: A chart showing the net flow of AGI in 2020 to each state respectively (left) and the net flow of taxpayers to each state respectively (right). The chart was generated using the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery Tool.
Massachusetts has not had a net inflow of domestic migrants for any year available on the Data Discovery website, which has records as far back as 1993. The only other years when net migration outflow was above 20,000 people were 2004, 2005, and 2017. Notably, those were also years when Massachusetts had a very prosperous economy.
Since 2015, AGI outflow to Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine at least doubled, while inflow stayed steady. That shows that the high level of outflow from Massachusetts is a relatively new phenomenon that has appeared over the past five years.
Massachusetts has the best schools, healthcare, and quality of life of any state in the country. So why would someone want to leave? It might be taxes, high cost of living, the ability to work remotely, or personal preference (including politics, climate, etc).
It is no secret that the cost of living in Massachusetts has been increasing dramatically. The World Population Review ranks Massachusetts as the state with the fourth highest cost of living. Massachusetts is also ranked as the third most expensive state in which to buy a house.
Additionally, remote work has become a new reality for many Massachusetts employees. It is now possible to earn a salary in Massachusetts while living in New Hampshire. Remote work may explain why New Hampshire is such a popular destination for Massachusetts emigrants.
Taxes are likely to be one other factor for people moving from one state to another. Is it a coincidence that Florida and New Hampshire both have zero personal income tax? In a recent press release, the Pioneer Institute Executive Director, Jim Stergios said “Massachusetts is hemorrhaging money and talent to low-tax states.”
Emigration from Massachusetts might actually reflect that the economy is doing really well! Most people are still willing to pay the high cost of living to stay, and income tax revenues for 2022 show that the economy is strong. Nevertheless, the state should take action to mitigate the impacts of emigration through tax policy changes.
One major policy change Massachusetts enacted in 2021 was to tax the incomes of people working in Massachusetts even if they are not residents. This includes people moving to New Hampshire who still work in Massachusetts. New Hampshire objected to this tax policy and brought it to the Supreme Court, where it was rejected.
Massachusetts is also about to hold a statewide vote to increase taxes on people earning over $1 million in a single year. Pioneer recently put out a number of publications on how the tax increase could hurt the economy and have an unintended impact on small business owners and retirees (the publications include a book, a podcast, and a video interview). The state should avoid increasing such taxes to make the state more competitive, especially at a time when income tax revenues are at an all-time high.
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Cover Image Credit: formulanone, published on Wikipedia at the link here.
About the Author: Joseph Staruski is a government transparency intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is currently a Master of Public Policy Student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was previously an opinions columnist with the Boston College student newspaper, The Heights, and an Intern with the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. He has a BA in Philosophy and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Haverford College. Feel free to reach out via email, LinkedIn, or write a letter to Pioneer’s Office in Boston.
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Cris Ramón, son of immigrants from El Salvador, immigration policy analyst, and coauthor of the new report, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Economic Potential and Obstacles to Success published by the Bipartisan Policy Center. For the report, he scoured the nation to learn not only what immigrant entrepreneurs need, but what municipalities and the federal government can do, to help build up these businesses. The report shows that immigrants are primed to take risks due to their willingness to move to the United States, but politicians aren’t doing much to facilitate that entrepreneurial spirit. The report offers case studies, recommendations, and stories that demonstrate the value and impact immigrant business owners can bring, as you’ll learn in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest
Cristobal Ramón is a senior policy analyst with Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)’s Immigration Project. Before joining BPC, Ramón served as a research consultant on immigration integration issues with the National Immigration Forum. As a graduate student, he interned with the Migration Policy Institute, the German Marshall Fund’s Migration Program and the U.S. Helsinki Commission. Ramón is a magna cum laude graduate of Macalester College and a graduate of the master of arts in international affairs program at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he focused on comparative U.S. – E.U. immigration policy. Ramón also researched Spain’s immigration policy as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Madrid, Spain.
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammad and welcome to a special edition of Jobmakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
If you haven’t heard me say it yet, you haven’t been listening. Immigrants are twice as likely than average to start a business here in the us. And these businesses are having real local and national impact, but the reception to these business owners is uneven. And there are many municipalities that can learn from places that actively and authentically engaged with their newest residents and helped build up their entrepreneurial capacity to the benefit of all residents for Cris Ramon, son of immigrants from El Salvador, immigration policy analyst, and coauthor of the new report, immigrant entrepreneurship, economic potential, and obstacles to success published bipartisan policy center. He scoured the nation to learn not only what immigrant entrepreneurs need, but what municipalities and the federal government can do to help build up these businesses. The report shows that immigrants are primed to take risks due to their willingness to move to the United States. But politicians aren’t doing much to facilitate that entrepreneurial spirit. The report offers case studies recommendations and stories that demonstrate the value and impact immigrant business owners can bring, as you learn in this week’s Jobmakers, Cris Ramon, independent researcher and policy expert on immigration, welcome to the Jobmakers podcast. How are you?
Cris Ramon:
Thank you. Great to be here and very much open to having this great conversation with you and, you know, obviously happy to chat with you. You’ve been doing amazing work that I’ve been following for many years now, so it’s great to be here.
Denzil Mohammed:
Yeah. Thank you for that. You have been studying immigration for a very, very long time. You are Fulbright scholar studying migration as well in Spain. And you recently, co-wrote a report for the bipartisan policy center called immigration entrepreneurship, economic potential and obstacles to success. Could you just, just give a little background about you and then this project?
Cris Ramon:
Sure. so my folks are Salvador immigrants. You, I was born in LA. My folks actually met in Los Angeles, so they didn’t immigrate together, but they they came here actually the same year in 1974 through some pretty different routes. You know, my, my mom was an undocumented immigrant and my dad came here because my grandmother who immigrated to the United States in 1968 was able to get him and my my uncle you know, helped with processing their immigration cases because she cleaned the house of an immigration attorney. So they got really lucky in the lottery of life to be able to get be able to come here. So, you know, very much, immigration’s a part of my story. But you know, in terms of you know, the work that I do in this report, you know, I had an opportunity to really look into you know, why, why immigrants become entrepreneurs? What are the challenges they face sort of the, the policy responses that you see at the federal and local level and then policy recommendations to do that.
Denzil Mohammed:
So just give us an idea of the landscape of immigrant entrepreneurship. What, why did you find generally speaking, what kind of sectors are immigrants concentrated in? Do they have a higher rate of entrepreneurship? How are they impacting their localities and regions?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah, so I think the key thing is that you know, immigrants are you know, immigrants can, are represented across different industries. You always hear the story about the immigrant entrepreneur that starts a high tech startup in Silicon valley. But also you see immigrant entrepreneurs in main street businesses particularly restaurants and, and service industries. And so you, you do have this broad distribution. I think one thing to note with the distribution is oftentimes particularly immigrants who are here they will sometimes start businesses that rep represent or reflect the cultures that they came from. So restaurants obviously is a major story that comes up when you see these folks in terms of products, you know, one of the interesting stories that we heard about, you know, in this sort of vein is that there was a Syrian soap maker who wanted to make their soaps in the United States.
Cris Ramon:
And so they were able to, you know be able to put together their business in, in the St Louis area to be able to do that. So I think that that’s something that’s important, but the key thing there is that immigrants do start businesses at much higher rates than even native born Americans. And the data really backs this up. It’s, it’s just incredible to see how active they are in building the businesses. You know, it’s not to say that native born Americans aren’t like creating businesses. It’s just that immigrants are doing this at much higher rates. I think the last thing is in terms of the E impacts, you know, we didn’t dive into that information as much, but there is, you know, I think overall there is a sizable impact to be considered in terms of the, because there are just more immigrants, foreign businesses that the, that the impact has to be strong and significant because they are creating jobs that are employing individuals and they’re paying taxes. So I think that that’s really something to consider. It’s a, it’s definitely a win for the, the national economy, but for local economies as well.
Denzil Mohammed:
And we are recording this podcast over zoom guests who founded zoom an immigrant. Yeah, you paint a really good picture here. And, you know, if we open our eyes just to main streets and see the variety of businesses that we have the variety of cuisines that we have access to, that’s really unique and important for us. So you said you found that I read that rates of entrepreneurship for immigrants increased over the past few years and actually decreased among the us born, but, you know, COVID obviously affected many of these businesses in a very, very significant way. And you found that minority owned businesses, immigrant business owners suffered some of the highest losses. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. And, and I think, you know, the reason you see that those losses suffered is that particularly service industries or industries were minority business owners and immigrant business owners were really hit hard especially during the first year with, with the pandemic because obviously individuals largely remained at home. And so the fact is that if you have individuals who are using these services at lower rates, you’re gonna have businesses, you know, going under a lot more at higher rates. So I think that the distribution of these individuals and their businesses, unfortunately, really put them in a tough spot. When I came back from the pandemic,
Denzil Mohammed:
Well, I interviewed a guy called Daniel Perez. He’s a entrepreneur here in Massachusetts. He has a very successful transportation business. So transporting businessmen from the airport to their meetings, to their hotels. And obviously when the pandemic happened, people weren’t moving, people weren’t going anywhere. People were confined to their homes and he found a way to be able to use his vehicles in a profitable way during the pandemic. They became mobile health clinics during the pandemic. So some immigrants did find ways to navigate successfully throughout this very trying time. So when it comes to some of the hurdles you found, you know, obviously immigration status, the stagnant immigration policy, there are many, many reasons why immigrants should not be able to start businesses. What are some of the hurdles you found?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. So to your point, I think with with the immigration system, I mean, first and foremost, we do not have a visa expressly designed for immigrant entrepreneurs. You’re an individual who needs to get funding from from a venture capitalist to be able to start your, your startup for instance, or you’re an individual who wants to start a mainstream business. There isn’t a, a visa for you to be able to come to the United States to do that. And, and, and so that’s kind of the first problem is that the, the ability to attract, you know, talent, at least through those channels just simply do not exist. You know, and the second issue with the immigration system is we’re not really designed to retain talent parti, you know, not just simply, you know, workers who can bring in their skills and stay here. I’m thinking obviously foreign students is one example who are here on an F student visa.
Cris Ramon:
And then, you know, if they don’t have a job lined up and get sponsored and be able to get a visa to stay here the, you know, their dire straits, we just do not have a status for these individuals to adjust into, to be able to become entrepreneurs. So we have this dual problem where we’re not able to attract talent or in this case, the, the ambitions, the skills, the knowledge, and the drive for immigrant entrepreneurs to come here and to be able to retain those individuals that they’re already here, but they’re on a temporary visa. That’s, that’s a major issue. You know, another issue is access to resources. So it’s, it’s, it’s interesting because, you know, one of the drivers of immigrant entrepreneurship is social capital. So the networks that you have you know, this is why you say you’re sort of seen over the course of American history, these immigrant enclaves emerge.
Cris Ramon:
And one of the reasons that, you know, those communities you know, have been able to really sustain themselves financially because a newcomer comes to the United States and they’re able to sort of navigate the, the, the business starting process. And this is obviously a long term project, you know, for, for many, you know, for decades even centuries in the United States with the history of immigration. But of course those social networks allow individuals to be able to navigate you know, the system to be able to set up their businesses. But the issue of course, is that if you’re a newcomer and you’re trying to start a business, now those issues around say accessing alone, maybe you don’t have a credit history in the United States. You don’t have assets to be able to offer to a bank. And, and, and so that can kind of put you at a disadvantage especially if you’re coming in and, and maybe you may not have the savings to do that. It’s not to say that it makes starting businesses impossible for immigrants but it certainly is a major challenge. So those are the two things to consider with the, the major, major obstacles that immigrant entrepreneurs face here in the United States.
Denzil Mohammed:
And despite this. So again, immigration status, immigration policy, as you say having a credit history, you know, 90% of, of immigrants who come here don’t even have a clue about a credit score. That’s something unique to the us language barriers, as you say, collateral having social capital is so important for anyone to succeed anywhere, having parents or children or cousins or family, or for any kind there. And yet still they have a higher rate of business generation, is that astonishing,
Cris Ramon:
You know, individuals come here and that’s a risky move. I mean, I, I recently just moved to Chicago. And, you know, there was a, you know, cost benefit analysis that I made. And it was still, you know, risky, but if you’re moving from one country to another oftentimes permanently you’re, you’re your, your ability to be able to assess risk and, and your willingness to do that, kind of primes you already to be able to take other risky steps, particularly start in businesses. And so I think that that, that the, that mitigate the experience of migraine to the United States really does mitigate the awareness you might have towards taking risks. So that’s one factor. Another important factor is, you know, a lot of these individuals who come to the United States are you know, they, they have knowledge, experience and skills, whether it’s formal channels that they, you know, they want to university or trade school, or it’s informal.
Cris Ramon:
You know, and sometimes it’s very hard to find jobs that can, you know, really fully use this in the United States. And especially if you’re, you’re coming in from a licensed profession, you need to get credentials renewed or, or need to take up additional study. And so these individuals oftentimes start their own businesses to be able to use the experiences that they’ve gained over a lifetime to be able to do the work that’s meaningful for them, and also probably to get paid at a decent rate. And, and so I think that there’s that also the drive saying I can’t find a way to integrate into the labor market. I will create my own path to do so.
Denzil Mohammed:
So what are some of the ways that we can address these issues? Let’s say let’s start at the federal level and then come down to the local level.
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. So, so Congress has recognized this issue. So I’m gonna give them pride upfront that they’ve recognized that this issue is something that that we need to focus on and they’ve proposed Democrats and Republicans. So it has been a bipartisan issue have proposed bills to be able to create a an immigrant visa and an immigrant status that people can adjust into if they’re already here and the visa will allow people to come here. But I think, you know, one of the key things that needs to be done is they just simply need to pass it. And I think that as much as I think that the, the, you know, that a comprehensive immigration reform bill, that addresses those multiple issues is the most ideal. I’m also being, you know, you have to be a little bit of a pragmatist and a realist and recognize that you may need to do reforms in a piecemeal fashion and and, and get the wins where you can get the bipartisan consensus where you can, and, and, and do that.
Cris Ramon:
At the municipal level, you are seeing cities really stepping up in, in some big ways to be able to provide technical assistance. And in some instances you know loan programs for minority owned businesses and immigrants. So you, you are seeing that there are the, these municipalities that are doing this. One of the interesting things in the conversations that I had with the experts on this, though, is that you, you wanna be able to, first of all you don’t wanna have services. And, and I didn’t really dive too deeply into this, into the report, but I can say this a little bit more now here. One of the things that somebody who works in the Mid-Atlantic city, he mentioned that one of the, one of the well intentioned efforts is to have a lot of funding to be able to provide technical services for minority potential minority business owners and immigrants.
Cris Ramon:
And that’s good naturally want the funding. The problem is that the funding actually started going into duplicative technical services that didn’t really adjust to the needs of the communities. It was just simply the same program. He literally almost said it’s basically almost like a copy and paste job, and, and that doesn’t benefit anybody. So one of the things that he said that municipalities really need to do is they do, you know, their services and, and see where they can try to re reduce redundancies and adjust the services to meet the actual needs of, of the, the individuals that they’re meant to serve. Another issue is obviously language services providing them in languages, and also recognizing that the immigrant populations are gonna shift. So just because you are providing languages language services and five languages in you know, 2018, that’s not to say that in 20, 22, the population hasn’t shifted.
Cris Ramon:
So that’s something else to consider. There’s trusted community navigators as a, that’s an important component of this is that you need to be able to reach out to the community and have the folks that people trust to be able to sort of do outreach to immigrant entrepreneurs and to know what their needs are and how you can access them. Some of these can be, you know a mayor who goes out and, and actually connects with the community with other members of important leaders in, in their communities, whether it’s police chiefs or, or representatives of chambers of commerce. But it can also be you know, nonprofits, chambers of commerce, community development corporations that can help you get a little bit more in the sense of what the actual needs are. I will say I will point to one interesting example of, I did think was really interesting in terms of particularly kind of doing this all well, is that you know, the, the city of Philadelphia ended up kind of canceling all these grants for these programs and actually just brought in, they had a common pot and they brought in consultants 10 99 experts who could provide targeted services depending on the needs of the community at any given time and pairing them up with individuals.
Cris Ramon:
Not only are they saving money because they don’t have to pay into healthcare or pensions, or what have you they’re able to bring in individuals that are targeted to specific needs and, and, and, and the needs, and the, the things that are important for these communities.
Denzil Mohammed:
Could you probably give us some cities that have been doing have been successful in building up the entrepreneurial capacity of the immigrant populations?
Cris Ramon:
St. Louis to me is actually something that’s just fascinating because and we mentioned this in, in our report, we highlight St. Louis. There’s just a high propensity of nonprofits that are doing very good and long standing work on providing immigrant entrepreneurs with technical services with loans and with just being able to connect with them. One organization that I’ve known about since at least 2012 is the mosaic Institute in St. Louis, Betsy Cohen, I think is the, the individual who works in that. And, and so she’s been doing groundbreaking work in this whole area for now, at least 10 years. You know, we mentioned the city of Chicago. I think one of the interesting things there is that you’ve been seeing the little village chamber of commerce. So that’s a community in Western Chicago that’s largely Latino.
Cris Ramon:
And, and they’ve, you’ve been seeing, you know, little village, the little village chamber of commerce the foundation of little village setting up some interesting programs. One is sort of a 12 week class for new and existing business owners that are offered in English and Spanish. There’s also the, the chamber of commerce is starting this project which is like a commercial cultural center that will actually have a business incubator. So individuals can start their own businesses and there will actually be a kitchen there to be able to allow food vendors to sell their items and learn from that. You know, we did mention Malden, Massachusetts you know, is one of those interesting examples where you did see the mayor really doing some great outreach work, largely under like a nonpartisan banner of say, we’re just gonna reach out to immigrant entrepreneurs, get secure support from all sectors of society to be able to support these individuals and doing it in, in, in, I think a non-political way, because sometimes you’ll see cities, municipality saying we’re a welcoming city.
Cris Ramon:
They’ll do that under the auspices of welcoming America, which is an amazing organization really appreciate their work, but they’ll say, oh, we’re a welcoming city, or they’ll pass policies, like say we’re a sanctuary city, which of course, there’s no definition of what a sanctuary city is, but they’re, they’re saying that to try to, you know whether or not it actually proves outcomes limit cooperation with immigration enforcement. There are these things that can symbolize that there there’s an openness, but I think molding Massachusetts is interesting because the mayor was deliberately non-political on this. And you can show that you can actually kind of approach this issue in a less, in a less polarizing way and, and get a community buy in, which is, I think is so vital to to ensuring that people feel secure and support
Denzil Mohammed:
At the local level. How do we move the needle on this? How do we, how do we spur some change so that we can foster the entrepreneurial capacity of immigrants in our communities, which is to obviously to everyone’s benefit
Cris Ramon:
These issues of competition for resources with other minority groups always comes up. And, and I, you know, I think there’s there’s feelings that are, are related to that, that, that people feel that, you know, this might be disadvantage. This might disadvantage minority business orders from other communities, but oftentimes minority business owners have immigrants in their in, in their ranks. So it’s, it’s not to say that it’s a competition for resources, but that I think is a, is a very real concern. So I think the first thing is just ensuring that, you know, municipalities nonprofits, community development corporations all are ensuring that, you know, minority business owners feel like they’re being supported and that they’re also that their needs are being met. And, and really acknowledging that. So people don’t feel like there’s a competition, even if there isn’t necessarily one just to ensure that that concern is addressed.
Cris Ramon:
And you know, what you see in cities and municipalities is sometimes they’ll just offer services for minority business owners. And that might be the assumption is that, you know, some immigrant immigrants might be incorporated into that minority group, because they’re already a large number of immigrants there. I think that’s one thing that’s incredibly important to build in that stakeholder relationship. I think another thing to consider too, is that, you know, whether it’s at the national level, the state level, the local level is trying to sort of delink immigration as an issue that is a single issue. You know, I think, and specifically related to the border, like I said, there’s, there’s, there’s a legitimate policy conversation to be had there. I, you know, I, I’m more critical of the politics around it, but I think in terms of effective policies, certainly there’s a discussion there to be had.
Cris Ramon:
I think though that when you’re talking about immigrant entrepreneurs, the thing is that you, you wanna, you know, it’s, it’s to say these are individuals who are here right now that are contributing to our communities. And they, they are a vital part of the, the economic and, and the community life here in, in, in these areas. And they think that you really need to be very intentional in understanding that you have to delink this, there are people who won’t at the end of the day, everybody, there will be people who you can’t change. There, there are views on this, but I do think that you are, if you’re able to at least get people to think through that immigration as an issue, whether it’s policy or political it isn’t just simply the border even though that’s natural default, so really being intentional to do this.
Cris Ramon:
And I think that as a part of that, and, you know, we go back to like said mold in Massachusetts is to really get a read on the community and how they view these issues. Particularly the non-immigrant individuals. You know, like I said, you know, it, it might be the case that in a very blue city stating that you’re a welcoming city or you’re you’re a sanctuary city might run a little bit better with some of the residents, but I do think that a depoliticized approach that doesn’t try to make this already a polarizing issue more. So I think with the issue around a sanctuary declaration, as opposed to the walking one, because I think welcoming America does good bipartisan work and works across the entire country. But I do think that kind of more hard line political stance on we’re, we’re here to protect immigrants from immigration enforcement and so forth.
Cris Ramon:
I don’t think that actually does anybody’s any, any favors in the end, especially if you’re dealing areas where people might have more I think complex viewers around immigration. So I think it’s more depoliticize it delink it from some other issues that make consensus very hard to find and, and ensuring that all community members feel like they can get services that they need. I think those are sort of three things that you can do to feel like to get people, to support these individuals already, if they’re not, you know, at least among the individuals who are worry about it and, but are willing to have a conversation to see if their minds can be changed.
Denzil Mohammed:
I love that idea of decoupling immigration immigrants are part of our community. So our neighbors they’re employers, they are workers. They’re our friends, they’re soccer players. So it’s not a separate issue from anything else in the community. It’s a community issue. It’s a economic issue. It’s a social issue. It’s not just an immigration issue. And I I’m, I’m glad that you, you made that that point. So Cris Ramon, immigration policy researcher, and analyst, and co-author of immigrant entrepreneurship, economic potential and obstacles to success. Thank you for joining us on the job makers podcast.
Cris Ramon:
Thank you so much. Appreciate the invitation
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thanks for joining us for this. Week’s look into how we can better grow our immigrant owned businesses for the benefit of all Americans. Remember, you can subscribe to Jobmakers on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Denzel Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another Jobmakers.
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This week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks with CATO Institute research fellow Trevor Burrus about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen and its implications for an individual’s right to carry a fire arm in states such as Massachusetts.
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Guest:
Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and in the Center for the Study of Science, as well as editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy. His academic work has appeared in journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty, the New York University Annual Survey of American Law, the Syracuse Law Review, and many others. His popular writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, Forbes, The Huffington Post, The New York Daily News, and others.
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. The second amendment of the United States constitution reads quote a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed deciding whether the right to bear arms was indeed a fundamental right, was the issue at hand in the recently decided Supreme court case of New York state rifle and pistol association versus Bruen the 6-3 majority held that while a licensing process may qualify and exclude certain applicants from firearm purchase possession and carry the state cannot require eligible applicants to demonstrate a special need to carry before being granted that fundamental, right? While this decision will have little impact on states, such as Vermont, that have very few limits on gun ownership, it will substantially disrupt the permitting process in shall issue states like Massachusetts, in which officials had reserved the prerogative to issue only to those with a special need to possess and carry.
Joe Selvaggi:
How does this case comport with the historical legal precedent of gun ownership in the United States and with the backdrop of recent school mass shootings and the tragedy of more than 40,000 us annual gun deaths all be the likely effects of a more permissive system on public safety. My guest today is Trevor Burrus, research fellow at Cato. Institute’s Robert A. Levy center for constitutional studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme court review. Mr. Burrus has written extensively on the history of gun policy in America and will share with us how the Bruin case fits with past Supreme court gun, right decisions, what impact the decision is likely to have on so-called may issue states like Massachusetts and how a more permissive gun regime may affect the rates of gun violence in the United States. When I return, I’ll be joined by Cato Institute research fellow, Trevor Burrus.
Joe Selvaggi:
Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by Cato Institute research fellow, Trevor Burrus. Welcome back to Hubwonk, Trevor, always a pleasure to be here. All right. So we’re getting near the end of the term of this Supreme Court term and some of the bigger decisions are coming down and we’re, we’re gonna be talking about the most recent decision just came down very recently. It’s being labeled the broad decision. What we’re gonna talk about our gun rights and laws restricting guns. This is an issue top of mind, independent of the decision largely because of both the tragic shooting eval de Texas, which we’ve all learned all the horrible details, but also in our country, we have more than 40,000 gun related deaths each year, and that number’s are rising. So it’s an issue that I think is top of mind for many of our listeners. So let’s, let’s start at the beginning. This decision just came down for our listeners. Tell us what are the facts in this particular case?
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, so the case is called New York state rifle and pistol association versus Bruen. And it came from sort of three plaintiffs, 1, 2, 2 individuals who wanted to geta carry permit in the state of New York and the association that they also belong to the New York state rifle and pistol association. Now New York is, is like six states that has a, what was called a may issue, carry law. So that meant in order to get a carry permit, you not only had to a pass the objective kind of stuff that is common to every state that issues permits, which is every state to some extent, which is, you know, safety training, shooting lessons, learning about the law of self defense, that kind of stuff. But you also had to demonstrate a particular subjective need for carrying a gun. So this was not a danger to you, and it had to be a danger to you specifically.
Trevor Burrus:
So in essence, you had to convince a bureaucrat. It was often like a local sheriff or sometimes a judge that you had a specific threat against you. And this allowed an amazing amount of discretion on the part of officials who essentially never granted these permits to people, except for really wealthy people who, who course often have bodyguards or the occasional person who, who was threatened specifically. So if you were a, you know, five foot woman who worked at a bar late at night, and every night, you had to walk home through a really dangerous neighborhood where muggings are quite common and you wanted to apply for one of these they, they would say no, hat question was actually asked of the New York solicitor general at oral argument would such a person apply. And they say, he said, no, that’s a generalized threat, not a specific threat.
Trevor Burrus:
So that’s how kind of onerous the restriction was. And what the court was asked to hear was whether or not that aspect of the discretionary permitting scheme was on constitutional and a six, three ruling written by justice, Clarence Thomas, they ruled that it was unconstitutional and were very specific to say that this was all, they were striking down discretionary permitting systems, where you have to show a particularized threat all the states that have permitting systems for carrying that are objective, that don’t have such criterion. Those were okay. And they went outta their way to say, that’s okay, this wasn’t about what type of guns can be banned or magazine restrictions or what kind of even people can be banned from having a gun. It was just about that. So you’ll hear a lot of sort of sky is falling as always happens when these gun cases come down. But this applies only to six states who will all then have to become like the other states that have had the, the shell issue, the objective test for carrying a gun.
Joe Selvaggi:
So Massachusetts is one of those six states that you mentioned. And so that’s why this is particularly relevant to our, our listeners. So I just wanna make sure and put some you know, finer point on what the point you made rather than let’s say we see our second amendment right to I’ll read it for our listeners a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. So in this case, one did not really have a right to as I would say, bear arms, one in a sense had to demonstrate a need to bear arms and a particular need to bear arms based on a a definable threat to one’s life. Is, is that what you’re saying
Trevor Burrus:
Precisely? And it’s important to realize there’s a lot of important language in the opinion that will apply to other gun restrictions. It’s important to realize, and this is one thing justice, Thomas went out of his way to point out, and he has in the past, how Abre this the way the second amendment is treated compared to other rights that are enumerated in the bill of rights. So they, I let’s say that there was a rule in some municipality that, you know, you could throw a protest or a rally but you had to first convince someone that what you were going to say was worth being said, because we all in first amendment law, we have a general rule that, you know, you can put limits on a protest or a rally that are called time place and manner restrictions that are kind of objective in the sense of, you know, you can only go between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM.
Trevor Burrus:
You can’t block traffic. This is how loud your speakers can be. All those have nothing to do with the content of the speech. But if you add another thing where, and the sheriff will determine whether or not, what you have to say is worth saying, it would be blatantly unconstitutional. It wouldn’t survive. The, the lowest court review it’d be struck down in a microsecond, but nevertheless, this restrictions were on the second amendment. Right. And so it’s very important that the court came in and said, we’re gonna treat the second amendment, like the other amendments in the constitution, like the first, or say the fourth where we’re gonna read it in terms of history and tradition and ask the question, is this the kind of regulation that the people who ratified the min would’ve been not okay with or okay. With, and we’re not gonna do these weird balancing tests. We’re gonna make the second amendment, not a second class. Right.
Joe Selvaggi:
So in other words, we don’t need to make the case for free speech. We don’t have to say my speech is worth speaking. We just are granted that right to speak though that it can be constrained in time and place and manner. All right. So let’s dive into the the opinion you said it was a six, three opinion. You already mentioned justice Thomas as being in the majority. What else do we know? I know this is a relatively recent decision. What else do we know about where the chips fell? Is it a classic right left or conservative, progressive divide. And if so, is there any disagreement amongst, let’s say the majority
Trevor Burrus:
It’s exactly what you’d expect. A six Republican appointed justices versus the three Democrat appointed justices, justice Breyer pinned the dissent. The whole thing is quite long. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion is over 60 pages long in all the, all the opinions are 135 pages. And it’s an interesting, so we did have we did have some concurrences from Justice Alito and justice Kavanaugh joined by the chief justice just to address some points that they wanted to be clear about in terms of what the decision was saying and what it wasn’t saying. Justice Alito wrote separately also to criticize justice Breyer’s dissent. I think very rightfully so, because Justice Breyer’s dissent, as he has wanted to do is essentially a policy brief which is not the way we should be deciding constitutional law questions. When the question is, what does the second amendment mean?
Trevor Burrus:
And so that was an interesting dissent from, or concurrence from Justice Alito. But in terms of the opinion, it’s what you’d expect from Justice Thomas, it’s a lot of originalist analysis of looking at what the history was in terms of how many laws were there, say in the founding era or perhaps in the reconstruction era when the 14th amendment was passed that regulated or prohibited people from carrying guns and going through the history of that and saying, you know, sometimes there were regulations that prohibited carrying of guns, but they, they usually said something like causing terror or mayhem. So it wasn’t, it was, it was, it was prohibited to carry a gun in a way that causes terror or mayhem. It didn’t just say it’s prohibited to carry a gun. And of course, you know, you could imagine in the American west in the 19th century, carrying guns was quite common.
Trevor Burrus:
And so the overview of the history gives for justice. Thomas says, no, this, this is not a longstanding or traditional prohibition. In addition to the fact, which is, must be first looked at that the second amendment says the right to keep and bear arms in the Heller case in 2008, when the court first decided that the second amendment conveys an individual, right, that was kind of about keep and in the now 14 years, since that decision we’ve been waiting on the meaning of bear. So this, this decision was also analyzing that term, what it meant what it meant to bear arms in the context of the second amendment. And since we already had decided in Heller that the second amendment is not necessarily tied to a militia, which was kind of the big question in that case the bear, the interpreting the word bear also, shouldn’t be tied to a militia like a militia, right?
Trevor Burrus:
It’s an individual, right. That people have presumptively. And yes, we could say that felons are not allowed to bear arms and other prohibited persons. And we could get into what the limits of this are. It’s not unlimited at all, but what it means is that for people, for guns that are in common use for self defense of which no one denied that handguns are such a gun then a law abiding person who can own that gun legally cannot be unduly prohibited from carrying that gun with sort of irrational or unconstitutional constraints on carrying.
Joe Selvaggi:
So you anticipated my couple of my future questions. I wanted get to Heller but I also wanna address the dissent. But I think it’s very important that you point out in the case that at the time of the Constitution’s ratification, you know gun ownership was fairly ubiquitous, right? That we like saying, you know, you have a right to have a dog. You know, it, it almost is unnecessary to, to, to enumerate, but nevertheless it is a fundamental, right. And it seems, again, we, I don’t wanna do all too much on Heller, but the militia clause seems also to be superfluous in so far as you can’t have a fundamental right, that ultimately if the government decides who’s in that militia, he, you don’t, that’s not your right. So if you only have a gun in the context of a militia and the government can restrict who’s in the militia it’s the opposite of a fundamental, right? It’s a, a granted right. Based on your participation in a government sanction organization, right?
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s important to remember too, like who the militia was at the time which was pretty much every able bodied male between 18 and 64 or even 16 and 64. And also that they had just won a war against the British, that very much depended upon citizen soldiers and never forget what the first action, the first battle of that war was at Lexington and Concord, which was the British deciding to go get the guns. And that’s what caused the war to break out. So there was no, there’s really no questioning that the, what was on the minds of the framers and the ratifiers of the second amendment. And one of the reasons we didn’t see a second amendment case for a very long time. There’s a lot of ones, but one of ’em is, is that gun ownership was broad.
Trevor Burrus:
It was, it was sort of not divided between red and blue states and people in state protection of right to keep and bear arms was pretty robust. And so there was really no need to start going after suing about gun rights until around the 20th century. I mean, there were different sort of state based examples, but federally suing about gun rights. Like wasn’t a, wasn’t really allowed, but there was no real need to do that until gun restrictions started coming in, especially federal ones. And we didn’t have a federal gun law until 1934. So all of this is fairly new and, and would be kind of strange to the framers.
Joe Selvaggi:
So if, but let’s say our let’s say Democrat appointed judges tend to take a more creative view of the constitution and perhaps weight less, the original intent and more towards sort of the practical consequences. So let’s talk about the dissenting opinion. I don’t know if you’ve had time to read that, but what is the essence of why, what would we seem to be in violent agreement of why this decision to bear arms is comports with the meaning of the constitution? What was the opinion of the dissenters?
Trevor Burrus:
Yes. Justice Breyer’s a very, very nice man. And he’s, he’s written some very, very good opinions. This is no last term on the court to be replaced by judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. But he, I mean, and sometimes he doesn’t act like a judge. And I would say his dissenting opinion is not really acting like a judge because it’s a policy brief and it’s very important for some judges. So they say, you know, the, the, there are things, you know, there’s decisions that are made by legislators about whether or not this should be the policy, or this should be a policy. And that’s and judges make different types of decisions is what is the law? What is the constitution to say? The second amendment by itself by being in the constitution is saying that it’s putting gun rights above the costs of gun ownership, which of course, they, they knew at the time that guns could be used for mayhem and violence, but they decided to say, this is how we’re balancing this guns, gun rights, go above the cost of having guns.
Trevor Burrus:
They did the same thing with the first amendment. They said that that political speech, which can be harmful and other types of speech that can be harmful. We’re putting that above the regulation or that speech, or when they give rights to accused criminals in the bill of rights. We’re saying we’re putting these rights where they could even get out of jail, or they could go away. Scott free if we give them rights. So there’s cost to these rights or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This, you know, hampers law enforcement, it might be easier to catch criminals if they couldn’t enforce these, right? So these rights have costs and what the judge should be doing, or what a justice should be doing is trying to interpret the constitution and say, what does this mean? Justice Breyer is just saying, here’s how many people died of guns here?
Trevor Burrus:
My here’s how many people died with suicides? Here’s how many people mass shootings there were. And I am not diminishing that at all. Like, it’s very seriously. We could talk about what policies I think could affect positively the rates of gun deaths in the country, but in terms of his job to make a judicial decision based on this, and also to bring in, I mean, there’s a lot of misstatement of facts in his opinion, but there’s also things that are completely irrelevant. He asks for a trial, he says, this should have been decided with a good record, where we had a good data about how this law works and how many acts of violence it prevents. Well, if that trial would’ve occurred, his entire opinion, would’ve been essentially nullified because bringing up suicides, which are two thirds of gun deaths and her serious problem, but, but what does this law that allows someone to that had only allowed someone to carry a weapon outside their home?
Trevor Burrus:
If some officials said that they had a particularized threat against them, what does it have anything to do with suicide whatsoever? And it’s just sort of head scratching. Gun accidents is another thing he brings up. And another thing that this law would be completely irrelevant toward. And so his opinion, yeah, it reads like the something who was, if he were a legislator, it’s the reasons why he would vote against a, a may issue, a, a shell issue law for caring like that. That’s what that he, if he was a legislator and he could, you know, retire from the court and join the New York state legislator, maybe not, he’s probably not a citizen of New York, but he joins a legislator. And then he can decide whether he likes the law or not like the law. He clearly doesn’t like this law and he thinks it causes harm, but it’s not his job as a justice to, to make decisions on such basis. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve been told by some of the justices appointed by Republicans, you know, that they say, you know, I don’t, it’s not my job to review policy in, in many of these cases, I don’t want a policy brief. I don’t want you to tell me, you know, all these things, it’s my job to interpret the constitution. The policy of keeping bearing arms was chosen by the framers. And now we have to figure out what it means.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. I, you know, I’m, I’m not an attorney. I know you that you are. But I do try to think deeply about this to me, the notion of a judge sort of interpreting the law or reading it as it is it, for my money, it has to be that way otherwise, what does it mean to be a good judge? If not that you understand and apply the law, as it’s written, as you say, you’re either a legislator or sort a super legislator or you’re, you know, a, a star chamber of wise men that sort of are hired, I suppose, or chosen because you have opinion the right opinions rather than the wisdom to apply the law as it’s written.
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, every, every judge should be asked, every judge gets nominated for a state, or especially if federal court should be asked the question, tell me a law that you think is constitutional, that you think is a bad idea. And tell me a law that you think is unconstitutional that you think is a good idea, because if you can’t make a distinction between your policy preferences and your interpretation of the constitution, then you don’t really believe in constitutions. You believe in your policy preferences as the law of the land. And unfortunately, again, I like justice Bres and me he’s written some many good opinions, but too many times justice Breer is behaving as a legislator who cannot separate the fact that he doesn’t like peep guns in private hands, comparatively speaking to the interpretation of the second amendment, like, and there are people out there, unfortunately, people are generally bad at separating their policy preferences from their constitutional interpretation, but someone like AKI, Lamar, who’s one of the great constitutional law scholars in the country at Yale. He explicitly says, I don’t like guns. I don’t think they should be as what broadly owned and used as they are in America. But the second amendment definitely protects that. So he’s able to separate his policy preferences and his constitutional interpretation. And I just wish there were more of that.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed, indeed. So we, I wanna sort of just address Heller one more time and say that, you know, in 2008, that was handed down and that was defined as you mentioned, the right to individually keep arms, not bear arms. Did you see this new ruling as necessary in other words was well obviously it was necessary if we had these owner’s laws in, in New York, but why doesn’t keep and bear mean the same thing, meaning I can keep it wherever I like. Why, why does bay mean I mean, was the essence of Heller to defend sort of home and, and hearth as opposed to oneself where everyone goes is, is that the spirit of the Heller decision?
Trevor Burrus:
Well, Heller was very strategic and, and my colleague Clark Neely was one of the attorneys who came up and litigated that case along with the know, my, my mentor, Dave Copel was an attorney who sat at the Supreme court table during oral argument. And it was strategic to try and get the court to do something that had never done before. And when you try to do that, you’re going for a very narrow question for the court to answer a very narrow question, cuz that’s the way the court likes to, to do things. So you want, you first say, okay, interpret the meaning of the word keep. And they went after a DC’s extremely onerous regulation of all guns, especially handguns since 1976, that essentially made it impossible to have a gun. And if you could get a permit to get a gun, and this is just to have one in your house, it had to be essentially, you know taken apart and put in a different room.
Trevor Burrus:
So it made it functionally unusual. And so the, the court ruled there in a five to four decision that, that, that law, that completely onerous regulation essentially prohibiting the keeping of a gun in your house was unconstitutional. And since that time there hasn’t been another major gun decision until this, this one came down recently. So, and that, and there’s been a lot of attempts to try and get some regulate, some cases to the court, many of which I’ve been involved in about different things, because some, some lower courts I have been taking Heller and saying the only thing it applies to is a law that is similarly as restrictive as DC’s was and saying that’s Heller is limited to its facts. Pretty much any other gun regulation is fine, you know, and we, we, we went offer a bunch of ’em like for example, there was, we almost got a case taking a very narrow question of California’s 10 day waiting period to buy a gun as applied to people who already own guns.
Trevor Burrus:
We were trying to get them like, tell me a reason why that would make any sense whatsoever. You own 50 guns in every, when you buy the 51st, you have to wait 10 days. And, and that, and the court didn’t take that there was a dissent from justice Thomas and the court not taking that case, but that’s the kind of cases that were trying to be brought to get a little bit more meat on the bones of the Heller decision, which has sort of a famous paragraph in it that explains that it’s not undercutting or overturning a bunch of existing gun regulations. And so today, not only did the court rightfully strike down this carry provision, but it did, it went kind of above and beyond to clarify more than it needed to kind of our brief in the case, CAS brief in the case, asked them to do this. And they followed, they followed us and others other briefs saying, you know, definitely strike this down, but also clarify Heller and the second amendment and how low court are supposed to interpret the second amendment and give them some guidance on that when other gun restrictions come up. And so that now it’s this history tradition test, which we’ve been pushing for rather than some balancing test that is very judge empowering and has let judges uphold many, many gun restrictions.
Joe Selvaggi:
So that’s a perfect segue to my next question. This is a a federal case. We have 50 states and some broad range of restrictions from New York to our, our neighbor we’re I’m in Massachusetts, our neighbor to the north. I think Vermont has almost no constraints, no laws limiting gun use usage or ownership. So wide range, we are closer to New York than, than Massachusetts than than Vermont. As far as our laws, how much does this I guess we’ll talk about the 14th amendment, how much do does a the federal ruling have an impact on the prerogatives of state state’s rights?
Trevor Burrus:
It’s gonna be interesting to see now. I mean, first off all the six may issue states, you know, they’re all in the same boat as New York, and none of those restrictions are constitutional about, but what we’ve seen in cities’ district of Columbia most recently, where they’ve actually had their may issue provision joined since 2017, we’ve seen them try and do as much as they can to keep gun ownership to a minimum and especially carry permitting. And so expect more of this from states like New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York Illinois Hawaii. So expect California. So expect more of this in the sense that, that the legislators of those states will go back to the drawing board and say, all right, we’re gonna have object. We’re gonna have an objective criteria test because the Supreme court says we have to have a shell issue thing, but we’re gonna require 27 hours of shooting classes, three days of classes on the law of self defense five days on, I don’t know, triage medicine for gunshot victim, just some very, very long list of things and say, you know, there’s no longer a subjective component to this.
Trevor Burrus:
There’s no may issue part of this. If you do, you know, all of these things, and it probably costs a few thousand dollars, you can totally carry a gun. And then we’ll be like back to the courts and say, no that, you know, try and get courts to be like, this is unreasonable. This is not how things worked. And so there’ll be of course, much more litigation in, in the future about these things and other regulations not related to carrying what kind of guns can be banned in different states and what kind of, you know, magazine restrictions, things like this. But we now have a clearer test for the lower courts to imply when, when applying it to any gun regulation whatsoever. And so what we’ll we’ll have to see but I think it will be better in terms of gun rights in the future than it is, but do expect these states to do everything they can to, to try and undercut the ruling in a practical sense.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes, I, I, I’ve heard let’s say pros restriction advocates compare owning a gun to, let’s say, driving a car, you know, licensing at what point does the licensing requirement, if we wanna call the sort of a regime of, of, of guiding who can you know, what, what it takes to own a gun in, in Massachusetts, can you make it so expensive? So honors, so time sent, you know, 30 months you know, and $30,000 and, and you know a thousand dollars renewal license, you know, something that has the effect of, of limiting guns, where does it enter into the realm of unconstitutional constraint?
Trevor Burrus:
I think now sooner than before, you know, like it in terms of what you could do it’s, it’s sooner now that, but again, you’re gonna hear a lot of chicken, little sky is falling. I’ve already seen it on Twitter. This is a radical opinion. It’s not a radical opinion at all. It means it, it interpreted the word bear in the second amendment to mean the word bear. And so, but going forward, like, it’s, we will have, there’s still many, many regulations the states can put on guns. And even from my point of view, things that I think are constitutional that even under my interpretation of second amendment, I may not think they’re a good idea. But I think they’re probably constitutional take magazine restrictions. I think you could probably go to like 10 round magazine restrictions, even though maybe 15 maybe let’s say 20 let’s I’ll go to 2020 is let’s say they could ban all magazines above 20 rounds.
Trevor Burrus:
Well, the question in the second amendment, the, the philosophical question is what it does is it protects a preexisting, right? To self-defense a natural right to self-defense, that’s what it does. And when you interpret it, you go, okay. So what does that entail? What it entails effective means to self defense. That’s what, that’s, what the, and in the same way that the first event protects a preexisting, right? To speak your mind that you have as a, as a human being what does it entail then? Well, it entails effective means of communication. So that means that you can start a radio station and you can buy pins and paper, and you can print books and you can do all these things that if they start banning printing paper, or they put a tax on paper that is a thousand dollars a page it’s an onerous regulation of, of speech.
Trevor Burrus:
And so similar when we think about a magazine restriction, does a, does a 20 round magazine restriction really impair the right to self defense, not, not a huge amount, I’ll admit. So that’s probably constitutional under my interpretation. I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I, I think it would be extremely difficult and bad. It wouldn’t do much for gun violence, and there’s a lot of 30 round magazines out there. And you don’t wanna turn all those people into felons overnight, but is it constitutional? Hmm, I’ll go with, yes. Other things like background checks different people who are prohibited from a owning a firearm, different places where you can’t bring a firearm. Those are, those are many of those could be constitutional too. So this is not in any way saying that there’s no room for regulation. It just means that we have to look at the second amendment, like seriously as serious constitutional scholars and intellectuals, and read the words and say, what does it protect?
Trevor Burrus:
And what did they choose in night, 1791 to protect. And I think that they chose essentially that people were allowed to have the kind of guns that are in common used for self defense that are used by both the government and the people. So like I would argue that an, an assault weapon quote, unquote, assault weapon is in common used for self defense. But an assault weapon with a hundred round magazine, probably not a 50 callable sniper rifle. You know, that could be an interesting question if that ever came up to the court rocket propelled grenade, launcher I mean, pretty good for self defense, but it’s kind of other bunch of other problems to it, a tank. Well, that one’s easy. People always say, oh, Trevor, you know, why can’t you just own a tank? Well, if we’re interpreting the second amendment, you can’t bear a tank, so that’s not really applied. So, so that’s the kind of questions we have going forward. And it’ll be much clearer, thankfully, cuz I’ve been beating my head against low court opinions that just made no sense for too long. So we’ll see where they go next.
Joe Selvaggi:
What about, what does this imply for here, Massachusetts? It’s actually the chief of police who grants these sort of licenses and says, okay, you, you, you can have one or you can have a gun and you can’t, which creates this interesting patchwork, which I would imagine is sort of, it’s an uneven application of the law regarding a fundamental, right. But also it makes it easy to run a foul. If I’m bearing my weapon and driving from one town to another, I may run a foul of, of some sort of, you know, town level limit. Will this have any bearing on a state like Massachusetts?
Trevor Burrus:
It should those kind of restrictions, you know, now you’re applying things where other provisions of constitutional law, like how much leeway does the state or municipality have in sort of creating felonies of which people are not aware. And like can’t be aware and suddenly become felons. I think that that’s an under, under theorized, but increasingly important part of constitutional law. And then of course, when you have that in a second amendment context then it’s a different question because we’ll think about this way, like the state could, let’s just say this microphone that I’m speaking into the state to tomorrow made it a felony to own one and you’d be, and, and this would seem to have some problems to it with all these people who just became felons. So yeah, there could be many different constraints, you know, ultimately as you’d hope that Massachusetts would try and rectify this stuff between the municipalities. So they aren’t creating felons out of nowhere, but in, in my experience, gun controllers are not terribly sympathetic to people who suddenly become felons and who are completely law abiding gun owners. So but so this is a good chance for people in Massachusetts to speak to their legislator and say, Hey, don’t make me a felon for no good reason.
Joe Selvaggi:
Right? So let’s, let’s move away from this, the constitutional issue. And I know that’s where your expertise lies, but you also have some expertise in sort of imagining a world where there’s say fewer gun deaths. We all wish for that. Let’s just think about the fact that there’s, I think more than 40,000 gun related deaths in the United States that number’s going up also there’s 400 million guns in the United States. So what would you say to those people who see this correlation if they infer causation by this correlation, meaning lots of guns means lots of gun deaths. What would you say to those folks?
Trevor Burrus:
Well, I totally understand. I mean, first of all, I think that gun rights supporters are often sort of flippant about gun deaths in a way that is not good from both humanity standpoint or a messaging standpoint. I understand the desire to do something. I just wish that we spent more time looking at where the actual majority of gun deaths are, who is dying, what guns are being used. Instead we play political theater all the time because it’s basically gun policy is a huge partisan signaling device as you’re well aware. But you know, first thing is to understand the gun deaths and where they are coming from. So two thirds are suicides. As I mentioned before, this fact is rarely brought up, but one things that you need to pay attention, if you’re a, you know, astute political observer is anytime the New York times or V or anyone talks about gun deaths versus the amount of guns pay attention to whether or not they’re using the word gun deaths versus gun homicides like interpersonal gun victimization, because there is no correlation internationally or in the states between the number of guns and the number of interpersonal gun shootings.
Trevor Burrus:
It’s a complete random scatter shop plot. If you try to put plot those things, nor is there internationally, you could go to a place like Ireland, which seems to have we don’t, we never, it’s hard to figure out how many guns there are, but Ireland seems to have about half as many guns as Germany. And it has about double the homicide rate. And it’s just a scatter shot plot all over the place. But if you bring in suicides and now you call ’em gun deaths, you will see a correlation between the number of guns and the number of gun deaths because of suicides. And that makes sense to some extent, because if you don’t have a gun, you can’t commit a suicide by gun. And so one, one thing we should be doing is looking at suicides very strongly, especially for men between the ages of 25 and 64, which is the huge amount of those gun suicides and understanding that literally no policy that’s gets discussed all the time would have any effect on it.
Trevor Burrus:
Magazine restrictions, banning AR fifteens and assault weapons. People are not shooting themselves with these you know, maybe waiting periods that we could talk about that there’s some data on that, but background checks probably not. So this is, this is where the confrontation should be. And also pistols are killing the majority of people in homicides especially inner city, black youth like connected to the drug war. And so my frustration is always having a conversation that is bigger than guns. Sometimes I joke and say, you know, like they, the gun controllers like to say, oh, gun rights supporters are obsessed with guns. And I say, well, it seems to me that you are obsessed with guns because the number one thing that you wanna talk about when you have a mass shooting when you have new numbers on homicides is the gun and not, you know, mental health, not policing, not the drug war, not the question of why people are killing or doing mass shootings but just whatever gun it was.
Trevor Burrus:
And you’d think that like, you know, if you talked to Diane Feinstein and you’d said, here’s a magic button and you can eliminate, you know, one type of gun just entire like a puff and a puff evaporations disappears that she’d press it to eliminate assault weapons, which would be irresponsible to say the least in many, many different ways from her own, from her own point of view. I remember when Elizabeth Warren was running for president still, she had put out a, I think 32 point comprehensive plan to reduce gun deaths by 80%. And only one of those had anything to do with suicide. I mean, and that’s just cuz you could you, if she eliminated every homicide, she’d only eliminate 30% of gun deaths, like 33% of gun deaths. So she couldn’t even get close to 80% without addressing suicide. And so that’s the, that’s the thing that frustrates me a, they talk about they conflate homicides and suicides and talk about the same policies to address both, which if, obviously that’s not true, very different policies to address homicides and suicides.
Trevor Burrus:
And B you just start talking about which gun like which guns are actually killing the most people cuz sometimes the totality of the wisdom of many gun controller’s policies is if they found out that last year, you know, 50% of gun deaths were with black guns and then they ban black guns and they think that next year there’ll be 50%, fewer, fewer deaths. And of course that’s not going to happen because brown guns are readily available. And for most times people use guns for most of the things it will suffice just as well as a black gun. So really it’s just about having a serious conversation and I, again, around where most of the gun deaths are occurring and not just focusing on the gun.
Joe Selvaggi:
So I’m already seeing, you know, over my, my newsfeed graphs that show a relationship between the number of deaths gun deaths, as you say, and the most restrictive states, the states that, you know, the six or seven that we’ve mentioned in this podcast is having the most restrictive gun related deaths. If, if I, I just wanna put a finer point on your argument, if you were to factor out there, there clearly seems to be correlation between gun deaths and gun regulation, but taking out the suicide, the two thirds of the gun deaths that are suicide and just talking about violent deaths, homicides, it would be a scatter shot. All 50 states would fall about equal regardless of their gun laws. So that this is essentially lining with statistics,
Trevor Burrus:
Right? Yeah. And it’s highly concentrated. You know, I said the gun, the drug war creates situations that engender violence when you have those SP of shootings in Chicago or Baltimore, Philadelphia, you know, which are exceptionally violent cities and have strict gun control laws. If you, if you have these spade of shootings, when they say, you know, 12 people died over the weekend, it’s often this back and forth where it’s like, oh, he killed my guy cuz they were fighting over a drug corner. So we wouldn’t kill one of their guys and they wouldn’t kill one of our guys. And so that’s why you have this common waves. So again, the drug war would do more. Any of the drug war would do more to mitigate interpersonal gun violence than any gun law you could feasibly imagine passing. And as you pointed out 400 million guns in the country, I, I often ask, you know, that when I give lectures and stuff, I ask this question of one who is disgusted by guns.
Trevor Burrus:
And depending on the group, like often student groups, a lot of people raise their hands and say, I am disgusted by guns. Okay. I get that. You don’t want one. You don’t like being around them. You’ve never really been around them. That’s fine. You probably shouldn’t make policy off of disgust. But but that’s fine. And then the second question is who here thinks that like a more civilized society will have fewer guns in private hands, in like a star Trek kind of way where everyone’s saying, oh, remember how violent we were 200 years ago. And then we evolved. And a lot of people say yes to that. And I get that too. But here’s the thing not gonna happen, just not gonna happen. Like you could take, you could eliminate 50% of guns in America. You still have 200 million guns. It’s just unrealistic. And so again, the, the conversations are much more about signaling and posturing than they are about actually doing something that could, could make a difference.
Joe Selvaggi:
If we’re going down this road towards talking about, you know, common arguments for restrictions, one of the common arguments for a gun advocacy is that the best thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And, and a lot of people have challenged that statement in that, you know, good guys with the guns will, I don’t even need to talk about Aldi. There was a theoretically, a professional good guy with a gun who stood by and did nothing. So it’s not, it may be necessary, but certainly not sufficient in many cases. But what do we have for statistics? Do, do good guys with guns, stop crime. Do you have that data or do we have even, oh yeah.
Trevor Burrus:
Oh yeah. They, they really do. When I first got into this, I, I’m not a big gun person myself. I didn’t even own a gun until about five years ago, but I’ve been doing this policy area for, for over a decade. And when I first got into it, I was doing research for Dave Copel and I was sort of astounded that the, the reasonable guess for how many times people defend themselves a gun a year guns a year, a conservative guess is a million. A, a one that is aside in the opinion is 2.5 million. There’s a lot of studies that they all kind of come up between one and 2 million. So let’s just say one and a half million. And when I first learned that I was stunned, cuz you’d think you’d hear about it more. Well, not necessarily cuz people who do that often, maybe not allowed to have the gun themselves, which is a different issue, but they still might be defend themselves.
Trevor Burrus:
And most of the time when someone defends themselves with a gun, they don’t fire it. Which is one of the big virtues of this. They, they just show the gun and then that dissuades crime. And we know that criminals think about where guns will be and whether or not someone will have guns when they commit a crime. And we could just, you know, we, we have it from surveys. We have it from data. Imagine if we took a given 10,000 person town and I, I brought 5,000 guns and I gave it to a random assortment of houses and said, all right, half the houses now in this town have guns. Okay. Criminals will this affect their behavior? And yes, it absolutely will affect their behavior. So there you have positive externalities of gun ownership. There’s also also of course, negative externalities. So yeah, that’s we do know and it’s, it’s a shockingly high number that cannot be downplayed.
Trevor Burrus:
That’s one thing I think is very important here from the gun control point of view, when you bring up how many times people defend themselves with guns a year, they don’t like this fact. And I know why I understand. They think it’s encouraging and endorsing a wild west mentality. They think it’s uncivilized to have that many people defending themselves with guns a year. They think the only reason they’re defending themselves with guns is because the criminals have guns to like the guns of the whole problem. But of course, most say robberies in this country are not committed with a gun. They’re mostly committed with knives and strong arm tactics. So they don’t like it. And I get it, but if you’re not gonna be, you know, if you’re gonna be talking about abolishing the police or defunding the police or how much you hate cops or all this kind of stuff.
Trevor Burrus:
And look, I have many, many problems with cops, but if you’re gonna be doing that and saying, you know, we’re gonna take away the cops money and resources to defend you and take away your ability to defend yourself. You’d you better choose one, at least on those things and, and great. I agree. It’d be nice to have, you know, fewer cops kicking down doors, you know, executing search warrants on drug offenders and more people just armed and protecting themselves in a responsible law abiding way. That’s, that’s fine with me. Other people may have a different view, but again, let’s approach the real world and the constitution as it is and not some sort of Star Trek fantasy.
Joe Selvaggi:
So we’re running out of time. You you’ve been very generous with your time. I just wanna then you, you alluded to this fact early in the top of the show that you have some ideas for reducing a gun desk, gun violence. I hope our listeners are unanimous in their desire to want to reduce gun violence and gun death. So let’s say you’re king for day. And we wanna honor the constitution as well. So we wanna, it wants to pass muster with the constitution. What do you think would be effective in reducing gun deaths and you know, all the things we all talk about, these red flag laws and, you know, mental health, give us a laundry list of where you’d like to see our efforts constructively applied to reducing gun death.
Trevor Burrus:
Well, I mentioned one in the drug war and I probably sound like a libertarian broken record and I work on drug war issues extensively, but it’s, it would be the number one thing. And then the next one is suicide and there we’re gonna have to be very careful, but very, very caring about this. Most people who ever commit suicide and survive a suicide attempt, regret it. Now most people who commit suicide with a gun don’t survive it. Those decisions are often rash and instantaneous, but also most people who commit suicide reach out to someone in the weeks or months before they do this. And that’s the point where as community, as friends as loved ones not so much as, as law enforcement, I would say. But people, when you say, Hey, you know, I know you’re super depressed and you own a bunch of guns.
Trevor Burrus:
Can I just keep those for a bit with the red flag laws, those have some possibilities of flagging or identifying shooters but at the same time they could dissuade people from seeking mental health which is really bad. We have some data that that’s what happened with veterans which is very bad because again, gun suicide is, is most of the gun deaths. So focus on those two things. There are other things that may make a difference safe storage laws seem to in one study, make a difference. If you have people stealing guns or someone like the killer in Sandy hook who, you know, took his mom’s guns, but if they were locked up and he didn’t know the combination that could have done something and it’s possible that waiting periods could do something a little bit for suicide, but we still need be better data on that. And those need to be well constructed and sensibly constructed. So yeah, there are things that can be done if we are thinking about it correctly.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. So again, we’re coming to the end of our show. I, I wanna, again, I know you’re a, I dunno if you’re an amateur or professional philosopher, but I wanna get to this sort of, this, this gun issue setting aside the, the, the statistics of how many people die at the hand of hands of guns. I think it reveals more about our society than merely our, a view of guns. And what I’m referring to is that two fundamental views of what a government is here for and a divide right down the middle. It seems that we either see the government’s role as keeping us safe, presumably from ourselves and others, or keeping us free, which is free from coercive power including that of the government. Do you see this sort of being as much a symbolic question, gun control as it is a, a practical or legal question
Trevor Burrus:
It’s definitely in the more symbolic thing, it, it kind of depends upon which side you’re talking about because some groups flip on one thing and, and they’re not consistent. I mean, as a libertarian, I try and be consistent, but so you know, the gun rights supporters maybe tend to be more anti-immigration because they think that immigrants are making us less safe. And there’s a very big commonality between how pro immigrant anti-immigrant and anti-gun arguments are very similar. And both of them feel like both of these sides feel like that something is making the country less safe and in some sense, like polluting it. I do think that the, the gun control people think that guns are like a pollutant, which is why they don’t want them on say college campuses, even if they’re innocuous, because it’s something it’s like stinking up the joint.
Trevor Burrus:
And of course, people who are anti-immigrant often have similar types of attitudes also anti-immigrant and anti-gun people tend to believe wrongly that there are like no gun laws in the country, and you can just buy a machine gun at Walmart, which is laughably false or B there’s like no immigration laws and, and everyone can just come in and we have open borders. So, so the question of what is making you feel less safe or less free is I think often contingent upon partisan BS and a bunch of stuff like that. But I do think it does when people don’t feel like they’re in control and it’s super wild out there. And, and when it comes to guns, you know, we have this very big problem that, you know, at least half of Americans, if you ask them, was America more dangerous 20 years ago, they’ll say, no, and this is really wrong.
Trevor Burrus:
Most people don’t know that gun violence has precipitously declined since 1992. It has uptick the last two years, but it’s still at about 1968 levels. And so if people don’t know that because these often these high profile shootings, they just think it’s a complete mad house out there. Well, I invite them to go to New York in 1982 and, you know, walk around and see how safe they feel. So, so knowing, you know, what, what you should be afraid of, and I’ll tell you, it’s not immigrants or guns would be important to this kind of distinction you’re talking about.
Joe Selvaggi:
Wonderful. Well, okay. That’s a great way to end our show. I think, you know those in our audience who, or, or in our country who feel some level of discontent, it’s easy to use the the government as our object of our scorn depending where you stand it’s either because it’s too big or because it’s too small it makes a great scapegoat for, for everyone. So thank you very much for joining me, Trevor. I think we’ve gone deep on this subject. It’s hot off the presses, and I appreciate you. You making yourself available,
Trevor Burrus:
Always a pleasure to be here.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. If you enjoy today’s episode, there are several ways to support the show. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to hub won on your iTunes podcaster, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find Hubwonk. It’s great. If you offer a five star rating or offer a favor review, we’re always grateful. If you wanna share Hubwonk with friends, if you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
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Massachusetts has among the highest standards of living in the US and the economy is booming, so why are people leaving? In 2020, the state lost thousands of residents to states like Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Related: Get Pioneer’s new book, Back to Massachusetts? How the proposed constitutional tax amendment would upend one of the best economies in the nation.
In 2020, Massachusetts had a net loss of over 20,000 residents and about $2.6 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) to other states, according to IRS data made available by the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery tool. The IRS tracks the changes based on the income tax returns Americans file every year.
The biggest destination states in 2020 were Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine, which all received significant net migration from Massachusetts. Net migration to New Hampshire was 5,922 people, Florida received 4,306 people, and Maine welcomed 2,315.
Figure 1: A map of the United States showing the net flow of AGI dollars in 2020 from Massachusetts to each other state respectively. Florida and New Hampshire receive the highest AGI amounts from Massachusetts and New York sends the most AGI dollars to Massachusetts. The map was generated using the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery Tool.
These emigrants (people moving from MA) took their salaries with them. Florida received the most AGI dollars with $955 million. New Hampshire received $870 million in AGI, and Maine received $327 million.
The Discovery Tool also shows the average AGI for people who moved from MA. The astounding fact about these numbers is that the average net AGI per migrant to Florida is about $133,000. New Hampshire’s average is $109,000, and Maine’s is $110,000. The average AGI numbers are significantly higher than the MA median household income of $84,000 (US Census, 2020). This shows that Massachusetts’ emigrants to Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine have significantly above-average incomes.
The majority of the inflow of salary dollars (about 64 percent) from New York State come from New York County, better known as Manhattan. The average person moving from New York State to Massachusetts has a salary of $117,000, which is one of the highest averages of any state sending people to Massachusetts. The Commonwealth also received far more net AGI from New York than any other state at $570 million (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: A chart showing the net flow of AGI in 2020 to each state respectively (left) and the net flow of taxpayers to each state respectively (right). The chart was generated using the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery Tool.
Massachusetts has not had a net inflow of domestic migrants for any year available on the Data Discovery website, which has records as far back as 1993. The only other years when net migration outflow was above 20,000 people were 2004, 2005, and 2017. Notably, those were also years when Massachusetts had a very prosperous economy.
Since 2015, AGI outflow to Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine at least doubled, while inflow stayed steady. That shows that the high level of outflow from Massachusetts is a relatively new phenomenon that has appeared over the past five years.
Massachusetts has the best schools, healthcare, and quality of life of any state in the country. So why would someone want to leave? It might be taxes, high cost of living, the ability to work remotely, or personal preference (including politics, climate, etc).
It is no secret that the cost of living in Massachusetts has been increasing dramatically. The World Population Review ranks Massachusetts as the state with the fourth highest cost of living. Massachusetts is also ranked as the third most expensive state in which to buy a house.
Additionally, remote work has become a new reality for many Massachusetts employees. It is now possible to earn a salary in Massachusetts while living in New Hampshire. Remote work may explain why New Hampshire is such a popular destination for Massachusetts emigrants.
Taxes are likely to be one other factor for people moving from one state to another. Is it a coincidence that Florida and New Hampshire both have zero personal income tax? In a recent press release, the Pioneer Institute Executive Director, Jim Stergios said “Massachusetts is hemorrhaging money and talent to low-tax states.”
Emigration from Massachusetts might actually reflect that the economy is doing really well! Most people are still willing to pay the high cost of living to stay, and income tax revenues for 2022 show that the economy is strong. Nevertheless, the state should take action to mitigate the impacts of emigration through tax policy changes.
One major policy change Massachusetts enacted in 2021 was to tax the incomes of people working in Massachusetts even if they are not residents. This includes people moving to New Hampshire who still work in Massachusetts. New Hampshire objected to this tax policy and brought it to the Supreme Court, where it was rejected.
Massachusetts is also about to hold a statewide vote to increase taxes on people earning over $1 million in a single year. Pioneer recently put out a number of publications on how the tax increase could hurt the economy and have an unintended impact on small business owners and retirees (the publications include a book, a podcast, and a video interview). The state should avoid increasing such taxes to make the state more competitive, especially at a time when income tax revenues are at an all-time high.
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Cover Image Credit: formulanone, published on Wikipedia at the link here.
About the Author: Joseph Staruski is a government transparency intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is currently a Master of Public Policy Student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was previously an opinions columnist with the Boston College student newspaper, The Heights, and an Intern with the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. He has a BA in Philosophy and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Haverford College. Feel free to reach out via email, LinkedIn, or write a letter to Pioneer’s Office in Boston.
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Cris Ramón, son of immigrants from El Salvador, immigration policy analyst, and coauthor of the new report, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Economic Potential and Obstacles to Success published by the Bipartisan Policy Center. For the report, he scoured the nation to learn not only what immigrant entrepreneurs need, but what municipalities and the federal government can do, to help build up these businesses. The report shows that immigrants are primed to take risks due to their willingness to move to the United States, but politicians aren’t doing much to facilitate that entrepreneurial spirit. The report offers case studies, recommendations, and stories that demonstrate the value and impact immigrant business owners can bring, as you’ll learn in this week’s JobMakers.
Guest
Cristobal Ramón is a senior policy analyst with Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)’s Immigration Project. Before joining BPC, Ramón served as a research consultant on immigration integration issues with the National Immigration Forum. As a graduate student, he interned with the Migration Policy Institute, the German Marshall Fund’s Migration Program and the U.S. Helsinki Commission. Ramón is a magna cum laude graduate of Macalester College and a graduate of the master of arts in international affairs program at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he focused on comparative U.S. – E.U. immigration policy. Ramón also researched Spain’s immigration policy as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Madrid, Spain.
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammad and welcome to a special edition of Jobmakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
If you haven’t heard me say it yet, you haven’t been listening. Immigrants are twice as likely than average to start a business here in the us. And these businesses are having real local and national impact, but the reception to these business owners is uneven. And there are many municipalities that can learn from places that actively and authentically engaged with their newest residents and helped build up their entrepreneurial capacity to the benefit of all residents for Cris Ramon, son of immigrants from El Salvador, immigration policy analyst, and coauthor of the new report, immigrant entrepreneurship, economic potential, and obstacles to success published bipartisan policy center. He scoured the nation to learn not only what immigrant entrepreneurs need, but what municipalities and the federal government can do to help build up these businesses. The report shows that immigrants are primed to take risks due to their willingness to move to the United States. But politicians aren’t doing much to facilitate that entrepreneurial spirit. The report offers case studies recommendations and stories that demonstrate the value and impact immigrant business owners can bring, as you learn in this week’s Jobmakers, Cris Ramon, independent researcher and policy expert on immigration, welcome to the Jobmakers podcast. How are you?
Cris Ramon:
Thank you. Great to be here and very much open to having this great conversation with you and, you know, obviously happy to chat with you. You’ve been doing amazing work that I’ve been following for many years now, so it’s great to be here.
Denzil Mohammed:
Yeah. Thank you for that. You have been studying immigration for a very, very long time. You are Fulbright scholar studying migration as well in Spain. And you recently, co-wrote a report for the bipartisan policy center called immigration entrepreneurship, economic potential and obstacles to success. Could you just, just give a little background about you and then this project?
Cris Ramon:
Sure. so my folks are Salvador immigrants. You, I was born in LA. My folks actually met in Los Angeles, so they didn’t immigrate together, but they they came here actually the same year in 1974 through some pretty different routes. You know, my, my mom was an undocumented immigrant and my dad came here because my grandmother who immigrated to the United States in 1968 was able to get him and my my uncle you know, helped with processing their immigration cases because she cleaned the house of an immigration attorney. So they got really lucky in the lottery of life to be able to get be able to come here. So, you know, very much, immigration’s a part of my story. But you know, in terms of you know, the work that I do in this report, you know, I had an opportunity to really look into you know, why, why immigrants become entrepreneurs? What are the challenges they face sort of the, the policy responses that you see at the federal and local level and then policy recommendations to do that.
Denzil Mohammed:
So just give us an idea of the landscape of immigrant entrepreneurship. What, why did you find generally speaking, what kind of sectors are immigrants concentrated in? Do they have a higher rate of entrepreneurship? How are they impacting their localities and regions?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah, so I think the key thing is that you know, immigrants are you know, immigrants can, are represented across different industries. You always hear the story about the immigrant entrepreneur that starts a high tech startup in Silicon valley. But also you see immigrant entrepreneurs in main street businesses particularly restaurants and, and service industries. And so you, you do have this broad distribution. I think one thing to note with the distribution is oftentimes particularly immigrants who are here they will sometimes start businesses that rep represent or reflect the cultures that they came from. So restaurants obviously is a major story that comes up when you see these folks in terms of products, you know, one of the interesting stories that we heard about, you know, in this sort of vein is that there was a Syrian soap maker who wanted to make their soaps in the United States.
Cris Ramon:
And so they were able to, you know be able to put together their business in, in the St Louis area to be able to do that. So I think that that’s something that’s important, but the key thing there is that immigrants do start businesses at much higher rates than even native born Americans. And the data really backs this up. It’s, it’s just incredible to see how active they are in building the businesses. You know, it’s not to say that native born Americans aren’t like creating businesses. It’s just that immigrants are doing this at much higher rates. I think the last thing is in terms of the E impacts, you know, we didn’t dive into that information as much, but there is, you know, I think overall there is a sizable impact to be considered in terms of the, because there are just more immigrants, foreign businesses that the, that the impact has to be strong and significant because they are creating jobs that are employing individuals and they’re paying taxes. So I think that that’s really something to consider. It’s a, it’s definitely a win for the, the national economy, but for local economies as well.
Denzil Mohammed:
And we are recording this podcast over zoom guests who founded zoom an immigrant. Yeah, you paint a really good picture here. And, you know, if we open our eyes just to main streets and see the variety of businesses that we have the variety of cuisines that we have access to, that’s really unique and important for us. So you said you found that I read that rates of entrepreneurship for immigrants increased over the past few years and actually decreased among the us born, but, you know, COVID obviously affected many of these businesses in a very, very significant way. And you found that minority owned businesses, immigrant business owners suffered some of the highest losses. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. And, and I think, you know, the reason you see that those losses suffered is that particularly service industries or industries were minority business owners and immigrant business owners were really hit hard especially during the first year with, with the pandemic because obviously individuals largely remained at home. And so the fact is that if you have individuals who are using these services at lower rates, you’re gonna have businesses, you know, going under a lot more at higher rates. So I think that the distribution of these individuals and their businesses, unfortunately, really put them in a tough spot. When I came back from the pandemic,
Denzil Mohammed:
Well, I interviewed a guy called Daniel Perez. He’s a entrepreneur here in Massachusetts. He has a very successful transportation business. So transporting businessmen from the airport to their meetings, to their hotels. And obviously when the pandemic happened, people weren’t moving, people weren’t going anywhere. People were confined to their homes and he found a way to be able to use his vehicles in a profitable way during the pandemic. They became mobile health clinics during the pandemic. So some immigrants did find ways to navigate successfully throughout this very trying time. So when it comes to some of the hurdles you found, you know, obviously immigration status, the stagnant immigration policy, there are many, many reasons why immigrants should not be able to start businesses. What are some of the hurdles you found?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. So to your point, I think with with the immigration system, I mean, first and foremost, we do not have a visa expressly designed for immigrant entrepreneurs. You’re an individual who needs to get funding from from a venture capitalist to be able to start your, your startup for instance, or you’re an individual who wants to start a mainstream business. There isn’t a, a visa for you to be able to come to the United States to do that. And, and, and so that’s kind of the first problem is that the, the ability to attract, you know, talent, at least through those channels just simply do not exist. You know, and the second issue with the immigration system is we’re not really designed to retain talent parti, you know, not just simply, you know, workers who can bring in their skills and stay here. I’m thinking obviously foreign students is one example who are here on an F student visa.
Cris Ramon:
And then, you know, if they don’t have a job lined up and get sponsored and be able to get a visa to stay here the, you know, their dire straits, we just do not have a status for these individuals to adjust into, to be able to become entrepreneurs. So we have this dual problem where we’re not able to attract talent or in this case, the, the ambitions, the skills, the knowledge, and the drive for immigrant entrepreneurs to come here and to be able to retain those individuals that they’re already here, but they’re on a temporary visa. That’s, that’s a major issue. You know, another issue is access to resources. So it’s, it’s, it’s interesting because, you know, one of the drivers of immigrant entrepreneurship is social capital. So the networks that you have you know, this is why you say you’re sort of seen over the course of American history, these immigrant enclaves emerge.
Cris Ramon:
And one of the reasons that, you know, those communities you know, have been able to really sustain themselves financially because a newcomer comes to the United States and they’re able to sort of navigate the, the, the business starting process. And this is obviously a long term project, you know, for, for many, you know, for decades even centuries in the United States with the history of immigration. But of course those social networks allow individuals to be able to navigate you know, the system to be able to set up their businesses. But the issue of course, is that if you’re a newcomer and you’re trying to start a business, now those issues around say accessing alone, maybe you don’t have a credit history in the United States. You don’t have assets to be able to offer to a bank. And, and, and so that can kind of put you at a disadvantage especially if you’re coming in and, and maybe you may not have the savings to do that. It’s not to say that it makes starting businesses impossible for immigrants but it certainly is a major challenge. So those are the two things to consider with the, the major, major obstacles that immigrant entrepreneurs face here in the United States.
Denzil Mohammed:
And despite this. So again, immigration status, immigration policy, as you say having a credit history, you know, 90% of, of immigrants who come here don’t even have a clue about a credit score. That’s something unique to the us language barriers, as you say, collateral having social capital is so important for anyone to succeed anywhere, having parents or children or cousins or family, or for any kind there. And yet still they have a higher rate of business generation, is that astonishing,
Cris Ramon:
You know, individuals come here and that’s a risky move. I mean, I, I recently just moved to Chicago. And, you know, there was a, you know, cost benefit analysis that I made. And it was still, you know, risky, but if you’re moving from one country to another oftentimes permanently you’re, you’re your, your ability to be able to assess risk and, and your willingness to do that, kind of primes you already to be able to take other risky steps, particularly start in businesses. And so I think that that, that the, that mitigate the experience of migraine to the United States really does mitigate the awareness you might have towards taking risks. So that’s one factor. Another important factor is, you know, a lot of these individuals who come to the United States are you know, they, they have knowledge, experience and skills, whether it’s formal channels that they, you know, they want to university or trade school, or it’s informal.
Cris Ramon:
You know, and sometimes it’s very hard to find jobs that can, you know, really fully use this in the United States. And especially if you’re, you’re coming in from a licensed profession, you need to get credentials renewed or, or need to take up additional study. And so these individuals oftentimes start their own businesses to be able to use the experiences that they’ve gained over a lifetime to be able to do the work that’s meaningful for them, and also probably to get paid at a decent rate. And, and so I think that there’s that also the drive saying I can’t find a way to integrate into the labor market. I will create my own path to do so.
Denzil Mohammed:
So what are some of the ways that we can address these issues? Let’s say let’s start at the federal level and then come down to the local level.
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. So, so Congress has recognized this issue. So I’m gonna give them pride upfront that they’ve recognized that this issue is something that that we need to focus on and they’ve proposed Democrats and Republicans. So it has been a bipartisan issue have proposed bills to be able to create a an immigrant visa and an immigrant status that people can adjust into if they’re already here and the visa will allow people to come here. But I think, you know, one of the key things that needs to be done is they just simply need to pass it. And I think that as much as I think that the, the, you know, that a comprehensive immigration reform bill, that addresses those multiple issues is the most ideal. I’m also being, you know, you have to be a little bit of a pragmatist and a realist and recognize that you may need to do reforms in a piecemeal fashion and and, and get the wins where you can get the bipartisan consensus where you can, and, and, and do that.
Cris Ramon:
At the municipal level, you are seeing cities really stepping up in, in some big ways to be able to provide technical assistance. And in some instances you know loan programs for minority owned businesses and immigrants. So you, you are seeing that there are the, these municipalities that are doing this. One of the interesting things in the conversations that I had with the experts on this, though, is that you, you wanna be able to, first of all you don’t wanna have services. And, and I didn’t really dive too deeply into this, into the report, but I can say this a little bit more now here. One of the things that somebody who works in the Mid-Atlantic city, he mentioned that one of the, one of the well intentioned efforts is to have a lot of funding to be able to provide technical services for minority potential minority business owners and immigrants.
Cris Ramon:
And that’s good naturally want the funding. The problem is that the funding actually started going into duplicative technical services that didn’t really adjust to the needs of the communities. It was just simply the same program. He literally almost said it’s basically almost like a copy and paste job, and, and that doesn’t benefit anybody. So one of the things that he said that municipalities really need to do is they do, you know, their services and, and see where they can try to re reduce redundancies and adjust the services to meet the actual needs of, of the, the individuals that they’re meant to serve. Another issue is obviously language services providing them in languages, and also recognizing that the immigrant populations are gonna shift. So just because you are providing languages language services and five languages in you know, 2018, that’s not to say that in 20, 22, the population hasn’t shifted.
Cris Ramon:
So that’s something else to consider. There’s trusted community navigators as a, that’s an important component of this is that you need to be able to reach out to the community and have the folks that people trust to be able to sort of do outreach to immigrant entrepreneurs and to know what their needs are and how you can access them. Some of these can be, you know a mayor who goes out and, and actually connects with the community with other members of important leaders in, in their communities, whether it’s police chiefs or, or representatives of chambers of commerce. But it can also be you know, nonprofits, chambers of commerce, community development corporations that can help you get a little bit more in the sense of what the actual needs are. I will say I will point to one interesting example of, I did think was really interesting in terms of particularly kind of doing this all well, is that you know, the, the city of Philadelphia ended up kind of canceling all these grants for these programs and actually just brought in, they had a common pot and they brought in consultants 10 99 experts who could provide targeted services depending on the needs of the community at any given time and pairing them up with individuals.
Cris Ramon:
Not only are they saving money because they don’t have to pay into healthcare or pensions, or what have you they’re able to bring in individuals that are targeted to specific needs and, and, and, and the needs, and the, the things that are important for these communities.
Denzil Mohammed:
Could you probably give us some cities that have been doing have been successful in building up the entrepreneurial capacity of the immigrant populations?
Cris Ramon:
St. Louis to me is actually something that’s just fascinating because and we mentioned this in, in our report, we highlight St. Louis. There’s just a high propensity of nonprofits that are doing very good and long standing work on providing immigrant entrepreneurs with technical services with loans and with just being able to connect with them. One organization that I’ve known about since at least 2012 is the mosaic Institute in St. Louis, Betsy Cohen, I think is the, the individual who works in that. And, and so she’s been doing groundbreaking work in this whole area for now, at least 10 years. You know, we mentioned the city of Chicago. I think one of the interesting things there is that you’ve been seeing the little village chamber of commerce. So that’s a community in Western Chicago that’s largely Latino.
Cris Ramon:
And, and they’ve, you’ve been seeing, you know, little village, the little village chamber of commerce the foundation of little village setting up some interesting programs. One is sort of a 12 week class for new and existing business owners that are offered in English and Spanish. There’s also the, the chamber of commerce is starting this project which is like a commercial cultural center that will actually have a business incubator. So individuals can start their own businesses and there will actually be a kitchen there to be able to allow food vendors to sell their items and learn from that. You know, we did mention Malden, Massachusetts you know, is one of those interesting examples where you did see the mayor really doing some great outreach work, largely under like a nonpartisan banner of say, we’re just gonna reach out to immigrant entrepreneurs, get secure support from all sectors of society to be able to support these individuals and doing it in, in, in, I think a non-political way, because sometimes you’ll see cities, municipality saying we’re a welcoming city.
Cris Ramon:
They’ll do that under the auspices of welcoming America, which is an amazing organization really appreciate their work, but they’ll say, oh, we’re a welcoming city, or they’ll pass policies, like say we’re a sanctuary city, which of course, there’s no definition of what a sanctuary city is, but they’re, they’re saying that to try to, you know whether or not it actually proves outcomes limit cooperation with immigration enforcement. There are these things that can symbolize that there there’s an openness, but I think molding Massachusetts is interesting because the mayor was deliberately non-political on this. And you can show that you can actually kind of approach this issue in a less, in a less polarizing way and, and get a community buy in, which is, I think is so vital to to ensuring that people feel secure and support
Denzil Mohammed:
At the local level. How do we move the needle on this? How do we, how do we spur some change so that we can foster the entrepreneurial capacity of immigrants in our communities, which is to obviously to everyone’s benefit
Cris Ramon:
These issues of competition for resources with other minority groups always comes up. And, and I, you know, I think there’s there’s feelings that are, are related to that, that, that people feel that, you know, this might be disadvantage. This might disadvantage minority business orders from other communities, but oftentimes minority business owners have immigrants in their in, in their ranks. So it’s, it’s not to say that it’s a competition for resources, but that I think is a, is a very real concern. So I think the first thing is just ensuring that, you know, municipalities nonprofits, community development corporations all are ensuring that, you know, minority business owners feel like they’re being supported and that they’re also that their needs are being met. And, and really acknowledging that. So people don’t feel like there’s a competition, even if there isn’t necessarily one just to ensure that that concern is addressed.
Cris Ramon:
And you know, what you see in cities and municipalities is sometimes they’ll just offer services for minority business owners. And that might be the assumption is that, you know, some immigrant immigrants might be incorporated into that minority group, because they’re already a large number of immigrants there. I think that’s one thing that’s incredibly important to build in that stakeholder relationship. I think another thing to consider too, is that, you know, whether it’s at the national level, the state level, the local level is trying to sort of delink immigration as an issue that is a single issue. You know, I think, and specifically related to the border, like I said, there’s, there’s, there’s a legitimate policy conversation to be had there. I, you know, I, I’m more critical of the politics around it, but I think in terms of effective policies, certainly there’s a discussion there to be had.
Cris Ramon:
I think though that when you’re talking about immigrant entrepreneurs, the thing is that you, you wanna, you know, it’s, it’s to say these are individuals who are here right now that are contributing to our communities. And they, they are a vital part of the, the economic and, and the community life here in, in, in these areas. And they think that you really need to be very intentional in understanding that you have to delink this, there are people who won’t at the end of the day, everybody, there will be people who you can’t change. There, there are views on this, but I do think that you are, if you’re able to at least get people to think through that immigration as an issue, whether it’s policy or political it isn’t just simply the border even though that’s natural default, so really being intentional to do this.
Cris Ramon:
And I think that as a part of that, and, you know, we go back to like said mold in Massachusetts is to really get a read on the community and how they view these issues. Particularly the non-immigrant individuals. You know, like I said, you know, it, it might be the case that in a very blue city stating that you’re a welcoming city or you’re you’re a sanctuary city might run a little bit better with some of the residents, but I do think that a depoliticized approach that doesn’t try to make this already a polarizing issue more. So I think with the issue around a sanctuary declaration, as opposed to the walking one, because I think welcoming America does good bipartisan work and works across the entire country. But I do think that kind of more hard line political stance on we’re, we’re here to protect immigrants from immigration enforcement and so forth.
Cris Ramon:
I don’t think that actually does anybody’s any, any favors in the end, especially if you’re dealing areas where people might have more I think complex viewers around immigration. So I think it’s more depoliticize it delink it from some other issues that make consensus very hard to find and, and ensuring that all community members feel like they can get services that they need. I think those are sort of three things that you can do to feel like to get people, to support these individuals already, if they’re not, you know, at least among the individuals who are worry about it and, but are willing to have a conversation to see if their minds can be changed.
Denzil Mohammed:
I love that idea of decoupling immigration immigrants are part of our community. So our neighbors they’re employers, they are workers. They’re our friends, they’re soccer players. So it’s not a separate issue from anything else in the community. It’s a community issue. It’s a economic issue. It’s a social issue. It’s not just an immigration issue. And I I’m, I’m glad that you, you made that that point. So Cris Ramon, immigration policy researcher, and analyst, and co-author of immigrant entrepreneurship, economic potential and obstacles to success. Thank you for joining us on the job makers podcast.
Cris Ramon:
Thank you so much. Appreciate the invitation
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thanks for joining us for this. Week’s look into how we can better grow our immigrant owned businesses for the benefit of all Americans. Remember, you can subscribe to Jobmakers on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Denzel Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another Jobmakers.
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SCOTUS Gun Stun: Bearing Arms in Summer Bruen Decision
/in Featured, Podcast Hubwonk /by Editorial StaffThis week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks with CATO Institute research fellow Trevor Burrus about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen and its implications for an individual’s right to carry a fire arm in states such as Massachusetts.
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Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. The second amendment of the United States constitution reads quote a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed deciding whether the right to bear arms was indeed a fundamental right, was the issue at hand in the recently decided Supreme court case of New York state rifle and pistol association versus Bruen the 6-3 majority held that while a licensing process may qualify and exclude certain applicants from firearm purchase possession and carry the state cannot require eligible applicants to demonstrate a special need to carry before being granted that fundamental, right? While this decision will have little impact on states, such as Vermont, that have very few limits on gun ownership, it will substantially disrupt the permitting process in shall issue states like Massachusetts, in which officials had reserved the prerogative to issue only to those with a special need to possess and carry.
Joe Selvaggi:
How does this case comport with the historical legal precedent of gun ownership in the United States and with the backdrop of recent school mass shootings and the tragedy of more than 40,000 us annual gun deaths all be the likely effects of a more permissive system on public safety. My guest today is Trevor Burrus, research fellow at Cato. Institute’s Robert A. Levy center for constitutional studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme court review. Mr. Burrus has written extensively on the history of gun policy in America and will share with us how the Bruin case fits with past Supreme court gun, right decisions, what impact the decision is likely to have on so-called may issue states like Massachusetts and how a more permissive gun regime may affect the rates of gun violence in the United States. When I return, I’ll be joined by Cato Institute research fellow, Trevor Burrus.
Joe Selvaggi:
Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk, I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by Cato Institute research fellow, Trevor Burrus. Welcome back to Hubwonk, Trevor, always a pleasure to be here. All right. So we’re getting near the end of the term of this Supreme Court term and some of the bigger decisions are coming down and we’re, we’re gonna be talking about the most recent decision just came down very recently. It’s being labeled the broad decision. What we’re gonna talk about our gun rights and laws restricting guns. This is an issue top of mind, independent of the decision largely because of both the tragic shooting eval de Texas, which we’ve all learned all the horrible details, but also in our country, we have more than 40,000 gun related deaths each year, and that number’s are rising. So it’s an issue that I think is top of mind for many of our listeners. So let’s, let’s start at the beginning. This decision just came down for our listeners. Tell us what are the facts in this particular case?
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, so the case is called New York state rifle and pistol association versus Bruen. And it came from sort of three plaintiffs, 1, 2, 2 individuals who wanted to geta carry permit in the state of New York and the association that they also belong to the New York state rifle and pistol association. Now New York is, is like six states that has a, what was called a may issue, carry law. So that meant in order to get a carry permit, you not only had to a pass the objective kind of stuff that is common to every state that issues permits, which is every state to some extent, which is, you know, safety training, shooting lessons, learning about the law of self defense, that kind of stuff. But you also had to demonstrate a particular subjective need for carrying a gun. So this was not a danger to you, and it had to be a danger to you specifically.
Trevor Burrus:
So in essence, you had to convince a bureaucrat. It was often like a local sheriff or sometimes a judge that you had a specific threat against you. And this allowed an amazing amount of discretion on the part of officials who essentially never granted these permits to people, except for really wealthy people who, who course often have bodyguards or the occasional person who, who was threatened specifically. So if you were a, you know, five foot woman who worked at a bar late at night, and every night, you had to walk home through a really dangerous neighborhood where muggings are quite common and you wanted to apply for one of these they, they would say no, hat question was actually asked of the New York solicitor general at oral argument would such a person apply. And they say, he said, no, that’s a generalized threat, not a specific threat.
Trevor Burrus:
So that’s how kind of onerous the restriction was. And what the court was asked to hear was whether or not that aspect of the discretionary permitting scheme was on constitutional and a six, three ruling written by justice, Clarence Thomas, they ruled that it was unconstitutional and were very specific to say that this was all, they were striking down discretionary permitting systems, where you have to show a particularized threat all the states that have permitting systems for carrying that are objective, that don’t have such criterion. Those were okay. And they went outta their way to say, that’s okay, this wasn’t about what type of guns can be banned or magazine restrictions or what kind of even people can be banned from having a gun. It was just about that. So you’ll hear a lot of sort of sky is falling as always happens when these gun cases come down. But this applies only to six states who will all then have to become like the other states that have had the, the shell issue, the objective test for carrying a gun.
Joe Selvaggi:
So Massachusetts is one of those six states that you mentioned. And so that’s why this is particularly relevant to our, our listeners. So I just wanna make sure and put some you know, finer point on what the point you made rather than let’s say we see our second amendment right to I’ll read it for our listeners a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. So in this case, one did not really have a right to as I would say, bear arms, one in a sense had to demonstrate a need to bear arms and a particular need to bear arms based on a a definable threat to one’s life. Is, is that what you’re saying
Trevor Burrus:
Precisely? And it’s important to realize there’s a lot of important language in the opinion that will apply to other gun restrictions. It’s important to realize, and this is one thing justice, Thomas went out of his way to point out, and he has in the past, how Abre this the way the second amendment is treated compared to other rights that are enumerated in the bill of rights. So they, I let’s say that there was a rule in some municipality that, you know, you could throw a protest or a rally but you had to first convince someone that what you were going to say was worth being said, because we all in first amendment law, we have a general rule that, you know, you can put limits on a protest or a rally that are called time place and manner restrictions that are kind of objective in the sense of, you know, you can only go between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM.
Trevor Burrus:
You can’t block traffic. This is how loud your speakers can be. All those have nothing to do with the content of the speech. But if you add another thing where, and the sheriff will determine whether or not, what you have to say is worth saying, it would be blatantly unconstitutional. It wouldn’t survive. The, the lowest court review it’d be struck down in a microsecond, but nevertheless, this restrictions were on the second amendment. Right. And so it’s very important that the court came in and said, we’re gonna treat the second amendment, like the other amendments in the constitution, like the first, or say the fourth where we’re gonna read it in terms of history and tradition and ask the question, is this the kind of regulation that the people who ratified the min would’ve been not okay with or okay. With, and we’re not gonna do these weird balancing tests. We’re gonna make the second amendment, not a second class. Right.
Joe Selvaggi:
So in other words, we don’t need to make the case for free speech. We don’t have to say my speech is worth speaking. We just are granted that right to speak though that it can be constrained in time and place and manner. All right. So let’s dive into the the opinion you said it was a six, three opinion. You already mentioned justice Thomas as being in the majority. What else do we know? I know this is a relatively recent decision. What else do we know about where the chips fell? Is it a classic right left or conservative, progressive divide. And if so, is there any disagreement amongst, let’s say the majority
Trevor Burrus:
It’s exactly what you’d expect. A six Republican appointed justices versus the three Democrat appointed justices, justice Breyer pinned the dissent. The whole thing is quite long. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion is over 60 pages long in all the, all the opinions are 135 pages. And it’s an interesting, so we did have we did have some concurrences from Justice Alito and justice Kavanaugh joined by the chief justice just to address some points that they wanted to be clear about in terms of what the decision was saying and what it wasn’t saying. Justice Alito wrote separately also to criticize justice Breyer’s dissent. I think very rightfully so, because Justice Breyer’s dissent, as he has wanted to do is essentially a policy brief which is not the way we should be deciding constitutional law questions. When the question is, what does the second amendment mean?
Trevor Burrus:
And so that was an interesting dissent from, or concurrence from Justice Alito. But in terms of the opinion, it’s what you’d expect from Justice Thomas, it’s a lot of originalist analysis of looking at what the history was in terms of how many laws were there, say in the founding era or perhaps in the reconstruction era when the 14th amendment was passed that regulated or prohibited people from carrying guns and going through the history of that and saying, you know, sometimes there were regulations that prohibited carrying of guns, but they, they usually said something like causing terror or mayhem. So it wasn’t, it was, it was, it was prohibited to carry a gun in a way that causes terror or mayhem. It didn’t just say it’s prohibited to carry a gun. And of course, you know, you could imagine in the American west in the 19th century, carrying guns was quite common.
Trevor Burrus:
And so the overview of the history gives for justice. Thomas says, no, this, this is not a longstanding or traditional prohibition. In addition to the fact, which is, must be first looked at that the second amendment says the right to keep and bear arms in the Heller case in 2008, when the court first decided that the second amendment conveys an individual, right, that was kind of about keep and in the now 14 years, since that decision we’ve been waiting on the meaning of bear. So this, this decision was also analyzing that term, what it meant what it meant to bear arms in the context of the second amendment. And since we already had decided in Heller that the second amendment is not necessarily tied to a militia, which was kind of the big question in that case the bear, the interpreting the word bear also, shouldn’t be tied to a militia like a militia, right?
Trevor Burrus:
It’s an individual, right. That people have presumptively. And yes, we could say that felons are not allowed to bear arms and other prohibited persons. And we could get into what the limits of this are. It’s not unlimited at all, but what it means is that for people, for guns that are in common use for self defense of which no one denied that handguns are such a gun then a law abiding person who can own that gun legally cannot be unduly prohibited from carrying that gun with sort of irrational or unconstitutional constraints on carrying.
Joe Selvaggi:
So you anticipated my couple of my future questions. I wanted get to Heller but I also wanna address the dissent. But I think it’s very important that you point out in the case that at the time of the Constitution’s ratification, you know gun ownership was fairly ubiquitous, right? That we like saying, you know, you have a right to have a dog. You know, it, it almost is unnecessary to, to, to enumerate, but nevertheless it is a fundamental, right. And it seems, again, we, I don’t wanna do all too much on Heller, but the militia clause seems also to be superfluous in so far as you can’t have a fundamental right, that ultimately if the government decides who’s in that militia, he, you don’t, that’s not your right. So if you only have a gun in the context of a militia and the government can restrict who’s in the militia it’s the opposite of a fundamental, right? It’s a, a granted right. Based on your participation in a government sanction organization, right?
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s important to remember too, like who the militia was at the time which was pretty much every able bodied male between 18 and 64 or even 16 and 64. And also that they had just won a war against the British, that very much depended upon citizen soldiers and never forget what the first action, the first battle of that war was at Lexington and Concord, which was the British deciding to go get the guns. And that’s what caused the war to break out. So there was no, there’s really no questioning that the, what was on the minds of the framers and the ratifiers of the second amendment. And one of the reasons we didn’t see a second amendment case for a very long time. There’s a lot of ones, but one of ’em is, is that gun ownership was broad.
Trevor Burrus:
It was, it was sort of not divided between red and blue states and people in state protection of right to keep and bear arms was pretty robust. And so there was really no need to start going after suing about gun rights until around the 20th century. I mean, there were different sort of state based examples, but federally suing about gun rights. Like wasn’t a, wasn’t really allowed, but there was no real need to do that until gun restrictions started coming in, especially federal ones. And we didn’t have a federal gun law until 1934. So all of this is fairly new and, and would be kind of strange to the framers.
Joe Selvaggi:
So if, but let’s say our let’s say Democrat appointed judges tend to take a more creative view of the constitution and perhaps weight less, the original intent and more towards sort of the practical consequences. So let’s talk about the dissenting opinion. I don’t know if you’ve had time to read that, but what is the essence of why, what would we seem to be in violent agreement of why this decision to bear arms is comports with the meaning of the constitution? What was the opinion of the dissenters?
Trevor Burrus:
Yes. Justice Breyer’s a very, very nice man. And he’s, he’s written some very, very good opinions. This is no last term on the court to be replaced by judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. But he, I mean, and sometimes he doesn’t act like a judge. And I would say his dissenting opinion is not really acting like a judge because it’s a policy brief and it’s very important for some judges. So they say, you know, the, the, there are things, you know, there’s decisions that are made by legislators about whether or not this should be the policy, or this should be a policy. And that’s and judges make different types of decisions is what is the law? What is the constitution to say? The second amendment by itself by being in the constitution is saying that it’s putting gun rights above the costs of gun ownership, which of course, they, they knew at the time that guns could be used for mayhem and violence, but they decided to say, this is how we’re balancing this guns, gun rights, go above the cost of having guns.
Trevor Burrus:
They did the same thing with the first amendment. They said that that political speech, which can be harmful and other types of speech that can be harmful. We’re putting that above the regulation or that speech, or when they give rights to accused criminals in the bill of rights. We’re saying we’re putting these rights where they could even get out of jail, or they could go away. Scott free if we give them rights. So there’s cost to these rights or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This, you know, hampers law enforcement, it might be easier to catch criminals if they couldn’t enforce these, right? So these rights have costs and what the judge should be doing, or what a justice should be doing is trying to interpret the constitution and say, what does this mean? Justice Breyer is just saying, here’s how many people died of guns here?
Trevor Burrus:
My here’s how many people died with suicides? Here’s how many people mass shootings there were. And I am not diminishing that at all. Like, it’s very seriously. We could talk about what policies I think could affect positively the rates of gun deaths in the country, but in terms of his job to make a judicial decision based on this, and also to bring in, I mean, there’s a lot of misstatement of facts in his opinion, but there’s also things that are completely irrelevant. He asks for a trial, he says, this should have been decided with a good record, where we had a good data about how this law works and how many acts of violence it prevents. Well, if that trial would’ve occurred, his entire opinion, would’ve been essentially nullified because bringing up suicides, which are two thirds of gun deaths and her serious problem, but, but what does this law that allows someone to that had only allowed someone to carry a weapon outside their home?
Trevor Burrus:
If some officials said that they had a particularized threat against them, what does it have anything to do with suicide whatsoever? And it’s just sort of head scratching. Gun accidents is another thing he brings up. And another thing that this law would be completely irrelevant toward. And so his opinion, yeah, it reads like the something who was, if he were a legislator, it’s the reasons why he would vote against a, a may issue, a, a shell issue law for caring like that. That’s what that he, if he was a legislator and he could, you know, retire from the court and join the New York state legislator, maybe not, he’s probably not a citizen of New York, but he joins a legislator. And then he can decide whether he likes the law or not like the law. He clearly doesn’t like this law and he thinks it causes harm, but it’s not his job as a justice to, to make decisions on such basis. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve been told by some of the justices appointed by Republicans, you know, that they say, you know, I don’t, it’s not my job to review policy in, in many of these cases, I don’t want a policy brief. I don’t want you to tell me, you know, all these things, it’s my job to interpret the constitution. The policy of keeping bearing arms was chosen by the framers. And now we have to figure out what it means.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. I, you know, I’m, I’m not an attorney. I know you that you are. But I do try to think deeply about this to me, the notion of a judge sort of interpreting the law or reading it as it is it, for my money, it has to be that way otherwise, what does it mean to be a good judge? If not that you understand and apply the law, as it’s written, as you say, you’re either a legislator or sort a super legislator or you’re, you know, a, a star chamber of wise men that sort of are hired, I suppose, or chosen because you have opinion the right opinions rather than the wisdom to apply the law as it’s written.
Trevor Burrus:
Yeah, every, every judge should be asked, every judge gets nominated for a state, or especially if federal court should be asked the question, tell me a law that you think is constitutional, that you think is a bad idea. And tell me a law that you think is unconstitutional that you think is a good idea, because if you can’t make a distinction between your policy preferences and your interpretation of the constitution, then you don’t really believe in constitutions. You believe in your policy preferences as the law of the land. And unfortunately, again, I like justice Bres and me he’s written some many good opinions, but too many times justice Breer is behaving as a legislator who cannot separate the fact that he doesn’t like peep guns in private hands, comparatively speaking to the interpretation of the second amendment, like, and there are people out there, unfortunately, people are generally bad at separating their policy preferences from their constitutional interpretation, but someone like AKI, Lamar, who’s one of the great constitutional law scholars in the country at Yale. He explicitly says, I don’t like guns. I don’t think they should be as what broadly owned and used as they are in America. But the second amendment definitely protects that. So he’s able to separate his policy preferences and his constitutional interpretation. And I just wish there were more of that.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed, indeed. So we, I wanna sort of just address Heller one more time and say that, you know, in 2008, that was handed down and that was defined as you mentioned, the right to individually keep arms, not bear arms. Did you see this new ruling as necessary in other words was well obviously it was necessary if we had these owner’s laws in, in New York, but why doesn’t keep and bear mean the same thing, meaning I can keep it wherever I like. Why, why does bay mean I mean, was the essence of Heller to defend sort of home and, and hearth as opposed to oneself where everyone goes is, is that the spirit of the Heller decision?
Trevor Burrus:
Well, Heller was very strategic and, and my colleague Clark Neely was one of the attorneys who came up and litigated that case along with the know, my, my mentor, Dave Copel was an attorney who sat at the Supreme court table during oral argument. And it was strategic to try and get the court to do something that had never done before. And when you try to do that, you’re going for a very narrow question for the court to answer a very narrow question, cuz that’s the way the court likes to, to do things. So you want, you first say, okay, interpret the meaning of the word keep. And they went after a DC’s extremely onerous regulation of all guns, especially handguns since 1976, that essentially made it impossible to have a gun. And if you could get a permit to get a gun, and this is just to have one in your house, it had to be essentially, you know taken apart and put in a different room.
Trevor Burrus:
So it made it functionally unusual. And so the, the court ruled there in a five to four decision that, that, that law, that completely onerous regulation essentially prohibiting the keeping of a gun in your house was unconstitutional. And since that time there hasn’t been another major gun decision until this, this one came down recently. So, and that, and there’s been a lot of attempts to try and get some regulate, some cases to the court, many of which I’ve been involved in about different things, because some, some lower courts I have been taking Heller and saying the only thing it applies to is a law that is similarly as restrictive as DC’s was and saying that’s Heller is limited to its facts. Pretty much any other gun regulation is fine, you know, and we, we, we went offer a bunch of ’em like for example, there was, we almost got a case taking a very narrow question of California’s 10 day waiting period to buy a gun as applied to people who already own guns.
Trevor Burrus:
We were trying to get them like, tell me a reason why that would make any sense whatsoever. You own 50 guns in every, when you buy the 51st, you have to wait 10 days. And, and that, and the court didn’t take that there was a dissent from justice Thomas and the court not taking that case, but that’s the kind of cases that were trying to be brought to get a little bit more meat on the bones of the Heller decision, which has sort of a famous paragraph in it that explains that it’s not undercutting or overturning a bunch of existing gun regulations. And so today, not only did the court rightfully strike down this carry provision, but it did, it went kind of above and beyond to clarify more than it needed to kind of our brief in the case, CAS brief in the case, asked them to do this. And they followed, they followed us and others other briefs saying, you know, definitely strike this down, but also clarify Heller and the second amendment and how low court are supposed to interpret the second amendment and give them some guidance on that when other gun restrictions come up. And so that now it’s this history tradition test, which we’ve been pushing for rather than some balancing test that is very judge empowering and has let judges uphold many, many gun restrictions.
Joe Selvaggi:
So that’s a perfect segue to my next question. This is a a federal case. We have 50 states and some broad range of restrictions from New York to our, our neighbor we’re I’m in Massachusetts, our neighbor to the north. I think Vermont has almost no constraints, no laws limiting gun use usage or ownership. So wide range, we are closer to New York than, than Massachusetts than than Vermont. As far as our laws, how much does this I guess we’ll talk about the 14th amendment, how much do does a the federal ruling have an impact on the prerogatives of state state’s rights?
Trevor Burrus:
It’s gonna be interesting to see now. I mean, first off all the six may issue states, you know, they’re all in the same boat as New York, and none of those restrictions are constitutional about, but what we’ve seen in cities’ district of Columbia most recently, where they’ve actually had their may issue provision joined since 2017, we’ve seen them try and do as much as they can to keep gun ownership to a minimum and especially carry permitting. And so expect more of this from states like New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York Illinois Hawaii. So expect California. So expect more of this in the sense that, that the legislators of those states will go back to the drawing board and say, all right, we’re gonna have object. We’re gonna have an objective criteria test because the Supreme court says we have to have a shell issue thing, but we’re gonna require 27 hours of shooting classes, three days of classes on the law of self defense five days on, I don’t know, triage medicine for gunshot victim, just some very, very long list of things and say, you know, there’s no longer a subjective component to this.
Trevor Burrus:
There’s no may issue part of this. If you do, you know, all of these things, and it probably costs a few thousand dollars, you can totally carry a gun. And then we’ll be like back to the courts and say, no that, you know, try and get courts to be like, this is unreasonable. This is not how things worked. And so there’ll be of course, much more litigation in, in the future about these things and other regulations not related to carrying what kind of guns can be banned in different states and what kind of, you know, magazine restrictions, things like this. But we now have a clearer test for the lower courts to imply when, when applying it to any gun regulation whatsoever. And so what we’ll we’ll have to see but I think it will be better in terms of gun rights in the future than it is, but do expect these states to do everything they can to, to try and undercut the ruling in a practical sense.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes, I, I, I’ve heard let’s say pros restriction advocates compare owning a gun to, let’s say, driving a car, you know, licensing at what point does the licensing requirement, if we wanna call the sort of a regime of, of, of guiding who can you know, what, what it takes to own a gun in, in Massachusetts, can you make it so expensive? So honors, so time sent, you know, 30 months you know, and $30,000 and, and you know a thousand dollars renewal license, you know, something that has the effect of, of limiting guns, where does it enter into the realm of unconstitutional constraint?
Trevor Burrus:
I think now sooner than before, you know, like it in terms of what you could do it’s, it’s sooner now that, but again, you’re gonna hear a lot of chicken, little sky is falling. I’ve already seen it on Twitter. This is a radical opinion. It’s not a radical opinion at all. It means it, it interpreted the word bear in the second amendment to mean the word bear. And so, but going forward, like, it’s, we will have, there’s still many, many regulations the states can put on guns. And even from my point of view, things that I think are constitutional that even under my interpretation of second amendment, I may not think they’re a good idea. But I think they’re probably constitutional take magazine restrictions. I think you could probably go to like 10 round magazine restrictions, even though maybe 15 maybe let’s say 20 let’s I’ll go to 2020 is let’s say they could ban all magazines above 20 rounds.
Trevor Burrus:
Well, the question in the second amendment, the, the philosophical question is what it does is it protects a preexisting, right? To self-defense a natural right to self-defense, that’s what it does. And when you interpret it, you go, okay. So what does that entail? What it entails effective means to self defense. That’s what, that’s, what the, and in the same way that the first event protects a preexisting, right? To speak your mind that you have as a, as a human being what does it entail then? Well, it entails effective means of communication. So that means that you can start a radio station and you can buy pins and paper, and you can print books and you can do all these things that if they start banning printing paper, or they put a tax on paper that is a thousand dollars a page it’s an onerous regulation of, of speech.
Trevor Burrus:
And so similar when we think about a magazine restriction, does a, does a 20 round magazine restriction really impair the right to self defense, not, not a huge amount, I’ll admit. So that’s probably constitutional under my interpretation. I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I, I think it would be extremely difficult and bad. It wouldn’t do much for gun violence, and there’s a lot of 30 round magazines out there. And you don’t wanna turn all those people into felons overnight, but is it constitutional? Hmm, I’ll go with, yes. Other things like background checks different people who are prohibited from a owning a firearm, different places where you can’t bring a firearm. Those are, those are many of those could be constitutional too. So this is not in any way saying that there’s no room for regulation. It just means that we have to look at the second amendment, like seriously as serious constitutional scholars and intellectuals, and read the words and say, what does it protect?
Trevor Burrus:
And what did they choose in night, 1791 to protect. And I think that they chose essentially that people were allowed to have the kind of guns that are in common used for self defense that are used by both the government and the people. So like I would argue that an, an assault weapon quote, unquote, assault weapon is in common used for self defense. But an assault weapon with a hundred round magazine, probably not a 50 callable sniper rifle. You know, that could be an interesting question if that ever came up to the court rocket propelled grenade, launcher I mean, pretty good for self defense, but it’s kind of other bunch of other problems to it, a tank. Well, that one’s easy. People always say, oh, Trevor, you know, why can’t you just own a tank? Well, if we’re interpreting the second amendment, you can’t bear a tank, so that’s not really applied. So, so that’s the kind of questions we have going forward. And it’ll be much clearer, thankfully, cuz I’ve been beating my head against low court opinions that just made no sense for too long. So we’ll see where they go next.
Joe Selvaggi:
What about, what does this imply for here, Massachusetts? It’s actually the chief of police who grants these sort of licenses and says, okay, you, you, you can have one or you can have a gun and you can’t, which creates this interesting patchwork, which I would imagine is sort of, it’s an uneven application of the law regarding a fundamental, right. But also it makes it easy to run a foul. If I’m bearing my weapon and driving from one town to another, I may run a foul of, of some sort of, you know, town level limit. Will this have any bearing on a state like Massachusetts?
Trevor Burrus:
It should those kind of restrictions, you know, now you’re applying things where other provisions of constitutional law, like how much leeway does the state or municipality have in sort of creating felonies of which people are not aware. And like can’t be aware and suddenly become felons. I think that that’s an under, under theorized, but increasingly important part of constitutional law. And then of course, when you have that in a second amendment context then it’s a different question because we’ll think about this way, like the state could, let’s just say this microphone that I’m speaking into the state to tomorrow made it a felony to own one and you’d be, and, and this would seem to have some problems to it with all these people who just became felons. So yeah, there could be many different constraints, you know, ultimately as you’d hope that Massachusetts would try and rectify this stuff between the municipalities. So they aren’t creating felons out of nowhere, but in, in my experience, gun controllers are not terribly sympathetic to people who suddenly become felons and who are completely law abiding gun owners. So but so this is a good chance for people in Massachusetts to speak to their legislator and say, Hey, don’t make me a felon for no good reason.
Joe Selvaggi:
Right? So let’s, let’s move away from this, the constitutional issue. And I know that’s where your expertise lies, but you also have some expertise in sort of imagining a world where there’s say fewer gun deaths. We all wish for that. Let’s just think about the fact that there’s, I think more than 40,000 gun related deaths in the United States that number’s going up also there’s 400 million guns in the United States. So what would you say to those people who see this correlation if they infer causation by this correlation, meaning lots of guns means lots of gun deaths. What would you say to those folks?
Trevor Burrus:
Well, I totally understand. I mean, first of all, I think that gun rights supporters are often sort of flippant about gun deaths in a way that is not good from both humanity standpoint or a messaging standpoint. I understand the desire to do something. I just wish that we spent more time looking at where the actual majority of gun deaths are, who is dying, what guns are being used. Instead we play political theater all the time because it’s basically gun policy is a huge partisan signaling device as you’re well aware. But you know, first thing is to understand the gun deaths and where they are coming from. So two thirds are suicides. As I mentioned before, this fact is rarely brought up, but one things that you need to pay attention, if you’re a, you know, astute political observer is anytime the New York times or V or anyone talks about gun deaths versus the amount of guns pay attention to whether or not they’re using the word gun deaths versus gun homicides like interpersonal gun victimization, because there is no correlation internationally or in the states between the number of guns and the number of interpersonal gun shootings.
Trevor Burrus:
It’s a complete random scatter shop plot. If you try to put plot those things, nor is there internationally, you could go to a place like Ireland, which seems to have we don’t, we never, it’s hard to figure out how many guns there are, but Ireland seems to have about half as many guns as Germany. And it has about double the homicide rate. And it’s just a scatter shot plot all over the place. But if you bring in suicides and now you call ’em gun deaths, you will see a correlation between the number of guns and the number of gun deaths because of suicides. And that makes sense to some extent, because if you don’t have a gun, you can’t commit a suicide by gun. And so one, one thing we should be doing is looking at suicides very strongly, especially for men between the ages of 25 and 64, which is the huge amount of those gun suicides and understanding that literally no policy that’s gets discussed all the time would have any effect on it.
Trevor Burrus:
Magazine restrictions, banning AR fifteens and assault weapons. People are not shooting themselves with these you know, maybe waiting periods that we could talk about that there’s some data on that, but background checks probably not. So this is, this is where the confrontation should be. And also pistols are killing the majority of people in homicides especially inner city, black youth like connected to the drug war. And so my frustration is always having a conversation that is bigger than guns. Sometimes I joke and say, you know, like they, the gun controllers like to say, oh, gun rights supporters are obsessed with guns. And I say, well, it seems to me that you are obsessed with guns because the number one thing that you wanna talk about when you have a mass shooting when you have new numbers on homicides is the gun and not, you know, mental health, not policing, not the drug war, not the question of why people are killing or doing mass shootings but just whatever gun it was.
Trevor Burrus:
And you’d think that like, you know, if you talked to Diane Feinstein and you’d said, here’s a magic button and you can eliminate, you know, one type of gun just entire like a puff and a puff evaporations disappears that she’d press it to eliminate assault weapons, which would be irresponsible to say the least in many, many different ways from her own, from her own point of view. I remember when Elizabeth Warren was running for president still, she had put out a, I think 32 point comprehensive plan to reduce gun deaths by 80%. And only one of those had anything to do with suicide. I mean, and that’s just cuz you could you, if she eliminated every homicide, she’d only eliminate 30% of gun deaths, like 33% of gun deaths. So she couldn’t even get close to 80% without addressing suicide. And so that’s the, that’s the thing that frustrates me a, they talk about they conflate homicides and suicides and talk about the same policies to address both, which if, obviously that’s not true, very different policies to address homicides and suicides.
Trevor Burrus:
And B you just start talking about which gun like which guns are actually killing the most people cuz sometimes the totality of the wisdom of many gun controller’s policies is if they found out that last year, you know, 50% of gun deaths were with black guns and then they ban black guns and they think that next year there’ll be 50%, fewer, fewer deaths. And of course that’s not going to happen because brown guns are readily available. And for most times people use guns for most of the things it will suffice just as well as a black gun. So really it’s just about having a serious conversation and I, again, around where most of the gun deaths are occurring and not just focusing on the gun.
Joe Selvaggi:
So I’m already seeing, you know, over my, my newsfeed graphs that show a relationship between the number of deaths gun deaths, as you say, and the most restrictive states, the states that, you know, the six or seven that we’ve mentioned in this podcast is having the most restrictive gun related deaths. If, if I, I just wanna put a finer point on your argument, if you were to factor out there, there clearly seems to be correlation between gun deaths and gun regulation, but taking out the suicide, the two thirds of the gun deaths that are suicide and just talking about violent deaths, homicides, it would be a scatter shot. All 50 states would fall about equal regardless of their gun laws. So that this is essentially lining with statistics,
Trevor Burrus:
Right? Yeah. And it’s highly concentrated. You know, I said the gun, the drug war creates situations that engender violence when you have those SP of shootings in Chicago or Baltimore, Philadelphia, you know, which are exceptionally violent cities and have strict gun control laws. If you, if you have these spade of shootings, when they say, you know, 12 people died over the weekend, it’s often this back and forth where it’s like, oh, he killed my guy cuz they were fighting over a drug corner. So we wouldn’t kill one of their guys and they wouldn’t kill one of our guys. And so that’s why you have this common waves. So again, the drug war would do more. Any of the drug war would do more to mitigate interpersonal gun violence than any gun law you could feasibly imagine passing. And as you pointed out 400 million guns in the country, I, I often ask, you know, that when I give lectures and stuff, I ask this question of one who is disgusted by guns.
Trevor Burrus:
And depending on the group, like often student groups, a lot of people raise their hands and say, I am disgusted by guns. Okay. I get that. You don’t want one. You don’t like being around them. You’ve never really been around them. That’s fine. You probably shouldn’t make policy off of disgust. But but that’s fine. And then the second question is who here thinks that like a more civilized society will have fewer guns in private hands, in like a star Trek kind of way where everyone’s saying, oh, remember how violent we were 200 years ago. And then we evolved. And a lot of people say yes to that. And I get that too. But here’s the thing not gonna happen, just not gonna happen. Like you could take, you could eliminate 50% of guns in America. You still have 200 million guns. It’s just unrealistic. And so again, the, the conversations are much more about signaling and posturing than they are about actually doing something that could, could make a difference.
Joe Selvaggi:
If we’re going down this road towards talking about, you know, common arguments for restrictions, one of the common arguments for a gun advocacy is that the best thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And, and a lot of people have challenged that statement in that, you know, good guys with the guns will, I don’t even need to talk about Aldi. There was a theoretically, a professional good guy with a gun who stood by and did nothing. So it’s not, it may be necessary, but certainly not sufficient in many cases. But what do we have for statistics? Do, do good guys with guns, stop crime. Do you have that data or do we have even, oh yeah.
Trevor Burrus:
Oh yeah. They, they really do. When I first got into this, I, I’m not a big gun person myself. I didn’t even own a gun until about five years ago, but I’ve been doing this policy area for, for over a decade. And when I first got into it, I was doing research for Dave Copel and I was sort of astounded that the, the reasonable guess for how many times people defend themselves a gun a year guns a year, a conservative guess is a million. A, a one that is aside in the opinion is 2.5 million. There’s a lot of studies that they all kind of come up between one and 2 million. So let’s just say one and a half million. And when I first learned that I was stunned, cuz you’d think you’d hear about it more. Well, not necessarily cuz people who do that often, maybe not allowed to have the gun themselves, which is a different issue, but they still might be defend themselves.
Trevor Burrus:
And most of the time when someone defends themselves with a gun, they don’t fire it. Which is one of the big virtues of this. They, they just show the gun and then that dissuades crime. And we know that criminals think about where guns will be and whether or not someone will have guns when they commit a crime. And we could just, you know, we, we have it from surveys. We have it from data. Imagine if we took a given 10,000 person town and I, I brought 5,000 guns and I gave it to a random assortment of houses and said, all right, half the houses now in this town have guns. Okay. Criminals will this affect their behavior? And yes, it absolutely will affect their behavior. So there you have positive externalities of gun ownership. There’s also also of course, negative externalities. So yeah, that’s we do know and it’s, it’s a shockingly high number that cannot be downplayed.
Trevor Burrus:
That’s one thing I think is very important here from the gun control point of view, when you bring up how many times people defend themselves with guns a year, they don’t like this fact. And I know why I understand. They think it’s encouraging and endorsing a wild west mentality. They think it’s uncivilized to have that many people defending themselves with guns a year. They think the only reason they’re defending themselves with guns is because the criminals have guns to like the guns of the whole problem. But of course, most say robberies in this country are not committed with a gun. They’re mostly committed with knives and strong arm tactics. So they don’t like it. And I get it, but if you’re not gonna be, you know, if you’re gonna be talking about abolishing the police or defunding the police or how much you hate cops or all this kind of stuff.
Trevor Burrus:
And look, I have many, many problems with cops, but if you’re gonna be doing that and saying, you know, we’re gonna take away the cops money and resources to defend you and take away your ability to defend yourself. You’d you better choose one, at least on those things and, and great. I agree. It’d be nice to have, you know, fewer cops kicking down doors, you know, executing search warrants on drug offenders and more people just armed and protecting themselves in a responsible law abiding way. That’s, that’s fine with me. Other people may have a different view, but again, let’s approach the real world and the constitution as it is and not some sort of Star Trek fantasy.
Joe Selvaggi:
So we’re running out of time. You you’ve been very generous with your time. I just wanna then you, you alluded to this fact early in the top of the show that you have some ideas for reducing a gun desk, gun violence. I hope our listeners are unanimous in their desire to want to reduce gun violence and gun death. So let’s say you’re king for day. And we wanna honor the constitution as well. So we wanna, it wants to pass muster with the constitution. What do you think would be effective in reducing gun deaths and you know, all the things we all talk about, these red flag laws and, you know, mental health, give us a laundry list of where you’d like to see our efforts constructively applied to reducing gun death.
Trevor Burrus:
Well, I mentioned one in the drug war and I probably sound like a libertarian broken record and I work on drug war issues extensively, but it’s, it would be the number one thing. And then the next one is suicide and there we’re gonna have to be very careful, but very, very caring about this. Most people who ever commit suicide and survive a suicide attempt, regret it. Now most people who commit suicide with a gun don’t survive it. Those decisions are often rash and instantaneous, but also most people who commit suicide reach out to someone in the weeks or months before they do this. And that’s the point where as community, as friends as loved ones not so much as, as law enforcement, I would say. But people, when you say, Hey, you know, I know you’re super depressed and you own a bunch of guns.
Trevor Burrus:
Can I just keep those for a bit with the red flag laws, those have some possibilities of flagging or identifying shooters but at the same time they could dissuade people from seeking mental health which is really bad. We have some data that that’s what happened with veterans which is very bad because again, gun suicide is, is most of the gun deaths. So focus on those two things. There are other things that may make a difference safe storage laws seem to in one study, make a difference. If you have people stealing guns or someone like the killer in Sandy hook who, you know, took his mom’s guns, but if they were locked up and he didn’t know the combination that could have done something and it’s possible that waiting periods could do something a little bit for suicide, but we still need be better data on that. And those need to be well constructed and sensibly constructed. So yeah, there are things that can be done if we are thinking about it correctly.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. So again, we’re coming to the end of our show. I, I wanna, again, I know you’re a, I dunno if you’re an amateur or professional philosopher, but I wanna get to this sort of, this, this gun issue setting aside the, the, the statistics of how many people die at the hand of hands of guns. I think it reveals more about our society than merely our, a view of guns. And what I’m referring to is that two fundamental views of what a government is here for and a divide right down the middle. It seems that we either see the government’s role as keeping us safe, presumably from ourselves and others, or keeping us free, which is free from coercive power including that of the government. Do you see this sort of being as much a symbolic question, gun control as it is a, a practical or legal question
Trevor Burrus:
It’s definitely in the more symbolic thing, it, it kind of depends upon which side you’re talking about because some groups flip on one thing and, and they’re not consistent. I mean, as a libertarian, I try and be consistent, but so you know, the gun rights supporters maybe tend to be more anti-immigration because they think that immigrants are making us less safe. And there’s a very big commonality between how pro immigrant anti-immigrant and anti-gun arguments are very similar. And both of them feel like both of these sides feel like that something is making the country less safe and in some sense, like polluting it. I do think that the, the gun control people think that guns are like a pollutant, which is why they don’t want them on say college campuses, even if they’re innocuous, because it’s something it’s like stinking up the joint.
Trevor Burrus:
And of course, people who are anti-immigrant often have similar types of attitudes also anti-immigrant and anti-gun people tend to believe wrongly that there are like no gun laws in the country, and you can just buy a machine gun at Walmart, which is laughably false or B there’s like no immigration laws and, and everyone can just come in and we have open borders. So, so the question of what is making you feel less safe or less free is I think often contingent upon partisan BS and a bunch of stuff like that. But I do think it does when people don’t feel like they’re in control and it’s super wild out there. And, and when it comes to guns, you know, we have this very big problem that, you know, at least half of Americans, if you ask them, was America more dangerous 20 years ago, they’ll say, no, and this is really wrong.
Trevor Burrus:
Most people don’t know that gun violence has precipitously declined since 1992. It has uptick the last two years, but it’s still at about 1968 levels. And so if people don’t know that because these often these high profile shootings, they just think it’s a complete mad house out there. Well, I invite them to go to New York in 1982 and, you know, walk around and see how safe they feel. So, so knowing, you know, what, what you should be afraid of, and I’ll tell you, it’s not immigrants or guns would be important to this kind of distinction you’re talking about.
Joe Selvaggi:
Wonderful. Well, okay. That’s a great way to end our show. I think, you know those in our audience who, or, or in our country who feel some level of discontent, it’s easy to use the the government as our object of our scorn depending where you stand it’s either because it’s too big or because it’s too small it makes a great scapegoat for, for everyone. So thank you very much for joining me, Trevor. I think we’ve gone deep on this subject. It’s hot off the presses, and I appreciate you. You making yourself available,
Trevor Burrus:
Always a pleasure to be here.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. If you enjoy today’s episode, there are several ways to support the show. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to hub won on your iTunes podcaster, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find Hubwonk. It’s great. If you offer a five star rating or offer a favor review, we’re always grateful. If you wanna share Hubwonk with friends, if you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
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Emigration from Massachusetts is at a Decade High, Despite Booming Economy and High Standard of Living
/in Better Government, Blog, Blog: Better Government, Blog: Economy, Blog: Transparency, Featured, News, Transparency /by Joseph StaruskiMassachusetts has among the highest standards of living in the US and the economy is booming, so why are people leaving? In 2020, the state lost thousands of residents to states like Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Related: Get Pioneer’s new book, Back to Massachusetts? How the proposed constitutional tax amendment would upend one of the best economies in the nation.
In 2020, Massachusetts had a net loss of over 20,000 residents and about $2.6 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) to other states, according to IRS data made available by the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery tool. The IRS tracks the changes based on the income tax returns Americans file every year.
The biggest destination states in 2020 were Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine, which all received significant net migration from Massachusetts. Net migration to New Hampshire was 5,922 people, Florida received 4,306 people, and Maine welcomed 2,315.
Figure 1: A map of the United States showing the net flow of AGI dollars in 2020 from Massachusetts to each other state respectively. Florida and New Hampshire receive the highest AGI amounts from Massachusetts and New York sends the most AGI dollars to Massachusetts. The map was generated using the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery Tool.
These emigrants (people moving from MA) took their salaries with them. Florida received the most AGI dollars with $955 million. New Hampshire received $870 million in AGI, and Maine received $327 million.
The Discovery Tool also shows the average AGI for people who moved from MA. The astounding fact about these numbers is that the average net AGI per migrant to Florida is about $133,000. New Hampshire’s average is $109,000, and Maine’s is $110,000. The average AGI numbers are significantly higher than the MA median household income of $84,000 (US Census, 2020). This shows that Massachusetts’ emigrants to Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine have significantly above-average incomes.
The majority of the inflow of salary dollars (about 64 percent) from New York State come from New York County, better known as Manhattan. The average person moving from New York State to Massachusetts has a salary of $117,000, which is one of the highest averages of any state sending people to Massachusetts. The Commonwealth also received far more net AGI from New York than any other state at $570 million (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: A chart showing the net flow of AGI in 2020 to each state respectively (left) and the net flow of taxpayers to each state respectively (right). The chart was generated using the Pioneer Institute’s IRS Data Discovery Tool.
Complete the form below to download a FREE excerpt from “Back to Taxachusetts?”
More Emigration than Ever
Massachusetts has not had a net inflow of domestic migrants for any year available on the Data Discovery website, which has records as far back as 1993. The only other years when net migration outflow was above 20,000 people were 2004, 2005, and 2017. Notably, those were also years when Massachusetts had a very prosperous economy.
Since 2015, AGI outflow to Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine at least doubled, while inflow stayed steady. That shows that the high level of outflow from Massachusetts is a relatively new phenomenon that has appeared over the past five years.
Why Some People Are Leaving
Massachusetts has the best schools, healthcare, and quality of life of any state in the country. So why would someone want to leave? It might be taxes, high cost of living, the ability to work remotely, or personal preference (including politics, climate, etc).
It is no secret that the cost of living in Massachusetts has been increasing dramatically. The World Population Review ranks Massachusetts as the state with the fourth highest cost of living. Massachusetts is also ranked as the third most expensive state in which to buy a house.
Additionally, remote work has become a new reality for many Massachusetts employees. It is now possible to earn a salary in Massachusetts while living in New Hampshire. Remote work may explain why New Hampshire is such a popular destination for Massachusetts emigrants.
Taxes are likely to be one other factor for people moving from one state to another. Is it a coincidence that Florida and New Hampshire both have zero personal income tax? In a recent press release, the Pioneer Institute Executive Director, Jim Stergios said “Massachusetts is hemorrhaging money and talent to low-tax states.”
Tax Policy Changes
Emigration from Massachusetts might actually reflect that the economy is doing really well! Most people are still willing to pay the high cost of living to stay, and income tax revenues for 2022 show that the economy is strong. Nevertheless, the state should take action to mitigate the impacts of emigration through tax policy changes.
One major policy change Massachusetts enacted in 2021 was to tax the incomes of people working in Massachusetts even if they are not residents. This includes people moving to New Hampshire who still work in Massachusetts. New Hampshire objected to this tax policy and brought it to the Supreme Court, where it was rejected.
Massachusetts is also about to hold a statewide vote to increase taxes on people earning over $1 million in a single year. Pioneer recently put out a number of publications on how the tax increase could hurt the economy and have an unintended impact on small business owners and retirees (the publications include a book, a podcast, and a video interview). The state should avoid increasing such taxes to make the state more competitive, especially at a time when income tax revenues are at an all-time high.
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Cover Image Credit: formulanone, published on Wikipedia at the link here.
About the Author: Joseph Staruski is a government transparency intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is currently a Master of Public Policy Student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was previously an opinions columnist with the Boston College student newspaper, The Heights, and an Intern with the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. He has a BA in Philosophy and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Haverford College. Feel free to reach out via email, LinkedIn, or write a letter to Pioneer’s Office in Boston.
Cris Ramón on How to Build Up Immigrant Businesses
/in Economic Opportunity, Featured, JobMakers /by Editorial StaffThis week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Cris Ramón, son of immigrants from El Salvador, immigration policy analyst, and coauthor of the new report, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Economic Potential and Obstacles to Success published by the Bipartisan Policy Center. For the report, he scoured the nation to learn not only what immigrant entrepreneurs need, but what municipalities and the federal government can do, to help build up these businesses. The report shows that immigrants are primed to take risks due to their willingness to move to the United States, but politicians aren’t doing much to facilitate that entrepreneurial spirit. The report offers case studies, recommendations, and stories that demonstrate the value and impact immigrant business owners can bring, as you’ll learn in this week’s JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammad and welcome to a special edition of Jobmakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
If you haven’t heard me say it yet, you haven’t been listening. Immigrants are twice as likely than average to start a business here in the us. And these businesses are having real local and national impact, but the reception to these business owners is uneven. And there are many municipalities that can learn from places that actively and authentically engaged with their newest residents and helped build up their entrepreneurial capacity to the benefit of all residents for Cris Ramon, son of immigrants from El Salvador, immigration policy analyst, and coauthor of the new report, immigrant entrepreneurship, economic potential, and obstacles to success published bipartisan policy center. He scoured the nation to learn not only what immigrant entrepreneurs need, but what municipalities and the federal government can do to help build up these businesses. The report shows that immigrants are primed to take risks due to their willingness to move to the United States. But politicians aren’t doing much to facilitate that entrepreneurial spirit. The report offers case studies recommendations and stories that demonstrate the value and impact immigrant business owners can bring, as you learn in this week’s Jobmakers, Cris Ramon, independent researcher and policy expert on immigration, welcome to the Jobmakers podcast. How are you?
Cris Ramon:
Thank you. Great to be here and very much open to having this great conversation with you and, you know, obviously happy to chat with you. You’ve been doing amazing work that I’ve been following for many years now, so it’s great to be here.
Denzil Mohammed:
Yeah. Thank you for that. You have been studying immigration for a very, very long time. You are Fulbright scholar studying migration as well in Spain. And you recently, co-wrote a report for the bipartisan policy center called immigration entrepreneurship, economic potential and obstacles to success. Could you just, just give a little background about you and then this project?
Cris Ramon:
Sure. so my folks are Salvador immigrants. You, I was born in LA. My folks actually met in Los Angeles, so they didn’t immigrate together, but they they came here actually the same year in 1974 through some pretty different routes. You know, my, my mom was an undocumented immigrant and my dad came here because my grandmother who immigrated to the United States in 1968 was able to get him and my my uncle you know, helped with processing their immigration cases because she cleaned the house of an immigration attorney. So they got really lucky in the lottery of life to be able to get be able to come here. So, you know, very much, immigration’s a part of my story. But you know, in terms of you know, the work that I do in this report, you know, I had an opportunity to really look into you know, why, why immigrants become entrepreneurs? What are the challenges they face sort of the, the policy responses that you see at the federal and local level and then policy recommendations to do that.
Denzil Mohammed:
So just give us an idea of the landscape of immigrant entrepreneurship. What, why did you find generally speaking, what kind of sectors are immigrants concentrated in? Do they have a higher rate of entrepreneurship? How are they impacting their localities and regions?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah, so I think the key thing is that you know, immigrants are you know, immigrants can, are represented across different industries. You always hear the story about the immigrant entrepreneur that starts a high tech startup in Silicon valley. But also you see immigrant entrepreneurs in main street businesses particularly restaurants and, and service industries. And so you, you do have this broad distribution. I think one thing to note with the distribution is oftentimes particularly immigrants who are here they will sometimes start businesses that rep represent or reflect the cultures that they came from. So restaurants obviously is a major story that comes up when you see these folks in terms of products, you know, one of the interesting stories that we heard about, you know, in this sort of vein is that there was a Syrian soap maker who wanted to make their soaps in the United States.
Cris Ramon:
And so they were able to, you know be able to put together their business in, in the St Louis area to be able to do that. So I think that that’s something that’s important, but the key thing there is that immigrants do start businesses at much higher rates than even native born Americans. And the data really backs this up. It’s, it’s just incredible to see how active they are in building the businesses. You know, it’s not to say that native born Americans aren’t like creating businesses. It’s just that immigrants are doing this at much higher rates. I think the last thing is in terms of the E impacts, you know, we didn’t dive into that information as much, but there is, you know, I think overall there is a sizable impact to be considered in terms of the, because there are just more immigrants, foreign businesses that the, that the impact has to be strong and significant because they are creating jobs that are employing individuals and they’re paying taxes. So I think that that’s really something to consider. It’s a, it’s definitely a win for the, the national economy, but for local economies as well.
Denzil Mohammed:
And we are recording this podcast over zoom guests who founded zoom an immigrant. Yeah, you paint a really good picture here. And, you know, if we open our eyes just to main streets and see the variety of businesses that we have the variety of cuisines that we have access to, that’s really unique and important for us. So you said you found that I read that rates of entrepreneurship for immigrants increased over the past few years and actually decreased among the us born, but, you know, COVID obviously affected many of these businesses in a very, very significant way. And you found that minority owned businesses, immigrant business owners suffered some of the highest losses. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. And, and I think, you know, the reason you see that those losses suffered is that particularly service industries or industries were minority business owners and immigrant business owners were really hit hard especially during the first year with, with the pandemic because obviously individuals largely remained at home. And so the fact is that if you have individuals who are using these services at lower rates, you’re gonna have businesses, you know, going under a lot more at higher rates. So I think that the distribution of these individuals and their businesses, unfortunately, really put them in a tough spot. When I came back from the pandemic,
Denzil Mohammed:
Well, I interviewed a guy called Daniel Perez. He’s a entrepreneur here in Massachusetts. He has a very successful transportation business. So transporting businessmen from the airport to their meetings, to their hotels. And obviously when the pandemic happened, people weren’t moving, people weren’t going anywhere. People were confined to their homes and he found a way to be able to use his vehicles in a profitable way during the pandemic. They became mobile health clinics during the pandemic. So some immigrants did find ways to navigate successfully throughout this very trying time. So when it comes to some of the hurdles you found, you know, obviously immigration status, the stagnant immigration policy, there are many, many reasons why immigrants should not be able to start businesses. What are some of the hurdles you found?
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. So to your point, I think with with the immigration system, I mean, first and foremost, we do not have a visa expressly designed for immigrant entrepreneurs. You’re an individual who needs to get funding from from a venture capitalist to be able to start your, your startup for instance, or you’re an individual who wants to start a mainstream business. There isn’t a, a visa for you to be able to come to the United States to do that. And, and, and so that’s kind of the first problem is that the, the ability to attract, you know, talent, at least through those channels just simply do not exist. You know, and the second issue with the immigration system is we’re not really designed to retain talent parti, you know, not just simply, you know, workers who can bring in their skills and stay here. I’m thinking obviously foreign students is one example who are here on an F student visa.
Cris Ramon:
And then, you know, if they don’t have a job lined up and get sponsored and be able to get a visa to stay here the, you know, their dire straits, we just do not have a status for these individuals to adjust into, to be able to become entrepreneurs. So we have this dual problem where we’re not able to attract talent or in this case, the, the ambitions, the skills, the knowledge, and the drive for immigrant entrepreneurs to come here and to be able to retain those individuals that they’re already here, but they’re on a temporary visa. That’s, that’s a major issue. You know, another issue is access to resources. So it’s, it’s, it’s interesting because, you know, one of the drivers of immigrant entrepreneurship is social capital. So the networks that you have you know, this is why you say you’re sort of seen over the course of American history, these immigrant enclaves emerge.
Cris Ramon:
And one of the reasons that, you know, those communities you know, have been able to really sustain themselves financially because a newcomer comes to the United States and they’re able to sort of navigate the, the, the business starting process. And this is obviously a long term project, you know, for, for many, you know, for decades even centuries in the United States with the history of immigration. But of course those social networks allow individuals to be able to navigate you know, the system to be able to set up their businesses. But the issue of course, is that if you’re a newcomer and you’re trying to start a business, now those issues around say accessing alone, maybe you don’t have a credit history in the United States. You don’t have assets to be able to offer to a bank. And, and, and so that can kind of put you at a disadvantage especially if you’re coming in and, and maybe you may not have the savings to do that. It’s not to say that it makes starting businesses impossible for immigrants but it certainly is a major challenge. So those are the two things to consider with the, the major, major obstacles that immigrant entrepreneurs face here in the United States.
Denzil Mohammed:
And despite this. So again, immigration status, immigration policy, as you say having a credit history, you know, 90% of, of immigrants who come here don’t even have a clue about a credit score. That’s something unique to the us language barriers, as you say, collateral having social capital is so important for anyone to succeed anywhere, having parents or children or cousins or family, or for any kind there. And yet still they have a higher rate of business generation, is that astonishing,
Cris Ramon:
You know, individuals come here and that’s a risky move. I mean, I, I recently just moved to Chicago. And, you know, there was a, you know, cost benefit analysis that I made. And it was still, you know, risky, but if you’re moving from one country to another oftentimes permanently you’re, you’re your, your ability to be able to assess risk and, and your willingness to do that, kind of primes you already to be able to take other risky steps, particularly start in businesses. And so I think that that, that the, that mitigate the experience of migraine to the United States really does mitigate the awareness you might have towards taking risks. So that’s one factor. Another important factor is, you know, a lot of these individuals who come to the United States are you know, they, they have knowledge, experience and skills, whether it’s formal channels that they, you know, they want to university or trade school, or it’s informal.
Cris Ramon:
You know, and sometimes it’s very hard to find jobs that can, you know, really fully use this in the United States. And especially if you’re, you’re coming in from a licensed profession, you need to get credentials renewed or, or need to take up additional study. And so these individuals oftentimes start their own businesses to be able to use the experiences that they’ve gained over a lifetime to be able to do the work that’s meaningful for them, and also probably to get paid at a decent rate. And, and so I think that there’s that also the drive saying I can’t find a way to integrate into the labor market. I will create my own path to do so.
Denzil Mohammed:
So what are some of the ways that we can address these issues? Let’s say let’s start at the federal level and then come down to the local level.
Cris Ramon:
Yeah. So, so Congress has recognized this issue. So I’m gonna give them pride upfront that they’ve recognized that this issue is something that that we need to focus on and they’ve proposed Democrats and Republicans. So it has been a bipartisan issue have proposed bills to be able to create a an immigrant visa and an immigrant status that people can adjust into if they’re already here and the visa will allow people to come here. But I think, you know, one of the key things that needs to be done is they just simply need to pass it. And I think that as much as I think that the, the, you know, that a comprehensive immigration reform bill, that addresses those multiple issues is the most ideal. I’m also being, you know, you have to be a little bit of a pragmatist and a realist and recognize that you may need to do reforms in a piecemeal fashion and and, and get the wins where you can get the bipartisan consensus where you can, and, and, and do that.
Cris Ramon:
At the municipal level, you are seeing cities really stepping up in, in some big ways to be able to provide technical assistance. And in some instances you know loan programs for minority owned businesses and immigrants. So you, you are seeing that there are the, these municipalities that are doing this. One of the interesting things in the conversations that I had with the experts on this, though, is that you, you wanna be able to, first of all you don’t wanna have services. And, and I didn’t really dive too deeply into this, into the report, but I can say this a little bit more now here. One of the things that somebody who works in the Mid-Atlantic city, he mentioned that one of the, one of the well intentioned efforts is to have a lot of funding to be able to provide technical services for minority potential minority business owners and immigrants.
Cris Ramon:
And that’s good naturally want the funding. The problem is that the funding actually started going into duplicative technical services that didn’t really adjust to the needs of the communities. It was just simply the same program. He literally almost said it’s basically almost like a copy and paste job, and, and that doesn’t benefit anybody. So one of the things that he said that municipalities really need to do is they do, you know, their services and, and see where they can try to re reduce redundancies and adjust the services to meet the actual needs of, of the, the individuals that they’re meant to serve. Another issue is obviously language services providing them in languages, and also recognizing that the immigrant populations are gonna shift. So just because you are providing languages language services and five languages in you know, 2018, that’s not to say that in 20, 22, the population hasn’t shifted.
Cris Ramon:
So that’s something else to consider. There’s trusted community navigators as a, that’s an important component of this is that you need to be able to reach out to the community and have the folks that people trust to be able to sort of do outreach to immigrant entrepreneurs and to know what their needs are and how you can access them. Some of these can be, you know a mayor who goes out and, and actually connects with the community with other members of important leaders in, in their communities, whether it’s police chiefs or, or representatives of chambers of commerce. But it can also be you know, nonprofits, chambers of commerce, community development corporations that can help you get a little bit more in the sense of what the actual needs are. I will say I will point to one interesting example of, I did think was really interesting in terms of particularly kind of doing this all well, is that you know, the, the city of Philadelphia ended up kind of canceling all these grants for these programs and actually just brought in, they had a common pot and they brought in consultants 10 99 experts who could provide targeted services depending on the needs of the community at any given time and pairing them up with individuals.
Cris Ramon:
Not only are they saving money because they don’t have to pay into healthcare or pensions, or what have you they’re able to bring in individuals that are targeted to specific needs and, and, and, and the needs, and the, the things that are important for these communities.
Denzil Mohammed:
Could you probably give us some cities that have been doing have been successful in building up the entrepreneurial capacity of the immigrant populations?
Cris Ramon:
St. Louis to me is actually something that’s just fascinating because and we mentioned this in, in our report, we highlight St. Louis. There’s just a high propensity of nonprofits that are doing very good and long standing work on providing immigrant entrepreneurs with technical services with loans and with just being able to connect with them. One organization that I’ve known about since at least 2012 is the mosaic Institute in St. Louis, Betsy Cohen, I think is the, the individual who works in that. And, and so she’s been doing groundbreaking work in this whole area for now, at least 10 years. You know, we mentioned the city of Chicago. I think one of the interesting things there is that you’ve been seeing the little village chamber of commerce. So that’s a community in Western Chicago that’s largely Latino.
Cris Ramon:
And, and they’ve, you’ve been seeing, you know, little village, the little village chamber of commerce the foundation of little village setting up some interesting programs. One is sort of a 12 week class for new and existing business owners that are offered in English and Spanish. There’s also the, the chamber of commerce is starting this project which is like a commercial cultural center that will actually have a business incubator. So individuals can start their own businesses and there will actually be a kitchen there to be able to allow food vendors to sell their items and learn from that. You know, we did mention Malden, Massachusetts you know, is one of those interesting examples where you did see the mayor really doing some great outreach work, largely under like a nonpartisan banner of say, we’re just gonna reach out to immigrant entrepreneurs, get secure support from all sectors of society to be able to support these individuals and doing it in, in, in, I think a non-political way, because sometimes you’ll see cities, municipality saying we’re a welcoming city.
Cris Ramon:
They’ll do that under the auspices of welcoming America, which is an amazing organization really appreciate their work, but they’ll say, oh, we’re a welcoming city, or they’ll pass policies, like say we’re a sanctuary city, which of course, there’s no definition of what a sanctuary city is, but they’re, they’re saying that to try to, you know whether or not it actually proves outcomes limit cooperation with immigration enforcement. There are these things that can symbolize that there there’s an openness, but I think molding Massachusetts is interesting because the mayor was deliberately non-political on this. And you can show that you can actually kind of approach this issue in a less, in a less polarizing way and, and get a community buy in, which is, I think is so vital to to ensuring that people feel secure and support
Denzil Mohammed:
At the local level. How do we move the needle on this? How do we, how do we spur some change so that we can foster the entrepreneurial capacity of immigrants in our communities, which is to obviously to everyone’s benefit
Cris Ramon:
These issues of competition for resources with other minority groups always comes up. And, and I, you know, I think there’s there’s feelings that are, are related to that, that, that people feel that, you know, this might be disadvantage. This might disadvantage minority business orders from other communities, but oftentimes minority business owners have immigrants in their in, in their ranks. So it’s, it’s not to say that it’s a competition for resources, but that I think is a, is a very real concern. So I think the first thing is just ensuring that, you know, municipalities nonprofits, community development corporations all are ensuring that, you know, minority business owners feel like they’re being supported and that they’re also that their needs are being met. And, and really acknowledging that. So people don’t feel like there’s a competition, even if there isn’t necessarily one just to ensure that that concern is addressed.
Cris Ramon:
And you know, what you see in cities and municipalities is sometimes they’ll just offer services for minority business owners. And that might be the assumption is that, you know, some immigrant immigrants might be incorporated into that minority group, because they’re already a large number of immigrants there. I think that’s one thing that’s incredibly important to build in that stakeholder relationship. I think another thing to consider too, is that, you know, whether it’s at the national level, the state level, the local level is trying to sort of delink immigration as an issue that is a single issue. You know, I think, and specifically related to the border, like I said, there’s, there’s, there’s a legitimate policy conversation to be had there. I, you know, I, I’m more critical of the politics around it, but I think in terms of effective policies, certainly there’s a discussion there to be had.
Cris Ramon:
I think though that when you’re talking about immigrant entrepreneurs, the thing is that you, you wanna, you know, it’s, it’s to say these are individuals who are here right now that are contributing to our communities. And they, they are a vital part of the, the economic and, and the community life here in, in, in these areas. And they think that you really need to be very intentional in understanding that you have to delink this, there are people who won’t at the end of the day, everybody, there will be people who you can’t change. There, there are views on this, but I do think that you are, if you’re able to at least get people to think through that immigration as an issue, whether it’s policy or political it isn’t just simply the border even though that’s natural default, so really being intentional to do this.
Cris Ramon:
And I think that as a part of that, and, you know, we go back to like said mold in Massachusetts is to really get a read on the community and how they view these issues. Particularly the non-immigrant individuals. You know, like I said, you know, it, it might be the case that in a very blue city stating that you’re a welcoming city or you’re you’re a sanctuary city might run a little bit better with some of the residents, but I do think that a depoliticized approach that doesn’t try to make this already a polarizing issue more. So I think with the issue around a sanctuary declaration, as opposed to the walking one, because I think welcoming America does good bipartisan work and works across the entire country. But I do think that kind of more hard line political stance on we’re, we’re here to protect immigrants from immigration enforcement and so forth.
Cris Ramon:
I don’t think that actually does anybody’s any, any favors in the end, especially if you’re dealing areas where people might have more I think complex viewers around immigration. So I think it’s more depoliticize it delink it from some other issues that make consensus very hard to find and, and ensuring that all community members feel like they can get services that they need. I think those are sort of three things that you can do to feel like to get people, to support these individuals already, if they’re not, you know, at least among the individuals who are worry about it and, but are willing to have a conversation to see if their minds can be changed.
Denzil Mohammed:
I love that idea of decoupling immigration immigrants are part of our community. So our neighbors they’re employers, they are workers. They’re our friends, they’re soccer players. So it’s not a separate issue from anything else in the community. It’s a community issue. It’s a economic issue. It’s a social issue. It’s not just an immigration issue. And I I’m, I’m glad that you, you made that that point. So Cris Ramon, immigration policy researcher, and analyst, and co-author of immigrant entrepreneurship, economic potential and obstacles to success. Thank you for joining us on the job makers podcast.
Cris Ramon:
Thank you so much. Appreciate the invitation
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thanks for joining us for this. Week’s look into how we can better grow our immigrant owned businesses for the benefit of all Americans. Remember, you can subscribe to Jobmakers on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Denzel Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another Jobmakers.
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