Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1JUlGSirSE
the jurogan experience um how much pushback have you gotten from this idea because it seems like a lot of people think that overpopulation is a giant problem and then when you say we should triple plus the amount of people in the united states we want to compete with the rest of the world i would imagine a lot of people are like what are you smoking matthew iglesias no that i mean the book's really good so everyone who reads it is just like oh you convinced me and this is there's no pushback at all um no i yes uh there is concern about overpopulation that's something that you know so there's people from the right they don't like immigrants they don't like immigration why do they see it through that let's start with that because this is a country of immigrants it's a it's a very strange thing to have a country that is entirely comprised of people who came from somewhere else other than native americans right entirely comprised and yet there's a giant population that doesn't like immigrants yeah i mean look some of it's a question of taste you know people like different places people like different kinds of things i think the best parts of america are places that have a lot of people from different places to me you know whether that's that's austin where we are new york where i'm from it's like it's cool like that's america at its best some people don't like it uh there's also the legality question though right starting in the 1980s and 1990s we built up a substantial group of people who were living here illegally i'm for you know what started in the 80s is that when it really started yeah i mean that's when it really took off was it because the regulations were made more stringent well so what happened was in 1996 uh they they changed the law they said irera is the acronym for it and they made it a lot harder for people who had come here without papers
to quote unquote get legal so even if you put roots down even if you were married to an american citizen there was no way to obtain legal status they also made it harder to cross the border so it used to be people would come over they'd pick vegetables in california for a season and then they'd just go back right they'd go back to mexico take their money with them get a nice house they made it harder to cross the border so people would stay and people who stayed had no way to get a legal status here so unauthorized population it built up it built up it built up there's a movement on one side to say well we should create a path to citizenship for those people most of them they're living here peacefully they're working hard they're not doing anything that's where i stand but there's people who say look you know they broke the rules we got to be harsh so we've been arguing about that unauthorized immigration so viciously and i think we've lost sight of the fact that you know we can just create legal pathways for people to come you know some people will say well my my grandparents my parents whoever they they came the right way they they didn't easy then exactly and it's totally true so my great-grandparents they came to this country at a time when there was no restriction yeah my parents as well they just came over from italy yeah not that hard so good for them right and so like yes like we should have a legal process for people to come we can have rules you know try to make sure you're like say you should be working age right you should come here get a job pay taxes you can't just like come across and collect social security yeah fair enough but obviously you're okay with children coming across as well like whether they're adopted once they get here or whether they come here with their parents or i mean we should make it possible right yes we should make it possible that's a great way of putting it and that's how
you can not have people breaking the rules that's to me but you know a lot of people on the right don't see it that way now on the left there's some folks you know people are concerned about the environment yeah i mean i'm concerned too i don't i don't want to breathe polluted air i don't want like cities underwater uh but there's a strain of sort of eco-apocalyptic thinking you know where people say oh like we can't handle it like only degrowth is gonna is gonna save us and i i just don't think that's right you know i am bullish on technology right we've got more and more clean energy sources we've got better and better electric cars there's more stuff we can do with electrification we need to take those steps but we can have a prosperous sustainable society that has plenty of people in it that has high living standards uh things like that so we don't need to worry about that a lot of americans also just overestimate how many people are here so a billion sounds like a lot it's it's about triple our current population but that would give us the population density of france it would give us about half the density of germany uh way less than half the density of the united kingdom and you know if you've ever been to the uk it's like it's a nice country they got london big city they got countryside they got rolling hills they got sheep you go up to scotland like there's [ __ ] nobody there um so like we could have all kinds of places with a billion americans countryside suburbs cities all kinds of stuff what's the benefit of having all those people though uh so two benefits right so one i think internationally you know the united states has been like the number one country for 100 years give or take right uh we're the the biggest dog out there you know no everybody knows better than to mess with us and we're losing that status you know
we're losing that status economically to china they're doing more stuff like you know telling nba coaches like what they can tweet what they can't tweet they're censoring hollywood movies because they've got the number one market out there you can get into scarier stuff eventually you know south china sea naval battles i'm not like a war guy but yeah you don't want that i think i think we want to stay number one and growth has been important to that historically right like why is the united states a big deal country and canada is like you know like our cute little brother and it's because a lot of people live here you know canada's nice but there's no people no real strength there second i think it'll make us a more prosperous country uh what we do as modern-day americans is we do stuff for each other right whether that's we make show we write books uh we we teach in schools we run restaurants we're doing services to each other and you get more prosperity when you have more people and more ability to sort of have those interactions catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience