Daniel DiMartino calls balls and strikes on the ongoing, highly partisan debate over immigration, legal and illegal. The border ought to be secure, and asylum limited to those who have a genuine need for it, he argues. But border policy ought always to be bound by law. When it comes to legal immigration, according to DiMartino, we do well to avoid an economics of nostalgia and should welcome the kind of immigration that adds to American life. DiMartino also recalls a recent run-in with the residual cancel culture at Columbia University.

Related Links

Daniel DiMartino on X
Daniel DiMartino, “I’m an Immigrant and I’ve Done the Math. Here’s How to Fix Our Immigration System“

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson and our guest today is Daniel DiMartino. He’s a PhD candidate economics at Columbia University, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Focuses on immigration policy. He’s originally from Venezuela, so he is motivated to address the problems that come from socialism and the way that it distorts the common good or the pursuit of the common good and political freedom.

His work has appeared in Fox News, CNN, USA Today, National Review, The Hill and the New York Post. He’s received fellowships from the Institute of Humane Studies and the Job Creators Network. He’s written on the subject we’ll be discussing today, that is immigration. But before we get to that, Mr. DiMartino, why don’t you tell us about a meeting you had at Columbia University?

Daniel DiMartino:

It’s funny, with everything going on at Columbia, them being on the public eye, because of the issues of both allowing discrimination against Jewish students, them discriminating against Jewish students and them discriminating in admissions against whites and Asians, as the Supreme Court case led to the changes in this affirmative action practices, they chose to call me into a mandatory meeting because I had been reported. I learned later multiple reports over what they allege was discriminatory harassment by me in the campus.

And what that actually meant, I asked them what that was, what was the accusation? They didn’t tell me. They said we needed to meet. We did, and it was all over just posts on X. One of the posts reads, and I can tell you, “God does not teach us that we can change our gender. Period.” How harassing of me to state the truth. That was, by the way, responding to this female pastor that, at the inauguration was lecturing about transgenderism against President Trump and Vice President Vance.

They said that it was excluding to other people to say that the decline of Christianity is because of the rise of secular ideologies like CRT, DEI, and even ethno-nationalism. It was wrong of me to praise Nikki Haley and Mike Pence for opposing gender surgery for minors. Oh, and it was of course also wrong for me to complain that gender-neutral bathrooms don’t have urinals, and therefore men have to wait longer in line. This really practical and normal opinions that I think 90 percent of the population perhaps agrees with me and certainly in the world, and this is what they chose to do.

This is what they do with their new anti-discrimination policy. They go after conservatives. They’re not going after the people who are causing problems on campus, as you would expect, really from these institutions because they have been discriminated against us for decades. And you know what? I think that they chose the wrong time to do that. And so I am not going to silence myself. I told them what I believe, that I stand by what I said. I, by the way, I’m totally open to have said something that I don’t believe in or wrong. And I did tell them that, but after they showed me the allegations, I was like, “I mean, I really have nothing to change. These posts, are my opinion, are perfect.”

James Patterson:

Oh, I’m very sorry to hear you deal with that. We’ve had an interview with Ilya Shapiro at the law school at Georgetown. His book came out detailing how he had made a single post on X that got him in tremendous amounts of trouble.

Daniel DiMartino:

Oh, I know.

James Patterson:

Is this the story now, where there’s a kind of surveillance state on conservatives that managed to find their way into elite institutions and attempt to denigrate them?

Daniel DiMartino:

It is perhaps worse because it is based on anonymous reports. So essentially there is a witch hunt where all the members of the community, even people not affiliated with the university, are allowed to report members of the university for, in this case, what they consider to be hate speech. Right? Because remember, these are people who believe hate speech or whatever they call that is not covered by the First Amendment.

And to be fair, Colombia is a private university, but it is a private university that receives federal funding. And the Trump administration has made it clear rightfully that they need to stop discriminating against conservatives and against Jewish students and of course against racial groups that they discriminated in hiring and admission and they need to stop doing all the DEI stuff that they were doing. And that’s not what Colombia did.

In fact, I know Ilya well, he’s a colleague at MI and he helped me. He was one of the first people I called after I received that email from Colombia, and so he’s been very supportive. And it’s a shame, right? Because if these institutions just let us be, and I even told them to the Colombia staff in this meeting, “I just want to live my life. You just go and live your life. Let us be, we’re not harming anyone.”

James Patterson:

That’s sort of the nature of speech is that it’s different from harm and the attempt to conflate the two has made it so that you can weaponize these policies. But I think you’re right that this policy has kind of already peaked and maybe this is an effort to kind of bring back, or maybe they feel as though they’ve kind of slipped past on this issue or that you wouldn’t say anything. But what is it that you benefited from? I saw that you also reached out to the Fire. Have they been good for you on this?

Daniel DiMartino:

Yeah, they actually sent a preemptive letter even before the meeting to Colombia, because I already knew it was about some X post because I am very mindful of my in-person interactions. I knew it had nothing to do with anything I had done. And I was right indeed after the meeting. It was all about my posts on the social media X, and Fire sent them a letter to tell them to not retaliate against me for my speech. They did tell me in the meeting they were not going to take any disciplinary action. Maybe they’ll retaliate now after my article. I don’t know. And I understand that’s a risk I took by writing that.

But what can they do to me? Expel me? Make the matters worse for them? I’m really tired. I know that this is a phrase you and I don’t like because it’s like a very non-con thing, like that they don’t know what time it is, but Colombia really doesn’t know what time it is. They don’t understand who is in power in the White House and the priorities of the administration when it comes to religious freedom, when it comes to racial discrimination, and when it comes to education. And so the best thing all these institutions can do for themselves is instead of fighting, they just need to stop discriminating against conservatives against people based on their race and uphold law and order. It’s really not that much that we’re asking for.

James Patterson:

And it’s not as though you were addressing yourself directly to a trans person in a classroom in an aggressive or challenging way. Right?

Daniel DiMartino:

Correct.

James Patterson:

This is just opining on X.

Daniel DiMartino:

Correct. I just said that I don’t believe men can become women and women can become men, essentially. And I repeated it in their faces to the staff because it is the truth, and I’m a student, that’s all I am. They said that people could feel afraid of walking on campus because of the opinions I have. And it’s funny to me because what share of the world’s population shares my opinion? Then they need to feel afraid of walking everywhere in the planet Earth because they overwhelming majority of people in the world, perhaps actually even higher shares outside the United States, believe that men cannot become women or vice versa.

It was really all about that issue. And also one post about how I said that facial tattoos should actually mean you should be screened if you’re crossing the border illegally because that could indicate you’re a gang member. And I was talking specifically about the case of a woman who was a child sex trafficker indeed from Venezuela. And I said that you just had to see her to know she was dangerous. And I very much stand by my comments, and anybody who sees her picture of this criminal would agree with me.

James Patterson:

You have experience, being from Venezuela. How many of the people in the room that wer