Of course, his quote is still wrong…

There is nothing economically unsound about open borders, rather the problem comes with open borders and democracy. When demographic changes can have profound political changes then immigrants can theoretically diminish or enhance economic liberty and economic growth.

Of course we do. Hispanics and poor people both vote statist. Anti-statist natives may grow in numbers as the transfer payments creep up, but they’re outnumbered now as it is.

That people initially respond by moving away just means the statist voters take over whole states, which affects the federal government, which has all the real power anyway.

Besides transfer payments include things like public education. No one’s ever going to deny immigrants or their children a tax-funded education.

Friedman said, “The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”

Later, Williams said, “[immigrants] are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __”

And after a brief conversation among others about the plight of undocumented workers living outside the law, Friedman added:

“…the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do.”

I found the transcript (which I’m pretty sure is faithful to the original) at: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1684832/posts