Chewing on a Million Gumballs

He does a mathematical slight of hand just after the 2:00 mark. He goes from people making less than $2 a day - true poverty, to "how many people live in countries with average incomes lower than that of Mexico." He's taking the entire population of any country making less than Mexico's average, including a bunch of people making more than Mexico's average.

So Mexico's average income is about $11,000 / year. Chile's is about $8,000 /year. So now he's adding marbles for the entirety of the chilean population including lots of people making more than $11,000 /year and even some multi-millionaires.

The other thing I'll say about this Mexico thing is that Mexico is light years away from Ghana in terms of poverty. Lumping them together and calling them all poor seems wrong. When I think about poverty reduction via immigration I'm not thinking about people making $11,000 a year Mexicans, I'm thinking about $1/day Haitians.

He also says,

"2 million people a year would totally overwhelm our physical, natural, and social infrastructures" 

Our population is predicted to grow at about 1.6 million a year, So does that mean in two years our resources will be completely overwhelmed?

 Between 1900 and 2000 our population grew from 76 million to 282 million. There was no population disaster. There wasn't even a plan. So how did we absorb 206 million people and still grow their average incomes by 5 times and have an unemployment rate of only 4.4%?

The economy just does it naturally. There's always work to do so there's always opportunity for employment. When we have unemployment it isn't because we run out of jobs, it's more complicated than that. And when more people do more work, more gets done. The economy grows. Average prosperity increases. I like the way economist Bryan Caplan puts it:

The economy is not like a party where everyone splits a birthday cake; it is more like a potluck where everyone brings a dish

And this gets at the very last point I want to make (though I could make several more). Immigration is not charity. This idea that immigration costs us in order to make them better is inapropriate zero-sum thinking. Immigrants make us richer, so long as they're self-supporting and peaceful:

"When Danny DeVito enters a room, he reduces its occupants' average height. But he doesn't cause anyone to 'lose height.' Shortness isn't contagious, neither is low income. A janitor earns less than average, but his existence doesn't impoverish his fellow citizens."

 Immigration is probably the world's greatest anti-poverty program, and it costs less than nothing.