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you find a professional on Angie to tackle

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can do this when you Angie that Hey

0:24

everyone, it's Chris Hayes. I'm excited to tell

0:26

you about a special Why Is This Happening

0:28

podcast series. We're launching called WithPod

0:30

2024, The Stakes. For

0:33

the first time since 1892, we have an

0:35

election in which both candidates have presidential records.

0:38

It's a unique chance to take a hard look

0:41

at what both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have

0:43

actually done as president. I'm talking

0:45

to experts about both candidates' records on specific

0:47

policy areas. Stay right

0:49

here to hear the entire first

0:51

episode where I talk to American

0:53

Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reikland-Melnick.

0:56

Search for Why Is This Happening and follow to

0:58

listen to the whole series. New episodes drop on

1:00

Tuesdays. When Biden

1:02

took office, the legal immigration system was like

1:05

a cruise ship that was on fire and

1:07

listing. It hadn't fully sunk yet, but things

1:09

weren't looking good. So right now the fire

1:11

is out. They've mostly

1:13

righted a lot of the list, but

1:15

the engines aren't really going yet. Hello

1:22

and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

1:32

Well, the general election is set

1:34

barring some unforeseen circumstances. It's going to

1:36

be Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And

1:38

for the first time in 140 or 150

1:41

years, the two men running against each other

1:43

each have been president and each have

1:45

actual records. And one

1:47

of the things that drives me a little crazy

1:49

about the way the campaign is framed and covered

1:52

is the fact that it seems to ignore that

1:54

fact. And one thing I've noticed about the vortex

1:57

of the Donald

2:00

Trump's sort of attentional vortex

2:02

is that the craziness around

2:04

him can obscure some

2:07

of the more basic meat and potatoes questions

2:09

of like, where is Donald Trump on education

2:11

policy? Where's Joe Biden been on

2:13

education policy? What have they done with the

2:15

Interior Department under Joe Biden? And how would

2:18

that Interior Department look differently under Donald Trump?

2:20

All these just very basic meat and potatoes

2:22

questions about the

2:24

brass tacks of governing. So today is

2:26

the inaugural episode of what we're calling,

2:28

why is this happening 2020 for

2:31

the stakes where we are going to

2:33

in a semi-regular franchise, we're going to

2:36

look at areas of policy. And

2:38

in a way that really we're trying to be

2:40

as sort of analytical and descriptive as possible, not

2:42

polemical. Like where are the

2:45

different people? Where are these two

2:47

different candidates on these policies? Where have they

2:49

been? What did they actually do

2:51

in office? Because you don't just have to check

2:53

their campaign websites. You don't just have to listen

2:55

to speeches. There's actual records. And

2:58

so we're going to commit ourselves for

3:00

the duration of this campaign to really

3:02

taking the time to sit down with

3:04

an expert every week and

3:06

just walk through where the two

3:08

different candidates have been,

3:10

what they have done, what their records are

3:12

on these crucial areas of

3:14

policy. Today, we're going to start with probably one of

3:16

the most controversial and one of the

3:19

most highest, one of the highest salience areas, which

3:21

is immigration. And of course, immigration has been front

3:23

of mind for a lot of voters. It has

3:25

been particularly the focus of a lot of Republican

3:28

rhetoric. But of course, there was a big border

3:30

bill that just fell apart. And

3:32

so we're just going to take a step back and

3:34

say, what did immigration policy look like under Donald Trump?

3:36

What does it look like under Joe Biden? What

3:38

are the differences? How can people make

3:41

up a decision about which of those two visions

3:43

they think they like? Joining

3:45

me today is Aaron Reikland Melnick. He is

3:47

the policy director of the American Immigration Council.

3:49

He is an immigration wonk to end all

3:51

immigration wonks, as far as I can tell.

3:54

In an area of policy that I

3:56

have to say is extremely complex, extremely

3:58

weedsy. It strains. My ability

4:00

honestly to understand. Often I find myself

4:03

at the sort of the border of

4:05

my Sybil city the kind of synthesize

4:07

errand is incredibly important resource for me

4:09

in that respect. So Aaron welcome the

4:12

program for happening. Obviously

4:19

you can for think tank that has

4:21

you know it's own sort of world

4:23

you envision of sort of normative we

4:25

want the best immigration policy as but

4:27

you're also just extremely attentive to what

4:29

what is happening. Which by the

4:31

way is no small thing because a lot

4:33

of times people get that wrong, right? I

4:35

mean I see you pointing out a lot

4:38

of basic mistakes in even help people understand

4:40

what's happening with Emery's. Mean

4:42

immigration lawyer Famously second in complexity only

4:44

to tax law. And that's just immigration

4:47

law. When you actually look at the

4:49

ways in which that law interacts with

4:51

reality and how people function in the

4:53

world and interact with the system, it

4:56

just becomes a mess. And so actually

4:58

understanding what is going on is not

5:00

easy because there's a lot of motivated

5:03

reasoning. There's a lot of government press

5:05

releases that say one thing, but when

5:07

you actually look at reality, it's a

5:09

little different. and it's a it's a

5:12

complexity. On to say the least. So I

5:14

want to start. Were literally just gonna divide.

5:16

Doesn't have to restart with immigration policy under

5:18

down from Two Thousand Seventeen through Two Thousand

5:20

and Twenty One. And I want to start

5:22

because they're so much emphasis on the border.

5:24

I don't want to start with the border,

5:26

so I wanted to start in broad strokes.

5:28

The President has a fair amount of latitude

5:30

on immigration policy. Quite. a bit

5:32

in fact it's an area where they're

5:34

sort of at their some of their

5:37

highest level of of autonomy all of

5:39

the courts will have thing say about

5:41

that what's just start about basically like

5:43

legal immigration just the standard it's how

5:45

many visas we give out who he

5:47

gives how to that's something that presidents

5:50

have some control over some input on

5:52

congress also obviously gets it get to

5:54

say in that's how would you described

5:56

sort of broadly the trump administration immigration

5:58

policy on illegal immigration Yeah, the

6:00

Trump administration was a restrictionist

6:02

administration. Their goal was to

6:04

slash immigration to the United

6:06

States. You would see President

6:09

Trump himself at the time pushing for, you

6:11

know, why don't we have more Norwegians here?

6:13

Why are we taking Haitians? And so they

6:15

tried to reshape the legal immigration system to

6:17

act a little bit more like the

6:20

early 20th century United States immigration system

6:22

from the 1920s through

6:24

the 1960s, when we had national

6:26

origin quotas and immigration system explicitly

6:29

designed to allow some desirable

6:31

immigrants and restrict the undesirable immigrants.

6:33

At the time in the 1920s,

6:36

it was really racial, that the Trump administration,

6:38

that was part of it, but it was

6:40

also aimed at keeping out lower income immigrants

6:43

and really saying, we only want a few

6:45

immigrants coming here. And if they're going to

6:47

come here, they better be from Europe and

6:49

or educated. And obviously Congress changes that and

6:52

the president signs the law, Lyndon Bays Johnson

6:54

in the 1960s with a watershed immigration law

6:56

that totally gets rid of the kind of

6:59

national origin and highly racialized quotas and

7:01

categories that had, you know, dictated

7:03

immigration policy for about four years.

7:05

But again, this is just

7:07

at a descriptive level. I think Stephen Miller

7:09

and many of the people that are around

7:11

President Trump really view that previous period, the

7:14

20s to 60s, as kind of

7:16

a more ideal model. That's actually what they want

7:18

to get back to. Less immigration, more

7:20

control over where people are coming from,

7:22

as opposed to like family reunification and

7:25

essentially selecting for people from countries, wealthy

7:27

countries, and particularly countries that they say

7:30

have a cultural linguistic affinity, which is often people

7:32

that are in the racial sense of

7:34

the word, quote unquote, white. Yeah. And

7:36

you'd find Jeff Sessions, for example, who

7:38

had a lot of a role in

7:40

the Trump administration immigration policy, having openly

7:42

endorsed the 1924 act, which

7:45

did set up these racial national origin quotas.

7:47

And you know, this is one of those

7:49

laws where the 1924 quota system, where

7:52

calling it racist is not an opinion.

7:55

It's fact. They were very open about

7:57

keeping what they call the racial stock.

8:00

of the United States a certain way through

8:02

this law. Now, of course, even if you go

8:04

into the 1960s, the 1965 Act,

8:06

one of the reasons we have a family-based

8:08

immigration system is because that too was

8:11

based in a racial belief. They said that

8:13

they got a number of conservatives at

8:16

the time to support the law because

8:18

they thought, well, okay, we'll keep America

8:20

white if we have a family-based immigration

8:22

system because most immigrants who've been coming

8:24

over the last decades were white immigrants,

8:26

Irish, Italian. That was sort of the

8:28

last great wave of immigration in the

8:30

early 20th century was from countries which

8:32

today we would call white, people's which today

8:34

we would call white back then that racial

8:36

categories were a little bit more mixed, to

8:39

put it simply. But that isn't

8:41

how it worked out, of course. And I think as

8:44

the Trump administration found out, if you have an

8:46

immigration system that is aiming at people from Europe,

8:49

well, a lot of Europeans are pretty happy to

8:51

stay where they are. And people tend to come

8:53

to the United States when the

8:55

United States is a great deal

8:57

better economically, safety-wise and everything, and

9:00

less so if you're coming from Finland

9:02

or Norway. There's not a huge demand

9:04

for millions of people to immigrate from

9:07

central Europe to the United States. So

9:09

did they succeed? The Trump administration

9:11

succeeded in reducing the inflows of

9:14

legal immigrants, like the amount of

9:16

visas that they'll able to get

9:18

through the various legal means. Yes,

9:20

absolutely. Visa issuance fell every single

9:22

year in the Trump administration. Now,

9:25

it cratered in 2020 because of the

9:27

COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered consulates around the

9:29

world. But even setting that aside, there

9:32

was a steep drop in immigration through

9:35

the legal immigration system. He also hollowed it

9:37

out. There was a hiring

9:39

freeze at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

9:41

that meant when President Biden took

9:43

office, there's about a thousand fewer

9:45

adjudicators than they needed to

9:47

get things back on track. And he

9:50

also banned immigration, wide swaths of legal

9:52

immigration, through a wide variety of different

9:54

means. There's, of course, the infamous Muslim

9:57

ban, transit ban, depending on how you

9:59

want which applied

10:01

to legal immigration from a wide

10:03

variety of Muslim majority countries, plus

10:05

Venezuela and North Korea. And

10:08

then you also had lesser known. He

10:11

had a number of other bans that were blocked

10:13

in court before they could go into effect, but

10:15

those were shaky legal decisions. And the

10:17

appellate courts and the Supreme Court could

10:19

have well-ruled otherwise because he used the

10:21

Muslim Ban Authority, INA 212f. At

10:24

one point, he blocked all legal immigration from

10:26

people who didn't have health insurance. So

10:29

that meant that if you were a lower-income individual

10:31

and you didn't have—it was a specific kind of

10:33

health insurance, too. So there was

10:35

essentially a wealth test imposed for people

10:38

coming to the United States. During

10:40

the COVID-19 pandemic, he actually blocked all

10:42

legal immigration, allegedly on economic recovery grounds.

10:45

So there was a period where even

10:47

if the system had been functioning, which

10:49

it kind of wasn't because of COVID

10:51

consulate closures, where we would have seen

10:54

a huge drop in legal immigration, and

10:56

that did get blocked in court. He

10:58

also blocked the Diversity Visa Program. By

11:00

the end of the 2020s, he was

11:02

throwing out travel bans left and right,

11:05

aiming not at migrants at the legal

11:07

immigration system. And there's

11:09

also—refugees are another part of the legal immigration

11:11

system that's different than asylum seekers because they

11:13

are in their home country where they apply,

11:16

and they go through a very, very long

11:18

and attenuated process of interviews and vetting before

11:20

they come over. That number is—the president has

11:22

a lot of control over that number. That

11:25

was an explicit campaign promise in 2016 to

11:27

reduce the number of refugees, and did he

11:30

make good on that promise? Yeah. When he

11:32

took office, the Obama administration's presidential determination from

11:34

the previous year had been 100,000 refugees. We

11:37

will admit 100,000 refugees in a year. Trump

11:40

slashed that immediately every single year after that

11:42

when it came time to set the refugee

11:44

level. He slashed it again. By 2020,

11:46

he had dropped it down to 15,000 total. Now.

11:51

this not only reduced the number of

11:53

refugees, it also meant that when President

11:55

Biden took office, it took years to

11:58

rebuild the refugee program because— Refugee

12:00

officers had quit en masse the refugee

12:02

resettlement organizations. I had to lay off

12:04

tons and tons of staff have some

12:06

Wow was down and so we are

12:09

just now in the start of twenty

12:11

twenty four getting back to the level.

12:13

Any think we're finally about to surpass

12:15

the levels it was when Trump took

12:17

office and get back to the Obama

12:19

live like the hundred thousand level we

12:22

will hit that this year, but it

12:24

took three solid years of rebuilding to

12:26

get us back there. So the broad

12:28

strokes of the various means. Of legal

12:30

immigration people that go through the system and

12:32

they've file may apply whether it's you know

12:35

them, a family member or the sponsored by

12:37

a business that are visas that are granted

12:39

student visas. Like all of these different ways

12:41

of people can come to the United States'

12:43

rights the explicitly wanted to reduce that's the

12:45

also wanted to sort of tip the balance

12:47

of which countries be more coming from. And

12:50

reduce the amount of people. And he

12:52

did all this space. ugly and debates.

12:54

tried to and probably could have done

12:56

more had court's not block some of

12:58

what they did. but in the aggregate

13:00

they did do that. They said they

13:03

could do that and he did do

13:05

that on legal immigration. It's a pretty

13:07

clear story, right? Yeah, and not just

13:09

using these like ban authorities. They also

13:11

threw everything at the wall to sort

13:13

of lower the number isn't using bureaucratic

13:15

red tape tracks. One of the worst

13:17

of them was called the know blank

13:19

spaces policy. To be started applying

13:21

it. So every form you had to

13:23

submit to the government for an immigration

13:25

benefit, there are extraneous extra boxes. So

13:28

for example, there's five boxes and point

13:30

your children. You know you. points shown

13:32

child one child to child. free child

13:34

or so. If you have five children,

13:36

you can sell out all five bucks

13:38

is if we have one child, you

13:41

fill out the one him and you'll

13:43

leave the rest empty. The Trump Administration

13:45

started mandatorily denying all applications in which

13:47

people didn't write n/a in every single

13:49

irrelevant open. box a sunday percent

13:52

know they know you're if they

13:54

don't believe that way applications because

13:56

somebody didn't put the apartment number

13:58

because they lived in because

14:00

they didn't write N slash A

14:02

an apartment number. And it was

14:04

this kind of COSCA-S bureaucracy that

14:07

they really weaponized. And

14:09

they said, look, the form instruction safe. Fill

14:11

out every applicable box and write N, A,

14:13

and ones that are not applicable. But

14:15

they didn't expect normal people to, again,

14:18

every single little irrelevant box,

14:20

if you missed one, they'd

14:23

reject the entire application and say, sorry, you have

14:25

to file this again. Go back

14:27

and file it again. So it was creating

14:29

these bureaucratic hurdles and again, not denying for

14:31

substantive reasons, just denying for pure petty, let's

14:33

throw as many pitfalls in the system to

14:35

just get people. Yes, and all of this

14:37

in the same direction. We don't want people

14:39

coming. We wanna keep them out. And if

14:41

to the extent that people come in, we

14:43

wanna select those countries like, again,

14:46

the president talked about Norway and

14:48

countries like that. He called Haiti a shithole country. Like

14:50

it was very clear. And again, this was expressed in

14:53

policy. So that's the sort of legal, that's

14:55

the top line of the legal immigration system.

14:57

Let's talk about the border, which

14:59

should not be conflated with all unauthorized

15:01

immigration. Cause a lot of people, my

15:03

understanding is it's still the case that

15:05

most people who are unauthorized migrants are

15:07

overstay visas. That was true as of

15:09

a few years ago. That's no longer

15:11

true. And that's partly because of how many people

15:13

are showing up at the border. So let's talk

15:15

about the border. I mean, the basic, one of

15:18

the things that you've pointed out is they clearly

15:20

wanted to keep people out of the border. And

15:23

in some ways, people will probably remember

15:25

the child separation policy in which the

15:27

government was separating children from parents. It

15:29

was not keeping track of who belonged

15:31

to who. It was essentially, for lack

15:33

of a better word, kidnapping these children,

15:35

detaining them away from their parents, putting

15:38

them into group homes through contractors, really

15:40

grisly stuff. It caused a national uproar. They eventually

15:42

had to walk back this policy, which they denied

15:45

they were doing. The reason they

15:47

did that was because they were so at

15:49

their wits end about

15:51

stopping the flow of people showing up

15:53

at the border. What was

15:55

their approach at the border? And maybe you want to

15:58

sort of lay the groundwork of what starts before. them

16:00

in 2014 under Barack Obama. Yeah.

16:03

I mean, basically, the goal of

16:06

the Trump administration was deterrence and

16:08

specifically deterring families from coming. So

16:10

basically, starting in around 2013 and

16:13

2014, we started seeing more unaccompanied

16:15

children and families, primarily from Honduras,

16:17

Guatemala, and El Salvador, coming to

16:20

the U.S.-Mexico border and seeking asylum.

16:23

This was a huge shift in

16:25

migration patterns. For decades, the overwhelming

16:27

majority of migrants coming across the

16:29

border were Mexicans, primarily coming

16:31

here for looking for work.

16:34

When the Great Recession hit in 2007 and

16:37

the construction industry essentially collapsed for

16:39

decades, that demand for labor went

16:41

down. You had fewer people crossing

16:43

because of that. And that also

16:45

coincided simultaneously with a massive growth

16:47

of border security apparatus and enforcement

16:49

personnel going on in the Bush

16:52

administration in the post-9-11 years. The

16:55

Border Patrol doubled in size in a

16:57

10-year period and quinced coupled in size

16:59

in a 15-year period. The

17:01

4,000 agents in 1993 up to 21,000 agents by 2011. So

17:07

you have simultaneously a collapse in demand for

17:10

the kind of labor that you have undocumented

17:12

immigrants coming and a huge increase in border

17:14

security. And so in the early, the first

17:16

term of Obama was actually the quietest the

17:18

border had been in 30 years. In

17:22

2013, 2014, families started showing up. And

17:25

those posed brand new challenges. Holding

17:28

children in detention centers, small children

17:30

in detention centers for months or weeks at a

17:32

time, created an outcry. The

17:35

Obama administration created family detention. Eventually

17:38

a federal judge ruled that a 1997

17:40

legal settlement about the treatment of children

17:43

in immigration detention required that

17:45

most families be released after 20 days.

17:48

And so you had in the Obama administration in 2014 and 2015,

17:50

2016, you did have families coming

17:54

and being released into the United States to

17:56

go into the immigration court system and seek

17:58

asylum. administration wanted

18:00

to stop that. Right. Just

18:03

to be clear, released with a court date, right?

18:05

So they just go through this. You presented the

18:07

border or you're apprehended. You say

18:09

you're seeking asylum. You get put into a process.

18:12

This is a complicated process, but there's things called

18:14

a credible fear interview. And then

18:16

you get a court date for sort of further

18:18

sorting, essentially, right? Yeah. So

18:20

I think it's sometimes I really like to go to

18:22

first principles on these. It's really important to understand as

18:24

a legal matter, when somebody crosses

18:26

the border and taken into custody, if the

18:29

United States wants to remove that person, because

18:31

that person is quote unquote removable is the

18:33

term in the law. They have violated immigration

18:35

law. So there are two ways to do

18:37

that. You have to get a removal order

18:39

because it's a legal process. It's not just

18:42

a pure exercise of force. There is a process.

18:44

It's set down in the law. And

18:47

there's two ways to do that. There's expedited

18:49

removal, which is a law created in 96. So

18:52

it's 30 plus years old. And we have

18:54

regular removal, which is immigration court. When

18:57

you put someone through expedited removal, key

18:59

to that, that's the credible fear process.

19:01

That requires asylum officers. In order to

19:03

do a credible fear interview as part

19:05

of this expedited process, you need to

19:08

have an asylum officer who can carry

19:10

out the interview. And if you don't

19:12

have those asylum officers, because there aren't

19:14

enough, then the only other option,

19:16

because you've got one of two options, is

19:18

to put them straight to immigration court,

19:20

skipping over the credible fear process entirely,

19:22

and going straight to the immigration court

19:25

system where they have a regular removal

19:27

hearing, where they can apply for asylum.

19:30

And if they fail, they get ordered deported and

19:32

ordered removed. So you have these two processes. And

19:34

Congress thought in 1996, so maybe

19:36

a few thousand people a year will apply for

19:38

asylum at the border. So we don't

19:40

need to fund the asylum officers. We

19:43

don't have that many of them. And so

19:45

in 2014, when tens of thousands of families

19:47

showed up in one summer, was the first

19:49

time we went, the system went, had a huge

19:51

stress test and it failed it. And

19:53

the system has been failing the stress

19:56

test for the last decades ever since.

19:59

And yet instead of fixing that. that we just keep

20:01

doubling down on this. But so basically, this

20:03

is the first time we saw this happening

20:05

under Obama. Thousands of families started showing up

20:08

every month. There weren't enough asylum officers to

20:10

carry out credible fear interviews. You couldn't do

20:12

them fast enough. And people

20:14

started getting released and they skipped over

20:16

that process again, because you have one

20:18

of two options, either expedited removal or

20:20

regular removal. And so people started going

20:23

straight to that, to the immigration court

20:25

process where they go to

20:27

court. If they file an asylum application, a judge

20:29

will hear their case and decide eventually whether

20:31

to grant asylum or deny asylum. So

20:34

the idea of people going into the sort

20:36

of normal immigration court system and not getting

20:38

expedited removal because they're then released into the

20:41

country with a court date. And this is

20:43

this catch and release notion, which again, Donald

20:45

Trump campaigned against in 2016. He

20:47

pledged to stop this. Again,

20:49

that requires legal changes because as you

20:52

said, like it's a legal process and

20:54

if the capacity is not there. So

20:56

what did they do about this general

20:58

set of issues at the border, you

21:00

know, before COVID basically? Yeah,

21:03

and you can see how they evolved

21:05

throughout the course of the term. The

21:07

family separation started actually within months. There

21:09

was a initial pilot project. Within weeks

21:11

they were discussing family separation. So this

21:13

is actually something that the Obama administration

21:15

had discussed. And so there was already

21:17

some little policies on there. So when

21:20

they took office and this was sort

21:22

of options that had come out there,

21:24

they seized on it. They said, let's

21:26

give this a try. And so they did

21:28

look at some options for just deliberate

21:31

separation and where they just said, we're not even

21:33

gonna give you a reason for it. We're just

21:35

gonna tear families apart. And they said, I think

21:37

even that was maybe a little bit too far

21:39

from them. And so they said, what we're gonna

21:41

do instead is we're gonna prosecute the parents for

21:44

illegal entry so that

21:47

will punish the parents. So the idea is then

21:49

the parents won't come back. And in the process,

21:52

that means the children will be separated.

21:54

They'll be sent off to office of

21:56

refugee resettlement. They'll be treated as unaccompanied

21:58

minors and treated. differently under

22:00

a different law and the parents will be

22:02

prosecuted and then they basically, you

22:05

know, it's like the South Park thing, but

22:07

you know, step one, prosecute parents, question mark,

22:09

question mark, question mark, reunite them and deport

22:11

them together. That's what sort of they were

22:13

saying to themselves. But the people inside the

22:15

agencies were going, what are you doing? There

22:18

is no, you have to figure out, you

22:20

happen to have a reunification process. You don't

22:22

have one. You're just taking these parents apart,

22:24

taking the sending the children elsewhere. You don't

22:26

even have a tracking system. And in fact,

22:28

so by the time zero tolerance rolled out

22:30

in spring of 2018, there were people inside

22:33

the government who had been raising alarm

22:35

bells for months about what was

22:37

happening. And all they had genuinely

22:39

was an Excel spreadsheet at

22:42

the office of refugee resettlement to try to track

22:44

these things. And then this quickly

22:46

became an absolute nightmare. 3,300 or so parents

22:48

separated from their

22:51

children. And I think there's some confusion here.

22:53

What happened is the parents were prosecuted and

22:56

then oftentimes the parents were deported. So the

22:58

children would still be in the US and

23:00

the parents would be gone to swear. Nobody

23:02

would know and they had no

23:04

process at all to reunite families.

23:07

So over 5,000 families

23:09

in total were separated during this time. And

23:12

it had very little impact on border crossings

23:14

too. This is the key to me is

23:16

that their theory of the case was

23:19

that people are presenting at the southern border,

23:22

not because of desperation and push factors,

23:24

but because of a perception of how

23:26

easy it is to get in. And

23:28

if we change that calculation, if we

23:30

say it's nightmarish to get in, it's

23:32

so nightmarish that you will risk being

23:34

separated from your child, that will deter

23:37

people from coming. This was explicitly

23:39

the theory and the currents

23:41

didn't work. And in fact, one of the things

23:43

that I've seen you note is that people showing

23:46

up the southern border all the way up until

23:48

COVID was still very high. In fact, Donald Trump

23:50

gave a primetime address at one

23:52

point from the Oval Office about the crisis

23:54

at the southern border. They kept

23:57

sort of throwing deterrence and

23:59

the notion of the wall at the problem

24:02

of people showing up because they didn't want

24:04

people showing up. They did not want people

24:06

applying for asylum. They wanted to stop the

24:08

flow at the southern border. And it really

24:10

wasn't until negotiations with Mexico and then

24:13

COVID that they were able to kind of turn

24:15

it off. Yeah. And so in 2018, they

24:17

did zero tolerance. That didn't work.

24:20

And ironically, it's very hard to say,

24:22

to point to one thing and say

24:24

this is the cause, but family unit

24:27

arrivals spiked pretty much immediately after Trump

24:29

publicly renounced family separation. And

24:32

that is in part, people have

24:34

theorized, I think there's probably some evidence to

24:37

this, but it's hard to say for sure

24:39

because everybody has different reasons for coming to

24:41

the border. But the international outrage over

24:43

family separation and the ways in which the message

24:46

was sent is we're going to stop doing this

24:48

may have encouraged more people to come to the border.

24:51

Right. children

24:54

from families. Like actually, even I agree

24:56

that this is bad and family unit

24:58

arrivals started spiking immediately after, you know, within

25:00

a month or two after that. And

25:03

we had throughout 2018, he shut down the

25:05

government in 2018, in December declared a national

25:09

emergency. Migrant arrivals kept

25:11

increasing every single month after that. They

25:13

put remain in Mexico in place in

25:15

late January 2019. They ramped it up

25:18

February, March, April, May 2019. And the

25:20

numbers kept going up, kept going up,

25:22

kept going up until Mexico

25:25

intervened and Trump threatened

25:27

25% tariffs on all

25:30

Mexican goods coming into the country. And Mexico

25:33

caved and said, all right, we will

25:35

crack down as hard as we can.

25:37

They deployed their new National Guard to

25:39

the northern border. You have images of Mexican

25:41

National Guard troops running after Central American

25:43

families, grabbing them and running them, hustling

25:45

them back onto the Mexican side or

25:47

making sure that they weren't able to

25:49

cross onto the US side. And

25:52

that caused an immediate drop in

25:54

migrant arrivals. The Trump Administration points

25:56

this and says, actually, it was rain in Mexico that

25:58

did this. This is the program. Worked in.

26:00

This is the argument that they make.

26:03

They say it's luck He reads that

26:05

deal to expand are made in

26:07

Mexico. Migrant arrivals dropped immediately. Program success.

26:09

The complicated version of that is that

26:12

this was again multiple other things

26:14

going on. And if you actually look

26:16

at like the dates in which this

26:18

expansion actually happened, arrival started dropping

26:20

weeks before the expansion actually began and

26:23

coincided pretty much exactly with Mexicans crackdowns.

26:25

And in we've actually seen this

26:27

happened several times in Twenty Fourteen. It's

26:29

Obama.mexico. To crack down and that

26:31

caused a significant drop and families

26:33

crossing the border such a cycle

26:35

multiple times when number spike Mexico

26:37

cracks down, the U S imposes

26:39

and policies and then they start

26:42

going up again. And the key

26:44

differences You know after this happened

26:46

in the lead twenty nineteen the

26:48

Trump administration started throwing other crazy

26:50

policies at the wall be created

26:52

a roulette system where they would

26:54

send Guatemalans to Honduras, Hondurans, El

26:56

Salvadoran Salvadorans to Guatemala. Not just

26:58

that y Las Vegas and. Yeah

27:00

what are these are it wouldn't even

27:02

as these. So these are the so

27:04

called asylum cooperative agreements and this deserves

27:06

so called see third Country agreements the

27:08

Trump Administration signed for I am with

27:10

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. You often

27:12

see people saying ending these agreements undermine

27:14

caused the big thing up. Know these

27:16

agreements never really went into effect the

27:18

Guatemalan one did. They said nine hundred

27:21

and forty five hundred and Salvadorans to

27:23

Guatemala total Before cove it hit me

27:25

agreements were suspended so he ideas getting

27:27

rid of those agreements made a big

27:29

difference. Again. Less than a thousand people ever

27:31

been through them. But setting aside the ideal was

27:33

basically no matter how you come here we will

27:35

turn your when sell cruises. You didn't have to

27:38

have ever been in one of these countries. If

27:40

you are hundred. And. You cross the

27:42

border, they could send you to Guatemala or El

27:44

Salvador. if you are salvadoran and

27:46

you cross the border the idea was they'd

27:48

send you to honduras guatemala and if you

27:51

were guatemalan they send you to el salvador

27:53

honduras and then they went further than that

27:55

the agreement signed with honduras let them send

27:57

mexicans to honduras so you could be born

28:00

in Tijuana steps from the US border and they would

28:02

put you on a plane and if you tried to

28:04

seek asylum, they put you on a plane and send

28:06

you 3000 miles south of

28:08

Honduras. And they also sent Ecuadorans

28:10

and Brazilians the idea they would send

28:12

them to Honduras too. Wait, I don't

28:14

understand. What is the logic here? Well,

28:16

the logic is find every way possible

28:18

to deny people access to the United

28:20

States. And that was their overarching goal

28:22

here. And look, treating

28:25

their utilitarian argument was this.

28:28

This is taking them as seriously as possible,

28:30

trying to treat their arguments as fairly as

28:32

we can. They said, it is

28:35

awful what happens to migrants. They

28:37

are abused by the cartels, often

28:39

sexually extorted, kidnapped, tortured. Awful

28:42

things happen on the way

28:44

here. So what we need

28:46

to do is basically make it impossible for

28:48

anyone to ever get into the United States.

28:51

Shut down this entire route and shut down

28:53

both the border and the entire route so

28:55

that this mass migration route is not happening

28:57

because it is a site of horrors. Which

28:59

by the way, it really is a brutal

29:01

trip and people do get exploited. They do

29:03

get sexually abused. They do get occasionally kidnapped.

29:05

They do get extorted, the amount of money

29:07

that people have to... I mean, they are

29:09

walking victims. There are sort of easy pickings

29:11

for a million different nefarious and

29:14

predatory people and institutions. And

29:16

the Trump administration basically thought, or this was

29:18

sort of their way of saying this is

29:20

we will just cause as much harm to

29:22

people so that if we just keep ratcheting

29:24

up the punishment and the cruelty, eventually it

29:27

will get so high that people stop trying

29:29

to come and all. And there is really

29:31

just no evidence that that actually works. They

29:34

do point to the fact that by early 2020, January, February

29:36

2020, family unit crossings were down.

29:42

Absolutely no doubt about it. And we

29:44

were in this sort of the lull

29:46

period. Then COVID

29:48

hits, Title 42, a pandemic

29:51

health policy that the CDC technically put

29:53

in place allegedly to stop

29:55

migrants from spreading COVID, even though COVID

29:57

was already spreading in the United States.

30:00

going to stop more people bringing it in. That

30:02

went into effect and totally reshaped the

30:04

border. It was essentially an end to

30:06

asylum as they envisioned it. And

30:09

the idea was any person crossing the

30:11

border could be expelled without letting them

30:14

access asylum because it was public health

30:16

law. It wasn't immigration law. So that

30:18

meant that they could circumvent every little

30:20

protection, due process, anything in

30:23

the immigration laws that were built in and to

30:25

say, well, we can get to ignore those because

30:27

this is public health emergency. We'll just turn everybody

30:29

away. And what that actually did,

30:31

they reached an agreement with Mexico to turn

30:33

back Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Mexicans to Mexico,

30:35

just those four countries. And they said, Mexico

30:37

said, we'll take those people so you can

30:39

send back as many of those people as

30:41

you want. And so what happened is people

30:44

started crossing, getting sent back to Mexico

30:46

and then saying, well, okay, all that

30:48

happened because this was not immigration law.

30:50

It wasn't a deportation. It had no

30:52

consequences. It was literally just a bus

30:54

back to Mexico. And they said, okay,

30:57

smugglers started saying, oh, great,

30:59

repeat packaging. We'll sell you a repeat

31:02

crossing package. Three tries or your money

31:05

back, that kind of thing. And

31:07

people started crossing over and over and over

31:09

again. And so by the end of 2020,

31:11

again, nobody was really paying attention at the

31:13

time because everything else happening with the election.

31:15

But by the end of 2020, border

31:18

crossings were already at 15-year highs. Wait,

31:20

wait, wait. The end of 2020. So

31:24

even in COVID, pre-vaccine, after they've

31:26

thrown everything at the wall, this

31:28

is important, everything at the wall at

31:30

the deterrence, they've done everything they can to

31:32

get border crossings of asylum seekers to zero

31:34

if they can do it. That would be

31:36

their ideal number, right? They have put

31:39

Title 42 through the CDC, which is a public

31:41

health law, which allows them to circumvent the normal

31:43

due process to just ship people out without having

31:45

to go through what you were talking about before.

31:48

Even under all of that, in the

31:50

last full month of Donald Trump's term,

31:52

border crossings in December 2020, we're at a 15-year

31:55

high. Actually 20-year

31:57

high. That is crazy. Yeah. And

31:59

again, No one was paying attention at

32:01

the time because, you know, we were a few weeks

32:03

away from 10 year six. And

32:05

I mean, realistically, the thing is every single

32:08

month from April 2020 through May 2021, border

32:12

apprehensions went up, border crossings went up

32:14

every single month. Initially, it was mostly a return to

32:16

the 1980s, 1990s of people coming here for work. I

32:21

mean, it was primarily single adults at first,

32:23

but the number of family units crossing was

32:25

creeping up to the number of unaccompanied children

32:28

was creeping up to. And

32:30

so you were you were already seeing a

32:32

reversal of the Trump administration's

32:34

like success. And not

32:36

only that, because people were just crossing over and

32:38

over the message was getting out right now, you

32:41

can cross as many times as you want. And

32:43

if they catch you every time, they're not going

32:45

to prosecute you, they're not going to formally deport

32:47

you, they'll just send you back to Mexico. Right

32:50

because of the way title 42 worked. Yeah.

32:52

In fact, it's estimated during the title

32:55

42 era, about one in three border

32:57

apprehensions was a person on their second,

32:59

third, fourth or fifth, a failed attempt

33:01

to cross. So this repeat crossings,

33:04

which used to be how the border worked back

33:06

in the 90s, when people

33:08

would just keep crossing until they eventually made

33:10

it through, we just sort of like policy

33:12

wise, title 42 was a return to the

33:15

sort of laissez-faire, just send them back to

33:17

Mexico policies of the 1980s and 1990s. And

33:21

it was a complete failure. And then the other

33:23

crucial thing to understand is three

33:26

days after Biden took office, the governor

33:28

of Tama Lipas, which is the Mexican

33:30

state bordering South Texas, pouring the Rio

33:32

Grande Valley, said a

33:34

new Mexican law had just gone into

33:37

effect about the detention of migrant children.

33:39

And he said, you know what, you

33:41

can no longer expel children or families

33:43

with children under the age of seven. So

33:46

if you are a family with a small child,

33:48

and DHS wants to expel you from South Texas

33:50

back to here, we're not going to let you

33:52

do it. So within

33:54

days, the Biden administration lost the ability

33:56

to expel all families, because that had been true,

33:58

you know, under the law. last bits of

34:00

the Trump administration, families were still being

34:03

expelled. But within days, that power broke

34:05

down. And then almost immediately,

34:07

we saw thousands of people who'd been waiting

34:09

in central, you know, in central Mexico and

34:11

northern Mexico to see what would

34:14

happen suddenly start crossing again because there had

34:16

been a whole bunch of pent up demand

34:18

with COVID and everything. And that

34:20

is really when we started seeing large

34:22

numbers of families start crossing again. More

34:25

of our conversation after this quick break. The

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shopify.com/podcast free shopify.com

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slash podcast free So

35:43

let's now go over to the Biden administration.

35:45

So we have a sort of view of

35:47

both the sort of legal, the vision of

35:50

restrictionism of legal immigration,

35:52

a vision of a sort of zero

35:54

people at the border crossing for asylum

35:56

and various attempts to get that number

35:58

to there, basically whatever. by any means

36:00

necessary, right, to get there, much of which did

36:02

not work, which I think is a key thing

36:05

to understand here. Or if it worked, it worked

36:07

temporarily. Right, it worked temporarily. So now you go

36:09

over to the Biden administration. Let's just stay with

36:11

the border, and then we'll go to legal immigration.

36:13

So the Biden administration does have a bunch of

36:16

promises about things they're going to do differently at

36:18

the border. And they do

36:20

revoke some of the executive orders

36:22

of the Trump administration. The argument

36:24

that Republicans and Trump make now

36:26

is the revocation of those is

36:28

what has led to record numbers of

36:31

border crossings. So let's just start with

36:33

what does the Biden administration do differently?

36:35

What are the places where it's doing

36:37

things differently than what Trump was doing

36:39

to the border? Yeah, I mean, the

36:41

thing is, as a policy matter, it's

36:43

not that much because Title 42 stayed

36:45

in effect, and it stayed in effect all the way through to May of

36:48

2023. And Title 42 was the

36:51

big policy in effect when Biden took office.

36:54

Those asylum cooperative agreements I mentioned where

36:56

they were sending Hondurans and Salvadorans to

36:58

Guatemala, that agreement had been completely suspended

37:00

since COVID hit. Guatemala said, absolutely not.

37:03

You are not sending back Hondurans and

37:05

Salvadorans here during a pandemic. So

37:07

zero people had been put through those

37:10

agreements when Biden took office and hadn't

37:12

been since March of 2020. Remain in

37:14

Mexico, very similar. There hadn't been

37:16

a single court hearing. So for those who

37:19

don't remember how it worked under Trump, the idea

37:22

was people were sent back to Mexico to go

37:24

through a court process in the United States. They

37:26

have to come back to the border, cross the

37:28

border, go to a court hearing. And then

37:30

if the court hearing ended or

37:33

didn't reach the end, they get sent back

37:35

to Mexico. And so those court hearings were

37:37

also completely suspended and had been suspended since

37:39

March of 2020 for COVID

37:41

reasons. And they had been putting about

37:43

a few hundred people, maybe a thousand people a month

37:45

into the program. That's it. Sort of literally just sending

37:48

them back and saying, hey, sorry, we have no clue

37:50

when we're going to start up these court hearings, but

37:52

why don't you just wait in Mexico for a mean

37:54

in the meantime? So when Biden

37:56

took office, because of the pandemic, both of

37:59

those policies were basically moribund or have been

38:01

set aside, or were like, they were, you

38:03

know, about less than 2% of people were

38:06

put into remain in Mexico during this period.

38:08

So Biden took office and said, look, we're

38:10

going to lift these policies. They're not even

38:12

really being used right now, but

38:15

we're going to keep in place Title 42.

38:17

And they sent a message early on during

38:19

the transition. They said, look, we

38:21

are going to be better on this, but

38:23

we need time. The system is not working.

38:25

Don't come. And they sent that message. Don't

38:27

come over and over and over and over

38:29

again. And of course, nobody listened because no

38:31

one ever listens to the United States and these

38:34

issues. And to be clear, the Obama administration had

38:36

tried that messaging. They had a big messaging campaign

38:38

in Central America saying, don't come. The Trump administration

38:40

had a messaging campaign in Central America saying, don't

38:43

come. And when the Biden administration, there's just very

38:45

little evidence that people listen. And of course, like

38:47

if you look at in the United States, who

38:49

listens to government PSAs, you know, some people do,

38:51

sure, but most people just tune them out. So

38:54

the main thing here to think about is the

38:56

third party repatriation agreements and remain in Mexico, which

38:58

were two of the big policies

39:00

the Trump administration used to try to

39:03

reduce border crossings. Your contention

39:05

is they weren't that effective. And by

39:07

the time that the transition happened, they

39:09

were essentially moribund because Title 42, which

39:11

was the public health thing, sort

39:13

of blocked it all out. That was really

39:16

the kind of sovereign at the border was

39:18

Title 42. That was really what was guiding

39:20

border policy. And so the revocation

39:22

by the Biden administration of

39:24

those two policies didn't really make a big

39:27

difference because 42 stays in place. Now eventually,

39:30

and this is a very complicated

39:32

litigation history here, but let's just

39:34

simplify it. And I'll simplify it this way.

39:37

You can't keep Title 42, which

39:39

is a public health emergency provision

39:41

in place forever. It got more

39:43

and more ridiculous, particularly there is

39:45

this certain moment where Republicans are

39:47

at every opportunity saying the pandemic

39:49

is over and all of these

39:51

emergency authorities have to be revoked.

39:53

And it was a huge, you

39:56

know, treading on liberty, but Title 42 has

39:58

to step into perpetuity. Like, whatever you

40:00

thought about Title 42, it was effective, it wasn't

40:02

effective, it was good, it was bad. At

40:05

a certain point, it's got to go away. It is tied

40:07

to the pandemic and the public health emergency passes. It's

40:10

going to go either way. How much of

40:12

a difference does it make when Title 42

40:14

does eventually go away? Yeah. You

40:16

know, we've now been, we're coming up on a year

40:18

this May without Title 42, going back to it.

40:21

And there have been some things that we can

40:23

observe about what's changed. So it's leading

40:25

to fewer repeat crossings. So the big

40:28

thing is, there are fewer people doing

40:30

this, you know, crossing over and over

40:32

and over again, because we're back to

40:34

a situation where the US government is

40:36

imposing harsher consequences on people, you know,

40:38

long-term multi-year bans on reentry, criminal prosecutions.

40:41

Those are back in effect. What

40:43

is happening is that we are seeing more

40:45

families crossing now. And this makes some sense.

40:47

You don't want to really take a child

40:49

across the border multiple times if you get

40:51

expelled. You know, no parent's going to want

40:54

to put their kid through that. So

40:56

we are seeing now where, you know, if

40:58

a family crosses, there's more likely that

41:00

the family enter, they cross the US-Mexico border,

41:02

then we have to decide what to

41:04

do with them under those two removal processes.

41:07

And so most families are going, having to go to

41:09

the second process, the regular Removal

41:12

Immigration Court process. So ending

41:14

Title 42 has probably led to

41:16

more families crossing just because I think

41:18

parents and children are more vulnerable to

41:20

deterrence-based policies to some extent, just because,

41:23

you know, any parent naturally

41:25

doesn't want to put their child through an

41:27

awful border crossing experience more than once. But

41:31

single adult migrants, you know, we are seeing fewer

41:33

of them crossing because there was less of that

41:35

churn of migrants crossing over and over and over

41:37

again and getting sent back. But

41:39

the key difference is what's really shifted

41:41

is the demographics are different now. From

41:44

2014 to 2021, it was Central

41:47

American migrants, was the big issue.

41:50

Starting in 2021, especially

41:53

as COVID pandemic destabilized

41:55

South America and really threw everybody

41:57

for a loop, a lot of vendors were having to do with

41:59

the pandemic. started coming north to

42:01

the border. About one in four people have

42:03

left Venezuela in the last decade, around 7.7

42:05

million. The overwhelming

42:08

majority are still in South America.

42:10

The United States is not the

42:12

foremost refugee hosting country in the

42:14

region. Other countries are hosting per

42:16

capita, much higher populations than

42:18

the United States is. And

42:21

starting in 2021, though, we did

42:23

start seeing more people could start

42:25

coming from countries like Venezuela and

42:27

Cuba. In fall of 2021, Nicaragua

42:29

relaxed its visa requirements for Cubans

42:31

and said, hey, Cubans, you no longer

42:33

need a visa to fly here. And

42:36

so suddenly tens of thousands of Cubans

42:38

started flying to Nicaragua and heading north to

42:40

the United States. Right. And very

42:42

crucial thing to understand about this is

42:44

that the United States doesn't have repatriation

42:46

agreements with every country in the world.

42:49

In particular, we don't have repatriation agreements

42:51

with Venezuela or Cuba. Many

42:53

people kind of have a sense about

42:55

this with Cuba for 50 years, basically,

42:57

Cubans were almost immune from deportation. If

43:00

you made it onto US soil, I mean, some

43:02

people have heard of wet foot, dry foot. Well,

43:04

wet foot, dry foot was an acknowledgment that Cuba

43:06

said, if somebody has made it onto US soil,

43:08

we will not allow them to come into the

43:10

country and back. So you can't deport them to us.

43:13

And the key difference here, we

43:15

saw this with Venezuela as well. You

43:18

had Venezuelans coming to the border and

43:20

crossing. And the United States had effectively,

43:22

even under Title 42, Mexico

43:25

wasn't taking them at first, and

43:27

Venezuela wasn't taking them. So

43:29

like Cubans before them, once they got onto

43:32

US soil, they reached a

43:34

point where they basically had no real ability of

43:36

the United States to do anything in that circumstance.

43:38

And again, this is not new. There

43:40

had been a way for Cubans. But as more people

43:43

from across the hemisphere started arriving, this became a

43:45

bigger and bigger issue for the United States. And

43:47

especially because the Venezuelan diaspora is so large,

43:49

as more and more people started coming, this

43:52

became a bigger and bigger problem for the

43:54

United States. Because you had tens of thousands

43:56

of people crossing from Venezuela and realistically, geopolitically,

43:59

why? There's nothing we could do about

44:01

that. Yeah. I just want to hammer home an

44:03

obvious thing that's implicit in what you're saying is

44:05

you can't deport people to a country against that

44:08

country's will, just to be clear. Like you cannot,

44:10

you can't do it. You need clearance with

44:13

them legally to set, to run your plane

44:15

there, to do whatever. Like, so if the

44:17

country says we're not taking them, like you

44:19

can't send them there. Yeah. And Venezuela does

44:21

not permit the United States to fly deportation

44:23

flights. So you can technically deport people via

44:25

commercial air, but there are no direct flights

44:28

from the United States to Venezuela. So

44:30

you actually have to like pass an ICE

44:32

agent to get on a flight, a commercial

44:34

flight, watch somebody go to the connecting airport

44:36

and like watch them get on the plane

44:38

back to Caracas. So realistically, only

44:41

like less than 200 people a year

44:43

were being deported to Venezuela. So

44:45

eventually, you know, the Biden administration reached

44:48

a deal with Mexico and in October

44:50

of 2022, Mexico said,

44:52

we will let you deport

44:54

Venezuelans here under title 42,

44:57

expel them under title 42. And

44:59

that deal was expanded in January

45:01

of 2023 to Cubans, Haitians and

45:03

Nicaraguans. But Mexico said, we

45:06

want something out of this. And what we

45:08

want something out of this is shared responsibility

45:10

for migration. And so they said, here's the

45:12

deal that they worked out. It was, we

45:14

will take 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans

45:16

and Venezuelans expelled back to

45:19

Mexico every single month.

45:21

But in exchange, you have

45:23

to accept 30,000 different

45:25

Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians

45:28

through humanitarian parole each month.

45:31

And that was as part of the sort

45:33

of like shared regional migration framework. So

45:36

this is now the CHNV parole program,

45:38

which you've seen a lot of Republicans

45:40

attack, as you know, there was

45:42

a completely inaccurate talk about these were like charter

45:44

flights coming into the country. No, you have to

45:46

you have to buy a plane ticket. And so

45:48

program, you get screened a little bit like immigrating

45:51

legally. But this was very much part of

45:53

a carrot and stick approach from the Biden administration.

45:55

It was we will crack down

45:57

and send send you back to Mexico. But

46:00

if you don't come here in the first place

46:02

if you apply for one of these programs Here's

46:05

a new option that's available that's right and available

46:07

to you off the border Right keep you from

46:09

ever coming to the border in the first place

46:11

Yeah, so let's just zoom out for a second

46:13

because there's a lot again This is all pretty

46:16

complicated right but the general thing is title 42

46:18

goes away And

46:20

I guess Michael here's one question there has

46:22

been an enormous spike in crossing to the

46:25

border Yes, and I think that sometimes people

46:27

who may listen this podcast and they're who

46:29

have my politics Like

46:32

the Fox stuff is like all this like it's constant

46:34

24 or 7 But

46:36

when you look at the numbers, they're pretty

46:38

wild like we're talking Ellis Island at its

46:40

peak Almost level numbers like of

46:42

people now as much more country, but like, you

46:45

know, there's a ton of people It's record-setting.

46:47

It was happening for several months and There

46:50

really hadn't ever been anything like this at the

46:52

southern border So it wasn't purely hysteria.

46:54

Yes and no so I think you

46:56

know if you look at overall crossings

46:58

for about a 25 year period from

47:01

the 1970s

47:04

through to 2007

47:06

basically when the Great Recession hit Routinely

47:09

over a million apprehensions a year

47:11

routinely and of course back then

47:14

Apprehensions is not the same as crossings because

47:16

they weren't apprehending everybody crossing not a surprise

47:18

there and even by 1977

47:22

president Carter is already saying an estimated 2.5

47:25

million crossings a year So, you know

47:27

one in three people are being apprehended

47:29

and it wasn't until according to official

47:31

DHS estimates It wasn't until 2012 that

47:33

a majority of the people crossing the

47:36

border were taken into custody So what

47:38

that means is you look back at you know, what are

47:40

official estimates in fiscal year? 2000 25 years ago you had

47:45

1.67 million Rehensions and according to

47:47

DHS estimates about 2.1 million successful

47:50

unlawful entries on top of that

47:53

So you're about 3.8 million total

47:55

crossings. That's 25 years ago So

47:58

we have seen this level of

48:00

very high crossings before. The key

48:02

distinction now is these

48:04

are not people who are primarily trying

48:07

to evade arrest. The majority of people

48:09

now are turning themselves in to access

48:11

the humanitarian protection system. They're no longer

48:13

Mexicans, and we increasingly high numbers of

48:16

people who don't have any family or

48:18

friends in the U.S., don't know anybody

48:20

here, and need a lot more support

48:22

services when they get here than

48:25

has happened in the past. This is a

48:27

transformation of what's happening down there, because when

48:29

you go back to 2000, it's

48:31

people essentially, primarily Mexicans, sneaking

48:33

across the border. If you've watched El

48:35

Norte or whatever, they're sneaking

48:37

across the border, although that was Central Americans, but they're

48:40

sneaking across the border probably with some

48:42

family or people they know there, and they're trying

48:44

to work, and they might go back or they

48:46

might stay. This is people

48:49

showing up with often no family from

48:51

not just the Western Hemisphere, but sometimes

48:53

all over the world. I mean, the

48:55

vast majority, the Western Hemisphere and pluralities

48:57

of Venezuela and Cubans right now, that

49:00

shifts around, going to be apprehended to

49:02

apply for asylum, and

49:04

basically an entirely, an

49:06

extremely high volume alternate

49:09

system of entry that

49:12

has basically been built up at the southern border in

49:14

a place that doesn't have, like it's compared to Ellis

49:16

Island. Ellis Island was built to do that. We've

49:19

now got this system where there's,

49:21

because of in some ways, I

49:23

would say, how little we're letting in people for

49:25

the other means, the demand

49:28

pushing to the border where like,

49:30

this system is completely ill-equipped to

49:33

do what it's now being stood up to

49:35

try to do, which is deal

49:37

with an enormous capacity of folks

49:39

presenting who basically wanna immigrate

49:42

legally, and they're using asylum because

49:44

that's what's available. Some of them

49:46

definitely deserve asylum, but not all,

49:48

but they can't assess that themselves because they just

49:51

wanna come to the United States. And

49:53

so I guess the question is like, why

49:55

have we gotten to this point? Like, has

49:57

the Biden administration made decisions this

50:00

or is this a sort of natural

50:02

forcing mechanism from global demand? How do

50:04

you see it? Yeah,

50:06

I mean, I really do see this on a

50:08

spectrum. And you look at what has happened over

50:11

the last decade, and this has been building. You

50:13

have to keep in mind that this isn't new.

50:15

This didn't start under the Biden administration. And

50:19

we had now three separate presidential

50:21

administrations that have been trying to

50:23

deal with this, and Congress has

50:25

been completely absent. We have

50:27

not updated our legal immigration system

50:30

since November of 1990. The

50:32

first website primarily put

50:34

online at CERN in December of 1990. So

50:37

our legal immigration system predates the

50:39

World Wide Web. Wow. Our humanitarian

50:42

protection system, this idea of expedited

50:44

removal, incredible fear interviews, that

50:47

comes from 1996 in like the

50:49

peak of the Macarena. These are

50:51

1990s, 20th century systems that

50:55

did not anticipate the modern world we

50:57

find ourselves in today. And so

50:59

presidents have used whatever limited executive

51:01

authority that they have here, and sometimes

51:04

very expansive executive authority, but the core

51:06

resource challenges and the bottlenecks in the

51:08

system just need Congress to

51:10

step in. So as this

51:12

has built and built and built, smuggler

51:15

networks have also built and built and

51:17

built. This did start out

51:19

10 years ago, it was mostly smugglers

51:21

in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. And

51:24

then as more and more people are

51:26

seeing, as the legal immigration system became

51:28

less accessible, if you don't prompt cut

51:30

legal immigration, then COVID slashed

51:32

legal immigration for years and consulates are

51:35

just recovering now. There are backlogs in

51:37

India right now in China. In China

51:39

in particular, if you look at the

51:42

numbers here, more people got

51:44

visas from China in 2019 than in 2020 to

51:47

2023 combined in a four year

51:49

period after that. That was how much COVID

51:52

devastated the system there. And it's

51:54

not really a surprise that when

51:56

legal immigration to the United States dries

51:58

up and you have global coverage

52:00

and politicians screaming about an

52:03

open border that you

52:05

start seeing more people say,

52:07

well, hey, seems like there might be.

52:10

And this becomes this sort of

52:12

self-reinforcing cycle. Wait, do you think

52:14

domestic political attention drawn to the

52:16

border perversely ends up as an

52:18

advertisement for people to come? Undoubtedly.

52:20

I mean, really, especially because a

52:22

lot of this stuff spreads through

52:24

WhatsApp and TikTok. And so you

52:26

see, social media has also been

52:28

a huge driver. And also it is just

52:30

easier than ever to migrate. You

52:33

now have translation apps. You can now

52:35

be from whatever part of the world

52:37

and you can have your language translated

52:39

into Spanish. That was not 10 years

52:41

ago. Right now have social media telling

52:43

people, giving people guides to get here.

52:46

You've got smugglers who are coming. All

52:48

of this didn't exist in the past. And

52:51

this has been a real shift. I mean, I

52:53

know you have certain political commitments or normative commitments

52:55

about what you would like to see happen in

52:57

policy. And you're being very careful and descriptive here.

53:00

Do you think if Donald Trump replaced Joe

53:02

Biden tomorrow with Stephen Miller to side, right?

53:04

Like would they be able to drive it

53:07

to zero? There's a sense that the attacks

53:09

on the Republicans, this is a lack of

53:11

will, right? That unilaterally, that Joe Biden actually

53:13

wants this to happen. He wants people showing

53:15

up at the Southern border because there are

53:18

going to be future Democratic voters, which is

53:20

itself ludicrous and dubious. And in fact, actually

53:22

maybe not true because like the history of

53:25

people fleeing failed left estates. They

53:27

become Democratic voters, by

53:29

the way. But is that fair?

53:31

Is there some lever he could hit,

53:33

some screw he could turn to make

53:35

this stop basically? No,

53:38

I think you would see a big

53:41

drop in part because people operate on

53:43

a wait and see policy. So when

53:45

Trump took office, border crossings plummeted. January

53:48

2017, the lowest

53:51

border crossings in 50 years. And that had

53:53

nothing to do with Trump actually changing any

53:55

policy. The policy remained identical. It happened because

53:57

people take a wait and see a policy.

54:00

And so we have seen this pattern before, the end

54:02

of Title 42, for example. The Biden

54:05

administration said, we are going to be harsh,

54:07

we are going to crack down. We've imposed

54:09

these new asylum restrictions, and border crossings did

54:11

drop significantly. And then people started

54:14

testing it and found out that these

54:16

fundamental resource limitations are still there. And

54:18

so as much as the Biden administration, you know, right

54:20

now, about 90 percent of people

54:22

who cross the border without permission right

54:25

now or across it illegally are denied

54:27

asylum, will be denied asylum eventually. But

54:29

they can't be denied asylum until they get

54:31

in front of an immigration judge five to

54:33

seven years from now. And

54:36

so the Biden administration can't put this asylum

54:38

restriction in place, literally does not have the

54:40

resources to do that. And so I think

54:42

not just a Trump administration, but any administration

54:45

that really wants to crack down, you

54:47

would see an immediate drop, and

54:50

then you would see the numbers start trickling up

54:52

again. And the real question mark

54:54

here is Mexico. You

54:56

cannot deal with migration without working

54:58

out a deal with Mexico. And

55:00

it's also elections in Mexico this time.

55:03

Next year, we will have a new Mexican president.

55:05

And it is going to be a woman. And

55:09

we have seen how President Trump

55:11

dealt with female heads of state.

55:13

And there is a

55:16

lot of Mexico's pride on the line

55:18

here. And you see Mexico really bristling

55:20

at the ways in which a

55:22

lot of people on the right now are going after

55:24

them, called to bomb Mexico. And in fact, and this

55:26

has really been an issue here. And so

55:28

this is something that they view as a battle of wills.

55:30

In fact, I testified in front of a congressional hearing two weeks

55:32

ago. I was sitting next to Gene

55:34

Hamilton, one of the Stephen Miller's

55:37

close allies and one of the architects

55:40

of family separation. And

55:42

he said in this hearing, very openly, he said, we

55:44

need to win a battle of wills

55:46

with them. We need to overcome

55:48

them, overcome their will. And he said, that's

55:50

how you do it. You overcome Mexico's will.

55:54

And international diplomacy is not that

55:56

simple. Mexico is

55:58

now our number one trading group. partner

56:00

with that used to be a China

56:02

now you're in can use be Canada

56:04

sign and who changed back and forth

56:07

is no Mexico. So the Trump Administration's

56:09

threat of twenty five percent terrorists and

56:11

twenty nineteen. You. Can friend

56:13

that today announced and twenty five percent

56:15

tariffs women in a time and were

56:17

worried about inflation that would set off

56:19

an economic death spiral and so Mexico

56:21

would probably rightly look at this and

56:23

say, who are you kidding. Now.

56:26

Amo has actually said Amo The President

56:28

of Mexico has said Anderson while Lopez

56:30

Obrador he has said. Actually

56:32

sure all work with the by moment when

56:34

the big senate deal came out or he

56:36

he said also migrants but we want

56:38

to give me something in exchange and what

56:41

he wanted an exchange was far beyond what

56:43

United States is willing to give. It was

56:45

legalization for all the an undocumented immigrants,

56:47

Twenty billion dollars in development assistance for Central

56:49

and South America and and to Cuba sanctions

56:52

and Venezuela sanctions. The United States foreign policy

56:54

establishment is not willing to do those

56:56

right now so it's hard to see whether

56:58

that was he deliberately to high demand sort

57:01

of intended to provoke. A who are

57:03

you carrying response. but it's a sign

57:05

that they want more than what they've

57:07

gotten because Mexico has been dealing with

57:09

this to and so I think Mexico

57:11

itself sees that he is the United

57:13

States greatest hold on actually been able

57:15

to get migrants to stop coming to

57:17

the border and they're saying whoa whoa

57:19

okay if you're going to me, what

57:21

kind of runs billions of dollars of

57:23

our own funds on nests But yet

57:25

once in a for us. We're

57:28

right back at Protect as quickly. As

57:38

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free. I

58:30

want to talk about one more policy thing under the Biden

58:32

administration because there's the unilateral stuff they can do. But then

58:34

of course there's the big border bill. And you said that,

58:36

you know, we haven't updated it since 1990. This was the

58:38

big attempt to update

58:42

not the whole immigration system, but

58:44

stuff around the border. It was

58:46

a bipartisan deal that was worked

58:48

out between Republican and Democratic senators.

58:50

James Langford of Oklahoma and Chris Murphy of

58:53

Connecticut and then a few other people, Katie

58:55

Britt of Alabama and a few other folks

58:57

got together. I think Kyrsten Sinema was piano

58:59

from Arizona, the independent Tom Tillis, it was

59:01

Tillis Langford Murphy and Sinema. Right. So the four

59:03

of them got together. They hammered out this thing.

59:06

Conservatives were crowing. It's well, initially they came

59:08

out of a crowing saying we've got the

59:10

most sort of the best

59:12

sort of border crackdown legislation we can

59:15

imagine. And they're not asking for anything

59:17

on the dreamers or, or, you

59:19

know, anything like that. It's just a border bill.

59:22

Donald Trump said came out and killed it immediately

59:24

because he wanted the border to be in the

59:27

worst shape possible as a, as a sort of political tool.

59:29

But tell me about the actual substance of that

59:31

bill. Yeah. I mean, it was

59:33

an actual serious attempt to discuss these

59:36

issues. They're very clear that they actually

59:38

did get in a room and talk

59:40

through these resource limitations and

59:42

you know, what statutory changes might be

59:44

necessary and come to what seems to

59:46

be a compromise. Now was it a

59:49

perfect compromise? No. In fact, we've argued

59:51

that it was just overly complex and

59:53

the authority had too many

59:55

weird aspects of it that were parts of

59:58

compromise for it to really have functioned that

1:00:00

well, but it was definitely

1:00:02

a big swing at actually fixing the

1:00:04

issue. So for example, it would have

1:00:06

hired thousands of new asylum officers, which

1:00:08

as I've mentioned is the

1:00:10

fundamental bottleneck right now. And it would

1:00:13

have hired hundreds of new immigration judges,

1:00:15

new agents, new resources in general to

1:00:17

deal with this, to really say like,

1:00:19

okay, this is a resource issue. If

1:00:21

we have enough resources, we can get

1:00:23

a functional system again. And it did

1:00:25

have a new authority to

1:00:27

essentially suspend asylum, to return a little

1:00:29

bit to the Title 42 type policies

1:00:31

of the past. And it

1:00:33

also greatly shortened the asylum process. Instead,

1:00:36

one of the biggest structural changes was

1:00:39

if you come across the border and you go through credible

1:00:41

fear, even if we can't

1:00:43

give you a credible fear interview soon, because

1:00:45

we don't have an asylum officer available, we

1:00:47

don't send you to immigration court, we just

1:00:49

keep you in this credible fear thing. So

1:00:52

maybe you have to wait six months for

1:00:54

a credible fear interview, but you're still in

1:00:56

this expedited removal framework so that you have

1:00:58

fewer rights, fewer rights to appeal. And in

1:01:00

fact, under the new process, people would just never go

1:01:03

to court. They'd never get to see a judge. If

1:01:06

a bureaucrat denied them, that was it. You

1:01:08

could not even appeal to a federal court.

1:01:10

It just essentially cut courts out

1:01:12

of the process completely and became a

1:01:15

bureaucratic process, purely in

1:01:17

front of officers in

1:01:19

the government with really no input

1:01:21

whatsoever from an independent third party,

1:01:24

whether that be an immigration judge

1:01:26

or later a federal

1:01:28

circuit court appeals judge. But

1:01:31

it also said people still have a

1:01:33

right to seek asylum. It also didn't

1:01:36

set as a goal, zero people crossing

1:01:38

the border. It acknowledged people will keep

1:01:40

crossing, and it's not bad that someone

1:01:42

crosses. We just need to have a

1:01:44

process in place in order

1:01:47

to ensure that they are someone with

1:01:49

a legitimate claim for asylum. But

1:01:51

you saw Speaker Johnson say, the goal

1:01:53

should be zero, zero people crossing. And

1:01:55

I think that is right now the

1:01:57

fundamental difference between the two parties. is

1:02:00

you are seeing an increasing on the Republican

1:02:02

side of things and increasing abandonment

1:02:04

of the idea that people can

1:02:06

seek asylum at the border. And

1:02:09

on the Democratic side, you have increasing

1:02:11

willingness to crack down and impose new restrictions,

1:02:13

but they have not abandoned the idea that

1:02:16

people will come to our borders, they will

1:02:18

be seeking protection, and we should have a

1:02:20

system in place to determine whether or not

1:02:22

they qualify. And I think that is the

1:02:24

rhetorical fight going on right now, between zero

1:02:27

and we actually should have a system in place

1:02:29

to screen people, and zero is unrealistic. Let's sort

1:02:32

of end this on legal immigration, because we spend

1:02:34

a lot of time on Biden and the border,

1:02:36

but for all the things you talked about before,

1:02:38

how the previous administration, Trump,

1:02:40

had used every means possible, including

1:02:42

throwing out applications that didn't put

1:02:44

N.A. in blank spaces. What's

1:02:47

the sort of top line of what the

1:02:49

Biden administration has done on legal immigration and

1:02:51

those pathways? Yeah, I mean, you use a

1:02:53

metaphor here, you know, when Biden took office,

1:02:55

the legal immigration system was like a cruise

1:02:57

ship that was on fire and listing. It

1:02:59

hadn't fully sunk yet, but things weren't looking

1:03:01

good. So right now, the fire is out.

1:03:04

They've mostly righted a lot of

1:03:06

the list, but the engines aren't really going

1:03:08

yet. And that's due in part to, again,

1:03:10

they had to dig themselves out of a

1:03:12

really big hole, not just caused by the Trump

1:03:14

admin, but also caused by COVID. And like, when

1:03:17

you just stop adjudicating a lot of things for

1:03:19

months and months and months and months on end,

1:03:22

that creates a huge backlog. But last

1:03:24

year, in fiscal year 2023, USCIS

1:03:26

for the first time in over a decade

1:03:28

actually reduced the overall number of applications pending

1:03:31

at the end of the year. Oh, wow.

1:03:33

But it's mixed because it's also, it's like

1:03:36

a balloon. If you squeeze one place, you know,

1:03:38

it expands elsewhere. So every time they sort of

1:03:40

gone after one kind of backlog, that causes

1:03:42

another thing to get neglected. And they

1:03:44

are hiring constantly. Congress two years ago

1:03:46

gave 250 million for backlog reduction last

1:03:49

year, 135. And the

1:03:51

DHS bill that just passed another 160 million.

1:03:54

So they are actually giving a funding

1:03:56

to the agency, which crucial

1:03:58

understand here, it's a fee funded. agency.

1:04:00

Congress usually doesn't give them any money at

1:04:02

all. They have to charge fees to people.

1:04:04

And so fees are going up. Starting April

1:04:07

1st, for example, pretty much any employment based

1:04:09

petition that people file to bring someone here

1:04:11

to work legally, we'll have a $600 asylum

1:04:15

program surcharge packed

1:04:17

on so that they can hire asylum

1:04:19

officers because asylum officers are not paid

1:04:21

for by Congress. So they essentially are

1:04:23

paid for, are now going to be

1:04:25

paid by employers and people filing for

1:04:27

things. So we're making the legal immigration

1:04:29

system more expensive to deal with

1:04:31

the border because Congress doesn't fund it.

1:04:33

So that's one thing we can fix.

1:04:35

But, you know, generally speaking,

1:04:38

there are still a lot of backlogs

1:04:40

and the system is by no means

1:04:42

perfect. And that's just processing

1:04:44

backlogs. We still, there's nothing the Biden

1:04:46

admin can do about structural

1:04:48

green card backlogs created by

1:04:50

the fact that Congress

1:04:53

hasn't updated this since 1990. You know,

1:04:55

if you look at Indian nationals, for example, so

1:04:58

crucial, you know, there's a 7% quota

1:05:00

on all visas. No country can get

1:05:02

more than 7% of any

1:05:04

visa category in any given year, which is

1:05:06

the idea was to ensure that no one

1:05:08

country dominates. But what that means is that

1:05:10

for certain categories of nationals, like Indian nationals,

1:05:13

the waiting times are over 100 years. There

1:05:16

are visa categories right now where

1:05:18

even if you are eligible, you qualify,

1:05:20

you file the application, you're approved and

1:05:22

they'll basically say, here's a ticket, go

1:05:24

get in this line, we're going to

1:05:26

give you your visa when you're dead

1:05:28

of old age. And

1:05:30

so that's the sort of stuff that like

1:05:32

Congress can fix Biden can't. And

1:05:35

in terms of raw numbers, we have seen

1:05:37

an increase, right, of legal immigrants coming to

1:05:39

the US just again, like at the broadest

1:05:41

level of like, yes, I know there's a

1:05:43

complex system and it's not just one dial,

1:05:45

but there is a difference. Like if you

1:05:47

want fewer people coming to the United States,

1:05:50

like if you really want to dramatically reduce immigration,

1:05:52

and that's like a key thing for you, like

1:05:54

Donald Trump is probably closer to views. If

1:05:56

you don't feel that way, if you if you would like

1:05:58

to continue what we have or or expand it,

1:06:01

Joe Biden is probably closer to your

1:06:03

views. And I also think it's important

1:06:05

to also look at the link between

1:06:07

the border and legal immigration. You know,

1:06:10

as legal immigration becomes more and more

1:06:12

inaccessible, people get driven to the border.

1:06:15

So you can't look at the

1:06:17

border with a myopic view that starts

1:06:19

and ends right down there

1:06:21

on the line between the US and

1:06:23

Mexico. You really do need a broader

1:06:25

perspective that looks at the

1:06:27

systemic issues throughout the entire legal immigration

1:06:30

system that are causing people to do

1:06:32

this. Aaron Reikland Melnick is

1:06:34

the policy director of the American Immigration Council.

1:06:36

That was so, so informative. And I'm

1:06:38

going to have to like process this

1:06:40

for a while. But seriously, that was that

1:06:42

was fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks

1:06:45

for having me. Once

1:06:51

again, cannot thank Aaron Reikland Melnick enough for

1:06:53

that conversation, which was exactly what I was

1:06:56

looking for when we launched this new undertaking

1:06:58

for this election year. Aaron is

1:07:00

the policy director of the American Immigration Council. We'd

1:07:03

love to hear from you after having done this

1:07:05

first one, if you found it helpful, if it's

1:07:07

the kind of thing that you would share with

1:07:09

friends or people that you know, people in your

1:07:11

life who are sort of thinking about this campaign,

1:07:13

you can email us with pod@gmail.com. You can get

1:07:16

in touch with us using the hashtag with pod

1:07:18

across a number of social networks. You can follow

1:07:20

us on TikTok by searching for with pod. We

1:07:22

actually have a with pod TikTok account. You

1:07:25

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1:07:27

on blue sky, all of which is Chris

1:07:29

L. Hayes. Why is this

1:07:31

happening? It's presented by MSNBC and NBC

1:07:33

News produced by Donny Holloway and Brendan

1:07:36

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1:07:38

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1:07:40

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