Angry Planet - Immigration Policy As Defense Policy

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comSpecial for our international listeners, did you know you can now buy a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the low, low price of $5 million sent directly to the U.S. treasury? For decades America’s immigration policies were a boon to its national defense. No one has better intelligence on a rival country than a fleeing dissident with firsthand knowledge.Times have changed.Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center is here to talk all about those changes. It’s an episode packed with bizarre anecdotes and interesting tidbits about how America runs now. You’ll learn why evangelical Christians are turning their back on refugees, why China won’t accept deportation flights, and how to navigate the Darien Gap using short form video posts.Immigration is a foreign policy toolDissident refugees as a strategic winWhat we know about how the “Gold Card” will work“You simply can’t create greencards out of nowhere.”How Mexico uses immigration to get concessions from the U.S.“At a certain point the people who send you into the blades look like the bastards.”Dealing with a dictator20,000 Chinese nationals at the southern borderThe internet has made it easier to immigrateNavigating the Darien Gap, one TikTok video at a timeOp-ed: Trump’s gold card visa, explainedDomestic debate, global strategy: Revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policyChina owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Here's whereWeapons of Mass MigrationSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. Jason Fields. He's got a tummy ache. I'm not kidding. Here with me today is Gilgara. Can you introduce yourself, sir? Sure. My name is Gilgara. I are not having a tummy ache. I am thrilled to be. be here on Angry Planet. I am an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center where I study topics that are in the intersection of immigration and foreign policy. Some of that is original research, for example, on trends in regular migration, especially from China, India, and Russia, which I've recently written reports on, but some of it is also applying that foreign policy lens to current immigration topics, including most recently birthright citizenship and the gold card. So we're going to get into all of that.

This was a suggestion from our producer Kevin, who said that we really need to do a story about, and have an episode about like the way the immigration policy is going to be shaping defense policy and kind of the way those two things will dovetail over the next, probably a long time. All right. So you have just published a very lengthy and detailed report.

Can you tell me, And you give me the title and kind of, I know it's very long, but give me the gist. If you were trapped with me in an elevator, what would you tell me about it? Right. And this is absolutely what I would tell people about if I were trapped in an elevator with them. So that's a very astute metaphor to frame this with. The title of the report is domestic debate, global strategy, revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policy. Short, pithy, catchy, you know, really rolls off the tongue.

But, you know, the idea is essentially for a long time during the Cold War era, for example, I think the connection between foreign policy and immigration policy was not only more clearly articulated by members of Congress and by policymakers, it was also more clearly understood by the public. The framework shifted during the global war and terror to security. It became primarily domestic, more of a domestic framing. And then we've been in this interlude period where we're shifting towards great power competition with China as the defining theme of American foreign policy, defining moment and challenge. But in the intermediary period, immigration has remained a foreign policy tool, but the connection between immigration foreign policy has ceded and taken less of a dominant space in the minds of the public, of policymakers. So it's called revisiting and not rediscovering or any other kind of novel implication in the title because it is something, again, has been present. But the point that I make right now, if you are someone who wants to study immigration policy or work in immigration policy, there is a large contingent of that work that is humanitarian and some of the refugee work, which I'm sure we'll talk about, touches on foreign policy but also takes in some ways less of a direct foreign policy role. There's lots of work that's done on the economic side of immigration policy as far as the impact of different kinds of immigration, lots that is done on border security strictly, lots that is done on the different visa programs.

There's relatively little work in the policy space that is directly on this national security foreign policy angle. Department of Homeland Security on the government side does hire foreign policy researchers and contractors. In academia, there's a whole subfield that I talk about specifically, Kempark. Kelly Greenhill and Robbie Totten as academics who have kind of given the framework for this policy work. And I used them in my paper there as well. But in the think tank world and the think tank scene in DC overall, this is something that I think is neglected too often. So this paper was basically an attempt to contribute to that body of work by detailing nine different case studies of the ways in which U.S. foreign policy is used to benefit allies, the ways that our adversaries have used it against us, the way that we have used it against us, the way that we have used it against us. adversaries and also the complicated ways that it deals with people who are frenemies or

people who are rather countries that are on sort of a peer level. We have to negotiate bargain with, Mexico, the EU, and China specifically. So let's start here with some history. I want to clue people in on how important this used to be and how we used to think about it. you know, I'm old enough to remember us being a city on a hill. I was there in the crowd watching Winthrop talk. You know, we used to take in Soviet, Cuban, Korean, Chinese, Iranian refugees. And this all was a national security boon to us.

Can you kind of give me the logic on why you would accept dissidents and refugees from rival countries? So I think we're in this moment of asymmetry that oftentimes disadvantages open democracies where because of the prevalence of technology and the ways in which countries like China, for example, are oftentimes more restrictive if you're doing things like open source intelligence collection. It's much easier to learn about open democratic countries like the United States than it is to learn about closed countries like China or especially North Korea. So I think from a strategic perspective for us having more people who are coming over from those countries and being most learned from them, again, at an elite level is good for us. Being able to bring over people who oftentimes are the most productive members of those societies.

If you think about the average person who is trying to come to the United States, it is oftentimes because they have come to the attention of their governments because they have values that align more closely with ours, sympathies align more closely with ours. and oftentimes also have skills that for us are useful. So it also works on the level of brain drain. On a popular level, I think it also helps to inform the American populace who increasingly gets their information about other countries through fictional media and fictional portrayals of the real human people who live in those countries and their perspective. So that's how it impacts us on our level. For the foreign governments, again, there's a question of brain drain as far as for them,

They really are, I think, oftentimes afraid of losing people to the United States. That's something that I've really picked up on and tracking irregular migration from China to the U.S. If they, for example, see themselves as a peer competitor to us, but people are taking desperate measures to flee China to reach the United States now. Not only is that embarrassing for them on the world stage, as they're trying to present themselves as an alternative to the United States, it's also something that's internally for their population is demoralizing. There's a temporal question that at the moment the world is struggling with demographics. There's a worldwide demographic decline, especially as countries become more developed, where people have fewer children, the children they do have, or older when they have them. The world is overall graying.

And so I think in the future, there will be a big demand for young people generally. And I think that is something that this is something else we start planning now, because of your adversaries who have even steeper demographic problems that we do, again in China and Russia, it's something that is very beneficial in that way. And it also, again, signals to people who may want to defect from those countries who may want to leave that the United States remains open and available as an alternative to them that if they do want to stand up and make a difference in their countries, they have at least a viable escape option in the form of the United States. So that's an abbreviated version of all the different benefits that defectors

can provide in these strategic competitions. And we used to be pretty good at this, right? 1980, the Senate passes the Refugee Act unanimously. But things have changed a lot since 1980. 2025 is not, is a lifetime, two lifetimes away. What, what is, what are the big trends that have kind of pushed us in, I, you know, I think a negative direction. I assume you would agree is probably a negative direction. So the way things are set up now and increasingly set up, we are losing the benefits of those people. We are perhaps not as attractive a country to come to as we used to be.

And it's becoming harder to get in, right? Right. I think to answer this in an abstract way that I promise will eventually, hopefully make sense. I think you can compare this to trade in some ways. And I think it really ties into the problems of globalization for people who are in favor of the benefits. globalization has wrought, which are that things like immigration, trade, other policies that stem from globalization have very diffuse benefits that are oftentimes is also difficult and nebulous to actually point out for people in their daily lives.

So, for example, we know that immigration leads to economic growth for the vast majority of Americans, it's difficult to have people in their daily lives connect immigration to those changes that they see. The same way that's difficult for them to connect trade to economic growth and the things that they see, although we know that these are the economic realities. In some ways, the benefits, although being very real and measurable, are invisible to the average person. But the downsides, although I think the objective calculus is that they are outweighed by the benefits, the downsides are very acute and very personal. You can think of, for example, immigration, Lake and Riley, is a case that it was a horrible tragedy, should never have happened, is something that you can definitively point to as saying this was caused by immigration. This was caused by someone who should not have been here in the first place, who wound up committing this murder. And how can you possibly weigh that against some sort of abstract calculus of other benefits? You know, obviously, I think there's a big disconnect between illegal migration, et cetera, but the fact that they all get lumped in. And I think that, and a cognitive

level American society, societies overall have become increasingly skeptical and impatient with long-term, more diffuse explanations and benefits. People really like simple explanations. People are really drawn to and immediately move by things that they can tangibly grasp and understand. And I think that is something that's to connect it to the refugee program, again, on a moral level, I think the arguments has yet to change. If anything, there are more refugee crises now.

You can think of in recent years, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, for example. But I think that the benefits for Americans has not been fully defended or explained because the question has been framed purely on a moral basis. And so the argument that, okay, well, where are other countries stepping in, ignoring the role that other countries perhaps have played in each one of those refugee crises, you know, by no means have we accepted the bulk of refugees from those countries. They've all gone to other countries, whether it's Poland for Ukrainians, Colombia for Venezuela, etc.

But the question of how is this benefiting Americans has, I think, outweighed the kind of moral imperatives that we've had that, again, we're really sharpens during the Cold War because we were directly competing with the Soviet Union in a way that although our competition with China is in some ways steeper, is still one where. We have an economic relationship with China. You know, the aspirations of China seem very different from those of the USSR. So there's no longer this moral framing between capitalism and the movement of people that is unrestricted versus communism. It's such repressive.

You know, the competition is still there, but it no longer has that kind of bearing on the refugee conversation either. So I think that's allowed the other questions to take over and really shape the refugee conversation in the United States. I do think that people perhaps don't care about the moral arguments anymore. And, you know, I mean, certainly some people do still care about the moral arguments. But I think that there's like an increasing group of Americans that simply don't. And I also think you were talking about messaging, you know, a guy on TV or a guy showing up with a clipboard and pointing to a pie chart and saying everything's better actually. When it's harder for you to get eggs or fill up your gas tank, like, doesn't wash, you know? Right.

Right. No, I think I think that's true to an extent. And I am very much representative of that class of guys with pie charts, right? Here in the think tank industry, you know, we love those. But I think that in some ways, although I'm very personally inclined towards cynicism as a person and as a person. personal disposition and towards negativity, which anyone who has been stuck with me in an elevator would be able to tell you very quickly. I do think that sometimes we overestimate the degree to which the American public actually is cynical. I do think that the fundamental driving impulse of

the effect Trump has had on politics and both domestically and in the world, it's a very transactional one, is one that is entirely determined by a cost-benefit analysis towards us of what are we getting out of this, that I think, again, has some purchase has really resonated with a lot of Americans who feel like we have been taking advantage of. But at the same time, I think it's undergirded by the fact that we have for a long time been cushions and protected from some of the most negative possible consequences of that worldview. And I think that we will see whether that worldview survives contact with Americans having to grapple with the actual consequences of what happens when we don't, have an active part in accepting refugees, for example, will we see images and headlines of people that we could have helped and then subsequently be moved by that? I think that there's conflicting evidence of that you could take from Afghanistan under Joe Biden's

term, for example, but I very much hope that there is still a constituency and certainly a plurality of Americans who can be persuaded by those moral arguments, even if I think we could do a much better job of also pointing out the strategic and direct benefits that things like the refugee program play for us from a purely self-interested perspective. So what is the transactional benefit of paving the way for white offer Connors? You know, that is something that I'm not sure has, I mean, that's something that I think is more directed by elite influence, obviously. If you look back through the years, you know, years of the U.S. refugee program. I have, I've got the exact years here. We've accepted

one South African refugee in 2024 and one in 2018. So that's one each under both the Biden administration and the First Trump administration. I, you know, I think that there's no explanation that goes beyond that. Other than that, that is Elon Musk overall, you know, being sort of part of it, you know, but the bigger issue for me is that the refugee program has otherwise been completely shut down. So even though I think that they are intentional about actually resettling Afrikaners into the United States, you know, the question becomes, one, how do you actually do that when we have otherwise suspended new refugee admissions to the U.S.? Sure, they get a special carve-outs for this, but otherwise, what other parts of refugee infrastructure system

are you restoring that you previously cut under this, you know, expense? a justification. But secondly, once they do get to the United States, who actually resettles them, what resettlement agencies that you otherwise pause contracts with are actually going forth and doing this. So that's something, I know that's recently you had, I guess, on your podcast who talked about rationalism and the ways in which some of these people, you know, tend to think, which I think is very true of people in industries like journalism and think tanks, you tend to try to make sense on a purely ideological basis of, you know, for example, the purpose of this administration

and of Doge is cutting costs, reducing government efficiency, or sorry, that's a Freudian slip, increasing government's efficiency. But how do you then square that with these policies that simply make no sense that are totally unworkable otherwise? And I think that trying to understand that, again, from a purely rational perspective, that people in these fields to be inclined to is one that oftentimes misses a point that they simply are not rational and cannot be rational explained in that sense. Yeah, it's been interesting to watch some very eye.

There is this, I agree, very strong strain of pure transactional foreign policy happening. But there is also this very strange ideological strain that is happening at the same time. And the ideological strain sometimes supersedes the complete transactional strain. And it's interesting to see where those things meet and bend. So evangelicals used to sponsor refugees quite a bit. Do you have any sense that that has changed and that especially like, say, maybe the last eight years, things are very different? Right. I don't think that itself has changed, but I do think it is fascinating to contrast.

the role of evangelicals in the Trump administration versus the George W. Bush administration, where I think they were really played a more significant role, for example, in policy generally, but also in immigration policy in particular, where, again, if you are simply to look at the religious makeup of who is coming to the United States, not only through the refugee program, but also, say, through legal and also irregular migration, It's very often, you know, sure Catholics from Latin America, but one of the big trends that we're seeing in Latin America now and also amongst Latin American communities here in the U.S. is that they are converting in large numbers to evangelicals Protestantism. So you might think, based off of that, for example, that there might be more of a concerted kind of effort here. But what I think's happened, I think, one, there's still a big role for evangelicals in the refugee resettlement program. World relief is. the most notable one, for example, that is evangelicals being involved in the refugee program, but also programs like Samaritan's Purse, for example, still have very strong support. I think on a popular level, many evangelicals, according to recent polling, over 70% are still in support of these refugee programs.

But, you know, what I think has happened is that you can kind of view the Trump administration as being this collection of different interest groups almost. Part of it may be that the U.S. population has been secularizing and that has kind of diminished some of perhaps the political influence overall of the Evangelical Christian movement. It may also be that the big trend among elite conservatives that I have witnessed is that they are increasingly converting to traditionalist Catholicism. J.D. Vance, for example, is an example of this, right, which has its own kind of political ramifications and which is certainly not spared. groups like Catholic charities, for example, from being impacted by these Trump policies. But it seems very much that the division of, if you want to call it, benefits that is given to each group within the Trump coalition, it seems that the Christian rights has gotten wins on issues like the Supreme Court, on abortion, on gender issues, and LGBTQ issues. Whereas the nativist side, which is often actually more secular and has more of a race-based view. that is distinct, I think, oftentimes from the worldview that Christians have really got an immigration.

You know, we talked about Afri-Conners and Elon Musk being able to wield influence over the refugee program. To the extent that, again, the group that is being accepted from these restrictions here is not persecuted Christians in Pakistan. For example, it is white South Africans. Elon Musk himself is not even of the Catholic convert faction of the new rights. he's a secular person himself is more tied to the Silicon Valley billionaire group and constituency within it. So I think it really has become, it can be explained, I think, by that kind of division of competing interest groups. And again, what issues they prioritize the most versus, you know, what are some of the differences between their opinions that you may get to put out behind the scenes a little bit, but ultimately, you know, one group has much more of an influence on. I think that's a really good distinction and a really good point.

It's the the extremely online weirdo racists are winning the immigration debate within the administration. Right, right. For the most part, I mean, at the same time, Elon Musk is part of the pro H1B faction, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, the gold card, which again, I have described. I think accurately and objectively as a totally unworkable proposal, but it's still something that, I mean, if you were to describe it to a person from the nativist faction, again, we are selling American citizenship. And not only are we selling it, we're actually conferring more rights and benefits to foreigners who are simply wealthy versus, you know, perhaps working class native born Americans, you would imagine that, you know, Stephen Miller would be pulling his hair out if he had any left, but it has been quiet so far, at least publicly, although I'm sure behind the scene. is being opposed to this. So again, it is a very interesting balance that if you are a rationally minded person, you like things to make sense. Again, to our over-conversation and conversations you've had, I guess this podcast just defies explanation and logic, but is simply how this administration seems to be running. Well, hopefully, Stephen, hopefully another

signal group chat with Stephen Miller inside of it will leak one day. Can you explain? Actually, let me ask you this first. How did, how did refugee resuscals? settlement work under Biden. And now it's just completely shut down. Right. Right. Okay. Right. So I think the the way that refugee resettlement has worked is worked through organizations, uh, that's under that were established, some of which, some of whom were established under the original Refugee Act of 1980, some of which like World Relief, for example, are organizations that receive contracts, uh, from the U.S. governments to help with refugee integration and assimilation into American life once they actually do arrive here in the United States.

One of the big changes that the Biden administration made, which I write about in my report, is, for example, the for Ukraine program, which was a private sponsorship program, by which I mean the people who are actually in charge of supporting the refugees who were coming from Ukraine were individual Americans or permanent residents. who voluntarily signed up, showed financial documents, were able to pledge support to bring over a Ukrainian refugee, which I think in some ways, again, it was very American. It's very decentralized from the governments. You know, it's sort of a privatized system. But it's also one that I think worked well in part because, again, it was bringing in and sort of having these organizations and nonprofits, which I think have been as someone who works at a nonprofit, kind of.

of unduly villainized in recent days, you know, it's very much put that at the local level and at the individual level, which I think apart from the benefits that it had for Ukraine, the benefits that it had for our relationship with them also made it more popular. And, you know, until recently, was able to, you know, kind of weather some of the political storms obviously has been shut down under the parole authorities that the Trump administration as challenged and as long held are not, we're not used in a legal basis, but it was still something that I think was an innovation in resettlement that we're very excited for and hopeful, hopeful for the future as a model for how resettlements can have perhaps more bipartisan support

on the future. So one of the things that we have now that has replaced things is the gold card visa system. Can you explain that to me in how that is ostensibly is working? Right. And ostensibly is the key word here. And I'll contrast it first with the EB-5 program, which is our previous investor visa, where you had to invest a little over a million dollars in an American company or investment program in order to get permanent residency and eventually get a path to a green card. You could either do that by bringing over your own investment project, but it was also connected to regional centers where, for example, let's say, a businessman in Wisconsin wanted to start manufacturing cow creamers again. You know, really thought the future of pottery was in bovine-shaped jugs and decided I can, you know, prove that I can create 10 American jobs.

I see a $1 million investment from someone else to help me start this and sort of revitalize this local center. You can then, if you're a foreign investor, buy into that pre-approved program that is already lying in waits for you and just have a much more expedited process. there instead of having to come up and manufacture your own. So it was something that was directly connected to American industry and innovation. That way has had some challenges throughout the years, but overall, I think it's been very successful. The gold card is very different in that it doesn't require an investment into the American economy directly in that way. There's no

requirement for American jobs. You are essentially paying $5 million directly into the American Treasury in order for permanent residency, a path of citizenship, and also apparently tax benefits on your overseas income that are not available to natural-born American citizens. So, you know, there are a number of questions here, that being one of them, which is how do you confer tax benefits that vary across citizenship levels? Are you essentially creating two tiers of citizenship? And are you actually privileging foreigners over Native-born Americans? It's that something that Trump administration wants to do, is one of them.

But beyond that, the primary challenge is that you simply cannot create green cards out of nowhere. You simply can't, on a legal basis, invent them and then distribute them however you see fit. Imagine if, for example, a democratic administration tried to do that. You know, that would be virtually impossible. There are some statutory things that they could do to the EB-5 program that would almost certainly get blocked in courts. They could raise the amount from $1 million to $5 million, for example. but they can't fundamentally redirect those funds directly to the Treasury without having a new law that is passed by Congress, which at that point, again, given the tight margins within the Senate of the House, becomes re unworkable to say nothing of some of the, again, the national security concerns that this could come up with. And some of the contradictions that become readily apparent, we are currently trying to ban China from buying farmlands or Chinese citizens, rather, from being able to buy farmland that is near military basis.

But let's say there are many rich people within China. And in fact, in order for this program to be viable, we would have to poach almost entirely from countries like China and in India in order to just find enough people who are wealthy enough to who are not already Americans to buy these programs. Let's say they buy those, they buy a gold card, then they want to buy the farmland that they were previously prohibited from buying. How could you ban them under those circumstances? For example, if they're American citizens under this program. So that's an overview of why it's, I think, in my view, well, I'm glad the administration is thinking of ways to expand legal immigration, at least in some capacity, is completely unworkable and unfeasible. Do we have any sense how it's going? It was supposed to have been rolled out within the two-week mark of its announcement, which was in mid-March.

has yet to be rolled out. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik said recently that he has sold over a thousand of them, by which I assume that he meant he has gotten pledges from people to buy them, and then announced yet again that it would be in two weeks' time was coming. It's very reminiscent of what I tell my editors about my drafts. It's always two weeks away and has been for the past several months, right? Because, again, it's something that for administration that I think has become very reliant to doing things purely through executive action is actually very difficult to do purely through statutory change and requires congressional action in a way that I'm not sure they have really fully thought through.

Again, it's an idea that sounds good if you know very little about actually implementing immigration policy, $5 million for a green card. you know, again, very, very simple, very easy to understand. And that way it maybe resonates with voters a little bit more because of its simplicity. But then when you actually get down to the brass tax of how are we going to implement this and how are we going to make this legal and workable and also viable for people, you mentioned before, do people still wants to come to the United States, for example, are there enough millionaires in the world for us to sell? One million of these who don't already live in the United States. All of those questions

were sort of afterthoughts, I think, in this process. 5 billion is it's not a bad number if it if it's real directly into the treasury could buy a lot of things with 5 billion dollars right right yes it's 5 million uh sorry well no no no uh 5 million times a thousand is 5 billion oh right right yes yes there you go i just uh showed why i'm bad at math in real time on air well i did while you were talking i did the i used a calculator to get the exact number so i yes very good it's the magic of broadcast or the magic of podcasts Let's talk about some of the case studies that you've got in your paper.

I think in America, when people think of immigration policy, they usually think of one country specifically, Mexico, even though a lot of our immigrants are coming from Latin American are passing through Mexico, but not necessarily from Mexico. you wrote about like how Mexico also is able to kind of use this as a lever of power against the United, not against, but to get concessions out of the United States, right? Can you kind of tell me about what this relationship is like right now? I think that a lot of American immigration policy can be explained by the fact that for so many decades it was defined by regular migration. that was coming from Mexico specifically, that for us has really instilled, I think, amongst policymakers a sense that as recently as last year, Speaker Johnson said, we are in the United States.

Mexico is Mexico. Mexico will do what we say. This sense that it's in the immigration relationship because of the economic importance that we have for Mexico, but also because of the importance that is played by Mexican nationals who come to the United States and and remittances back home, that we have sort of the upper hands in that relationship. But I think it's more complicated than that. In the first Trump administration, one of the big changes that occurred or one of the big items in the negotiations over tariffs, for example, was Mexico using the threat of withdrawing immigration cooperation and holding migrants from third countries who were passing through

Mexico if they had tariffs put on. For example, under the Biden administration, it became even more pointed in several ways. For example, we arrested a Mexican general here in the United States on drug trafficking charges. The Mexican governments threatened, again, to withdraw cooperation over immigration during a year in which that was a major issue for the Biden administration, as border numbers rose. So we wound up releasing that general as well, for example, and returning him to Mexico because that cooperation for us has been so important. So that's purely within the bilateral U.S.-Mexico relationship, where I think it's actually more interesting in many ways that have been less picked up on, is that it's also changed U.S. policy towards other countries

in the region. So, for example, the previous Mexican president, Andreas Manel-Lopez-Obrador, or Amlo was someone who had very deep ideological sympathies with Cuba in particular, but also with countries like Venezuela and like Nicaragua, on the basis of, again, having this more socialist orientation, but also this orientation that really saw the United States as being the primary driver of migration from those countries via their policies of sanctions and of economic warfare that was conducted towards those countries. So the way that the Mexican governments negotiated with the Biden administration in part was, I think, having a result where the Biden administration not only created pathways for nationals from those countries to enter legally, which had their own rationale, which I talk about in a separate case study, and say the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan parole program, but it was also about lessening sanctions on Cuba, on Venezuela, and trying to take a tack towards Venezuela in particular that supported the elections that

wound up to be fraudulent anyway or wound up to not be fully recognized by the Maduro regime. But I think that was a really interesting way where Mexico was able to not only use immigration as a tool to change U.S. posture towards Mexico. Under the Biden administration, it was also able to use it to change the Biden administration's posture towards other countries in the region that were more in accordance with Mexico's own preferences, which again, for me was very interesting given historically the role and the dynamic of the relationship between the United States and Mexico. How do you see that relationship playing out? We've got new presidents in both countries. The relationships are more transactional, but it also seems like, she kind of knows what she's doing, right? Right. I think at this point of the time we're talking, it's difficult to say that Canada has played that relationship better than Mexico has in many ways. There certainly have been tense moments.

You know, and I've written pieces, or I wrote pieces rather, that we're sort of predicting some of these tensions where, again, Amlo was more of a populist leader in Mexico, had more of a personal rapport with Trump that Shinebaum seems to have been able to, at least for the moments, emulate. I do think that there are some complications in the future. One of which is that paradoxically for Mexico to have more leverage, there needs to be migrant flows. And by virtue of trading and giving the Trump administration a lot of supports and cooperation and stemming those migrant flows, it also means that they have less leverage because they aren't that border numbers decrease, for example, that could become something that the Trump administration tends to value less. One of the things I see as being very interesting at the moment is the military buildup on the border because the ways in which this dynamic has worked previously. Obviously, there's a rationale behind that military buildup that both has a domestic political audience to show constituencies here in the U.S. We're taking the border very seriously. We're selling the military there.

We're really doing everything we can to secure it, deterring migrants elsewhere from coming to the border if they think that it's militarized, et cetera. but also, you know, the rationale that Mexico previously had was more or less if we send migrants to the border in the U.S., and all of a sudden they have to scramble to put up military hardware or to put up security hardware there and treat them poorly, then the U.S. will look bad. But if the border is already militarized and Mexico is then the ones who are sending migrants into a space that is already militarized, it defangs that. And if anything, makes Mexico look like the reckless actor from a humanitarian perspective in that sense, if that's infrastructure is already there. So I also see it as a hedge where, for example, the Trump administration very well may want to launch unilateral military strikes within Mexican territory on cartel targets in the future. If they do that, and Mexico wants to withdraw security cooperation, but also migratory cooperation, it is sort of a hedge against some of those future refugee flows that will allow them to not only respond to those flows faster, but also address that global. image soft power question of

does the administration look bad for being morally responsible for what happens to migrants who do wind up interacting with any U.S. military personnel. That's an interesting point. Once Abbott deploys buoys

with giant spinning blades on them in the Rio Grande, like whose fault is it for sending people into that? Like you knew it was there, it's been there for a while. They've been very, very upfront about it being there. So at a certain point, the people that send you into the blades look like the bastards, right?

Right, right. And, you know, this is something that, you know, one of the political scientists who I mentioned earlier, Kelly Greenhill, who my, who my, his work my report is largely based on, talks about this explicitly in her book, Weapons of Mass Migration, that the most sensitive targets for this are liberal governments who are concerned about. about migrants who have constituencies domestically who also care about or are concerned about migrants. If your constituency as a Trump administration is an electorate and a voter base that not only doesn't have as rigorous concerns about migrants, oftentimes actually wants more stringent enforcement that oftentimes goes beyond anything the U.S. has done, you don't have the same domestic political ramifications and repercussions and blowback. let's say a Democratic administration would.

So it also makes that tool that's not only Mexico, but especially in another case that in Nicaragua has used, it very much lessens the ability of it because there's no longer, again, that's kind of tradeoff that the U.S. government has to make because the constituencies that are currently the most important simply don't have that as a priority for themselves. So kind of working off of Greenhill, tell me about the Biden administration's relationship specifically with Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua? Sure. That's something that for a long time has been very curious because it's not as if Daniel Ortega became, you know, very suddenly an authoritarian figure overnight.

This is someone who was involved with the Sandinistas, you know, was a central, you know, leading figure, obviously, in the San Danista movement there in Nicaragua, came back to power. and really only began using migration as a weapon towards the United States after the United States did not recognize one of his re-elections and it also took measures to more pointedly, again, from a democratic moral perspective, start sanctioning him for being repressive within his own country. And I think Nicaragua very much learned from Venezuela and Cuba that one of the main sensitivities, of Democratic administrations in particular is this question of immigration because at the time the administration apart, again, from the moral considerations,

we're grappling with how to re-win the Latino votes after starting to lose it in 2020. We're very much grappling with, I think, a lot of the influence of immigrant advocacy groups that form a big part of the Democratic coalition also.

And at the same time, didn't want to have a big border crisis or didn't want that crisis that was already in existence later on to wind up impacting the election too much. If you are Cuba, for example, you have really only the ability to descend Cubans to the United States in the sense that it's an island. It's relatively small. There's that proximity to Florida, for example, so you can control your own population.

Venezuela is a larger country. But if you're coming from Venezuela, you still have to get through the Darien Gap, which until more recently was very difficult to cross through. If you're Nicaragua, you are a smaller country, far smaller than Venezuela. You are already, there are already people leaving Nicaragua, for example. But what they did that was something that we've also seen in Belarus, so it wasn't necessarily an innovation in that sense, but it wasn't an innovation in that it was the first time that it happened in this hemisphere on this kind of a scale, is that they intentionally sought out migrants from countries in Africa and in countries in places.

places like Central Asia that otherwise would have security ramifications for us and then made it far easier for those migrants specifically to use Nicaragua as an entry point into the Americas to then go to the U.S. border, knowing that, again, African Americans are a big part of the democracy. All of a sudden, there are lots of black migrants coming to the border, and the Biden administration has to respond to that, because if they send them back, you know, then again, there of these questions of is the Biden administration giving preferential treatment, for example, to white Ukrainians and their immigration policy system, really creating a headache for the Biden

administration as a hedge against sanctions that we have been putting on Nicaragua as well. So, again, it's part of this asymmetric toolkit that small dictatorships like the one in Nicaragua can use vis-a-vis the United States in ways that are really demonstrated a very sophisticated understanding of U.S. domestic politics and U.S. domestic temporal concerns around issues like immigration. Another one I thought it was really interesting that you write about is the deportation flights from China or from the U.S. to China. One of the things I thought was really startling that you write about, that sounds like

like a Taylor Sheridan-S.-Cicario fever dream, is that, you know, in 2024, you know, in 2024, border protection recorded like almost 20,000 Chinese nationals coming through the southern border? That's pretty wild. What is happening with this? And why won't China take them back? Right. So to give an overview of that trend in irregular migration, I think that it's partially explainable, for example, by COVID, where a lot of the economic impact in China that we've been able to see. from the profiles of these migrants I was able to pull, they came in in a way that for me, really on a research level wound up being almost perfectly aligned because one of the only countries in the Western Hemisphere that had Bisa Free Travel for Chinese Nationals was Ecuador.

And Ecuador also happens to be one of the only countries that publishes very detailed airport entry data of travelers every year as far as their age, their gender, what they say their occupation is, for example. So I was able to get a very good sense of who these Chinese nationals entering through Ecuador towards the U.S. were. And it looks like many of them are essentially small business owners in China who owned things like, again, small shops, perhaps hair-cutting businesses from profiles we've seen and interviews we've seen with Chinese migrants here, who had enough money saved up to make

the journey to the United States. Again, these are not journeys that cost nothing. You know, the cost is anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 per person, which is something that the average person in China can't afford. So you have to, again, think of who's actually making this journey. So, you know, part of it was that there was this constituency within China who was able to afford and make that journey because they had savings after the pandemic had wiped out their business where they could essentially restart somewhere else but didn't want to do that in China after the COVID restrictions. I think a big uncovered part of it oftentimes is also the rise of social media technology. Where if you think of how social media has evolved over time, but also people have immigrated over time. If you tomorrow were to want to move to a new country without knowing anything about it, that would be very difficult.

We've always immigrated to places where there's already information about it that almost always comes from a pretty closed information network. It's a parent. it's a neighbor perhaps it's a religious group that can tell you this is what living in this country is like. This is where you get a job. This is how you adopt the culture and customs. And I think social media has over time come to replace that intermediary factor where if you were trying to use social media to immigrate on a regular basis in the 2000s, your options may have been text-based applications, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook. And if you're just reading about how to immigrate on a regular basis, that's not very helpful. You know, that's if you're just reading a manual, you have no idea what kind of problems you might encounter.

You know, it's oftentimes outdated. And also, more than anything else, doesn't inspire this kind of drive and desire in you to go migrate somewhere. Right. Words are, for most people, not very emotional and evocative. We move into the mid-2000s, the mid-2010s, all of a sudden things are more photo-based. It's Snapchat, it's Instagram. So now you're seeing photos of what your life in this new country makes. be like, which is more inspiring, but it's also not very informative. It's not something that's, you know, you can very easily scroll through a carousel of photos and see how you cross the airing

gap. The big change that we've seen recently, which I'm sure you've also encountered in your profession, is that now everything is short form video. People very much communicate and consume overwhelmingly short form video, which is very helpful if you are trying to migrate irregularly because one, you can see this idealized version of what your life in America will be like you see people, again, who may not know, but who you view as peers who have made this journey. But also, if you're using these short-form video apps, which for the Chinese specifically is an app called Doyin, what you are seeing is if there's a migrant's two or three days ahead of the journey from you that is recording their journey every time of the day. Every day, you're getting

essentially a short-form video intelligence reports of this is what the conditions are like, this is where the border checks are, this is how much I was extorted by this guard. So you know enough in advance to plan, okay, this is how much I can expect to pay in a bribe to this individual at this checkpoint. So it really made it, again, it's increased, I think, the desire to take this route by a lot because it showed people that it could be done. And it also made it much, much more feasible on an operational, logistical perspective. So that's essentially that's the component of it, that is why this migration has started to occur from China specifically. And I think some of the other countries that I've studied, for example, India, it's a sort of middle-class constituency that has

the funds to do so and also the technological component. China's response to the immigration for a long time, again, their priority has been to be seen as a peer to the United States to signal that things in China are going well. And if things in China are going well, then why are people, especially middle-class people, paying tens of thousands of dollars and trekking through South American jungles just to escape China and go to its main competitor? So I think part of it was this embarrassment factor of it. A lot of times the Chinese nationalists themselves would destroy their passports or identifying documentation. Or I think in many cases, credibly also say that it was stolen or lost along the journey. So for the Chinese government, their line has long been. Essentially, one, you can't actually prove that these people are Chinese. So for us, why would we take anyone back who doesn't have a passport or paperwork, who could be a criminal, Or maybe you're also just racist and think that all Asian people look Chinese and they might actually be from somewhere else. And so why would we be accepting a national from another country in that sense in a way that I think has shifted because you can see so much of China's recent policy changes internally, whether it's restricting foreign graduates or graduates from foreign institutions from having government jobs within China or doing tax clawbacks and small businesses.

they're really trying to now actually get people to stop leaving China. So no longer is it's this priority to say, you know, we're not going to accept any kind of repatriations. Now it's, I think a lot of Chinese policymakers who are looking long term at their demographic challenges and thinking, okay, this is embarrassing. But we also need to actually start accepting people back who are economically productive within China because we very much need those people to stay in, provide tax revenue, hopefully have children contributes to our ongoing. going to a demographic crisis. There's something really striking about the idea, that kind of image you just painted of someone on Instagram learning about a country, then attempting to travel to that country, and then like following people ahead of them online and like watching the

videos and watching like, you know, maybe reels or TikToks or even YouTube videos about like, these are where the checkpoints are. This is how much you bribe a guy. this is what the path looks like, like these digital coyotes. It's strange and a varied like 2025. Yes. I want to turn our eyes to Europe kind of here at the end of the conversation. I think another one of the, another interesting piece of this is, and we've already talked about this in this conversation, but using immigration policy as a tool.

to attempt to affect the politics of like an authoritarian regime. Tell me about Hungary and how that Victor Orban is doing. Yes. And this is something that as I was picking these case studies, you know, there's, there, there were dozens I could have chosen. I was trying to choose ones that showed that I think to the extent that we have these kind of archetypes of how both parties and movements here at the U.S. domestically at a political level use immigration.

as a foreign policy tool, I think it's very common that you might intuitively think the Republican Party uses harsh enforcement mechanisms against adversaries. The Democratic Party uses beneficial, more open measures towards allies. But for me, this was something that demonstrated that both parties have used each one in different ways in recent years. And one of those is in the case of Hungary, I think, which was very much a thorn in the Biden administration's side, was very clearly preferential towards the Biden administration's political opponent in Donald Trump and the late to the election. And also, I think, had legitimate concerns about democratic backsliding within Hungary at the time.

I think the way that the U.S. has wielded programs like the visa waiver program, like global entry, for example, is that it is very much a prestige kind of benefit also. for many of the countries that are in these programs. Sure, part of it is that your nationals can access the United States without as much security vetting, without as much of a logistical hassle also. But it's basically being part of this club of high-income democracies for the most part and countries that are basically deemed as being sort of trustworthy. And so by downgrading Hungary's visa privileges towards the United States,

you know, essentially on the basis that Hungary made this change in their own internal passport laws was something I think was very much, you know, a message where if you're, you're limited somewhat and what, you know, directly you can do, you know, we're not going to necessarily announce, you know, massive sanctions on Hungary over these things, but you can signal displeasure in these ways. And that was one that I think very much was the Biden administration doing this in a way that was meant to be putative towards, towards the Orban governments in particular, and finding a way to use immigration to do so. And has that shifted at all since Trump's come into office?

You know, I don't think that, from what I've seen, I'm not sure that they've readjusted or restored the visa changes for Hungary yet. But there's a number of things that I think we'll see in the coming months from my reports that will play out. You know, that I think, again, the governments in places I talk about like Brazil, the European Union, were in some ways, you know, very cany and aware that if there were some changes that they instituted under Trump would lead to immediate retaliation, whereas if they did them under Biden, they would face less consequences. So, for example, the EU under Biden instituted a more stringent visa policy for American travelers, which in fairness we did to them first, right? So it was reciprocal in that sense. But the most interesting me for one from this sense is Brazil, which the Trump administration got along very well with here Bolsonaro, the right-wing president's formerly of Brazil, allowed Brazil into global entry. In response, Brazil deviated very significantly from historically what has been its visa doctrine and gave Americans visa to travel to Brazil. The Biden administration chose not to remove Brazil from global entry. And Brazil under the current president, president who's much more friendly to the Democratic Party, Lula, decided to keep the United States

in its visa-free program up until April of 2025, so a few months after the new administration here. So quite, again, hedging their bets to see who might win. And this way, you know, they don't have to deal with the fact that, okay, well, Trump won, and now we're going to kick America out of our visa-free program, and then America is going to have their trial aid. Now, again, it's already in place. So they can very much point to and say, we did this before the election, before we knew who was going to be the winner, and it's their choice whether or not to renew it. Obviously, as we've mentioned before, Elon Musk seems to have a really outsized role in this administration. So it seems like, you know, he has had problems with a free speech court case in Brazil. Here Bolsonaro yesterday, Supreme Court's in Brazil rule that he would have to stand trial for some charges that he's also facing there in Brazil. So it becomes, you know, it's still something that I think in the next months we'll see. Does Brazil and the U.S. have more of a serious diplomatic break? And will that maybe be signaled by Brazil no longer keeping the U.S. in this visa waiver program?

You know, it's a way that, again, if you only follow foreign policy and not immigration, I think there are some early warning signs in some of these relationships that you can miss, which I very much enjoy following. Yeah, my big takeaway here from the conversation is that immigration policy is this really powerful and important, like, tool in the foreign policy toolkit that we kind of don't think about. We usually think about immigration policy in terms of its economic benefits and like, and the moral argument. It's kind of like you were saying at the beginning, like, is this the right thing to do and how is this going to affect the economy? But it's way more complicated than that, right? Right.

Right. Yes. Well, where can people find this lovely report and read some of these case studies themselves? Yes. They are all on the Niskanan Center websites if you go to the Immigration Policy tab. There, again, the very pithy and catchy title is domestic debates, global strategy, revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policy. So you can read it all there for yourself. And I will have that in the show notes for everybody.

Thank you, sir, so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Yes, perfect. Great to speak with you. Very sorry that I missed Jason, but I will mail him some tombs and hopefully it gets to talk in the future. Excellent. All right. Thank you very much.

Thank you. That's all for this episode of Angry Planet. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gulp, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. Angry Planetpod.com, $9 a month, early access, commercial-free episodes. You know the drill. We will be back a little bit later this week with another conversation. Conflict on an Angry Planet.

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