Plain English with Derek Thompson - World on Fire, Part 3: How Did America's Border Crisis Get So Bad?

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Today is the third and final episode in our miniseries on this unique moment in global war and conflict. In the first episode, we looked at the turmoil in the Middle East. In the second episode, we offered explanations for the historic rise in global conflict between states and within states, from Eastern Europe to Central America. Now, we come home to the U.S. By just about any measure, the U.S. southern border is facing a historic crisis. Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 2.5 million encounters at the border—an annual record. In December alone, border officials processed some 300,000 migrants—a monthly record. This surge has created chaos in parts of southern Texas and Arizona. It has also created a humanitarian crisis and a political headache for liberal governors and mayors in Chicago, Denver, and New York, where shelters are bulging with migrants and tents are strewn across the streets. Meanwhile, in Washington, lawmakers are haggling over a bill to secure the border but making little progress. Today’s guest is Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has been covering immigration policy for many years. We talk about why the border crisis is happening, who or what is to blame for it, what is to be done, and why immigration is such an impossible issue for American politics to solve. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dara Lind Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today is the third and final episode in our mini-series on global crises. The first episode in this series looked at the billowing violence in the Middle East,

from Gaza to Israel to Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. The second episode looked for theories about why violence and conflict is rising around the world, not only in the Middle East, but also in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, and Ecuador. Today we come home to America to discuss the mess at the southern border, which is causing an urban crisis in some of America's biggest cities and a political headache in Washington, D.C. We'll start with the facts. By just about any measure, there are more migrant crossings today at the southern border than at any time in recorded history.

There are more through legal ports of entry, more estimated undetected crossings. Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol had 2.5 million, quote, encounters at the border. That's an annual record. In December alone, border officials processed some 300,000 migrants. That's a monthly record. But raw numbers alone do not capture the scale of the crisis or the anguish. These migrants are fleeing what we've described in this episode as a world on fire. They are fleeing war in Sudan.

They're fleeing violent gangs in Mexico. They are fleeing war between cartels. They are arriving in Texas, Arizona, hungry and cold, hundreds of thousands of miles away from home, and that's if they actually arrive in the first place. Last week, several migrants were struggling to make their way across the Rio Grande by Eagle Pass, Texas. The federal government claims that Texas officials barred agents from accessing the area, and several migrants drowned, including two children.

This surge has created chaos in parts of southern Texas in Arizona. It's also created a humanitarian crisis for, for liberal governors and mayors in Chicago, Denver, New York. Homeless shelters are bulging with migrants. Tents are strewn across the street. New York City alone is dealing with more than 70,000 people who have arrived in the last year, 500 new migrants arriving on average each day.

Meanwhile, in Washington, lawmakers are haggling over a bill to secure the border. Today's guest is Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who has been covering immigration policy for many years. We talk about why the border crisis is happening, who's to blame for it, what is to be done, and why immigration is such an impossible issue

for American politics to solve. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Dara Lind, welcome with the show. Great to be on. Thank you for having me. This is a big thorny subject. You are a real expert on it. I'm just a curious person trying to get my hands around

a humanitarian and political crisis. So in the interest of full transparency and organization, I want to say from the top that I have three goals for our time together. Number one, I want to understand why this is happening now, why attempted crossings and border encounters have surged to all-time highs in the last few years. Number two, I want to talk about our America's immigration infrastructure, why we can't handle this surge, why it's causing so many problems, what are the bottlenecks, what are the policy failures? And number three, I want to talk about the politics. What's Democrats want, what Republicans want, what each side has put on the table to try to fix this. Let's start with this. Migrant encounters at the southern border reached a record high in 2022.

They broke that record again in 2023. Let's begin by trying to piece together the so-called push factors. What's happening in the Americas and around the world that is causing more and more people to seek refuge in the U.S.? The way that I would put it is that the push factors have never been as pushy as they have now. A lot of Central and South America is in a position of instability much worse than it was 10 years ago. The regions have not recovered from the economic hit posed by the COVID pandemic in the way that the U.S. has, especially in Central America, natural disasters have been really, really

severe. And in some of those areas, you also have climate change causing formerly agricultural areas to no longer be able to feed people. And you have a lot of political instability. The government of Guatemala just had a real squeaker of a democratic transition. The government of Ecuador is in what I wouldn't exactly call free fall, but it's in not great shape. And so what we're seeing is not just more reasons that people might want to go elsewhere and try to survive elsewhere, but even in cases where they've already done that, the first place they're trying might not be enough for them. For example, Venezuela. Venezuela has been a regional migration crisis for a decade at this point.

And frankly, the U.S. has never really gotten the brunt of it, right? The overwhelming majority of people have been in Colombia, have been in Peru, have been in Chile or Argentina. And what we've seen in the last few years is the people who had tried to settle there, found either that post-COVID, they could no longer make a living, or that because of political or frankly social factors, they weren't, they didn't feel welcome. They were dealing with xenophobia. They were dealing with discrimination. And so they picked up again and set on for the United States in what's called secondary migration. So we have this combination of not as many places that people can stay if they're born there and not as many places they can go as a first option.

In remarks at Rice University in Texas, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, quote, this moment when it comes to migration is something totally aberrational in terms of the historic import that it has. It used to be that when there was a migration crisis, it tended to be one, maybe one country at a time. It was Haiti. It was Cuba. Maybe it was Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, the so-called Northern Triangle countries. Now it's all of the above, plus Venezuela, plus Nicaragua, plus Ecuador, end quote. this is not just about a crisis in one country or another. It seems to be a kind of omni-crisis. And, you know, add to that, the global chaos that we just talked about on this show on Tuesday with University of Chicago's Paul Post, the number of global conflicts has surged to an 80-year high.

That's not deaths. That's the number of global conflicts. So when you think about, I love the way you put it, the push factors, they've never been pushier, and there never, and there haven't been so many places that we're pushing at the same time. There are one way that we can think about, you know, where in the world people are coming from, is to have a kind of country of origin breakdown for these migrants when they arrive at the U.S. Do we have a statistical sense of country of Oregon breakdowns for these migrants? At this point, if you look at Mexico and the Central American countries

that were the predominant sources of migration 10 years ago, which is El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, those four countries make up about half of migrant encounters right now. the remainder are not only what you used to what people used to call other than Mexican, but it's other than Mexican or Northern Triangle, which is the U.S. government's term for that region. So what you have instead is kind of, it's much more diverse, right? You have a certain number of Venezuelans, certain number of Colombians, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaragua. There's also a certain number of people from India, although those folks tend to come through the northern border.

There's a certain number of Russian and Ukrainian effort. There's a certain number of Chinese. And so the infrastructure going up through Panama because it's much easier to fly into countries in South America than it is to fly into the U.S. where you can't unless you have a valid visa or into Mexico, which has been pressured by the United States to not accept people without valid visas, that's created this ability. And once the word of mouth is out, once social media is actually, once there's a smuggling recruitment interest,

then it's easier for further people to go through. Do you have a theory for why turmoil has been contagious across Central and South America in the last few years? I am not a regional expert, although I'm working on it, and I wouldn't want to step, overstep my bounds. But what I do know is that a few things, right? First of all, while generally the U.S. has a few goals when it's dealing with other countries, under the Trump administration, there was so much emphasis on hardcore immigration negotiations that other issues fell by the wayside. For example, in Guatemala, the U.S. prior to the Trump administration had been, or for at least post-cold war, but prior to the Trump administration, had been pretty active in urging them to,

to improve the human rights record, to improve transparency, to reduce corruption. Under the Trump administration, the Guatemalan government kicked out its UN-affiliated anti-corruption investigation agency in the U.S. didn't do anything about it because it was busy pressuring Guatemala to accept asylees from other countries and to do more to enforce its own borders to prevent people from coming in from the South. So that hasn't exactly helped. I think COVID really cannot be overstated, especially when in so many of these places, a lot of people were working in, for one thing, industries that relied more on in-person interaction, and for another thing, more people were in the informal economy, and that's obviously especially true for migrants.

The last thing I'd say is that Ecuador in particular is an interesting case, because what it sure looks like there is that instability and criminal activity in Ecuador has increased since Colombia, made its peace pact with the FARC after decades of civil war there, indicating that criminal organizations that were operating in Colombia, instead are in Ecuador, or as one expert I know put it, that the FARC prime lords who used to live in Colombia, or rather who used to have their vacation homes in Ecuador, and so it would prevent there being any criminal activity in Ecuador

so that they could have nice vacations, now have moved back to Colombia and have left Ecuador for death. Very last question on the push factor. Is it worthwhile making a distinction between clandestine migration, which often requires the help of a criminal organization and which might involve smuggling and human trafficking, which is a discrete phenomenon? Obviously, as people come up through, you know, when they're engaging in clandestine migration, they often are relying on, you know, they're often paying, you know, someone who may be paying money to a criminal organization or they're paying a criminal organization directly. and I think that that's led a lot of the conversation in the U.S. to talk about these groups as human traffickers. Human trafficking is a very distinct, it's a very discrete phenomenon, right?

It's when someone is being moved against their will. That it's not, in practice, somebody can start trying to migrate voluntarily and end up essentially getting kidnapped and, you know, it pushed into human trafficking. But when we're talking about criminal movement of people, that's usually smuggling. And so the use of trafficking has been a certain amount. amount of rhetorical inflation. It's also true, frankly, that, you know, the use of kind of any criminal facilitation is itself a response to people not feeling that they can migrate safely, you know, that they won't be harassed by, not just by officials, but shaken down by people

who may or may not be wearing official uniforms. The caravans that we saw a lot in 2017-2018, were a response by local organizations to try to allow people not to have to pay their way up and to be able to have safety in numbers so that they weren't sneaking through in groups of 10 in the dead of night. Now we get to the poll factors, which is to say policies and events in the United States

that might attract more migration. And I know that this part in particular is quite politically contentious. So I will, without stating my particular opinion, just say what different groups are saying. Republicans, of course, blame Biden policies for making it easier for children to enter the country, for refusing to build the wall. I've said some reporting that suggests that this is mostly about attitude rather than policy. Trump was stridently anti-immigration.

Biden has said things like, we are a nation that says, if you want to flee and you're fleeing oppression, you should come to the United States. So it might be more about vibes than it is about specific policies on the books. how do you think, we should think, about the whole part of this equation? I have a lot of humility about understanding why people make the decision to come to the U.S. And I have, I'm like, I'm leery to draw any conclusions about it because I've talked to enough of them to know that the level of awareness of what U.S. policy is varies widely. But it's even the maximum amount of knowledge of U.S. policy is far short of, what you would expect for someone making an assessment for like, oh, I'm coming here because I know I will be taken care of. That is, people may have a certain understanding or hope for what they're

going to find in the United States. But that doesn't necessarily comport with reality. And frankly, when people are told that it doesn't comport with reality, it's often hard for them to understand. People, if you tell them, it's very unlikely that you'll get asylum in the United States. The judge is very unlikely to grant your case. We'll say, but the judge will look at it. into my heart and see I'm a good person, and so they'll let me stay. There's, you know, in what in any other context, what we would kind of consider an admirable human resilience in this context becomes a huge policy problem. That said, word of mouth, as I said earlier, is really powerful. And so once someone knows someone who's come through successfully, whether they, that means

they've gotten released from government custody, whether that means they're, you know, they've found a job, they've found some place to live, then they get the message that it's okay for them to come to. I want to understand what these migrants go through. So please paint me a picture here. Let's say I'm a 37-year-old migrant from Ecuador, a country facing enormous violence and political instability right now. I enter the U.S. through a legal port of entry. I say, I want to file for asylum. What is that process like? How does my life change from that moment? Last spring, the Biden administration did away with Title 42, which was the pandemic era. We're using a public health law to say you can't seek asylum in the U.S. essentially order.

Instead, they created this regulation that I talked about that raises the screening standard for people between ports of entry. And so encourage people to present at ports of entry instead. They have also rolled out this app called CBP1 that allows you to make an appointment at a port of entry three weeks in advance. The demand on that app is so high that they have had to create a lottery system. Initially, it was a, you know,

you had to be logged onto your phone at the exact right moment for the day's appointments to come online, and if you were somewhere with bad internet reception, then, you know, you were out of luck. Now it's a lottery, so you register one day. You're told the next day if you made it or not. If you made it, you get your appointment.

if not you get thrown back in. But people are still waiting, you know, weeks or months is entirely normal. I was in Juarez in fall and was talking to people who had been waiting for, you know, in some cases, three or four months. That's time you have to spend in northern Mexico where you can't work there either. You may not have, you know, you may not have consistent shelter. Mexican authorities do plenty of street sweeps. And if you, in theory, you should be allowed to, to just, if you really need to present yourself at the port of entry and say, look, I can't stay here anymore. I, you know, I'm like leading from a gunshot wound in one example that resulted in the lawsuit. You should be allowed into the U.S., but in practice, it depends what the border official on the other side says. And so, you know, so once you actually get your CBF1 appointment,

you're one of the lucky ones and you've probably been waiting for a bit. That said, in In general, people who come in through CBP1 are being paroled into the U.S., which is something distinct from just getting released on your own reconnaissance. And parole allows you to apply for a work permit pretty much immediately. It's not clear how many people actually know this. I've heard anecdotally that at some of the clinics that people in New York, for example, have been running trying to tell people how to fill out their applications for work permits. they've seen people who had been eligible to apply for a while and hadn't known that.

But in theory, that is the case. And so, you know, the people who I've talked to who have gotten through on CBP1 have been able to get work permits pretty quickly. Now, that's different from getting a job, obviously. They may not, that's different from having a place to live. But those are not the folks who are really in trouble. It seems to me that some people migrate into the U.S. get relatively lucky. They are processed, paroled. They get a court date for asylum.

And then some people are very unlucky. They get detained, expelled, deported, turned away. What determines that role of the dice? What determines who can stay and who can't? In general, it's always been, to a certain extent, sector by border patrol sector by border patrol sector. It's always been resource dependent, and it's always been to a certain extent dependent on agent discretion.

That has been true for as long as I've been doing this, which goes back to first-term Obama. So it ends up being a question. of, you know, does the officer who apprehends you in his station, or her station, have the resources that day to keep to hold you? Do they have the resources to process you? You know, does, is ICE going to send a van to pick people up? Is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for unaccompanied kids? Like, are they sending vans to pick people up? So it really comes down to this very logistical matter, which makes it very,

really hard to explain to people when they're out of it, why what happened to them happened to them. The spectrum right now is that some people, especially single adults, are being detained or presumed, you know, presumed detainable. That's, that makes it much easier to deport them if they, you know, and it means that usually they actually have to go through the screening interview process if they want to make an asylum complaint. For families, as people might be pretty familiar with at this point, there's a longstanding legal settlement called the Flores Agreement. that requires children to be held in the least restrictive conditions in immigration custody, which in general has meant that the government doesn't detain families.

The Biden administration is extremely aware that the fact that families can't really can't get detained means that they can't demonstrate their families won't be allowed to stay in the U.S. And so they've been piloting and expanding something called the Family Expedited Removal Management Program, which for some families says, okay, you're going to show up to like Chicago. but three days from now you've got to present yourself and get an asylum screening interview and if you don't pass that interview, we will take you into custody,

hold you in a hotel, and deport you within a few days. So that is increasingly happening, but it's still not the norm. And again, it depends who you get and what day you get them. I want to go a little bit deeper now into the effect that the border crisis is having on various cities and states.

And let's start with the border regions. There have been all these images of migrants waiting through the river, news stories of drowning, and showdowns between the feds and Texas. How has this surge in migration affected life for people who live near the border? The way that this, the kind of anatomy of a border crisis

tends to be that the system gets backed up and the border is the kind of last place it gets backed up, right? That like ICE handoffs are happening slowly, that ORR handoffs are happening slowly, that it's taking a while to get people through screening interviews, And so ultimately you have a situation where border patrol does not physically have the space to house people. And that's when you start seeing the kind of optics of border crisis, right? Whether that's people being held in open air camps in El Paso under the Obama, or sorry, in El Paso under the Trump administration and more recently in open air camp in New Mexico.

let me check that and I'll tell you, I'll hit it in post if it's wrong. But also the street releases where like Border Patrol just dumps people into a border community. That is where local governments tend to get really upset, right? Because you have people who have no means to get anywhere else who don't know anything, just getting released. So that has created this need for border communities to develop their own. infrastructure. In San Diego, there's a branch of Jewish family services there that has been doing this for a long time. There is a pretty well established, you know, you like, CBP will bus you there.

And then you go through, you get your legal orientation, people figure out where to take you. In El Paso, the county has stood up a triage center where they're like, look, we won't house you ourselves, but what we will do is explain to you, you know, how you can get to wherever you're going. we'll sit with you while you talk to your people and we can figure out what plain ticket to book so that you don't find yourself booking a ticket for, you know, to get out of Houston in two hours. Those solutions, though, require a certain amount of time to build up. Like El Paso was in really rough shape a couple of years ago whenever this sort of thing happened because they would deal with a lot of people on the streets.

San Antonio, which is not on the border, but is the biggest city in South Texas, has had huge amounts of buildup in its homeless shelters for this reason. And so it's, you know, frankly, when the Abbott administration started busing people to initially Washington, D.C. and then New York, my reaction was that so many of the people that they were busing were trying to get to the East Coast anyway, that for those people, it was not obviously worse to be put on an Abbott bus and sent closer to where you were going than it would be to be in San Antonio and try to figure out how to pay for it yourself. Obviously, as you've mentioned several times, it's created a humanitarian crisis and a political

headache for governors and mayors far away from New Mexico, Arizona, Texas. In Chicago, in Denver, in New York, these communities are being stressed by the cost of providing for migrants. In New York, I read that 70,000 migrants are now crammed into emergency shelters. That's according to the New York Times. They're sleeping on floors. They're in giant tents. They're huddled on the sidewalk in the December cold. Hundreds more are arriving every single day, and New York City is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a month to care for them. The city's homeless shelter population is now at an all-time record because of the number of migrants that have come to New York.

Is this sort of thing typical of past migrant surges, or is it really unusual the degree to which this migration moment is creating crises and emergencies in cities, across the country? It's absolutely unusual. And I would say there are a few reasons for them. First of all is that, as I mentioned, a lot, there are more people who are coming who don't already have a lined up place to stay in the U.S. That's frankly, it's self-related to the housing crunch that's affecting everybody, right? I definitely talked to some folks who came thinking that they were going to be able to stay with a friend of a friend and then found out that that friend didn't actually have a space for them because their own housing situation was in flux.

The other part of this is that before the Biden administration, especially if you were a single adult, if you didn't have someone you were going to stay with, it was much harder for you to get released from immigration custody. The Biden administration has taken a pretty firm line and it's, you know, on the one hand, it saved the federal government a lot of money that it would otherwise be spending detaining people. On the other hand, it's meant that more people who otherwise would have been detained, where they would be in detention and were more likely to get deported, but they didn't have to figure out how to feed and house themselves, are now being led into the streets

where they do have to figure all of that stuff out. The other thing is, frankly, that we are seeing just higher numbers than we've seen before and that the combination of those higher numbers, the fact that so many of them are families, and the fact that so many of them are seeking asylum, creating this kind of need for a default assumption that everyone is seeking asylum

have meant that more people are getting released into the interior than we've seen, well, more people are getting released into the interior of the U.S. than we've seen probably ever. So now we have a migration crisis that has also become a big American city crisis. And it does raise to me an uncomfortable question

for liberals, which is, were the immigration hawks right all along? Were they right that border security is paramount and right that liberals were ignoring border security to their own peril? So I think that there are two kind of basic, like, truths that you only hear articulated by the Hawks because, you know, because they make sense as like global principles. One is that not everyone who wants to come to the U.S. can come to the U.S. and that many of those who want to come to the U.S. don't necessarily fit within the parameters of asylum law. The other is that, you know, it shouldn't, like, is that most people want to stay where they are.

Or, like, most people want to stay where they grew up. The thing is that if you put those things together, you end up with a lot of people are already in the less than ideal situation where they can't remain where they are and have chosen to come to, and, like, aspire to come to the U.S. instead. And this is where I think things get really tricky because it is if you have people who have to flee, not necessarily because they're being persecuted in a way that the, you know, 1950s reformulations of the refugee convention would clearly have accepted at the time as persecution,

but who nonetheless cannot live, cannot, like, they can't feed their families. They are certain to be killed and they know the police are not going to protect them. In those situations, usually there's been somewhere that you can go. And if the place that you try to go isn't safe for you because the rule of law isn't strong there either to protect you to protect you from the people who are coming after you or because you can't make a living there either or anything like that, then your list of places dwindles pretty quickly. And so I think that thinking about if there's going to be international cooperation in

quote unquote burden sharing. And the U.S. is going to be making asks of other countries anyway. You can make the ask of, yes, you should do more to militarize your own borders so that people, so that it's harder for people to get into your country, which means ultimately it's harder for people to get out of their own countries. And or you can say you should make it easier for people who are in your country to stay in your country. you should try to, you know, like try to offer them paths into the economy.

You should make sure, you know, you should have some sort of temporary status that they can access so that their only option isn't coming to the U.S. and hoping that the U.S. grants temporary protected status. That kind of thing, which we're seeing, like, abstract commitments to and, you know, regional compacts on migration and that kind of thing. if you saw, for example, a world where the U.S. was doing as much to, like, fund the training of asylum officers in other countries as it is to fund the training of, you know, border officers, then you might see an equilibrium in which there were fewer people coming to the United States, but not because they were being prevented from leaving. I want to finish by talking about politics. And I think we should start with Republicans. Republicans in the Senate and Congress have proposed several ways to make entry into the U.S. more difficult.

What would you say, how would you characterize what Republicans want? What do they want and what are the plans they're putting forward? There have been ongoing discussions between the White House, Senate Democrats, and Senate Republicans. There's also been a very loud insistence from House Republicans that they are not engaging in those negotiations. The House Republican demand is that they put out a bill very broad, covers a lot of ground. That would require the U.S. to reinstate the Remain in Mexico program that the Trump administration did. Unclear how you would do this because it does require Mexico to agree to physically take people into its territory. It would prevent the federal government from doing anything to shelter or anything.

asylum seekers outside of custody. It's just an extremely, it would radically restrict qualifications for asylum on the outset. And ultimately, it's just a very sweeping bill. The negotiations on the Senate side have been a little, have been more focused, although at this point, and again, things could change. They've kind of reached the point where it seems like more stuff's getting added to the table, which is generally not how successful negotiations or negotiations that are getting closer to success go.

So what Senate Republicans have been pushing for there is the expulsion authority you mentioned, which is basically there's a consensus that it was at least easier to politically deal with the issue when Title 42 was in effect. And so you should reinstate that but make it explicitly about migration and tie it to a certain number of apprehensions the previous day.

Now in practice, this means it would be like on and off and on and off and off. They also want, and there's pretty strong bipartisan buy-in on this, to raise the initial standard for an asylum screening interview. They want something that will make it harder to release people into the U.S. And whether that's mandates for detention, whether that's preventing the, restricting the authority to even release people to begin with unclear. they also want permanent restrictions on the president's authority to parole people into the U.S., which is what's getting used for CBP1 at the ports of entry, but also for people on other humanitarian programs. That's what Biden did with Uniting for Ukraine, for example. More recently, it's allowed people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to apply outside the U.S.

for two-year work permits if they can demonstrate that they're staying with someone who could support them even if they didn't have a job. And so these, things that the Biden administration sees as really important ways to reduce the crunch at the border by taking people who would otherwise be tempted to cross irregularly and say, no, no, here's a line you can get into, are now what Republicans think of as a very important, you know, pull factor for what they consider illegality. And so far as these people don't have, you know, like permanent status and are only here at the executive's discretion that they now want to restrict. And how committed does the White House seem to solving this problem?

President Biden clearly really, really, really wants something done on this because it's being tied to aid for Ukraine. And so, and this has happened, you know, a couple of times in the past when negotiations have pulled off, the president has said explicitly, I am willing to make significant concessions on this. I think partly that's the assessment that they really want a win on this. Now, what a win looks like is not clear, right? if you can say that you did something, then you get that by being willing to negotiate with Republicans. If it's actually reducing arrivals at the border, then it gets a lot more complicated,

and it's not at all clear that the things that they're asking for or offering would do that. But also substantively, they are simply less committed, and this is also true for Senate Democrats, at least the ones who are in the negotiations. They are less interested in holding the line on the immigration status quo than they are in getting, you know, another few months of military aid to Ukraine.

We had a conversation in the earlier podcast with Paul Post about how there's some interesting things connecting the different arenas of turmoil around the world. Like, for example, it's a fallacy to think that all of the crises happening around the world are the fault of Russia. But nonetheless, Russia taking its attention away from Central Asia allowed Azerbaijan to attack the Armenians

and Nagorno-Karabakh. And Hamas said that, in fact, the perception that the U.S. was distracted by the war in Ukraine, triggered there the timing of their attack on October 7th. And it's interesting to think that yet again, we have another connection between two arenas of turmoil that seemingly should have nothing to do with each other.

Like Russia's war in Ukraine has nothing to do with a Ecuadorian seeking asylum in the U.S. because of crises specific to the cartels of Ecuador. But in fact, the solution to those two problems are being yoked politically. in Congress. And so the border crisis might have a material effect

on the future of the war between Russia and Ukraine because certain concessions made or not made might determine whether or not the U.S. continues to support Ukraine's fight against the Russians. I find that to be really interesting.

Do you think... The flip side of that, I would say. Please, yeah, go ahead. The U.S.'s attitude toward Latin America and particularly Central America has historically been kind of an accessory to its view of geopolitics and especially a great power conflict with Russia during the Cold War.

The asylum laws we have it right now is partly the result of the 1980 act that like enshrined it, but partly the result of stuff that happened after that when it became clear that whether you got asylum in the U.S. was dependent on whether the U.S. was propping up your government or, you know, or representing the insurgents fighting your government in Central America. And so I'm looking at this now and looking at the statements from senators saying that it's simply less important than Ukraine and seeing that yet again, the U.S.'s attitude toward its own hemisphere is being made secondary and its investment in the future of its own hemisphere is kind of this, it's on the nice to have list. It's not seen as an essential thing geopolitically.

I have a very, very open-ended question here that might not make any sense, but we'll see where it lands. if you looked at where liberals and MAGA conservatives live in the U.S., liberals tend to live in urban areas where there are lots of immigrants, and conservatives who, like President Trump, are more likely to live in wider areas and more rural areas. Now, you might think from that depiction of geography and exposure to immigrants that liberals would care a lot about this issue and conservatives would care less. but it's the opposite. It's voters in the interior with little contact with immigrants who vote for Trump, who say shut it all down, and it's liberal urban voters

with lots of contact with immigrants who don't seem to put immigration near the top of their most important issues. Why do you think that is? So I'm going to take this opportunity to just start off by getting up on my soapbox and talking about kind of ethical obligations. American citizens, by death,

definition, do not have current first-hand experience with the immigration system. If you're naturalized, then you've had experience with it in the past. But frankly, USCIS consistently will put its resources toward naturalization because it's very important. And so your experience becoming a U.S. citizen is likely to be the least fraught and least complicated and bureaucratic and slow encounter you have with the federal immigration system. But, you know, Native-born Americans do not have the kind of firsthand experience that, you know, everyone has had to sign up for health insurance at some point if you're, you know, an adult of a certain age. Everyone has had to deal with questions of, you know, of policing, of housing policy, all of that.

And to a certain extent, you haven't, like, you may not have had to sign up for public benefits, but you at least are vaguely aware and are affected by these things. immigration, the people who know the most about it are politically excluded from having any influence on it. And that really has encouraged the kind of gradual breakdown of the system that we've been talking about because there isn't an obvious upside in investing in it if you're not going to solve the problem. And that's what's created in all of these border crises, this kind of demand that there be something that will stop people from coming because that's what an immediate solution would, look like that would actually have political upside. That's really hard to do because you're relying on people who aren't you. You're relying on what's happening in countries that aren't the U.S.

You're relying on weather patterns. You're relying on the global economy and you're relying on people making the decision you want them to make in really murky and under-informed information ecosystems. And so, unsurprisingly, what we tend to see when people, when there is a kind of shut it down change is we'll wait and see and numbers will drop and the government will take a victory lap and then numbers will go back up again. And Democrats in general do not care a ton about immigration. It is not, and this is not just elected officials but the base. It is not as important an issue to them. Republicans, it increasingly is. And like, frankly, this wasn't the case pre-Trump. So the extent to which Trump has not only recognized this but created it is unclear, but consistently

or Republicans see immigration as one of the most important issue, or like the most important issue facing the country. And so in that environment, when you have some people who care a lot about it and don't know a whole lot about it, some people who neither know nor care a whole lot about it, it's generally hard to create a whole lot of political will for, you know, for any kind of resolution. Where I think this gets interesting because of this kind of, the optics, as you said, are different. And I do think that when the talking about optics is really important because so much of what's moved the needle on public opinion on immigration in either direction over the last, you know, as, again, as long as I've been covering it has been visuals, visuals of caravans coming in, visuals of large groups of people in custody, visuals of kids in cages, of screaming children after they were separated from their parents. Right now, the visuals are lots of people on the streets in major cities.

And that means that even people who don't live in those cities are receiving that. kind of mediated idea of things. When I was doing criminal justice reporting, I thought a lot about Bill Stunts, the collapse of American criminal justice. One of his arguments is that because local news patterns meant that you could live in the suburbs where you'd engaged in white flight a few decades earlier and your only interaction with the city was seeing local news, that you thought of the city as being a crime-ridden hell-hole.

Can we say hell-hole? Of course. Yeah, that you thought of the city as being a crime-written hell-hole and would vote. for policies that wouldn't affect you out there in the suburbs, but would affect the people in the inner cities. I do think there's a possibility that something like that will happen, or is happening on immigration, or that the continued movement of people without, that the slight movement of people without college degrees, including non-whites without college degrees, toward the Republican Party, might get exacerbated by that. But I think it's also true that the

kind of cross-pressuring of blue cities means that progressives are more likely to just see this as kind of a complicated issue that they won't particularly want to deal with. Let's say I am a progressive living in New York City, Chicago, Denver, and on the one hand, I am pro-immigration in the abstract, in my politics. I am pro-diversity. I am pro-diversity. I am pro-the-U.S. continuing to grow. and majorly increasing the amount of legal immigration to the U.S. And at the same time, visually and aesthetically scandalized by seeing people in the streets, reading the New York Times that the homeless population of New York City

is soaring, realizing that lots of people fleeing terrible situations in Central and South America are out in the cold and struggling to make it in New York. And I'm trying to balance these two ideas, that I'm pro-immigration, but I'm definitely not pro the status quo of whatever the hell it's happening right now. What are, what should I hope for for immigration system?

What are the principles that I should hope for for immigration system? So, you know, you mentioned supporting rapidly expanding legal immigration, and I want to dig down on that because I think that so, so much of the debate right now treats the people who are here as a, like, as some kind of model with in a way that makes it really hard to know what any given U.S. citizen would want to have done with them. So, for example, is your primary concern people, if your primary concern is people who are on the streets, then what we were talking about before about work permits is really important. Like, obviously, frankly, like, supporting it being easier to have to like have a housing supply in your community is also

important, but the work permit issue is really, really important. And, you know, thinking about these people not as people who can't work legally, but as people who can't work legally yet and who the U.S. government is preventing from working legally, that really shifts where you would want to be, you know, where we're learning more about the issue would put you. By a similar token, the expansion of parole, for, for example, the CHNV, Cuban-Hasian, Nicaropuan-V-V-V-V-V-Venezuelan program, like, that's a massive expansion of legal immigration temporary, but it is, you know, it's very big and it's bringing, you know, the Venezuelan example in particular, so many of, so many people who have left Venezuela are middle class professionals. There are plenty of

examples of Venezuelan doctors and economists, you know, having to try to migrate clandestinely to the United States that in, that you're not even talking about like, quote unquote, low-skilled immigration in all of these cases. But, But if your concern is people, you know, if your concern is that you really don't want people coming to the U.S. crossing into the Border Patrol cut, crossing into the U.S. border without papers, then some of those people are, you know, then like, then you would support CHNV, but some of the people on the streets, your view is they shouldn't have been allowed, they shouldn't have been released. They shouldn't have been, they should have not come to begin with. at that point, maybe the solution is that you want to direct more of them toward ports of entry, and so you need to expand capacity at ports of entry. Or maybe the problem is that you just don't want people showing up without the U.S. knowing where they are. If your position is that, gosh darn it, the Black Letter of Federal Law says that so many people can come in a year. And if more people come in,

that's people who Congress didn't explicitly authorize. And that means that in some sense, there is a violation of the law, then you're where, frankly, you know, like certainly House and arguably Senate Republicans are, right? Where it's about illegality, kind of,

but the, you know, people who support legal immigration may not actually be on board with that position depending on what it is about illegality that annoys them. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. that's a great answer.

Darling, thank you so much. This is really, really helpful for me. I appreciate it. Thank you. Always glad. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Baroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. For feedback and episode suggestions, email us at plain English at Spotify.com.