Pod Save the World - Trump’s cruel immigration policies

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Literally no one is surprised that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has contracted COVID, and how Sweden’s terrible response could help us move past the broken debate about reopening our economy. Mysterious explosions at military sites in Iran. Garbage right-wing outlets publish fake news by fake people. Joe Biden’s diplomatic style. China’s legal crackdown on Hong Kong. Neo-Nazis infiltrate the German military. And then Ben talks to Cecila Muñoz, former head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, about Trump's latest heinous efforts to restrict immigration and what the next administration will have to do to change course - and about her new book, "More than Ready."

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we're still doing this social distancing thing, huh? It's weird how it's getting way worse, not better, huh? Yeah, it's sinking in that we could be doing this for like a year. Yeah. It is not fun. Remember that heady time when we used to sit at literally the same desk and talk about foreign policy together in person and then like hang out in our offices and I don't know, interact? And remember when we thought we were like super COVID woke because we sat like six feet apart from each other in the early? days? Yeah. Well, so much for that. Well, on that a depressing note, we have a great show today anyway, despite our being so close but so far away. We're going to talk about Brazil, the coronavirus, and what happens when you have terrible leadership in your country. We'll talk about mysterious explosions at Iranian nuclear and military sites, very interesting series of stories. A network of fake op-eds humiliated a bunch of right-wing publishers in the United States. We'll talk about how that happened and who might have done it. Look at Biden's relationship with Chinese President

Xi Jinping and his general approach to diplomacy. There's an uplifting story about far-right fascists infiltrating the German military and what parallels we might see here in the U.S. And then, Ben, you're talking to an old friend today for the interview. Tell us all about it. Yeah, Cecilia Munoz ran the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House and was really the point person on immigration. Really, someone who deserves a lot of credit for the DACA program, the expansion of DACA and the program that was just upheld for Dreamers by the Supreme Court. But I wanted to ask her about this really gross new announcement from ICE that they were basically going to insist that any foreign students attending U.S. universities leave the country

or not be permitted to be in the country if those universities are going to be doing online learning in the fall. No reason for this other than kind of cruelty. And I wanted her to put this in the context of what we've seen the Trump administration do on immigration, during COVID, like what other goalposts have they moved as part of this bigger agenda that they have? So check it out. She's as smart as anybody on these issues. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm excited to hear that because I saw that announcement about online universities and it seemed so ridiculous and needlessly cruel and, you know, sort of surprisingly so from an administration that wakes up every day thinking what is the next thing we can do

that is needlessly cruel and brutal to immigrants. Yeah, and, you know, for the world of perspective, you know, I don't think there's any program that the United States has done in the last, you know, in my lifetime that's as effective as international education. And I think people don't get this enough, but foreign students come here. They just pump money into our economy, right? Because every dollar they're bringing into the U.S. economy through tuition, through living expenses, that's, you know, billions of dollars of net worth to our economy. But even more importantly, you know, these are the future leaders of countries. And the fact that they are educated here, that they get to know the United States

is of tremendous and tangible value to us is part of the goodwill that the world has felt generally towards America, including parts of the world that may not love our foreign policy but love our system of higher education. So this, you know, in addition to being cruel and inhumane

and part of their anti-immigration approach, is about as dumb a thing as you can do from a foreign policy perspective too. Yeah, it really seems incredibly terrible all around. A couple quick housekeeping things before we get to the show. So the wind of change, bonus episode is out now. Patrick talks to Joanna Stingray, the daughter of an anti-communist who

smuggled music in and out of the Soviet Union. It is unbelievable. There's an international love triangle. There's high fashion. There's an explosive ending. Check out. It's only on Spotify. It's free. You don't have to have a paid account to hear it on Spotify. Just check it out. And also, now that Adoptist state organizing trainings are all wrapped up and everyone is trained up and ready to go, make sure you check your email. This is how we're going to send you all of your state-specific opportunities. So just keep an eye on that. Make sure you have accept messages from Vote Save America. And if you have not signed up, it's not too late. Go to Votesaveamerica.com slash adopt. Join the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of volunteers looking to flip some swing states.

Ben, let's talk about our friends in Brazil for a minute because in news that should surprise absolutely no one. President Jaya Bolsonaro of Brazil has the coronavirus, even after testing positive. Bolsonaro is trying to downplay the disease right after his diagnosis. He walked up to a bunch of reporters pulled his mask off and said, just look at my face. I'm fine, which is in fact the medically approved way of determining whether or not you need a ventilator. 65,000 Brazilians have died from this disease. At least 1.6 million Brazilians have gotten it, but we'll probably never know the real number because the health ministry in Brazil stopped posting data back in June. A study by Brazilian researchers published also in June found that infections in Brazil's poorest

neighborhoods could be 30 times higher than the official count. So there's probably a massive, just unseen group of people suffering. Bolsonaro is just, you know, he's made it worse for several months. There's no other way to put it. He walked around in public without a mask. He criticized lockdown, social distancing. He called it the little flu. But despite all these grim statistics, some Brazilian states are starting to reopen bars and gyms and restaurants.

sounds familiar. Brazil's response, you know, it has nothing to do with Trump, but the parallels are obvious, right? I mean, Bolsonaro is worried about the economy tanking. He wants to win re-election.

He's worried about getting impeached for corruption charges. And despite running a country with an advanced economy, with healthcare infrastructure, the response has been a disaster. I also just point out, the guy's 65 years old.

He's had some recent health problems. He got stabbed a couple years ago, which is insane. So he's a considerable risk here. But he's basically decided that the political and economic hit is worse than the virus. Ben, do you think that Brazil is going for de facto herd immunity by letting this disease just ripped through the country? Or is this terrible leadership? Is it both? Like, what is your read on why Bolsonaro would approach a pandemic this way?

Well, if you were going to design in a laboratory, one of these right-wing populists who is the worst possible person to be in charge during COVID, it'd be a pretty tight race between Trump and Bolsonaro. I mean, I think if you look at his response, too, he's exhibited a lot of the traits that have been problematic everywhere. He downplayed the virus. He kind of mocked people who took it seriously as not being, you know, manly enough. You know, his self-conception as this tough guy, this strong man, you know, led him to not want to wear masks and make fun of people who did that. He has, you know, basically deconstructed pieces of the Brazilian state that he sees as leftist or socialist, you know,

the environmental protections in the Amazon, he's taken aim at the education system as being too liberal, and obviously the public health infrastructure, clearly not meeting the moment here. So if you needed a warning sign of where this brand of kind of anti-government, strongman, tough guy, kind of misogynist type leadership can lead, you know, Bolsonaro is it. It's telling to me that the second world leader we've had with COVID that we know about,

the first is Boris Johnson. Another right-wing guy nationalist. Boris Johnson used to make fun of people who shook hands. Then he almost died from COVID. It'll be interesting to see literally what happens to Bolsonaro's health because, as you say, he has some risk factors. Here's the thing that worries me, Tommy, and I think to broaden it for the world those. The Americas is in much more dire shape than the rest of the world.

And part of this is that the U.S. and Brazil, the two biggest countries in this hemisphere have handled this probably as badly as any other major countries in the world. But you've also seen increases in Mexico where the left-wing government, the left-wing populace there, is not particularly handled this well. You see vulnerable countries in Central America, they don't have a lot of infrastructure. So one of the things that I worry about as we look out over the next six months is some real problems in the Americas that leads to, you know, obviously first and foremost loss of life, but also potentially kind of break down. in different places, movement of peoples. This could be a really rocky time from, you know, Sao Paulo all the way up through our northern border.

The Canadians have handled it okay. And I think we should see this as yet another warning sign about, you know, our own hemisphere needing to do better here. Yeah, it's probably not long before we start hearing Build the Wall chance at Trudeau events. Like the thing that I'm finding just still enormously frustrating is that we still have a debate that's framed between this like either or choice between addressing the economic concerns or dealing with the virus. It's like lockdown and destroy the economy or open up and save it. And it's just not how this is played out in the U.S. and states or internationally. Sweden is a great example of a

government that basically just let everything stay open. And the result is a country that has six to 12 times more deaths than its neighbors and that still expects the economy to contract at about 5% this year, I think it was 4.5%, which is comparable to Denmark's neighbor. And what we're seeing is the countries that have a good economic story lock down quickly and severely. Then they put in place testing and mitigation processes to ensure a safe reopening. But these half measures mean people are getting sick, people are dying, but at-risk populations are staying home. They're self-quarantining. They're reducing their spending and the economy is getting hit anyway. I mean, this morning, Ben, I saw that if you want to travel to New York from

19 states out of 50, you have to quarantine for two weeks. I mean, the economic impact of a state-based policy like that is going to ripple through the U.S. economy. I guess my question for you is, like, do you have thoughts for how Biden or Democrats in Congress or people like us or the media can try to reframe this debate in a way that's accurate? Because right now, it feels polarized and stupid and honestly not really reflective of where the country is. When 80% of the country wants people to wear masks and 20% dope, but those 20% get the news, like I do think it skews the perception of what people want or the choices involved. Yeah, well, it's interesting, you know, how much the distorting effect of Trump, you know,

filters into other parts of the culture, right? Because the clearest indication to me is, okay, we've all talked about how South Korea got on top of this at the very beginning and never really took off their deaths in the low hundreds. But Europe, Western Europe in particular, was about where we were a few months ago. And they have significantly bent the curve. which has put them in a position to safely begin to reopen their economy and resume economic activity. And of course, one of the ultimate indicators of how much Trump has been winning is that Americans can't even travel to Europe now. I think if you look at what's happened in Europe, so places that couldn't stop the outbreak from reaching them, but then we're able to get on top of it faster, it's not a mystery, right?

It is people wearing masks, leadership modeling that behavior, people abiding by social distancing, and a very, very robust network. of testing that can both allow people to kind of return to work and resume normal activity with confidence as to whether or not they have this, but also to allow for contact tracing if we can identify somebody who's sick, who they've been in contact with, and shut that down instead of shutting down the entire economy. There's not a lot of mystery to this. But I think part of what happened here is we all knew that. And a couple months ago, when these debates were happening, people are saying, where's the national testing regimen? Why aren't people wearing masks. Why isn't Trump modeling this behavior? And then a bunch of like jackasses with AR-15s started

going to state capitals and suddenly we're covering that. And then, of course, you have George Floyd and people are focused not only in that, but how Trump is responding to it. And it's amazing to me how much we as a country have kind of just lost the threat on what we need to be doing. And the basic message is we cannot open this economy safely and we're going to be shutting things down again and again, unless we do the things that we know have worked in other countries. I think for Biden, what this means is when he gets elected, think about this, if he gets elected, knock on wood, it'll be a very contentious transition period, where Trump will be actively kind of working against him, probably not cooperating with him.

But Biden's going to have to be prepared to hit the ground running on January 21st. And that means rejoining the World Health Organization that Trump has left, joining the international response around hopefully the dissemination of a vaccine so that that can be disseminated globally in a fair and equitable and not a costly way that benefits pharmaceutical companies, but puts people front and center. But also, how are we going to resume the global economy? When is air travel going to resume? When are supply chains going to get back to normal? Because even if people are going to bars, I mean, I don't know why the whole debate about opening the economy became about like bars and fucking restaurants. Who cares? What about global supply chains?

What about travel? What about manufacturing, having a capacity to have their supply chain in place so they can sell stuff or they can get the parts that they need? This kind of, there's no evidence that this kind of work is being done. And I think the Biden people have to be prepared to hit a very uneven ground running on January 21st if they win. Yeah, let's stop talking about whether or not bars and restaurants are opening and start planning for the long game. I would love to see them like nationalize the patent to whatever vaccine comes out and just take it over and give it to everybody. but I don't know, maybe I'm going a little hardcore socialist on you here. But can you imagine what will happen if there are delays at all in the dissemination of this

vaccine because some fucking pharmaceutical company is trying to leverage it to get as much money as they can, which is what's happening. Yeah, or even treatments. Yeah, or treatments, you know, we just can't abide by this. And if Biden is elected, he can't indulge it. I totally agree. Okay, let's talk about something slightly less infuriating, which is Iran. So over the past three months or so, there have been a series of fire.

and explosions in Iran at nuclear facilities, power plants, and oil refineries. Two that got a lot of attention were pretty recent. There was a July 2nd explosion in Natanz, which is Iran's main nuclear site. And there was a June 26th explosion at a production facility that makes fuel for ballistic missiles. Iran initially downplayed that fire in Aton's said it was no big deal. Now they can see that it caused considerable damage and it could have been deliberate sabotaged by Israel or the U.S. presumably. The Guardian reported that U.S. and European analysts believe that the building that was bombed at De Tans was developing advanced nuclear centrifuges. Those are key to enriching uranium to make a nuclear bomb. A journalist at BBC Persia reported that right as or before the explosion happened or

became public, he got an email from a group that called itself the homeland cheetahs taking credit for the attack on Tans. The group claimed to be dissidents within Iran's military and security forces. a Middle Eastern intelligence official told the New York Times that Israel planted a bomb in the facility and that's who did this. Ben, I just finished a great book called Rise and Kill First. It's by Ronan Bergman. It goes into a lot of detail about Israeli efforts to disrupt Iran's nuclear program through sabotage, including a bombing campaign to assassinate nuclear scientists in Iran. There's a longer conversation to be had about the morality of targeting scientists, but that's a conversation for another day that's probably more important than this one. What did you make of

these recent reports? Do you believe the secret homeland cheetahs were behind this operation? Do you think it's more likely to be an Israeli covert action campaign? What did you make of this coincidental string of bombings? So my daughters, three and five, play this game endlessly under COVID called Ninja Cheetahs, which I don't really know what the game is other than that they say they're ninja cheetahs and they growl at me. I don't know if there's some overlap. I don't know if the cells have coordinated. Look, you pointed, we obviously, there's not too much we can say about this,

other than the fact that it's a matter of public record, right, that in the past there have been sabotage efforts, both cyber efforts, but also these assassinations that you mentioned of scientists. So I would presume that this is coming from external power. And I say that not knowing in this case, but, you know, if there are multiple efforts of sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program or ballistic missile program. And you, by the way, have a President of the United States, Tommy, who you recall, like tweeted out some image of his PDB that showed like a, you know, a ballistic missile launch not working. Right. You know, not exactly subtle that he was suggesting the U.S. might be involved in this and might be doing with Israel.

But I think here's what people have to understand. This is a sideshow. It gives the warm and fuzzies to all the hawks on think tanks in Massachusetts Avenue, but it doesn't stop the Iranian nuclear program. They know how to do this. They've mastered the fuel cycle to produce nuclear material, right? So they can just produce more centrifuges, install them in different places, build different facilities. You can blow up a few centrifuges that barely sets back the clock.

You know, and then they just restart it, right? And so there's two problems with this. One is it doesn't work. The only thing that has worked in the last two decades and actually rolling back Iran's program is the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, which led them to dismantle and put into storage two-thirds of those centrifuges, led them to destroy the core of a reactor, right?

Much more significant rollback of their nuclear program than a fire someplace, right? And yet the same people that were so against the nuclear deal are probably some of the same people celebrating these very minor setbacks to the Iranian program. But the other thing is, think about what this does the environment. The Iranians will want to have a reprisal, you know, and how much of this is we lived through? So then they do stuff. They launch rockets at our people or at Iraqis inside of Iraq or Hezbo undertake some attack or they do something somewhere in the region. And then we come out,

the U.S. and say, why are you doing all these provocative actions? Well, Well, we're in this cycle too, and this is not going to lead anywhere. It's not going to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon because they can just build more of this stuff in different places and hide it and then break out and get a nuclear weapon. The only thing that can stop them from getting nuclear weapon, unless we're going to invade that country and remove that regime and take it over is a diplomatic settlement. And this stuff not only fails to do that, it makes it less likely that Iran's going to undertake diplomacy, and more likely that they're going to do something in response.

and here we are on this endless cycle of escalation. So I would not exactly be popping the champagne in whatever country is doing this. Yeah, I don't necessarily feel safer either. But interesting reporting. Odds are that some of the great journalists inside and outside of Israel, if they are responsible, will end up reporting this out, although some will be censored by the military censorship program.

But clearly that didn't stop the New York Times from publishing what they published today. One other piece that caught my eye, similar region. The Daily Beast published a story about a network of at least 19 fake personas that published at least 90 opinion pieces in dozens of news outlets that targeted conservative audiences in the U.S., Israel, and East Asia. The article described these opinion pieces as generally positive towards the United Arab Emirates, critical of Qatar, Turkey, Iran. Very subtle, right? And they often called for cracking down on Iranian proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon. the U.S. outlets that ran these pieces are fringe garbage. It's the Washington Examiner, the American thinker, newsmax, the national interests.

International outlets include the Jerusalem Post, Al Arabia, the South China Morning Post. But while we all can laugh about newsmax being a joke and best known for being the only place that would hire Sean Spicer, that doesn't mean these links don't get a lot of traffic. So there's one article titled, Qatar is destabilizing the Middle East. It was tweeted out by the co-founder of students for Trump to about a million followers. Obviously, it makes that guy look like a total moron, but a lot of people read this garbage. This literal fake news, literal fake authors, this network was first spotted by a guy named Mark Owen Jones. He's an assistant professor at a university in Qatar.

Whoever was running these accounts, like they stole photos they found online, they generated them with AI, they made up fake bios. And then somehow, you know, all these publications had such lax editorial standards that they published them. then any theories on who might run this sort of operation? And I guess like if we found one of these big networks, how many do you think have not been discovered yet? Because it feels like this is a pretty replicable play here. Yeah, I mean, just to roll back the tape on the United Arab Emirates, the UAE, right? In 2013, they financed a massive media campaign in Egypt

against the Islamist president at the time, Muhammad Mercy, against our ambassador and the United States for its alleged support of Muhammad Mercy and to kind of gin up some of the public protests that led to the military coup that installed a brutal, brutal dictator, C.C. in Egypt. So the UAE's been in this information space for a while. During the Iran deal, like it was not subtle.

They were spending millions of dollars. And look, sometimes it's, you know, fake personas spreading op eds. Sometimes it's giving $100,000 to friend of the pod, Bob Gates, to give a speech at a Washington think tank. It's all manner of things. But these guys play the information game and they play it really hard. And I think that the UAE gets a pass a lot in our discourse because it's easier to focus on Saudi Arabia, who's kind of the senior partner in this whole effort. But you know what? This is the same agenda. Maham bin Salman and Mohamed Zaid of the UAE, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, have the same agenda. And it's right-wing politics in this country,

it's total support for their anti-Iran, anti-Qaeda agendas in the Middle East. And it's essentially securitizing the way that the world looks at the Middle East. So we'll continue to turn to them as the islands of stability and the storm of extremism and conflict that they themselves are contributing to, right? That's all part of the deal. And I think because Dubai and Abu Dhabi look so modern and so great and so fun to visit there, people lose sight of that fact. You know, I think that this also demonstrates what an easy mark. Totally. You know, right-wing media.

You can just kind of, you know, you could have like an algorithm write an op-ed about how the Iranians are terrible or Qatar is a bunch of Islamists and this creeping Sharia in the U.S. And the answer to this is to back our strong allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Middle East. like, you know, you can cut and paste this stuff and get published in any number of publications in this country. So it also shows just kind of how to base the thought is here on these issues. But I do think the UAE doesn't get enough tension precisely because they're good at it in terms of how much they seek to influence the information space in this country and really around the world. Ben, I thought you'd like this. David Fulkenfleck, who's a media reported NPR,

flagged that the, I guess the editor-in-chief of human events, which is like one of the these just garbage fringe outlets, tweeted that they think the op-ed holds up even if we were deceived as to the authorship. So basically, they know that this was a sock puppet campaign, probably sponsored by the UAE, written by some PR official or like intel agency person, but they're cool with it because they like the underlying argument. That is the state of conservative media in America right now. Yeah, this is the same reason that it's so easy for Russia to intervene in our politics. It's our, fault. Like, to have a bunch of fucking idiots who will read, you know, in 2016, they'd read any

article about Hillary Clinton being sick. So the Russians can create thousands of articles. She's got depression. She's on death store. She had a stroke. They'll just publish them. Yeah. The turn it's a Biden right now. And it doesn't matter if it's by Steve Bannon or a Russian bot. Like it's our ecosystem that these countries are manipulating. And yes, the Emirates, I would say, have spent a lot of money to help create that ecosystem. But that's, it's a lot of, but that's, it's, it's that's still part of the problem. And it's widespread. I mean, I remember we flagged the report to each up, well, on our endless text saying Tommy, you know, David Rothkoff, right? It was the editor of foreign policy magazine, like a, you know, not like some right-wing guy, like someone seen as in the center of the

foreign policy debate. It turns out he was on retainer from the Emirati embassy in the U.S. to develop a, like a podcast, you know, do you think that the coverage of foreign policy magazine or of a potential podcast is not influenced by the fact that like the Emirates are promising a retainer. I mean, this is what's happening. And it's very widespread. And, you know, until people are sick of it and until, frankly, our foreign policy apparatus is telling these countries that are supposedly friends of ours to stay out of our business, they're going to keep doing it. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to, to manipulate the U.S. debate around foreign policy if you're a foreign government. This is probably the cheapest, easiest way. But they're also, you know, countries hire lobbying shops who can then essentially launder huge contributions to various members of Congress, directly lobby them. And, you know, you have countries spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying over the course of several years to ensure that, for example, the U.S. keeps selling weapons to Saudi Arabia or like whatever disgusting, you know, priority they might have.

Yeah, and a quick anger on this. It was in Adamentis, a great reporter for the New Yorker, had a piece about Fiona Hill recently. And there was a little nugget in it about how Connie Mack, this former Republican congressman who's become a super lobbyist, lobbies for Victor Orban. And Victor Orban couldn't get a meeting with us during the Obama years. But as soon as Trump was elected, Connie Mack gets into Trump Tower, says, you got to talk to Orban. He's our guy. Guess who else has worked for Victor Orban? Rick Grinnell was doing some of this work for Victor Orban. And lo and behold, this deepening relationship and friendship between Trump and Urbond develops, oh, lo and behold, Rick Rennell, you know, he ends up ascending to be ambassador to Germany. I mean, the point is that it's not just that a lobbyist comes and makes a case. They kind of embed themselves in the infrastructure of how foreign policy is made, how the media reports on foreign policy become massive influence campaigns for foreign governments. And look, some that's just what happens and has always happened. But it's gotten totally out of control, in part because there's no. check on money in our politics and the media is not policing this stuff. That's right. That's right. And, you know, there's a story in The Times this week about how David Urban, who was a lobbyist, who's

friends with Mike Pompeo, was on the Trump campaign, I believe worked in the White House, got the Raytheon CEO, a meeting with Pompeo when all their efforts were failing. It's like they definitely, lobbying has existed for as long as Washington has existed. It does feel like it's gotten more brazen. People care less about public exposure and sunshine laws and reporting about their kind of influence peddling. It's pretty gross. Let's talk about Biden for a minute because hopefully he can change some of this horribleness.

So Michael Crowley from the New York Times had a good piece over the weekend about Biden's basically foreign policy style. The hook for the piece was Biden's relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The backstory is in 2011. The Obama administration believed that she would ascend to become president. We wanted to develop a better relationship with him,

sort of better understand his thinking. So Biden, who was basically his counterpart in the government, met with Xi eight times over the course of 18 months, including 25 hours, dining privately with just interpreters. That sounds brutal. No offense to anyone involved. Experts credit Biden with, you know, coming away from that period of time, understanding better than most that she was really an authoritarian who was going to control China like it hadn't been controlled in a few decades. But, you know, that kind of personal time and that diplomacy, it's a window into Biden's general approach to foreign policy. which is to focus on these personal relationships and use that to facilitate the substantive work. It's basically how we approach Congress too, like call it empathy, call it sort of old school

backslapping LBJ politics, whatever. But it's worth reading the whole piece. There's lots of history in there. There's interesting anecdotes. You know, Biden spent time with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing in 1979. He called Gaddafi a terrorist to his face. It talks about Biden's relationship with Bibi Net and Yahoo, including a very tense visit to Israel in 2010. when the issue of settlement construction flared up.

Ben, you were quoted in this story. We were both at the White House during that sort of courtship of Xi and the blowup with Netanyahu. Do you think the piece was accurate? Do you think that brand of politics is more effective than a more business-like transactional approach? And what would you say to a critic who reads that piece and says, yeah, man, well, you know, we were told that Trump, you know, his buddies with the Russians and with Kim Jong-un and North Korea. And what the hell has that gotten us? So what is the difference here? Yeah, I think it's a very accurate representation of Biden, first of all.

I mean, he used to always say again and again and again and again in situation room meetings, foreign policy discussions, that all politics is an extension of personal relationships. And in the same way, all foreign policies and extension of personal relationships. This is a man who looks at his personal relationships as his currency for getting things done. You know, he would always talk to Iraqi leaders. And I remember, you know, reading the transcripts of these calls and long windups about everybody's grandkids. And he knew the names of every grandchild of Barzani, the Kurdish leader. And his point was having that relationship is going to come in handy someday if I have to ask this guy to do something hard. I know him. He knows me. He trusts me. I think there's something to that. But I think it is potentially dramatically overstated the impact it can have. essentially leaders make decisions based on their perception of their own interests. Right. And based on either their national interest or where they're trying to take their national interest.

Having a close relationship can make a difference, certainly, at times. And so Obama's closest relationship with Merkel, and they did a bunch of hard stuff together, and the fact that they had a lot of trust and they had kind of an ongoing conversation made it easier to do things because when he picked out of the phone and talked to her, she knew where he was coming from. They dealt with other issues. they knew they could trust each other. So I don't want to diminish it.

But I do think sometimes the Washington conversation can really focus on these kind of, you know, they used to say, Obama didn't have, you know, enough friends in the world. Well, one of his very close friends was David Cameron. And we got along great with David Cameron. They had a great personal relationship, you know. And David Cameron said, I got to do this referendum for Brexit. And could you come over here and help us with the referendum campaign?

And lo and behold, David Cameron had misread his country and Brexit happened. And no personal relationship would have changed that. you know. So I think it's, look, it matters and it's interesting and it is a window into Biden's style, but it's not some be all and all for curing our farm policy. It's one element of how a leader approaches these things. Yeah, I totally agree. And look, the difference between Biden and Trump is that like Biden has done the homework for 40 years. Trump can't read the PDB when it says the Russians are killing U.S. service members. There's no, there's no comparison there. It was sort of a straw man question. The piece read true to me too. No, and the homework part is really important, right? Because

one of the most famous instances of this, right, is not just Trump and Kim Jong-un. It's when George Bush met Vladimir Putin. And Putin played him like a fiddle. And he talked about his Christianity and his faith and all this stuff. And that's when Bush came out, for some of the younger world, those who don't remember this, and said he looked into Vladimir Putin's soul and saw a good man. You know, if you don't do your homework, you're going to get played if you're trying to have a positive relationship with somebody. So my hope is what Biden can bring to it is, yes, the willingness to invest real time in a personal relationship with these leaders combined with an administration that does its homework. That can get something done.

Last week we talked about a new Chinese law that is going to turn Hong Kong into basically another Chinese city from a semi-autonomous region that has limited freedoms. We are seeing now just how quickly the Chinese plan to implement this law. Reuters reported that books by prominent pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong are no longer available in public libraries. because they're being scrub for compliance with this new national security law. Hong Kong officials are figuring out how to put in place technical tools to censor online content and to allow China to spy on any resident they want, basically. Some tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, they've said they're going

to temporarily stop complying with requests from Hong Kong authorities to turn over user data. In response, the Hong Kong government is playing some serious hardball. they said they have the authority to arrest those tech company employees. And basically, if fully implemented, this law means that you're basically not safe if you're, let's say, a Facebook employee working in Hong Kong. Because a Facebook staffer in Hong Kong could be arrested if the company won't hand over data on an individual in the U.S. or the UK, for example, if you read the letter of the law. Confusingly, TikTok said that they're going to withdraw the app from Hong Kong because

managers outside China make their decision. decisions about data. Despite that fact, Mike Pompeo said Trump is considering banning TikTok in the U.S., which just to pause and be a political hack for a second here, everyone listening, tell people you know in your life who are under 35 that Donald Trump is going to ban TikTok in the United States and use that to motivate them to vote because it'll work. But to the bigger questions, like, this is a big business decision for a lot of these companies who make money in Hong Kong. they have like major infrastructure, data servers, like all kind of stuff in Hong Kong. So getting out of there would be a big choice.

Ben, you read these stories and it's like overwhelmingly depressing, right? Like, you know, the Chinese are moving fast on this. There's no pushback from Trump. But, I mean, do you think that the private sector, like the international organizations, they still have time to put pressure on authorities in Hong Kong or the Chinese to slow the crack down or to crack down less? or does China just like have all the cards here? So unfortunately, I think that they have all the cards.

You know, what's clear is that China's had a playbook of things that they would want to do to kind of take control of Hong Kong. And they're just doing it now. They're like, the world is distracted by COVID. There's a lunatic authoritarian as president of the United States. Like, we should just rush this through now and basically transform Hong Kong into just another Chinese city. They've done this in different sectors in the past.

So there was a famous incident that we talked about where they kid. kidnapped three booksellers from in Hong Kong, took them into China, they disappeared, they made these Potemkin confessions. And lo and behold, a couple years later, there really was no independent bookselling industry to speak of left in Hong Kong. The Chinese media bought up the bookchains. So most of the booksellers in Hong Kong are literally Chinese mainland interest. You know, just imagine what books they're selling. They, you know, basically arrest people who try to bring books back into China, Chinese language books that they don't. So they had this kind of web around the book industry that has choked off the capacity to have an independent book publishing operation in Hong Kong.

Now that's what they're doing in the entire information space in Hong Kong. And they don't care. You know, they don't like I'm interested when I go to Hong Kong that I can get on Twitter, you know, I mean, in a way that you can't in mainland China. But the Chinese don't care if these tech companies pull out. That's their problem, not China's. China's calculated that if they take some kind of economic hit in Hong Kong, that that's fine. That's worth it for them to swallow up the city. They'll probably try to counteract it by just pumping a bunch of money into Hong Kong to make it so that the private sector there and the banks

have some incentive and don't feel the whole economy going down to go along with what China's doing. I hope that, you know, you see some private sector interests kind of stand up to this type behavior. But the reality is that China has the cards in this situation. And I think what that means our policy is kind of what we talked about last time, which is that we just have to help as many people as we can. And, you know, the Brits have now made it possible for three million people to come into the UK if they want to from Hong Kong. The U.S. should be doing the same thing because the island is drowning and we just need to save as many people as we can, frankly, who are in risk of political persecution. Yeah, it is a very dark situation. Okay, so speaking of which, let's talk about a pretty disturbing

report in the New York Times that is about neo-Nazis infiltrating the ranks of the German military. Never good, Tommy. Never good. Totally, man. This is never a fun topic. So last week, I missed this until I read this long piece over the weekend. Germany's defense minister disbanded one of four special forces companies within Germany's like most elite special forces unit. It's called the KSK. It's basically the German version of the Navy SEALs. And they did so because far-right extremism had become so widespread within the ranks of this unit. So German authorities have been aware of the broader problem of like far-right extremism within their military for years, but they haven't gotten a handle on it. They're still investigating a party from three years ago where people were singing

Nazi songs and doing the, you know, Hitler's salute. I mean, really gross, frightening stuff. In May, though, there was this precipitating event, which was German authorities rated the home of a 45-year-old German sergeant major suspected to have extremist ties. In his home, actually buried in his garden, they found plastic explosives, guns, and like tons of ammunition. And this guy had been in the KSK, their Navy SEALs, since 2001. So this wasn't some young idiot who, you know, was misguided. This was someone who's been into this stuff for a long time.

And so the German military is just now being ordered to account for an estimated 48,000 rounds of ammunition and 137 pounds of explosives that have just gone missing. The head of German counterintelligence said they're investigating six. 600 soldiers for extremism, including 20 of these 1400 special forces guys. And so, you know, there are not surprisingly, Ben, like parallels between German far right nationalists and these far right extremists in the U.S. both believe that at some point soon, society is going to break down. There is going to be a civil war in the U.S. You know, they really think it's going to be a race war. But that's why these authorities believe German troops are stealing weapons. They're stockpiling for that

inevitability. In the U.S., there just isn't really a supply problem, right? I mean, until 2015, you could go to Walmart and buy a fucking AR-15. So it seems clear that, you know, not only do the U.S. and the German authorities not have a handle on the problem, it seems like they're hesitant, maybe politically, to really dig deep. It learned the extent of the problem, because this is so frightening. Most experts point to 2015 as the tipping point for the growth of the far right in Germany. That was when German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced she'd allowed more than a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, into the country, which led to a big surge in support for the AFD, which is his right-wing extremist party. A brave decision by her, but it does seem like

there have been far-reaching consequences. Ben, it also made me think about an incident in 2019 when this member of the U.S. Coast Guard was arrested with weapons and like a kill list of Democratic politicians and media figures. And, you know, 2009, there was this DHS report about extremism in the military and the recruitment efforts of military members. I also saw that in 2018, there was a poll, the military times that a poll of their readers. And 22% of service members who answered said they had seen signs of white nationalism or racist ideology within the armed forces. So just a lot to unpack here, but I know you'd read this story.

It alarmed both of us. There's all kinds of spin-off issues I'd love to talk about too about like General Flynn and QAnon and extremism and the police. But what did you make of this epidemic? in the German military? Well, the challenge in Germany is the history matters. And if there is an incident, like let's say there's a terrorist attack from one of these people, the weight that that will have on kind of the global consciousness will be much greater

because it's from Germany. So Germany has always taken kind of an extra responsibility to combat fascism and Holocaust denial inside of its borders since the end of World War II. and that's kind of how I respond to this. There's kind of an ex-responsibility to go the extra mile to root this stuff out. You know, because of Germany's past and also because of think of the impact that would happen if some German neo-Nazis, you know, kill a couple dozen people. Like that will reverberate in very dangerous ways and potentially inspire all these white supremacists

who might be in our military or in other Western militaries. So I'm glad that Germans are taking it seriously. they have to. I think we need to look in the mirror about this stuff. You know, we talked about the Navy Seal, you know, Gallagher, who was, you know, essentially Trump weighed in on his behalf and he wasn't convicted of war crimes when, in fact, he was a war criminal. If you read carefully kind of between the lines in that story, you could see some of this stuff, right? This is someone who thought that basically brown people were of less value. This is someone who, you know, involved in defacing corpses and, and shooting, you know, or killing children.

Like, what is the mentality behind that? And, and again, I want to say this very, like, respectfully, but as in Germany, our special forces community, full of exemplary wonderful, heroic people who've done far more than I ever will for this country, you know, got bin Laden. So I'm not painting a broad brush here. But that was a window into the fact that,

this is a much whiter part of the military, and there may be these challenges, right? There's also been reporting of just like systemic disciplinary problems within the ranks of some of the special forces communities. There's a lot of reasons for that. It could be because of long deployments, excessive deployments, brutal missions. But this has been a pretty well-reported thing that's just worth just noting as a fact. You know, to put it more bluntly, like if you, if you walk into a giant room of enlisted people, it's very diverse, you know. If you walk into a special forces units, it's usually not, you know. And so just the odds of this kind of thing can be higher for that reason, too. Never mind, like you said, the lengthy deployments. And yeah, if you look at the

Mike Flynn circle and you look at the kind of flirtation with conspiracy theory in that circle, and you mentioned he's retweeting Q&N stuff, like this is home too. Every time Q&ON comes up on this show, I like try to think of a short explanation. It's a crazy cultist thing that thinks like Trump's going to save the world from like evil democratic pedophiles. basically and like lock us all up, et cetera. Pedophile stuff, really about, like, that's key to it. I mean, that's crazy. It's, you know, common pizza pizza stuff.

Yeah, it's like pizza gaity, like that next level stuff. There's a QAnon oath that people are swearing. General Mike Flynn, three-star general, former national security advisor to the United States, got read into every covert action program in the country, did the QAnon oath on video and tweeted it out on July 4th. This is an organization that the FBI has said has links to domestic terrorist incidents. And it like barely got any attention. Sorry to interrupt. No, no. But because Tommy, I think the reason this matters, right, is we think of this as a bit of

a Trump problem. We think of this as Trump as a white nationalist and look at all these, you know, a thousand white nationalist flowers blooming. Never mind that there are, you know, probably deep-seated white nationals views in pockets of the American national security state as there are in Germany and other countries. But why would we think this is going to go away if Trump is defeated? You know, if anything, if these people are kind of being radicalized right now, well, if Joe Biden's elected and things are still a mess and there's still COVID and there's an economic crisis, this problem is going to get worse, not better. And the risk of it leading to actual violence is very real. This is how many warning signs do we need? These are trained and armed people in Germany.

It could be the same case here and other places embracing a violent agenda that if they act upon it like they could do a lot of damage and you know we need to start taking it that seriously yeah that's got it's really it's one of the more alarming stories I've read in a while and you're just like okay great I just read you know 2,000 words on you know neo-nazies in the German military I guess I'll go on with my life you're like what the fuck what is anyone doing about this to give you the hopeful you know counterpoint there's studies that have been done recently that that assimilation that taking in of a million refugees has paid enormous dividends for Germany that they have been better integrated in Germany, even in those bigger numbers, than in surrounding

countries, that they're adding a lot to the economy, that they're replenishing the labor force, that they're very entrepreneurial, that Syrians are very educated. So what's interesting about it is not unlike what's happening in the U.S., I really do believe that that's going to be viewed by history as a huge net plus for Germany, not just because it was a moment of moral leadership, but because practically they got a bunch of young, educated, hungry, literally hungry, not just for food, but for entrepreneurship. In flux of Syrians and their country became more dynamic and more diverse as a part of that. Part of the problem is that when you do that, as we've seen here, there's a backlash.

And the backlash can take very ugly forms. And so this whole political fight that we're in all around the world is kind of between the forces that are okay with change and diversity and the forces pushing back on it. And I think in Germany you see both stories taking hold. Hopefully the better story is the one that prevails. Yeah. that is a knock on wood for that. Last thing I had, so this kind of sucks. According to the independent, Britain is going to resume selling arms to Saudi Arabia, despite determining that the

Saudis could be using them to commit war crimes in Yemen. We talked about Yemen briefly last week and several times before that. The Saudi has been fighting this brutal civil war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2015, at times with U.S. support, currently with U.S. support. It's created the world's worst humanitarian disaster. Reading this, Ben, it was depressing to know that the Brits are like as completely morally bankrupt and full of shit as we are on this issue. You know, some members of Congress have bravely, bipartisan, by the way, have bravely tried to cut off U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and get us out of this war in Yemen.

Trump has made that impossible so far. I guess my question was, do you think there's ways we can help create similar pressure on the UK through international organizations or press? I mean, is Boris Johnson, because it's a parliamentary system, more susceptible to these criticisms than a U.S. president insulated by four-year elections? Like, how do you view this? I think you have seen in the U.K., you know, a combination of protest and movement building have an impact. It's just a lot harder when the U.S. isn't going along with it. What I would say, Tommy, is that if people are thinking about where are the progressive spaces that we want to put pressure on an incoming Biden administration, let's make this one of them. Big time. Like those guys and some of them are my friends, but they should feel tremendous pressure, stop Yemen immediately.

Again, they shouldn't have started as it did under Obama. That has to stop immediately and suspend arms sales immediately and review them and figure out what needs to be done by Saudi Arabia to climb back into a status where they can buy U.S. weapons. Because this is atrocious. And again, if you're looking for progressive parties to apply pressure, to call members of Congress to raise awareness in the media to mount social media campaigns, Yemen and the Saudi relationship should be near the top of the list for the U.S. because then that will make it impossible for Boris Johnson to do this. If the U.S. is not selling these arms, then the Brits cannot do it either. And so I think that this isn't something where we all can kind of lean into this here in the U.S. and hopefully that will have an

impact. That's good. Another reason we've got to win. You know, if you want to know more about the Saudi relationship and internal power struggles, David Ignatius, who's been on the show a couple Times has an interesting piece about this constant wrestling between Muhammad bin Salman, his, you know, former rival, Mohammed bin Nayef, who is this U.S. friendly prince who was basically deposed by Muhammad bin Salman. It's hard to summarize it on the show today, but it's worth reading. Ben, before we get to your interview, I just want to do a quick book plug and see if you had any recommendations because the world does tend to like that. I've been reading this book called The Fighters by-by-Ly. Byrd bylaw is C.J. Chivers in the New York Times.

It's an incredible book that weaves together the stories of different individuals who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades. About halfway through, it's one of those books where I, you know, I started it like five days ago and you're just like ripping through the thing. It's incredible. I highly recommend it. And it like, it does not shave off the really brutal hard edges of war, but it humanizes it by letting you get to know the people that are actually fighting it.

and, you know, that at a time when a lot of people don't know anybody who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, because it is an all-volunteer army and there's no draft anymore is, I think, really worth your time. Yeah, you know what? Since I've been, like, sliding some of my book plugs into the conversations recently, the only thing I follow up with is actually C.J. Chivers had an amazing story that, you know, I said to you, Tommy, in the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago. People should check out.

He was a Marine who was deployed in Los Angeles after the Rodney Kemp. King violence. And so he saw that from the perspective of Marine and was deeply uncomfortable with the military being in American streets. Then he reported on protests all around the world where there was violent crackdowns against peaceful protesters and then reported on this latest round of protests obviously with Black Lives Matter movement. And this article explains both why our police have become so militarized. And so he as a war correspondent explains how all this surplus stuff from Iraq and Afghanistan found its way to all these police forces. But then he does the uncomfortable thing of looking at us like he would cover, you know, militarized crackdowns in other

countries. I think he does find some hope, too, though, that here there is much more of a culture of accepting protests and just completely stamping it out. But that's worth checking out, too, the Times Magazine piece. That's a great plug. Amazing piece as well. Highly worth reading. Okay. When we come back, we'll have Ben's conversation with Cecilia Munoz about the ways Trump is radically changing our immigration system. I'm very happy to be joined by a very good friend of mine, Cecilia Munoz, a political advisor, author, and really an expert on civil rights and immigration policy. She was with me for all eight years in the Obama administration.

She was director of intergovernmental affairs and then director of the domestic policy council. She's now the vice president for public interest technology and local initiatives at New America. And her book, More Than Ready, came out in April. Everybody should pick this up. It's an amazing story by someone. who has done more than anybody to try to help bring about a more just and humane immigration policy in this country. So, Cecilia, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Ben. So I want to start with recent news. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that they would not be extending any international student visas for students whose universities are moving online, which is what's happening at most universities. And the U.S. has over a million international students, you know, people who've come here, the best and the brightest from around the world, and this rule kind of effectively deport them during a pandemic where some of them might be going back to kind of unsettled circumstances. I mean, what do you think motivated this policy decision at this moment? And how should we understand what the ramifications are for?

I mean, it's easy to understand what motivated the decision. It's the kind of decision that you make if you start from the premise that people from other countries are bad for the country, for bad for the United States, right, which is motivated much of the Trump administration's policy making when it comes to the foreign born really since they came into office, right? So if you assume that anybody from a foreign country is bad and you want to use any possible excuse to get them out of the United States, which has really been how this administration is thinking about it, then you take the situation of the pandemic, the fact that universities are having to shift strategies and use it as an excuse to get people to leave. And this is consistent with a bunch of

of other decisions that the Trump administration has made. It has, I mean, it's not only bad for these students, of course, it's terrible for these students. It's terrible for their universities. In many cases, it's terrible for their families and terrible for the U.S. I mean, it's really driven by an ideology that, you know, believes that the foreign-born

are bad for the United States, and it's, you know, not only wrong, but damaging. And you mentioned that there have been a number of decisions like this recently. You know, one was the executive order he signed that went into effect on June 24th that froze work visas for skill workers in tech and education among other sectors. How much are these, I mean, it seems like they've begun to target obviously legal immigration in addition to demagoguing illegal immigration. But how much of these steps that he's taken during the pandemic, like the foreign student ban, like this executive order on skilled workers? like some changes even further restrictions around asylum seekers. How much are these permanent policy changes and how much are these tied to kind of emergency measures that might have an expiration date?

How should we think about the assault on legal immigration that's taken place just since the pandemic led to this lockdown? There's really two levels to think about. The first is just that they're using the fact of the pandemic in its circumstances to drive people away from the United States. So including, by the way, family visas. So, you know, if you're an American citizen who's trying to get a visa for your spouse or your fiancé, that's all shut down. Or for your parents to help with the child care because there's no school right now, all of those visa systems are shut down as a result of the pandemic. And while that's arguably pretty easily reversible, hopefully, by a next administration, the other thing that's happening is that the agency, USCIS, which is the agency which processes visas, it processes. it processes asylum applicants, it processes citizenship applicants.

That agency is collapsing because for many, many years, it's been run off of the fees that you pay when you're trying to bring in your relative or when a business is trying to bring in a worker. And when you shut down visa processing, you shut down the fees that support the agency, and the agency is about to lay off two-thirds of its employees. So that is a much bigger, longer lasting problem that's going to be very hard to undo. They're finding excuses to keep immigrants out, to throw them out, but also to shut down the agency, which is responsible for processing them in. And we've also heard, just to round out the pandemic discussion, obviously there are already

very difficult circumstances at some of these facilities, detention facilities, really, that are holding children, families along the border. And I know there have been concerns raised about the additional COVID risk of people in these conditions, you know, close quarters in detention. What have you heard about and what are you concerned about when it relates to the issue of children in our custody and families in our custody near the border? Well, it's a source of extreme worry for me, for the legal groups, for the humanitarian groups who are working, around detention facilities and also around the border. So we know, for example, that there was a recent court order to preventing the administration from keeping children in detention facilities, right? These are children who are detained with their parents. The administration has to release the kids,

but they are considering releasing them without their parents, separating kids from their parents again. So that's one major humanitarian concern. The second is that we've seen the first cases of COVID in immigration detention facilities. We know what that. means that there's going to be more cases and that there's going to be, there will inevitably be tragic circumstances, deaths, and severe illness. And the third is that we have now seen the first cases of COVID in the camps in Mexico where people have been forced to stay in squalid conditions exposed to all kinds of dangers in addition to the virus because we've shut down asylum processing. And that is a humanitarian catastrophe of our own making because

the reason there are camps in the first place is because they shut down the asylum processing and people have no other choice than to live in these conditions. We already knew that there were kidnappings and violence against folks who were in these camps. And now there are cases of COVID. And we know where that's heading. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about asylum, given the kind of international viewpoint of this show, is, you know, I think people may not fully appreciate, you know, so the asylum processes, if you're coming with a legitimate fear of political persecution, you a legitimate reason to be fleeing your country, there's a process that is supposed to exist where you can petition for asylum in the U.S. And for generations, we've been enriched by asylum

seekers as well as providing kind of really human rights benefit. And the Trump administration has essentially tried to really shut down the asylum process writ large, going beyond, I think, you know, what people think the president is empowered to do. Could you talk a little bit about how, let's say Joe Biden wins, how a new administration could resume asylum process, but also the complication of doing that in the context of a pandemic, obviously, which makes this more difficult. But what are the steps that need to take place in order to kind of get that running again? And how do you account for COVID in that process? Yeah, this is something that keeps me up at night because the asylum system was already overburdened in the sense that

We had large numbers of people when, you know, when you and I were in government in the Obama administration, there was a surge of asylum seekers from Central America. These are people who were in some cases fleeing economic circumstances, fleeing the effects of climate change on the coffee crop in Guatemala, but also people who were fleeing violence in the Northern Triangle countries from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. And so the asylum system was already under significant strain. There were big backlogs that could take years to get your first asylum here And so that was already a problem in need of being solved with more asylum officers, more judges, more capacity, more legal representation, which are all things that we fought for in the Obama administration that we couldn't get the resources out of Congress to do. Now, add to that, right, we have the same pressures at the border, in fact, increased pressures at the border.

but because the Trump administration has effectively shut down people's ability to come in and make their case for asylum, we now have a backlog of tens of thousands of people who are stuck in Mexico. And, you know, God willing, if there is a Biden administration, they're going to be faced with a very difficult challenge of figuring out how you open the door, how you process the cases in a way that's expeditious and that's fair in a system that was already overburdened. And how you do that in the, you know, we may still be in the middle of a pandemic. And the pandemic is really only beginning in the camp. So this is a problem that the Trump administration created, which, if we are fortunate enough to have a Biden administration,

they're going to have to figure out how to untangle. And frankly, the tools available to the government to deal with this situation are kind of terrible. They are insufficient to the task. So there are some good thinkers out there, an organization called the Migration Policy Institute, for example, has come up with recommendations for how we could rethink the asylum process so that we could accomplish really two or three really important things. One is to just do what is the government's job, which is to sort out who is really eligible for asylum and who is an economic migrant because the law doesn't allow a pathway for economic migrants. So to do that sorting, but to do it in a humane way and find a humane way to deal with the folks who don't qualify to come in and make their asylum case. So that's kind of challenge number one. That's got to be a challenge that we're up to.

I have to believe that. This is the United States of America. It's not easy, but that is who we are and who we need to be. The second challenge is then processing for the folks who are eligible for asylum, who have the ability to make their case, doing that in an expeditious way. So in the Obama administration, we experimented with some faith-based groups who said to us, we will watch out for them. We will help make sure that their needs are met. We'll help them get legal representation and we'll make sure that they show up at their hearings. And that worked.

That's also very hard to do at scale, but that's a set of tools that we could be developing. Because the goal here is to make sure that they have representation in order to make their cases, that they can make their cases expeditiously and get an answer expeditiously. I mean, a system which takes years to get a hearing and then years to get an answer is not a functional system. And Migration Policy Institute is making the case that we could use an existing asylum officer corps, that we have the capacity. If those are the people who greet people at the border,

and if we start to think about how we use our facilities and our personnel at the border, we can do a much better job of greeting people who have been, traumatized, recognize that they need help, sort them in a way that's efficient and humane, and then get them an expeditious answer so that they can get on with their lives, hopefully in safety, in the United States or elsewhere. Yeah, well, I think, you know, so much to do on immigration, you know, the asylum process and the refugee process, you know, are ones where, you know, from my perspective, there's a lot that needs to be done for us to reestablish both order and a humane approach.

I did want to ask you, Cecilia Betcher book, and your book tour. So the book is more than ready, and the subtitle says a lot, Be Strong and Be You and Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise. And reading through it, you know, you've obviously packed a lot of lessons that you've learned as someone who could really assert themselves, break barriers, lead with kindness but also firmness and confidence. But I'm curious, you know, having been on a book tour myself, writing a book like this and having it come out in this context, right, a pandemic, but then also

protests for racial and social justice. What have you learned about your book by talking about your book? And how has it been received in this context? What a wonderful question. It's a really weird time to come out with a book. I mean, my book came out a few weeks after the lockdown started and you feel sort of, I mean, I'm not much of a self-promoted to begin with, so it's hard to promote a book. It's kind of not how I'm wired and to do it in the middle of a crisis felt very strange, except that the whole premise of the book is that we need women of color to step up and recognize ourselves for the leaders that we already are. And the more conversations I engaged in, the more I've connected with women who are hungry

for this kind of guidance, who are hungry to be reminded that they already have what it takes to be the leaders that the country needs, the more I've come to understand that in a weird way, it's an excellent time to come out with this book and to be having this conversation, because the world needs us right now. And too many of us have, you know, what I fought against for over the 30 years of my career and certainly the eight years that I spent in the White House is both the doubts that people around me had and expressed about whether or not I belonged to where I was, and the doubts that that created in me, right? So there are ways in which sometimes we get in our own way. Sometimes we allow the naysayers to get in our heads. And, you know, we struggle with things like

imposter syndrome or self-doubt or fear. And we struggle with showing up in the world with kindness and being authentically who we are. And so I'm, you know, it's been an extraordinary experience of connecting with other people, women, in particular women of color, especially, who are ready to step up and ready to be reminded that they don't need anything. They've already got what it takes, but sometimes we need to be reminded that the rooms that we're sitting and need what we bring and the people that we're sitting with may or may not know that they need what we bring, but they do. Yeah. Well, we certainly did. And I want to ask you one last question, which is, you know, one of the things that, you know, you did because you were in those rooms was really, you know, the DACA program and fighting for the Dreamers, you know, legislatively.

but then when we couldn't get that done through executive action, the protection of dreamers. And obviously we had this profound Supreme Court decision that at least provided some respite, even if it didn't solve the problem. But again, thinking is someone who looks at this from a global perspective, I mean, there are people outside of this country

who are looking at us and they see Donald Trump and they see National Guard in our streets so he can have a photo op. But then they see people like you who fought and achieved change, including, you know, the decision in the Supreme Court for the Dreamers. I mean, when you look at that decision and think about all the fights of the last decade, what perspective does that give you on, you know, both the fact that you can actually make progress, even if you can't get everything done you want, and how we can draw strength

from that going forward and see that there are two Americas here. There's the one that Trump represents and the one represented in that effort. I mean, how have you digested that decision and how it fits into your life's work, really, in this space? Yeah, you know, that was a day, the Supreme Court decision day was a lot of emotions by a lot of people all around the country, including me. And I was reminded both of the fact that this is still not a permanent fix for people, and we got, you know, we got a reprieve in order to keep fighting the fight so that the dreamers can stay in the United States and continue to live their lives and make their contributions. 29,000 of them are on the front lines of the COVID response, for example, because they're in the medical field. But I was also reminded, you know, we lost the Dream Act on the floor of this U.S. Senate in 2010 in that lame duck session. There were some tears that day, too.

And, you know, President Obama came and, you know, he heard that the team was upstairs in my office, kind of reacting to that moment. And he said, you know, you have to remember that these are long battles. and that there are defeats on the way to victory. And you have to accept that, you know, not only did you give it your all, but that this isn't over, and you have to believe that that defeat is going to contribute to the day when we succeed. And so, you know, it helps to take the long view. It helps to recognize that the fight takes twists and turns that you don't expect, but that it's worth fighting.

And, you know, for eight years, the dreamers who qualified for DACA, hundreds of thousands of them, have been able to work, have been able to go to school, have been able to teach, to serve as medical professionals and live their lives and have children and make extraordinary contributions to this country. And most of the country, including, by the way, the majority of the people who voted for Donald Trump believe that they should stay. and I have to believe that that's going to not just amount to something, but it's going to amount to a lot over the long trajectory. But, you know, we won't be done until they can be here permanently. And so it's yet another moment to dust ourselves off and keep going. Well, look, that's a great note to end on. Cecilia, thanks so much for walking us through some of these developments

and talking a bit about your book more than ready. Good luck on the rest of your Zoom book tour. Thank you. And I hope to see you when I can see you. I hope so too. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks, Cecilia, for joining the show. Ben, good to see you as always. Have the fireworks in Venice toned down yet? Only a little bit. I mean, Fourth of July was absolutely insane. Literally, I did not sleep on July. 4.45, they were going ham with those things outside my house. Yeah, yeah. I was glad I had a couple extra drinks because that's the only reason I fell asleep. But I did wake up a couple times when it felt like, you know, there was an armed invasion down the street here.

Yeah, fun. Well, hopefully, hopefully everybody. everybody's out. That's our only hope, you know? Seriously. All right, man. Well, I hope to see you soon and have a good day. See it. Pote of the World is a product of crooked media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.