Tangle - INTERVIEW: Alejandra Oliva and Simon Hankinson talk with Isaac about immigration and border policies.

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

Our podcast editor, Jon, is traveling today. So, we wanted to use this time to release an interview we’ve had for a little bit. This is a discussion between two people on different sides of the immigration issue. Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, translator, and immigrant justice advocate. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, nominated for a Pushcart prize, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her book, Rivermouth, is forthcoming from Astra House in 2023, and received a Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022. Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation. From 1999–2023, he was a Foreign Service Officer serving in India, Fiji, Ghana, Slovakia, Togo, Washington, D.C., Marseille, and Nairobi. Prior to entering the State Department, Hankinson worked as a lawyer in London, and then taught history, English, and drama at a private school in Miami.For weeks, we've been hyping the first-ever live Tangle event in Philadelphia on August 3rd. I am thrilled to announce our three guests and the topic: We'll be joined by Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, Henry Olsen of The Washington Post, and Anastasia Boden of the Cato Institute. On stage, I'll be moderating a discussion on the biggest Supreme Court decisions from this term and the current state of the high court. As we've said in the past, our goal with this event is to gather the Tangle community and bring the newsletter live to the stage. Please come join us! Tickets here.You can read today's podcast here and you can also check out our latest YouTube video here.You can⁠ subscribe to Tangle by clicking here⁠ or drop something⁠ in our tip jar by clicking here.⁠Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

Hey everybody, Isaac here. As you can probably tell, this is a bit of a different podcast episode for our normal weekly podcast. Our editor, John, is traveling today, and so we're giving him the day off. And we're actually going to use this space to release an episode that we've been sitting on for a little bit. This was a really interesting conversation I got to moderate between two people on different sides of the immigration issue, discussing what was happening on our border. I think we explained pretty well the topic and the background these people have in the intro to the podcast. So I'm just going to let you guys listen to it, but I hope you enjoy. And we'll be back on Wednesday with our regular programming. So you'll hear from us then.

I hope you enjoy it. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to Tangle, a place where we share views from across the political spectrum on the big debates of the day, and then I get to share a little bit of my take. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and today we are sitting down with Alejandra Oliva and Simon Hankinson. Alejandra is an essayist, translator, and immigrant justice activist. She's the author of Rivermouth, a memoir that tells the story of the United States' quote-unquote immigration crisis through a human and journalistic lens. Her book is coming out on June 20th, 2023.

Simon is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation. Previously, he spent over two decades as a Foreign Service officer at the State Department. And at Heritage, his research focuses on border policy and its effect on the labor market and asylum laws. Simon and Alejandra, thank you both so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Good to be here. I have been having a heck of a day with the technology on Riverside. So I am hoping that we get through this smoothly. Obviously, right now, there is a ton of news out there about what's happening on the border, the end of Title 42, a lot of immigration topics that are dominating the headlines. I'd like to start with you, Simon, with kind of a broad 30,000 foot question, which is

just how would you describe the situation at the border right now? What do you think Americans and migrants need to know about the current border situation? It's unprecedented. Historically speaking, we've never seen numbers like these in our 250 years. It's out of control in the sense that the government doesn't have operational control over the border. They don't have the ability to interdict drugs or illegal immigrants or anything from coming over, including people with criminal records, terrorists mixed up with just ordinary human beings coming to try to seek asylum or look for jobs, more the latter than the former. So I was down there in Arizona last month and in Texas a few months before that. And what I saw, I think, would surprise, if not shock, most Americans who have not seen this kind of thing before and imagine that we have some kind of a frontier with Mexico that is protected by the laws of the United States and by our personnel. I'd be curious to hear, you know, both your reaction to Simon's description of the current state of the border, but also in your own words, how you would describe the current situation on the border right now.

So I would actually describe the situation on the border pretty differently from Simon. now what we are seeing is the um the result of yet another policy of deterrence uh failing to keep people from making the extremely dangerous journey to the border uh failing from you know causing the conditions in home country that makes so many people choose to make this decision and something that I, you know, really feel strongly about. And I think that, you know, we have been trying different and alternative policies of deterrence for the last several decades of immigration policy, and we have not been able to really see a difference. We know that they don't work. We know that the only thing that deterrence policies do is funnel people into more and more dangerous ways of attempting to cross the border. They do not actually deter people from coming. They only

drive them into even more dangerous situations, which is incredibly ironic and difficult as many of them are coming here to escape dangerous situations in their own home countries as well. Simon, I'm curious about the idea that Alejandra just kind of touched on that we have a history of failed deterrent policies. I think for me, at least, that's one thing that's been really hard to kind of weigh over the last decade, especially. I mean, COVID really threw everything into a loop, the migrant numbers, the data we had from the CBP. But in your experience, do you think there are effective deterrent methods? And if so, you know, have we seen them recently? What do they look like in your eyes? Well, first, it is amusing to hear the Biden administration's,

like I said, historically unprecedented open borders policies criticized from their left as, you know, harshly deterrent. Just for someone who supports enforcing the current laws that we have that were passed by Congress, it does seem as if this administration has been about the most generous and the least willing to enforce the laws of any we've had in our history. But I don't think it just with certain policies, including immigration and law enforcement, you really can't go too far to the left to please a significant percentage of the left. Are there effective deterrents? Yes, of course. because we, the problem now is that, and you know, I, and I understand how someone could believe that we Americans have the obligation to feed and house the entire world. There are people out there who

are a lot nicer than me. But in, in reality, we have limited resources. We have a limited ability to take care of people. We have a tax base. We bring in revenue. We spend that revenue. And we need to decide how many people we allow in and what services we provide for our own people and for those people who are allowed in as immigrants. The deterrence that worked in the past, most recently, this remain in Mexico policy was highly effective because what it did is it required people who were seeking, who claimed to be seeking asylum to wait in Mexico, wait outside the United States until their cases could be adjudicated. Because historically, about nine out of 10 of people who say they're going to

claim asylum either don't ever get around to claiming asylum because they knew that they didn't have a case or they claim it and then drop it somewhere along the process or they get refused because they're economic migrants and not asylum seekers. And I fully understand. I don't know about a hundred, but I've lived of my 54 years, half of them at least overseas and in many very poor developing countries. I know why people want to leave. I know why they would have better lives here. And so the motivation for them coming is not a mystery. But if we follow the U.S. immigration law, which in turn follows the Geneva Convention and the Refugee Convention of 1951, you have to qualify as a refugee by showing that you would face

persecution on certain grounds in your home country. You can't say that you live in a poor country and life is tough and you'd like to go somewhere richer. That just isn't a qualification. Now, they could change that law. There could be countries where they accept anyone for any reason. I don't know of any such country. I don't think they would last very long. But that's not currently U.S. law. Alondra, I'm sure that you disagree with some of Simon's description there about the Biden administration's generosity on the border and the idea that the border is currently open, just from reading some of your writing and knowing about how you've kind of qualified some of those things. So I'm curious to, you know, your reaction to that. I mean, do you believe that this administration has been generous or open to migrants that are

coming? And if not, why do you feel like you disagree with what Simon's seeing on the border right now? Yeah. So as Simon kind of talked about, I am in fact coming to my critique of the Biden administration's policies from further left than the administration itself. But I think that it's also a little surprising to hear Simon describe them as being particularly generous because many of these policies are basically copy pasted stamps from what the Trump administration famously extremely hard on immigration and extremely limiting of immigration had been passing. We are seeing programs like the PACER HARP program, and I do not remember what that stands for, but it essentially is super, super

speedy asylum processing that doesn't allow people to retain legal representation and doesn't really let people have enough time to adequately build and represent their own cases in asylum. We have that policy carrying over. We also have what's called the transit ban, which means that people who apply for asylum in the United States are required to have applied for asylum in another country first and been rejected before they can come to this border. That's, again, a Trump administration policy, one that was notably struck down by courts for being unconstitutional, illegal. I'm not sure about the details on that. But we have so many of these

policies carrying over that are all working around the same goal, which is to say to restrict immigration, to restrict people from coming and restricting people from accessing their due rights as they apply for asylum. Simon, I'm wondering if you can maybe flesh out, in your opinion, some of the differences between the Trump and Biden administration's border policies. I think Alejandro just laid out, you know, some of the layover and some of the crossover between the way that they've tried to handle the situation. But yeah, I mean, if your view is that it has been an open borders and I, you know, maybe you feel Trump was was leaning on immigration, too. I doubt it. So I'm curious about, you know, how you view those distinctions, what the big differences have been. You know, I honestly think Trump is such a polarizing figure and such a historical anomaly that it's never a good idea to just say, you know, Trump did this, Biden did that, and compare the two as if those are like the options.

Biden did that, I compare the two as if those are like the options. I'd rather go back further into time. I've worked for, I think, three Democrat presidents and two Republicans in my 23 years at the State Department. But I was a history teacher, so I know a little bit about U.S. history. It has always been accepted by American presidents and administrations that it is their job. They swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. And that includes carrying out the laws that Congress passes, whether or not they agree with them. There's a process. If the president vetoes and he gets overridden, well, he still has to enforce those laws. And if you go back to President Obama, President Clinton, Joe Biden, before he became president back in his senatorial days, there was never really any question that we had to enforce the laws that were on the books.

There were people who advocated for amnesties. There were people who advocated for higher numbers or making more family unification or whatever the policies were. But there was never an administration that said, you know what, forget the rules, let's just do what we want to do. And that's what we're seeing now. So essentially, the difference between Trump and Biden boils down to that. The Trump people used the rules that were on the books and applied them to channel people into an asylum process that was manageable, where they got their chance to claim asylum. And as I said, nine out of 10 don't qualify. And rather than release them into the country and say, could you please self-deport yourself, which would never happen, they either kept them in Mexico in

some cases, they detained some, and they also let many in. I mean, it was not a perfect time by any means from an enforcement point of view. But what we're seeing today is just an unprecedented refusal to follow the law that's written, which is why there are so many lawsuits against this administration. Alejandro, I'm curious to pick at one of the things Simon just said, which is difficult for me, even as a political reporter and someone who spent a lot of time on the border and reported a lot on immigration, to flesh out, which is how many of the people who show up at the border seeking asylum, claiming asylum, the distinction between economic migrants and migrants who have legitimate asylum claims, I think, can sometimes be difficult to parse. And I'm wondering how you think about that issue and, you know, what you understand is being a big reason for people showing up at the border right now? You know, it depends on who you're talking to. It also depends on what kind of policies are on the books as far as what counts as asylum. So the asylum law, as it's written, means that you have, in order to be able to qualify for asylum, you have to have been persecuted for something that you can't or shouldn't have to change about yourself. So your race,

your religion, your nationality. And then there's also this really kind of squishy group called your particular social group. So in the past, that has been interpreted to mean things like whether or not you are someone who is LGBTQ and whether LGBTQ people are persecuted in your home country. Or it can be, for example, if you are someone who strongly believes that you or your children should not have to join gangs is something that we see a lot in Central America. And so for a lot of people, not wanting to join gangs is tantamount to a political opinion, For a lot of people, not wanting to join gangs is tantamount to a political opinion of like your direct contact with them and your direct involvement for them, rather than just, you know, being someone who lived in the neighborhood that they really badly were trying to recruit. And so they were harassing you that that was would not be a reason to apply for asylum. I believe that a lot of these people are coming here because of economics in some ways, but also in very great measure because of the violence and danger that a lack of stable economics has created in these countries. And we see through policies like NAFTA, we see a lot of extractionary, still really colonialist, honestly. Policies from the United States,

that means that we're going in and we're taking a lot of resources out of these countries and our companies are going in and taking a lot of resources out of these countries. And when people are like, hey, I can't make a living here because somebody is building a resort on my family land and I've been displaced

or my land is, I'm suddenly trapped in the middle of a multi-year drought cycle because of global warming that my country didn't cause. And that I am in no way responsible for because I'm, you know, a subsistence farmer in the middle of the hills in Guatemala and my carbon footprint is like probably negative. And then we have these people coming up into the United States and we're trying to draw a distinction between the violence of sort of like guns and knives and like bodily violence and between that and economic violence.

And I just don't think that there's a very clear distinction between the two when at the end of the day, it means that your life is in danger in your home country. Simon, I'm curious for your reaction to that about, you know, the how we sort of can delineate between these, quote unquote, legitimate asylum claims and the economic migrants, as you put it, and whether, you know, you can, how you view Alejandro's definition there? Well, let me take it back up to the 30,000 foot view. Why is there such a thing as asylum, right? Why does one country have a duty or an obligation to accept people from another country? It goes back to World War II, essentially. You had two really clear cases in the 40s and 50s of persecution based on political opinion or ethnicity. You had the Jews fleeing the Nazis, and you had dissidents

fleeing communism. And that's the basis of the present asylum system. And those are clear-cut cases. If you were a Jew and it was 1938, Kristallnacht, you had a fairly decent chance of being killed by the Nazis in the next five years. Maybe people didn't know that was 1938, Kristallnacht, you had a fairly decent chance of being killed by the Nazis in the next five years. Maybe people didn't know that in 1938, but if you fled after that, or even then, under today's laws, there'd be no question. If you were a Soviet and you had opinions that were counter to the Soviet Union, to the Kremlin's party line, you were going to end up in a gulag at best and probably die. if you were a Cuban who was against Castro. The problem is that system that was set up for the 1950s post-World War II

world is now being, it's subject to the forces of the 21st century. And if you just break it down to that, the problem is one of supply and demand. There are if you if you simply say that anyone who is poor, who comes from a country that has corrupt government, I'm talking about Guatemala. It's a country I love. I visited several times going back 30 years where people have large families on small plots of land. You have soil erosion from over farming. plots of land. You have soil erosion from over farming. You have all kinds of land disputes because the land registry is, I think, applies to only a small part of the land. You have a civil war that's intermittently plagued that country. Then, you know, anybody can make a case that they're fleeing on a basis of, you know, draw a list. And if you look at this question, a particular

social group, that was a giant loophole that we wrote into our law that seemed like a good idea at the time. But looking back, it is just too vague to make any sense. And the Sessions memo that I was talking about was one where the attorney general attempted to put some sanity back into that definition. Because if you look at it now, everything Trump did, the Biden administration has tried to undo whether it was good or bad. And so they just undid that list of priorities or that definition of particular social group. And you should see what they've written. There's guidance on the USCIS website. If you're a gang member, if you used to be a gang member, if you didn't want to be a gang member, if you're a debtor, if you're someone who is owed money, I mean, it's pretty much,

if you're a member of a family, of a particular family, that can qualify as a particular social group. So by the definition that the Biden administration uses, it's amazing that anybody is turned down for asylum. So, you know, for me, it's a question of supply and demand. It's a question of this 1950s framework not fitting 2023. And if you say that every person in the world whose current livelihood and life is difficult because of things like, you know, economic violence or global warming, then it becomes almost impossible for anybody to adjudicate that case. I mean, how do you say if a Guatemalan farmer shows up at the border and says, I had to flee my village because of global warming, what possible criteria could you apply

to that adjudication that would make any sense. And, you know, I know it's very fashionable on the college campuses and among this current generation to talk about violence other than, you know, physical being hit on the head violence. But I can safely say that when the law was written, it was not talking about microaggressions and, you know, people being mean to other people. It was talking about pogroms and people ending up to other people. It was talking about pogroms and people ending up in death camps. Let me ask you a quick follow-up because I think what you said about

your experience in Guatemala and being on farms where the land is eroding and these large families are struggling economically, I think that sort of touches on a point that many folks on the left make in my experience, which is that, you know, we should go to this kind of like the root cause and we should no matter what we do, sort of how Alejandra said at the top of the show, no matter what we do at the border, it's going to be really hard to stop people from coming.

And I'm curious if like your vision of a comprehensive immigration policy to reduce migration at the southern border, to reduce illegal immigration at the southern border, it includes, you know, putting our money and resources and people into trying to address those quote unquote root causes and going to countries like Guatemala or countries of the Northern Triangle or Southern America and trying to address some of the issues that they're having as a means to stop that flow? Is that something you view as part of a comprehensive immigration thing or that is beyond our capacity? I view effective foreign aid as a positive thing, but I don't link it with immigration in the sense that I don't believe there's any amount of money you can throw at, say, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, that would inspire young unemployed people

not to come to the United States. I mean, it would be like a Marshall Plan-sized amount of money that you would have to throw. You'd probably have to overthrow the governments to ensure that the corruption disappeared and you'd have to build infrastructure. So I'm all for aid that helps build ports, helps factories or U.S. companies build factories, helps the rule of law, because that's one reason U.S. companies don't want to invest. that are being done in Bangladesh or countries that are far, far away to places nearer to us where people could have good jobs, sort of middle class, blue collar jobs, the kind that we used to have in the US. So I think that the root causes argument, I've looked a little bit into this, written about it. It's a fallacy to believe that you could pump enough money into, let's say, Guatemala when they are in terms of remances, getting billions, 15, 20. I think the highest was like El Salvador was getting 40% of its GDP

through remittances from people living in America. We can't match that even if we wanted to. It's just not realistic. So they're going to continue to want to leave and to work in the U.S. But that doesn't mean that I don't think it's a good idea to invest in aid that's effective and helps build up their own economies and infrastructure. Alejandro, I'm curious, I guess this is sort of a two-part question. The first part is, do you think that we need to reduce the flow of migrants to the southern border,

to the U.S.-Mexico border? And if yes, what do you think is a good means to do that? And if no, why don't you feel that way? Why do you disagree with somebody like Simon who thinks that we should be prioritizing deterrence right now? So I think that ultimately, a lot of people are talking about the right to remain, the right to remain at home, but in places that are by the United Fruit Company, an American company growing bananas that was heavily invested in and sort of had really strong connections to the Dulles brothers, who we know as, I think, a secretary of state and maybe a CIA director. I don't remember exactly their positions. When Guatemala tried to take the land back, tried to give it back to some of its people, that kicked off the Guatemalan Civil War,

something that the CIA was deeply involved in. As Simon said, the United States is very comfortable overturning governments that they deem to be corrupt or socialist in that case. I'm not sure I did say that, did I? You did talk about overturning some governments that were corrupt. So, sorry, that was a little cheeky. Good. But that is something, you know, it's because in part of the United States, deep, deep involvement in these countries historically that we're now seeing this unrest, this sort of dissolution. And so I don't think that we need to work on decreasing the numbers of people coming to the southern border

for its own sake or for deterrence's sake, because again, I don't think deterrence is a policy that works. What I do think is that we need to be doing the most we can to ensure that these places are places that are safe, that are comfortable, that are good to live in. And that could be by decreasing our involvement in these places, not necessarily not sending aid, but making sure that U.S. companies, when they arrive in these places, are taking good care of the people, following the rule of law, giving people actually access. I mean, you talked about jobs in Bangladesh, and I don't really know anyone who would want to be a garment worker in Bangladesh. And so I think improving the quality of jobs that we send overseas, improving the quality of the workers that we rely on for all of the goods and services that we get in this country is an incredibly important part of decreasing migration. Because if we give people safe, comfortable lives, you know, I think that we are in an age of global involvement and global economics. There's no way to kind of walk that back, nor would it be a good thing. But I do think that if we are going to be

in other countries, we need to ensure that we are giving people good quality of life so that they feel like they can stay home and they feel like their home countries are places where they can grow and achieve financial mobility and all of these other things. So I don't think that, you know, arrivals to our southern border should be stemmed necessarily. But I do think that there is work to be done in making home countries a better, safer place for people to be. And I think that, you know, as a country that has companies that has people in all corners of the world, that we have a role to play in doing that. Let me ask a quick follow up to that before we jump back to Simon. You know, I think that given, you know, the images that I'm seeing,

the stories that I'm reading about what's happening on the southern border right now, that I'm reading about what's happening on the southern border right now, I certainly feel like whatever system we have in place currently can't handle the migrant flow that we're seeing, whether it's, you know, as you said earlier, Alejandro, that the remain in Mexico policies and similar policies like it are leaving people in border towns that are unsafe and dangerous, or whether it's that once they're getting here and they're filing their asylum claims, we're having trouble housing them, taking care of them, feeding them, giving them shelter. And in many cases, these people have court dates that could be five, 10 years down the road, which to me represents a failure of the system. So I guess Al--Andromai, I'm curious,

if we start with the premise that we don't need to reduce or stem the flow of migrants that are coming here, what do you see as a comprehensive policy that we can put in place in order to resolve some of what we're seeing on the border right now? Which, I mean, in my view, I don't think looks like an organized or humane or, you know, totally reasonable situation for us to be having. So how would you approach that if it's not to stem the migrant flows? What would you suggest that the administration do? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things that we could do is to divert all the millions and millions and millions of dollars that are going to militarization, that are going to incarceration of immigrants who have essentially committed no crimes in many cases, and divert it instead to actually staffing USCIS adequately. Right now, to improving some of the processes that they have. Right now, USCIS filings are still done almost entirely on paper, which is wild to think about. There are backlogs in just about every aspect of what USCIS does due to underfunding, due to a lack of ability to move things through quickly.

And I also I live in Chicago. I have been pretty involved in sort of the busloads of migrants, welcoming the people who are coming here, thanks to Governor Greg Abbott's sending buses full of people. And, you know, there's been a fair amount of political conflict surrounding these folks who are arriving here, often like not really. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown.

When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. On purpose, I guess. And Chicago is full of empty buildings empty spaces uh like we have received i believe 10 000 people since the beginning of august and like it has not been

a perfect system it has not been a perfect welcome a lot of this is due to lack of communication between federal, state, the two different states in question. And a lot of it is just kind of realizing as a city that, oh, actually, we do have these resources. We do have the will to help. booted up, but I am so extremely confident in my city being able to, um, you know, welcome these folks with open arms. I was there the day that our, um, that the first bus arrived, I was there, um, sort of at the witty, at the city reception center, um, to welcome people in as they were getting off those buses. And it was some of the proudest I've ever been just watching people, um, And it was some of the proudest I've ever been just watching people come in and make space, make time, find the resources to help these folks out. And I firmly believe that that is something that is possible. And, you know, there are cities, places all over the country that are realizing that they need additional workers. workers. We have factory meat processing plants in Iowa who are relying on child workers because they don't have sufficient adults who should legally be the ones working. And so I think that there is space inside the country, there is need inside the country, and that it is just a

question of slow processing, incredibly slow work permit processing, especially people are often waiting years for those. And that's, I think, what makes so much of this problem so tenuous because folks have been in Chicago for months, they still don't have work permits. They don't know when they're going to be able to get work permits. And so things like housing, like food are not things that they can do for themselves right now, but they want to, they should be able to. there in different elements of that solution, but I guess I'm curious to scratch at a couple things. A, I'm wondering how you feel about the idea of, you know, diverting funds away from something like UCIS or whatever, and moving it into, you know, supporting the migrants who are coming here, why that's not necessarily a feasible solution. And then, you know, I'm, I think Alejandro

just touched on something, which I think is another really interesting facet of this discussion, which is, you know, we are living in a time right now where there's a labor shortage in the United States. And it is certainly a popular argument on the left that, you know, we're turning away a lot of migrants who could be coming here working legally if we gave them work permits, and contributing to our economy and helping us out in a positive economic way. And I'm wondering, you know, how you feel about that proposition, whether that's something that you feel is a realistic outcome. Yeah, like you said, a lot's unpacked. So I'll hit a few a few things that I think are worth saying. First of all, I mean, I think Alejandro's position is a classic socialist one. I understand where it comes from. That's a you know, it's a political view, not one I subscribe to. And I think Margaret Thatcher said it best when she said that, you know, the socialists, they give up when they run out of other people's money. I would love to know, first of all, how many illegal immigrants or undocumented non-citizens or whatever euphemism you want to use you have living in your apartment right now and how many you would think would be enough.

Would it be one or two or five and how long they'd be allowed to stay? So I'm pretty sure that in my neighborhood, the people who have the no human being is illegal sign on their lawn. If I were to show up with a van and say, you know, these are your 12 from the border. This guy has a hearing in 10 years. This one has one in five. And this lady is pregnant. And this person needs dialysis three times a week. They wouldn't be there very long before the people would complain and ask for them to be taken off their hands and ask for someone else to pay for it. And as someone who pays a lot of taxes and has done all my life, I do believe that there's a limit

to what the United States can do. It's not simply a question of diverting resources. So the job of the Department of Homeland Security is to deter people. If they can't deter them, they should detain them. And if they can't detain them, they should deport them. I'm not talking about the legal immigration system, which lets in a million people a year as immigrants

and also millions of others as tourists and some as temporary workers, agricultural workers, you know, legally on short term visas. So the idea that somehow it's simply a matter of sending more bodies down that are just keep processing people faster and faster and faster, I think is really unrealistic. is really unrealistic. If you go to India or you go to Guatemala or Honduras or West Africa or a number of other places, you will see that there are literally billions of people who would take advantage of that policy. And let's take Illinois, for example. So Chicago is complaining about, what, 10,000 people that have been sent there. They would rather they all stayed and festered in El Paso and let the poor Mexican-American community down there. When I say poor, I mean their incomes are lower in those border areas than they are in the wealthy suburbs of Illinois and Martha's Vineyard in New York City and so on. And they're not ungenerous people,

but they are simply overwhelmed. And I think Governor Abbott is trying to make other cities and other states understand that this is a national burden that the administration has unleashed. So to get to your questions, no, I don't think there is any amount of resources that you could transfer to what I call process, parole, and punt, you know, get people in as quickly as possible on some kind of status and just get them out into the countryside. Because the demand is unlimited. I mean, once the word got out under this administration that the doors were open, we started seeing over 200,000 people a month showing up at the border, which is, as you see, swamped our ability to handle it. And you got to remember, none of them are paying a dime in fees. So this is all taxpayer funded at this point. And interestingly, it's coming out of the

backs of people who are paying for the legitimate immigration system. And I would ask that question. We can have a conversation about a labor shortage, and we have a Congress that could vote to increase visas, either permanent or short term for agricultural workers, for whatever was needed in the US. And I hope eventually they'll get to that question. But if they can't, the default is they have to obey the law that's there. And I would ask this, having done 100,000 visa interviews in India and Fiji and West Africa, why should we prioritize? Why should someone who is a non-English speaking, unskilled laborer from, say, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru,

Guatemala, have preference over an unskilled English speaking laborer from Africa or India. Because if it's simply a matter of we need labor, let's bring people in. Shouldn't we find a way to prioritize those who have the skills, including language skills, that would best fit our economy? But the system we have, it just simply prioritizes the bum rush, the one who can get their feet in the door and just walk in, have an advantage, which is why I've met people. The one night I went out in Yuma, I met people from 16 different countries, Russia, China, Georgia. It wasn't just Latin America. They're all coming. India. I saw six guys from the Punjab and tried to get my rusty Hindi back because they realized there's no point in waiting for a visa. There's no point in doing anything legally. You just have to walk in and take advantage of the

unlimited, and I'll finish in just a second, generosity of the US taxpayer. And let's just take Illinois' situation. They voted to provide Medicare to illegal aliens over the age of 65. And they were told, the legislature was told it's going to cost about $2 million a year. That was the estimate. The actual cost is turning out to be about $1 billion a year and climbing north. And that's in a state that because of unfunded pensions, people fleeing the state and services that are provided that aren't paid for by taxes, there I think, I could be wrong on the figure, $175 billion in debt. So there comes a time at which a state, a city, a country has to pay its bills. We're seeing that with the debt ceiling

right now. So while I understand the motivation of socialists to provide unlimited benefits to unlimited people, as a capitalist, I have to ask, where does that money come from? Alejandro, I'm curious to, I guess, get your response to a couple of those things. I mean, first of all, I think that the question of prioritization is a really interesting and tricky one. I mean, you know, Simon's example of how do we decide which migrants we're going to prioritize or who we're going to take, assuming there's, you know, finite resources and finite capacity to process them. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you think about that, you know, considering the migrants from areas like the Northern Triangle versus considering English- speaking migrants from Africa or India or wherever else.

If there is no limit, then how do we fund and handle what would probably be, you know, even more migrants and more migration than we're seeing right now, if we truly did, quote unquote, you know, throw the signal up that the borders were open, that we were going to take a lot more people? Yeah, so I think the way that I want to answer this question is to return it to kind of the reason that I wrote the book and the reason that immigration was something that I sort of got involved in, which is to say the individual people who are arriving at the southern border do have legitimate asylum claims. I think that that is where our priority has kind of frustrating and could be solved by work permits um right now undocumented people who work in sort of um w-2 jobs uh not like day laboring and stuff like that but rather working in meat processing plants at restaurants things like that um are paying into all of our systems in the same way that you and i are with like our w-2 income which is to say that it's taken out um they just have no way of getting that money back and so undocumented individuals add a ton of money

to our economy every year um create jobs create um, you know, pay into all of our systems. They just don't get to see any benefit from it. So I actually see the Illinois program as returning some of these profit capital that they've generated to the communities that have generated it. I think that, you know, allowing people to work, allowing people to get to work as soon as possible if they like with legitimate papers and everything is a really easy way to get them into into the system to get them to become taxpayers and things like that. There are right now a ton of policies put in the way of folks using public benefits when they need them, undocumented people. And honestly, that just ends up causing more and more of a strain on public resources, because instead of getting someone, you know, taking their little kid to a preventative checkup every year, you end up with a kid coming into the hospital, the emergency room with

some kind of huge health emergency that could have been caught six months ago. Instead of, you know, people being able to find housing, you again have people sort of hitting the emergency net really, really hard instead of just being held up by the regular social safety net that the rest of us have. And I think that bringing people in, getting people accommodated and accepted and, you know, becoming part of our communities as quickly as possible is a way to sort of get them giving back to those communities as well as quickly as possible. And I see people, you know, I've talked to so many people who are like, hey, I was a therapist back home or I, you know, I used to be a cook back home, like put me in coach, basically being like, I want to be volunteering or I want to be, you know, talking to other people And that just like blows my mind. And so I think that knowing that folks who are coming in are ready, willing, and able to, to be part of the communities that they're placed in, who are ready and willing to take care of each other and take care of us

is, um, is a huge part of why I so strongly believe in immigration. is a huge part of why I so strongly believe in immigration. Just before we pivot back to Simon, I am curious just to hold your feet to the fire on one point, which is, you know, if we are talking about processing and supporting all of these migrants, and if we're saying that, you know, for every migrant that comes in, there's a certain level of, of capital created and benefits to, you know, the society around them is, is your view that we as a country can handle, you know, unlimited migration, unlimited immigration, or do you feel like there's a cap, but we are just not really close to it yet? not really close to it yet? Um, I don't really know. I'm not an economist. I don't, um, I am not an expert on things like this. What I do believe is that, you know, we work together and we can, like, I have seen the communities that I am a part of. I've seen my community here in Chicago,

like come out in such a spectacular way to help people out. And I know that 10,000 people is not that much, especially compared to El Paso, but El Paso also is such an incredible example of a city. My brother lived there for a number of years is such a remarkable example of a city that again, has like risen time and time again, to meet the challenge of the people who are arriving there. And I like, I'm not comfortable saying, you know, like there's a number, there are caps or anything. And like, I don't know what unlimited immigration would look like, but I do know that when my communities, the groups that I am a part of have seen people that are in trouble coming to them for help, the hand has been extended and have said, you know, come in. Yes, we will figure

this out together. Simon, I'm sure there's a lot there from Alejandra that you want to respond to, but I do want to pivot a little bit into some of the more recent events around this administration, specifically around the end of Title 42. One of the things that happened that was a little bit confounding for me, and I think also surprising based on a lot of the things that happened that was a little bit confounding for me. And I think also surprising based on a lot of the media coverage was we heard a lot about how the end of title 42 was going to usher in this, this huge wave of new and increased migration. One of the ways I discovered your work was actually a piece you wrote about this kind of comparing title 42 to like having a bouncer at the club as a way to stop entry on the southern border and how it was a very effective way to do that.

And in the lead up to Title 42 ending, we did see a very large rise in migrant encounters at the border and people crossing. I think there was something like 10,000 in a single day, which as far as I know, was the highest ever. But then immediately after Title 42 ended, we saw this 50% drop in the first week or so after. I was surprised to see that. I was expecting based on left, right, middle, whoever I was reading was all saying that there was going to be this kind of big wave. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what we've seen since the end of Title 42, if anything there has surprised you and why we might be seeing some of those numbers come down the way that they have. Yeah, it gets detailed. But after Title 42 was allowing DHS to, it would have allowed them to expel pretty much everybody, but they were,

they didn't use it against people from certain countries like Venezuela, I think, and Nicaragua. They didn't use it against family groups. And we've had, ever since they, a couple of legal decisions made it impossible for ICE to detain families, everybody suddenly has a family. And you have, some of them are actually families. A lot of them are just rent-a-kids that go along with adults and maybe more than once to help them to avoid being detained. So Title 42 at its best was being used under Biden for about 45% of people at the border and the rest were being one way or another mostly let in. They only detain at any given time about 20,000, 25,000, that's the max. And you're talking about 250,000 coming a month. So that's a drop in the ocean. Hopefully they're detaining the actual

murderers and rapists who have criminal convictions here in the United States. But I like the bouncer example because it shows you that, look, we were all young once and young people tend to be generous. That's why they tend to be socialist until they have something to lose. But if you look at a nightclub and you let in anyone who wants to come, right, what happens? Well, sometimes the balcony collapses and people get killed. Sometimes there's a fire and people get killed. That's the reason why you have capacity limits on public buildings. And the analogy would be that in a country, in order for the country to survive, to have a social fabric, to have an economy that can support the people in it, those people get a vote. They get a say, just like you get a say on who lives in your house. The government can't come

to you and say, you have to take five people in your basement as lodgers because the country is full. So there are reasons for those rules. And Title 42 was an exceptional rule because it was only brought in after COVID hit in March of 2020. But we could easily replace it with a very similar power, for example, that said that when the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection are unable to keep the flow orderly, meaning there's X number per day, then they get to shut it down and expel everybody on Title 42 until the numbers get back to a manageable amount. And you set up refugee processing centers outside of the United States, which is how we get our people in through the refugee program. The United States refugee

program brings in, it should bring in 125,000 people a year, according to the Biden ceiling that they put, but we only brought in 25,000 last year because everything is going down to the border. So right now what we're seeing is it's unprecedented bad daily numbers, but they're just not quite as bad as they were two weeks ago. bad daily numbers, but they're just not quite as bad as they were two weeks ago. And some of that flow is being hidden because people are being given what I call McVisas. They're getting parole. They fill out an application on their cell phone, and that allows them to fly into an airport. It could be Boston. It could be Los Angeles.

It doesn't have to be a border port. And then they ask for parole, and they get parole. What is parole? Parole is kind of outside of the whole immigration system. It was intended for, let's say you need a kidney transplant and the only donor is your cousin. And for whatever reason, your cousin can't get a visa. Maybe DHS would say, in this one case, the secretary would look at it and he'd have a team to give him the paperwork and say, look, this one case, it's worth it for this guy. The Shriners are paying. He's going to go back home again and it's going to save a life. Okay. Or you have a court case, you're going to put Al Capone behind bars, and the only witness is a guy in Italy and you need a visa. You say, okay, we'll give that guy a visa. That was used maybe 300 times a year under George Bush. Biden is using it 30,000 times a month just for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans,

and has so far used it over a million times, as far as I'm aware, for people from other countries, which is just a blatant misuse of the power that was in the law. So there's a little bit of hide the, you know, of three-card Monty going on where it seems as if there are fewer arrests at the border because the rest are being channeled into what they call lawful pathways, which is an oxymoron as someone who worked on the visa side of things for a long time. These pathways are not lawful pathways, which is an oxymoron as someone who worked on the visa side of things for a long time. These pathways are not lawful, for one. There's nowhere in the law that it says that they're allowed. And they're also pathways to nothing.

They're pathways to immigration limbo, where they're going to be clogging up this asylum process for the foreseeable future so that actual refugees won't be able to come in. And I guess my question is, in finishing this answer for Alejandro, would be, if you did set out the message that we can handle it, the borders are open, just come and we'll figure it out, you would pretty soon get charter flights. You already have them. Charter flights coming in from India, coming from China, from all over the world, with people funneling into Mexico and just being bussed up. It's very orderly. The cartels are extremely efficient. And then the travel agencies and other

businesses would get involved. Would there be any point at which you think even the residents of Chicago would say, hang on a minute, I saw some people from the south side of Chicago on TV a couple of days ago say, wait a minute, why are you putting migrants, illegal migrants in our school gym and our public buildings when our kids and our families aren't getting any help from the city of Chicago? And you're starting to see a split in the base of the Democratic Party in Chicago, which as far as I know, is a rock solid control for most of my life. But is there can you see any upper limit? Can you see any point at which I don't know, five million, 10 million, 20 million that you would say maybe now we need to take a pause? take a pause. Alejandra, I want to give you a chance to answer that. And then I want to follow up quickly about something Simon brought up about the CBP one app as well. Like I said, I am not an economist. I am not someone who is like knows about demographics or, you know, how many people

the place can comfortably hold. And I do agree with folks on the South Side that there's a reason that there are so many people in their empty school gyms, and that's because the South Side has been historically and categorically defunded. What I am saying is that I think that by raising taxes on the wealthy, or not even raising them, ensuring that they

pay the taxes that they are levied, there is money in this country. There are resources in this country. It is a matter of allocating them correctly. And I think that the place where those resources should go is back to the people. So the question I wanted to follow up on really quick about the CBP One app, which I could almost laugh listening to Simon describe it because of this great, big, beautiful country we have where we all disagree so vehemently with each other, because I know Alejandro, you also very much have criticized and torn into the CBP one app in your writing, but almost for the exact opposite reason.

So I'm curious if you maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, why briefly why you have, you know, not been satisfied with the CBP one app as a solution to some of the asylum migration issues we're seeing on the border. Yeah, everyone hates the CBP One app. There are currently two lawsuits against it, one from the state of Texas for the reasons that Simon outlined and one from the ACLU for the reasons that I'm about to outline. And basically, the app is incredibly glitchy. First of all, you don't or shouldn't need an appointment to request asylum or to start having your asylum claim processed at the border. The current law states that basically if you are present in the country, then your asylum case should be listened to. The other thing is that the app

is bad. It has a facial recognition element as part of it. And so you have to like point the camera at yourself and sort of wait for it to say like, oh yes, there's a face there. And what folks have been finding is that the app does not recognize people with darker skin. It just kind of keeps loading or booting up and just like will not recognize people with darker skin. It just kind of keeps loading or booting up and just like will not recognize people with darker skin as like having faces that the app can read, preventing them from making appointments, which is a huge violation of their civil rights. It's also, and this might have been something that's been fixed already, but for a while, it also wasn't allowing people in family groups or who are traveling together to make concurrent appointments. And from what I

understand, the sort of the appointment slots opened in the morning, people would like log in, try and get into it, and they would fill up or wouldn't. But it was very hard to get sort of two concurrent appointments. So you could end up essentially being separated from your family by when you got these appointments, which is not great. And finally, it also relies on having a phone, speaking a language that's supported by the phone, which especially with indigenous folks that are coming up to the border, many of them don't speak Spanish. Many of them don't speak French. I think it's in Spanish, French and Haitian Creole where the language is supported. And so it's just relying on a lot of different things that migrants may or may not have or have

access to steady Wi-Fi, having a phone, having a phone that works, having a phone that supports the app and isn't like a couple years old and kind of clunky. And so for that reason, I think that the CBP One app is sort of discriminatory against certain groups of people, oftentimes the people who need help the most. Okay, so I know we're running up against time here. I want to give you both a brief 30 second slot before we get out of here to just share, I guess, what you, if you could snap your fingers and drop yourself into the White House, what your priorities would be for the Biden administration on the border. And Simon, I'll give you first swing at it, and then Alejandro will close with you. I just want him to obey the law. I just want him to enforce the law. And if he wants to persuade Congress to make changes, whether it be amnesties or increased amounts of immigration, let's have that conversation. But in the meantime, you don't get to decide to arbitrarily and through rulemaking and executive fiat bypass Congress. There are three branches of government and checks and balances for a reason.

And what we're seeing now is really undemocratic. Ultimately, this is a question of resources. And they're finite. There's a finite amount of people that can be taken into the United States in any given year, unless you're just willing to borrow and debase the currency in the economy. unless you're just willing to borrow and debase the currency in the economy. Alejandra? Funnily enough, I agree with a lot of with Simon's main point, which is that I would like the president to follow the law. Asylum is a law is a right that's protected under law. And currently we're seeing the Biden administration kind of try and take little pieces away from it bit by bit and essentially undermine the right to asylum that people have. And I would like to see that supported. Before we get out of here, Simon Hankinson, thank you so much for coming on. Really quickly,

if you want to let our listeners know where they can find your work or keep up with your writing or commentary, what's the best place to do that? Your writing or commentary, what's the best place to do that? I tweet it out at WatchfulWaiter1 and also the Heritage website. I'm pretty easy to find. Awesome. Alejandra, how can folks keep up with your work? Well, first of all, they should preorder my book, Rivermouth, which you can just find by Googling.

And I'm also on Twitter at Oliva Alejandra. And that is also my website, which is where I'm posting the articles that I'm writing, any book news. I'll be on tour pretty soon. So I may be in your city. Awesome. Alejandra, Simon, thank you so much for a great conversation. I really appreciate it and look forward to having you guys back on the show sometime

in the future. Thank you so much. Thank you. sometime in the future. Thank by Diet 75. For more on Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. We'll be right back. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown.

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