The Chris Cuomo Project - Rethinking Immigration: The Lessons of Ellis Island and Today's Border Crisis

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Chris Cuomo explores the complex issue of immigration in the United States, revisiting the Ellis Island model to manage immigration more effectively. Chris delves into the history of Ellis Island, shedding light on its operations and the common misconceptions surrounding it, and suggests a need for modern, comprehensive infrastructure to help conduct efficient immigration processing. Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, it's a big idea and a lot of people aren't gonna like it. I know what to do to change our reality on the border. I know what to do to change the reality of what's happening in New York City. What's the issue? Border, immigration, how to process, how to deal. You know what a huge move would be? Bring back Ellis Island.

Build more Ellis Islands. No, no, not landfill actual islands, but the facilities that had a holistic approach to how to deal with this. The history of Ellis Island, the reality of Ellis Island, many of you have no clue about what was the deal with it, what it was supposed to do, what it wound up doing, how dark some of the history is,

and how what is being done today by the Biden administration that is seen as so radical started in the 50s with Republican president who designed a new mentality that is today seen as new and crazy. It was born in 1951. It is all true. And I'm going to tell it to you now, and you can check it

for yourself. And then, more importantly, you can think, huh, is this another solution that should be on the table? Ellis Island is what we're going to talk about today as the missing piece of the matrix of disasters on the southern border. I'm Chris Cuomo. Sometimes you must look into the past to see a better way into the future. What is this? Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing. If you're not into the ads, go to the sub stack and don't just follow, subscribe. It's only five bucks and it's ad free and you'll get the increasing amount of long COVID specific talk. All right. But thank you

for being here at The Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for being at News Nation and watching me at eight and 11 o'clock at night. Thank you for wearing your independence. You see how important it is now. You see how the parties are poisoning us. Wear your independence with your free agent gear. Good for you. And we gave $10,000 to Inara, which is Arwa Damon's foundation

that is helping kids right now in the West Bank, not in the West Bank, in Gaza. Sadly, she may wind up helping kids in the West Bank not too long from now, but right now it's in Gaza and in Egypt with the overflow out of Palestine, helping the kids who are getting just decimated, life-changing injuries because of the war in the Middle East. Palestine, helping the kids who are getting just decimated, life-changing injuries because of the war

in the Middle East. So gave her 10 grand. That money is coming from what was sold in free agency. And I am doing it in the dumbest way possible for me, personally, as a tax event, but that doesn't matter because the cause matters. And the crowd sourced compassion, the crowd sourced contribution, I think is very cool.

So the free agent money is not going to me. It's gonna be a function of the we, and we're gonna give it away like we did to Inara, I-N-A-R-A, Inara, you can look it up online, Arwa Damon, if you wanna help kids because you care about what's happening in the Middle East. So here we are talking about how bad the border is. Gotta get out of that mindset

because that's what the players of the game in the poison party political system, in the battle to the bottom of all that matters is who and what is worse and more dangerous. That's why we hear the word dangerous and the word unhinged and worse and all these other negative pejorative terms. Then we do anything positive, any better ideas,

anything about vision. Why? Because it works for them. And the metaphor of the madness is the Southern border. Where we now know that the problem works better for them. And the metaphor of the madness is the southern border, where we now know that the problem works better for them than a solution, at least in their minds. How do we know this? How is it not just cynical speculation by another pod yapper? Here's how we know, because they said the quiet part out loud. When Mitch McConnell and Senator Langford, both Republicans obviously, said, yeah, the deal's got to be scuttled because the Trump

guys said they'd rather campaign on the problem. Wow. Wow. Quiet part out loud. We'd rather keep it a problem than fix it because the problem works better. Well, guess what? We ain't them, okay? Here, we think about problems as critical thinkers with an eye towards fixing them, like we do in every other part of our lives that we are blessed with an opportunity to fix. So much of our hardship in life is intractable that you do not have control over it, but this we do.

And that takes us to something that hasn't been mentioned, something that may not be accepted, that may not be liked, but that's okay. That's okay because it's an interesting idea. Ellis Island, okay? That is the symbol of immigration for so many, certainly generationally so. That little island, New York Harbor,

just off the coast of New Jersey, right? You pass the Statue of Liberty, so many people have ancestors who told them that story. Well, there's a lot to the story you haven't been told. There's also a lot to the utility of the place that I think should be re-thinked because I think we need one or five or 10 such places on the Southern border.

And by the way, that's not a radical idea. We used to have a lot more federal large catchment institutions, they got closed in the 50s and oh, the irony of why they got closed. But just wait for that part. First, we'll get to why they were formed. Why? Because the flow was coming.

Flow was coming. Now, the numbers are laughable by today's standards. But remember, it was a smaller place. It was a smaller world. It was a smaller universe of people willing to risk everything to come to a place that they could not know anything about except by word of mouth and maybe a letter

if they were fortunate enough to have literate people in their lives, which is not sarcastic. I know it didn't happen in my family. So Ellis Island, the name comes from some guy named Ellis. He owned the land, okay? But they opened it up in the 1800s. I think 1890 President Harrison made Ellis Island

the first federal immigration center. Okay, cool. So why? Because the flow was up. Now, what were they doing before that? Very interesting. You could just were they doing before that? Very interesting. You could just come into America before that. And they figured it out state by state.

The flow became too much. They wanted to start choke points where they could control things. Sound familiar? Because that's what we wanna do now, right? And that's how Ellis Island got set up. And it was like a little thing. It was like three square acres.

And they wound up using landfill to build up that area to make it over like 27 acres and they built all these different buildings. In the beginning it was just a processing center. Okay. We wanted people here and it's interesting because there's this romanticism. That's the word I was looking for of everybody going through Ellis Island. This is the way it was. We all came in here the right way. We got treated the same way. Bullshit. If you came here as a first class passenger on a ship or a second class passenger on a ship, you got a cursory health wellness check on board

and then you went to New York City and went to customs and came right on in. But if you were like my people and so many others who were third class citizens, you got sent to Ellis Island for processing to see if you were carrying a communicable disease, to see if you were someone they wanted here. Very interesting. So menacing. So many people got turned away and sent away because they were trash who had illnesses and they weren't seen as worthy and sent back, right? No, you know what percentage were turned back in these first phases of the development of our policy? 2%.

Do you know how many get turned back today when they make asylum claims over 85%? Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? These were people with no legitimate claim other than ambition and want to get into the country. And the rejection rate was about 2%. Now you have these people who say they're fleeing

for their lives under established international doctrine for asylum and over 80% of their claims get rejected. Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from PrizePix. I gotta tell you, there's a reason prize picks is America's number one fantasy sports app. Three million members. Why? Easy, plenty of action if you're into DFS, and it's just you against the numbers. You pick more than or less than on two to six player stat projections, and if you're any good, the winnings will roll in.

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And that's why I like prize picks, okay? I'm not in there with a bunch of sharks. I'm able to control the flow. I'm able to tailor who I wanna bet bet on and what I want to bet on. You know, for me, it's so much better than just the game, but this is personal to me. And PrizePix gives me the options. And it's fun. And I don't feel like I'm going to get exploited or played by some system that's a foot that I don't understand.

So go to PrizePix.com slash CCP and use code CCP for a first deposit match up to a hundo. Again, go to prizepix.com slash CCP and use code CCP for a first deposit match up to $100. Prize picks. Pick more, pick less. It's that easy. Now, I will say something to defeat the power and cogency of my own argument. A lot of the asylum claims don't pass muster and the asylum standards need to be rethought. It's one of the big fixes that are needed that by the way was put in this bill that everybody says, it's a bad everybody says it's a bad bill it's a bad bill that's the new bullshit rubber stamp mindless lemming sheeple thing to say about the immigration I the bill was a bad bill it's a bad bill I wouldn't have voted for the bill it's a bad bill why are you

mocking it like that why Why am I mocking it? Because you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know what was in the bill. It's a bad bill. It's a bad bill. That's what they told me to say. Sean Hannity says it's a bad bill. Mark Levin says it's a bad bill.

Don't vote for the bill. Well, let me tell you something. It wasn't just Langford, okay? They had Republicans work in that bill for weeks and weeks with Republican input. Now, did they do enough of it? Obviously not. But what does it tell you

that Custom and Border Protection, speaking through their union, wants the bill? Okay? Do they not know what they need? Oh, but it wasn't perfect. Oh, wake up. It changed rules that would make it more difficult to apply for asylum. It changed staffing, it changed resourcing,

it changed the ability for staff to make instant judgments on people. It helped. It was not perfect. Absolutely not perfect. Absolutely not everything. And putting Ukraine funding in there was a poison pill as far as I'm concerned. I'm with you. I'm with you. But it was not a bad bill. Bad bill. It's not a bad bill, Rain Man. It's not a bad bill. It wasn't a perfect bill, but that's not why it was rejected. It was rejected because Trump wanted it rejected. And I don't blame him for doing that because that's the game, brother, and I hate the game. I don't decide to just hate the players. I think that's naive, okay? Because you change

nothing by just going after people who are doing what the system allows, encourages and almost forces them to do. Certainly compels them. And I'm no Trump protector, that's a damn sure. But the problem of the border works better than a solution. So the asylum laws need to be changed. Economic asylum is not what asylum was meant for.

It's really dangerous in Venezuela. Biden giving those people temporary protected status, 400,000 or more that came in here in IEI, no. Someone who came into this country illegally from Venezuela just killed that kid at the University of Georgia. And does Biden deserve blame for that? Absolutely. Is the problem with homicide in our country

driven by migrants? Absolutely not. Is it driven by illegal entrance? Absolutely not. Does that mean that it's okay? Absolutely not. Is it another sign, is it a sigil of what marks the need for change?

Perhaps. And I think that that crime, that murder, and that guy is gonna be a face. I don't know if he's gonna be like Willie Horton was back for Dukakis when he was running against Bush, I think 1988. I remember that one, of course not. It was about Dukakis.

These issues, nothing is new in politics. It's all about the new iteration, okay? It's all about more, but it's not new food. It's just about more food for the same hunger, okay? And I'm gonna show you that about Ellis Island in a moment. Willie Horton was, you let the scary black guy out on furlough instead of keeping him in prison and he did bad things again.

Now I say it not because the policy was silly to mock, it was a bad policy, but the hysteria around it and that the scary black face, the face that was actually darkened in ads to be more menacing. And here we are once again, okay? Whether it was Katie Steinle or now what we saw with Lakin, we're gonna see this again with this guy, Ibarra.

And Biden is gonna take it on the chin. And I think that there's some merit to the criticism. The point is the rules need to change. And if we look back at where that came from, it takes us to Ellis Island. So that was how they wanted to do it, one stop shopping. Okay, and it was really only for the third class folks. And the numbers were so small,

the most processing that was done at Ellis Island in any one year was a million. That's like called like a month on the Southern border now. But you know, of course the scale has changed. There's so many more people in the country and the world now than there were back in the 20s, 30s and 40s. So what happens in our history? Actually before that, really like in the 1890s,

the 19 aughts and the 10s and 20s. Then you have World War I, okay? Now things change after World War I. Post-World War I, we got on the road to less. There was legislation about controlling intake into America, okay? And between like in the 1920s, a lot of this legislation came

where we started to lose our appetite for new people here. There seemed like we had enough. Sound familiar, right? And we were making the same mistake that we're making now then, which was we were confusing our needs for our wants and this idea of keeping it for the rest of us, this us and them.

This was going on then. Wasn't just straight up xenophobia, but it was close. And we were missing then, in the historical analysis, you'll see this, and we are missing now, that America runs on new and fresh blood. That's why it resonated in some of the right fringy ranks when Steve King said, we need to make more white babies.

And that why Donald Trump is banging on that same key on the keyboard of xenophobia and of dangerous nationalism by saying, they're messing with our blood, the national blood, American blood. That is a coded statement for some. I certainly think it is a foolish statement for the former president to make, but it harkens back to that diluting of American blood

with foreigners. The problem is we're all foreigners. It's about when you decide to draw the line, right? And the need is just as great now. We have millions and millions of unfilled jobs in this country and a lot of them are trade jobs. And a lot of you don't want to do the trades. And we know this.

And a lot of it is a bad stigma in society, which I don't even understand. Do you know how many of the guys I fish with who have like 100, 400, 300, 200, 500, 700 thousand dollar fishing boats who are tradesmen? Most of them. Why? Because they're really entrepreneurs. These aren't guys who are tradesmen? Most of them. Why? Because they're really entrepreneurs.

These aren't guys who are plunging shit all day and then go into their $600,000 boat. They've got 10, 12 trucks. They're entrepreneurs. Everybody needs a plumber. I can get you a lawyer in five minutes. I have to beg a guy to get to my house within a week. Why?

There aren't enough of them and you'll always need them. I don't care if we go all electric. I don't care if we have hydrogen fueled engines instead of combustion engines. Our homes, electricity is gonna exist, right? Infrastructure is gonna exist in your house. HVAC is gonna exist. Whether there's solar panels or oil or whatever,

someone's gotta put it in, take it out and fix it when it doesn't work. These are the trades. And there's a lot of beauty and craftsmanship that comes along with it. And we needed that then in the 1920s when we started to cut it off and it was a mistake. But we had a lot more people then

who wanted to go in to trades. We had workshop in high schools, wood shop, engine building. remember Grease, the movie, how they were building the car in shop class? That's dying all over the country now, if not dead already. So we have jobs to fill, and now we don't have the people to fill them.

Yes, we do, we got a gazillion people coming in, but we're treating them like rats, and they have to sneak their way into the system. And you have these uniparty players, you know, the powerful corporate types that are hiring all these people and encouraging them to be corralled and sneaked across the border and they don't pay any price for it. Why? Because they got money and power. And instead you blame the migrants who are responding to the demand.

Isn't that, doesn't that bother you? I get that it's scary, the brown menace. Here they come to take your women. I get it. They're stealing your jobs. No they're not. They take jobs you don't want. Well, but they get health care for free and they do this and they do that for free. True, true. Shame on the people that employ them in mass amounts and then let them feed off the rest of the system and your tax dollars. Punish them. Not the person who hires one as a nanny,

the person who hires 10,000 of them over the course of a season. Why aren't we seeing their names blown up on social media? E-Verify my ass. That system is as flawed as it is in any way productive. Why? Because they got money and power. Just like back in the Ellis Island days. First and second class people didn't have to go to Ellis Island. My people did. So, World War I happens. We start to move through. And we got on this road of less to the point where in 1954, okay, Ellis Island is officially closed

by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, I like Ike. He says, we're gonna shut down the six major immigration centers, why? Because what had happened was that those places have become largely about detention and deporting. There had been more and more quotas put on who could get into the country and why.

So more and more people weren't passing through and getting processed and getting let in. They were getting held there and sent home. Sound familiar? Sound familiar. It should. Because the road to less started in the 20s. And get this, what did Eisenhower do?

He didn't like the detention and removal. Why? It was expensive. It sucked manpower. It sucked infrastructure. He said, or his administration said, listen to this, and please check it.

And I'm not saying it because it was a Republican administration. Doesn't matter. Who knows what the parties stand for anyway? They're only about advantage in the moment. They're not about real hard principles anymore. It's not my father's Democratic party. My father was about things that made him a Democrat, okay?

Policies, people, philosophy, principles. Now, the only principle is the exigency of advantage and finding a way to make the other person look worse. My father refused to do negative campaigning. I know there's a lot of ugly, stupid suggestions out there about what happened in his campaigns. They're either false or they had nothing to do with him, I promise you that.

And you can ask the people who knew him, you can Google it and research it, that day is dead. Dwight Eisenhower decided that confinement would now be the exception, not the rule. And instead of paying to warehouse these people, which he saw as inherently what? Un-American. Instead of warehousing them and detaining them like being what un-American, he decided it's a better policy to let them live

out in the communities and establish themselves while deciding whether or not they got to stay in the country. That's the origin of the policy that is now called catch and release and blamed on Democrats or just Biden. I am not forgiving the policy. I don't believe that it is working right now. And it is certainly not popular. And I think it's a mistake for the Biden administration and not be using its executive authority

to shut down the border, to let the process and catch up with the flow. And I think catch and release is a mistake. Now, it's easy to say it's a mistake. It is not easy to do something else. Oh yeah, just send them back. That's not easy. I know Trump says he's going to have the largest deportment operation ever. It's easy to say, like Mexico is going to pay for the wall. Okay? They didn't pay for the wall. You paid for the fencing that was put up. And you always will.

You're right? Easy to say, hard to do. But that's where it came from back then. So then why are you calling for it? Because I believe in the institutional model. I think that we have a mistake that we make in this country of over-correcting pendular moves in our politics and our cultural mores in the interest of change.

We often go too far. We start off not doing enough and then we do too much. And I think that building up the infrastructure to allow to hold people, determine what their status should be, and then returning them or letting them in should be centralized once again, like it was at Ellis Island.

And you should do it the right way so that people aren't abused. But obviously America doesn't want people running through its communities that they don't know should be here, like the guy who just killed the kid in Georgia. I know that's the exception, not the rule. But every time someone dies that way,

it magnifies the madness. So I think that thought should be given to bringing back these institutional settings that allow for one-stop shopping when it comes to getting into this country. I think it's a big part of the fix. But what an interesting irony that what seems like a perversion of the norms and of the right way to do it by Democrats and now Biden actually originated with Eisenhower. And I know that somebody will look at it and say, oh, no, no, he meant it a different way

than how they're using it now. It worked differently. It was the same concept. Ike didn't wanna spend the money and didn't like the message of detaining people the way they were then. And that's why he closed the centers. And that's why they came up with the alternative

of letting them assimilate into communities while they were making the decision. I'm not judging whether it's better or worse. To be fair, I'm not sure, okay? I really think a lot of it is about who you're dealing with as a population, what the rates are of the efficiencies involved, how much abuse is there in these holding places, what happens when they're out in the communities,

how many of them show up, that's a very low number. There are some programs that have had community sponsorship of people that had them show up more for processing and adjudication hearings, but the percentage is still low. And concerns about crime are real. And are some of the concerns about crime wrongly put on this population?

Yes. But is some of this population involved in the crime? Yes. But I do think if you wanna think about solutions and what went right and what went wrong in our history and what we need to do now, go back to Ellis Island and think about one stop shopping. And instead of just having a port of entry

where people come in and they're putting up tents and they got them in cages and they can't deal with it and they're putting them on buses over here and they're running away and it's catch and release. So we really want to get into this game of having an absolute border that is a fortress then build one. And it's not just about walls or fences, it's about infrastructure. And I don't mean that just on the security side, I mean that on the processing side. Double, triple, the staffing, the security and the processing, the adjudication processing,

the number of magistrates, the places to hold them, the places to give them the services they need, the ability to deport them, the planes, the money, the transportation, the logistics, up all of it. If that's what you want, if that's the way you want it to work, then you got to build it, right? Remember Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come.

Well, let's switch that up a little bit. If you build it right, you will deal with those who come and figure out who gets to come in and who gets to go home. But you got to do it the right way. And this is not a big brain idea. And it's not the first time we've dealt with it. The scale is different, but the dynamic is the same. What's changed is that we don't have Eisenhower right now.

And I'm not saying this about him in any grand way. Everybody can be picked apart. But we don't have anybody whose goal is to change it in the interest of fixing and making better, which you can then judge as a voter at the next election. They don't do that now. That's why the Democrats waited so long to put up an immigration bill.

If it was really a priority, it would have happened earlier. If it was really a priority, Trump would have done more than bitch about a wall and try to ban Muslims because Islam hates us. And Biden would have done an executive order already to stop the flow at the border. He can't. Trump tried it. Trump tried to ban all Muslims.

Okay? The Immigration and Naturalization Act is pretty broad and expansive in the powers it gives the president to do an emergency stoppage. But it is not, you're going to have a hard time in America banning a religion. Okay? So, Biden should be doing more, but we should be thinking bigger about what needs to be done. And this bad bill, bad bill doesn't work for me. There was plenty in that bill that made it acceptable to the people doing the work on

the border. The real reason it wasn't acceptable is not because it was a bad will. It's because it was bad for business, the business of division. Look back at your history. George Santayana, those who fail to remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them and we are doing that shit right now. This ain't new. The scale is. The scope is. But the dynamic is not. Thank you very much for letting me talk at you. I look forward to your comments about it. Thank you for subscribing. You don't dig the ads. Hey, I feel you. Join

the Substack and get the podcast ad free and get your entree into the long COVID conversation. It's real and it's spreading and that is gonna be a matter of fact and it should be considered one already. I'll see you on NewsNation. 8p, 11p, every weekday night. Don't forget to wear your independence. Be a critical thinker. Tell these parties to piss off. Be an independent. Be a critical thinker. Wear it as a free agent. I'll see you soon. Let's get after it.