The Daily - Thursday, Feb. 15, 2018

Episode Date: February 15, 2018

President Trump has called for an overhaul of immigration that replaces a family-based system with a merit-based one. But what counts as merit? We also report on the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in which at least 17 people died. It was the 18th school shooting in the United States this year. Guests: Caitlin Dickerson, a national immigration reporter for The New York Times; Catherine Porter, Canada bureau chief for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump is calling for an overhaul of the U.S. immigration system to replace family-based migration with merit-based migration. But what counts as merit? And the school shooting in Florida?

It's Thursday, February 15th. It's now Wednesday morning of the week the Senate set aside to debate DACA, border security, interior enforcement, and other immigration issues. Kaitlin, what's been going on in the Senate this week? The Senate has taken this really unusual step of engaging in a kind of unmitigated hashing out of all things immigration. Kaitlin Dickerson covers immigration for The Times. And that's because in order to convince Democrats to reopen the government last month,

Mitch McConnell agreed to an open debate. So that's what they're doing. I promised I would clear the way to debate these matters this week, and I have. I promised I would ensure a fair amendment process in which both sides could offer legislation for discussion and votes, and I have. Everyone should be focused on finding a bill to protect the Dreamers and address border security that can get 60 votes.

That's the ballgame. The goal is to build a new immigration policy from scratch. So something that deals with dreamers, but also if the Republicans get their way, the deal would involve a lot more than that. It could, in fact, overhaul our entire immigration system. Our legal immigration system as well. Exactly. And what would that mean, the change that Republicans are envisioning of our legal immigration system? Well, the biggest thing that it means is a shift away from the core of our current immigration system, which is family-based acceptance, family ties.

You know, right now we allow about a million people into the country every year, and about 800,000 of them, or two-thirds, are allowed in based on who they're related to. That's really what makes up the bulk of who we allow into the country. if not totally get rid of visas that are based on family ties and to focus instead on employment skills, on education and on factors that they believe are going to clearly benefit the American economy. We will have so many more benefits. It will save countless dollars, raise workers' wages and help struggling families, including immigrant families, enter the middle class. And they will do it quickly. And they will be very, very happy indeed.

So how does this system of family-based migration, how does it actually work? So the system allows people to petition to bring family members into the country, specific types of family members. So young children, but also in some cases adult children who are married, siblings and parents. is ushered in, the sponsor has to prove that they make a certain amount of money so that this person who is coming into the United States is going to be supported, that they're not going to be a drag on the economy. And then each of those categories is subject to limits. So just because, again, you qualify as somebody whose family member has enough money and as a sibling or a child of an American citizen, you also are going to have to wait in line. And in many cases, those lines are years and years long, and they can even be decades long. So it sounds like you're saying there are limitations on this. It's not an open door system to family. But in essence, this is a system built around the idea that eventually you can have a lot of your family, maybe even most of your family, join you in the United States.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, people have looked back at three and four generations and seen a single immigrant bring in more than 100 people. And this may be responsible for the name that President Trump likes to use to describe this system, which is controversial. Chain migration. Chain migration. Exactly. Chain migration. Chain migration. Chain migration.

Ending chain migration. How common is the system you're describing around the world, outside the United States? It's not common at all. I mean, lots of other countries, they do allow some people based on family ties. But even in places that do, the American definition of family is much broader than it is elsewhere in the world. Other countries don't consider, you know, an adult child necessarily an eligible family member or a sibling an eligible family member. So we are the most generous country when it comes to family-based immigration. So why do we do it this way? Why would our immigration policy be based on anything other than what's theoretically best for our economy? This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill.

It does not affect the lives of millions. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. What's interesting is that when family-based immigration was introduced in 1965, it comes along with a sort of surprising goal in mind, which is to keep the United States primarily white, primarily European. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves, both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways. Before that, we had quotas that were based on country of origin.

Under that system, the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. And those were then considered during the 1960 civil rights movement to be racist. Men of needed skill and talent were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents. And so we moved away from a quota system and yet created another system that was intended to maintain the racial makeup of the country, the demographic makeup of the country. But of course, shortly after, immigration patterns shift and we see a lot more people coming to the United States from basically everywhere except Europe. And so, you know, as a result, this policy starts to really propel dramatic change in terms of demographics in the opposite direction that it was intended to when it was introduced. So this is really interesting, Caitlin.

This is really interesting, Caitlin. When the president made his now infamous shithole comment, he was talking about doing away with aspects of our immigration system that result in people from poorer countries or people without high-end economic value coming to the U.S. And that's also, it sounds like, what he's thinking about with this shift away from a family-based system to a merit-based system. But it feels like what you're saying is that that's what the creators of the family-based system wanted as well when that system was created. Exactly. It does the exact opposite of what the architects of the policy hoped for. And as a result, the country has become a lot more brown. So with that in mind, would a merit-based system, this thing that President Trump says he wants, would it actually accomplish his stated goal of bringing immigrants with higher economic value than the family-based system it would replace? It could. It depends on what the merit-based system looks like, because all that means in general is that as a country, you decide on factors that are important to you

in terms of who you want to bring in. You assign each of those factors some degree of weight, and then you use that sort of rubric to decide who gets a ticket in and who doesn't. means fewer overall immigrants. And then of that much smaller number of people we allow in, a much larger proportion of them being people who have high skills, doctors, engineers, PhDs, entrepreneurs, more immigrants who can slide into the upper echelons of the American economy and of American society. And so if we think about his definition of merit-based, then yes, that will be the result. So we've been discussing this kind of philosophical question of what immigration is for. And this seems to be another philosophical question. What is merit? And having high skills is just one way to think about it. But it sounds like that's how President Trump is thinking about merit.

That's right. I mean, I think one thing that's actually getting lost in this debate is that there's research that shows that people who have family ties actually fare better in the economy because they have a built-in safety net. So if you move to America and you have family members here, you have someone who you can stay with if you don't have anywhere to live. You have someone who can take you to the DMV, who can show you how to file taxes, who might help you learn the language and understand the culture. So there's definitely an economic argument that says people with family ties are actually going to do even better than

somebody who's a PhD or who has millions of dollars to contribute to the economy, but who doesn't have anybody to help them on a rainy day, you know, when things go wrong. So there's a case to be made that family-based immigration, that having family ties when you're an immigrant arriving in the U.S., is actually a pretty strong form of merit. Absolutely a strong case. And, you know, that's something that could be incorporated into a merit-based system. We could offer points based on who has family ties, just like with the diversity visa that we've talked about. You know, you could offer points for diversity. These are all things that could be incorporated into a merit-based system in theory, but that's not

what President Trump is talking about doing when he proposes his version of a merit-based immigration system. So, Caitlin, what we're talking about would be a massive overhaul of the U.S. immigration system. Is this actually on the table right now? It is on the table, and it looks like it's going to have to be on the table because on Wednesday, President Trump came out and said that if whatever bill the Senate comes up with doesn't include this idea of merit-based immigration, that he'll veto it. He's really putting pressure on them to make this bigger and broader than just a bill that looks at DACA. And he is pushing them to try to come up with something that looks a lot more like what happens in countries like Canada. But here's the thing. happens in countries like Canada. But here's the thing. What President Trump has described as his ideal immigration system, it looks vastly different than what actually happens in Canada.

And it's not clear how the Senate is going to reconcile those two ideas. Thank you, Caitlin. Thanks, Michael. When we come back, what actually happens in Canada? The current outdated system depresses wages for our poorest workers and puts great pressure on taxpayers. Nations around the world, like Canada, Australia, and many others, about a merit-based immigration system. One, he wants high-skilled workers to be the priority. And two, he sees Canada as a model. Is that how the Canadian merit-based system works?

Does it prioritize high-skilled work? Yes and no. It's actually quite a complicated system. Catherine Porter is the Canada Bureau Chief for The Times. So there's three streams of immigrants to Canada. There's refugees, which is about 14%. There's the family reunification stream, similar to the American one. And then as much as 60% is this merit-based system. And the system is super complicated. In fact, it's like if you talk to people who teach it, they'll tell you it's super

complicated because it changes all the time. But it's basically a point system where you get a certain amount of points based on your age, your education, your language skills. You have to take language tests and something they called adoptability. It's basically, you know, the idea that you'll come and you'll hit the ground running. And that's not just the federal government, but each province in Canada and territory also has their own system of ranking.

And they can rank it based on what skills they're looking for. Now, on paper, it says that 58% of our system comes that way, people who are merit. But really, most of those people come with spouses and kids. So if you take them out of that equation, it's really only a quarter of immigrants coming to Canada who are picked specifically for their skills. So it sounds like the skill sets that are used to judge an immigrant are not always what we might think of as high skills and high education. The last surveys show that not just people who have IT skills are getting in, but cooks, like short order cooks, people in the catering business. So because each province and territory, because there's 13 provinces and

territories in Canada making this easier, but each of them gets to look at their own job market and see where the holes are that they want to fill. So they also have a very large say, like 50% of the say of which immigrants come in. So yeah, no, it's not necessarily only PhDs, although the more education you have, the higher your points are under this merit system. Catherine, do you know why Canada built their immigration system this way? Yeah, it's actually a really interesting story. basically, people will tell you like a race-based system here, like a very racist system where they gave preferential treatment to people from white countries. They even had like a quota on how many people from Sri Lanka or India were allowed in every year. And in the 60s, that all

changed. They wanted a system that was colorblind, that was based just on merit. And they brought this new system in gradually. And by 1967, they put in like this point system to make sure basically that you are bringing people based on math and not where they came from or what they looked like. So it's interesting that it's being held up right now in the United States as this model, because with the debate in the States being so polarized around race right now, in Canada, this was like an antidote to that. This was seen as something to treat people fairly coming in and give everyone a fair shot. Because we just heard from our colleague, Caitlin Dickerson, that the U.S. system of family-based migration was also a response to what was seen as a racist immigration system in the 60s. So these two countries responded to the same problem in two very different ways. So is this merit-based system that Canada came up with, is it working in Canada? Do people like it? Yeah, it's super popular. Immigration in Canada is still seen as nation-building.

Everyone sees it as a way that we grow our economy. It makes us more competitive. Yeah, it's really, I would say, an essential part of the Canadian identity of being like multiculturalism is immigration. Part of that is Canada brings in a lot of immigrants, like they bring in 0.8% of the population every year. And at this point, more than 20% of the whole Canadian population are immigrants. So there's still a real embrace of the idea that immigration is something that is good. And I think the merit-based system is a special sauce into that. It does really promote the idea that we're getting the best people from around the world coming to Canada,

and not just that they're so lucky to come to Canada, but Canada's lucky to have them be here. So that sounds like a case for this version of merit-based immigration. But why, if President Trump's goal in moving to a merit-based system is to limit the number of immigrants coming in and to prioritize the high-skilled, why is he pointing to Canada as the model? It's a head-scratcher for many people in Canada, I've got to tell you, It's a head-scratcher for many people in Canada, I've got to tell you, because the model here is about bringing in lots of people. It's based on an idea that immigration is really good for the country,

that it brings in talent and skills and fresh blood, fresh ideas, that it builds the country up. Whereas what the president in the United States seems to be saying is he wants fewer immigrants, which is completely contrary to the Canadian experience. Catherine, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. On Wednesday afternoon, a broad bipartisan group of senators announced they had reached an agreement on an immigration plan that is narrower than the one called for by President Trump. The compromise legislation would boost border security and resolve the fate of the Dreamers, offering them a path to citizenship, but would not address family-based migration

or the visa lottery program. But the president's insistence on his hardline plan calls into question whether any compromise legislation can make it past his desk. What happened was the fire alarm went off, so everybody was going outside like a regular fire drill. And then all of a sudden I heard like two gunshots, and then I just see a whole bunch of people start running my direction, and then all the administrators and teachers just told us to start running, so I was just running wherever, and I was just following the crowd. running wherever, and I was just following the crowd. On Wednesday afternoon in Parkland, Florida, about an hour north of Miami, a gunman walked into a high school with a semi-automatic rifle and killed at least 17 people.

I thought it was just someone pulled the fire alarm, and then I actually got scared, like there's actually a shooter, and people are actually dying. scared like there's actually a shooter and people are actually dying. Police have arrested a 19-year-old former student at the school who recently was expelled and who was known to carry guns, but they have yet to describe a motive for the shooting. It was the 18th school shooting in the U.S. so far this year. On Wednesday evening, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel held a news conference near the school. This incident truly makes me sick to my stomach. It's horrible.

It's catastrophic. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.