The Dispatch Podcast - Immigration and the Problem at the Border

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

The Biden administration plans to end use of Title 42, the pandemic-era border policy, next month. The governor of Texas is busing migrants to the nation’s capital. Meanwhile, illegal border crossings are on the rise. Does anyone have a plan? Ali Noorani, president of National Immigration Forum and author of Crossing Borders, joins Sarah to discuss America’s immigration woes.   Show Notes: -“Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants” by Ali Noorani -Room to Grow: Setting Immigration Levels in a Changing America -Texas Tribune: “San Antonio and other Texas cities confront the spillover from the border migration crisis” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgher. And this week, we're going to do immigration. We're going to explain it. We're going to talk about what it could be, what it is, all of the above, and we're going to do it with a real expert. Ali Narani, he is the author of Crossing Borders, the Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants, as well as the president of the National Immigration Forum and a fellow at the Arizona State University Social Transformation Lab. This will be fascinating. We're going to do the specific. We're going to do the general, the philosophical, and of course, the politics. Let's dive right in. Thank you so much for being with us. And I want to split this conversation

into two parts. I'm going to explain what's happening at the border, what's happening with our immigration system, but also talk about what a good immigration system would look like something I know you've given a lot of thought to as well. But let's start with just where we are right now. So obviously a lot of headlines over Title 42, it's a public health measure, not an immigration measure, but it has wildly affected what's happening at the border. As the Biden administration has said that they're prepared to repeal it, a lot of pushback from Democrats and Republicans. saying that we are simply not prepared for what will happen after that.

So if you could just explain what's going on at the border right now, what's about to happen at the border right now. Sure. Well, I mean, first of all, Sarah, thank you so much. I am a huge, huge fan of all the work that you all do at the dispatch. And I am an avid reader of everything that's turned out every single day. So I really appreciate it. So Title 42.

So back in March of 2020, the Trump administration instituted, in essence, kind of an effort to close the U.S.-Mexico border to those seeking asylum by utilizing the Title 42 guidelines or policies of the CDC. Title 42, more or less, is a World War II era provision that says the government can close borders based on a public health emergency, which clearly, at that point in time, we were certainly in the middle of or beginning. This was kind of a boon for Stephen Miller. He was waiting for an opportunity to close the borders to immigration.

And the New York Times reported, I want to say a couple months later, that, yeah, quite frankly, you know, for Stephen Miller, Title 42 was his opportunity to end the immigration system. So what has happened over the course of the last two years is the approximately 1.7 million apprehensions have taken place at the U.S.-Mexico border under Title 42. Now, let's unpack that number a little bit, because over these two years, we've seen the rates of recidivism, in essence multiple attempts to cross, increase fourfold, some months, 30 to 40% increase in recidivism in rates. Why is that the case? Because under Title 42, if I am from Honduras and I'm coming to Customs and Border Protection asking for protection, and they say, no, you've got to return to Mexico, I am, in essence, spelled. I'm not formally detained and deported. So what the cartels are doing, and these are the key

characters in this awful story is the cartels. The cartels are selling packages of three tries for the price of one, meaning that they're telling people in Honduras pay us $10,000, and we will ensure that you have three attempts to ask for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. And that's a big reason why we're seeing this big number of apprehensions. Now, the Biden administration has said that they're going to end Title 42, and return to Title VIII. Now, Title VIII is the traditional border enforcement policy coming out of the Department of Justice, which means that if I am crossing, I apply for asylum,

I am ineligible, and I'm deported, and then I try again. Under Title VIII, I have a 10-year bar from trying to ran to the country. So that takes away that sales pitch from cartels. So in some ways, the Biden administration is actually increasing enforcement pretty dramatically at the border by going from Title 4 to 2 to Title 8.

But let's go through then what would happen under Title 8. And I want to just provide some statistics. So what happens first is that you would encounter someone from the Department of Homeland Security and you would say, I have a credible fear of returning to my home country. Approximately 88% of those encounters are passed through. So only 12% of people either,

don't even say the magic words right. I mean, it's pretty hard not to get your credible fear passed through in that initial encounter. Of those then, about half who passed that screening, then never file an application for asylum. They are released into the country, especially if they have children, they can't be held. And they never file an asylum claim. If you do file an asylum claim, let's see, there were 700% more removal orders issued in abstentia

uh over the last recently versus the last 10 years this is before title 42 was put into place so we're now talking 2019 really numbers um meaning you know a 700% increase in the people who don't show up for their hearing if they do file for asylum of those who then say the magic words actually file an asylum claim actually show up for their asylum hearing only 20% of those are be legally meritorious by an asylum judge. And so I think the pushback to what you're saying about how the Biden administration would actually be increasing enforcement, on the one hand, you're absolutely right because there are criminal penalties then if you reenter. Right now, there's nothing they can do with these reenterers. But on the other hand, if you took, let's even

say it's one third of the 1.7 million, although again, we have estimates from DHS intelligence about how many people are waiting to cross, you know, as many as 14,000 per day they think could start crossing on May 23rd if they remove Title 42. The vast majority of those then won't get legal asylum. They will simply be illegally present in the country, which is bad on a number of levels. And if you want to talk about the incentives for the cartel, the cartel doesn't care how your life is once you're here. And the cartel taking unaccompanied minors has been feeding some really horrible things in this country. So what's your answer to then why you don't keep Title 42 in place,

at least until we have some plan for what to do about 14,000 people a day, very, very few of which will actually ever have a meritorious asylum claim? So earlier about a month ago, a little more than a month ago, the Biden administration announced a new rule in terms of asylum processing. And this rule is due to go into effect on May 29th. I would argue that the administration should at least delay the lifting of Title 42 a week until this new rule is in place. So somebody needs to look at the calendar there.

A six-day problem. Exactly. But the new rule would allow U.S. citizenship and immigration service officers to adjudicate these cases. So that, therefore, if a person passes that credible fear initial screen, their case is heard in a much shorter amount of time when they're at the border. And then if they're not eligible for asylum, and let me be clear again, I'm not saying that everybody should be able to receive asylum, but the laws that they are on the books is that people

should be able to apply. So part of this, part of the solution here under the control of the administration is to have the personnel and the infrastructure in place so that USCIS can process a large number of these cases as they are presenting. That's number one. Number two, and this is where I think like the administration has really failed. And they have failed in terms of of engaging Congress in a process to actually reform the immigration system. Because the quickest way to reduce the number of migrants seeking asylum is to actually create legal pathways to immigration into the United States. So that way, you know, that migrant from Honduras is paying the United States $10,000 to

apply for a agriculture visa versus paying the cartels more than $10,000 on a very dangerous journey. And I just think that Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been, you know, they have abdicated any and all responsibility when it comes to lawmaking on immigration. And, you know, they're winning as a result. And, you know, and the cartels are just happy campers. They're just making money hand over a fist. So I understand and I agree with all the challenges you present. But the solution that we've had as a nation for decades is to blame the immigrant. And that is clearly not working because they're making perfectly rational decisions that anybody would make in the situations that they face. So we've got to approach this in a different

way. You and I are going to be in such a violent agreement on who is to blame for this problem, and it is Congress. It is not even the Biden administration. It is absolutely at the feet of both parties in Congress who have known about this problem for 15 years. But before we get to that part of the conversation, let's talk a little more practical what's going on at the border. So governor abbott in texas certainly making some headlines as well two different things that he well he's tried many things let's talk about two or three of them specifically um one is delaying commercial trucks from coming over the border he has since rescinded that after coming to an agreement with some of the mexican state governors that they would do more thorough checks looking for

smuggling operations and of course um you know the famous case in texas infamous um is the case case where a truck driver has 19 people in the back of his car, the car breaks down. It's in the summer in Texas. He's afraid that he will get arrested for smuggling illegal aliens. So he locks the back of the truck and all of them die, a horrible death. And I think it's important to tell some of those stories because otherwise it can seem like one side is quick. One side is cruel and the other side is kind, when in fact, I think all of this is incredibly cruel, the incentive system that has been set up, as you've said, people are making rational decisions, but those rational decisions can lead to horribly inhumane consequences when you say

that we don't have a functional system at our border, so just do whatever and the cartels are your best source. So that's one thing he did that they estimated had a $9 billion effect on US GDP, $4 billion just in Texas, not surprising that that didn't last. But then there's the more stunt-based, I think, approach that he took, or at least it's being portrayed as a stunt. And this is the idea that if you are a illegal alien in Texas, you have the choice to get on a bus and that bus will take you to D.C. And on the one hand, you know, the left I think has made fun of Abbott, I think they've said that it's cruel to just drop people off in D.C., but I don't feel

like those people have a good idea of what's actually happening at the border, because that is what's happening. It's just that the buses aren't going to D.C. These towns on the border with 4,500 people are experiencing that 14,000 a day. They're then having to charter buses to take folks to Yuvaldi or Laredo. Laredo gets overwhelmed. They then charter buses to San Antonio or Austin. And there are nonprofits and NGOs and those places set up to try to help. And I think that's important. And a part of the D.C. story that didn't work is that they didn't communicate of how then we could have something set up in D.C. for people showing up. But this idea that it's insane to give people a bus ride somewhere, that's what's already happening. And to not

experience that, I'm a Texan. So to not understand that from people outside of our state or outside of the border, I found insulting for people to sort of weigh in on their own judgments on that. And I'm curious, as someone who cares so deeply about this issue, where you fell on the stunt versus maybe this is an educational opportunity to tell people how this is working right now because it ain't good how it is. Well, you know, I've spent a lot of time in, you know, places like El Paso and Macal and, you know, Laredo and just in San Antonio. And I guess Best food in the country. Best food in the country, best people in country, just the landscape.

I mean, the Rio Grande Valley is just a special, special place. In El Paso, quite frankly, is one of my favorite towns in the nation. And I got to say that, you know, the organizations, the churches in these communities, the elected officials, they have been doing heroic work for years, decades, full stop. And they are kind of on the front lines of this in every single way. So look, I mean, Governor Abbott did not approach this as a teaching model. He approached this as a opportunity to politically demagogue asylum seekers, right? So I think we have to separate what Abbott's intentions were versus the need for the American

public to better understand what the situation is. And I think that what is happening, you know, a lot of the questions that we ask these days is like, example, you know, why are we welcoming Ukrainian refugees or even Afghans, Afghan allies, but then, you know, people who are presenting at the U.S.-Mexico border, whether they're Haitian or Central American, we have this very, very inhumane and cruel response. And I think that for, from our perspective, the National Immigration Forum, these are opportunities to continue to broaden the conversation around immigration and refugees. So that, you know, with the Afghan allies and the evacuation, it was a military community to step forward.

With Ukrainians, it's, you know, the church community as well as, you know, almost all Americans. But, you know, at the border, there's just such an outpouring of, you know, support, but also, like you said, tension around these issues. And, you know, how do we create the ways that people just better understand that, you know, the family fleeing MS-13 in Honduras is not entirely different than the family fleeing Putin in Ukraine? You know, their lives are both under immense threat. So what are we as a country doing to address not just those threats, but also help these folks, you know, find safety? So Mayor Don McLaughlin, Yvaldi said they began seeing large numbers of migrants coming through the town. They have 16,000 people in Uvaldi. And Border Patrol was releasing people in front of their local stores.

I just, I mean, that's what's happening in these places. And yes, I just can't agree with you more about the work that Catholic Charities has been doing, for instance, getting people to family. You know, they add one great story that I'll put in the show notes from the Texas Tribune about a man from the Congo who crossed the border and had $2 in his pocket, you know, gets bused by border patrol to various places, ends up in San Antonio with two bucks when the Greyhound lets him off. And that's it, man. there's nothing else for you. And he needed to get to Portland, Maine. There was a Congolese community up there and $2. That's what the federal response is right now in Texas to this immigration crisis.

And thankfully, Catholic Charities stepped in and got him a bus to Portland, Maine. So, like, that story ends well. But there were a few interesting things about it. A, the number of buses that he was put on until he was just dropped in San Antonio through these border towns, already not the safest thing I can imagine. But also, he would have been apprehended and held pending his asylum petition, but for the fact that he traveled with his children. And we create a whole other problem and incentive system at the border when the cartels can tell people, if you are a single man traveling, you will have to wait in what amounts to,

frankly, something worse than a prison in terms of the facilities and how they're actually overrun right now. Or if you can find children and say that they are yours, if they are your children, all the better, you're better off traveling with them. But regardless, take any minor and travel with that child across the border. And the incentives are so great for that. And I am deeply concerned about, as you said, everyone's a rational actor. And what happens when we incentivize bringing children? So I said there was a New York Times article this morning about Ukraine. families, extended families, making it to the San Diego Tijuana border. And the CBP was separating families because a child was traveling with their aunt.

So according to the law, that is a potential smuggling victim. So a lot of the cases that are actually extended family are conflated into this idea of trafficking children. So I think we have to be really thoughtful of how we are explaining this. and it's not always as simple as, you know, finding any child because that child may be a nephew or a niece. They might, and that's why I don't use statistics when I talk about this problem, because I think the statistics are unhelpful for exactly what you said. I think it's impossible to know how many of these kids belong where they are versus don't. And I hope the vast, vast majority are traveling with an aunt or uncle, even if they say it's a father, you know, that that person cares deeply for that kid.

but the problem is, what if it's 2%? Are 2% of what, you know, a million people a year, is that acceptable? But at the end of the day, we have two choices of the country, given the current system, given the current world that we live in. We have the choice or the solution that President Trump put in front of us and saying, okay, anybody who applies for is coming to apply for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border has to remain in Mexico. What happens to that family as a result? 10,000 cases of violent robbery, rape as documented or less since January of 2021 under Title 42.

Not to mention the public disease aspects. I mean, these are shanty towns actually makes them sound too nice. So the consequences of the Trump approach to immigration and asylum application is that. The Biden consequence is that, yes, people are going to be put into the process, put into the system, and then, you know, hopefully adjudicated at the border under this new rule or released into the nation so that they are part of the system. This is where we get to our kind of our mutual agreement of ultimately Congress has got to update this system and has to say, okay, as a country, asylum should not be the only way that somebody can apply for legal entry because that's the case right now. We should have also other ways for people to apply for legal entry to the country that meet the United States economic and social. needs. I mean, look, we're facing a massive labor shortage. A lot of these folks at the U.S. Mexico border, they would jump at a job in a restaurant, at a nursing home, at a farm. That is a massive

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Two, as you've mentioned, like this asylum problem at the borders themselves, where the borders are both porous but not supposed to be, but they definitely are and everyone knows it. I mean, what, like, the worst of all possible scenarios for a border of a nation state. And lastly, the chain migration aspect. And you can take any of the three you want, just explain chain migration, if you will, and what that would be versus a merit-based immigration system or some other form. And that is not, I think chain migration is sometimes used to sound derogatory. And I don't mean it that way, because someone having community ties, we know is incredibly important. But overall it makes for a weird immigration system. So explain what we have. Explain what you,

Ali, would create if you got to start from scratch. Sure. So let's take a quick step back and define the problem in a slightly different way. Right. So at the beginning of 2021, my colleague Daniel Zach and I issued a paper called Room to Grow. And what we did is we looked at the old age dependency ratio in the United States. In essence, the ratio of retirement age adults, to working age adults. Historically, around, you know, beginning in 1965, that ratio would be well over six working age adults to retirees. Over time, that number has plummeted to what it is currently now, about 3.54 working

age adults to retirees. On the current trajectory, we are in a position of, in essence, having a hollowed out social security system in the next 20 to 30 years because of this ratio continuing to decrease. the only way to increase the ratio of working-age adults to retirees and to sustain our social security system in any sort of a timely fashion, barring, you know, some sort of Benjamin Button kind of, you know, thing where retirement age adults become working-age adults, is for... Okay, so that's your immigration plan.

Benjamin Button technology. Okay, check. This is to increase legal immigration. And our theory is just to increase legal immigration to maintain the current ratio of 3.54 working age adults to retirees is to increase legal immigration by only 300,000 people. In a nation of 350 million plus, 1.3 million people per year is not a lot of people. So if that's the problem, then the solution is a combination of legal work-based immigration programs, whether it's for a skilled farm worker or a skilled engineer. And then I think we have to come to terms with the idea that people are not just workers. People are parts of families. So that by extending the opportunity for that farm worker

engineer to actually legally sponsor their families to join them, what the research shows is that by having that family unit, children are more likely to succeed. If the family goes on to start a small business, there is a social network, a network through which they can share child care duties. They can, you know, pool money to buy that home, start that business. There are all kinds of positive, you know, net pluses to immigration in a much more holistic way. But what has happened, you know, over the last two decades is that immigration has been presented to a large part of the American public as an existential threat to the American identity. And so the question is, how do you have a policy system that meets economic and social needs of the country, but also helps people see that immigration is not an existential point to the American identity?

In fact, it is a continuation, if not an expansion and a growth of the American identity. I think that, look, there are some people who are just anti-immigration. Nobody's going to argue that. But for the vast majority of people who show up in these polls, I think that they're angry that there's not a legal system being followed in place. And instead, it feels like almost a whoever is willing to break the law the most gets to come. And the system that you're describing sounds remarkably like how our system is supposed to work. You know, we have visas for people to come into the country based on their jobs. And then once they have legal status here, they can bring.

family members. But in reality, that's a very, very now small part of the immigration system. Now, in part, I think, because we have too few visas being offered, right? We have two little legal immigration, and that does drive illegal immigration. But now we get to, instead of getting to create the system you want from scratch, create the system building on what we already have now, which is, I mean, to say it's a cottage industry, it's not cottage. It's like, city skyscraper industry that these cartels have to bring people up through the southern border, what would you do if we increase legal immigration to a number that you think is the correct number, whatever that might be, two million people a year. I'm very open to a high number on the legal side.

And then what do you do at the border? So what you do at the border is you actually then focus the resources that are in place and the resources are necessary on the bad actors that are attempting to either smuggle drugs, guns, or money or people through the border. And that there are penalties for people who are trying to cross illegally that are, you know, in essence, kind of above and beyond what they face now. But how is that different from what we have now? But I have talked to so many people in Central America and Mexico who have paid that cartel of $10,000. I mean, for my book, Crossing Borders, I'll tell you a story of I was on a hillside in the highlands of Honduras talking to a coffee farmer, Carlos.

Between climate change, corruption, and decreasing coffee yields, the only choice he had to be able to pay his loans and pay for health care for his kid was to try to get to the U.S.-Mexico border. He told, and he got turned around, right? And he had to pay $10,000, $12,000 to cartel to do it. He told me, point blank, he said, if I had, number one, if the Honduran government was functioning and I could make a go of it here, I would stay. He didn't want to leave.

Number two, he said, if I had a way to pay for a legal path to enter the United States, I never would have paid a cartel. But presume for a second that even if we increased legal immigration to two million people based on merit and then their family members, there would still be lots and lots of people in Central and South America who would not get that lottery ticket. And so that Carlos may be in the exact same position, in which case he's still paying $10,000 to a cartel that's going to use that money to fund their own drugs, human smuggling, sex trafficking, trade. And defeating, by the way, the very governments that we need standing up.

Like, we're funding the cartels that are corrupting these governments. It is so cyclical and frustrating to even think about. So I don't see the legal immigration system as a solution. to the demand problem? So the demand problem is also addressed by addressing the root causes of migration in a place, in a region like Central America. So under the Obama administration, for example, there was an effort that was politically and financially supported by the U.S. to purge the Honduran National Police of Corruption.

Over the course of a very short amount of time, I'm talking like 18 months, 6,000 Honduran police officers from the leadership to rank and file. were fired from their job. And what happens? At the same time, the Honduran national police as being purged of corrupt actors, the homicide rate in Honduras,

which was as recently as 2014, San Pedro Sula, was the most dangerous place in the world to live. The homicide rate in Honduras starts to decrease as the Honduran National Police is purged of corrupt actors.

So there are ways to address root causes and really significant quality of life indicators. For somebody, Because look, if you have a taxi in Honduras right now, you're being shaken down by gangs because the gangs are paying the police. So it's starting to chip away at that stuff. And it takes a long-term commitment. Because under Trump, one of the first programs to go in Central America where all these efforts to root our corruption. Totally true. No disagreement there. The problem is it would be great if the issue were Mexico, because that is how we approached when we had the majority of people crossing the. the U.S. southern border were coming from Mexico. We spent so much money trying to root out corruption in Mexico and make that a functioning democracy, which frankly, pretty well done.

Mexico is in far better shape than it has been at various points in its history. And then the problem moved to Central America. But that's even not all the problem at this point. That was the problem three years ago. And when I say problem, I mean the plurality slash majority of people trying to cross at the border. Haiti, African countries. As you said, they're Ukrainians now trying to cross. Your solution is to go fix every country in the world, which I would love to, but I'm not sure that we have the capability or expertise, as we have shown throughout our country's history, of fixing other countries. We haven't been very good at it. So I am not saying, like, it's not, I don't think the United States job to fix countries. Our job, and again, I mean, through the project,

gotten to know the Honduran work more better than other places, is that there was a regional approach, a hemispheric approach to addressing the situation in Central America, where, and I just think that, you know, for so long, we as a nation have really kind of ignored Central America and even South America and only recently played any attention to Mexico. And there are ways to have regional approaches where you're drawing in other partners, you're addressing, you're identifying, okay, what are the specific levers that we need to be pulling as a as a coalition of countries that address these root causes. So it's not all the U.S. going in. I mean, a lot of, you know, the work in Central America, frankly, on the corruption

front was done by other Central American countries where they said, okay, we are going to work through the organization of American states and put in place a very high profile and high-powered legal team to root out corruption. So there are different ways to do this, but yes, it takes American leadership, but it doesn't necessarily take only American taxpayer dollars. Okay. Let me provide you an alternative to your solution and see, I want you to critique it, why it won't work, why it's not good. So have the same legal immigration system that you want. Maybe it would, you know, be tweaked slightly in terms of the how we decide which jobs we need, stuff like that. Maybe it looks more like Canada. Maybe it, whatever. There's ways to do that.

But let's say we're basically an agreement on the legal side. On the asylum issue or the southern border issue, you change the policy so that anyone who will ever get asylum in the United States has to apply in their home country or a neighboring country at the U.S. Embassy. You massively, I mean, you start slashing the Pentagon budget and put it into Border Patrol, the technology that we know we could have. And basically, you make sure that you're catching a very high. percentage of people crossing the border illegally. They get turned around immediately a la what's

happening under Title 42, but this wouldn't be a public health issue because nobody crossing the border can apply for asylum on our side of the border or even in Mexico if they're not from a country that touches Mexico, which is only one country. And therefore you stop all of this incentive because as long as some people crossing the border get to stay, and get legal status because they cross the border illegally, I just don't see how anything you're doing in these countries is going to be a big enough incentive to stop that incentive, as bad as it may be.

But we can stop border crossings at the southern border to a way larger extent that we're doing now if we simply don't let anyone apply for asylum once they've crossed. Critique. I would agree with parts of your proposal. and have concerns, if you will, about other parts. Great. That's why you're here, the expert.

So I would completely agree that there needs to be a ramping up of opportunities for people to apply for refugee or asylum status in the region. Under the Biden administration, I'm sorry, under Obama, and then Biden has tried to restart the program, a Central American Miner's program, which in essence allows minors to apply for protection, you know, in a neighboring country. They haven't... This is Miners-O-R, not Miner's ER. Correct. O.R. Minor's. The program has not reached the scale that's necessary. And I don't know if that's a function of resources, commitment, or just pure difficulty of implementing it. But I do think that would reduce some of the pressure at the U.S.-Mexico border. I do think that then working with UNHCR and others so that people, if they do want to apply.

What is UNHCR? Sorry, it's the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. In essence, the international organization that does a processing for refugee resoundment. So, you know, putting in place the infrastructure at Mexico, southern border, Guatemala, Honduras, et cetera. You know, Panama, for example, you're seeing a lot of people come from South America through Panama would all be incredibly important. Those all would be measures alongside legal immigration that would reduce pressure. What I'm flinching at is the idea of changing asylum law so that nobody who gets to the U.S.-Mexico border can apply for protection. And, you know, I'm thinking of Haitians, Cubans, Ukrainians, you know, much less somebody from Central America who is just in a dire situation.

So I would not want us to say at the U.S.-Mexico border, nobody can apply for asylum protection, rather set up other opportunities to recover. what if they can only apply at the U.S.-Mexican border, just not once they've crossed? So then they're applying on Mexican territory, right? Correct. They would be applying to U.S. officials on the border. So then you're asking Mexico to set up, in essence, kind of refugee camps on their side of the border, which is kind of a version of what Trump has done with Remain in Mexico. I know.

Right. But the hope would be that that would be the, as you said, like the very few who, for some cannot do this other way. But I'm with you, right? Like, I think there would be problems with any of this. Okay, we haven't talked about the politics for good reason and that the politics, I think, are stupid and largely pointless. But nevertheless, let's end on it because it's the only way this gets fixed is through politics. There was a time when DACA, the unaccompanied minors, sorry, the people who were brought to the country as minors illegally being given work status, legal status in the country, that was an executive action taken by President Obama,

that by and large, I think, if not the majority of legal scholars agree, probably exceeded his authority. The Fifth Circuit certainly thought so. The Supreme Court has kind of insinuated it as such. So it has been, was one of the biggest carrots in this whole thing is we can fix DACA. We can codify DACA into law because we've got these kids in this country, well, they're now adults. And this is stupid that they don't have a legal status here when they don't speak any other language. They went to our schools and high schools and then we're going to kick them out after they get their, you know, PhD from Harvard. That's the dumbest thing you can imagine. I haven't heard a lot about DACA as a

real chip lately. And I'm curious what you think, you know, if you tied DACA to something else, what would the compromise look like? Why isn't DACA being talked about more as part of a small bipartisan compromise with the same six Democrats, nine Democrats maybe now, who are willing to sign on to a bill that would say the Biden administration can't get rid of Title 42 at the border? If they're willing to sign on to that, why can't we get a sort of old school gang of 12 back in action to do at least a little bit of this? Not what you and I are talking about. There seems to be zero appetite to actually do something big and smart. But what about the little stuff?

So you bring up a lot of really important points here. First of all, with DACA, DACA as a program is a great risk. So you have this case coming out of South Texas that, yes, this Supreme Court kicked back, but it is continuing to move through the process. we are expecting that it will make it to the Fifth Circuit sometime before the end of the year and eventually to the Supreme Court next spring, which means that it is very likely by legal minds much, much, much smarter than me. I just play a lawyer on podcast where the Supreme Court will eliminate the DACA program, meaning people cannot renew their status. So if you're a Republican lawmaker, this is a situation you're looking at. You're looking at likelihood of Republicans

winning the House and the Senate. So you've got a Speaker McCarthy, and then you have a chairman Jim Jordan of judiciary, not a friend of immigrants. You have a leader McConnell who doesn't really seem to care about the issue, and then you have a senator to Grassley, likely, or someone else in charge of Senate judiciary, unless it's someone like TILUS, probably not a friend. So what happens next year is that DACA is ended by the Supreme Court

and Republicans are faced with this complete disaster of, okay, they're the ones who are not going to move forward on a solution because you have this major war happening within the Republican Party. And the Biden administration is then forced to start deporting dreams. Bad politics for Republicans. So that gets us to where we are right now and to what you're talking about. Over the last, I would say about four or five months, kind of once the reconciliation window has closed, you're seeing an increasing number of Democrats and Republicans working

both publicly to a certain degree, but more importantly in many ways, behind closed doors, to say, okay, what is the solution that we can reach? I would argue that with a growing number of Democrats urging the administration to pause on the lifting of Title 42, there is now some momentum on the part of Democrats to say, okay, we got to come to terms with the idea that we need something around border security. So how about this, Democrats? Let's get something for it. Let's get protection for dreamers.

Let's update the agricultural visa program. So there's a lot of work that's happening in this space, and we're part of a new coalition called the Alliance for a New Immigration Consensus that has been working, you know, and part of this is, you know, part of the group is, you know, Americans for prosperity, you know, the Catholics, the Evangelicals, the Chamber, the Episcopal Church. So we're all working together to try to figure out, okay, how do we get Democrats from Republicans to sit down and work together towards a discrete set of solutions, not the big solutions that we've talked about in the fact. But really kind of what are the very specific pieces? I'll be curious to see how that moves forward. I think you're spot on about sort of the horizon political incentives. The one part that I disagree with potentially, although it's interesting that you raise it, is the idea that the Biden administration would start deporting dreamers because the legal

problem with DACA was not the deportation prioritization of people who have violated the law, but actually that they were giving legal work status, which was something that the court so far, at least have said, only Congress can do. The president can't grant legal status, even though the president can use his prosecutorial discretion, enforcement discretion of who to deport. So if the Biden administration started deporting dreamers, in my view, that would be purely for the political lever because it would not be required at all for them to deport people who, you know, had not broken the law. Now, of course, there are those unique examples where someone is a dreamer, a DACA recipient who then, you know, open container violation, misdemeanor, and that then puts them in a deportation shoot. So I guess that part's possible. I'm curious what you think about that. So you're correct. One of the, I think the most important kind of law enforcement

changes the Biden administration is put into places to kind of returning to prosecutorial discretion so that, you know, our valuable law enforcement resources actually spent on public safety threats. Now, of course, I think it was Texas and a couple of other states promptly sued the Biden administration in protest to those prosecutorial discretion measures. So as meritorious as the DACA is unlawful cases, that's how unmeritorious the prosecutorial discretion case is unlawful is, just so people don't think I am a one-way ratchet on this. So you're correct. I think the chances of the Biden administration deporting people given the prosecutorial discretion changes is likely minimal. Yet still 7 to 800,000 DACA sapiens would lose their legal status, would lose their work authorization, would lose an incredible amount of stability in their lives. And if Texas and other states are successful in terms of pushing or combat or fighting against these prosecutorial discretion measures, then immigration customs enforcement has kind of free reign to deport trainers.

Okay. Last question. You spend your career, your life, advocating for people who want to come to this country who believe that it is their best hope for a better life, for their family, and for their future family, right? I mean, as my grandmother came here, having no idea that I would exist, let alone what I would become. But that was part of her dream. I want to reverse this for you a little bit. If you, Ali, had to live in any other country in the world and you couldn't live in the United States, you've traveled extensively, what country would you pick? Oh, that was not a question I was expecting.

We all know you think America's the best. I want to know what second best to Ali? I would, it would be a toss-up between Portugal and Thailand. Thailand, I had like, I had to go to a meeting in Thailand. in Bangkok, and I went out for a couple days early, I ate my way through that city. Oh, man. That was fantastic. I would just sit and eat and sweat and just eating sweat.

It was fantastic. And then Portugal is just a beautiful, beautiful country. In both places, the people are amazing. Yeah, so that would be my choice. I think those are good choices. And in the meantime, we will still believe that this country is, that's why. that's why we're here. That's why we're having these long chats. That's why you do what you do. And we so appreciate it. And thank you for taking the time to explain your views on all of this to our listeners and this back and forth with me, the not expert.

I just really appreciate all of it. So thank you. No, thank you so much. And like I said, a huge fan. I really appreciate everything that you do at the dispatch. And, you know, I feel like there's a little bit of a bucket list podcast. So thank you. During the Volvo Fall Exhibit. experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, leased a 2026 XE90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com.