Today, Explained - Give Us Your No One

Episode Date: February 26, 2018

Today, the United States Supreme Court denied a request from the Trump administration to expedite a decision on DACA. This keeps the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on life support for a few more months, but also keeps its 690,000 recipients in limbo: Do they stay or do they go? Congress still hasn’t been able to pass a vote on DACA. Vox’s Dara Lind and Matthew Yglesias say that’s because Trump has moved the conversation into unfamiliar territory: from illegal immigration to legal immigration.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New week, new shows. Can't wait to share them with you because I got some really good sleep this weekend. Did you? If not, consider a new mattress from Mattress Firm. They've got hella mattress brands to choose from. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep. Dreamers. Unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. Named after the DREAM Act, a bipartisan proposal from 2001 that was never passed. DACA.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Established by President Barack Obama in 2012 to give people who came to the U.S. as minors the opportunity to stay and work. Almost a million people enrolled. Remember that one time the government shut down earlier this year? We have a 700-page bill that no one has read that was printed at midnight. No, not that time. The other time. The bigger one. The Democrats are shutting down our government to stand up for people in this country illegally. That big shutdown was over immigration. What to do about

unauthorized immigrants who came to the United States as children? Here's Jeff Sessions last September. I'm here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded. There were vague promises of a permanent solution for DACA, but six months later, crickets. So Democrats shut the government down. Now, the government's obviously up and running again, but there's still no permanent DACA plan on the horizon. And a big part of it is because now we're talking about something else. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has changed its mission statement to no longer characterize the U.S. as a, quote, nation of immigrants.

All of a sudden, we're talking about whether immigration is still a fundamental part of our country, our identity. So how did we get here? How did we go from debating a DACA solution to questioning our basic values in the space of a month? I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, full disclosure, an immigrant, a naturalized citizen actually, thanks to that agency that just changed its mission statement. And this is Today Explained. If you'd asked me a couple of years ago, why can't both sides come to an agreement on immigration, I would have said that they can't agree on what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently living in the U.S. Daryl Lind writes about immigration for Vox. That's not really the dividing line anymore.

For a lot of Republicans, including President Trump, who's really been the driver of this change, there's a newfound interest in cutting legal immigration levels pretty drastically. The split right now is do we want to substantially cut legal immigration to the U.S. or not? Right. Yeah. And I can't imagine anything that sort of captures that newfound interest more than what happened last week. So USCIS, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, dropped that line about America being, quote, a nation of immigrants. Yeah, they actually overhauled the entire mission statement. They also no longer mention the citizenship part of their mission, even though it doesn't change what the agency is actually doing. They're still processing applications for people to come to the U.S. legally to change their status here. But they no longer consider that, you know, core part of their mission, according to the mission statement, which is interesting given that it's in the name. There was an email that the director of the agency sent out to staff along with the new

mission statement saying that it's important that this change happened because they didn't want to give the impression that the point of the agency was to serve immigrants rather than serving Americans. The agency doesn't consider it part of its job to help people who are here as immigrants become Americans, integrate in their communities, it's kind of implying that that's not even possible. I was pretty surprised to hear this news late last week, but maybe I shouldn't have been. It was Jeff Sessions who first made the announcement that the Trump administration would be phasing out DACA. Right.

Check out this vintage Sessions tape from a Breitbart interview he did in 2015. In seven years, we'll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the republic. And some people think, well, we've always had these numbers, but it's not so. This is very unusual. So Jeff Sessions throws back to a time when the U.S. government stepped in to really limit legal immigration. And in fact, when the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy,

and it slowed down immigration significantly. Sessions seems to be a little wistful for the Immigration Act of 1924. Now, Dara, I'm scared to ask, because brown people weren't allowed to host shows back then. But can you take us back to 1924? In the aftermath of World War I, there was a concern at the time that America's culture was being diluted and torn asunder by these southern and eastern European immigrants. That they were taking jobs, that they were uneducated, that they wouldn't learn English, etc. So they set country quotas for who could come to the United States. So that, for example, Ireland and Germany could send a lot

of immigrants, but countries like Italy and Poland could not. This was a conversation focused on Europe because we'd already excluded Chinese immigration and there just wasn't large numbers of immigration from, you know, say Africa. And they weren't trying to regulate immigration from Mexico, particularly at that point. And the argument at the time was explicitly about racial balance, was that there was something in the U.S. that would be threatened and tipped over if too many foreign people came at once. When you're baking something, you don't want to add all the flour at once. Immigrants were the flour in this.

And Jeff Sessions is saying that the cake's at risk of getting too floury again, and we need to slow it back down. Yeah, it's like too much brown sugar. So 1924, we establish these quotas that take us all the way to the 1960s? Yeah. And at that point, they created the legal immigration system we have in place today, which is mostly based on coming to the U.S. based on having relatives who are already here or coming to the U.S. based on having a job.

As a result, since 1965, immigration to the U.S. has gone from being a European thing to being a global thing. Immigration from Asia has increased dramatically. Immigration from Africa has also gotten really substantial. The flow of immigration from the Western Hemisphere has gone from being overwhelmingly Mexican to being much more diverse, including more Central American, more South American. America right now is bringing people from all over the world in a way that's never been true in American history before. When Jeff Sessions talks about going back to 1924, explicitly what he's saying is that there are too many people coming in. But given what the 1924 Act, you know, was in practice, we need to go back to a system that favors white people over non-white people. Why are they doing this, pushing against legal immigration? This gets into a lot of questions about what the White House's goal really is, right? It's not clear that anyone in the White House actually thought that they were going to be able to get cuts to legal immigration. But if they did think that that was possible, it makes sense that they would

want to tie it to something that not only Democrats wanted, which was a path to citizenship for DREAMers, but that was actually urgent. But by shifting the debate to legal immigration, Trump is making it much harder for Congress to pass a solution for DACA, which is the thing that they're ostensibly supposed to be working on. And at CPAC just this past Friday, Trump was pretty unequivocal that this was the Democrats' fault. The Democrats are being totally unresponsive. They don't want to do anything about DACA, I'm telling you. And it's very possible that DACA won't happen. And it's not

because of the Republicans. It's because of the Democrats. And frankly, you better elect more Republicans, folks, or it'll never happen. I am confident saying that Donald Trump does not understand what is happening with the DACA program. I am extremely confident saying that. Let's explain it to him. I have tried. Donald Trump, please listen to Today Explained. Give me the tweet version. So let's say like I'm Donald Trump. I'm scrolling through my Twitter feed. There's a retweet somehow from Dara Lind about like, dear Mr. President, here's how DACA works. What would it say? Right now, 122 immigrants lose work permits a day. In March, that goes to 400 plus. The way that DACA is set up is that individual immigrants have individual work permits. So it's not that all 690,000 people who were covered by it on

September 5th when Trump announced he was ending the program are all losing them on one day. There are court orders in place that allow them to reapply. But those court orders have only been in place for a month. And thanks to the Supreme Court's decision this morning, they'll probably be in place for a few more months yet. So many of those people who have applied are probably going to end up getting work permits at some point in the next few months. In a best case scenario, a lot of people are going without work permits at some point in the next few months. In a best case scenario, a lot of people are going without work permits for a couple of months, which also means they're vulnerable to deportation during that time. At real Donald Trump, why aren't the Democrats doing anything? Democrats tried.

Republicans insisted on legal immigration overhaul. No deal. Coming up, the midterm elections and how's this all going to pan out for President Trump. This is Today Explained. If you think about it, you spend at least a ton of your life in bed. So why waste that much life on a subpar mattress? Check out Mattress Firm. Some people call them America's Neighborhood Mattress Store because you can find them online, sure, but also out there IRL. Mattress Firm can help you stretch your budget a little further when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep. These are mattress experts, but that's not their only expertise. Mattress Firm can help you build

your bed from headboards to adjustable bases to sheets and they've got bedroom decor mattress firm has your back and your front you're totally covered go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to see their latest deals mattress firm offers 120 night sleep trial to ensure perfection and 120 night low price guarantee so you know you paid the perfect price. Again, go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how your sleeping could be improved. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from President Donald Trump has managed to pretty quickly change the conversation about immigration in the United States from what do we do about undocumented immigrants to whether we really want immigrants at all. Yeah, that's a real

innovation of Donald Trump's. Matthew Iglesias writes about politics for Vox. He also co-founded the joint. It used to be that the question of what to do with undocumented immigrants was very contentious in Republican circles. George W. Bush was for a legalization program. Mitt Romney ran strongly against that. But almost all Republicans you heard from said that they were very much in favor of legal immigration, that that was the right way to do it, part of the American way. And Trump has really changed that around. Jeff Sessions used to be a lonely voice in GOP circles calling for cuts to legal immigration. Now Trump has made it mainstream.

Most Republican senators seem to be lining up behind him on that topic. It's a real shift from what we've seen over the past couple of generations. How did he do that? It's not like President Obama came into the White House and managed to shift everyone's opinions on immigration, did he? No, I mean, but I do think you've seen the parties realigning on the immigration topic. 10 or 15 years ago, this was an important issue in politics, but one that the parties were not that well sorted on. Starting under Obama, Democrats became more clearly identified as the pro-immigration party. And Donald Trump has really made the Republican Party a clear vehicle for anti-immigration sentiment that I think polls show was present in the population, but wasn't sort of fused into

partisan politics the way he has made it. Is that a bad long-term game plan? It seems like the country's getting browner. I mean, the conventional wisdom among Republican establishment types had been that the party desperately needed to do something to become more appealing to African-American, Latino, and Asian voters. Trump has really gone the other way. And he made it work, though. I mean, he picked up votes from white, working class, northern, secular people who had been voting Democratic.

And they flocked to Trump's banner. And the immigration issue is an important reason for dragging them into it. So it creates a very different political map from the one experts had been sort of anticipating. And it's genuinely unclear how it's going to play out, I think. Hillary Clinton very much had this message of stronger together during her campaign. Is sort of catering to people who are pro-immigration

a bad game plan for the Democrats? Or is it going to help them in this midterm election? I think it looks really differently in the House and in the Senate race. In the House races, a lot of the biggest swing districts have relatively well-educated white populations and relatively large Asian and Latino populations. So those are places in California, in Texas, in Florida, to some extent even in the suburbs of Minneapolis, in New Jersey, with this strong anti-immigration tilt, I think it's going to be a real problem for Republican candidates. In the Senate, it's the reverse. The Democrats are trying to win tough races

in West Virginia, in North Dakota, in Montana, in Indiana, in Wisconsin, in Ohio. These are all states where there are very few Asian and Latino people and where the white population has below average levels of college degrees. Those are places where anti-immigration politics probably helps the GOP. So you see the sort of two arms of Congress torn in different directions on immigration politics. Which makes me think we're just still so far out from figuring this out. I mean, we are very far from a bill passing. Part of what happened here was that it initially seemed like Trump was trying to use the Deferred Action for Tribal Arrivals program as leverage to get wall money. And that worked. Democrats were willing to do it. But as Democrats became willing to make that deal, Trump raised his aspirations to push for these

huge cuts to legal immigration. And he's nowhere close to having 60 Senate votes for that. It's not clear that he has a House majority for it. And there's no real path forward to doing that. And at the same time, Trump staking out that position means Democrats don't have a path for their kind of vision of a path to citizenship for Dreamers. So we're in a real state of deadlock. The parties have moved further apart than they've ever been. They've polarized the issue.

And, you know, there's reasons for that. It gives people a clear choice, but it makes it very unlikely that anything will happen. And in the meantime, for dreamers, they're faced with some pretty tough choices. I will lose my education, which I'm paying for myself. I will lose my occupation. Go back to where? I don't know.

I mean, this is all I've known for the past 16 years of my life. I had a lot of students in tears asking me if I was going to be taken away and if they could hide me. I had students ask me if their parents were deported, if they were going to be allowed to leave with them, or if they would become a part of the foster care system. To be in our shoes, to be us for a day or for our life. Being brought here, you know, at two months, you know, not realizing that you were not a citizen here until you're 13 because you got really sick. Not realizing that you can't drive,

that you can't go on senior trips, that you probably won't be able to go to college, that you won't be able to get a job, that you have to live in fear. Imagine that. Thanks to Matthew Iglesias and Dara Lynn from Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Hey, thanks for listening all the way to the end. As a reward, here's a tip. Mattress Firm wants to help you get better sleep,

and they'd like to save you money. Your budget stretches further when you shop at America's Neighborhood Mattress Store. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep.