Today, Explained - Our immigration identity crisis

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Americans hold contradictory views on immigration: They’re more supportive of it than ever before, while also calling it the nation’s most divisive political issue. A pollster, a policy researcher, and a pundit help make sense of our stalled immigration debate. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember just a few days ago when, for the first time ever, a United States president got convicted of a felony? Of 34 felonies. The first thing he said was, of course, the whole trial was rigged. I'm a very innocent man. But the second thing he said was... Our country's gone to hell. He was weirdly talking all of a sudden about immigration. Millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now. He was weirdly talking all of a sudden about immigration.

The next day he spoke about his guilty verdicts again. This time immigration was the first thing he wanted to talk about. and millions of people are flowing in from all parts of the world, not just South America, from Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East. It's an election year and the leading Republican candidate, maybe the leading candidate, period, wants to make it all about immigration. So we're going to talk about our options on Today Explained. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement,

and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Today explains Sean Ramos from former president Donald Trump only wants to talk about immigration. He's promising mass deportations. He wants to end birthright citizenship for people who are here unlawfully. He'd like to deny entry to legal immigrants, depending on their ideological beliefs. He'll be the first to tell you immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

That's what Biden's platform, on the other hand, is evolving. He came into office big on being humane, but then he started breaking records in a bad way. Illegal border crossings are averaging two million a year under his watch. That's the most ever, the worst this problem's ever been. And it's starting to affect his approach. Today, he announced he wants to close the southern border with Mexico and suspend asylum protections. It's a pretty Trumpy policy position to take. And without a doubt, he's taking it

because the crisis at the southern border is shifting American attitudes on this issue. Just ask Gallup. I'm Lydia Saad, not Lydia Saad, director of U.S. social research at Gallup. For decades, Gallup's been asking Americans one big, huge question. Yeah, so that's our most important problem facing the country question.

And that one actually goes back 65 years. And in April, which is our latest reading on that, immigration was the most often mentioned problem, mentioned by 27% of Americans. The next most often mentioned problem was the government itself at 18%. Immigration's a huge issue. And when you get rid of that, get rid of the government. Yeah, that's a popular one. But just because Americans increasingly think immigration's our biggest problem doesn't mean they want to shut it all down like Donald. Overall, the public thinks immigration's a good thing. They welcome immigration in concept,

but they're concerned about illegal immigration. And so at the border, they want to see basically a process put into place so that people are processed correctly without all of this chaos, basically, that's happening at the border. And then all of this sending migrants to blue cities and all of that, that just doesn't make sense to people. Like there's something broken, right? Americans aren't asking for much. For the most part, they simply want an immigration system that works, one that lets people who want to make this country better in and keeps people who don't out.

And this is something of a shift from, say, 30 years ago. Back in the 90s, when immigration was a lot less popular than it is today, there was much broader concern about immigration. People wanted it decreased, didn't think it was a good thing. Since then, Republicans have continued to see immigration as a net negative for the economy, even more so today. But Democrats have really switched and now see immigration as a positive for the economy. And it's worth talking about where Americans were on this issue 30 years ago, because according to Vox alum Dara Lind,

it was 30 years ago that Congress last managed to do something on this issue. When we're talking about the kind of broader issue, and it's not just legal immigration, but also enforcement, you have to look at 1996. All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. When Congress passed a fairly broad bill that stepped up immigration enforcement in the United States and narrowed ways for people who were here without authorization to get legal. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure

our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more. So the political context of 1996 is really important, right? If you're familiar with political history, you know 1996 as not just a presidential election year, but the year that President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform, EDPA, the Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act, and signed this immigration bill, IRA, IRA. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to

permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it. And all of those were part of this post-1994 pivot to the right that the Clinton administration did to make the case to voters that they were governing in a centrist fashion. And that required working with Republicans in Congress to demonstrate that the Clinton administration could be trusted to keep the country's best interests at heart and not just governing from the left. And it's not like the left and the right haven't tried to pass immigration reform since then. They've tried and failed over and over and over again. When President Obama tried to pass a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013, it was like, you know, negotiated with like four Republicans and four Democrats

in the Senate. We are here to announce that eight senators from opposite sides of the political aisle are coming together on a common-sense immigration reform proposal that we believe can pass the Senate. Very old-school, let's all work together. The legislation isn't perfect. There are provisions most, if not all, senators can support. Some will appeal more to one side than the other. No one will like every provision in the bill.

Neither should anyone oppose every provision. There was polling at that time that showed that Republicans supported the bill until you told them Obama supported it. Immigration was an issue that resisted polarization for his argument about why you should be president. That immigrants were bad people, that they't seen in seven, eight years. And the COVID pandemic was the best thing that could ever happen to them because, A, they used this obscure public health policy to start expelling people without even giving them the chance to seek asylum in the United States. But also, nobody was moving in spring of 2020. And so the numbers went down again, and it allowed them to obscure the fact that nothing in immigration craft outsports forever. But on the flip side, you know, immigration doesn't just encompass immigration enforcement, but also legal immigration.

And the Trump administration's efforts to impose extreme vetting and to slow the process and to make it really, really hard for people to immigrate legally did create the situation where the agency that deals with legal immigration, USCIS, is still really struggling from backlogs from the one-two punch of Trump in the COVID pandemic. And, you know, again, this isn't a thing that Americans are usually thinking about when they think about immigration. Immigration and the border are kind of synonymous. But in terms of what the Trump administration was really enthusiastic about, even more so than the border, where they really distinguished themselves from previous administrations was that it wasn't a legal immigration good, illegal immigration bad.

It was all immigrants should be held to a higher degree of scrutiny. Biden wins the election in 2020, famously, undisputed win. He comes in and says he's going to turn the page on immigration. But here we are, four-ish years later, and he's adopting many of the policies that Trump promoted. The Biden administration reversed course and announced that they were planning to expand Title 42. Does that mean that Donald Trump was on to something? I think that the partisan polarization of this can imply that Democratic elected officials have a totally different strategy than Republican elected officials in terms of what a border solution would look like. Unfortunately, we haven't seen that. What we've seen is that the idea that the solution to the border is to stop people from trying to come to begin with is a really, really seductive one.

Because that's the only way you get apprehension numbers down. The way we measure border security isn't the number of people who are getting through. It's the number of people who are getting through. It's the number of people who are getting caught. And so even in a world where a ton of people were getting caught and all of them were getting deported, you would still have these numbers going up. So it makes sense in that framework that the solution people seize on is, well, we got to stop them from wanting to come.

The problem is that the U.S. doesn't control the world and it can't stop people from needing to flee their home countries. And it can't force them to stay places where they can't stop people from needing to flee their home countries and it can't force them to stay places where they can't make a living or where they're unsafe. So the Biden administration has been struggling because they don't particularly want people to be able to come to the U.S. who, you know, may not have strong asylum claims and ultimately be allowed to stay. Do not come. Do not come.

And what that's meant has been that they've done some stuff to increase alternate legal pathways to allow people to come to the U.S. temporarily without requiring them to just present themselves at the U.S.-Mexico border. But they've tried to make it harder for people who present themselves at the U.S.-Mexico border to ultimately get asylum in the United States. I mean, Trump didn't invent that approach. Obama was doing some kind of border crackdowns in 2014. But it demonstrates just how narrow the solution space is, that instead of letting go of the fantasy that you can just stop people from coming, there is this persistent, oh, we just haven't tried the right combination of buttons to press to unlock the deterrent's cheat code. Dara Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a former reporter for Vox. Dara is hinting at a bit of an identity crisis we've got here in the United States.

We've never believed in immigration more, but also it's our biggest problem. And we gotta do something about the border. But do we have the stomach for it? Up next on Today Explained, we're going to hear from an arch conservative on this issue who thinks we do. And he says we've got to have the stomach to keep out most everyone else who wants to come. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share

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This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents. And they are ready with a battle-tested playbook. The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times. And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU.

With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. Estar escuchando a Hoy Explicado. Today Explained. For this show, we wanted to get at the heart of Donald Trump's immigration philosophy, so we reached out to Stephen Miller, the guy who basically wrote it, but Stephen didn't reach back. So we settled for Mark Krikorian, the guy whose work Trump and Miller are always citing. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 62 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants. Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington,

D.C. If you've never heard of it, think of it more like the Center for Anti-Immigration Studies. He's been called the leading theorist of immigration restriction in America and our chief nativist. And we wanted to know what our country's nativist in chief would do if he were in charge. And he had two answers, one for if he were president and one for if he were some kind of all powerful emperor. If I were emperor, well, first of all, legal immigration, I would reduce to the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. So you would reduce legal immigration to essentially, you know, what's that?

What's that, like a 90% reduction, 95? No, no, no. That's spouses and minor children of like 400,000 people a year. Okay. And that's just something that, you know, I think is inarguable, frankly, as long as it's legitimate. I mean, there's always fraud and everything, but if it's legitimate spouses that Americans actually married somebody abroad and brought them here or adopted a baby, which almost never happens anymore, that's legitimate. But you limit it to that and then a handful of Einsteins, real Einsteins, and a handful

of genuine humanitarian cases who literally have nowhere else to go, which is not a very large number. But it's, you know, 60, 70% less than we take now. Now I want to ask you what you would do if you were president and you had to deal with Congress, you had to deal with a divided Congress, you had to deal with Democrats who have fundamentally different opinions on you and how many people we should be letting into this country. What would you do then? Obviously, a harder nut to crack. It's always easier to imagine what you're going to do when you have unlimited power. In the real world, the first thing that has to be done is we need to regain control over who's coming into the country. That is the prerequisite for even discussing what legal immigration should be. Since the Biden administration took office in 2021, there have been at least 6.3 million migrant encounters at U.S. borders. 2.4 million of those people have been let in,

mainly asylum seekers apprehended, then turned loose to wait for their court dates, and eligible for work permits after six months. You stop releasing people. That means you're going to need to detain people who come across. For that, you're probably going to need to detain people who come across. For that, you're probably going to need DOD resources because they can set up holding facilities quickly on large scale. It's going to cost a lot of money for a couple of months. But once people get the message that you're not

going to just be let go, the flow dramatically is reduced. The reason people are coming, and we've talked to them before they get lawyered up in the United States, and they just freely say, well, it's because they're letting everybody go, and that's why we're coming. So that's the first thing you do. But sort of to kind of map out what I would do, let's say I'm president over two administrations. I get reelected. The first term would be all enforcement. Seriously, no BS. It wouldn't mean deporting everybody because the resources don't exist for that, but it would mean deporting a lot of people, sending the message that the party was over, and through attrition shrinking the illegal population significantly. That is a

realistic goal. Once we have tamed the idea of sanctuary cities, then in my second term, my proposal would be now let's legalize the illegal aliens who are left, in exchange for dramatic reductions in legal immigration. Those people get a quick rip off the Band-Aid amnesty, no 13-year path to citizenship, that's all BS. Get it over with quickly in exchange for immigration, legal immigration coming down by, let's say, 60 or 75 percent. There are two guys running for the big job. Neither one of them is proposing what you're proposing. But as we established, Americans choose immigration as the biggest problem facing this country right now more than any other issue. What would you have them vote for?

Who would you have them vote for? Look, the Center for Immigration Studies is a 501c3 nonprofit. We don't engage in electioneering. I can only tell you who I would vote for as a citizen, and I'm going to be voting for Trump. Look, the guy's got lots of baggage. I'm a very innocent man. But he's the closest thing we have to somebody

who is willing to address the immigration issue. And I mean, not just in his, you know, usual way of, you know, build the wall and all that stuff. But even when you look at the legislative proposal, the White House put forward in 2018, that almost passed the House, it actually would have amnestied probably between two and three million illegal aliens, dreamers so-called, in exchange for serious legislative fixes and a reduction in certain categories of legal immigration. So that approach is, I think, the way to square the circle, the way to get to more of a stable consensus on immigration policy. Do you think Americans have the stomach for cruelty? Because I think what came out of the Trump administration was that a lot of Americans didn't want to see kids in cages. And then you had Biden come in and say, no more kids in cages. And I don't think a lot of Americans would argue that he's done a great job on immigration, but he did try to reset the tone to something that felt more American in

nature, at least to himself, perhaps to the Democratic Party, perhaps to a majority of Americans. Whereas Trump took the hard approach, build the wall, put the kids in cages. Mexicans are rapists. Barack Obama is a Kenyan. They're shithole countries and they are good countries. They happen to be brown versus white. Do you think that Americans have the stomach

for four more years of that? Yes, especially after four years of seeing what the consequences of not turning people away are. Much of the world is an unfortunate and broken place. Just because you can sneak across our border doesn't mean you get to stay here. You know, this idea that it's somehow virtuous for us to break the rules for those who manage to get here, even though there are people much worse off elsewhere in the world, is kind of juvenile. It's not a mature way of making policy. So to answer your question, yes, I think it is politically sustainable.

Now, will Trump talk about it in a way to make it harder to support real enforcement of immigration laws? Maybe. That's yet to be seen, but it's entirely possible. But to the question of will the American people support enforcement of immigration laws? The answer is yes, especially because Biden has shown them what the consequences are of not enforcing immigration laws. There is a legal pathway for, you know, a woman fleeing gang violence, the threat of murder in a Central American country to enter the United States. Yes? No. There's not any legal pathway. gang violence have better odds of getting asylum in the U.S. after a move today from the Biden administration. The Justice Department says it's vacating several controversial decisions from the Trump administration that sharply limited who is eligible for asylum. Gang violence is not a basis

for asylum, and it shouldn't be a basis for asylum. And if she wants to flee, and I can see why you might want to flee, Mexico is right next door or right nearby. And you don't get to come here just because you don't like where you live and you prefer the United States. Sorry. There's 7 billion plus people in the world who don't live in the United States and they don't all get to move here. We are the ones who get to decide who comes here and who doesn't. There are going to be people who we're going to kind of be stuck with, as it were. But genuine asylum seekers actually are going to grab whichever life preserver is closest at hand. And if people are asylum shopping, as it were, using it as a gambit to enter the United States, they can't be allowed to do that. Mark Krikorian runs the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. Tomorrow on the show, we're going to kick things off with someone who's maybe on the polar opposite of the ideological spectrum from Mark,

maybe the most impossibly optimistic individual on immigration in the United States, and he happens to be running a city that most anyone would agree is experiencing a crisis, the mayor of Denver, Colorado, Mike Johnston. Our show today was produced by Hari Mawagdi and edited by Matthew Collette. We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter. It's Today Explained. Thank you.