--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Immigration is one of the biggest issues this election. And as we get closer to the showdown between old and older, there's less and less daylight between their immigration proposals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The former president wants to shut down the border. It's never, ever been worse than it is now. And now the sitting president does too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We must face the simple truth. To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The convicted felon wants to reject asylum seekers. Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. And we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions, insane asylums. We know they're terrorists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And guess who's following in his footsteps?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, I'm announcing actions to bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It turns out a lot of big ideating on this issue is happening locally. So on Today Explained, we're heading to the Mile High City to talk to their mayor in crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Estar escuchando a Hoy Explicado. Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you hear about American cities that are dealing with a migrant crisis, you usually hear about New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Denver's seeing more migrants showing up per capita than any other American city.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Over 40,000 migrants have shown up so far. That's close to a 7% increase in the city's population, except without shelter or food.
--:-- Mike Johnston: But if you talk to the mayor of Denver, a Democrat named Mike Johnston, it sounds like he didn't get the memo about his crisis.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We think this has, for us, been a real example that what appears as a crisis is actually an opportunity.
--:-- Mike Johnston: You know, the only crisis we have is we have folks who arrive in our city every day and say, Mr. Mayor, all I want is a job. Can I please work?
--:-- Mike Johnston: And I have CEOs who call me every day and say, Mike, I got 50 open jobs in my company. Why can't I please hire those folks that just got here?
--:-- Mike Johnston: And our only challenge is we have a federal government that stands in the middle and doesn't allow those employees to work for employers who want to hire them.
--:-- Mike Johnston: But we feel like we've been able to find solutions to all of those problems.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And we're going to turn this crisis into an opportunity for Denver.
--:-- Mike Johnston: The work thing is the biggest thing.
--:-- Mike Johnston: Everyone from former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg to sitting Topeka Mayor Mike Padilla to the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, wants to let migrants do what they came here to do. Make money.
--:-- Mike Johnston: When I first took this job nine months ago, we sat down with Secretary of Mallorca, Governor Polis and I, and we really asked him quite directly what we really need is just work authorization.
--:-- Mike Johnston: Folks just need the ability to work.
--:-- Mike Johnston: Hundreds of thousands of people who came to the U.S. from Venezuela will receive legal status as the number of people fleeing that country rapidly grows.
--:-- Mike Johnston: The Biden administration will grant temporary work permits for people who arrived in the U.S. before July 31st.
--:-- Mike Johnston: That was a game changer for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Republicans, of course, then tried to impeach him for that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The American people are fed up. We have an invasion at the southern border and Americans are dying every single day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And people want Mayorkas impeached. They want accountability.
--:-- Mike Johnston: After that, what we found was more and more of the folks that arrived to us did not have temporary protective status.
--:-- Mike Johnston: This is a policy that was created by Congress to offer a temporary safe haven to migrants from countries facing a humanitarian crisis like Venezuela is right now.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And did not also have what's called Customs and Border Protection One, which is an app you can use on your phone to set up an appointment at Customs and Border Protection.
--:-- Mike Johnston: If you set up an appointment, you can also get a work authorization within 30 days.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So there was a wave of folks that came with that. either of those populations we could help get into work in about a month and we created infrastructure to do that.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We had one of the largest legal authorization work authorization clinics in the country to move about 2,000 people through work authorization, get them up and on their feet.
--:-- Mike Johnston: During these clinics, local nonprofits, volunteers and city staff helped newcomers file the necessary paperwork to receive federal work permits.
--:-- Mike Johnston: The challenge for us when the third wave came this year in 2024, it's now almost all people who are what we call asylum seekers.
--:-- Mike Johnston: They don't have temporary protective status. They don't have customs and border protection. They don't really have any path to work authorization.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And because of the backlog in the asylum courts, their asylum court dates are set for the year 2030 or 2031.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So they have a six or seven year wait and they can't work in the interim.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And so that was where we saw the biggest challenge, what many cities were facing.
--:-- Mike Johnston: But the solution we've built now, the asylum seeker program we've launched, is designed to show that even this most difficult situation is actually solvable here at the local level.
--:-- Mike Johnston: Through Denver's Asylum Seeker program, migrants will get legal help for each asylum application.
--:-- Mike Johnston: What we've done is set up an infrastructure. We will actually proactively apply for all those people for asylum up front.
--:-- Mike Johnston: The program will also include job training, food assistance through a monthly debit card, and rental assistance for six months.
--:-- Mike Johnston: While the courts may still take seven years to resolve the case, it means now they could get access to work authorization within six months.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And so instead of seeing that as a risk, we see it as an opportunity, which is what kind of workforce training do we want to give people for those six months?
--:-- Mike Johnston: That will include English language skills. It will include financial literacy, digital literacy.
--:-- Mike Johnston: It will include certifications in any relevant field they want to enter.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And it will include on-the-site workforce training that was unpaid internship-type experiences in the career industry of their choice.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So by the time they reach that six-month mark, they have English language skills, they have digital skills, financial skills, they have relevant certifications, and they have on-the-job experience in the profession they want to enter.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And now we've taken this crisis and made it into an actually incredibly important and useful workforce pipeline into our highest need professions here in the city.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And we're really excited to get that launched.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like you having a really positive experience here positive for the city positive for these migrants
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But certainly this is placing various stresses on the city resources on your budgets
--:-- Mike Johnston: It has definitely not been easy.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We've worked very hard to get to this place.
--:-- Mike Johnston: There were a lot of failures that went into it before we get to some of the solutions that we found that have worked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you're right, to provide these services as well costs money.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So this will cost us about $90 million this year to lead this effort all in.
--:-- Mike Johnston: Here is where the money would come from exactly.
--:-- Mike Johnston: You've got nearly $46 million from budget cuts and other tweaks.
--:-- Mike Johnston: The city says that most comes from the vacancy savings category you see there.
--:-- Mike Johnston: That basically means that there are open positions, open jobs that will not be filled.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So that is a big investment we were not planning on making a year ago.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And so it certainly has been without difficulties.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We've had city workers who have had to be reassigned from regular jobs at Department of Human Services into being intake and case management and support for newcomers that have arrived.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We have nonprofit communities who've been overwhelmed by the amount of support they've been asked to provide.
--:-- Mike Johnston: Regular citizens every day who are bringing people into their homes and into their basements or taking on families to help pay their down payments to get them into apartment units.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So it has certainly challenged the city, but the city has shown up in incredible ways where it's not a day that goes by.
--:-- Mike Johnston: I don't meet someone who says, oh, thanks so much, Mr. Mayor. I actually have a family of Venezuelans myself that I helped get housed last week, or I just provided food for, I just provided a backpack for a classmate of my son who's a brand new newcomer from Venezuela.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So I think the city has risen to the occasion in wonderful ways.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And for me, it's a real proof point for a very different way the country can look at this challenge, which is really not a crisis, but an opportunity.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And in most cities, I find that to be true.
--:-- Mike Johnston: When I talk to a lot of Midwestern cities, cities that have dying populations, they are desperate for new workers and for new residents.
--:-- Mike Johnston: They would love to have folks arrive if those individuals come with work authorization.
--:-- Mike Johnston: If they can work to support themselves, they're an asset to your community.
--:-- Mike Johnston: If they can't and they have to rely on public services, they're a cost to your community.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So this is, we think, what we're trying to shift is how do we move people from being cost to being what they want to be, which is assets to help the community.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And if they can work, they can do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, hearing you talk about this quote unquote crisis, it hardly even sounds like a crisis the way you talk about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You sound like the, you know, glass is half full version of this crisis compared to, I mean, especially New York, where I believe the mayor said that this crisis could destroy New York City, destroy New York City.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We're getting 10,000 migrants a month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do you think sets your administration, your city apart from the other experiences that are being had across this country?
--:-- Mike Johnston: The challenges are not simple.
--:-- Mike Johnston: I do not want to anyway communicate that.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We have heroic city employees who've worked around the clock to insist on finding new solutions.
--:-- Mike Johnston: And it's been hard without the federal support we wanted when that bill died.
--:-- Mike Johnston: The Republicans simply cannot vote for the bill in good conscience.
--:-- Mike Johnston: We said we wanted three things, either more work authorization, more federal dollars to help support us, or an actual coordinated entry system to send people to cities where we had capacity based on what we knew about those cities the way we do for other asylum seekers.
--:-- Mike Johnston: When folks arrive from Ukraine or Afghanistan, we don't let the governor of New York decide where to send them all because they land at JFK.
--:-- Mike Johnston: There's actually a coordinated plan to send them to cities where there are available jobs.
--:-- Mike Johnston: They come with work authorization, they come with federal resources, and they've succeeded.
--:-- Mike Johnston: So I don't have a partisan solution here.
--:-- Mike Johnston: There are solutions that work and those that don't.
--:-- Mike Johnston: This is one that works.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mayor Mike Johnston, Denver, Colorado.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How the United States can put migrants to work when we're back on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You listening to Today Explains
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is is it Today Explain or Try Explains Explain Duh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Explain Duh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Denver Mayor Mike Johnston thinks he's got a solution to his migrant crisis. Let people work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's not just a Democrat idea.
--:-- David J. Beer: I'm the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute.
--:-- David J. Beer: and we are known as the libertarians in D.C.
--:-- David J. Beer: David J. Beer and some of his libertarian-leaning colleagues at Cato recently got together and proposed a whole slew of ideas that could help get this country out of its immigration crisis.
--:-- David J. Beer: His contribution? State-sponsored visas.
--:-- David J. Beer: So this idea is to have state governments be able to sponsor someone for a visa in the same way that, you know, employers under the current system can sponsor some people, family members can sponsor their relatives.
--:-- David J. Beer: States could basically sponsor whoever they want, target certain industries.
--:-- David J. Beer: You know, there's no year-round temporary work visa for non-seasonal, low-skilled jobs in this country.
--:-- David J. Beer: So think meatpacking plants.
--:-- David J. Beer: A lot of places have a desperate need for workers who are willing to go out on natural resource intensive jobs, mining and and oil rigs and so forth.
--:-- David J. Beer: These are jobs where there's huge demand and not many workers willing to do them.
--:-- David J. Beer: And there's nothing for the legal immigration system right now.
--:-- David J. Beer: So the idea would be let states figure it out.
--:-- David J. Beer: Has anyone ever tried something like this before?
--:-- David J. Beer: Obviously, we haven't.
--:-- David J. Beer: Yeah, so actually Canada...
--:-- David J. Beer: Canada! Ever since I left the city...
--:-- David J. Beer: Yeah, Canada actually has a much stronger version of federalism than the United States does in many ways, where their provinces historically had a very strong role to play in immigration.
--:-- David J. Beer: And that has continued on through their provincial nominee program.
--:-- David J. Beer: The provinces can nominate someone for permanent residence in Canada, and they're granted permanent residence based on the state's go-ahead.
--:-- David J. Beer: And it's one of the more popular programs because it is responsive to the state in which the person is being sponsored.
--:-- Christy DePena: I focus on immigration policy at Niskanen Center, named after William Niskanen, economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, notable Republican.
--:-- Christy DePena: Christy also wants to see migrants working in the United States.
--:-- Christy DePena: There are businesses across America that are desperate for more workers, and it's really impacting negatively the economic productivity in lots of these places.
--:-- Christy DePena: And you see places like Utah, like Indiana, trying to come up with ways that they can get more meaningfully involved in encouraging folks to come here and controlling migration to some of their states.
--:-- Christy DePena: As in Utah and Indiana, red states have been begging the federal government to let them do this, to let them put migrants to work.
--:-- Christy DePena: Utah in 2010 actually passed a bill requiring the governor to lobby the federal government for the right to sponsor people for work visas so that they could resolve some of these immigration issues at the state level.
--:-- Christy DePena: You know, the Indiana governor, the current Utah governor have put out an op-ed saying we would like this authority, let states lead the way on immigration reform.
--:-- Christy DePena: We do need more immigrants in our country.
--:-- Christy DePena: We have so many job openings right now in the state of Utah and in other places that cannot be filled.
--:-- Christy DePena: It's actually hurting our economy that we can't have good people that want to live here come in here.
--:-- Christy DePena: And, you know, other states have passed resolutions in Georgia and elsewhere saying, look, we want some of this power to deal with these issues.
--:-- Christy DePena: Topeka, Kansas right now is so desperate for new people that it just launched the Choose Topeka program.
--:-- Christy DePena: Topeka, Kansas has about 7,000 open jobs right now.
--:-- Christy DePena: They also have, believe it or not, a growing Hispanic community.
--:-- Christy DePena: So in the last couple of years, Topeka, Kansas decided why not sort of merge the two, use that growing community as a solution to all of those open jobs.
--:-- Christy DePena: They recently started doing all of their marketing in both English and in Spanish.
--:-- Christy DePena: It provides people with $15,000 if they are willing to rent or buy homes in the city and are employed by a local business that is partnering with that program.
--:-- Christy DePena: So I don't know that it's a destination city, but it is certainly a place that has some of the indicators that, you know, they have a lot of jobs, they have affordable housing.
--:-- Christy DePena: So it's specifically tailored towards people that already have work authorization.
--:-- Christy DePena: They are obviously creating programs that are trying to entice new people to come there because they need more people.
--:-- Christy DePena: And they are not alone.
--:-- Christy DePena: There are many cities and localities that are looking at programs that are going to incentivize new arrivals, especially in these places that have really high levels of kind of declining economic productivity for any number of reasons.
--:-- Christy DePena: Topeka proves that putting people to work isn't that far out of the realm of possibility, and we already kind of do stuff like this at the federal level.
--:-- Christy DePena: So the program that comes to mind is the Conrad 30 waiver program.
--:-- Christy DePena: It's also been around for decades.
--:-- Christy DePena: It allows foreign medical graduates to waive the requirement that they return to their home country for two years after they finish medical school in the U.S.
--:-- Christy DePena: Your interns, grunts, nobody's bottom of the surgical food chain. Run labs, write orders, work every second night until you drop and don't complain.
--:-- Christy DePena: They are allowed to waive it if they are willing to go to a rural or a medically underserved area.
--:-- Christy DePena: Aha. Since 2001, that program has allowed more than 21,000 physicians to treat about 44 million Americans.
--:-- Christy DePena: Wow.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: Work permits were a part of the bipartisan immigration reforms that failed earlier this year.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: The bill expands work authorizations for illegal aliens, threatens American workers' wages, and also acts as another magnet for illegal immigration.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: It's a pull factor.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: That's not the message that is helpful to send around the world.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: But work visas are far from the only thing the federal government could do to help cities and states in crisis.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: I want a whole new department.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: He'd call it the Center for Migrant Coordination.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: So when we're talking about the Center for Migrant Coordination, we are talking about a federal center located within the Department of Homeland Security.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: In particular, we're talking about a agency or component within the Department of Homeland Security that has its primary role of establishing federal leadership in migrant response.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: Some of this could be done at an executive level without changes from Congress.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: And some of this would require Congress to set up and fund this new center within the Department of Homeland Security.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: This is obviously a boatload of work, but it's not like this work's not being done.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: It's just that everyone else is having to pick up the slack.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: The people who are picking up the slack are cities, state governments and local nonprofits themselves.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: For example, there are nonprofits in Texas who are in contact with New York City employees and letting them know we've got buses coming your way.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: New York City is a self-declared sanctuary city.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: And so why he's ever complaining for one moment about these people being bused into a city goes against his own self-declaration of being a sanctuary city.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: You know, at first, you know, when Greg Abbott started sending buses to New York, they weren't telling New York that the buses were on their way.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: And the only way cities like New York were finding out is because nonprofits on the ground in Texas were letting them know.
--:-- Aaron Reikland-Melnick: I'm announcing an executive order requiring charter buses transporting migrants, those often contracted by the state of Texas, to provide 32-hour notice in advance of their arrival into New York City.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: We can't wait for the federal government to act.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: Ideally, they would.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: Ideally, we would have common sense immigration reform that meets our labor needs, our economic needs, our security needs, that allows for persecuted people to continue to find refuge in this country.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: But I think, you know, we have to move forward in the world that we are living in.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: And so right now, it's where all the action is at the state and local level.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: That's where the energy is.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: That's where people are seeing the direct effects of people coming.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: You know, cities have to act.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: The federal government, as we know, we've seen for decades, does not have to act.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: There are no real consequences for that, at least that we can see, you know, electorally.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: So, you know, so punting on immigration seems to be a winning strategy.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: I don't know.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: It's terrible for the country, but that's where we are.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: And so the states and local communities have to lead the way.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: And that comes down to community-based organizations that are trusted.
--:-- Melanie Nezer: That's the only way forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Americans increasingly see immigration as our biggest problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That likely won't last.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what will is that people will always want to come to this country, irrespective of who's in charge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because a whole lot of people still believe that...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That America is the greatest nation on earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're going to have to figure out what to do about immigration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we haven't made much progress at the federal level in 30 years, and we might not in the next few.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if you want to feel hopeful, you can look local.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Having the states be these, you know, laboratories of democracy, they call them, where they can test out different ideas and figure out what's working and what's not and solve some local problems where we don't end up in a situation where the situation just gets worse and worse and you end up with more and more problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it builds from the local level, from the state level into a national crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was David J. Beer from the Cato Institute.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You also heard from Christy DePena from Niskanen Center, Aaron Reikland-Melnick from the American Immigration Council, and Melanie Nezer from the Women's Refugee Commission.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our program today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi with help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, David Herman, Andrea Kristinsdottir, Jolie Myers, and me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
