--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remember just a few days ago when, for the first time ever, a United States president got convicted of a felony? Of 34 felonies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The next day he spoke about his guilty verdicts again. This time, immigration was the first thing he wanted to talk about. It's an election year and the leading Republican candidate, Maybe the leading candidate, period, wants to make it all about immigration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're going to talk about our options on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, Sean Ramos for a former president Donald Trump only wants to talk about immigration. He's promising mass deportations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He'll be the first to tell you immigrants are... They're poisoning the blood of our country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Illegal border crossings are averaging two million a year under his watch. That's the most ever, the worst this problem's ever been.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's starting to affect his approach. Today, he announced he wants to close the southern border with Mexico and suspend asylum protections.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just ask Gallup. I'm Lydia Saad, not Lydia Saad, director of U.S. social research at Gallup.
--:-- Lydia Saad: For decades, Gallup's been asking Americans one big, huge question. Yeah, so that's our most important problem facing the country question.
--:-- Lydia Saad: 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 percent of Americans.
--:-- Lydia Saad: The next most often mentioned problem was the government itself at 18 percent.
--:-- Lydia Saad: Immigration is a huge issue. And when you get rid of that, get rid of the government. Yeah, that's a popular one.
--:-- Lydia Saad: But just because Americans increasingly think immigration is our biggest problem doesn't mean they want to shut it all down like Donald.
--:-- Lydia Saad: Overall, the public thinks immigration is a good thing. They welcome immigration in concept, but they're concerned about illegal immigration.
--:-- Lydia Saad: 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.
--:-- Lydia Saad: And then all of this sending migrants to blue cities and all of that. That just doesn't make sense to people.
--:-- Lydia Saad: Like there's something broken, right? Americans aren't asking for much.
--:-- Lydia Saad: 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.
--:-- Lydia Saad: And this is something of a shift from, say, 30 years ago.
--:-- Lydia Saad: Back in the 90s, when immigration was a lot less popular than it is today, there was much broader concern about immigration.
--:-- Lydia Saad: People wanted it decreased, didn't think it was a good thing.
--:-- Lydia Saad: Since then, Republicans have continued to see immigration as a net negative for the economy, even more so today.
--:-- Lydia Saad: But Democrats have really switched and now see immigration as a positive for the economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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, Ed Pug, the Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act, and signed this immigration bill, IRA IRA.
--:-- Dara Lind: We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that required working with Republicans in Congress to demonstrate that the Clinton administration could be trusted to keep the country's best interest at heart and not just governing from the left.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: Very old school. Let's all work together.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: No one will like every provision in the bill. Neither should anyone oppose every provision.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was polling at that time that showed that Republicans supported the bill until you told them Obama supported it.
--:-- Dara Lind: Immigration was an issue that resisted polarization for a long time, and then that stopped.
--:-- Dara Lind: And Donald Trump took that trend and actually he accelerated it to the point that immigration was the point of the sphere for his argument about why he should be president.
--:-- Dara Lind: That immigrants were bad people, that they were committing crimes against U.S. citizens, and that what you needed was a tough guy who was willing to say you're a bad person and that would fix the problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, the Trump administration had this huge decrease in numbers in 2017 when Trump was inaugurated, which then increased through 2018, fall of 2018 into 2019 into what were then numbers that we hadn't seen in seven, eight years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But also, nobody was moving in spring of 2020. And so the numbers went down again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it allowed them to obscure the fact that nothing in immigration crackdowns works forever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But on the flip side, you know, immigration doesn't just encompass immigration enforcement, but also legal immigration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was all immigrants should be held to a higher degree of scrutiny.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Biden wins the election in 2020, famously, undisputed win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Biden administration reversed course and announced that they were planning to expand Title 42.
--:-- Dara Lind: Does that mean that Donald Trump was on to something?
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: Unfortunately, we haven't seen that.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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 caught.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: So it makes sense in that framework that the solution people seize on is, well, we got to stop them from wanting to come.
--:-- Dara Lind: 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.
--:-- Dara Lind: And it can't force them to stay places where they can't make a living or where they're unsafe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do not come. Do not come.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they've tried to make it harder for people to present themselves at the U.S.-Mexico border to ultimately get asylum in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, Trump didn't invent that approach. Obama was doing some kind of border crackdowns in 2014.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 deterrence cheat code.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dara Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a former reporter for Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dara is hinting at a bit of an identity crisis we've got here in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've never believed in immigration more, but also it's our biggest problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we've got to do something about the border. But do we have the stomach for it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up next on Today Explained, we're going to hear from an arch conservative on this issue who thinks we do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andy says we've got to have the stomach to keep out most everyone else who wants to come.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's in your life kit? I'm asking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Están escuchando a Hoy Explicado. Today, Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 62 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you've never heard of it, think of it more like the Center for Anti-Immigration Studies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's been called the leading theorist of immigration restriction in America and our chief nativist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we wanted to know what our country's nativist in chief would do if he were in charge.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: If I were emperor, well, first of all, legal immigration, I would reduce to the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: So you would reduce legal immigration to to essentially, you know, what's that? What's that like a 90 percent reduction, 95?
--:-- Mark Krikorian: No, no, no. That's spouses and minor children, like 400,000 people a year.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Okay. And that's just something that, you know, I think is inarguable, frankly, as long as it's legitimate.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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, you know, that's legitimate.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: But you're limited 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: But it's, you know, 60, 70% less than we take now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now I want to ask you what you would do if you were a president and you had to deal with Congress.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: What would you do then? Obviously, a harder nut to crack.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: It's always easier to imagine what you're going to do when you have unlimited power.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: That is the prerequisite for even discussing what legal immigration should be.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Since the Biden administration took office in 2021, there have been at least 6.3 million migrant encounters at U.S. borders.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: You stop releasing people.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: That means you're going to need to detain people who come across.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: For that, you're probably going to need DOD resources because they can set up holding facilities quickly on large scale.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: It's going to cost a lot of money for a couple of months.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: But once people get the message that you're not going to just be let go, the flow dramatically is reduced.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: So that's the first thing you do.
--:-- Mark Rameswaram: But sort of to kind of map out what I would do, let's say I'm president over two administrations.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: I get reelected. The first term would be all enforcement. Seriously, no BS.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: That is a realistic goal.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Those people get a quick rip off the band-aid amnesty, no 13-year path to citizen, that's all BS Get it over with quickly in exchange for immigration legal immigration coming down by let say 60 or 75 percent
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are two guys running for the big job Neither one of them is proposing what you're proposing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as we established, Americans choose immigration as the biggest problem facing this country right now more than any other issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What would you have them vote for? Who would you have them vote for?
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Look, the Center for Immigration Studies is a 501c3 nonprofit. We don't engage in electioneering.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: I can only tell you who I would vote for as a citizen, and I'm going to be voting for Trump.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: And I mean not just in his usual way of 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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 this circle the way to get to more of a stable consensus on immigration policy
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: And then you had Biden come in and say, no more kids in cages.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think that Americans have the stomach for four more years of that?
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Yes, especially after four years of seeing what the consequences of not turning people away are.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Much of the world is an unfortunate and broken place.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Just because you can sneak across our border doesn't mean you get to stay here.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: It's not a mature way of making policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So to answer your question, yes, I think it is politically sustainable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, will Trump talk about it in a way to make it harder to support real enforcement of immigration laws? Maybe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's yet to be seen, but it's entirely possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Yes? No.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: There is not any legal pathway.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Survivors of domestic and gang violence have better odds of getting asylum in the U.S. after a move today from the Biden administration.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: The Justice Department says it's vacating several controversial decisions from the Trump administration that sharply limited who is eligible for asylum.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: Gang violence is not a basis for asylum, and it shouldn't be a basis for asylum.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: And if she wants to flee, and I can see why you might want to flee, Mexico is right next door or right nearby.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: And you don't get to come here just because you don't like where you live and you prefer the United States.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: We are the ones who get to decide who comes here and who doesn't.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: There are going to be people who we're going to kind of be stuck with, as it were.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: But genuine asylum seekers actually are going to grab whichever life preserver is closest at hand.
--:-- Mark Krikorian: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mark Krikorian runs the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he happens to be running a city that most anyone would agree is experiencing a crisis. The mayor of Denver, Colorado, Mike Johnston.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained.
