Immigration and the border: the real story
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Hi, I'm Cardiff Garcia, and this is The New Bazaar. Coming up on today's show. We have always changed in radical ways from generation to generation because of who's come into this country. And we've always questioned those that have come in. Andrew Seeley on immigration and the border. When people talk about the crisis at the border, what are they really talking about? Here's a little background.

The Department of Homeland Security keeps track of a statistic called border encounters at the U.S. border with Mexico. And this includes mainly the large number of people who try to cross the border without documentation or illegally and are not at a formal port of entry. And so they end up getting apprehended by the Border Patrol. It also does include some folks who do try to cross at a port of entry, but who are found not eligible to be admitted into the U.S.,

And in the past three years, under the Biden administration, the number of these border encounters each year has been more than quadrupled the average of what it used to be throughout most of the previous decade under the Trump and Obama administrations. So the system for processing all these migrants has just been entirely overwhelmed.

And if you're a politician or a pundit or anybody pushing an agenda, the obvious temptation is to make this all political, to say this is either all Joe Biden's fault, the fault of Donald Trump, maybe for not fixing the problem sooner or making some argument like that.

Today's guest does not do that. He does something altogether different. Andrew Seeley is the head of the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI. MPI is the think tank that I turn to when I want non-stupid, smart, non-partisan commentary on immigration, and especially when I just want to inform myself on this topic outside the nonsense of how these debates usually tend to play out in public.

So, Andrew and I on today's episode talk about the real fundamental reasons behind the crisis at the border, what can be done about it, and we talk about legal immigration, which still has a lot of problems with it, but has been a kind of quiet success in recent years, one you just don't hear that much about.

And all throughout, as I think you'll agree, Andrew's not afraid to criticize Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Congress or really anybody else. But mainly what he's focused on doing is simply acting as a useful guide to this really important topic. Here it is. Andrew Seely, welcome to the new bazaar. Cardiff, great to be with you. A few years ago when we were talking, you said just before Joe Biden took office that you thought that as president,

He would end up seeing immigration as an opportunity to be managed rather than a problem to be solved. And I tell you, it kind of seems at this point like it is a problem to be solved and an opportunity that requires ongoing management. It seems like it's turned into both. I think that's right. And I think they have not spent enough time thinking about the opportunity that was there.

And that has turned it into a problem, right? What do you mean by that?

And I think they didn't do enough of the good stuff and they didn't pay enough attention to some of the things that are going to get you in trouble if you don't pay attention to it. And that's the border. We're going to split this chat into two different sections. One is we are going to talk about what happened at the border and what possibly could happen going forward. But we are also going to talk about legal immigration. And I got to say, when I was looking at the statistics to prepare for this chat, I was not

Not shocked to find that in every year of the Trump administration, legal immigration had fallen. And in every year of the Biden administration, legal immigration has actually gone up. It has. And preliminary data at least show that last year-

was a really good year for legal immigration. Almost 1.2 million people getting lawful permanent status last year, and the number has been climbing. So it does seem like the Biden administration on that side of things has turned things around from the trend before him.

I think that's right. I mean, I think they really have, you know, some of this was COVID, of course. I mean, some of the numbers went down because of COVID, but also the Trump administration threw a lot of sand in the gears of the immigration system, right? A lot of extra reviews, a lot of ways of, because they were suspicious of legal immigration as well. There was a division in the Trump administration, but there was part of the administration was very suspicious of legal immigration and people cheating the system. And so they made it a little bit slower and then COVID hit.

And the Biden administration both took a really tough moment where, in fact, we hadn't been processing visas during COVID. And there was a lot of demand. And there was all sorts of things that had to be started again. And they've done that. And then they've also made it a lot easier for people who, for example, are signing up for a second visa. Usually, if you're coming to the States for the first time, you're going to get checked out a lot, right? There's going to be, no matter how you're coming, there's going to be some sort of review of

of a new person coming in. But there's a lot of people who are renewing for a second, third, fourth visa where you don't necessarily need the same kind of depth of review. And so they've gotten rid of a lot of the requirements that were really duplicative. And that's helped the system move a lot faster than it did before.

There's an interesting line in one of the papers published by your colleagues at MPI, and I want to read it to you and then have a chat about it. So here's what they write, quote, pandemic-driven adaptations accelerated modernization of the immigration system and facilitated the high numbers of visa issuances.

How did they do that? Increasing the types of applications that can be filed online, holding remote hearings, waiving interviews, and extending documents' validity periods have all resulted in faster visa approvals, unquote. What's interesting to me about this is that this is an example of...

a crisis, a pandemic, forcing government to do something differently, just as it forced many companies to do something differently. And that different thing that they did worked much better, more efficiently. It was more productive. And on the one hand, it's a little sad because it shouldn't require a crisis to start doing things better and to try things. But that really was an opportunity that the government seems to have capitalized on. And we don't hear that much about it.

These are the silent changes, right? Because there haven't been big legislation on immigration. So these are process changes. They're not that sexy, right? I mean, they're sort of things that a bureaucrat is doing in the background or sometimes a political appointee. But this is, you know, kind of going on the background of the big political conversations. But they really matter in people's lives, right? And they matter for the economy in the end.

And a lot of this was really realizing with COVID, I mean, you don't need to duplicate the same product. You don't need to fingerprint the same person over and over again because their fingerprints aren't going to change, right? I mean, you know, you don't need necessarily to interview the same person with the same rigor every time. You can do some remote interviews and you can waive some interviews, right? I mean, that one that I remember particularly was on agricultural worker.

right? If they're people coming for the first time, still have to do an interview. But if you're coming for a second or third time and you were here the year before, you don't necessarily have to go through another interview, right? I mean that there's certain trust that you're the same person. I mean,

And it's coming back and didn't do damage the first time you actually left the country when you're supposed to probably going to do it again. You know, there's a certain amount of confidence that you don't have to duplicate it. But they did this right down the line on lots of things. And so absent legislation, they were just looking, you know, how do we how do we find these little advances that over time are going to add up in a big way? And they've been pretty successful. Now, the one downside, the one thing they haven't fixed yet is.

tourist visas, people for getting a first time tourist visa. I was talking to someone who's in this category over the weekend. This is like these stories that people want to come here from certain countries. They need a tourist visa and the backlog is like two years or something like that. That's it. That's it. That's the one thing they haven't fixed. And it's for new tourists. If you have a tourist visa and you're renewing it, it's pretty easy. But if you're, I was talking to this person who I know who, you know, is from Mexico, she's in Mexico city and

saying, you know, I didn't get my tourist visa renewed and now I have to start a new process. And two years down the road, literally, I mean, you know, it's what it looks like. So that's the one they haven't fixed, but for business, for students, for, you know, most other things move pretty quickly. And for returning almost anyone who's renewing a visa, it moves so much quicker than it used to. Let's talk about the border. And I want to go a little bit into the past because, um,

MPI has written that there are essentially two different eras of dealing with border crossings. There's everything that happened in the decades, the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, into the mid-2010s. And then there's everything that happened since then, since around 2013, 2014. Can you tell us what the two different eras were and what the differences are between them?

Yeah, the first era was really about Mexicans, primarily Mexican men coming to the United States. And they would often come with women later. Sometimes children would follow. But overwhelmingly, we were talking about adults and they were overwhelmingly from Mexico and they were coming to work.

And they were, for the most part, circular. There was a time when more and more stayed. I mean, starting in – So by circular, you mean they'd come in, work, and then either send the money back or go back home themselves. Or go back, right. And they often went back. But increasingly, people did start staying during this period as well. But often, people would go back. And the border was fairly easy to cross. It got harder during the 1990s. More and more people stayed. But overall, we're still talking about adults coming to work.

Since 2014, we've really seen a huge increase in Central Americans first, families, and asylum seekers. And all three of those are complicated in different ways. So Central Americans, and then I'll get – there's actually a newer period. I'll get to that in a second. I mean, Central Americans are complicated because they're not next door, right? And so if you're making decisions about deporting someone, it actually involves getting people on an airplane, for example. Right.

Families matter because you have to take care of children in border installations, right? It's not the same thing to deal with a single adult than it is to deal with children who are vulnerable population. If you catch a single adult male crossing the border illegally, it's one thing to deal with that person, especially if they're coming from Mexico and it's just a matter of sending them back to Mexico versus if you have people who are fleeing persecution –

Families, including a lot of children, how do you process that? That's exactly right. And children are not allowed to be held for more than 20 days in detention, which is a lawsuit that was done in the 1990s, late 1990s. There's a judge that supervises that decision. And so that has held and has now been extended to children.

It was originally about unaccompanied kids, but now it's about kids with parents as well. And then the last thing is you do have a lot more people, like you said, applying for asylum, people who say – some of them –

are fleeing from gangs that are trying to kill them from political unrest. In Central America, primarily. In Central America, primarily. I mean, that was the next phase. And so you have to make decisions about asylum. You have to actually figure out whether these people qualify for international protection or not. We're bound by international law on this. And that's a whole other obstacle than when people, if they were caught, they would largely go back either willingly or unwillingly, but they know they had another shot. This is different.

But let me add the third phase, because I think there really is a third phase, which is the Darien Gap, which is this giant...

It's about 60 miles where there is no roads. It's all forest. There's an entire road that goes from Canada all the way to Argentina, from the north of North America to the south of South America, the Pan-American Highway. It stops in these 60 miles, a little over 60 miles between Panama and Colombia. And it's just a dense rainforest. And it used to be mostly impenetrable. It was the thing that kept people from coming from South America up through the

Central America, Mexico to the US. Because they struggled to cross the Darien Gap. It was not crossable. It was not crossable. And there were always a few hundred people every year that did it. There were always a few Africans, for example, a few people from South Asia. I mean, it was always an eclectic group of people that came through there. They'd fly into Brazil or something like that and start making their way north and they'd make it

And they'd make it through. But it was an adventurous thing to do, right? You'd have to either be fleeing from something really bad or be a risk taker to do this. Since 2021 – this actually started about in 2016, 2017. We started to see the numbers go up and then go down and go up and go down. 2021 –

is where right at the end of COVID is where you see the numbers really shoot up. And what happened that changed things is that they built an infrastructure to move people through the Darien Gap. Who's they? Who built it? They. So local people. This was primarily built by people who live on the edges or even sometimes inside the Darien Gap. There's some indigenous groups inside the Darien Gap, and then there's some non-indigenous groups on the outside on both sides.

And, you know, smugglers figured out how to do this. But smugglers, the smuggler of today was not necessarily a smuggler yesterday. Right. I mean, some of these are real smugglers who've been smuggling people elsewhere and then discovered the Darien Gap and that there were people they could move through there. Some of this were local people who said, you know, I know my way through the forest and I'm going to make a little bit of money doing this.

Because they would charge migrants to help them pass through the Darien Gap on their way to the US. Yeah. And look, for a lot of people, I mean, we demonize smugglers a lot and there's some bad smugglers out there. Don't get me wrong. But a lot of people look at this, particularly if you live in a town like Nicolet, which is the entry point for most people in Darien Gap, who said, look, people want to get through the Darien Gap.

I can help them. I'll make a little bit of money for my family. This is good, right? I mean, so people started to do this. Mutual exchange, you could say. Mutual exchange. Some people that live in the Darien Gap provide food and water along the way. You know, they say we're helping people out who would otherwise be starving. But it ultimately is a smuggling infrastructure. And so we had a half million people last year in 2023, half million people crossed through the Darien Gap on their way north.

And that's a game changer because it means that South America is suddenly – first of all, anyone in South America, and South America has a huge displacement crisis. We can talk about this. About six and a half million Venezuelans who have left Venezuela are living in Latin America and the Caribbean. So suddenly they have an option to go north. The Venezuelans are a real game changer in and of themselves because they operate like a displaced community.

And we can talk more about why that is, but I think that's a real, that's a particular one, but also suddenly possible for anyone anywhere in the world to say, Hey, I'm, I'm willing to risk it. I'm going to try and get to the United States.

And I will do it by flying into Brazil or Ecuador or wherever I can get a ticket to. And then I'll move north. And yes, it's a dangerous journey. And the daring gap is still dangerous. But it's now crossable in a way it wasn't before. And that actually – before we were talking until 2021, we were overwhelmingly talking about Mexicans and then Mexicans and Central Americans. And now we're talking about Mexicans and Central Americans and everyone else from the world who wants to come. And that's a really –

different situation that we're in. Yeah. And I want to just go through one statistic here real quick that really kind of gives you a sense of how many more people are trying to come to the U.S. now through the southern border than

If you look at the years of the sort of second part of Obama's second term and then Trump's term in office, there were each year roughly four or five hundred thousand people that federal law enforcement would encounter down by the border as they tried to cross illegally without authorization. In Biden's three years in office, it's been roughly two million per year.

That's a staggering increase. And I think you just answered part of my next question, but not the whole... I don't think you provided the whole answer, which is...

Why? Why are so many people coming here now in just the last few years? One reason, as you just mentioned, is that it's easier to get through the Darien Gap, and that makes it more accessible for more people to try to make that journey across Central America and Mexico into the US. But there might be other factors both attracting people here or just making it easier to make that journey.

So I think there's a few other factors. I mean, one is the U.S. economy, right? I mean, you know, we always talk about why people leave their countries and poverty and violence. But poverty and violence have always existed, right? And they exist many places in the world. The reality is the game changer on this is the U.S. economy is doing so much better than other economies in the Western Hemisphere and many other economies around the world. And there's a very active labor market. And I'm sure we'll talk more about this when you've got 8 to 10 million jobs open every month.

And a fairly big informal economy, right? We don't talk about this much, but the US has a big informal economy. Like lots of people find ways in their gardeners, they're doing care work, they're doing all sorts of things that are paid in cash. Right, exactly. And occasionally they're even finding ways of working in legal establishments, right? They're getting a social security number on the black market and they eventually make it into even into formal jobs, right? So that's a huge attraction, right?

now. And I think that also explains since the end of COVID, I mean, the US economy took off and we have a long-term demographic shift going on.

Then you've got another what seems like a small thing but turns out to be huge, which is the US used to be able to deport people to any country, almost any country. There was always North Korea and Myanmar. There was a couple of countries that wouldn't take their nationals back. There's now four or three countries in the hemisphere, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba that do not want to take their nationals back or see every time that the US asks them to take someone back, they see it as something to negotiate. Right.

And then you add in there Haiti, which is a country that the US and most other countries don't want to deport people to because of the chaos. It's so dangerous. Because it's so dangerous. And so suddenly you're in a tough position where if people from those countries show up, even if you find that they're not eligible for protection, you still have no way of sending them anywhere. And so that's become very complicated. Yeah.

Let me just pause for a second, by the way, to also give some sense of the scale of this. In the last couple of years, roughly 400,000 Cubans have tried to make it into the US through that border with Mexico specifically. Cuba only has a little more than 11 million people in total. That's like one out of every, I don't know, 20 something Cubans has tried to make that trip through

And furthermore, that's just a ton of people for the U.S. to have to process. That's just Cuba. Venezuela, also several hundred thousand people. So you're adding an incredible number of people trying to make that trip into the U.S., which is what's contributing to the sort of

overflowing the system, right? The impossibility of processing all of these different people trying to make it into the US. I mean, that's it. These are complicated. It's hard to figure out what to do. You have to check if they have protection needs because these are authoritarian countries. If you find that they don't have protection needs, you probably still can't remove them. I mean, so it's a huge- And they don't want to take them back. They don't want to take them back. So it's, you know, folks know that their chance of getting to stay in the US is pretty good. And then

And the Cubans, I have to say, I have a friend who I always love the story just because it's

It tells you where things are in Cuba. She and her siblings needed to hire someone to take care of their elderly mother. And they managed to find who speaks Spanish. And so they managed to find two people who are eminently qualified. So the two people working in their, in the house, taking care of their elderly mother, one is a doctor. The wife is a doctor and the husband was in the national symphony of Cuba. And so, you know, they had a concert every night and,

And, and completely free, you know, not free medical care, but I mean, the person who's who would be doing elder care normally would not be licensed doctor. And in this case, she's not licensed because she hasn't got licensed in the US, but one day perhaps we'll practice medicine again in the US. I mean, that tells you the kind of human capital that left Cuba, the similar things to Venezuela.

But let me throw out one other thing. Yeah, please keep going. I interrupted you to give the scale, but I want to keep hearing more of the reasons why. No, the scale's right. I mean, but this all adds up at border processes. In the end, the way the border's managed matters, right? I mean, some of this stuff would have happened anyway. I don't think, you know, once the Darien Gap is crossable, that opens up the world. You've got countries that won't take people back. You've got real displacement crises. People want to get out of Cuba and Venezuela. So some of that stuff was going to happen to us anyway.

way, right? I mean, the people were in the US is the attractive economy. So some of this was going to happen, right? Why is it 2.4 million last year? I mean, you know, some of that has to do also with errors on our side, right? With a system that's outdated. And you were getting this earlier, I think, you know, we have a system that's built for Mexican men that's

that was built up in the 1980s and 90s for processing Mexican men, making a decision about whether they – if you get caught, you get sent back. You get sent back next door. You're held for a few days. Right. Back then, it was more about law enforcement and it wasn't even that big of a law enforcement problem. Now, it's law enforcement plus. It's all these other things. It's processing. It's where do you put families, right? Can you make a decision about whether they have protection needs within 20 days because that's as long as you can hold kids? Yeah.

And by the way, you probably shouldn't be holding kids even 20 days, right? So I mean, can you make a decision quickly?

people are going to ask for asylum because they come from countries where it's plausible that they have protection needs. And some of them, they now know this, and some of them do deserve international protection. Others probably don't or they're not going to qualify, but you have to actually make the decision in some sort of real time. And by the way, you've got to have Border Patrol agents and what are called the OFO, the Office of Field Operations, the folks who are at the ports of entry, which are not Border Patrol. They're a different part of the US government. You

You know, you got to have agents at the border who are actually making decisions about whether these people come in or not. Do I send them for an asylum hearing? I don't. And it turns out one of the things you see when you spend time in the ports of entry and the border patrol stations, one big problem is we don't have the ability to make decisions on asylum. We don't have places to hold people, all that. But they don't even have time, most of the time, to figure out what to do with people, right? The numbers are so vast and the resourcing is so much old school from another period that

that we're talking about, you know, most of the time the decision is to let people in because you don't have the ability to send them anywhere. You send them to an asylum screening and there aren't enough asylum officers. You want to hold them for a few days in a holding cell, but there are not enough holding cells. So last year, last fiscal year, the U.S. government, you know, as you know, goes from this crazy, you know, October 1st to September 30th fiscal year.

Last fiscal year, about 81% of families were allowed into the United States on what's called a notice to appear. And others were allowed in other ways, but notice to appear. To be clear, when you say allowed in, you don't mean they come into the country and they can stay here forever. It's that their specific case is backlogged. It's backlogged.

It's exactly right. And so they might still get deported eventually or they'll be granted asylum or whatever is going to happen to them will happen eventually, but it might take years. And meanwhile, they come into the country and they go to a city, they try to settle in somewhere and they're here until their case can be dealt with.

That's exactly right. And so they're given a piece of paper. It tells them that they have to show up at an immigration facility in the city they're going to. They're often given a monitoring device to make sure that they show up. It's usually now a cell phone. It used to be ankle monitors.

So there is some enforcement that they show up, but when they show up for that immigration, it's an appointment at that point. It's not even a hearing. When they show up at the immigration office and they say, I'm here, here's the paperwork I was given, most people do seem to show up. They are then given a date for a hearing four or five years in the future.

Now, the reality is they're in limbo at this point. So they entered semi-legally. I mean, they were caught entering illegally. On the other hand, the U.S. government said you can carry on to where you're going. Where are you going? I'm going to – Cleveland or New York or whatever. Right. Okay. Here is a notice to appear in the immigration office in Cleveland. And so they've done what they were told to do.

And then because the system's so backlogged, they're going to wait for four or five years. Now, obviously what happens is people set up their life and, you know, their chance of them- They settle down, they get a job, they have kids and so forth. All that, right. And the reality is, you know, we're probably not going to deport those people down the road, right? And they may also, in fact, if they're running for their lives, they probably aren't going to get asylum for four or five years. So they will be wondering for four or five years if they're going to be sent back to a bad situation. Yeah, they're in this in-between status, right? It's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. But if they also didn't qualify for asylum, they might as well apply for it because they'll be waiting for four or five years anyway and probably longer than do an appeal. So we've created a system that doesn't protect people, but it doesn't deport people either. And it just doesn't make decisions. I mean, it ultimately comes down to we don't have any decision points.

that would then discourage people. You know, in an ideal world, you want people with protection needs to show up and get asylum, that people who are running for their lives deserve protection, but other people to think twice about it. And right now, there's not a lot of reason to think twice. It seems like one of the things that's been done to try to navigate

mitigate this problem of being totally unprotected and in this weird in-between period where you came into the country illegally, but you might be here for several years and so forth. And the government said, you're allowed to be here now, is that some people have been granted a kind of temporary protected status. And there's a few different ways of doing that. There's like more than 2 million people who now have this kind of status, but that also...

Has a sort of in-between quality to it, or as I think your colleagues have referred to it, it's a kind of liminal status to it. Can you just explain what that is? Yeah, it is. So this gets really complicated at this point. But there's something called humanitarian parole, which is discretionary from the U.S. government. And the Secretary of Homeland Security is allowed to grant it via authorities at the border or elsewhere, right, by immigration authorities. Right.

And it allows people to come into the country, stay legally for a period of time, usually two years, and to work. So there's a few ways people get this. I mean, initially, they were giving it out to people who were caught at the border. They've stopped doing that now. But there are two ways that people get this legally now. So one is if they agree not to cross between ports.

So not trying to run across the border and get away with it, but to formally go to a port of entry that's set up exactly to process this kind of case.

And frankly, they're still letting most people in between ports of entry. And so you have a lot of people who look at this and go, if I wait for an appointment, yeah, I'll get two-year permission to stay. But I may be waiting for a month or two to get an appointment. If I run across now, I won't have any legal paperwork, but they're still going to send me on into the interior and I'll get a job in the informal economy. And so people are doing that. So it hasn't quite worked out. The idea is a good one, but the actual mechanics are hard.

The other thing they did, which has worked better, is a program called CHNV, which is Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. One of these programs that has a terrible sounding name because, you know, you have no idea what this is, you know, CHNV. But the idea was, you know, people from those four nationalities, countries that are in turmoil, if they have a sponsor in the U.S., someone who's legally present in the U.S. who's willing to sponsor them,

they can get into a queue and come legally to the United States. And they also get parole for two years and they get to fly in. They don't have to go across the border. You know, they will eventually get the, you know, if they are chosen, they get the humanitarian parole. They can hop on an airplane. They can fly into the U S they're eligible to work very quickly after that, that has actually worked better. And it's worked really well with Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans because they have stopped crossing between ports of entry and

Can that be replicated for people from other countries or is it just – would that just then be too many, too big a problem? I think there's – no one is sure if it's on solid legal standing. And so there's a number of court cases out there on this and they've been afraid to go any further than just those four nationalities until they know whether they're on solid ground. And those four nationalities have a little more legal –

basis because they are four countries where people have humanitarian protection needs, right? And so they're not deciding on an individual basis, but they're saying, look, because people coming out of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti are likely to be people that are fleeing from a difficult situation. We can grant them humanitarian parole. So they felt like they're on better legal ground there. And if they're being sponsored by someone in the US, it's almost like they have somebody in a sense speaking for them. Right, right.

They have someone – I think sometimes we can underestimate how much that matters in the U.S. The entire U.S. immigration system has been based on sponsorship. And we never talk about it that way, but it really is. And you're sponsored either in the legal system by an employer or by a family member, right? Or if you're a refugee, you're sponsored by – we actually created a whole set of agencies that sponsor people and help them adjust. Right.

Even undocumented people until recently mostly came to a place where they had a relative, where they had a couch to sleep on, where they had someone that's going to hook them up for their first job.

And this is a really powerful integration mechanism, right? And this doesn't, you know, when you look at Europe, for example, there's lots and lots of immigrants who arrive without family or personal connections, right? And that's often really hard. And for the first time, we're seeing it in the US. So this is, you know, New York, Chicago, Denver, where primarily Venezuelans have been the ones who've been arriving in those cities, a lot of them bused by the Texas state government, but some of them arriving on their own as well.

And overwhelmingly, it's a Venezuelan issue. I mean, it's interesting because the Venezuelans, this is where we get back to the whole Venezuela crisis. Venezuelans act more like a displaced community. They're less about making a strategic decision on where they're headed. They were getting out of Dodge. They were getting out of Venezuela when it was collapsing, right? And there's political turmoil. There was persecution. Economic collapse. Economic. I mean, million percent, more than million percent inflation one year. I mean, health system collapsed.

You know, a quarter of the population left. A lot of them went to other countries, more or less got settled. And most of them have stayed in other countries in Latin America, actually. Most of them are, you know, in Colombia and Ecuador and Peru and other places. But some number of them said, wait, I can get into the U.S. right now. I hear, you know, my cousin got in last week and I can make more money there. I could send money back to my grandmother that, you know, stayed in Venezuela. And so people have headed north.

But not necessarily knowing someone. And that's really unusual, right? I mean, so they're the ones who are having real trouble adjusting. You get a few other nationalities as well. But it tends to be the Venezuelans that don't have the couch to sleep on. They don't have the person that hooks them up with their first job.

But most Central Americans do. Colombians do. Ecuadorians do. Mexicans certainly do. The traditional groups that came to the United States, Haitians and Cubans, I mean, they almost always have someone they know. And they're arriving in a dense community of people who are going to help them out. And that's why they move so quickly in the labor market.

Something I really liked about your answer to the question of why are so many people coming to the U.S. now via that border with Mexico is that you didn't mention politics. And so much of the debate that plays out in the media, on TV and so forth, is

is about whether or not, for example, Joe Biden is softer on immigration than Donald Trump, that essentially a lot of these migrants are like, well, Trump's gone, Biden's there. So now's the time to make a run for it, to actually try to get into the country. And what you're saying is that actually the real reasons are a lot more fundamental, right?

that it's about the economy, of course, doing incredibly well, the US economy. And so that attracts people. And it's also about this kind of supply side issue of making it easier for people to make that trip, for example, to cross the Darien Gap and so on. And also the fact that the system itself is so overwhelmed that perversely,

potential migrants might see that and think, well, you know, gosh, if I can just get there, the system is overwhelmed. So they'll have to let me go. And I'll at least get into the country and then take my chances because once I'm actually inside the U S it's,

Anything can happen. What do you make of the sort of the conversation around these things, like the debate and how it lines up with reality? I think it obscures reality, right? I mean, and I can criticize things about the Biden approach, right? I mean, I think they took way too long. I think it actually came with a pretty good compromise to resource the

But, you know, they could have done that two or three years ago, right?

Maybe politically it would have been hard, but they took way too long to fix the part they could fix, right? They can't fix the U.S. economy being good. We don't want to fix that, actually. That's a good thing for us, right? So it's attractive. They have trouble creating more visas because that does go through Congress and it's contentious. They certainly can't change the ability of people to pass through the daring gap. But they could have fixed the permissiveness of the asylum system. More than permissive, it's sclerotic, right? I mean, it just doesn't move.

And so the incentive that creates the lack of resources to the border authorities. So they've made their mistakes along the way, as did the Trump administration. But most of this is...

than any one political party or any one administration. And frankly, the numbers were going up before COVID during the Trump administration. A lot of what we see now, I mean, I think even the Darien Gap, the numbers were going up. It's really interesting to look at. I hadn't realized this until the other day, how much the numbers went up until 2019. And then they dropped down as the world closed down, right? I mean, it became harder to cross all borders. Right.

Panama stopped allowing people to move on through Costa Rica. You know, they all everyone shut their borders. But the reality is these numbers were going up and these are bigger. You know, this stuff we're seeing in Europe. We're seeing this happen other places in the world where people just have more options for mobility than they ever did before. And they're going to where they think they'll be better off. And it turns out in countries that have always transformed.

tried to make some decisions about who comes in and who doesn't, they very rarely have the capacity to do it in real time in the way they might once have done. Let's talk about some of the solutions that have been put forward by MPI.

One just seems to be that all of the different agencies tasked with managing immigration and the border need to work better together, and maybe that collaboration should be formalized somehow. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's right. One of the things that happened when they divided up the Immigration Naturalization Survey, which used to exist back in the –

I'm trying to think when it started. I think it started in the 30s up through the 2001, 2002 when Homeland Security was created. They divided into three pieces and those three pieces don't actually work very well. And they fused a couple other pieces from elsewhere on there. Created the Department of Homeland Security. This was a reaction to 9-11. It was a reaction to threat of terrorism. And so the Department of Homeland Security was going to defend the homeland.

And immigration got put in there, but it has three different pieces, major pieces. And one is U.S. citizenship and immigration services, which is all about visas, deciding who comes into the country. Immigration and customs enforcement, which is about deciding who should be removed from the country.

And it also does investigations. It does a few other things that are quite eclectic. Primarily people who are already in the country's interior. Yes. They decide those cases and who gets removed and so forth. Exactly. Primarily. Although they also do the removals from the border. They do the actual physical removals. Okay. And then you have customs and border protection, which is really supposed to be present at all the ports of entry. So primarily land borders, but also at airports and seaports. Okay.

And they're the ones who are supposed to decide what happens and manage the mechanics. I mean, it's usually handing off either to ICE, to Immigration Customs Enforcement, to deport people, or handing it off to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, to make a decision about asylum or some other form of relief. But it's usually asylum process. Right.

But CBP is the most process-oriented. They're the real border authorities that are really just trying to grab someone who comes across or take them in and then hand them off to another agency. It's a complicated process, and they all respond to – they all have different incentives. They all have different structures. They certainly work together on a day-to-day basis, but there isn't necessarily coherent policymaking that ties them together. Last question about the border before we turn to legal immigration. Sure.

We've been talking about the role of government, but there are other players involved. There's NGOs. There's, you know, I don't know if there are private sector solutions at play here, right? Or at least being discussed. My question is, is that all nice, helpful, great, but small potatoes relative to what the government can do? Or is there actually an important role for non-government organizations to participate?

I actually think the role of non-government organizations is huge. I mean, let's start with the private sector. I mean, you know, the private sector is really concerned about labor markets right now, about having human capital, you know, having people that just sometimes just even bodies to work, you know, and then certain kinds of human capital for different sectors.

We've seen a huge increase in recruiting of people for seasonal work from Central America, which has been helpful. I think it's actually reduced the numbers a bit of Central Americans coming to this country. Hard to prove, but it looks like it has – those numbers at least have stayed stable and gone down quite a few months. But getting the private sector involved in this matters more.

And they see this differently. They don't see this as immigration policy. They see this as, you know, we need workers for certain sectors. If there are workers in another country, you know, make it easy for me and, you know, make it possible for me to recruit them and I'll do it. So there's a huge opportunity for government and the private sector to work together on this.

Civil society groups play an actually essential role, first of all, in protecting migrants on their journey, which is important whether or not we think people should get in in the end, that we want people to be safe. We don't want kids to be preyed on. We do want people to be safe on the way. And civil society has played a huge role in a chaotic system of helping people get out of border communities. And that may sound crazy.

trivial, except that there was a moment where people were really backing up in cities like El Paso and Laredo and Brownsville and Tucson. And all along the border, you would see people who had nowhere to go. What a lot of the nonprofits have done, sometimes with state and federal government support,

is create a space where people can stay and then help them go on their journey. Most people pay for their own way. If they have a family member, they'll pay for their, their ticket, but really getting people on their feet and on their way in an organized fashion. And that, and it's actually fascinating to see. I mean, there was a time when like nonprofits and the border patrol didn't talk to each other, right? They were always on opposite sides. It's fascinating when you're in border communities and we've, we've spent a lot of time in, in border communities over the past couple of years and,

One of the things you realize is actually how well they work together on some things, because if nothing else, they want to make sure there's an orderly process in the border and that you don't have people living on the street. You don't have people released and wandering around without anywhere to go. And so they've created a really orderly process that allows people to move on. Now, downside of all this, of course, is we've got a process that makes no decisions about whether people should move on or not. But if we're letting them move on anyway, then at least you want it to be orderly.

All right, let's turn now to legal immigration. And let me just start with these two facts. I was looking at the unemployment rate for both immigrants in the U.S. and for U.S. native-born workers, so people who were born in the U.S. at the end of last year, so very recent.

And the unemployment rate for immigrants was 3.8%, which is incredibly low. The unemployment rate for US-born workers was 3.5%, also incredibly low. So at the very least, it's clear that the increasing immigration of the last few years, the increasing legal immigration...

is at the very least consistent with a very low unemployment rate for the country as a whole and for U.S.-born workers.

And I want to get your reaction to that and also just ask for your general thoughts on the role of immigration and immigrants in the US economy. Well, there's a great book coming out by a guy named Zeke Hernandez, who's a professor at Wharton at University of Pennsylvania, a business professor. Ezekiel Hernandez, I think is his whole name. And it's a really fun book. It comes out in May. And so I'm going to give a quick promo for his forthcoming book. But I was lucky enough to read an early copy of it.

And he talks about the economics of immigration. It's absolutely fascinating because what you see is over time, immigrants actually contribute more in taxes than they use. They do certainly use something in tax, particularly schools, right? I mean, when people come with kids or they have kids, that is a burden actually on local public finances. But over time, they contribute a lot more.

They tend to – Because kids get older, they start working and then they pay their own taxes. And immigrants who are here longer end up paying a lot – even undocumented immigrants turn out to pay a lot in taxes, right? I mean because they end up paying sales tax. They end up paying rent. I mean they pay property taxes indirectly through rent and so on and so forth. So they end up paying quite a bit as well, which is always surprising I think to people. Yeah.

And that immigrants also are incredibly productive, right? I mean, in the second generation, the children of immigrants actually tend to do better on average than the children of native-born Americans of similar economic circumstances, which is surprising. We don't know why that is. I mean, we assume there's something about people, self-selection of people that migrate that perhaps are a little more driven, but we really don't know the answer to that.

And it turns out immigrants are workers, but they're also consumers. They're also sometimes business people and inventors and everything else. And so there's a number of ways, you know, it's not that sort of immigrants drop into a labor market and just become workers. They also are consuming in ways that drive the economy. And

And so one of the things that we've seen is there tends to be an enormous complementarity between immigrant workers and native-born workers. And it's on both ends. It's really interesting. I mean, we tend to get more people willing to work in lower-wage occupations. They're not always lower educational levels. We have a lot of very educated immigrants, but they're willing to at least start off in lower-wage occupations in areas that most American workers won't work.

And then we got a lot of very high skilled immigrants that come in also that are deeply involved in technology and innovation and in starting businesses. And so on both ends, we see a lot of complementarity with American workers. And I think it's probably part of why the U.S. economy is so dynamic right now. Right. I mean, there's lots of reasons for this, but this has been part of the secret sauce that's made this country work for a very long time. And now is no exception to that.

One of the criticisms you've made is that the legal immigration system as it is set up now is not very responsive to the needs of the U.S. economy. What do you mean by that? Yeah, we're the only industrial country that puts most of our immigration, most of our visas into law, which is –

which is to say the actual numbers. Like most countries adjust the number of visas they have according to economic cycles. So for example, we have 66,000 visas for seasonal workers in non-agricultural occupations every year. That number was created in law in 1990.

Here we are 34 years later, and the only way you can change it from 66,000 to another number in a much bigger economy and a much more active economy is by going back to Congress and changing the law. And instead, what we have is a situation where maybe one year –

You need 150,000 of those workers. In another year, you might need 20,000 of them. Exactly. And the number doesn't change. And the number doesn't change. And so countries do it in different ways. I mean, a lot of countries do what we do within the quotas we have, which is allow employers to make decisions. And there's a certain market sensibility there because when people can hire, when employers can hire native-born workers, they usually rather do that, right? It's cheaper to hire native-born workers. If you have to go

file for a visa, you have to recruit someone abroad. Usually that costs you more money. So, you know, if the economy is not doing well, they'd rather hire American workers and not go abroad, right? If the economy is doing really well and they can't find American workers for a particular job, then you have some ability to go abroad.

Some countries like Canada also survey the market periodically and they set quotas. They allow employers to hire people, but they do set quotas. But they set it within parameters depending on how the economy is doing. And it's not perfect, right? But we've often thought that that would be a good model for the US to have a nonpartisan, very technical board that just looks at what the labor market is.

situation is, what the prospects are and make some decisions about what quotas should be, what the numbers of visas should be in different sectors. But that's far from where we are as a country. We like putting things in stone and then we don't ever go back to it. What's your idea?

So our idea is something we call the bridge visa. I mean, our sense is that lots of people, if you have a sort of dating and marriage, right? I mean, you know, we want people to come to the U.S.,

initially as on temporary visas, right? To try it out. Employers get to see if they work, people get to see if they like living in this country, and then the ability to transition to permanent status. And it can vary a little bit in the time and the requirements depending on what the job is. Reasonable people could get together and craft this, come up with something that

It would make sense. But our sense is, you know, it actually makes sense to bring lots of people in in a temporary way, give them a little bit of portability so they're not stuck in a single job, but they're still stuck in a somewhat temporary situation, but then be able to adjust to permanent status. And this makes sense, by the way, for engineers, and it makes sense for agricultural workers. Yeah.

And some jobs should still allow for seasonality. We actually do think there's some jobs for which agriculture probably fits well and actually fits better into the seasonal work because there are seasons, people come, they go back. And by the way, circular is not bad. A lot of people-

really enjoy being able to come and go and still live with their family and their country of origin. Not everyone wants to move to the United States. A lot of people would love to make money in the United States. People would come for a part of the year, make their money, and then go back home. And go back. And we should assume there's some jobs where that'll always be true. Not everyone wants to live in the United States. I've done this experiment, my totally random unscientific way in some communities in Guatemala where I spend time and sort of ask people if you could –

go permanently to the US, would you rather live there for a few months? And almost invariably, people are like, if you're telling me I can make money in the US and come back, I'd much rather do that. And especially if they know that they'll be able to go back to the US the following year and make money again. That is the key. People have to know that there's some security being able to do that. But for most jobs, people are probably going to have to stay. You can't have an engineer. You probably can't have a care worker who comes and goes back after 10 months and

But you can have people come in a temporary way and then be able to adjust to permanence over time. And that would really – and it also allows, if there are economic cycles, to be able to cut down on some of the temporary workers, right, on the number of people coming in in a temporary way. So it creates a little bit of market sensitivity that we don't – frankly, don't have right now. Yeah.

And to your analogy about dating and marriage, the bridge visa essentially puts in place this three to six year period where it's like the US labor market and that particular immigrant are dating to see if they like each other. So the immigrant has a job, comes here, works in a sector.

According to what you just said is not tied to a specific employer. There is, when you say portability, that immigrant can switch jobs. That's right. They want to. And then at the end of the three or six year period or whatever it ends up being, what happens? Like who determines if that immigrant can then get permanent status or if they have to leave? How does that work?

Play out. I mean, it generally depends on having a clean criminal record, being able to show constant employment, being able to show that, you know, they're a productive member of society and other ways that they're involved in their community. But these are all things that have to be crafted. Right. And I think we're along. We've put this out as an idea. But frankly, these are all things that would have to be.

In a more sane political world, reasonable people of different political persuasions would sit down and hammer out something like this because it makes sense for workers. It makes sense for employers. It's sensitive to changes in the market. That may not be the political world we actually live in. But in a sane political world, that would be the kind of thing that reasonable people could figure out what are the parameters. And it could be different for –

engineers than it is for care workers, right? I mean, conceivably or someone working in a factory, maybe it is a quicker pathway for someone with a high skill set than someone who comes in with less higher education. But, you know, I think one of our assumptions behind this is that there are no unskilled jobs.

Almost every job requires some skillset. I mean, care work, even if you're a care worker who only has a middle school education, care work requires skills. It requires a personality to work with children or elderly or whoever the target population has some real skills. And all work is that way. Agricultural work is skilled work, right? Every work, every, every job requires some skillsets. And part of what we're doing is matching people, um,

who have either the skill sets or the ability to develop them with employment options that are out there, trying to see if it works, trying to see if also there's a match in the community and the person wants to stay. And then at some point you can think about marriage. You can think about the permanence. Last question.

You, I imagine, spend a lot of time talking to policymakers, a lot of time talking to the public, a lot of time talking to others at other think tanks, just trying to be sort of influential with your policy views on immigration.

And I'm wondering what some of the biggest misunderstandings are about immigration that you've come across, the things that you'd really want people to remember that maybe they get wrong about this topic, which is so important but also so unbelievably complicated. It is unbelievably complicated. When you get into the law, it's really complicated.

I think the first one is that we assume that most people are here illegally. And in fact, most people, at least before COVID, which is the last good numbers we have, well over three quarters of immigrants were in this country legally. And it's really a little higher than that. It's actually around, or at least it was around 80% or so if you include people that had some sort of temporary status. So

you know, most people do come legally. Now that may have changed a little bit in the last couple of years. I mean, I think the balance, you know, it's still a majority of people are here legally, but the vast majority, but there are more people that are in these liminal statuses and there's probably more people who are also unauthorized in the country than there were before. So it's, it's certainly changed, but it's still the vast majority of people come legally and are here legally. I think the second thing is the fear about immigrants being a burden rather than

what I think most of us know, which is that immigrants are actually part of the success of this country. You know, now the question is, in what sectors? How do they come? You know, I think we need to figure out all those things. Like everything, there's no unalloyed good in the world, right? I mean, everything, you need to figure out where it fits in. But immigration has been part of what has made this a successful country. And it's frankly why we're aging less quickly. Even though we are aging, we're aging a lot less quickly than countries like

Italy or Korea or Japan, right? Who are really hitting demographic.

walls and having trouble figuring out who we're going to pay for social services, who's going to pay payroll tax when people are getting older, who's going to do work, who's going to take care of the people who are getting older. We haven't had those problems on the same degree because we constantly renew our population. And I guess there's a whole thing I think about changing –

who we are as a country. And frankly, what has made this country great is, you know, we're constantly changing. And that's actually always been true of this country. I mean, that is actually one of the fascinating things about the United States. People can argue about the pace of change, right? And that's a legitimate conversation to have too, right? I mean, how fast do we change as a country? But frankly, we have always changed in radical ways from generation to generation because of who's come into this country. And we've always...

those that have come in. Right now, people question Latin Americans and people from Asia, but they were the same debates and they were probably even more accurate about Italians and Poles. And at some point it was the Germans, Benjamin Franklin went down, wrote this one letter at one point talking about how Germans would never integrate into the United States and they don't look like us and they're undemocratic.

You know, that's sort of been the story of the United States. And yet we turn out to be stronger and better over time. And so we can certainly argue about the pace of change and how many people and all that. But change has been good for us as a country. So I think those are the myths we run into. And I guess immigrants not working is probably the other one. I mean, immigrants, particularly immigrant men, tend to have a higher employment rate than native-born men. The only time that changes is during downturns in the economy.

Women, it depends. It actually depends on the moment. And right now, because more people are working from home, care work has actually changed a little bit. That's affected the employment of immigrant women. But generally speaking, particularly immigrant men and generally in the past, immigrant women actually have very high employment rates. They come here to work and they do. And most people fall in love with this country and-

start families and become just another big part of the tapestry. Andrew Seely, what a great chat. Thanks so much. Great to be with you, Cardiff. Good to be on the show. And that's our show for today. You can find links to the work done by Andrew and his colleagues at the Migration Policy Institute in the show notes for this episode. Thank you.

The New Bazaar is a production of Bazaar Audio from me and executive producer Amy Keene. Adrian Lilly is our sound engineer, and our music is by Scott Lane and DJ Harrison of Subfloor Studio. Please follow or subscribe to The New Bazaar on your app of choice. And if you enjoyed today's show, leave us a review or tell a friend. If you want to get in touch, I'm on Twitter as at Cardiff Garcia, or you can email us at hello at BazaarAudio.com. And we'll see you next episode.