It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind Immigration Enforcement with Mark Krikorian
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here today, Rome tomorrow. Join now at Synesta.com. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to A Numbers Game with Ryan Groduski. I'm here again. Happy Monday. I hope you all had a great weekend. Back at it. And I know it is the dead of summer. So thank you for being here and talking about politics. Last week was a busy week. There was obviously a lot of news with Iran and Israel, and it was kind of whiplash following it all. It's very difficult when you're

Hearing international news trying to understand who to believe which side to get all the information from and seeing clips online some of its AI generates some of his old video so That's been kind of wild to watch Trump and Tucker even kind of got into it Trump called Tucker a kook on Truth Social after Tucker didn't introduce Steve Bannon about Iran Which I thought was something I didn't expect to happen

I don't have that many insights into the Middle East. And I'm not going to do an episode on the Israel stuff. It's just, I don't have actually a lot of one deep felt opinions aside from kind of bland generic ones. And there's just, it's just not,

It's not for me. It's not what I plan on doing this podcast on. But I do have a good story about Tucker Carlson that I would like to share with listeners because I think you guys would like it. I did Tucker's show when he was on Fox like six times. And when you did it, because he did it out of his studio in Maine and of his house. So he wasn't like I was never in a room with him. I think he moved to Maine like after the first year when there were protesters at his house in D.C. This is not.

hidden information, by the way, this is well reported. So you would go, I would go to a satellite location and sit in a black room by myself and tape with just, you know, a camera there, not even a camera guy, just me and a camera. And, uh, there was complete silence on my end until the segment started because they would do whatever they needed to do. And that's how guests were working with anyway. So the whole time you're there, I'm a note taker. I take,

tons of notes that you couldn't tell from this podcast. And I'm sitting there in complete silence. And then one time I started to hear Tucker's side of the broadcast and what was going on, I guess, with his EPs and his producers and whatnot. And they were blasting Willie Nelson's Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die. And Tucker's like singing along with it.

That's all I could hear as I'm trying to remember what I'm going to talk about. And he's like singing and he goes, let's go. And then they go right on air like there was no like preview. So, you know, Tucker introduces me 20 seconds that I could hear in my head was him singing, roll me up and smoking when I die. Really funny. Anyway, total side note, nothing to do with Israel, but just a funny story.

Anyway, this week also there is the upcoming New York City Democratic primary for the mayor of the city. It's tomorrow is the primary, June 24th. Early voting has started last week. The numbers coming out of the boroughs for who's showing up look very good for socialist Zoran Mamandini. Mamandini, I know I just butchered that name, but don't worry about it. He's a socialist, all you have to remember.

But I saw some private Democratic polling, and they do believe that Andrew Cuomo, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, is going to pull this out with a decent double-digit margin. New York has the ranked choice of voting, which is the stupidest way to do an election. Only someone with a PhD in political science could think of that. So we won't know who's the winner probably on election night. We'll probably have to wait several days while they rank them all and count all the votes. But I've heard from Democrats they do feel like

Cuomo is going to pull it out, which if he does, we'll see if the Working Family Party endorses the socialist and it is a four Democrat to one Republican race, which is very possible.

OK, lastly, and most consequentially, though, for this podcast, what I want to talk to listeners about was President Trump's many different takes on immigration enforcement. So we all know that immigration restriction was the centerpiece of Trump's two successful presidential campaigns. In 2016, it was build the wall. That was his rallying cry. And in 2024, it was mass deportations.

You could see signs at the RNC, people waving, saying mass deportations. It was a very proud logo. There was no hidden agenda around it. The only campaign that he didn't really emphasize immigration enforcement was in 2020, allegedly at the advice of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Trump also put out a white paper in 2016 where he said he would do all these things on legal immigration to reduce the numbers. When he first became president, he actually supported a bill from Senator Tom Cotton called the RAISE Act, which would have created a point system. People would have been allowed entry into our country based on how many points they ranked up, if they spoke English, if they had a college degree, if they had skills, if they had money, and it would have cut legal immigration by 50%. Never

It never got passed into law, but Trump actually supported it when it first came out in 2017.

Now, most of those promises on legal immigration never kept, right? You just never kind of kept them, and they kind of were sidelined by a lot of people in the admin who were big supporters of mass legal immigration. It wasn't all of Trump's fault, but it happened right before COVID. And actually, legal immigration started ticking up throughout Trump's term. There was intense pressure from corporate donors and from the Republican business class. When he announced his run in 2024—

President Trump really did back away from a lot of the earlier stuff he made in 2016 about reducing legal immigration. But mass deportation was still the center theme. He was very much holding on to that campaign promise. And as someone who was a day one, 2016, 2015, whatever it was, Trump supporter, which was actually 10 years ago from last week, I was very skeptical that he would keep the promises, the promises.

The second time that he won successfully in 2024, the third time he ran, I was very skeptical he would keep those promises because he had walked away from so many of the legal immigration stuff in 2016. And I'm happy to sit there and say I was wrong, you know, and actually the reason I took the meeting even with the DeSantis influencers in 2024 was because I was so skeptical, but I'm happy that I was wrong.

So here we are, six months into President Trump's second term. And

Illegal immigration is down substantially, right? He has completely kept his promises on enforcing the border. There's essentially no border crossings. From February to April 2025, there were 35,000 illegal alien encounters at our southern border. That's down from 559,000 during the same three-month period the year prior under President Biden. So

So from 559,000 to 35,000, that's almost a complete shutdown. And ICE has done a really incredible job at increasing their capacity to do interior apprehensions. The most recent ICE detention data shows that the average number of people held is up 25% since President Trump took office. You might have heard there's a trope coming out in the media that President Trump is

deporting less people than President Biden or President Obama. That is really just based on how President Biden and President Obama cooked the numbers, because what they were doing, what they were counting everyone arrested by CBP, that's the Border Patrol agents who were being turned back at the border as deportations, even though they were never in the interior of the country. So President Trump's

apprehensions and deportations are coming from within the country. People who have been living here rather than people who just come to the border and are turned away, which President Biden wasn't really doing a lot of that in any way at the advice of Ron Klain. So

Ron Klaim was his advisor who was very liberal on immigration. Anyway, so now let's talk about mass deportation. That's another story entirely. In the first 100 days in office, ICE officially reported that there were about 65,000 illegal aliens removed from our country.

While there's been no official updates since that 100 days, the estimates coming out of people in the know and the administration, though not in ICE specifically, say that it's about 140,000 to 207,000 total deportations in the six months. We'll have to wait till ICE gives them an official number whenever they update their numbers periodically.

to find the exact amount, but 140,000 to 207,000 is our best estimate.

There's a question also about self-deportation, the number of people choosing to leave the country on their own devices because they don't want to be arrested and deported. President Trump's administration is actually offering to pay illegals $1,000 plus a free flight out of the country if they leave without having to go through the rigmarole of a court and an arrest and all the rest of it. And several thousand have taken the administration up on their offer.

A story from the Wall Street Journal that's gone viral over the last few days is that data released

alongside the recent job report from the Labor Department show that the number of foreign-born people either working or looking for work fell by one million from March to April. That's the biggest two-month decline in foreign-born labor force since the early days of the pandemic. It's unclear if they are leaving the country or just leaving the workforce because they are afraid of being arrested and deported.

A resource that I have started to use to look at if there's indications of self-deportations by different groups is the CDC Wonder Fertility Data. Okay, let me explain. Back in 2010, there was a law that Arizona passed called SB 1070, which would allow local law enforcement to ask people for proof of citizenship during routine encounters like traffic stops if they suspected the person was not legally in the country.

And what happened was when the Arizona Health Department updated their birth data year and year, year by year, there was a 5% decline in the number of children being born to Hispanic women in the state. From 2008 to 2012, because remember it was in 2010, the number dropped by a while 14%, fewer births.

children being born by Hispanic women. Hispanic women went from having 3,000 more children than white women in the state to 5,500 fewer. That's because they were self-deporting from the state. They were leaving the state in order not to be asked when they were driving and they blew a stop line or whatever if they were legally in the country. Illegal aliens were not, you know, not just your regular legal Hispanic American, but illegal aliens were leaving. And they didn't necessarily all go to Mexico or

or wherever their native country was. A lot went to California or Nevada or New Mexico, states with looser immigration laws. But they did leave Arizona. So what does the CDC wonder early data say about the country as a whole now that Trump is doing these strict immigration enforcement laws?

I want to sit there and know that this is the preliminary data that only goes to April. So we're not getting like the full number because they didn't include May and June, and that's when a lot of the immigration enforcement happened. So March and April 2025, compared to a year ago, there's been about a 1% drop in Asian births, and Hispanic birth rate is basically flat. There's almost no change. Completely side note,

birth rates among black women dropped substantially at 4% and birth rates among white women has dropped about 1%, which is kind of normal considering there's less people having kids. But once again, there was the Hispanic birth rate is flat. So it's only two months. It's only early data. But if there was a sign for

for mass deportation at a million people, which is a substantial amount of people, you would see something in the birth data and it's not there. So I kind of have my hesitancy towards whether or not that million number is correct. Maybe it will. We'll have to sit there and wait for more data to come out in May and June. Maybe they will show numbers that coincide with the million number coming out of the Labor Department.

This hasn't stopped researchers from believing that we're about to see the first net decline in overall immigration population for the first time in 50 years. According to the Washington Post, two economists from the Brookings Institute, which is a liberal think tank, and AEI, which is a conservative think tank, they both kind of suck on immigration. That's a side note. But they are coming out with a paper this month stating that immigration is likely to be in negative numbers for the first time in 50 years in 2025.

Which leads us back to Trump. Mass deportation was obviously on the menu when he became president. Democrats seem completely shocked that that means actually deporting people. I think that they must thought it meant vibes or something, but it actually is what he says it is. And he was really carrying that vision out, him and his advisors and Stephen Miller and everything until Trump.

Last week, when out of nowhere, President Trump, at the advice of his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, a former close ally of Jared Kushner's, announced that they would no longer be doing immigration enforcement in farms, restaurants, and hotels. It was this abrupt change.

turn of events that led to a bit of a backlash among some conservatives. After all, progress was being made on the side of the American worker, even in those industries. Meatpacking giant JBS signed a new labor contract with the Commercial Workers International Union for higher wages, better safety standards, and paid sick leave. It was the first time in 40 years that this meatpacking giant chose to sit there and do important

improve wages and safety standards. And it was because they didn't have an endless stream of illegal aliens crossing the border like they had under previous administrations. After receiving initial pushback from conservatives, Brooke Rollins came out with a Twitter post, which was very much like these allegations against me are not true, but it's good that it's happening, that we're not doing this enforcement.

Very much kind of showing her face. Remember, she has spent a decade on record supporting amnesty for illegal aliens and jailbreak for criminals and definitely more one of more liberal people in Trump's orbit. So it wouldn't be surprising to anybody who knows people in the administration that she was doing this to begin with.

President Trump came out with a Truth Social post quickly after she made those comments, stating that he was going to continue deportations, but only in blue states, as if millions of illegal aliens don't live in Georgia, Florida, Texas and Arizona.

Then, within 24 hours of that Truth Social post, a story from the Washington Post broke where the Department of Homeland Security announced to its staff they were reversing the guidelines again and continuing mass deportations at farms, hotels, and restaurants. The Post suggested Stephen Miller was behind the reversal of the earlier decision, which, good for Stephen.

But what about farms and endless stories about rotting fruit, you may ask? What about these need to have an endless supply of illegal aliens, which they always say whenever you have any pushback against illegal aliens at farms?

Well, farmers can apply for an H-2A visa. That is the farmworker visa. We issue more than 300,000 H-2A visas per year. But here's the thing. If you apply the legal way, farmers have to ensure that they're not affecting American workers, that they're paying prevailing wages, and they're offering housing and transportation.

With illegal immigration, they don't have to do any of that. They can pass any cost over to taxpayers who can sit there and fund illegal aliens when they go to the hospitals when they need – if they have children here, the children qualify for SNAP and for all these food benefits and for public housing and all the rest of it. Taxpayers absorb the cost for big agriculture.

Immigration enforcement is at the root of the Trump movement. And by the way, most nationalist movements across the entire world, not just talking about Europe, but in Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, immigration is the root cause of nationalist movements across the entire globe. The thing that establishment politicians, globalists, established political parties, the thing that they hate

The most, which is the populist movement, they are responsible for because they refuse to enforce immigration. That's the long and complete short of it. With me this week is an expert on immigration who's been writing about this for decades. He's been doing it longer than I've been an adult. He knows what's going on in the Trump administration, what they're doing right, what they can improve on, and if we're ever going to get real mass deportation. Stay tuned. Every day, our world gets a little more connected.

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Mark Akorian is my guest this week. He is the executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a fabulous nonprofit. I highly recommend everyone checking out. Mark, thank you for being here. Glad to be here. Mark, what do you make of the administration's abrupt series of changes when it comes to immigration enforcement during the week? Well, what happened was that the president seemed to suggest and ICE actually ordered its agents to exempt from enforcement.

all farms, meat packers, restaurants, and hotels. And that was crazy. It just doesn't make sense. And it only lasted, though, for a brief time. He was caving to pressure from business interests and from even within his own administration, the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, who was kind of

in a sense, more of agriculture's lobbyist in the administration rather than the administration's representative to agriculture.

But we saw this. We saw this is the first Trump term, too, that the secretary of agriculture was very hesitant towards a lot of stuff. So that's not unusual. But I went into Baruch during my monologue. But go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. So but I mean, it is an example of, I guess, regulatory capture is what they call it in political science. But the fact is, the president has a good relationship with her. He's also a businessman. He hears from other businessmen. And so, you know, he said, oh, OK, yeah, this is important. And so we'll back off on this. Well, immediately.

he faced not just a resistance from his own base, you know, people online and elsewhere saying this is crazy, but within the administration itself, there was extreme pushback. I only know a few of the details. I can't really talk about what the little that I know, but there was strong pushback. And so on Monday, they reversed course and sent the kind of a message reversing the

a ban on doing immigration enforcement in whole sectors of the economy and it's good he did both for political and policy reasons that he stuck to his original you know his original strategy

What gets me is and I don't know if you saw this or not. It just and it is unimportant if you didn't. But I was watching two way the other morning on Monday morning when they were talking about this. And they had this is pre reversal. And Sean Spicer, who was in the first Trump cabinet, was a very high ranking member of the Republican Party for some time, has probably an ear close to the president still or mouth close to the president.

sat there and said, this is the Republican Party's chance to really go big on immigration and get an amnesty done without voting rights, which is, it drives me genuinely wanting to jump through screens to scream at people when they say, you can pass amnesties without voting rights. You've been working on immigration longer than I've been an adult. No shame in that. You're very qualified to talk about this.

Can you talk about for anyone who's like, oh, that's a reasonable position. Talk about what happens when judges get their hands on things like the 86 Reagan amnesty, how they kept it going for years and expanding it for years after it was even signed by the president. Yeah. You know, to adapt something Ronald Reagan used to say.

immigration control is only one memo away from extinction. In other words, the business interests and the libertarian interests on the Republican side, even if they appear in MAGA face,

really haven't changed. They still want, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, they're going to say, now is the time to amnesty all the illegal immigrants and to, you know, expand legal immigration even more than the million we take in now every year. So that's always going to be there. And, you know, eternal vigilance is the price of immigration control. So this incident didn't really

surprise me at least the the impulses of the people trying to take advantage of it for instance there were some before even this happened there was an open letter from a bunch of republican congressmen i think there were hispanic republicans from naria sarosar was i did the main person she's law from california he's actually not hispanic he's portuguese but he's also okay

horrendous on immigration. But they were saying, look, we backed the president and we want to deport criminals too, but let's not deport anybody else. So that impulse is always there and the president has changed the

uh that kind of the perspective of the party in general but that perspective that minority perspective if you will among republicans isn't going away it's always going to try to like a weed you know grow up through the cracks in the sidewalk again if it's allowed to well you've been you've been going you've been writing i think you started writing in 1995 um i think that that was the year a

I looked you up a little bit because I was like, I actually know Mark for a long time, but I don't know his whole biography. He was raised in 1995. When you started, right, Bill Clinton was the president, the Barbara Jordan Commission. And for those who don't know what it was, it was a Democratic black congresswoman who had started a commission on how to improve the lives of working class people. And she came up with the idea of you need to reduce legal immigration was going on.

And it was Republicans that really killed Barbara Jordan Commission's full adoption, because I think Clinton was willing to do it. How has the Republican Party changed since the mid-90s on this issue? Have they, aside from Donald Trump? Are we just one non-Trump election away from fading back into old habits? Well, just to defend some of the Republicans back in 1995, the legislature

legislation that was introduced based on the barbara jordan commission was in the republican congress it was um written by republican senator al simpson in the senate and lamar smith republican congressman in the house it was killed though by uh or not killed but it was gutted by spencer abraham who was a pro-business republican in the senate so it was it was almost a kind of

debate among Republicans. The Democrats weren't even really part of the discussion. And

Clinton would have gone along with it so long as Barbara Jordan was alive, because the woman had real moral heft among Republicans. As soon as she died, he just flushed the whole thing down the toilet. And so Congress passed a good law, but it was just enforcement. It didn't include legal immigration cuts. And what's changed, I think, is that and has changed on the Republican side, is that

although there are still pro-amnesty, de facto open borders Republicans, they are now no longer in any position to be driving the bus. In other words, they're kind of the tolerated,

rump of the old Republican consensus on mass immigration who agree on other issues. And every coalition has many parts to it, but they are now clearly pushed to the back of the bus. They're not in any position to

you know, kind of dictate terms to the rest of the party. That's just who are for. OK, so for the average listener, because I always try to give my audience as much facts as they can possibly get. They don't get, you know, more narrative driven podcasting and television shows.

Who are members of Congress that are driving the bus on a more restriction aside of lower levels of legal immigration and enforcing the laws to actually get rid of illegal immigration? Who are some people that people should look at and say, this is the leader, you know, on Congress?

illegal immigration and enforcement, which is an easier issue, obviously. Pretty much everybody in leadership is in good, you know, is solid on that. Speaker Johnson, you know, people, a lot of sort of are more excitable people on the right are dissatisfied with what he's doing. But he's actually with a, what, three vote majority or something, but phenomenally effective. And they passed in the last Congress, H.R. 2, which had a whole panoply of important

changes, the kinds of things that can't be in a reconciliation bill. In other words, that substantive changes and they're going to reintroduce that. So on immigration enforcement, you're pretty much going to be, you know, almost all the Republicans are going to be pretty good. Legal immigration numbers is where the issue is. And I think in the House, a future leader on this issue, a current leader is Chip Roy.

He's good. In other words, he's committed to broadly reducing immigration, not just enforcing the law. And an up and coming person, a freshman is Brandon Gill from Texas, who's definitely wants to make this issue again. Legal numbers as well. And who was Brandon's GC for his first campaign? I don't know.

Thank you. Oh, really? Congratulations. Thank you. Then it has to be Tom Cotton, right? Yeah, Tom Cotton, clearly. Josh Hawley as well. He's sort of, you know, taken the lead on other issues, but he is definitely on this issue. And I got to say,

Even Ted Cruz has become better on the legal immigration issue. He used to be more of just a kind of conventional legal good, illegal bad Republican. In fact, he literally said that once on the floor of the Senate. My immigration policy is legal good, illegal bad. And I was I felt like saying, Ted, that's like a joke. That's a meme. What are you doing?

but he's gotten better and yeah and i'm going to say one of the best people who's no longer in the senate is jd vance on immigration so you know um if knock on wood you know things work out in three and a half years i think we would have you know an actual restrictionist in the white house whereas with trump look i voted for the guy all three times i'm delighted he's president but

You know, he's not really a restrictionist. He's more of a enforce the law, but we need lots of legal immigrants kind of guy. Would you say... Transitional figure, I think.

Would you say he's the most conservative president immigration in your lifetime? Oh, absolutely. No question about it. Well, I mean, I don't know. Let's see. Yeah. Lifetime thus far. OK, so the left, the Democrats and the left broadly have used the lawfare to try to slow down his agenda on immigration. How effective have they been? Because you've seen screaming on the part of, you know, commentary and commentators that, you know,

He has usurped the judiciary, which is never wrong in their eyes, to deport illegal aliens. Have they had they been that effective on it? Because it feels like he's kind of doing what we need to get done to do mass deportation anyway.

uh he's been way more effective than the first time around they learned a lot of lessons they learned if you're gonna spark a lawsuit get the thing going early so you have time to work it through the courts and win because there were things triggers they pulled at the end of the last administration and they just ran out of time and so biden just reversed them all so yeah he's been much more effective but the lawfare look it's been pretty effective uh but it hasn't

stop them from doing what they need to do. And in fact, if anything, the bottleneck in getting more deportations, for instance, has been money. That's what the big, beautiful bill is going to do. It's not just hiring more ICE agents or what have you, because that takes years to recruit and train people and all that.

It's more money for detention space because you can arrest all the people you want. If you got nowhere to hold them while you do the paperwork, send them home. You end up having to let them go. And that's sort of missing the whole point. So I think once that bill is passed and the money is authorized or appropriated for them to

let out more contracts for detention space, you're going to see deportations actually go up significantly. And there's just nothing that the other side can do in court to stop that. The lawfare has mainly been about

more narrow issues like that uh jew hating crackpot in new york who was the columbia guy that's just one guy so it's holding up that there's that you know that the court case is you know getting a lot of attention but it's just the detention of one guy and they're deporting a thousand people while that's going on you see what i mean so so the lawfare is

almost more a kind of to make the left feel better because they're stopping the deportation of one guy rather than actually interfering with the president's agenda. Adam is allowed, but Jew hitting crackpot, which is a very funny turn of phrase that I. It's a lot of people. That's 100 percent true. I want it. So I did a debate in.

October or September of last year with the Libertarian candidate running for president. They saw everything his name was. And he would say things. And I want you to answer them because this is what a lot of

regular people here day in and day out. And on its face, it sounds good policy, but it's not good policy. So why is it not a good idea just to let the market and businesses set immigration standards? Because

There's an unlimited demand to come to the United States. I mean, there's only, you know, what is it, seven and a half billion people outside the United States? But, you know, if 10% of them come here, the United States ceases to exist in any meaningful sense. And this idea of a market-based immigration policy means that every American worker is now in direct competition with everybody abroad who have, you know, totally different expectations about citizenship.

salary or work conditions or any of that. We have immigration limits precisely because there's only so much immigration our system, broadly speaking, can successfully deal with. For instance, in employment, we have a post-industrial knowledge-based economy.

If we're going to let everybody in the world in, we're going to end up with a third world, low productivity economy, because that's what we'd be importing. We have a welfare state. Libertarians say, oh, that's true, but let's just ban welfare. Well, okay, you know, do that and then give me a call. You know what I mean? It's a part of any modern society. And then there's assimilation. Even 100 or 200 years ago, assimilation was still a difficult thing. It always is.

But in a modern society with both advanced communications and transportation so that you can keep in touch with the old country and basically almost live in two countries at the same time, combined with

a leadership class, not just in government, but in business and schools and religion everywhere that basically don't believe in assimilation. How can you Americanize people? So a market driven immigration policy is just a fancy way of saying unlimited immigration and unlimited. Everybody sort of gets, except for some libertarians, that unlimited immigration is bad for the country. And what,

And what I think a lot of people don't know, because not everyone knows history, especially on this issue specifically, as well as maybe they should, is that for 40 years, we essentially had almost no legal immigration. I mean, it was very close to zero between what was in 1924 and 1924 to 1965. And we have legal immigration, but it was a lot lower than it had been. And during that...

40-year period, we had... It was funny. I had a tweet that went slightly viral because someone was saying the fact that there is a white... that people are perceived as being white means assimilation works. Yes. After 200 years, several...

forced integration through the draft wars. I think there was four drafts between, or three drafts between the 1924-1965, Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. In a unique culture, people who all came from regions 200 miles apart from each other seemed to assimilate in America. Um,

Anyway, sorry. OK, last question for you. What is something that Congress should be moving forward to achieve the president's agenda on immigration? Let me just mention two things that Congress would need to do. One is mandatory e-verifying.

Explain that, though. That's the online system that it's free for employers to use. And what it involves is when you hire somebody, you do the payroll information with Social Security and IRS anyway. It's just another website you go to verify the person's lawfully authorized to work. And it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It can be gamed, but it's not easy to gamed.

And it exists now. It's up and running for a government program. It actually works pretty well, but it's voluntary. And so only about half of new hires have screened through it. Everybody needs to do that. It needs to be just a regular part of the hiring process. On its own, it's not a magic bullet that's going to end illegal immigration, but it's kind of the lowest hanging fruit, the most obvious thing we need to do. And the other thing Congress needs to do is reform asylum rules.

Because under Biden, that was the excuse for opening up the border was, well, these people are asylum seekers and asylum is a

an artifact of the Cold War and the end of World War II. It basically was invented in 1951 by UN treaty. The president can, in fact, start the process of reforming it by withdrawing from the UN refugee treaty. We signed the 1967 version of it. It doesn't really matter. But the point is he can withdraw from the treaty. Congress still has to change the law. But I think politically, the way to get it

the ball rolling is for the president to withdraw from the treaty. I actually suggested that to the White House last time. And some people were receptive and it never went anywhere. Maybe because Jared Kushner liked the idea or Ivanka was like, oh, that's mean, daddy, or something. Anyway, whatever it is, it didn't happen. It's put completely within the president's power. And it is essential because

Asylum is different from refugee resettlement. Refugees, we could do it badly. We often have Ilhan Omar as an example, a case in point. But it's something that we, it's an act of Americans. It's a sovereign act of the government.

asylum is an illegal alien breaking into your country and saying you you have no choice but to let me stay because i i have a right to stay here whether you like it or not that has to change it's the big vulnerability in all developed countries europe is facing this asylum being the way

that sort of a vehicle for illegal immigration. Israel is facing it. People wading across the Jordan River from Africa and saying, you know, you have to let me stay. Australia has dealt with it. So all modern societies need to deal with asylum. And ultimately, it's Congress that needs to fix that in our case.

Where can people go to read more about from Immigration Studies and from your stuff? We're online at cis.org. Everything's there. We have new blog posts every day. And anything we do elsewhere, like op-eds and stuff, we always have in the link in the blog. So that's kind of the one place to go. And if you like snark and sarcasm, I'm on Twitter at Mark S, as in Stephen, Mark S. Krikorian.

Well, Mark, thank you for being here. Check out Center for Immigration Studies. I love that website. I go to it all the time. Thank you for being on this podcast. Thank you, Ryan. You're listening to It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Groduski. We'll be right back after this message. At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than just a house. It's your home, the place that's filled with memories. The early days of figuring it out to the later years of still figuring it out.

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Now,

Now it's time for the Ask Me Anything segment of the show. I have to tell you, I have received so many emails recently and it means so much to me. Like it's I I'm very humbled by it because everything that I do in my professional life are most things I do in my professional life is very solitary.

I don't work in an office. I really never have worked in an office. I do a podcast with just a producer or I'll do television when I'm invited with just a cameraman. I write alone. So I don't ever feel like anyone is listening, even though I see number reports. It's...

it doesn't mean as much as getting some human communication that there's somebody else on the other side of this phone or wherever you're listening. So it really, I, it means a lot to me. If you want to be part of the ask me anything segment, if you want to ask me any questions on polling or policy or my favorite movie or whatever, email me Ryan at numbers game podcast.com. That's Paul Ryan at numbers game podcast.com. I read every email and those that I can't answer on air, I will perpetuate.

personally email them back. So I have two questions this week. First question this week comes from Jill. She writes after listening to your May 29th podcast about the shifting political landscapes, I am interested in your thoughts on whether Americans would come together if attacked by another country. Seeing videos of bombs falling on Tel Aviv, I fear politically divided America would not stand strong and united. Your thoughts. That is a great question. Thank you for sending me that email.

I, I think like many people of a particular age, when I think about Americans coming together in a time of tragedy, I think about nine 11, uh, it happened 24 years ago. So it's weird to say people of a certain age, cause it feels like it was just like last year in some, in some sense, like it doesn't feel like as long as it actually was. Uh, and you know, I don't talk a lot about my personal life, but nine 11 was deeply, deeply personal, uh,

to me in a certain way, because my mom worked on the 97th floor of tower one. Thankfully she made it out alive because she wasn't in her office yet. If she had been, she would have been killed. Um, my uncle was a window washer at the world trade center. So, um, and thankfully he made it out alive. So the memories of that day were very real because of how

personal it was and i guess parts of the country it was but it wasn't at the same way but they was a feeling of we should all be together i would actually love um

to do a podcast for 9-11 with my mom and my uncle on it and talk about that day. I didn't even mention this to them yet. They have no idea I'm going to pitch this to them, but I'm going to do it and we'll see if they'll be up for it. But growing up in New York City, I think, and being middle-aged at this point, I think that that day and those memories are

of even the post 9/11 are so palpable and more than they even were when it first happened. Because there was a real sense of unity and that everyone was for New York City, which being a New Yorker, you know,

That doesn't happen very often. I think there was a Woody, a lot of Woody Allen line from Annie Hall where he thinks everyone of the whole country thinks everyone from New York is a Jewish pornographic homosexuals, a socialist. And I think that, and I live here. That's very much true. Some people view in New York city. So the fact the whole country came together is super powerful, super, super meaningful. And, um,

I don't think it would happen again. I talked to a veteran recently who served in Iraq and signed up after 9-11, and he was from the middle of the country. And he said something to the effect of like,

viewing how new yorkers feel about us i wouldn't go fight for them anymore um and i feel like he's probably not alone so my heart tells me that they would that we would do it but because of the internet because of grifters who try to make a name for themselves peddling conspiracy theories or unpopular um sentiment attacking our own country attacking our own people um

I think that there would be a real incentive for people out there to make money by, you know,

tearing each other down in a time when we really need help. And, um, I, I just feel it that way. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe. I mean, the floods in North Carolina were a good example that, um, and, and the fires in Florida and California were a good example of people rallying around and coming together. Um, my heart tells me that they would, but my head sits there and says, no, they would probably use the moment to really, especially in a war to, to,

fracture us. So, all right, I'm not going to leave it on a downer note. I'm going to do one more email. Here's the, here is the, so he says, hi, love the podcast. First heard you on Clay and Buck and had to follow yours. Truly keep, keep this brief. And I know you get a lot of emails and I don't get a lot of emails, by the way, I just get a very few, but I appreciate them. In response to your Omaha E-Verify story you covered Friday, years ago, I ran an HR at a small manufacturing plant in Lincoln, Wisconsin.

I guess Lincoln, Nebraska, 40 miles southwest of Omaha. Low paid, no skilled jobs, hard to hire folks. We employ 90% immigrants. Received a letter from Social Security that 60 of our 120 Social Security numbers were invalid, not stolen, but they did not exist. I put out a notice that we need to re-verify their Social Security numbers so to bring their IDs and Social Security cards the next day and we could clear it.

None showed up to work the next day or ever again. My CEO often turned a blind eye to this for one simple operational reality is that he needs workers and they only be paid. Over the years, we had a handful of stolen ones, but mostly fake social security numbers. I copied them all as an onboarding and they looked legit, like legit documentation.

At the Omaha plant, they are facing a similar situation, I suspect. Few residents like to want to work there or at all, so the illegal aliens who want to are welcomed by the company. Supply met demand and the firm used E-Verify the best that they could, quote unquote, and hoped that they'd fly under the radar. Illegal entry is a

crime and I am for deportations and against the bogus orchestrated protests. But I do understand the business's case when citizens would rather sit at home and lament that they can't start their careers at the same point as their parents are today. I don't mean that to paint everyone the same brush, but I'm a finance professor and see enough of the stereotype, I'm afraid, while the manufacturers need workers to get product out the door. Anyway, I don't write often to podcasts I follow, but

The story was literally so close to my home. Appreciate your intellect, L.W. Hughes. L.W., thank you for this email. Yeah, I speak to people all the time, business people, and they say, what do you want me to do? It is a problem with the fact that there are a lot of Americans who are comfortable enough, and this is true of my own family, that they don't let their teenage children or sometimes 20s

20 some odd year old children work because they don't have to. So there's millions out of the labor pool who could be getting jobs. Let's not even say agriculture jobs, but just some jobs out there that have to go to resources like illegal immigration. But there's also the problem of that. We do give out visas. We give out

a million plus visas a year. We don't do the job of having our visas because most visas, most green cards and visas are through family reunification and not through work needs.

So we don't have enough going to the right place, one. And two, employers do not want to go through the process of housing and transporting these people and applying for the visas. They just want the illegal alien stuff. And I understand the need of businesses to operate. I completely get that. But in the agriculture industry, they should be doing two to three things. One, changing the agriculture visa to make it possible for people to apply easier.

Two, mechanize because we have the machinery to do most farm labor now. Japan doesn't have a plethora of Mexicans showing up every year to do their rice patties. They have machines that do them. We could mechanize a lot of our labor force. And three, we need to reform agriculture.

the way we do welfare to make sure able-bodied people are working. I mean, that's just, I think, the three things. And I wish we had lived in a culture that would produce people who are teenagers and in their 20s to do jobs. I mean, that's just...

You know, they don't. I agree with the old W. Thank you for your email. I appreciate you. I appreciate all you guys. Please like and subscribe to this podcast each and every week. It means a lot. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. I'll speak to you guys on Thursday. Thank you.

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