SPEAKER_00: What do we do?
SPEAKER_00: How do we get up off the floor of Trumpism?
SPEAKER_00: Because I think we saw this experiment with Biden of being like, the witch is dead, you know, like like we're free again.
SPEAKER_00: And it was a fucking catastrophe.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Like right away.
SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Jerusalem Demsis.
SPEAKER_00: I'm Matthew Iglesias.
SPEAKER_02: And welcome to The Argument.
SPEAKER_02: This is a show where two friends argue about politics, policy, and whatever else we're interested in that week.
SPEAKER_02: This week, Matt has a take.
SPEAKER_00: I do.
SPEAKER_00: I think that asylum is not really something that we can or should bring back from Donald Trump and the Trump era.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell It's a depressing take, Matt.
SPEAKER_02: Depressing take.
SPEAKER_02: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Because I mean I think that the concept of a legal right to asylum as it was enshrined in the in the post-World War II era worked well enough for a long time.
SPEAKER_00: But it was it was very small.
SPEAKER_00: You know, like very few people were actually taking advantage of the right to asylum.
SPEAKER_00: And then over time, you know, to put a little bit of a slightly arbitrary number on it, but like starting in 2014 in the United States and then propelling forward, it became more and more of a loophole, essentially, right?
SPEAKER_00: A thing where people had learned immigration lawyers in the United States, people smugglers, would-be immigrants, that this was like a way to gain entry.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, let's just start from first principles here.
SPEAKER_02: Like, what is the point of asylum?
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell The purpose of asylum is to help people in need.
SPEAKER_00: The functioning of asylum.
SPEAKER_02: But specifically, a political asylum was created for people who had a well-founded fear of persecution.
SPEAKER_02: And this was largely in the context of like political persecution from the state, like whether it's people fleeing communism or the idea you'd be fleeing the fact that you were going to be genocided by your own government.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's the idea of political asylum, not just like helping random people around the world.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02: Sure, yes.
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, but I also want to draw a distinction because there's the concept of a refugee, right?
SPEAKER_00: Which is like this is a person who we are going to allow to come live in our country because they're facing some kind of problems in their homeland and we're helping them out.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's humanitarian immigration.
SPEAKER_00: But refugee resettlement, you know, exists in a like numerical framework, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like a country says we are willing to resettle X number of refugees, and you know, we do it.
SPEAKER_00: And that's like many different things that governments do to try to be helpful actors in the world.
SPEAKER_00: The idea of asylum, right, is that it's a it's a procedural legal right.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that like you can just, you know, there's an immigration officer and they're like, you're not here legally.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to deport you now.
SPEAKER_00: But then you can say, no, like I need asylum here, right?
SPEAKER_00: And it's supposed to be, like with any kind of like judicial legal process, right?
SPEAKER_00: Just judged on the basis of the facts, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's not a discretionary government decision how many people are going to get asylum.
SPEAKER_00: It's if the asylum claims are valid on the facts and the law, you get it.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_00: So what started to happen is that when very few people are making asylum claims, the asylum claims are adjudicated very expeditiously, and maybe not that many people are being granted asylum.
SPEAKER_00: And it just goes on and on for years and years and years as a low-level aspect of the American immigration system.
SPEAKER_00: But when I uh I graduated college in 2003, I covered the 2007 immigration reform debate, I covered the 2013 immigration reform debate, I covered a lot of arguments that were happening between then and now.
SPEAKER_00: We were talking almost exclusively during those periods.
SPEAKER_00: We were talking about what to do with the stock of illegal immigrants living in the country and what should we do about ongoing flows of illegal immigrants.
SPEAKER_00: And then we started talking about legal immigration, like visa allocation.
SPEAKER_00: But shortly after the 2013 compromise fell apart, we started getting more and more debate about asylum claims.
SPEAKER_00: First, it's because people were sending sort of teenagers alone to come to the United States because there were legal restrictions on the government's ability to incarcerate children, essentially, right?
SPEAKER_00: So if you came and you were caught and you made an asylum claim, then while that was being processed through the system, you could be released to like a relative or a family friend or something like that.
SPEAKER_00: Which again, if you're thinking about like one unaccompanied minor who shows up at the southern border, that totally seems like the correct way to handle the situation, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's like that that's what I would do.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's what anybody would do.
SPEAKER_00: But it became a flood of people because it became clear that I mean it wasn't that many people in the grand scheme of things.
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about in tens of thousands, we're not talking about anywhere near But it was too many people for the system to handle.
SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Because the system was built on the presumption.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But I think this is actually a really good place.
SPEAKER_02: Because like the fact that there are many people who are in bad situations that would not qualify as political silleys, right?
SPEAKER_02: They're not like, my government is not trying to genocide me, they're not trying to like destroy me, but are in a bad situation that anyone would be like, yeah, it doesn't seem good.
SPEAKER_02: Like maybe you're in a domestic violence situation, maybe you're in a situation where like um, you know, there's a bunch of crime in your country and it's really unsafe and it's bad, um, but you're not specifically being targeted, or you're just like really, really poor and you're looking for a better job.
SPEAKER_02: Like people can understand that that's not a good thing, and you might want to go search for a better life here.
SPEAKER_02: And they notice that the asylum system might be a place for them to like say, like, okay, well, I am following um, you know, maybe this there's a smuggler or there's some sort of like uh, you know, there's an informal economy that's been set up to like help me get into the United States, and they tell me to go to an uh across the US southern border, go up to an American official and say, hey, I'm here for asylum, and then someone will help me figure it out.
SPEAKER_02: And in the meantime, I'll probably be able to get a work permit and be able to stay here for a few years.
SPEAKER_02: And the fact that that happens, I think is like not really contested at this point.
SPEAKER_02: What I think is strange is the turn from there's clearly a problem here to the whole system doesn't work.
SPEAKER_02: Because to me, like the number, like the amount of money it would take to actually make it possible to run the backlog through is like not, it's like negligible.
SPEAKER_02: It's like a drop in the pond of the US federal budget.
SPEAKER_02: So the Langford Murphy Cinema Border Act, they thought they could get that down to like processing those claims under 90 days in that case.
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a little, I think that's a little optimistic.
SPEAKER_02: And like the Manhattan Institute, not a liberal outlet themselves, also had very similar estimates about a billion dollars a year.
SPEAKER_02: It would take a little bit longer when there's a backlog built up because you can't just like hire thousands of officers.
SPEAKER_02: But like, I don't get how you go from there's a problem with the system to like just throw it out.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I think the question is like, what are we trying to do with our billion dollars?
SPEAKER_00: Because say it's not one billion dollars, say it's three billion dollars, right?
SPEAKER_00: Same difference.
SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's not that much money, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like three billion dollars on addressing a significant problem is like money well spent.
SPEAKER_02: But the question is we spend like$11 billion on ice right now.
SPEAKER_02: Right.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So it's not like we're not spending money on immigration.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell So the question is like, what is the problem?
SPEAKER_00: Like what what are we trying to do, right?
SPEAKER_00: And what I remember all during Trump's first term, you know, I was I was doing the weeds then.
SPEAKER_00: Um we had a number of immigration episodes over the years.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Dara Lind, who was one of my co-hosts for most of those episodes, you know, she was a real immigration specialist.
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I think also clear that like, you know, she and the people in the immigration advocacy community, broadly speaking, they would like concede that things were going kind of off the rails, right?
SPEAKER_00: And that like we should do something to fix the system.
SPEAKER_00: But what they really wanted was to make sure that, you know, like a decently large number of people would get these claims positively adjudicated.
SPEAKER_00: And we had a lot of expansion, actually, like of the eligible categories, right?
SPEAKER_00: The whole deal.
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to do a bunch of minor near because like what we're talking about here is how to set up like a like I I agree with you that a lot of people who care about immigration, including myself, are like sort of like, all right, more people come in, great.
SPEAKER_02: Like that seems good to me because I have broader views about whether or not it's good for immigration to come in or not.
SPEAKER_02: But like on the merits itself, like I think that like, and I what I hear you getting at is that like, okay, maybe we can fix this problem with a few billion a year, and then people don't think there's a loophole anymore, and then there are fewer people trying to come in through asylum, but like what are we, why do we even have asylum to begin with?
SPEAKER_02: And like I think asylum on the merits is a good thing that many Americans actually do think should exist.
SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the question, right?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, because again, uh when it was small, if it was small again, you know, things that are small by definition are like not that big of a deal, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so if you get a future where like 400 people are making asylum claims per year and six of them are getting in, I'm not gonna 400's a little bit.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, like, I just mean I'm but I'm just saying, like the process that I started having during this time, right, is on the one hand, like I was writing various articles that are like, you know, these like anti-immigration people are being kind of crazy.
SPEAKER_00: They are wildly exaggerating the downsides of immigration, and they are wildly underestimating the upsides of immigration.
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, eventually I get the idea of writing a book that is going to pull together a bunch of different things that I'm interested in, housing and transportation, but also immigration, right?
SPEAKER_00: And it's called One Billion Americans.
SPEAKER_00: And it was like an effort to, you know, the original abundance.
SPEAKER_00: We frame a lot of these ideas in sort of like patriotic national greatness terms.
SPEAKER_00: And what happens when you write a book, you know, is you need to um, you know, I I the whole book is like mostly just stuff I already thought, but you need to put your ideas together like in a more systematic, more holistic way.
SPEAKER_02: You actually don't have to.
SPEAKER_02: You can just publish a bad book.
SPEAKER_00: Well, fair enough.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and like decide what you actually think, right?
SPEAKER_00: And the more I dug into like, no morons, like immigration is good, immigration is good for America, the more I found myself pivoting on the other side of it to like immigration policy should be designed to maximize the national interest.
SPEAKER_00: And the sort of proceduralism and reactiveness of asylum does not fit into that very well.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell I think this is a bit weird.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, do you think this is true for all criminal justice?
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that the criminal justice system should not have procedural rights?
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell It's not that the criminal justice system shouldn't have procedural rights.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: But like the criminal the main reason, you know, as I always say, right, like the criminals get rights to protect the innocent.
SPEAKER_02: And because people have rights even if they've committed crimes.
SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, and but like when you're convicted, you're you know, punished in ways that you wouldn't punish an innocent.
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: So just, you know, trying to do first principles and like think about not, you know, me being less reactive as a writer, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like instead of me saying, well, you know, if we look at the Hmong refugees in Minneapolis, you get such and such outcome, and like it's actually broadly good.
SPEAKER_00: If you were like, how are we going to maximize economic growth in the twin cities over the next 50 years?
SPEAKER_02: It's like But this is such a narrow view of national interest.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Like national well, no, but I'm saying, like, if you ask individual people, I mean, and the thing is, this is why I think that the immigration and like public opinion debate has gotten like way too black and white here.
SPEAKER_00: What we This is why I'm trying to stay away from public opinion.
SPEAKER_02: But my point is when you think about national interest, it's also like what people believe to be a good outcome for their country.
SPEAKER_02: It's not just like we just look at GDP, which if we did, maybe we wouldn't have an asylum seeking system per se, but we'd have like a lot more immigrants and many of the same people would probably come in through a different system.
SPEAKER_02: But it's also like, hey, I want to live in a country that actually reflects my values.
SPEAKER_02: And I want to be clear here, this is not just like Jerusalem doing her like lib bullshit, which is like I'm also doing that.
SPEAKER_02: But like when you look at systematic efforts to try to figure out when and why people support different kinds of groups coming in asylum, you largely see that there's like actually like a clear pattern of deservingness.
SPEAKER_02: And like people will probably be surprised by this.
SPEAKER_02: But when you look at Afghan translators, right, you had like an 84% support for resettling Afghan asylum seekers because people thought there was like a deservingness aspect.
SPEAKER_02: They'd helped the United States.
SPEAKER_02: This isn't new.
SPEAKER_02: Ukrainian refugees, 78% of Americans approved admitting up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.
SPEAKER_02: It's not 400, Matt.
SPEAKER_02: That's like 100,000 people.
SPEAKER_02: Um this is an old, even older when we had a much more anti-immigration country.
SPEAKER_02: 66% of Americans approved admitting ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo.
SPEAKER_02: And again, again, this is not just the United States, even in far more anti-immigration countries.
SPEAKER_02: There's like a great study by Banzack, Heinmueller, and Hahn Gartner, which I'm probably saying there's all wrong.
SPEAKER_02: They look at 15 European countries and they again see this over and over again that like people are willing to be in favor of this.
SPEAKER_02: And so when I think about shifting the asylum system, like the problem to me is that we've conceived of it as there are all of these people in the world, like the masses of the world are coming to your doorstep and they're in need.
SPEAKER_02: And it's like a charity.
SPEAKER_02: Like you have to let them in and you have to let them in no matter what it does.
SPEAKER_02: And like from that aspect, I totally agree with you.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I think like that entire framing is wrong, and I think harmed by the fact that we're often not making clear, discrete cases for specific groups of people that are either in the national interest, like Afghan translators, where it's like clearly like we want people like this to be able to help the American uh military or the American government when there are foreign entanglements that we're getting involved in for bad reasons.
SPEAKER_02: We still want people translating for us.
SPEAKER_02: Um, or for other reasons, like, you know, there's not like a huge reason to care about Albanian refugees, other than the fact that we thought that like it was uh, you know, it was bad.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, happening to that.
SPEAKER_00: I don't wanna I don't want to like overly interrogate the specifics of the polling on this kind of stuff, but I I wanna I guess like draw a distinction, right?
SPEAKER_00: When we were talking about doing this episode, like one framing I toyed with was that like humanitarian immigration is like gotta go, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because I've been reading um well, I was actually surprised when the argument published uh an Alexander Kustav piece because I think his views I publish a lot of people on immigration.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, I know.
SPEAKER_00: I, you know, so I mean, he has got a book about the politics of immigration where like he is like very exclusively tethered to, you know, self-interest in like a very narrow kind of conception.
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to pivot my claim to like the asylum concept, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because again, the the nature of the asylum concept is that it is legal and procedural and it is rights-based.
SPEAKER_00: I think the Afghan translators situation, right, is a thing where the case one would make for it, I mean, not just public to anybody, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like common sense, is that there is an obligation incurred by the United States of America as a polity when other people work with us in a military effort.
SPEAKER_00: And so we should help those people out, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's a way of you know, paying faith forward.
SPEAKER_00: If the United States had never invaded Afghanistan, um, or forgetting the United States, I crow, you just imagine like some other country, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like there's a war between, you know, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan or something, and there's a bunch of Tajik translators who are working with the Kazakh army, and then the Kazakhs leave, and then the Tajik translators are getting in trouble back in Tajikistan.
SPEAKER_00: The case for the United States to take those people in is much weaker than the case for the Afghan translators, because they were working with our military, right?
SPEAKER_00: So this is a kind of like we can have immigration for lots of different kinds of reasons, but it's still like purposeful, intentional, selected.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_02: But I think this actually presumes that the existing asylum system isn't actually good at determining when asylum cases are or are not legitimate.
SPEAKER_02: So you look at the 2024 data about asylum grant rates, and you have 11% for Dominican and Republic nationals, 16.6% for Mexicans, 19.3% for Colombians, 19.7% for Ecuadorians, and then on the other end, for Afghans, Syrians, Cameroonians, Eritreans, and Venezuelans, it's like 75 plus percent.
SPEAKER_02: And like that tracks my like basic understanding of which of these countries has a lot of people who are going to be fitting under the specific narrow definition of political asylum.
SPEAKER_02: And so like our existing system is actually quite good.
SPEAKER_02: And I think that you're underestimating like how difficult it would be for the government to um uh select those people rather than ask them to petition themselves to us.
SPEAKER_00: Like, but I I don't read those numbers the same way that you do.
SPEAKER_02: What do you mean?
SPEAKER_02: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Well, because like well, go go back like the Dominican and Mexican numbers.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like 11% for Dominican Republic.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_00: So like this is what I like the Dominican Republic, country with problems.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure people who want to move there from here have good reasons for it.
SPEAKER_00: But the Dominican Republic is like a democracy.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't know what's going on there, but I I mean like I think we'd have to like know the facts a bit more to like make claims that they don't actually fit under political asylum.
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, this is what I'm saying, though.
SPEAKER_00: Like they are clearly fitting under political asylum in the existing legal structure of like what political asylum looks like.
SPEAKER_00: And I think it does not look like a reasonable system.
SPEAKER_00: That that is, you know, that some fraction of people from Latin American, middle-income, imperfect Latin American democracies are successfully making asylum petitions, is itself like that is the broken system.
SPEAKER_00: That is not selective immigration or national interest.
SPEAKER_02: I guess this is like my thing is like I understand that you, Matiglacius, believe this.
SPEAKER_02: But I'm saying, like, I don't think this is actually the viewpoint of Americans.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know what is I mean, I'm just saying like you're just not have a discussion just about politics because I think it's clear if you look at the politics of the United States and every other country in like basically every election for the past generation that like the real public support for immigration is lower than whatever is in these polls and these academic studies.
SPEAKER_00: Like this relentless growth of far-right political parties, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: But like, I'm I'm trying to like stick to the merits of this, right?
SPEAKER_00: The case for the Afghan translators is that I don't need to know anything about like the specific details.
SPEAKER_00: Like, we all remember that that war happened, and we all remember that American forces departed, and we all know that the Taliban is bad.
SPEAKER_00: So for any given asylum applicant, there's like a factual question, like, was this person in fact a translator who cooperated with the American military?
SPEAKER_00: But the like, what is the normative case is like completely transparent, right?
SPEAKER_00: Well, then, similarly, if you wanted to say, okay, we want to say, like, categorically, you know, if you are like um, you know, a defector from the People's Republic of China, right?
SPEAKER_00: That like we want you in, right?
SPEAKER_00: And you would have to like write out some specifications of like like what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: Like, how are we gonna make sure you're not a double agent or a spy or or something like that?
SPEAKER_00: But but like that would be a policy, right?
SPEAKER_00: The Dominican Republic is like a uh you could just go there on vacation.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have a free trade agreement with the Dominican Republic.
SPEAKER_00: Um, they're not like a formal treaty ally, but like this is a friendly country.
SPEAKER_00: It is not a state that the United States of America regards as like a despotic adversary where we are trying to like cultivate a Dominican opposition.
SPEAKER_02: I think that like, to be clear, I think that the the the argument that you are laying out now is like very um we can call it ending asylum, uh-huh.
SPEAKER_02: But many people call this reforming the asylum system.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but that would be a boring podcast.
unknown: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, but I this is But like this is okay.
SPEAKER_00: I think this is why I I consider it ending rather than reforming.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Is that with most immigration, right, there is a centrally directed, there is like a top-down quantitative limit on like what is happening, right?
SPEAKER_00: It is not a proceduralist rights-based claim.
SPEAKER_00: The way that asylum is, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like the way that asylum works, anybody who is physically present in the United States and is being faced with deportation can say, no, I deserve asylum.
SPEAKER_02: And there's like a second-cause the only reason that matters, the only reason that matters at all is because the system is incapable of keeping up with those claims.
SPEAKER_02: Like if someone was like, oh yeah, uh give me asylum right now, and then it took, you know, we put you in detention for three months, and then we're like, no, this is completely fake, and then we deported you.
SPEAKER_02: And because now you've been deported rather than leaving on your own, it's more difficult to come back to the United States.
SPEAKER_02: Like, this would just end the problem we're talking about.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, but then like the question that becomes to me like, what is the purpose of because I understand what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02: I I'm saying many of the problems that you're outlining here to me just like seem like very clearly like problems with the implementation of how the system is working right now.
SPEAKER_02: And I think this is not just the thing that we've already talked about.
SPEAKER_02: With like, you know, fixing all the judges or whatever, which I know you agree with.
SPEAKER_02: But it's also just like if you expanded the legal pathways in our national interest, like you made it possible for businesses to hire workers that they needed when you know labor markets were incredibly tight, like they were during the Biden years, et cetera, um, many of these people would just not be coming through this pathway.
SPEAKER_02: They would just take the legal pathways that were available to them.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's that's the literal thing that you would expect to happen because that's what happened before people were using asylum system, they were using the other sorts of legal pathways that were available, and then they transferred over to asylum when that was no longer available.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what would hope, right?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, part of my interpretation of the increase in asylum claims starting in the late aughts is that I think, you know, there was this big push for border security starting in the late uh later years of the Bush administration.
SPEAKER_00: Well, sure, at a different way.
SPEAKER_00: I I think we essentially succeeded in making it harder to like sneak across the border to work illegally.
SPEAKER_00: And then we had the Great Recession, so there was a decline in demand, and we continued investing in like the border security rollout during a period of years when there was very little demand to immigrate, and it like worked.
SPEAKER_00: And as is often the case with these things, it sort of backfired because the fundamental dynamic of like people want to move to the United States to work here when the unemployment rate is low and businesses like to hire people, like remained in place, right?
SPEAKER_00: So it's like the water starts trying to flow around the dam, and what they found was this asylum thing.
SPEAKER_00: I definitely favor, right, like trying to create both like more uh generous like visa programs for skilled workers, other things like that, but also more um, I guess we're calling it rotational labor rather than guest workers.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but like, you know, particularly like during a labor market boom, there should be a system by which like companies can recruit temporary workers to come live here and do jobs.
SPEAKER_00: And hopefully, if that is in place and that is working well, it reduces people's inclination to like want to try to find backdoors and loopholes in the system, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Like I think I think we're both agreeing.
SPEAKER_00: And I think the Biden administration tried a um you know, a kind of like like chewing gum and masking tape version of this with a lot of like parole programs and like quasi-legal immigration to try to like tamp down on the chaos element.
SPEAKER_00: And it sort of worked and sort of didn't.
SPEAKER_00: And if we had like a real Congress that did things, we could put together a better version of those kind of systems.
SPEAKER_00: All the more that's like leaving me with not really seeing a big role in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Well, because there's like a bunch of things that are unknowns that you don't want to just leave to Congress to have to legislate on a dime about in order to make sure that you can actually meet your national interests' needs in the moment.
SPEAKER_02: Like the Trump administration right now is destroying for all of like as many ways as possible for there to be like legal pathways that the president can quickly spit up.
SPEAKER_02: Like the parole programs, which you praise in a slow boring article like many years ago, as having actually reduced irregular migration when we had them, uh the CHNV program that the Biden administration stood up to actually process people and make sure they were uh eligible in these specific four countries to come to the United States, like that program has not only been like canceled by the Trump administration, that's been rubber stamped by a Supreme Court at this point, which means like the process that you're talking about where you could just have the president go, like, okay, well, like now we know we want to help this specific country because of this national interest, like that has been derailed.
SPEAKER_02: And now what we're left with is the East Island system and Congress.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like in Matt's world, there's like a crisis happening somewhere, and your entire faith is on the fact that Congress will pass something in time in order to do our national interest well.
SPEAKER_02: And to be clear, when Congress fails to do this at some point, the chaos that results is what actually creates the anti-immigration politics.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's not yes.
SPEAKER_00: Clearly, like Congress sucks, everything sucks.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the next president is gonna have to deal with a chaotic and difficult situation under whatever the circumstances are.
SPEAKER_00: We can't really know what they're saying.
SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying is that, like, if we got to open up the box, right, and like have Congress change immigration laws, right?
SPEAKER_00: I would be there in the committee, wherever it is, I would be saying, like, we need like more visas for skilled workers, we need to like completely uncap certain categories of programs, we need to create some like legal guest worker programs, things like that.
SPEAKER_00: We need to preserve some level of presidential discretion around different kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00: But if restrictionists are coming to me and they're like, but like we gotta like, we gotta scrap these asylum courts, you know, we gotta tell people, you know, if you're transiting anywhere, it's like that's where I'm like, yeah, you know, like that makes sense, like especially in the context of we're making these reforms to change, to like create more selective, more organized pathways.
SPEAKER_00: Um, like I just don't see a strong argument for the proposition that we should be letting kind of random immigration judges look at cases that they feel sympathetic about and saying, like, yeah, you know, 16% of Mexicans are getting their claims approved.
SPEAKER_00: Because again, like Mexico is one of these countries where, like, obviously there are lots of profound problems in Mexico.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's like a very serious interplay between organized crime and state governments in Mexico.
SPEAKER_00: It's also just much poorer than the United States.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I get why people want to come here.
SPEAKER_00: And if I was empowered, right, if a specific Mexican individual was sitting in front of me and I was empowered to give that person the right to live and work in the United States, I would feel like incredibly tempted to just give it to them, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because I'm a humane person.
SPEAKER_00: Like I care about the world.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to send someone back to be deported to deal with cartel shit and all kinds of other terrible stuff.
SPEAKER_00: But like, again, Mexico is a democracy.
SPEAKER_00: Mexico is a friendly country.
SPEAKER_00: We have a free trade agreement with Mexico, we have like formal diplomatic process with Mexico.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it makes sense to say that like there are political refugees from Mexico or from the Dominican Republic or other things like that.
SPEAKER_00: If we want to create as part of our foreign policy apparatus, like selective um humanitarian immigration pathways, that makes sense, but it has to be integrated with like the whole rest of our foreign policy outlook.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Okay.
SPEAKER_02: So I just asked Claude like why Mexican American why Mexican asylum cases are coming through.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00: We're just gonna have just AI is gonna obvious questions.
SPEAKER_02: Well I mean we don't have time to do the debate- I didn't look into this.
SPEAKER_02: I think we're gonna go.
SPEAKER_00: Is asylum good?
SPEAKER_02: Claude's gonna say yes.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you've got to say, you let me know what Claude says about Mexico.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell No, but so apparently it's a few cases.
SPEAKER_02: One, it's journalists covering cartels or corruption.
SPEAKER_02: So they're journalists who can document specific published stories uh about cartels or government corruption and specific threats tied to those stories, the Mexican government's inability or unwillingness to protect them, and often the murder of colleagues or family members.
SPEAKER_02: Those are the ones we're getting grants.
SPEAKER_02: The second are LGBTQ asylum seekers.
SPEAKER_02: So it is uh folks who have um uh show particularly from states with actual patterns of violence against these people, sometimes like anywhere in Mexico, because obviously some faces it's not it's not as a problem.
SPEAKER_02: And third, it's family members of cartel targets, which is very, very conditional in being able to prove this.
SPEAKER_02: And to be clear, like 84% of these cases are not of Mexican asylum claims, are not succeeding.
SPEAKER_02: I just think it's very weird to look at that and go like these judges are like real, like soft-hearted libs who like can't get over the fact this person's begging not to be sent back.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I just and again, like I don't want to make this I don't agree, it's not about public opinion here, but when we're conceiving of what is in the national interest, like it is in the national interest to have a country with like reasonable values.
SPEAKER_02: I think that people don't want their countries to like be completely without any level of care for issues that Americans care about, like freedom of speech and journalists being able to cover like a literal cartel that's causing spillover problems in multiple American states.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's a category where I think it's actually really just I think that if the American president got up and was like, hey, it's really important that people cover this horrible shit that cartels are doing.
SPEAKER_02: It's creating problems in Arizona, it's creating problems in New Mexico, it's creating problems in Texas.
SPEAKER_02: We think these are bad people.
SPEAKER_02: Look at how they're murdering the families of journalists.
SPEAKER_02: The Mexican government, we're leaning on them to protect these journalists, but they can't do it or they won't do it for whatever reason.
SPEAKER_02: And if they come to this country, we think we should give them asylum claims.
SPEAKER_02: I agree that someone should do that rather than let it letting it just happen without any kind of explanation to the public.
SPEAKER_02: But I don't think that actually means getting rid of the system or expecting Congress to like legislate around these very specific categories.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but I So I just I I feel like this is maybe more convergent than you're gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think that's like what do you think should be?
SPEAKER_02: What maybe this would be helpful?
SPEAKER_02: Like, what should happen?
SPEAKER_02: Like, let's say in your world, there's no asylum, Congress has not the, you know, there's Congress has not made some specific carve out for a journalist in Mexico, and a journalist from Mexico who's on who's like done incredibly done great work or whatever comes to the United States and says, help me, they're about to murder me.
SPEAKER_02: Like, you think what should happen?
SPEAKER_02: But I just like don't think that people think that that person should just be sent back to be murdered.
SPEAKER_00: I agree.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, but like this is my point though.
SPEAKER_00: Like these are sympathetic individual cases, right?
SPEAKER_00: And in the case of Mexicans, I think you have the strongest claim because the United States is obviously adjacent to Mexico, right?
SPEAKER_00: And like, you know, we have a lot.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, no country enjoys it when like a bunch of refugees like cross the border because there's a civil war in the adjacent country.
SPEAKER_00: But in almost every case, the view is that you can't like just like put the guards at the border and be like, no, you have to come, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's like immediate crisis, something, something, something.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, I I was very struck again.
SPEAKER_00: This was during uh But that's asylum, Matt.
SPEAKER_00: What you just said is asylum.
SPEAKER_00: To an extent.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean We had, I mean, like I've been to San Antonio and seen people who had come from Congo into South America, overland, through Mexico, to the southern border, apprehended there.
SPEAKER_00: CBP has limited language capacities, and so they bust those people to San Antonio, which is the clo big city that's closest to the border, where they have more translators.
SPEAKER_00: You got the Congolese translators there.
SPEAKER_00: And what the people are asking to do is be sent to Maine, uh, where there's a Congolese uh community, um, you know, and they have relatives, things like that.
SPEAKER_00: Some of those people, I think, have invalid claims.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them have claims that like probably there's a lot of problems in Congo.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: Like people who are saying they're being persecuted, stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00: Like that, that's not BS, right?
SPEAKER_00: But it's also not like imminent emergency, right?
SPEAKER_00: When you're like going from continent to continent, across oceans, across multiple countries, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's it's different from the kind of classic, you know, refugees at the border, right?
SPEAKER_00: Again, to me, this is just an example of a system where what was written down in policy in the years following World War II was meant for a set of circumstances that has like stopped applying in the modern world.
SPEAKER_00: And it requires changes that are tantamount to, I mean, look, if for some reason it goes down better with like libs to call this reforms to asylum, like I'm all for that.
SPEAKER_00: But like in your Mexican case, you know the United States of America, whether through, you know, discretion granted to the executive branch or explicit congressional action, has policy toward Mexico, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like a country that is nearby.
SPEAKER_00: The cartel activity in Mexico is a significant public policy issue in both the United States and Mexico.
SPEAKER_00: Different administrations on both sides of the border have had different approaches to that.
SPEAKER_00: Saying, as part of Mexico cartel policy, we want to establish a process whereby people whose lives are at risk from the cartels can get refuge in the United States, like that could make some sense.
SPEAKER_00: And you would have to think about what are the rules of that program, what's its exact purpose?
SPEAKER_00: Like, are we trying to get people to cooperate with us in legal cases?
SPEAKER_00: Are we trying to make the Mexican government like us more?
SPEAKER_00: Like, like what are we trying to do here, right?
SPEAKER_00: Versus a system where it's just how objectively threatened you are, is the criteria.
SPEAKER_00: Because I just don't think that that fundamentally makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: If you talk about one person, like I'm a humane person, like I get it, right?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: But when you start getting to, oh, this is overwhelmed, oh, we need more judges, blah, blah, blah, like, yes, to an extent, but like also we need a policy.
SPEAKER_00: We need to say like how many people are we taking in, why are we taking them in?
SPEAKER_00: What are the categories of eligibility?
SPEAKER_00: I don't Did you read the story that the BBC did recently about like Nigerians going to the UK and being coached into how to like pretend that they're gay?
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: I I again I think that the places of overlap between our positions are largely that we think it's really important for a case to be specifically made about the people that we're letting in, and that the system not just brought like the mass majority of immigrants should not be coming in in some sort of system where like they've never been justified on the grounds they're coming into the United States.
SPEAKER_02: I think that is like completely reasonable.
SPEAKER_02: I think we live in a democracy.
SPEAKER_02: There should be like clearly some sort of like public reasoning about what we're doing because it's an obligation we have to citizens and residents of this country to be clear on what's going on and why and what the process actually looks like and how decisions are being made.
SPEAKER_02: That's just like a fundamental right or a fundamental way that liberal democracy is supposed to work.
SPEAKER_02: But I think there are a few things I want to draw draw out here because I think that what's different about our positions is a few things.
SPEAKER_02: One, I think discretion with really high impact cases is actually really important.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, like most of my work is about like places, and my journalism, like places that the government should have like way less discretion because like what the fuck are you doing?
SPEAKER_02: Like every single house does not need to be going through like a historical design review process in order to decide whether or not you should be allowed to build it or not.
SPEAKER_02: If it's a triplex or a quadplex, like who gives a shit?
SPEAKER_02: Like, just like fucking let's keep going because there's no point in like um uh the the error rate, right?
SPEAKER_02: If you if you err on the side of building uh uh, you know, if if you if you accidentally build a house that was slightly outside the design review, like the costs there are not that great relative to the cost of like running a system with high discretion.
SPEAKER_02: But that's different with immigration, Matt.
SPEAKER_02: Like with immigration, the stakes are incredibly, incredibly high.
SPEAKER_02: And the cost of running the system is actually not that high.
SPEAKER_02: So now we have a situation where instead of like the housing situation or other kinds of areas where we want to reduce discretion, we have a situation where like the stakes for it getting it wrong are that people die in ways that no one would want to see happen, or American interests are undermined.
SPEAKER_02: And like, let's be clear here, it's not just like, oh, it's boohoo, it's really sad that someone gets murdered somewhere else.
SPEAKER_02: It's that like if America deports someone to be murdered by a horrible regime, that's actually a problem for our national interest.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's not like a good outcome for like, you know, uh our ability to do diplomatic relations, to whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Like there's lots of things that create issues if that's a news story that goes viral.
SPEAKER_02: And again, those things actually do make Americans uh I think set Americans apart and really not wanting to see their country do that.
SPEAKER_02: But I think that like implicit to a lot of what you're saying, and I think I hear this explicitly from other people, is there's this expectation that there's going to be just like this like if if you allow this to happen, like, okay, it's a billion dollars now to fit this, make the system work, it's two billion dollars, but like soon every single one in them in the world is gonna come to our doorstep and like we're not gonna be able to process that because that will be the entire GDP of America to be able to manage it.
SPEAKER_02: And like, I think this is like fundamentally founded on like an incorrect premise about how many people actually want to migrate.
SPEAKER_00: I do not think So how many people want to migrate?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you can look at like the uh I think that like let's take like the really um hard case, like for instance, Venezuela, right, where you have um like 10 million percent inflation, uh it's a really bad situation, whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Um I think it's like 70 plus percent of the country don't even leave.
SPEAKER_02: This happens also, 70 plus people don't leave either also in like Sudan or in Syria when this happens.
SPEAKER_02: And I think less than 5% leave the immediate region, even in the worst situation imaginable, like a Syria-level state breakdown where like actively people are going to be murdered if they stay.
SPEAKER_02: 70 plus percent stay.
SPEAKER_02: And then of the people who leave, like l like single-digit percentages leave the immediate area.
SPEAKER_02: So, like obviously a lot of people.
SPEAKER_00: Plenty of Syrians, uh enough Syrians left the immediate area to like destabilize all of European politics for multiple years.
SPEAKER_02: It's a question of where you want to put the like problem.
SPEAKER_02: Like, is like to me, and this is my fundamental view of like all uh uh of the majority of like the immigration black backlash, is it is fundamentally founded in chaos, not in specific numbers.
SPEAKER_02: And like you can see this because in Australia, which is like every you know, immigration mod's favorite country.
SPEAKER_00: I love Australia.
SPEAKER_00: I've never been, but I hear a good thing.
SPEAKER_02: Australia's system is like from Americans' perspective, like quite Daconian.
SPEAKER_02: They can do this for a couple reasons.
SPEAKER_02: One is that they're like obviously an island, but like secondly, that like most of the people who are trying to come to Australia are trying to come on boats from usually like Indonesia, and Indonesia has mostly been willing to take those people back if Australians just like return them on boats back.
SPEAKER_02: Um, notably uh when Indonesia decides not to do this, it creates like a massive political backlash in Australia.
SPEAKER_02: So like even in Australia right now, you see far-right populist backlash happening in a country where like we're talking about like extremely small numbers of irregular migration causing chaos.
SPEAKER_02: Right.
SPEAKER_02: And so to me, it's like unless you can generate a system which no one can, in which you can like eliminate all ability for anyone to come at any point without expectation, then you need to have a system that can process unexpected numbers of people coming in.
SPEAKER_02: But like and then judges that can adjudicate, like, hey, should you come in or should you not?
SPEAKER_02: Like that's the whole point of having a discretionary system.
SPEAKER_00: But this is why like we're talking about this at all now, because you know, when Biden was president, right, there was all this like hemming and hawing, and like he said, like we needed new legislation and blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: I think you wrote a piece about how like deterrence won't work, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_00: Like Trump has become president.
SPEAKER_00: And whatever problems are happening in the United States of America now, and they are many, we are not grappling with large quantities of people making asylum claims.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, sorry.
SPEAKER_02: I agree, if you make the United States of America so unappealing for people to come to, there will be a small break in people attempting to come here until they figure out other pathways of entry.
SPEAKER_02: And you know how I know this?
SPEAKER_02: Because in Trump won, they literally started separating families from one another.
SPEAKER_02: And you saw increases of families coming to the border under Donald Trump.
SPEAKER_02: Why?
SPEAKER_02: Because the American economy bounced back in 2019 and the labor market pulled a bunch of people in.
SPEAKER_02: To an extent, but No, not to an extent.
SPEAKER_02: It was it caught like despite all of the draconian measures we remember from Trump One, despite all of those things happening, the highest number of irregular arrivals at the southwest border of all measurable time happened in 2019.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00: But right now, the unemployment rate is very low.
unknown: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02: Well, the hiring rate isn't.
SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing like well, but I mean, I I think we can argue which direction this is going, but like there's like negative migration, basically.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So I agree that because like what we see, and I I wrote this piece, which Matt called out, which is about deterrence not working.
SPEAKER_02: When we say deterrence doesn't work, we're not saying like there's no way to pause the number of people coming in.
SPEAKER_02: But what we also observe from like places, for instance, like the Mediterranean, where in Europe, uh, you know, way more draconian than what Trump's doing, they're like literally trying to capsize people's boats if they're coming over.
SPEAKER_02: People figure out other pathways and they try to figure out where the state uh the system has stabilized in order to figure out what next to do.
SPEAKER_02: Like the pulls and pushes are still going to exist even under these regimes.
SPEAKER_02: And notably, I mean, I'm just putting this out here, and you know, job openings are like half what they were in 2022, and the hiring rate is 3.1, whereas the hiring rate in March 2022 was like 7.4 percent.
SPEAKER_02: Right.
SPEAKER_00: So like listen, listen.
SPEAKER_00: I am not like an anti-immigration maximist.
SPEAKER_02: I agree.
SPEAKER_00: I want to get more immigration to the United States than but I mean I I think like the baseline is important to understand, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because we are now not having the Biden debate.
SPEAKER_00: We're not having the Trump one debate, we're not having the Obama debate, we're having a debate about you know, say there's a Would you recommend that a Democratic president have like 33% approval rating?
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
SPEAKER_00: I'm saying, like, you know, somebody new is taking over.
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, or maybe it's not even somebody new, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like Donald Trump is just phoning me up.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Matt, like, what should I do?
SPEAKER_00: I gotta I gotta improve my numbers.
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I would say, like, just like chill on the interior enforcement.
SPEAKER_00: Like just let it slide a little bit, you know, like who cares, right?
SPEAKER_00: And then I would say to him, like, your proposed H1B reforms, like some of those ideas make sense, but like some of them are counterproductive.
SPEAKER_00: And if you can make H1B Better, you ought to expand the program.
SPEAKER_02: But like the presumption here, I'm going across it.
SPEAKER_02: But I'm saying I'm not even talking about like, yes, you should t tell Trump good policy ideas if he calls you up in that case.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not objecting to you doing that.
SPEAKER_02: But what I'm saying is that the politics of immigration are such that it actually does not serve anti-immigration forces to fix these procedural problems.
SPEAKER_02: Anytime there's a procedural issue.
SPEAKER_00: I agree, but this is why I'm trying to come up with like good advice.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, how do you improve from this baseline?
SPEAKER_00: Where like people have been quite chilled from coming to the United States.
SPEAKER_00: Something Trump has done that I think is good and that Joe Biden should have done is that he has expanded uh H1A agricultural worker visas, and he has also weakened the Department of Labor regulation of those people.
SPEAKER_00: Like the Biden administration, because it was so screwy, like the only restrictionist things it did were like labor regulations, right?
SPEAKER_00: They like made it harder to get no pair, stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00: And you should, you should like drop all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Like take all the well-organized channels and try to broaden them, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because like chaos is bad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_00: The thing about asylum, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't want to make this sound excessively narrow, but like I really am harping on the proceduralism of it because I think that you are inviting chaos, right?
SPEAKER_00: The difference between saying we are going to allow 700 LGBT Mexicans from the following three states to immigrate because somebody told us that this is a bad situation and people feel sympathetic, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: Fine.
SPEAKER_00: And like which three states, which are the right number, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: You can negotiate it.
SPEAKER_00: But like, if there's a number and there's a region and it is set out in advance, that is fine.
SPEAKER_00: People can then apply.
SPEAKER_00: You can do the thing, you can have it.
SPEAKER_00: If you say if you show up illegally and then argue ex post, no, I should have protection, and like you and your lawyer are allowed to become makeup region.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: You're right.
SPEAKER_02: If they come, but like I I don't want to be.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, but I mean this is what a lot of asylum seekers come here on legal visas and then request asylum.
SPEAKER_02: I just want to put it out there.
SPEAKER_00: There's that too.
SPEAKER_00: But my brought I brought up I I guess I tried to ask you about this before, but like the the the the story about the UK and the sort of like Nigerian gay status fraud question, right?
SPEAKER_02: Where it's like the incentive There will always be an incentive to figure out a way to get into a country where you can like e without asylum, there to like 20x your life's potential outcome.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.
SPEAKER_00: This is why I don't understand what we're disagreeing.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, there's this very spirit of the Trevor Burrus.
SPEAKER_02: But I'm saying without asylum or with asylum, it will exist.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Yeah, but it's important, I think, to try to create immigration pathways that do not become invitations for rule breaking.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Any anything you could possibly imagine.
SPEAKER_02: The O1 visa is gamed, the H1B visa is gamed.
SPEAKER_02: Like there's not the system that you're talking about where you have like a very specific set of metrics and then someone has to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00: The people have to apply from abroad, right?
SPEAKER_00: You're avoiding the chaos.
SPEAKER_00: Like I think that you are big chaos theorist in terms of immigration, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's about the chaos, it's about the disorder, it's not about the numbers.
SPEAKER_00: But then I think you're shying away from the implications of that, right?
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
SPEAKER_00: Which like it go back to the Australian case that you talked about, right?
SPEAKER_00: You talked about how draconian the Australian system is on asylum seekers.
SPEAKER_00: Australia also has like a much uh significantly higher foreign-born population share than the United States, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like Australia is a big pro-immigration success story on a sustainable basis.
SPEAKER_00: But they put, I think they put into effect like Jerusalem, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like it is fanatical about maintaining order.
SPEAKER_00: And you are correct that even very quantitatively small breakdowns in the orderliness of the Australian system create big shockwaves to the politics.
SPEAKER_00: And I think you had something similar in Canada, which is not literally an island, but has some of the same kind of geographic separation, and where for a long time Canada had a very, very high farm-borne population share without a lot of political dissent around it.
SPEAKER_00: And the Trudeau government started flipping some switches and pulling some levers and changing things up, and the situation got more chaotic in Canada, and there was backlash to that.
SPEAKER_00: And so I think like you are correct to put a to underscore the relative importance of orderliness versus like the sheer numbers that are involved.
SPEAKER_00: But that you're then shying away from what it takes to maintain orderliness.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that the functioning of a kind of ex post asylum system is an invitation to chaos.
SPEAKER_02: I think restraining myself from interrupting you when you said that Australia was Jerusalem, I think I deserve some sort of kudos for that.
SPEAKER_02: Because that was it was uh a beyond the pale, Matthew.
SPEAKER_02: Uh so I think uh two things.
SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, I think the first thing I want to say is that like this question of gaming the system, I think is really important because I think you and I both agree that many Americans really don't enjoy the idea that people are not coming here in order to.
SPEAKER_02: Even existing immigrants, right?
SPEAKER_02: They get very upset at the idea that there are people who are gonna have to jump the line, who don't get to follow, um, who don't have to quote unquote follow the rules.
SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people often have mistaken understandings of how easy it is to follow the rules to come in, but putting that aside, they really don't like that idea.
SPEAKER_02: So then the question becomes what is the way to reduce people from actually gaming the system?
SPEAKER_02: And I think a series of extremely specific and narrow uh, you know, programs is actually incentivizing this gaming the system rather than deincentivizing it.
SPEAKER_02: Like, yes, this Nigerian situation that you mentioned earlier about how people are being coached on how to, you know, uh say that they're gay and at risk of LGBTQ violence.
SPEAKER_02: This is true in many other cases.
SPEAKER_02: There are people who are Ethiopians who are being coached to sound like they're from Eritrea.
SPEAKER_02: The entire purpose of having this the asylum system is that you actually have like subject matter experts on the ground who are like, I know things about Ethiopia and Eritrea, and I ask you questions about Eritrea, and like you say you've been coached, but like I am someone maybe with like you have gotten coached by like a random person you paid a thousand dollars to for like a week, and I am someone who's an American, like a uh, you know, consulate official or whatever it is, or asylum officer who like is literally trained and has been to your country, who's been to this country you're taught you're faking being from or whatever for ages.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like, do you, for instance, faking it that you are LGBTQ, do you have evidence?
SPEAKER_02: They don't just say, like, hey, yeah, I'm gay.
SPEAKER_02: You have to be like, show us any kind of evidence that you've ever been gay.
SPEAKER_02: Have you told anyone that you're gay?
SPEAKER_02: Have you been prosecuted, persecuted in any way?
SPEAKER_02: Like, I think that the whole point of like these kinds of digital systems is to be able to say, like, okay, let's say Matt's perfect world.
SPEAKER_02: There is some allotment from, like, as you mentioned, these Mexican LGBTQ persecuted individuals.
SPEAKER_02: There still is a ju j j uh uh discretionary system that people will try to game.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but but the the the difference here, right, is between, you know, you're saying people game O2, you know, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: But like, there's a difference between any kind of thing, which is like apply for a visa at your consulate and a thing that's you are here already in the country and you are asking that's Australia.
SPEAKER_02: Austr most of Australia's foreign-born population are visas, not I don't know if it's most, but very many of these are people who are on visas who then are applying going, like, can I have asylum now?
SPEAKER_02: Like, or like, can I have, can I stay here?
SPEAKER_02: Or can I, whatever?
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's what we're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure, sure, sure.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm saying in the the the invitation to chaos, right, that we were seeing in the United States under Obama, that I think they're seeing now in the UK, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's from the fact that like you can apply, you can c come in an irregular manner and then make the asylum claim.
SPEAKER_00: In Australia, they categorically forbid that.
SPEAKER_02: And there's still irregular migration to Australia.
SPEAKER_02: There is some, but it's we live in an irregular world.
SPEAKER_00: There is some and there is much less.
SPEAKER_02: But again, like But E my point is this like what are we trying to solve for?
SPEAKER_00: This is why I say that Australia is Jerusalemism.
SPEAKER_00: Because, like, what are we trying to solve for?
SPEAKER_00: Like, we want to have I want to have a world in which we have a good one million Americans.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, no, but I mean, broadly in the world, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like international labor mobility has a lot of benefits.
SPEAKER_00: Um, many, many countries are very poorly governed.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, lots of people are suffering from, you know, illiberal, you know, I mean, LGBT persecution, you know, for example, like it's bad, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like, uh, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not good.
SPEAKER_00: And the United States benefits from a growing labor force, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a little bit perverse that I feel like, not you, not accusing you, but I think that the kind of like Lib NGO Borg in the United States of America views the pre-Trump American system as better than the Australian system because they regard the American system as less inhumane, but like they're letting in more immigrants in Australia.
SPEAKER_00: Well, not more.
SPEAKER_00: Well, relative to the population.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's like seven people in Australia.
SPEAKER_00: But like I think if you take seriously the view that it's not really the numbers that matter, it's the chaos and the orderliness.
SPEAKER_02: Like that points to But I think I'm actually surprised by this view of yours.
SPEAKER_02: I actually, I mean, I'm not surprised that you, you know, want to mod out on immigration, but I think I'm I'm surprised this at like a principled level that you have because exactly what you said about like free movement of people and of um understanding like the like there's a lot of random cases that are still very positive, some that are in the national to the United States to exist, that are very, very difficult to categorize.
SPEAKER_02: And I agree we want as many applications happening in not at the Southwest.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't think anyone thinks it's good that these things happen southwest border.
SPEAKER_02: That's why, you know, I think these immigration lawyers do.
SPEAKER_02: I mean I don't think that they think it's they were very a lot of these uh uh uh NGOs were in cr were in favor of the processing centers being set up through Latin America, of the CHNV process uh parole programs, which processed people in their home countries, of the creation of the CBP1 app, which made it possible for people to actually get an appointment so they could actually meet with an asylum officer rather than just flooding across the border randomly.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, all of these things were put in place by people who wanted a less chaotic system and who didn't think it was good that people were just showing up and asking for it.
SPEAKER_02: And like, but I think the the the the critical distinction between our, I think, our positions here is that there are going to be some situations, unforeseen situations, that are like very, very bad and that are in our national interest to be able to respond too quickly.
SPEAKER_02: And we should develop systems like the asylum system where we can have legal ways of adjudicating whether someone fits into this and that is not just completely subject to the like ability of Congress to get its shit together in the moment.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like that is the distinction here.
SPEAKER_02: And I think also to say this, just like there when we're talking about what's in America's national interest here, there is this like view that is, I think, percolating that is not just, you know, the specific thing that we're talking about right now, but there's a view that's percolating on a lot of the centrist think tank borg, which is this idea that you can sort of plan your way to the level of immigration success America has had.
SPEAKER_02: The American success with immigration has largely been founded on like open borders.
SPEAKER_02: It was Ellis Island open borders, unless you had literally like syphilis or something like that.
SPEAKER_02: It was open borders for Mexicans to go in and out and like all of these studies that we have showing that the economics of the United States, the culture of the United States, the whatever, the innovation, the dynamism, the Nobel laureates, like whatever we're talking about, are founded on a system in which, of course, no one could select for that, which is something that you believe in many other contexts, where like it's very, very difficult to like have central planning of these sorts of things.
SPEAKER_02: And like, but now, with like perhaps the most important market that will ever exist ever, we're like, yeah, we can central plan that and it'll be fine.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I think that would genuinely harm the national interest.
SPEAKER_00: But this is what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I take this through like turn the lens backwards.
SPEAKER_00: I think there are lots of people who unambiguously do not qualify for asylum in the United States.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Who it would be good for them and it would be good for the United States if they moved here.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: And that makes me less worried about denying like a good claim to some random person because I think there are so many tragic non-immigration, you know, like like blocked migration scenarios under the status quo, right?
SPEAKER_00: And like that's really bad.
SPEAKER_00: And that we ought to be thinking really hard about how do we get a system that allows for more immigration to the United States in a sustainable way, which is like a little bit caring about the electoral politics, but it's also just a little bit caring about the fact that, you know, I we we saw this with the like the Greg Abbott and the and the busing stunts, that like that was a good political stunt that created political backlash.
SPEAKER_00: But the reason it created political backlash is that he created a substantive problem.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: Like it wasn't just like, oh, people in Chicago are freaking out.
SPEAKER_00: Like they were freaking out because there was a problem.
SPEAKER_02: Because they couldn't handle it.
SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, there's a universe in which a large number of immigrants come to Chicago and it's fine for everybody.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it literally happened with Ukrainians the exact same thing.
SPEAKER_00: But there's but there's also a universe in which a relatively small number of immigrants arrive in Chicago and it's a catastrophe.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: So like it's there's a you know dynamic interplay between the substance and the public opinion.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that if you want to solve for like immigrant maxing over a long time horizon, that requires being like really strict about anything that's max of chaos and being tough-minded about these individual sympathetic cases and really trying to assure people and create a system that is based on like m what is the maximum number of maximally advantageous immigration interactions.
SPEAKER_02: We are agreeing about the fact that there need to be clear guide, like 80% of these people of Mexicans are being sent back.
SPEAKER_02: That the system that I am supporting is not like, man, we're just like letting anyone in.
SPEAKER_02: Like even before the Biden years, the qu the problem was the backlog, right?
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't that like the judges were just letting anybody in, like there's variety of like admittance rates per judge.
SPEAKER_00: Again, it's the quantity, I think, of like countries being traversed.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: Like they're creating like chains of chaos and problems globally.
SPEAKER_02: I think that like the history of humanity has been that people are going to try to cross places to get to better opportunity, and that like we're not going to like eliminate that when there are such massive differences in people's life outcomes depending on like a border that they are across.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like, we're not gonna solve that.
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's actually not a thing to be solved, that's a thing to like fix.
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think more broadly, the substantive problem that I still think you're not really addressing is that there are going to be many, many situations in the national interest that you cannot plan for.
SPEAKER_02: So I don't understand, like it will not be it's not like a small and that will create chaos.
SPEAKER_02: Like it's not a small problem if like we just don't have a system one day to like let in this important Chinese dissident who, whatever, and they get back and they get murdered by the Chinese guy or they can disappear.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's like a big issue.
SPEAKER_02: And like I agree there are problems in both worlds, but like I you're not even explaining how you would solve for that.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I mean, I just think we're like flipping really fast from like Chinese dissident to You're the one who said crossing multiple cartel journalists in Mexico or I already solved, I I already uh you know solved that.
SPEAKER_02: Um Listen.
SPEAKER_02: I meant I meant like an actual legitimate pol uh case where you and I both agree there's a political asylum case.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Sure.
SPEAKER_00: So I mean look, I sort of think that if asylum goes away in the United States and like other Western countries, you know, for like a while and people continue to want to move and like things keep happening, but like this particular channel, like it goes away.
SPEAKER_00: It's like forgotten, you know, in the short-term mythos of like how do people do things?
SPEAKER_00: How does things operate?
SPEAKER_00: Like, we will probably end up reinventing some version of this, right?
SPEAKER_00: In much the way that we'll be debating.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: I like we're we're I guess I think we're trying to debate, like, what do we do?
SPEAKER_00: How do we get up off the floor of Trumpism?
SPEAKER_00: Because I think we saw this experiment with Biden of being like the witch is dead, you know, like like we're free again.
SPEAKER_00: And it was a fucking catastrophe.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Like right away.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: And I think part of what drove the catastrophe was precisely the kind of like progressive liberal moralism, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like the most outrageous form of immigration denial is like somebody who doesn't come and then they die because they're persecuted in their home country versus just like a skilled electrician who could be making more money in the United States and like also helping people, I don't know, get electric whatever the fuck electricians do.
SPEAKER_00: Um my sister-in-law trained as an electrician.
SPEAKER_02: We're all gonna be electricians one day.
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: We're all because we need the data centers, right?
SPEAKER_00: But like we need to focus on getting the electricians.
SPEAKER_00: You know, on like getting student visas operating in a reasonable way.
SPEAKER_02: I actually think this is the distinction between our views, is that like I think that the ability to select in a like central planning type way for the people who are going to benefit the United States is much harder than like you are letting on.
SPEAKER_02: Like many of the people who we like hold up as wow, like this CEO is a children of immigrants, would their father have gotten in on the skilled immigrant visa?
SPEAKER_02: Maybe.
SPEAKER_02: I don't I haven't looked at all of them, but some of them it's not true.
SPEAKER_02: Some of them require this.
SPEAKER_02: Like, um, you know, there are many, many people who like we're talking about here who end up being the exact like oh one category person, this out uh extraordinary individual, who like none of the existing pathways that were designed to let in extraordinary individuals would have let in.
SPEAKER_02: And like me and you usually agree about this, about like the beauty of allowing these like kind of markets to form that would allow people to come into places where they are needed and wanted and they themselves would be benefited and and you know, these positive some interactions.
SPEAKER_02: But like, I think that if we're talking about how to get up off the floor of Trumpism, it is, yes, part of it is understanding that national interest is a core way of of is the only way of thinking about immigration that it cannot be thought of as like a charity to other people.
SPEAKER_02: That's definitely true.
SPEAKER_02: But also that, like, I mean, I'm not interested in abandoning the very core precepts of like liberalism in order to short-term respond to an immigration crisis where even very liberal countries are facing the exact same political problems.
SPEAKER_02: The Denmarks, the Australias, like these places that like supposedly crack down on immigration and like fix their politics, like did not do so.
SPEAKER_02: So if this conversation is about what do we do after Trumpism to actually build up an immigration system, it's yes.
SPEAKER_02: We need to fix the asylum systems that people who are coming to this country are coming here under real pretenses and they're not like coming here under false ones.
SPEAKER_02: We need to make sure the courts are st are staffed up to be able to absorb those individuals.
SPEAKER_02: And we need to make sure we're expanding as many legal pathways as possible and not ones that are like hyper-narrowly tailored like you're talking about, but are actually able to absorb the individuals who are going to make the country a better place.
SPEAKER_00: And I just think I'm not trying to say that we need to be hyper-narrow with our selectivity.
SPEAKER_00: What I'm trying to say is that like Australia and Canada have sustained higher levels of legal immigration relative to their numbers.
SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02: And they're not as great as the United States.
SPEAKER_00: And that it's not well.
SPEAKER_02: And no, I'm serious.
SPEAKER_02: Like literally, what you're talking about are countries that have not been able to produce the benefits their citizens, the US has been able to produce.
SPEAKER_00: I do love America.
SPEAKER_00: Um I'll let you I'll let you have the last word.
SPEAKER_00: Um Should we do peer review?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, we have fun paper.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, what have you got?
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so um I am a middle child, so I love papers about birth orders.
SPEAKER_02: And this one is a really interesting one that kind of looks into the consequences of what they call germs in the family.
SPEAKER_02: So I as we know, kids get sick, preschool age kids in particular, daycare kids get sick.
SPEAKER_02: I saw some other study that showed that um, you know, if you have a kid in daycare, like one out of two days as a parent, you're sick.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So anyway, kids get sick a lot.
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
SPEAKER_02: And they spread disease to other family members.
SPEAKER_02: And they basically use, they use Danish administrative data to document that before age one, younger siblings have two to three times higher hospitalization rates for respiratory conditions than older siblings.
SPEAKER_02: So like if you have an older sibling who's going to daycare, uh you know, uh, they're probably bringing home some illness, and then you're going to the hospital a lot more, but your older sibling didn't have a younger, didn't have anyone in the home doing that when you were a kid.
SPEAKER_02: So um, they find like really lasting impacts on early life respiratory disease exposure on younger siblings' earnings, educational attainment, chronic respiratory health, mental health related outcomes.
SPEAKER_02: And this like speaks to this broader question of like why is it that like younger siblings just like underperform?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just to like set the stage because I feel like you know, as an older child and the husband of another older child, and you know, we We are big on eldest children pride in my household.
SPEAKER_00: But like a lot of people don't know, but younger kids are um they're inferior objectively.
SPEAKER_00: Um they uh they earn less, they have less education.
SPEAKER_02: Um I think they go to jail more too.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: And this um, as far as we can tell, like it compounds.
SPEAKER_00: It's like second kids better than third.
SPEAKER_00: There's not that many fourth and fifth kids anymore, but let's like and you know, and they study like both like family size and birth effects, and like both are both are relevant.
SPEAKER_02: And people are like, oh, maybe it's because parents don't have as much time for their kids as like you know, you you have all this time for your first kid, you're like really invested in them, and then second kid, you're like, all right, well, I literally my time is divided between two children, but also just like maybe you're like less enamored of your second kid or something.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, I mean I think especially if you're a parent, this is the most intuitive explanation.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you look, if I look at like friends that I have, and and you know, you can see that like third kids um speak a little bit later than like first kids.
SPEAKER_00: And and it's pretty clearly because like if you only have one baby, it's like you gotta take care of the baby.
SPEAKER_00: And it's like you talk to the baby a lot, like for no real reason.
SPEAKER_00: It's just that the baby's there, right?
SPEAKER_00: And they learn language.
SPEAKER_00: Um, parents with with three kids, like they get really busy and the third kid's just kind of being dragged along in a snugly um to the older kids' activities and stuff all day.
SPEAKER_00: And so it seems like this kind of like relative parental attention effect is like very intuitive to anyone who's like been in the shit with it.
SPEAKER_00: But like this paper is positing that there's this like actually more important, like basic biological mechanism, which is that the third kid is being bombarded with germs all the time.
SPEAKER_02: And it's not like small, it's like the it's two to three times the rate of firstborns that their sorry, secondborns are hospitalized for acute respiratory conditions, two to three times the rate of their firstborne.
SPEAKER_00: But there's like a low base rate of hospital.
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
SPEAKER_02: But my point is like if that's happening, then like you should imagine that the getting sick rate is also like higher.
SPEAKER_02: All the people who are most people don't go to the hospital.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell At a very high level.
SPEAKER_02: And like, you know, um I think we now know post-COVID it's much better known that like there's like real long-term issues with having like viral infections that can affect your your long-term health.
SPEAKER_02: And uh um it's obviously much worse for infants.
SPEAKER_02: Um I don't know what the like practical advice is here.
SPEAKER_02: I I feel like there's like uh maybe there's like a birth spacing question here, which I think is not good for the for the pronatalist, uh for the pronatalist movement here.
SPEAKER_02: If you don't want to have a kid in daycare when you have a you know your infant in the home.
SPEAKER_02: I think there's another thing about I I actually should have looked this up beforehand, so our fact checker will tell us if we're wrong in the show notes.
SPEAKER_02: But uh having an infant that's born in winter is is worse for life outcomes too, because uh more likely to get sick um at that time of year.
SPEAKER_02: Um but you only have one kid, so you don't have to worry about this.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean I do think these are sort of more um internal questions for right of center people, you know, because there's like there's a lot going on in right of center politics.
SPEAKER_00: That's both where you find more people who are talking about how like people should have more babies.
SPEAKER_00: It's also where you find people who are um more like pro-inequality, right?
SPEAKER_00: And like saying, like, well, we should like be less concerned with with the less fortunate and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_00: And I do think that you see in like in this in a lot of these findings, right?
SPEAKER_00: There's like a slight tension between those those two ideas that it's like when you have more kids It's har it's it's not that like you'd be worse off not existing or something, right?
SPEAKER_00: But it's like you are likely to get below average outcomes with like the marginal child in increasing family sizes.
SPEAKER_00: And so the question of like what do we as a society like do with people who are below average in educational attainment, earnings potential, et cetera, et cetera, is like relevant to how you think about that.
SPEAKER_00: And from a progressive standpoint, like the people who aren't having children are also the ones who are like, sure, but this like 40th percentile person like deserves healthcare and housing and pensions and like all this good stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's like in that world where all these below average people are also having great lives because of our equalitarian economic structure, then it seems like a no-brainer.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, sure, like have the fourth child, right?
SPEAKER_00: But in the like harsh, you know, like night watchman state universe, that like seems like a dicier proposition to me.
SPEAKER_00: I I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: It's like I both only, you know, I'm I'm like we're all part of the same hypocrisy here.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just on the other side of it.
SPEAKER_00: Um so like it's fine.
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm happy to like give welfare benefits to somebody else's seventh child, but it's um and I mean it's not like small too.
SPEAKER_02: Like they're finding that the earnings impact of like like the the usual the the uh penalty for being the second kid on earnings gets cut in half um based on the respiratory uh um if they if you control for the infancy disease environment.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell But also because almost everything we do in terms of like social benefits, right, is done on a per capita basis, right?
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, you know, you take something that I'm not that excited about, like free college tuition, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like that's a lot more money to a family with four kids than to a family with one kid, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's like you know, you're you're you're you're doing all right, the the politics is a little, I don't want to say it's upside down exactly, but like it's interesting that we land in this line, but this is also part of the one billion Americans message, right?
SPEAKER_00: Is that like, yeah, that like, you know, I think that um you know a well-designed immigration system has positive fiscal benefits.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that a like strongly pronatal political system uh probably costs a lot of money.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but that like that's probably worth it to have like a society that like persists over time.
SPEAKER_00: But like the the challenge is it's not just that like it's stressful to like deal with a lot of kids, right?
SPEAKER_00: There's like real reasons sort of like driving people to smaller family sizes, including, you know, these like slightly hidden, um, but like also quite real, like dealing with sick kids, like when you also have jobs and things like that.
SPEAKER_00: This is a big problem.
SPEAKER_02: Um, all right.
SPEAKER_02: Well, from someone with zero kids and someone with one kid, uh, we're not gonna tell you how many kids to have, but if you like this episode, you should subscribe.
SPEAKER_02: Next week we have a very special one.
SPEAKER_02: Uh Matt and I spent some time reading a very old book, I guess not that old, but it's uh The Feminine Mystique by Betty Fridan.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she will tell you how many kids to have.
SPEAKER_02: She will definitely tell how many children to have.
SPEAKER_02: Um uh it's actually a really great segue.
SPEAKER_02: Um, so uh, if you are interested in reading along, feel free.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, we'll see you next week.
SPEAKER_02: Bye.