A Broad Look at Immigration

Over the next months, the Why Is This Happening? podcast will include episodes called The Stakes that look at a particular policy topic, and compare and contrast what Trump did during his term as president with what Biden has done since 2021. 

As the podcast description says, for the "first time since 1892, we have an election in which both candidates have presidential records, which provides a unique opportunity to cut through messaging and rhetoric and culture war flotsam and actually take a hard look at what each man has actually done as president."

The first episode aired recently on the topic of immigration, with guest Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. I've never heard of him before, which tells me he's a wonk on the topic. 

It's a informative on many levels, but here are some specific facts I learned:

• As part of undermining legal immigration, the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze within the refugee resettlement program. By the time Biden took office, there were 1,000 fewer adjudicators on staff.
• When Obama left office, the U.S. was accepting 100,000 refugees per year. By the time Trump left, it was 15,000. No matter what Biden wanted to do, it wasn't possible to increase the number immediately because there weren't enough adjudicators, and the network of nonprofit resettlement organizations across the country had been decimated during the Trump years as well, with their staffs cut back because of lack of work. The number of refugees admitted is just now reaching the level it was at the end of the Obama years. (And note that it's not as if 100,000 is a great number relative to many other countries!)
• The Trump administration used every petty means it could to keep people from coming here who had a right to come under international law. One example Reichlin-Melnick gave was this: forms with fields an applicant didn't need (like apartment number when you live in a house) were rejected if the person didn't put NA into the field. 
• The number of people "at the border" is not more than some other times in the last 25 years, but the nature of the situation and who they are has changed. And, of course, our systems have not kept up because Republicans in Congress have made sure nothing can get fixed.
  

The details of what happened with family separation, "zero tolerance," and the failure of deterrence are all laid out, including what happened in 2020 during the covid shutdowns, when none of us were paying attention to immigration.

At the end, Reichlin-Melnick says that a slight bit of progress is being made now against the asylum backlog, but the structural issues persist, which only Congress can address . 

Finally, he says, "As legal immigration becomes more inaccessible, people are driven to the border... You need a broader perspective that looks at the systemic issues that are causing people to do this."