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The Gist
Miles Taylor on Resistance Cascades, Rubio’s Turn, and Testing the Judiciary
00:35:15
Former DHS official Miles Taylor, author of the “Anonymous” op-ed, returns to discuss Trump’s second term agenda, the courts, and the missing “axis of adults.” Pesca opens with a theory on why deportees landed in Eswatini, then closes...
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American made tariff free clothing with American Giant. With American Giant they aren't affected by tariffs because their clothing products Never left the U.S. get 20% off your first order when you use promo code STAPLE20@american-giant.com It's Wednesday, September 3, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Lawyers for one of the five men who've been deported to Eswatini say their client has spent seven weeks in a maximum security prison and has not been able to contact them. This client is a Jamaican whose home country offered to take him back. Why is he. Why are all the others in Eswatini? I have a theory and it goes back to Trump's. Well, it wasn't the State of the Union. It's what we call the first speech a president gives in his term, a address to the Joint Houses of Congress. In it, Donald Trump said this.
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C
Nobody knows what that is.
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B
$8 million to promote LGBTQ I+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of. Lesotho is an Eswatini. Of course, you could tell by the names. One's Lesotho, one's Eswatini, though Eswatini was once Swaziland. But I think Trump was very excited to send some prisoners to a landlocked country entirely surrounded by South Africa. Or maybe it less specific than that, to take Trump at his word, a questionable undertaking. He had literally never heard of Lesotho. And maybe someone told him, oh, that's a small country surrounded by South Africa. And then later someone else said, Mr. President, the Eschatitians are willing to take our prisoners. And he said, what's an esthetician? And was told, oh, Eswatini is a small landlocked country inside South Africa. And he said, great. I talked about that in the State of the Union and no one even thought to say, well, actually the first time it's not the state of the union. They just said, great, let's go with it. Anyway, I'm willing to admit my theory could be wrong. What's also wrong is the legal procedures these deportees seem to be experiencing. And even if the courts don't literally agree with that, we have to ask, as reasonable people, what are we doing sending deportees to Eswatini? Jamaica will take this guy back. Everyone's heard of Jamaica, which is what I guess makes it less enticing to Trump. On the show today, I'll speak more broadly about the non esotian aspects of immigration policy. But first, Miles Taylor is back. He wrote the op ed in Trump's first administration under the pen name Anonymous. He became not just a big critic, but a big target of Trump, was even labeled treasonous in an official memorandum by the president. More with Miles Taylor, author of Blowback A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump Falls in Full Swing. I'm feeling the chill. Maybe you are feeling the chill of an old wardrobe that leaves you cold. It's the perfect time to refresh your wardrobe with pieces that feel as good as they look. Quince makes it easy to look polished, to stay warm, to save big. Oh, you're saying you have to stint on quality? No. No stinting. You know what they have essentials for fall? 100% Mongolian cashmere from $50 washable silk tops. You know me and the tops and the skirts. All right. This is my wife. She went online, she found these perfectly tailored denim pieces. There are these wool coats. They look designer level. Somehow they cost a fraction of the price. It depends on cutting out the middle person. You get luxury quality goods at half the price of similar brands. I've talked a lot about the linen shorts, but we're getting the wool. The wool is coming. I'll tell you how my wife likes the wool. The wool coat, I think she's going to like it. I think that it's cut and its comfort will be second to none and oh so cheap. Keep it classy and classic and cozy this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/the gist in our last interview with Miles Taylor, we were talking about Trump's shakedown tactics. You feed the alligator, the alligator eventually eats you. You pay off if you're a law firm, the administration, the price only goes up. That is how intimidation works. The more organizations give in, the harder and scarier it gets for everyone else. But this is where sociology helps. There's a famous Stanford sociologist, Mark Granovetter, who wrote about thresholds of collective behavior. In a riot, the first person to throw a brick takes the biggest leap. The second needs less courage. And the third or fourth, the permission structure is in place. Okay, so flip that from the negative to the positive. And you see the same logic here. Once one firm resists, it lowers the threshold for the next. Then eventually, maybe resistance can cascade. I don't know. Miles Taylor, what do you think?
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C
So I saw a version of this in 2020 is. You know, you and I spoke a couple years ago, and it was a super hard decision to come forward in the first place. Right. I'd written these criticisms from inside the administration anonymously. And, you know, I understand if people didn't like that. Some people thought that that wasn't the way to go. But I did it to get attention, right? Not to myself, but to the message. Right. It deprived Donald Trump of. Of the messenger to focus on, and it forced everyone to focus on the message, which was the majority of Trump's cabinet sought, thought he was unfit for office and was worried about his abuses of power. That was true. And that was a big concern going into the 2020 election that people needed to know about. But when I decided to unmask myself, that was scary, Mike, because there weren't a lot of Trump officials who'd come forward in their own name. So even though I said, hey, I'm gonna unmask myself before the 2020 election, when push came to shove, I was like, shit, I'm gonna be out there alone taking all the punches. And so I went and had coffees with a whole bunch of my former colleagues, cabinet secretaries that served under Trump, people who'd worked in the White House, people who I knew shared my view of the president's unfitness for office, to see if they would come out with me, because I knew that would make it easier for me to come forward. Mike, I wasn't some superhero that was ready to go it alone, man. I wanted company. And you know what? Coffee after coffee, lunch after lunch with these people, folks were like, there's no way I want to go forward. And so I had to make the decision whether I was just going to go out there solo or not. And I did. And, like, within days of having come forward, some of those same people I had coffee with some of those same people I had lunch with said, hey, I think I'll join you out there. One of those was Olivia Troy. She was Mike Pence's Homeland Security advisor. And I heard from her within days of coming forward, and she said, I think I want to come, too. And then we had more and more folks and it ended up being, I think Jake Tapper at the time called it the largest group of ex officials in American history to campaign against a president they served under. But it took somebody going first. And again, I'm not saying I was the only one out there, but this is proof to your point that throwing the brick or the positive version of that takes someone making what probably looks like a reckless and foolish decision for others to then jump on board.
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B
Yeah, but what did it do? What did it do besides convince people like me who've been paying attention and suspected that this was going on on the ins? And what did it do besides give Donald Trump an opportunity to talk about. See, this is the deep state that I was talking about. What did it really do?
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C
Well, it's a super valid question. I would actually go back to the operative words you used a little bit ago, which is permission structures. And I'll tell you what I think the impact was in 2020. I wasn't terribly involved in the 2024 campaign because like I said, we were trying to grow a family, keep our heads down and get back to a normal Life. But in 2020, I think that it was decisive in turning the tide against Donald Trump. I don't mean me and my actions. I mean more broadly the fact that so many Republicans from the party came out against Donald Trump's reelection. And then if you went and looked in the cross tabs of the polls after Election Day, you saw that, no, there wasn't a huge tide of Republicans that turned against Donald Trump, but a very large minority of Republicans for the first time in their lives went and voted for a Democrat. And what did they say when they were interviewed after the polls? In those after action interviews, a lot of them said, well, it's because other Republicans that they saw out there publicly were providing the permission structure. Now, they didn't use those words, but it's the concept that you laid out there, provided the permission structure for them to say, oh, okay, I can temporarily step away from the tribe because what's happening isn't great, and then go back. So look, I do think it was important for people to speak out in 2020 because it created those permission structures for Republicans to separate from the party vote a different way and get Donald Trump out of office. Why do I think that didn't work four years later when Kamala Harris tried to court those Republicans? Is a very, very simple thing. You don't need political science experts to tell you people don't have long memories. There is recency bias. And so I remember this. In the year leading up to the 2024 election, you could start to look in the cross tabs of the polling. And those same Republicans who had voted against Donald Trump in 2020, incredibly, they were going back to the tribe. They were saying, ah, I'm sick of a Democrat being in office. Maybe it wasn't so bad four years ago.
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B
Yeah, that's definitely part of it. And also that the Democrats in office have to deliver and have to have a good message. There were other Republicans this time elected, like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who you could tell that the Harris theory of the case was if we, if we campaign with Cheney, maybe we'll get some sort of Olivia Troy Miles Taylor effect, maybe even more, since people knew Liz Cheney's name before she defected. But it didn't work. And so there's a lot of political science and a lot of election reasons. But I want to ask you about a couple. And you're observing as a business owner, as someone deeply invested in democracy, but not an active part. Yeah, well, at the time, in 24, the business was.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
Do you think. Do you think that the message of democracy was on the line? Was. And I think about it a couple of ways. One, was it the right message? Was it the wrong message? Was it the right message as expressed through the wrong messenger? Because I kind of think that was. Joe Biden liked expressing the message, but. And he got some kudos for it. It was one of the few messages that quote, unquote, worked for him. But I also think that it's not the right way to win an election to campaign on the abstract. And when you were saying it, it was an abstract. But by 2024, the threat of Donald Trump seemed more abstracted. And so you had to campaign more or connect with people more on things like cost of living than concepts like democracy or autocracy. But what do you think?
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C
I don't know, Mike. I mean, you've said it so eloquently. You've left. Left me scarcely anything else to offer analysis on there. But, you know, look, I'll add that in 2020, to your point, the threats were very specific. We were in the midst of COVID people were losing family members. Like, I lost an uncle to Covid. I mean, he died amidst all of this. And it was like, okay, people are dying. Because whether you agree or not with the public health response, which, you know, totally separate conversation, people were dying. And that's very crystallizing when it comes to God. Do we want to keep this guy in or not? He seems to be handling this thing pretty recklessly. And in 2024, like you noted, it did become very abstract. And I think you're right. I think the message was hard. But more importantly, I do think it was the messenger. And look, I think Harris did the best she could have. I'm still not a Democrat, even though I've turned against Donald Trump. I mean, politically, I'm still a conservative. I'm a classical liberal, which is, in today's terms, a libertarian. Like, I'm a hardcore libertarian. Get government out of my life conservative. But I caucus with the Democrats now because of the threat that we are seeing. But here's. Here's. Here's the. What I think could be proof to the point that it was the wrong messenger. Compare how Kamala Harris was being received to how right now Gavin Newsom's being received. Now, I don't love the idea of a governor from California becoming president in general because I think California is such a shit show.
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B
I got friends there specifically. How about as a conservative, Specific guy with Gavin Newsom's track record.
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C
Totally look as a conservative. I look at California and I'm like, man, that's not what we want America to be. And I have a lot of friends who've left California to get away from that. However, Gavin Newsom as a personality has taken the threats to democracy and made them easy to digest from a popular standpoint and even fun and funny. I mean, right now, he's engaged in this dark humor mocking of the absurdity of the way Donald Trump talks to the American people in his tweets and in his messages. That sort of satire that's effective and not just rallying Democrats, that gets independents to say, you know what? That's funny. Like, if you can do it with a joke, you're going to be 10 times better than doing it with a lecture. And I think in 2024, America was getting lectured to by the left. This is bad. Democracy in danger. You have to vote this way, or you are an authoritarian. People. People don't want to be lectured to. Like, bring them in on the dark joke.
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B
So I know from your book and from your analysis that you think the big difference between Trump's first term and this one was that there weren't. And this is a phrase you coined the, the axis of adults, the idea of adults in the room. And you work with John Kelly and you work with these adults. There are many people in many positions of power who are actively trying to thwart Donald Trump. So just take that away. He's going to achieve more. Replace it with people who are trying to supercharge the Trump agenda. You know, the Author of the 2025 playbook is now directing the Office of Management and Budget. So that's a huge change. Another change is it just took him time to ramp up and he didn't know how things worked and now he does. But what about, do you think that at his core he's changed and gotten darker? That the first time we wouldn't say that he had great instincts, but there was something about what Donald Trump wanted to do that was venal and he was egotistical, but he didn't really want to. He didn't care that much about. He, we know he didn't care about norms, didn't care that much about democracy. But do you think now he's gotten darker and actively opposes democracy as we define it, in a different way than the first time?
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C
There's probably people who would disagree with me here, but I don't think so. I think he's the same man with one exception. The only asterisk I would add is he always wanted to weaponize the power of the federal government for revenge. And the only thing that changed in those four years is he had more people he wanted to get revenge against.
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B
But yeah, and he has more specific targets. But he might have the first time said the New York court system. It's tortured me in my life. Now it becomes Letitia James and there's 10 more behind her or 100 more behind her. Correct?
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C
That's absolutely right. So I think he's the same man. And he's the same man who at the time, John Kelly called one of the most evil people he'd met in his life. I mean, Kelly's who brought me into the Trump administration. And look, that guy is not a partisan. I couldn't even tell you to this day whether John Kelly votes Democrat or Republican. I mean, he is a service member through and through. You know, four star general, United States Marine Corps, still the greatest boss that I've ever had. And, you know, he left that job as chief of staff at the White House and basically said Trump was one of the most evil people he had ever met. That has an impact on you when you get to know a guy that's as moral as John Kelly. And he said that not because of the way Trump tweeted, not because of all the other things in his past. I'm sure those things contributed to it. But. But he said that primarily because of the things in private that the President would want John Kelly to do. Those are the things we are now seeing Trump do publicly. And, you know, I don't want to do the whole I told you so thing, but we were right a few years ago when a lot of us came out and said, look, if you think it's bad now, if he comes in a second time, it's a lot darker because the things he keeps directing us to do behind the scenes that we are telling him are illegal. He's going to have a team that wants to do them. And I'll add another asterisk there, Mike, though, which is. You mentioned the deep state earlier. I want to be very clear about something. I have long held the view that the civil service in the United States needed a little bit of reform. Government is bloated, it is wasteful, it is gigantic. I don't think the way Doge did it was smart. I think the Congress is responsible for deciding how to reform the government. But I'm all about, you know, reforming the government and clearing out the so called deep state. What people like me did inside the first Trump administration wasn't an evil deep state thwarting the President's lawful orders. It was a group of people who regularly said, Mr. President, what you're telling us to do is illegal or unconstitutional. It was people willing to speak truth to power when something was wrong. That's what we were worried about. I don't support the idea of government civil servants being given lawful orders and saying absolutely not and thwarting them. Look, if you don't agree with the President's agenda, then resign, Right? But if it's illegal, right? If it's unconstitutional, dammit, Democrat or Republican, it is your job to signal that to your boss and to make sure they know that's the type of people we've lost in the second Trump administration.
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B
So as far as John Kelly saying this is the most evil guy I ever met, he did, but he said it to Jeffrey Goldberg in a print interview on the record.
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C
Did Kelly end up saying that publicly? I don't know if he ended up saying that publicly, too.
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B
Well, maybe I'm paraphrasing, but he gave a pretty strong interview to Jeffrey Goldberg.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Can you. I remember. I think we all remember as Americans, when General Kelly and General Mattis and General McMaster in that campaign video with the flag in the background got on all our television screens and say, we served in the first administration. We can't go back. No, we don't remember that because it never happened. And we're a visual society. And abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq were going on, but we didn't care until Abu Ghraib. And maybe we won't care about the Epstein scandal until we see video. Did they do all they could do? Did they. I know how these guys operate in the world and their sense of duty and their sense of decorum. But if we were, as you argue and as I think they argue, at a precipice of turning into an autocracy, did they really do all they could do?
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C
I think most of us have not done all we can do. And look, and I'm not going to try to dance around that question, no, I don't think they did all they could do. I mean, I still admire those guys, and I'd be happy to have that conversation with any of them. And privately, a number of those folks over the past couple of years, I've reached out to on an almost weekly basis to say, here's an opportunity to speak out. Here's another opportunity. Here's another opportunity. Here's another opportunity.
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B
What do they say? Do they say, a lot of times I get fired?
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C
Yeah, a lot of times I get radio silence. I mean, look, it's fucking annoying to have a guy like me be like, hey, speak out, speak out, speak out, speak out.
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B
I mean, that's really annoying. Look how good it's going for me.
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C
Exactly. Especially if you want to move on with your life and go make money. It's, you know, like, it's the same advice they give rock stars and celebrities is, like, politics is not very profitable. But you know what? There's bigger principles at play. And a lot of those guys, look, I mean, they came and spoke out. But if you're talking about the generals, I mean, the tough thing with people like Kelly and Mattis and other folks that came up in that era is you talk about spending decades in the United States military being taught that you serve the commander in chief and to not be political. I do have to say it was extraordinary that we even had some of those folks coming forward at all. What's more galling to me now is a lot of the other people who had spoken out in 2020 and 2024 have gone to ground completely or even repudiated some of their previous comments because they want to be in the good graces of the administration. Make no mistake, the fight we are in right now, in my view, is vastly more significant than the electoral fights we've been in the past three presidential cycles. Because now we are actually seeing those powers of government weaponized in ways that the courts are determining to be unconstitutional. And it's happening in a blizzard so fast that there's almost no accountability for each of those individual transgressions. We are in a really scary moment for the rule of law in this country, and the people who are going silent are making it easier for that to move forward.
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B
If there was still an Axis of Adults, would you put Marco Rubio in it?
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C
I mean, once upon a time, Marco Rubio would have put himself in it.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Look, I don't know what's happening inside the administration. And, you know, I don't want to prejudge whether Marco Rubio or not is helping to check things that we don't know about that are illegal. What I will say is I have been deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed that Marco Rubio has seemingly become the chameleon that he spent years criticizing. Marco Rubio hated people like the man he has become today, people who talked about the danger of Donald Trump and then contorted themselves in knots to go serve him, you know, at the highest levels. And look, I had a lot of friends that have worked very closely with Marco Rubio. And as recently as, you know, him being a United States senator, you know, before he came in as Secretary of state, you know, Rubio would privately criticize those types of people who were shape shifting to become Trump's buddies. And now he seems to have done exactly that. And, you know, he's become a very different Marco. There was a. He gave a speech that I went to. I saw him a few months before. The Trump administration is I support a nonprofit organization that Rubio also supports. And so we end up at this same event every year together. And he gave some remarks to a small group of us that was probably, and I mean, this one of the most inspiring pro democracy, off the cuff speeches I've ever heard is Rubio was talking about the US Role in the world and our responsibility and fighting back against the enemies of human freedom and dictatorial impulses and the authoritarian strain taking over global politics and on and on and on. And it wasn't lost on me that just a few months later, he decided to go work for the man who was bringing some of those same forces into our country. So my disappointment with him is almost bottomless at this point. But look, I still leave open the possibility that he might throw himself on a grenade one day and say, I'm stopping Trump from starting a nuclear war.
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B
Did you glean any insights from that leaked signal chat? Because it showed members of the administration communicating with each other in an unguarded way?
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C
Yeah. I mean, don't, don't invite Jeffrey into your chat if you want to keep it secret. I mean, that was. Yeah, you know, I don't know.
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B
To me, I'll just throw it out there. Waltz has been sidelined and now he's U.N. maybe going to be U.N. ambassador. So, you know, he hasn't been totally being called treasonous to me. He was an adult in the room during that chat. Your conception?
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C
Yeah. I mean, I think if Waltz was an adult in the room, look, I'd say let's call him a preteen in the room. I don't think that Waltz's influence was any sort of massive check on the President. I haven't seen a big change in policy since Rubio notionally took over the National Security Advisor job. But my biggest takeaway is what happened afterwards, and you just mentioned it, which is that they told Waltz they would nominate him for unique ambassador. This is what Trump does, is he tries to buy off the people he's worried will turn against him. And there are a lot more cases of this that aren't publicly known of Cabinet secretaries that left the first Trump administration and got offered jobs or deals or things, and it was never an exchange. Cuz Donald Trump is very careful to try to not document a quid pro quo. But instead of letting someone get unceremoniously fired from his administration, which will make them angry, he'll say, but hey, I've got a good landing pad for you. Why don't you go work over here so that they don't turn against him. And that's what he's done with Waltz and he's done with a number of others already in this administration. But going back to the first term, I mean, there are cabinet members that you haven't heard speaking out against Donald Trump, not because they love the guy, privately they loathe him, but because he said, let me help you out with your next gig. And that's what he does. It's very mob like behavior.
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B
What's your assessment of the courts so far? Not just the Supreme Courts, but all the challenges that seem to have. We don't know how it will play out. But so far I've been more heartened than not. I know that they, you know, where's your you made your decision, Mr. Justice. Where's your army to enforce it? I get all that, but it does seem to me that the judiciary has been as robust as I could have hoped to meet the moment. How about you?
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C
Largely, obviously with the exception of the Supreme Court. And I can touch on that in a second. But I think someone had done an analysis at one point, Mike, you probably know because you have a near photographic memory. But I think someone had assessed that it was like 3/4 of courts had ruled against him and ruled activities unconstitutional. Something along those lines were, which is quite extraordinary. I mean the Article three powers that are the powers to the judiciary and the Constitution I think are the last big bulwark we have against a would be tyrant in this country, whether it's a Trump or someone else. I mean that's kind of the last bastion right there are the courts. Now you mentioned the famous Mr. Chief justice, you've made your decision, now go enforce it. The notion that the courts can't actually enforce their decisions. They don't have a police force or an army to go make sure a president carries out their determinations to that point. I'm gonna put a marker down right now, Mike. And that marker is, I think well before the end of this administration, you will see Donald Trump's White House openly flout a very significant judicial order and that will break the seal and make it much easier for them to flout other orders. We will end up in that situation.
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B
And yeah, that's the constitutional crisis. It was said to have been occurred when he, you know, let's say to give him maximum credit, his lawyers vigorously rebutted some of the deportation charges when he very much rebutted and tried to play footloose and fancy free with the facts on the Abrego Garcia decision. But so far it has not been the full on flouting that you're talking about.
- [28:28]
C
It hasn't been. And look, there are some liberals who would come after me for that and say it has been. Look, I think there's been a full on flouting of the rule of law generally. But there hasn't been.
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B
But that's an abstraction.
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C
It's an abstraction. There hasn't been a decisive Supreme Court decision that the administration has said screw you, we're going forward anyway. And what I'm saying is I think it's coming. And my worry is by the time we get there The Republican Party has done such a good job of popularizing the notion that the courts and the judges are partisan that I don't think we end up in a everyone in America is on the streets type of moment. I think it largely passes as another he said, she said, Republicans like it, Democrats don't. Whatever it is, it ends up being partisan that he flouts a judicial decision and then we're in a really dangerous place because it becomes easier and easier for any president then to ignore the judiciary. And I do think that happens before this administration. But it's unclear what that will look like.
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B
Miles Taylor is. Well, he was anonymous. He is the author of A Warning. His new book is Blowback, A Warning to Save Democracy From Trump's Revenge. He's going on one of these tours and sometimes doing interviews from actual studios and sometimes driving into the woods, as he did for us. Thank you so much, Miles.
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C
Look, you got it. You got to, you got to find safety where you can get it, Mike. But, but genuinely, my friend, very grateful for you and, and the light you shine on important issues. So really appreciate the time.
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B
And now the spiel. Over the last two days, I've been speaking about immigration, as has America. Other than the constant of the economy, it has been the issue that has driven politics in this country and most of the world's countries for the last decade, and there is no good answer to it. The politicians themselves know this, which is why here in America, they thwarted progress at the behest of Donald Trump during the Biden presidency. But the Democrats don't have good answers either. That is why a bipartisan solution was so badly needed. We know what happened under the Biden administration the first three years. It was disastrous or at least unprecedented, the number of people legally and illegally coming across the border. And it is not necessarily Joe Biden's fault, or at least it is not unique to Joe Biden. The same thing happened under the Merkel administration, the Trudeau administration administration, the Stefan Lofven administration. In Sweden, Western democracies with an inkling of openness to immigrants were punished by voters. David Leonhardt has described the Democrats policy on immigration this way. More is good, less is racist. Many Democrats would howl in objection to that as a caricature. And yet in practical terms, that's often how the stance plays out. It's kind of comforting to believe that you are occupying a position of righteousness when you decry the racism that you can certainly find in the statements and actions of ICE agents or politicians who support aggressive deportation policies. I will never tell you that. Steve Bannon Stephen Miller Donald Trump the architects of the deportation policy are not racist. They're certainly cruel. They seem to be uninterested in due process. There are heapings of excess in their deeds and policies. However, simply pointing to the abuses of the incumbents does not get us to a workable immigration policy. What does work so upsets Democrats that I sometimes think the party will never embrace a real solution. And in the absence of a practical policy, you have Donald Trump doing what he does, taking things too far and violating due process, not out of indifference, but out of an actual strategy. Because the more attention he gets for the harshness of his policies, the better he thinks he's doing. And among his base and a lot of the public, he's right. Let's also point out that among immigrants, or would be immigrants, it seems to be the case that advertising a harsh policy disincentivizes border crossings. Look at the statistics. So among the conundrum of immigration policies is that the more illegal immigration the US experiences, the more it signals that the United States is an economic success. Our country is so attractive even compared to European nations, that people want to come here. America's neighbors in this hemisphere are doing comparatively poorly. And so for hundreds of millions of people, migration is a rational choice. To upend this reality would mean something like the US economy would have to crater. This might solve immigration as an issue, but it would of course create problems in every other aspect of life. You can't blame immigrants for wanting to help their families. Despite frequent claims that there are more criminals among immigrants than native born, which statistically does not seem to be true. Immigrants are laudable in their aspirations and just getting here. It shows the kind of grit they often possess. So in order to do the right thing, as we define it, as American people, we are in the odd position of punishing other people who are doing the right thing for themselves and their families. Whatever values we as Americans asp to, they are in fact sharing those values. And that's why I call it one of the conundrum. It seems that there is only one tactic we can live with. And we can live with it only if we don't think too hard about it. The tactic is to stop crossings at the border because once people are in America, they become to us and to our storytellers and sense makers in the media, they become real people. They become, if not Americans, then residents of America, or they become recognizable stories. They become identifiable members of families. They have ties not just to a community, but to our communities. So the only thing that seems workable is to never let this happen in the first place. To dissuade migrants from crossing, to apprehend them at the border, to quickly remove them if they do make it across. Because once they become Americans, however we define it, it becomes too hard for decent people to do the necessary thing if they want an immigration policy that hasn't caused upset and dislocation the world over. Now, you're smart, you are moral. You have definitely identified the logical and moral flaw in what I've laid out. It's that when a person makes his or her way into America and establishes roots, that's not when they become an actual person. If we care about humanity, I. E. Humans shouldn't start caring about them only after they arrive and present themselves and become unignorable. The migrants who wish to arrive, who are breaking our policy by crossing at the border, are still people, and they still deserve empathy, sympathy, human rights, economic possibility. But as a workable solution, as Americans, we can't countenance that fact. And in fact, we can't allow it. You could even argue that it's probably less moral to only care about the migrants among us as opposed to the human beings who never make it into our communities or our consciousness. So this is also why I call it a conundrum. There are no good moral choices on this issue. But politics, policy, pleasing the public, those things aren't necessarily about moral choices. They're mostly about practical choices. And practical choices often mean the least bad choice we can live with. And that's it for today's show. The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. Astrid Green runs our social media. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Philip Swissgood has been chipping in, and of course, Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Michelle Pesca is here, which she almost never is. I can prove it.
- [37:06]
C
Hi, honey.
- [37:07]
B
You see that? How about that? She didn't know I often mentioned her in the credits. What do you think of that?
- [37:14]
C
I deserve it.
- [37:15]
B
This is the kind of interview style she has given herself to as the overseer and CEO of PetroFish Productions, Improve GPRU do Peru. If that is indeed the right order. Is that the right order?
- [37:30]
C
Yes, you said per G. Per Duper.
- [37:34]
B
Thanks for listening.
- [37:41]
D
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