← Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
What Trump’s Immigration Policy is Really Doing with David Bier
00:56:45
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, joins WITHpod to discuss the ways in which legal paths to immigration have been interrupted, coalitional cross pressures and more.
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B
It's not limited to illegal immigrants. They've already stripped. Another prediction I made was they'd strip more people of legal status than they increase deportations. And that has hold true, you know, three or four times over. I mean, they stripped about two and a half million people at least of their legal status to live in this country legally and work in the country legally, while at the same time they've, you know, they've increased deportation. They've caused a huge amount of chaos in the process, but not nearly as much as they've created needed new illegal immigrants as a result of this.
- [01:39]
A
Hello and welcome to why Is this Happening? With me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, it sounds crazy for me to say this, but it's a true fact that for a very long time, for maybe the majority of the time that I have covered politics and policy as a journalistic adult, the Republican Party and the conservative movement coalition was cross pressured on immigration. Like there was an intense tension within the faction, something you see on a bunch of different issues right now. For instance, in the center left coalition, there's huge cross pressure on the issue of American foreign policy with respect to Israel. Right. There are factions within the party who have diametrically opposed views on it, but they're both within the coalition. This is the source of incredible tension. It's very difficult to navigate. And that was not that dissimilar from what immigration politics were like in the Republican Party, the center right coalition, the conservative world. For a long time there were basically the kind of nativist impulses that are now totally dominant. But there was also, partly because of the economic rationale for immigration, because of interest from the Chamber of Commerce, from farm, agricultural, industry. Also, I think some first, some principled commitment to the notion of America as a kind of beacon, creedal nation. You had Ronald Reagan. His last speech he gives is about how America is unique because anyone can come here, be an American. You can go to Germany, not be a German, you can go to France and not be a Frenchman. But here you can come and be an American. Ronald Reagan oversaw massive facilitation of massive refugee influx into the United States. Some of the people that I know, one of my best friends was one of those Soviet Jews who came here as a child. So there was this cross pressure, this tension within the coalition. I think as we sit here in 2026, it's safe to say that one side won that pretty definitively. The most extreme, most nativist, most xenophobic, and frankly, to my mind, bigoted faction kind of won out in that internal battle. That victory, though, doesn't actually erase the tensions that are still extant. And I think you're seeing this manifest in a bunch of ways. I think you're seeing manifest in the public opinion about Donald Trump's immigration policy, which was his most the issue he was pulling best on and is now down there at the bottom. There is mass public revulsion, I think, to mass deportation and broadly to the sort of cruelty with which it's been done. There's also real problems for the American business class, American corporations, with the multifaceted attack that they are engaging in on forms of legal immigration. And one of the kind of, like, voices in the wilderness, someone that I really like, depend on. He's one of these kind of like, wonks that I've come to trust that I think is like a really genuinely rigorous, good faith actor is David Beer, and he is the Director of Immigration Studies and the Seltz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy at the Cato Institute. Now, the Cato Institute is a kind of libertarian think tank, I think broadly part of the center right. Even though Cato's views on things like criminal justice and immigration are more sort of liberal coded, but in a sort of institutional, almost sociological way, Cato has been part of the center right. And so I thought, now that we're here at this moment in which they are attacking immigration on all fronts, there is mass public revulsion to it. One of the voices I keep hearing trying to sort of make a case both from sort of conservative principles, also just from first principles, also with data for, like, why immigration's good, why this is a bad idea, that we're doing this has been David Beer. And I thought, given where we are right now, it would be a great conversation to have in the podcast. So, David, welcome to the program.
- [05:32]
B
Thanks for having me on. It's really great to have this conversation.
- [05:41]
A
So I want to start on this kind of, you know, I want to get to what we're seeing now and talk a little bit about what the Trump administration is doing and also why you think this is a bad idea. But I want to start with this trajectory and just maybe just start with that monologue, like your own view on that. Whether I got that right, broadly, those are the kind of contours of it. Whether there's stuff I missed, like, how do you see the development of this in sort of broad, broadly center right, Republican conservative politics?
- [06:06]
B
Yeah, right. Like during the 1990s, you had Pat Buchanan, who was closed borders and was railing against the invasion of the Mexicans and all of this stuff. And really, if you look at the D.C. conservative coalition, Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform and others, we're much more on the libertarian bent. And even the Heritage foundation, which is the main conservative think tank at the time, was mixed as well on, you know, there was a lot of debate about how to react to the Bush administration's proposals on comprehensive immigration reform. And they put out really pro immigration work still, even as late as 2006, they were putting out at Heritage, you're saying, that were explaining the economic benefits and the arguments in favor of immigration. And so when I came to D.C. you know, around that time, you know, a little bit after, during the Obama years, you felt at home with conservatives being pro immigration. There wasn't like, you know, no one was going to be like, oh, well, you're obviously a liberal Democrat if you want to allow people to come here illegally. Now, illegal immigration, always a concern, always something that, you know, was an issue where you had some divide. Well, how do we deal with the people who already immigrated? No one was in favor of illegal immigration. I think that's true today. But I think the core message of conservatism was just to give you one example that stands out in my mind and my own personal memory of this is kind of quite clear, is rush Limbaugh at CPAC, and it would have been around 2010 or so. And Rush Limbaugh, you know, like, he's the conservative guy. Like, he is the most bombastic and
- [08:08]
A
a sort of populist figure. Not like not a D.C. wonky, nerdy lecturer, like a genuinely populous figure with a mass audience.
- [08:16]
B
This is the real deal conservative. And his main message to this Conservative Political Action Conference, the biggest gathering of conservatives in the country, was people are good. That's our main message. People are good. Doesn't matter where you're from, doesn't matter what your background is. We're pro life, and we're proud of the fact that we see all people as potential, as if we just get the government out of the way, people can build great things and contribute great things to this country, and it doesn't matter who you are, what your race is. And maybe he totally didn't say any of those things on his talk show. I don't know. I never listened to it. But I do remember listening to that message as a senior, junior in college, and thinking, yeah, that resonates with me. That's my views on the matter, too. And so there was a first principle kind of basis to being pro immigration in the Republican Party all the way up until, really, Trump killed it. But that is. That's the core. I mean, goes to Reagan, you know, carried on through Bush, even Dole. If you look at his speech at the Republican National Campaign Convention, it was the same message. It was a message of inclusiveness. Anyone can be an American. We embrace. You come here legally, you can have a home here. And I do think that message has been completely lost. Maybe people have missed where it was completely lost, but it has been. And if you look at the administration's actions on legal immigration and just immigration in general, the attitude is, no, these people are not really, truly Americans in any sense, and we should close our borders and keep them out because they're corrupting the country. And Trump called the legal refugees a Trojan horse, something designed to destroy the country from within. Totally antithetical to the perspective that most Republicans, the Republican leadership, most Republican presidents held to that point.
- [10:28]
A
Yeah. I want to stay on two things here. One is about the legal, illegal distinction, and one is on why this, why the faction that won one. So just to go back to limbo, I do want to say that, like, what he said on his talk show wasn't quite as expansive and inclusive, just to be clear.
- [10:44]
B
Of course it was. Of course it was. The hypocrisy has been run through. The core principles, I think, are something that United States, the right and libertarians for a long time as this is. You know, there are. There is a shared value here. And the fact that he could say that.
- [11:01]
A
Yes.
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B
With us, you know, and not get up is a big difference from today.
- [11:05]
A
Right. And I think what it speaks to. To this extent that he himself was speaking out of two sides of his mouth is about the contradiction there, right. Which is that there are these twin impulses. One is the kind of American exceptionalism, the civic idea of like a creedal nation, and the idea of libertarianism, which is like we want people who are hardworking people to come here and then get the government out of their way and they can do their thing. Wherever they're, you know, wherever they're from is there's. They're lawful and patriotic, you know, religious, you know, devoted folks. They're not like, inherently suspect because they came from the Soviet Union or Iran, you know, as, as refugees or Mexico. So there's, there's that idea, but then there's the, like, there's also this legal, illegal distinction. So I want to just start on that because that to me is actually a. That gets a little glossed over here, I think, because Trump is attacking on so many ways that I really do think is like, that was always an incredibly important line in the conservative view on immigration. There's people who come the right way lawfully and orally, and there's people who cut the line who break the law and come unlawfully. And as long as I've been reporting, there was never a ton of sympathy for or, you know, for the folks that came illegally. There was sort of practical considerations. Obviously, Ronald Reagan is the one who passed amnesty, right. So there was, there were practical considerations. Considerations, but there really was like, those people broke the law. We're the law and order party. The thing that has really changed to me is that that has been, that distinction is now annihilated. Like there is no pretense that that's what matters at all. They'll, they'll trot it out because I think there's a kind of like vestigial muscle memory about it. And also they understand that, like, being sort of pro legal immigration and anti unlawful immigration is kind of the sweet spot of the center of American public opinion, more or less. But that is not at all the project. I mean, I just want you to be, I want you to lay that out a little bit because I think we have lost this sight of this a little bit in the craziness of watching masked agents shoot and kill two American citizens. The spectrum of assault on legal immigration is basically unprecedented in my lifetime. Is that a fair way to characterize it?
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B
Certainly in your lifetime and possibly ever. You know, kind of depends on how you look at what happened during the Great Depression. But, but I do think that if you look at, just compare the first Trump administration, one of the most anti legal immigration administrations ever.
- [13:30]
A
Trump won.
- [13:32]
B
The first Trump administration. Right. During the first Trump administration, when all the asylum seekers were coming to the border, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security was still out there saying, there's a right way to seek asylum. Go to a port of entry and apply. And. And meanwhile, behind the scenes, she had secretly passed a memorandum saying, we're going to cut the number of people we're letting across by 50%. Don't tell anybody. She lied to Congress about it, but she still said it right. She still said there's a legal way to come and you can go that way. Now it's the opposite. They've completely banned asylum. There's no way to seek it legally or illegally. That happened on day one. They eliminated parole, which is a humanitarian legal pathway for people to come. And it had been expanded under the Biden administration, but it had existed for decades. It had been used for Cubans and Vietnamese and many other populations in cases of emergency. And they've eliminated that. That was tens of thousands of people per month who are coming in through that legal channel. They just, I mean, the number of actions here are endless. But they eliminate the refugee program entirely. These are for legal refugees.
- [14:52]
A
They just got rid of it like it doesn't exist anymore.
- [14:54]
B
It doesn't exist. They have something they call the refugee program for South Africans. It doesn't have anything in common with any of the lineage of the refugee program. Back to the 1980 Refugee act, they basically just said, we're going to waive all the normal requirements and just let in some white South Africans because we want to let white South Africans in. And so that's 125,000. That's about 10% of all of the permanent legal immigration to the United States comes through the refugee program.
- [15:26]
A
The refugee program is also. I've known people and reported on refugees. It's very hard to overstate the onerousness, rigor of the process of getting to be a refugee. Refugee. The difference between refugee and asylum. Asylum, you present at the border and then you're sort of interviewed and sorted later. Refugee, you stay out of the country and you go through a very arduous process where you are interviewed and vetted many times that you kind of qualify before you even let into the country.
- [15:52]
B
Yeah. So these are the people who are going through the right way, the longest way, the most intensive way. I mean, they're being interviewed three or four times. They are being vetted by all of the national intelligence apparatus that we have here. And so yeah, the most legal of the legal are the refugees. Then you have just, in the last couple of months, they've banned half of all immigrant visa applicants in the United these are people coming for permanent resident status who are mainly sponsored by close US Citizen relatives here in the United States. Half of the flow has now been banned as a result of country specific bans. We just, you're from a specific country, we're not gonna allow you to apply. They shut down the green card lottery, which is basically the only way that someone could just apply to come to the United States. You enter into a lottery and hope that you win without a sponsor, without a family member or employer who's lined up to help you come. And so when you add it all up, they've done more to restrict legal immigration to the United States and they've cut illegal immigration at the border and it's really not close. And it was fascinating addictions that I made. I never do predictions in this business because it always gets you in trouble. But the safest prediction I've ever made was on January 20, 2025, I published something on the Canada website that says Trump will cut legal immigration more than he cuts illegal immigration. Illegal immigration had already fallen 90% under the Biden administration. Yes, it fell a further 90%, but from a much lower base. And so, so what ended up happening was, yes, the border is very quiet, but the legal immigration system has been decimated by this administration. And so when you talk about immigrant visa applicants, just to show you how extreme they are, they are banning even the spouses, minor children of U.S. citizens. Okay, so this is not a policy that is supported by basically anyone. I've never met anyone who would go that far when it comes to just shutting down legal immigration. This is like a 10% opinion. And yet they have effectively carried it out without anyone realizing it. It's not something that you hear on the news. It's not like your show exception. I mean, it is literally something that is so extreme no one would support it on its own. It would go nowhere in Congress. But through executive orders, they've carried it out anyway. And it's 100,000 people who are spouses and minor children of a U.S. citizen or green card holder and they're banned, and that's per year. So I mean, it's really going to add up over the next three years.
- [18:52]
A
I want to talk about why this happened and why the wrong faction won. And you know, I want to be clear eyed, but also not Overly dependent on my biases. So I mean, I think, you know, if you look at the sum total of what they're doing, if you look at the countries that have been banned on that list, and then you also add the South African white refugees, I mean, that to me is like there's just no getting around, right? What they're communicating. You know, fundamentally it's a racist project and it's because they don't like essentially non white immigration. I mean, Trump has said this explicitly multiple times where he has said, why can't we have more immigrants from countries like Norway, for instance? He, he doesn't hide the ball about what the problem is here from his perspective. Stephen Miller, you know, has, has said similar things about Somalians and things like that. And I guess, you know, basically my, my reading of why the wrong, to my mind, faction won this fight is because they were able to harness this kind of very potent raw bigotry in the base better than, you know, that, that, that ended up being a kind of trump card in this internal factional war. What do you think?
- [20:06]
B
Well, the Republican Party is very different than the party of the 1990s, 1980s, early 2000s. Many of the districts in the south were Democratic Blue Dog districts that go back to segregation where Democrats had controlled everything. That all changed in the 2010 election when the Blue Dog Democrats were eliminated and Republicans basically became the party of the South. And that brought in a large group of voters who were very animated by issues of culture. I don't know if race is certainly mixed in there with culture and there's certainly racists, but then they're just culturalists. And then Stephen Miller's out there and backed up by JD Vance that we don't want to have people who don't speak English next door to us. This is a normal opinion in the conservative world now, whereas before it would have been quite an odd thing to say. Now it's taken as completely obvious that we wouldn't want to have people who speak a different language living next door to us. And so I do think that element within the Republican Party explains probably most of the actual change in attitude and what happened. But I also think Trump is a salesman in a way that we really haven't seen and demagogues are good at this. If he had a different opinion on immigration, if he was really pro legal immigration like he says, I mean, in his 29, 2019 State of the Union address, he said, I wanna have the biggest legal immigration ever.
- [21:50]
A
Dude, wait a second. I'm gonna go even More than that, there was always the wall and then there was the golden door.
- [21:55]
B
Yeah, the golden door right in the middle.
- [21:56]
A
But here's a moment everyone has lost to history, cuz everyone forgets everything that Trump does the next day. Right?
- [22:01]
B
Yeah.
- [22:02]
A
The most brilliant political move I've ever seen him do. The moment where I was most scared of him as a political figure was in the 2020 Covid campaign when they staged the RNC in the White House and they did a citizenship swearing in ceremony in the White House. And it was. And I thought that is a stroke of genius because this is playing against type, it's playing to the middle, it's reconnecting to what I think is kind of the center of American political opinion on this issue, which is like we do like when people come the right way, isn't it an awesome thing? This person wants to be an American. We're going to administer the oath. It was also just like crazy showmanship. It's in the White House, which is also totally wrong and corrupt to be using the White House for that purpose. So it had that Trumpian aspect. But like that was again in the rhetoric. At least that was still part of what they were doing the first time around.
- [22:55]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So look, I've had colleagues of mine who've met with President Trump and his view is distorted by the information that he receives from Stephen Miller. I think that's very obvious. Of course Trump has some base xenophobia that's just baked into who he is. I mean, you can't say what he said about Mexicans and not be biased against Mexican immigrants in his very first campaign speech in 2015. So I don't wanna ignore that. But at the same time, it goes to the character of the MAGA movement, which is really bound up in Trump himself. If Trump said, I'm really pro legal immigration and I'm gonna let people come here legally in the greatest numbers we've ever seen in the history of the United States, people would say, ha, told you liberals, he's not an anti immigrant, whatever. And so, so I do think, well,
- [23:49]
A
we're seeing a test of that with the war with Iran, which he basically ran against.
- [23:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, like explicitly ran against
- [23:56]
A
as like, I will keep you out of a war with Iran. Kamala will send your kids to war. And now it's like, what?
- [24:01]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think with immigration being such a central part of his message, I mean, it's even more clear that he has the power to, you know, flip on a dime, change his movement change their view on, on policy. I think he could probably even get away with amnesty, like just outright amnesty. If he told people, we're gonna get the criminals, we're gonna get the bad people that I've been talking about, this is gonna clear out all the good people so I can go get those bad people. He could get away with that. And so I do think he's caught up in the policy outcomes which are attributable to the types of people who are attracted to him.
- [24:42]
A
Yeah, that's interesting.
- [24:43]
B
I was working for a Republican member of Con 2015. I could have made the choice in theory to endorse Trump on the hope that actually I will be put in charge of immigration policy in the United States and be the most pro legal immigration president in history. Stephen Miller made the opposite. He made that bet, but in the other way. To make him the least legal immigration or the worst president on legal immigration in our history.
- [25:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting. Yeah, I'm not sure. I think I can be persuaded in both directions. Right. There's a certain amount that whatever Trump says is what MAGA is. And there's also a degree to which like the immigration really is the core. It's like it feels like it's the, the furnace in the engine that's, that's driving this whole thing. And you know, it has been from the beginning that, you know, when you look abroad to other right wing populist movements like that is the same thing in those places. So there's something unique and distinct about it as a driver in this moment in global politics that I think is, you know, not just Trump specific.
- [25:46]
B
I think with Trump, he could get away with it.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah.
- [25:49]
B
Average member of Congress, maybe not. Probably not, in fact. And so I do think there is a division there between, you know, Trump and his personality and his ability to sell things and the average Republican. But I do think there's more, a lot more wiggle room here than we kind of let on. I agree there's a component of the base that are, are highly animated by this. All they think about, certainly if you go on X, that's all anyone who's a right winger on X seems to care about is these issues and other related issues.
- [26:28]
A
I mean, one of the things, again, because I've reported on this quite a bit for a long time, I wrote the first ever profile of John Tanton, who is the intellectual father of the modern anti immigration movement in America. Fairly obscure figure, an ophthalmologist from Petoskey, Michigan. Who started out as an environmentalist. And I've been around this a lot. One of the things that's interesting is like, there's a type of person who is a monomaniacal anti immigration crank. And there. It's a real. You will know what I'm talking about. It's a real type. It's. It's this bizarre worldview in which everything comes back to immigration. Like, whatever you say, it's like housing prices, immigration, crime. Immigration, like what? Whatever your issue is. Then they'll tell traffic, immigration. And at a certain point you're like, what is what?
- [27:12]
B
What.
- [27:13]
A
There's something going on with you.
- [27:15]
B
Yeah.
- [27:16]
A
Your pathologies that you are this. And those people who, again, tiny sliver, I think, of the overall population. I don't even think that big a part of the base. Miller is one of those people, like, pathological and monomaniacal and neurotic about it. Like people that wash their hands too much. Like, get it away, I need. It's grossing me out. But they're in the driver's seat of the policy. I mean, to your point about, like, there's no other way to understand the policy other than that.
- [27:44]
B
Yeah. And look, it really has become, at least within this Trump administration as a result of Stephen Miller. Is that all other policies, all other objectives, all other laws, the Constitution itself, the entire Republican.
- [28:00]
A
Yeah.
- [28:00]
B
To this goal. So, you know, J.D. vance says we can't give people due process and deport 10 million people. So then due process cannot be required because it would interfere with our goal of deporting 3% of the population. Now, he actually said, I believe 20 or 30 million, which I don't know how that makes it better. That seems to me like you're inflating the impossibility of your goal here. But. But at the end of the day, their goal is to deport lots of people, remove a huge chunk of the country. It's not limited to illegal immigrants. They've already stripped. Another prediction I made was they'd strip more people of legal status than they, increase deportations. And that has hold true.
- [28:50]
A
That's a great point.
- [28:50]
B
Three or four times over. I mean, they stripped about two and a half million people at least of their legal status to live in this country legally and work in the country legally, while at the same time they've increased deportation. They've caused a huge amount of chaos in the process, but not nearly as much as they've created new illegal immigrants as a result of this.
- [29:11]
A
One other, I think, factor here, there's two other Factors, I think, in how we kind of got to this. Just again, in these sort of internal coalitional dynamics you mentioned before as you were going through parole, as a tool, you said, had been used for folks from Cuba and Vietnam. And I think one of the, the factors here is the end of the Cold War. I mean, it was a tool in Cold War geopolitics and in propaganda. Right. I mean, my friend who came as a Soviet Jew wasn't an accident that she came from the Soviet Union. It was. That was part of the Cold War politics. Cubans, the Hmong population, particularly Minneapolis, were just being terrorized by DHS. Right. They were allies of U.S. armed forces in the Vietnam War. Again, Cold War context, like there was this propaganda part of the American exceptionalism in response to communism and the fact that communist countries were places that people wanted to flee and were being walled into. America was a place people wanted to come to. Right. So it was useful for that reason. I think the decline of that really does play a role here. And then the other thing I think, and I'd be curious to hear you talk about this, is there was just a big gap between the kind of corporate wonk class and the base on this issue. And the two places where you saw that most were on trade and immigration. Those were the two things that Buchanan hit, right?
- [30:27]
B
Yeah.
- [30:27]
A
Your median D.C. staffer, think tank, denizen, K Street lobbyist, you know, donor in the Republican Party was considerably more pro immigration and pro trade than your median Republican voter. And that gap got really wide. Donald Trump drove a truck through it.
- [30:47]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And the power of those people has been constrained over time. The importance of the primaries has grown and the power of the base has grown over time as well. So I do think you're onto something there. My only pushback, when I think about the idea of this disconnect being growing over time is as trends don't happen in a vacuum.
- [31:12]
A
Right.
- [31:13]
B
The Republican Party leadership made a choice in 2006. Bush administration's pushing comprehensive immigration reform. The rest of the Republican Party decides, no, we're going to go all in on making it a felony to be in the country illegally, and we're going to make it a felony to give anyone housing. And the priests are out saying, you're going to criminally prosecute me for serving my neighbor. And I think that is there are choices that happen. And I think the leadership of the Republican Party chose the direction that they were going to go in. Donald Trump was the ultimate destination for that trip. And, you know, we are where we are as a result of those choices.
- [31:58]
A
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- [33:42]
A
This how you think about making the case for immigration in this context? Because I just did a podcast with Ross Douth that on the New York Times and we talked a bit about this. I do think they have overreached tremendously. I mean, I I think the majority of Americans don't like mass agents running around snatching people. They don't like watching American citizens get shot and killed in the streets and then slandered as terrorists. They don't like little children being used as bait to get their parents. They also, I think, don't know a lot of the stuff about the legal things that are happening. But to your point, like if polling on like should an American citizen be able to bring their spouse or child here? I agree that's probably an 80% to 90% sure issue. They've totally overreached. It's reflected somewhat in public opinion, although I think not even fully because I think the public's not aware of how extreme the agenda is. This has produced to me an opportunity to seize for the sort of Broad pro immigration coalition to seize the center back on this issue. And I think it's something you're pretty good at because I think, again, you're someone who's from, you know, you're a staffer for Republican member. You're not a bleeding heart lib like me who, whose, you know, audience is a little constrained when you are in a room with someone or you are talking to people that are, you know, not the Stephen Millers, not people are going to shut you down, but are broadly center, even center right. You know, you're trying to make your case. Give me the case.
- [35:03]
B
Yeah, well, look, I turn it back, you know, if I have that opportunity to turn it back to whoever is asking the question or, you know, we're in conversation. You know, this goes back to when I was a policy advisor for a member of Congress, deep red Idaho district. You know, we had to do town halls. He was working in a bipartisan group to work on immigration reform. He's getting attacks all over the place about, you know, immigration. And I would say, look, if someone comes at you, ask them the question, how do you think it should be for people to come to the United States? And any system that we had people create, you know, on the spot, what are the characteristics, what are the requirements, what are the rules to come legally to America? 100% of the people that we asked that question to came back and designed a legal immigration system that is vastly better, more humane, more open than the system that we actually have, which is one really. It's a century old. I mean, the foundation of the system is the Immigration act of 1924. It set hard caps on the number of people who could come. It prioritized family members of citizens and relatives.
- [36:25]
A
We should say hard caps, particularly based on ethnicity, region, country of origin.
- [36:29]
B
Yeah. By country. And there have been reforms to it. You know, we made, you know, the country caps equal in 1965. We've messed around with the caps again in 1990. But the basic part of the system has remained the same for a century. And as a result of that, a huge backlog has developed. There's so many people we're trying to get here. I mean, one of the studies that I did was look at what is the percent of people who came through Ellis Island. There were restrictions. You had to prove certain things in order to come in. 98% of those people before the 1924 act were admitted to the United States on a path to citizenship to come here legally in 2024. Okay. A century later, under the Open borders, BIDEN Administration, just 3% of all the people who are trying to get permanent resident status in the United States actually achieved it. Okay, so that is such a good stat. 98% to 3%. I mean, that's the system. That is the reality. And of course, the 3% are not randomly selected. There's no, you know, it's really spouses and minor children of US citizens, they're parents of US citizens. I mean, basically that's 70% are close family members of US citizens. And so this is the system people are dealing with. And we can design a better system that focuses on the outcomes that you care about. You care about crime. So we should have a system that focuses on crime and criminality and keeping out people who are gonna do harm to the United States. Instead, if you look at what U.S. citizenship and Immigration Services is doing, besides banning people based on where they're born is they're analyzing whether you have exceptional ability or extraordinary ability. These are the distinctions that we're spending billions of dollars. It's really the immigrants fees that are paying for it. But this is what we're spending tens of billions of dollars to analyze, as opposed to, is this person a threat to the country? Are they going to be able to support themselves when they get here? Those are reasonable questions to answer, and an honest system would focus on those questions. That is not what our system is about. It's about keeping people out. So the fundamental basis of our system is not designed to encourage people to follow it. It's forcing people not to follow it.
- [38:51]
A
So that's your fundamental. The starting point for you is like, well, what do you want in an immigration system? And if you talk through that, you just on the fly, like people's moral intuitions and practical political intuitions are, yeah, I want people that are hardworking and patriotic and love this country and want to come here because they love this country or are just looking for a better life. I obviously want people that are not going to be violent or do harmful things, and I want that. And when you think of it in those terms, you just, on the fly, build something that's completely different than the system we have, which is part of. I think the obstacle to the politics here is people don't understand. People say it's broken, which is a cliche and also true. But they've also just never tried to like, get an H1B or, or, or. Or bring a loved one here or like, dealt with any of it, because it's. It's just the biggest nightmare in the world.
- [39:43]
B
One of the events that one of my colleagues was speaking in Arizona during the whole debate about the Arizona law in around 2010, 2011, and one of the audience members said, why don't they just go to the post office to apply for a green card? And it's just like you have no idea what the system is. If that's how you think the system is, then of course you think everyone who's coming to the border are a bunch of criminals who have something to hide and it's intentional. Like if you go back to 1924, they just called them undesirables. They didn't call them illegals. They called them undesirables because that's what they, you know, they understood. We're keeping out people who we don't like, then that's why we're keeping them out. It has nothing to do with legality or whatever. They're coming across the border because they're banned by our legal immigration system. And so. So I do think that when we talk about this topic, people have no idea what they're dealing with. We created a game that you can actually play called the greencardgame.com and you can try to get a green card through that system as it existed in 2024. See if you can get through the system under the open borders Biden administration, again, under those rules, not even accounting for all the trump stuff. It's basically of all the people who've played it. Again, it's about 3% of the people who found a way to get through it. And I actually know one of them. And so, you know, it's. He knew how to game it. So the whole thing is it's impossible for the average person who wants to immigrate to the United States. It's impossible for them to come legally, which is why they come illegally. And I think that is the core issue. I still think it's. It's the legality. It's the disorder under Biden that was so repulsive to people. It was such a problem. It was not about, you know, we don't like immigrants. You know, we didn't wake up one morning and decide, you know, as a country, we immigration's a failure. No, it was about the disorder at the border. The illegality and better legal immigration system would fix that stuff.
- [41:47]
A
Again, just. I just want to be precise here. I mean, you and I are on the same page in this. I mean, the people that are coming and presenting at the border are attempting to go through a legal process just to Be clear. It's not like. It's not illegality.
- [41:56]
B
Ultimately, yes. Ultimately, yes. I mean, if you cross the Rio Grande and you present to a Border Patrol agent, you've broken a law in the process. The reason why you're doing that, though, is because there's not a legal way for you to present at a consulate and wait for a visa and then come the legal way. So I do think there's a distinction there. And just to give you one example, under the Biden administration, the Haitian encampment at the border was the single worst day of the Biden administration in terms of public optics on immigration. And if you look historically, and one of the things that I did, I looked at historically, 99% of all Haitians who came to the southwest border under the Obama administration, under the first Trump administration, until 2020, when he shut down the border entirely, entered legally. And then they waited under for a while under the first under Biden. And then when Biden said, I'm not gonna open the borders in 2021, they all crossed around a port of entry. They all cross and created this big spectacle. And then in 2022, Biden changed his policy again, and the Haitians all entered legally again. So it really is a switch. It is a cheat code to solve a very serious problem politically for the Democratic Party. This was a political problem, if nothing else. Obviously, it's a humanitarian problem. It's a lot of other things, but it was a political problem, and it could have been solved just by having any kind of legal process for people.
- [43:28]
A
The statistic you gave about Ellis island makes me think about the fact. I mean, there's. Obviously, there's just insane hypocrisy in all this. Obviously. Stephen Miller's family immigrated to the United States. Donald Trump is the son of an immigrant and married to an immigrant. Two of the women that he had children with were immigrants. J.D. vance's children's grandparents are immigrants. So, you know, this goes in every direction. But part of what's wild, too, is there's this sense, this sort of make America great again. And Trump sort of talks about the 1890s fondly sometimes, and McKinley and tariffs. You know, I'm writing a book right now. It's partly on immigration. It's about something that happened in the 1890s. It's a mass lynching of Italian men in New Orleans in 1891. Something that just blew my mind the other day. So after these 11 men are lynched, there is a protracted inquiry to figure out whether they're Subjects of the Italian king or American citizens. Like, it's. The citizenship is so porous at that point.
- [44:23]
B
Point, yeah.
- [44:24]
A
The immigration policy is so porous. Basically what you would do is you would swear an oath that you're going to be a citizen and then they let you vote. And because there was all this, like, desire to kind of get as many people in your party as possible, it was like, yeah, okay, yeah, he's going to be so. But just think about this. It took weeks to determine just the status of the citizenship of these people who had just been murdered by this mob. And it's precisely, again, like, there's this deeper idea that, like, it's intolerable to not have this defined and for there to be porousness around it. And like, I think that's actually a deeper held view. I think on the right. And I think is like, now we're moving sort of out of that. Like, I think in the center there is this, like, you come the right way. But one of the things I even just question is that, like, I don't actually care.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah.
- [45:15]
A
Talking to me, there's people I move through the world and interact with all the time. They're a citizen. They're not. They came here legally. They're not like, I don't care. Honestly, personally, to me, a lot of people do. But I'm just saying it for myself. And not only am I saying it for myself, enormous swaths of American history, I mean, huge periods of American history in which this was totally amorphous. No one actually knew. It was actually not even clear to the person or anyone whether. Whether they were a citizen or.
- [45:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, I care insofar as I think it's better for the country, it's better for Americans to have an orderly, legal immigration system. But I don't think it says anything about your character.
- [45:57]
A
Yes.
- [45:57]
B
That you cross the Rio Grande versus took a plane. I mean, those are not character determined decisions. Those are decisions based on other factors that are outside of people's control in most cases. So the reality is we should look at the content of people's character, not whatever status they happen to hold. If you're here legally, if you came legally and you murder someone, I don't care if you came legally or not. It has no basis, it has no meaning to your moral status. And of course, there is a fundamental issue here. I think individual rights are paramount and more important than the law. If the law passed tomorrow that said we're going to just round up an entire ethnic group and put them in a camp because we don't like them. That law would be immoral and we should violate that law. So I think no one actually believes this comic book notion of we should just always follow the law no matter what, and we should never even think about the content of the law. We should just go out as drones and just follow whatever the dictates are from the government.
- [47:07]
A
The person who believes that least is Donald Trump. Who could give a shit what the law is? I mean, it's genuinely preposterous.
- [47:15]
B
Well, one of the things that Stephen Miller levied at us at the Cato Institute specifically was we don't believe in borders. We are anti borders. Which you really have to laugh at when you think about them trying to intimidate Greenland and invading countries and bombing countries. There's no one who believes less in borders. I mean, even Trump himself called the Canadian border its arbitrary line. That was so. There's no one who believes less in borders than the people who talk endlessly about our borders. And the reality is people like me who believe in the Constitution see the border as a limit on government. I want borders to prevent the government from being able to do things tyrannical and violate people's rights. And they see borders as arbitrary lines, arbitrary constraints on my power to do whatever I want. So it's a completely different perspective. Federalism and limited governments. I mean, these are all ideas that conservatives used to care about and now they focus on, well, how can we get as many constraints out of the way as possible to do our big agenda, which is really nothing more than mass deportation and invasions? It seems like at this point it's a great point.
- [48:35]
A
We'll be right back after we take this quick break.
- [48:46]
B
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- [49:45]
A
best price, avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte, paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app download today. Let's talk a little bit here in the time we have left about, about the economic case, because I make it myself, I actually do think it's correct on the merits. It just is good for the country economically. But it's also, I think, an important one. And I do think again, when you're talking about sort of grabbing the center of American opinion, you've been particularly outspoken on a few things. One, the notion that immigration is sort of a net drag on the public purse. And as long as, again, as long as I've been covering monomaniacal anti immigration cranks, they have been.
- [50:40]
B
Yeah.
- [50:40]
A
Torturing the data to get to this result. And I wonder if we can sort of go through why that's not the case.
- [50:48]
B
Yeah. So I mean, it really is. It starts with an intuitive understanding of the budget, which is we run a big deficit, so therefore anyone who comes must be on average a drag because we run a big deficit. But if you actually break the government spending down into its component parts, you realize there's a huge fixed cost at the top, that is interest payments on old debts. We're going to have to pay those things whether the immigrants come or not. And the military, which we're going to have to pay for the military, whether immigrants come or not. And once you take those items out of the budget, we actually spend less than they take in on taxes on actual benefits provided to people. And that's everything. That's the roads, that's the parks, that's the library. That's everything the government spends money on is less than they take in revenue when you look at just the benefits. And so the average person, as long as they're just average, is going to be a benefit in terms of reducing the deficit. So we should want more people to come in and more population growth and all of that. That's going to be a good thing for the budget. And yet if you look at immigrants, are they better or worse than average? Lots of people think they're worse than average. This couldn't be more wrong. Immigrants arrive when they're like perfect working age, we get a free worker. Basically, they just show up, they're ready to work, they enter the labor force, they work at much higher rates than the US Born population. So they're working at way higher rates than the born population of the US Average, which results in more tax revenue being created than the average person. So they're better on the tax side than the average person. Then on the other side, on the spending side. Immigrants uniquely face all kinds of constraints to getting benefits. Whether it's Social Security benefits or Medicare or Medicaid, you name it, they all face more constraints in getting those things. It doesn't mean they don't get any. Of course they can find the immigrants who get benefits, but they use much less than the average person as a result of those limits. So they use for means tested or needs based benefits. It's about average. It kind of comes out in the wash on those items. If you throw in unemployment and child tax credit and things like that, it's about equal on the old age and retirement benefits front. Mainly because of illegal immigrants. Actually, they are using about 34% less than the average person. And it's not because of their age. They're actually not really underrepresented in the elderly population. Immigrants aren't. It's because of the fact that they have these eligibility restrictions mainly on illegal immigrants, but also on people who arrive and don't have sufficient work history to qualify for Social Security. So they're better on the benefits, they're better on the taxes. And the consequence is that when we look at the last 30 years of U.S. budgets, which we did in our report that we released last month, they reduced deficits by $14.5 trillion over that 30 years. And I get people criticizing me about this and I said, look, that's just the primary tax payments, okay? That's just the fiscal flow analysis.
- [54:04]
A
That's not none of the economic activity.
- [54:06]
B
It doesn't take into account that immigrants are also making us much more productive. And that's the economic argument. That's even more important is that when immigrants come in at both the low skilled and at the high skilled side of things things, they're making us more productive at high skill, they're starting businesses at higher rates, they're innovating and creating patents and new technologies that make us more productive and wealthier and ultimately that results in more tax payments. But that's kind of ancillary. It's making us more prosperous is the main message. And then at the low skilled Side, these people who come in and do hard manual labor jobs are creating better paying jobs, better quality jobs, jobs for Americans at the low end. So you go to any construction site, there's this bifurcation between the low skilled manual laborers from foreign countries and then Americans who are their managers, their supervisors. And when you cut out those low skilled workers, those managers and supervisors aren't managers and supervisors anymore. They're just doing the grunt work again, which is not as attractive a job. So there's complementarity between the immigrants and Americans. So that's the economic, full economic picture in a nutshell.
- [55:15]
A
Yeah. And I think the other part of it to me too is that, like, I was thinking about the, you know, Springfield, Ohio, which had a large influx of Haitian immigrants who were legal, they had temporary protected status. They came into that town where they were actually struggling to find workers for a few of the manufacturing, the factories. Obviously, that this became an enormous flashpoint in the campaign where there was this sort of disgusting racist lie that they were eating cats and dogs, which J.D. vance doubled down on. But, you know, that to me was a really interesting example because, like, there are trade offs, right? Like, it is the case that I think housing costs in Springfield have gotten more expensive on average. But that is also because the place was depopulating and is now, like growing and has measurably much more economic activity. So it's like, right, yeah, you could get rid of everyone and yeah, rents and housing costs would probably fall. But on the whole, like, there's this intuition that it would. I think it fundamentally goes back to this weird intuition of, like, it would be better if there were fewer people.
- [56:15]
B
Yeah, people are pretty misanthropic when you start, you know, initially talking about it. But, you know, if your premise is that fewer and fewer people are going to make us wealthier, well, it's really the opposite of everything we know about economics. Adam Smith, Specialization of labor. Why are you prosperous? I didn't make anything in this office. I didn't make anything in my apartment. Obviously I would want more people making stuff for me that's going to make me better off. I don't want to be Robinson Crusoe. That's the definition of poverty, is making everything yourself. So we want more people making stuff for us. I think that's the basic economic message. So, yeah, I mean, when I think about Springfield and the housing cost is the one thing they've latched onto because the only thing with even a shred of truth to it. But if it were true, that Immigrants were bringing crime and destroying communities and sucking them dry, then housing prices would be going down.
- [57:08]
A
Exactly.
- [57:09]
B
The fact that housing prices are not going down as a result of immigration means that they're making those places that they go better than they would otherwise be. And so it is a total manipulation of that little data point there.
- [57:24]
A
One of my favorite little sort of linguistic things is when you turn housing prices around and call it property values, you get the opposite valence. So if you say like, oh my God, all these people moved in, housing price has gone up. It's like, that's the problem. You go, all these new people showed up and property values have increased. It's like, oh, awesome. It's the same thing. Like you're literally describing the same thing.
- [57:43]
B
Yeah. And the windfall is disproportionately to Americans because they own more property than immigrants do. So it totally exposes their entire rhetoric that immigrants are coming here and they're going to destroy the country. You have to understand, this is apocalyptic everything. Stephen Miller, we do not even have a country if we don't allow these people to come or allow them to stay. And it's the exact opposite. When you look at the reality, they're improving the places that they go to. And you as a consumer, as an American, you don't care. You don't ask, papers, please, before you go to McDonald's and say, are you really here legally before you accept your fraud? No, you pay them and you say thank you because they're providing you a service. And that's the core of the free market, is we provide each other services and we both say thank you. It's a win. Win. Yeah.
- [58:38]
A
The fundamental setting of the sort of fundamental prior about zero sum versus non zero sum, I think explains actually a lot, because Donald Trump is fundamentally a zero sum thinker and Stephen Miller's a zero sum thinker. And I think one way of saying the philosophical transition of sort of modern conservative ideology has gone from non zero sum to zero sum. The basically the kind of, you know, whatever my objections to Milton Friedman's worldview and many of the ways that the Cato Institute looks at things sort of more broadly, which I have, it is fundamentally a non zero sum worldview. Very much so in the ways that you just expressed it has switched onto a very zero sum track. And I think that is a kind of underlying conceptual architecture for a lot of this transition. I root for the people in your camp, David, it to recapture. And I do think, you know, we're talking about me. The sort of non Trump forces in American life, recapturing the center on immigration, particularly the opposition party coalition, you know, not even partisan sense, just broadly. But I do think and hope there's an opportunity, I think as this disaster becomes more apparent, for people like you, David Beer, to recapture stuff within even the American center. Right. So David, thanks so much.
- [59:46]
B
Thanks for having me on. This is great.
- [59:48]
A
David Beer is a Director of Immigration Studies and the Seltz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy at the Cato Institute Institute. You can get in touch with us by emailing withpodmail.com why is this Happening? Is produced by Donnie Holloway and Brendan Omilia, engineered by Bob Mallory, Greg Devins and Hazik Bin Ahmad Farid. Katie Lau is our senior manager for audio production. Our coordinating producer is Franny Kelly. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for Mike msnow Audio. New episodes come out every Tuesday. You can Watch us on YouTube by going to Ms. Now withBot. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like Superheroes and Sidekicks or auto and Home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.