Fixing Immigration: Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
May 2nd, 2024
”We really have to look beyond the lens of just the U. S. Mexico border.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is the Policy Director at the American Immigration Council, a non-profit organization that strives to strengthen the United States by shaping immigration policies and practices. We discuss how out-of-date immigration laws are and why the only cure is comprehensive immigration reform from Congress.
US immigration laws have not changed since the 1990s. The current border enforcement and asylum system dates back to 1996, and in fact, one of the reasons that asylum seekers are living in shelters is because Congress decided in 1996 to make it illegal for them to get a work permit until six months after they apply for asylum. The asylum system is severely underfunded and is a major reason for processing delays. In addition, there are more than 4 million people who have already been approved for visas but the wait time to get the legal status is decades long.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, so we're here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
It's an election year -- 2024. So naturally, the immigration drama is in full swing with crisis at the border rhetoric getting the full attention of the media and the Republican controlled House of Representatives successfully impeaching the secretary of Homeland Security, Mayorkas, on its second try, not to mention the spectacle of two presidential candidates visiting the Texas border on the same day. But what's actually going on? And how can we make sense of this important issue as we go to the polls this year to help us better understand American immigration policy and the kind of comprehensive reform that would be necessary to render a functional system.
We're joined by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. He's the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit organization that strives to strengthen the United States by shaping immigration policies and practices grounded in evidence, compassion, justice and fairness.
Welcome, Aaron. Thank you for joining us.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:01:38] Thank you for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:41] We all know that immigration in the US is deeply dysfunctional, and we also know that there are no easy answers. In fact, it's so complex that it's safe to say that most Americans really don't have a firm grasp on what's happening. So just to set the stage, how would you describe the state of play when it comes to immigration?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:02:00] I mean, the most important thing for people to know is that we haven't changed our immigration laws since the 1990s. Our legal immigration system dates back to November 1990, one month before the first website went online. And our current border enforcement and asylum system dates back to 1996, at a time when the Macarena was the hit dance craze still sweeping the nation.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:25] Wow. So if we think about the history of immigration policy as being long and complicated, is this really the main problem that it's old and outdated?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:02:35] That is a large part of it. So there are some sort of systemic issues of how the system was designed, ideas that we had 27, 33 years ago about how a system should work that have proven to be incorrect over the last quarter century. And then there's also the question of resources. Do you provide enough funding to the system to ensure that it is working as intended? And there, the answer is no. Congress hasn't provided enough resources to the system, so it isn't working as intended. But again, even if it was working as intended, some of the ideas that people had 25 years ago, you know, over a quarter century ago, just didn't turn out to be correct. And we need to tweak those as well.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:17] Um hmm. So let's unpack those. What are the ideas that were incorrect and then what were the intentions?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:03:23] I mean, one of the great examples is the flaws with our legal immigration system. In 1990, Congress set the number of visas that would be available in any given year, with an expectation about how many people should be coming to the United States to benefit the country. Those numbers have proven inadequate, but they are statutory caps. It is illegal to grant more visas beyond those certain numbers. So as of today, there are more than 4 million people waiting who have been approved for visas but can't get them because they're in 20 to 30 or 40, or even longer, year waiting times just to get legal status. There are people today who have been approved for a visa who cannot get that visa because they will die of old age first, because there are so many people in line in front of them. And that's in part because of the system Congress designed. They massively underestimated the demand, in short, and they made a couple of sort of structural decisions that exacerbated it, including, for example, that one country can only get 7% of the global visas in any given year. So that
means that some countries -- India, China, Mexico and the Philippines -- where there are large amounts of immigrants from those countries approved for visas, get stuck in these backlogs because every year they can only get 7% of the pretty small number of visas that are being handed out. But they apply and are granted for way more than 7%. And that's why Indian nationals in particular, wait in backlogs that are routinely 20 to 80 years long.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:57] 20 to 80 years. That's, I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. Well, I want to backtrack here a little bit because are you saying that the ideas that were wrong were the concept that you should limit the numbers? Or is it that there's a different idea that they got wrong?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:05:14] Well, that's part of it is. The first is that they need to update the numbers. You know, again, because they came up with this idea of like, what is the United States need in terms of numbers of people coming? And they came up with these ideas again before the World Wide Web existed, when the Soviet Union was still around in this Cold War era pre-modern internet world that doesn't exist anymore. And of course, what our economy needs, who is coming and from where. We didn't know at the time we could have predicted some things about how the internet was going to go. But we got a lot of it wrong, and we didn't predict that. For example, there would be a massive need for STEM workers coming from countries like India and China, and we set a bunch of visa numbers without being aware of that demand. That was going to quickly become a big thing within a few years. When the dotcom boom happened in the 90s, already within ten years after this law was passed, the backlogs were starting to grow significantly. And now we are in this point where there are Indian nationals graduating with master's degrees, with PhDs from American universities today, who find that they may have no realistic way of ever living here permanently, and they have to literally enter a lottery to hope that they get one of the very limited slots of H-1B visas available, or eventually they just give up and go to Canada, or the United Kingdom, or some other country that has a legal immigration system, which can be amended more rapidly. You know, right now Canada is eating our lunch when it comes to immigration because they have a flexible system that can be updated rapidly in response to changes in labour demands. We don't have that in the US. We literally have this system that was created in 1990 and that, just by and large, has not been updated since that point. So by losing out on the flexibility to respond to changes in demand,
changes in labour needs, throughout the United States, we are losing out on the world's best and brightest. And we're also sending a message, you know, tying this back into what's going on at the border, that the only way to get here legally is to come to the border and ask for asylum, which is not how our legal immigration system should incentivize people.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:26] Mhm. Yeah. I definitely want to talk about the border and asylum seeking. But let's go at this from the other side. We know that there's no silver bullet and we know that Congress needs to take action. So how do you and the American Immigration Council envision a durable comprehensive immigration policy reform? Because obviously, you know, it's been 30, 40 years since things have changed. Canada is eating our lunch. But what would it look like to have something that actually is adaptable to your point into the future, and really looks at all the nooks and crannies that we need to address?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:08:01] Yeah, I think the number one thing is we have to do a big approach here. Yes, small scale change is a good idea. And I don't want to discourage small scale change because there are a number of small fixes that can be made to fix obvious problems in the system. One great example of this is backlogs. As I've mentioned, all of these backlogs lead to situations where people who are here on visas, who bring their children over as dependents, if they have to wait 20 years to get a visa, their children, who they bring here legally, grow up in the United States. And then at age 21, their status as a derivative of their parent expires and they have to leave. So these are kids who grow up in the United States on visas here legally. And this is a group that calls themselves documented dreamers. And it's estimated there's about 200,000 kids in the country who basically have to self-deport when they turn 21. And Congress can fix that. There's bills out there. So you can do these small fixes. And I think Congress should do small fixes. But if you really want to solve the bigger problems, you have to do something together. You have to look at what is driving people to come to the border. And that is both what's going on around the world, but it's also the failures of our legal immigration system and the ways in which the parts of the system do not function together as a coherent whole to give people real, viable alternatives if they want to ever come to the United States. You know, most people say, why don't they just get in line? But the reality is, for the overwhelming majority of people around the world, no line exists. It's a myth that there is a line that they can even get in.
The closest thing is the diversity visa lottery, which 22 million people applied for last year for 50,000 slots. If you are one of the lucky 50,000, out of those 22 million who managed to get a visa, congratulations. That's your only way to come here. But for most of the rest of the world, unless you are the best and the brightest, and even then, even if you are the best and the brightest, there are still obstacles. So we really have to look beyond the lens of just the US Mexico border and tackle this as a more comprehensive whole.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:09:58] But that's sort of just my pitch for comprehensive in general, so like the specifics here. One, we need to fund the asylum system. I mean I think that is the key. We don't have enough asylum officers. We don't have enough immigration judges. We don't have enough people to enforce immigration law. Even if we want to do that, we don't have enough people to deliver decisions. We don't have enough staff at the courts. We don't have enough staff in the legal immigration system. At U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. We don't have enough staff at U.S. consulates abroad, just systematically the adjudication process, either for people who cross the border irregularly or for people applying for benefits, is broken. Six to 7 to 8 year waits are now common in immigration court just to have a claim heard, and that is in part because of the high volume of people crossing. But this is not a new problem. These numbers have been rising pretty much every few years for the last decade, and despite the alarm bells ringing about the need for more funding, Congress continues to dribble out 10% increases here, 15% increases there, rather than going big and bold.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:03] Uhmm, yeah.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:11:05] Beyond that, the legal immigration system, we really do need to rethink the static caps and these 7% country quotas that are creating these huge backlogs. You know, one way to do this would be simply say no one can wait in the backlog beyond a set number of years. There's one proposal out there that would say, if you've been waiting for ten years for a visa -- again, these are for people who are approved -- that just says, all right, you just get it at ten years. So you could do something like that. You could just cap it and say after a certain point, everybody just gets the visa. After you've been waiting for that long enough, you can increase the number of visas. I think that's very necessary, given again, think how much bigger the US population now is than it was 30 years ago. And that is part of the reason why you
need to sort of increase the immigration numbers to keep up with the increasing demands for labor. And then at the border, we really do need to think through both alternate pathways to drive people away from the border and again, ways to deliver a decision on whether or not someone gets to stay or has to go in a reasonable period of time, not five, six years.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:11] Right. Right. So tell us a little bit more about how the asylum process works, because I think this is a source of great confusion, because people popularly think that you can show up at the border and ask for asylum, but actually you can also do that in your country of origin. So what are the steps in broad strokes? Just people have an idea of like, who are these people who apply for asylum and what's the process? How long does it take and what can we expect? And if you're funding it, what does that mean?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:12:42] Yeah. So brief correction here. You actually can't apply for asylum in your country of origin. Asylum. Asylum is a protection that is only available to people who are physically present in the United States.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:54] Ah, thanks for the correction.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:12:56] This is distinct from refugee status, which you can apply for outside of the United States. Both are about determining whether someone is a refugee. Asylum is about basically this idea of "we won't send you back" and refugee status is "we will agree that you're a refugee and take you in as part of an international process." So refugee processing in the Western Hemisphere is done in collaboration with the United Nations High Council on Refugees. They identify people who are potential refugees. Those people are then referred to the United States, screened by refugee officers. They go through several extensive rounds of vetting, security, vetting. And then after all of that process is over, which can take upwards of 2 to 3 years depending on where people are, then they enter the United States legally as having already been granted refugee status. They're already on a path to a green card, and then after they get their green card on a path to a citizenship. By contrast, asylum is for people who come to our borders or come on a visa and say, "I'm here. I'm in the US, please don't send me back. I am a refugee." And then it's up to the system to determine whether they actually do meet the legal definition of a refugee. This process happens a
wide variety of different ways, and this is part of the confusion. There's really no one standard process that actually occurs. So in theory, how it works for somebody who is supposed to come to the border is they come to the border, they turn themselves into a border patrol agent, or go to a port of entry and ask for asylum and say, I fear persecution in my home country.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:14:34] At that point, they are supposed to be referred for what's known as a credible fear interview, which is like an initial screening to determine whether their claim meets a very easy threshold bar. You know, does it pass the smell test? Basically, if they pass that screening, which is supposed to happen in, in like 7 to 14 days, then they get referred to immigration court where they have to file an asylum application in front of an immigration judge. The judge then decides whether or not to grant that person asylum. If they lose at any stage of that process, then they can be deported. Now, the problem is, is that breaks down a lot in practice because of these resource constraints that I mentioned before. Credible Fear Interview is the best example of this. In order to carry out those credible fear interviews, that initial smell test, you need to have enough asylum officers to do those. Basically, an asylum officer can usually do about one a day, maybe two a day if it's particularly fast. So if you don't have enough asylum officers, you can't put people through these credible fear interviews. And right now, there's less than 1,000 asylum officers. The Biden administration is doing more asylum credible fear interviews than any administration has ever done in the past. And that works out to about 400 a day. There are more than 400 a day people crossing the border. So what happens in those circumstances? Well, what happens is the same thing that happened in Obama and Trump and now under Biden. If you can't do the credible fear interview, then your second option is to simply release the person and send them directly to the immigration judge so they skip the credible fear stage and go straight to the judge where they can file an asylum application. And then the judge can decide to to grant or deny. As of now, there's 3 million cases in the immigration court stage and people end up waiting five, six years. All of this is, of course, solvable if you just give the system the resources it needs to function. But Congress doesn't even fund the asylum officers. They're actually paid for by fees that people pay in for regular immigration benefits, like green cards or citizenship or visas. Those fees paid for by users go to fund asylum officers because again, in 1996, when Congress created this process, they decided that it should not be funded by Congress. It should be funded by fees, because at the time they thought, well, this is probably only going to be a few
thousand people a year. And so we don't really want to spend a bunch of money on this when it's going to be a pretty small amount of the work that this agency does on a day to day basis.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:01] Aha. Wow. Yeah. So things have changed. Things have changed a lot since 1996 for sure. And the funding model doesn't work. But let's talk about the numbers at the border because of course people talk about -- if you believe Fox News -- that the borders are open, that there are droves of people crossing and smuggling drugs, etc., etc. and you've just described the situation with asylum officers and how underfunded it is, and really why people end up getting released in order to go to immigration court. But if you were to have a conversation with somebody who is on the right, and this person will not believe that the border is not open, what would you say? How would you describe the situation?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:17:51] Yeah, the border is not open. But but of course, the fundamental difficulties of having a discussion about that is that there's no agreement on what it means to have an open border. If you ask me, an open border is one that any person can simply walk across with no problem without having to do anything. And for that, I would point to the border between states. New York and New Jersey have open borders with each other. There are no checks when I cross between the two of them or, you know, between any state in the United States. No one is checking my passport. Nobody is confirming whether or not I have a right to cross. And you could see similar things in the Schengen zone. In Europe there are external border controls, but inside Europe there are open borders. You can go from France to Germany without having to get your passport checked. And that is open borders. What isn't open borders, you know, I would argue, is the situation we have today where people cross and then are placed into an enforcement system. Some people who cross have the immigration laws immediately enforced on them. They are rapidly deported, thousands of people every single month. But because of these resource constraints, other people get shunted into this long term system, you know, in order to figure out whether or not they can stay permanently or not. And to me, that's not an open border. That's a system that has broken down. But at the same time, we have to keep in mind this idea that every single people person crossing is let in, that's just not true. Tens of thousands of people are sent back to Mexico every month under the Biden administration and the Trump administration. The title 42 Health Policy was in effect for
three years. Over 2.5 million times border officials carried out expulsions of people under that authority, which ended in May 2023 when the Covid 19 public health emergency expired. And so there's not an open border when you had over millions of people being sent back to Mexico. But of course, not everyone was. And there are some people who say the border is open so long as a single person can cross and be released. And I think that's what makes this conversation so challenging. There are just these fundamental disagreements about what should happen. I would say when someone crosses our border and expresses a fear of persecution, we have to have a system to figure out whether or not they are bona fide refugees, because we know that people cross our borders in these situations. I mean, in the 1980s, during death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador, during indigenous genocide in Guatemala, the Reagan administration turned away 97 to 98% of all people from those countries who were seeking asylum, because geopolitically, it was a bad thing for the United States to admit that our allies in Central America were persecuting people. So we basically encouraged our government to turn away genuine, bona fide refugees who were fleeing death squads.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:20:43] And because we haven't forgot that lesson, we built these protections into the law for a reason. The fundamental reality is you don't know if a country is collapsing necessarily, or if a genocide is about to occur until after it happens. And there are people who leave before it happens. And this is in 1938. We turned away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, because at the time we thought, well, they might be German spies, and because there were a number of anti-Semites in the FDR administration. But the reason they gave was we can't take all these German Jews fleeing Germany because some of them could be Nazi spies, and maybe some of them were like, I don't think there's any evidence of that fleeing and particularly pretending to be Jews. But the reason is, you know, at the time, there wasn't this idea. Nobody knew that the Holocaust was happening. People were certainly giving a lot of alarm bells about it. But so we created this asylum system post-World War two because we recognized it's not just about what happens during the Holocaust, it's what happens in the years before that when people start leaving and saying, I will be persecuted. If you send me back, don't send me away. Don't turn me away. Because we did that prior to World War Two for Jews. And so we said never again. And we created this international system of asylum protections so that people can just show up at a border and say, if you send me back, I will be killed.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:22:01] And it's not a perfect system. Obviously not. And there are ways in which we can improve it and make it better. But I don't think it's the system that we should get rid of. Whereas there are many people who say, I just think it's time for us to move away from this concept. If you are facing persecution, just go to whatever country is closest to you. Don't come to our borders, you know, don't do any of this. So if any person gets released, then that means it's an open border. And I just don't think that's true. But this is why we have such challenge having these conversations. Because I think we aren't having these bigger conversations about asylum, about, you know, what do we do in a world of increased global displacement? And I think those are the conversations we should be having, you know, what does it mean to be the United States, a nation that has traditionally held itself out as a place of refuge in the modern world? Is this a national ambition that we should abandon or. Or is this a national ambition that we should double down on? And there I think, where the conversations get most interesting, because then people can really start talking about their real concerns about this. How do we make this system work? How do we uphold American values?
Mila Atmos: [00:23:06] We're taking a short break, and we'll be back with Aaron in a moment. But first, I want to share about a new podcast called The Amendment.
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Mila Atmos: [00:23:52] And now let's return to my conversation with Aaron Reichlin- melnick.
Since you have just mentioned the larger displacement realities in the world that are contributing to migration flows everywhere to Europe, from North Africa or Africa or the Middle East. How does the US fit into what's happening globally?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:24:16] We are in a global displacement crisis. What's happening at the US-Mexico border is not unique to the United States. There are tens of thousands of people crossing the Mediterranean in small boats every single year. Hundreds died. You know, when when these boats sink, they're landing in Greece and Italy and other countries that are not run by Democrats, that are not run by liberals. In the United Kingdom, there are thousands of people crossing the English Channel in small boats, to the point that this has become the defining political crisis in the United Kingdom is: what to do with the small boats, what to do with immigration. So the idea that the United States is unique in this challenge here, that this is something unique to President Biden, just misses this broader point. People are on the move and migration is easier than it's ever been. Not only are people being forced out of countries due to wars and famine and climate change and political instability, but the act of leaving has become easier than ever thanks to changes in technology. Social media means that people can see images of their compatriots who've gone to other countries, splashed on their Instagrams and TikToks and Telegram, what have you, and WhatsApp in particular. So now diaspora stories are making their way back home more easily than ever. And then the travel itself is easier than ever because people can fly cheaper. You now have translation apps. You know, before, if you were someone from China and you needed to walk from Ecuador to the United States, or in hitchhike from Ecuador to the United States as people do today, the difficulty if you didn't speak Spanish was enormous. But today you can literally speak into your phone and have it perfectly translate converse -- not perfectly -- but like close to perfectly translate conversations back and forth between Mandarin and Spanish without much difficulty in a way that you never could do before. And that has made the process of traveling easier than ever. Beyond that, we also have to keep in mind that nations around the world who are hostile to US foreign interests are also recognizing this fact and have decided to sort of encourage migration because they know it, quite frankly annoys us as a nation. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador all are countries in which the United States has strong diplomatic disagreements with. And Ecuador, for example, has made it so that virtually any person in the world can fly to Ecuador. You don't need a visa. You can just show up at the airport in Ecuador and they'll wave you into the country. And that is a stopping off point. Nicaragua is now doing the same. In November 2021, Nicaragua started letting Cubans fly to Nicaragua without a visa for the first time, and that set off a mass exodus with tens of thousands of Cubans leaving their country, which was at the time, you
know, in increasingly economically dire straits and political instability following the Covid pandemic. So tens of thousands of Cubans left and went to Nicaragua, and some stayed there, some went to Costa Rica, and a lot of them went north to the United States. And so this is both a diplomatic issue, and it's an issue of, you know, the modern world getting smaller and smaller than ever.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:22] Well, let's talk about the tensions around having exclusionary immigration laws and at the same time being this country that prides itself on being a place of refuge and where everybody can pursue the American dream. And since we are a pro-democracy podcast, what is the case for fixing immigration for a country that believes in practice in democracy, and in being a place of refuge?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:27:49] I firmly believe that the United States gets its strength from the fact that anyone can be an American. You know, that is, to me, a core thing that makes this country work. We believe that if they can contribute and become part of the community, they can become American. You know, on social media, I see all the time pictures going viral of people becoming U.S. citizens waving the little American flag. It is like, if you've ever been to a naturalization ceremony, it's such a joyous environment. And I like encourage people to do that at any time.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:18] I am a naturalized American.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:28:19] So you know, exactly. It is a joyous moment, but it's of course, it's a complicated moment for for everybody going through it. The feelings are not that simplistic. That said, I do think we derive our strength in this country from the fact that anyone can come here and become an American. We've got multiple members of Congress who are themselves immigrants. We've had secretaries of states who are immigrants. We've had cabinet members who are immigrants. You know, this is something that we draw our strength from. And yet our immigration policies have frequently been exclusionist. We had explicitly racist immigration laws in effect from 1924 to 1965. And before then we had the extraordinarily racist Chinese Exclusion Acts from 1881 onward. Then, you know, our first federal immigration laws ever were exclusionist. The Naturalization Act of 1790, which was in effect until 1952, said that only free white persons could naturalize. And so for the first nearly 175 years of our country, we restricted naturalization only to free white persons. There's actually an
extremely interesting Supreme Court precedents about what it meant to be white. Were Asians white? Are Mexicans white? Are Caucasian Aryans, you know, from northern India, are they white, under the race science was at the time? These are all legal cases that had to be brought because of these restrictions. But in 1965, we passed, in my opinion, the most important immigration law, you know, in modern history, which basically got rid of these racial origins of our immigration system and said for the first time, America is open to anyone who can go through and navigate this legal process. We will not turn away people based on where they come from. And it was part of the civil rights era. It came within the same time as the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, and it was part of this recognition of the United States as a multiracial democracy. And so I think we have to acknowledge the exclusionary tactics that our laws have adopted in the past, but lean into this view of the United States as a country, that anyone can become a US citizen, anyone can become American and make that our guiding vision going forward.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:29] Yeah. Hear, hear. We talked about Congress already a little bit about how Congress needs to take action. And I think this conversation would not be complete to talk about the recent bill that failed in the House, but of course, passed in the Senate. What was in it? What did you like about it? What did you not? And is it a springboard for potentially action in this election year?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:30:54] Yeah, the Senate bipartisan bill, it's a complicated bill to talk about because it's a complicated bill. It was a product of compromise. I think our biggest concern was that it wasn't a comprehensive bill. It was a border enforcement only bill that kicked a lot of other cans down the road by saying, you know, oh, we'll just only do border. It did represent a very real serious effort to tackle with what changes can you make to the system to make it function. Unfortunately, as a product of that compromise, it ended up more complicated than it should be, to the point where it might not have worked. And I think that that hampered it to some extent. But certainly it was a very significant increase in border enforcement. But it also came with the resources. And I think that is something that has sort of gone not talked about as much. It would have led to the hiring of thousands of new asylum officers, over 150 new immigration judges, more funding for processing people, more funding for supporting state and local communities, basically the sort of massive infusion of funding that is necessary for a system that's buckling under its own weight, and that in and of itself
would have made a hugely positive difference. Unfortunately, the discussion very quickly got derailed into a bunch of largely inaccurate talking points. You heard some people saying, oh, it required 4000 people to be allowed into the country a day. That's flagrantly false. What it said is that when border crossings rise above a certain level, at that point the border gets shut down and they stop letting people ask for asylum; though they would still have allowed some people to ask for a slightly harder to win form of protection known as withholding of removal, which offers fewer benefits and it's more difficult to obtain. So it's not that nobody would get asylum screenings for protection, it's just far fewer people would get screenings for protection, and it would have sort of allowed the US government to simply turn people away, potentially sending them to Mexico. Though no one ever answered the question of whether Mexico gave the approval for this. And if Mexico said no, then these bills' practice of simply sending back to Mexico obviously couldn't happen. You can't do that without Mexico's permission. But I think, broadly speaking, it was a serious effort to address these challenges. And even if it didn't get the balance exactly right, it's great that people were having serious conversations about it. Unfortunately, it's very, very, very, very hard to have serious conversations about immigration policy today in Washington DC.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:23] Well, since it was just a border bill primarily, which I didn't fully understand until you just explained it, what's the role of states in securing the border? The state of Texas passed Senate Bill 4, which aimed to take matters in its own hands. But I think this bill is very poorly understood. What was this bill meant to achieve? What's the controversy and how do you expect this to play out in the long term?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:33:46] Yeah. Texas SB4 is an attempt by Texas to create its own immigration system, and I think it should be properly understood that Texas wants to enforce immigration laws and carry out deportations on its own without the federal government being involved, and that's not allowed. The US Constitution is pretty clear on this. Well, at least as has been interpreted for the last century and a half, that immigration is a federal authority. And Texas bill has a lot of weird things in it because it's not a federal bill. For example, under the bill, a Texas judge could order someone who is seeking asylum to walk back into Mexico at threat of 20 years in state prison. If they say no, even if the person is already in the process of applying for asylum with the federal government and the federal government has said that they can stay. So you would have a system where you could have the federal government saying: no, no, no,
no, this person can stay and go through a process. And the state saying: if you don't leave, we'll throw you in prison for 20 years. And because we have a Supremacy Clause, the federal government wins out in that circumstance. And this sort of threatens to throw a ton of confusion into it. SB4 also allows state law enforcement across the state to arrest people that they suspect have crossed the border illegally, even if they've been here for decades. So you can have it go after long term undocumented immigrants, even though it's not just people at the border, but broadly speaking, you know, why did Texas do this? It's because Texas wants to be the people who can arrest people, send them to jail for crossing the border illegally, and deport them because they think the federal government isn't doing it enough. They've poured $10 billion into Operation Lonestar over the last three years. $10 billion. And the end result has been basically no net reduction in migration across the border at all. And I think even if they were allowed to put this law into effect, I think they would very quickly find that as the federal government has found over the last 20 years or really 50 years of trying to patrol the border, it's just not that easy. You know, when you look down at what they've done with the barbed wire and the razor wire that represents about 1 to 2% of the Texas Mexico border total. So, yeah, you can spend billions of dollars and have a National Guard troop every five feet along the border. If you're covering about five, six miles or ten miles of the border. But Texas is 900 miles of border with Mexico, and it is not something that scales as easily when you're not doing it in a major metro area, which is where they're doing it now. They're doing it in the city of Eagle Pass and the city of Brownsville and the city of El Paso. Well, okay. That's, that's again, all well and good when you're five minutes from the nearest major highway. But if you're doing it 50 miles from there in farmland or mountains, it is just not as easy to patrol the border as Texas is trying to pretend they're doing here. And you can't do these kind of policies at scale. You know, even if you can, like, physically shut off 1% of the Texas-Mexico border, it's the other 98%. That's the concern. And the United States actually found out on the federal level in the 1990s. The big thing was Operation Hold the Line in 1994, because at the time people were crossing in the really easy sections. We didn't really have any border walls at the time. So people were crossing in San Diego, in El Paso, in Nogales, Arizona, like within a mile of the regular border crossing points in the middle of cities. And what the US found is you can close off those areas. It's not too difficult to do that. You put up walls, you know, you flood the area with Border Patrol agents and people stop crossing and those, those narrow, smaller areas. But what happened was everybody just started going to the mountains and to the more dangerous spots of
crossing and crossings didn't stop. And so Texas, I think if they ever did get a chance, would become the dog that caught the car. They would find out that, you know what might be really easy if you throw billions of dollars at it, which is shutting off these 1 to 2% of the border becomes a lot harder when you're trying to go everywhere else.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:45] Now that we know we really need comprehensive immigration reform, what are two things an everyday person can do to advance something comprehensive? Do they go to their elected representative or what is it that people can do?
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:38:02] I think there's... I'll focus on two things. One, yes, talking to your representative. Let them know that, you know, more funding for the system, more funding to make the system work and really moving away from this border only idea of the system. If all you're doing is looking at the US-Mexico border and you're not looking at anything else in the immigration process, you're not going to solve the broader problems. People aren't going to come to the US-Mexico border if they do have a viable path to come here legally. Nobody's going to throw themselves into the hands of smugglers. If they could just get in an actual line, you know, if there was a line to stand in. But there isn't. And so people do end up in those circumstances. So contacting your representatives and asking them to address not just what's happening in the border, but the between 10.5 and 15 million undocumented immigrants in the country finding a path for them to adjust their status, pay a fine. You know, this is a very, very popular among the American public is give people a path to legal status that requires them to go through a system, pay, get background checks, do whatever it has to, maybe, you know, get their papers right. That's very, very popular among the American public. But we aren't having that conversation in D.C. anymore because all we're doing is talking about the border. And so I think that's part of it. It's contacting a representative and let them know it's not just the border. You care about other things. And the other thing I think is to model inclusion and welcoming in your communities. People want to feel welcomed. They want to understand that when they arrive in this country, they can become American. They can go through a process. And it is about presenting a positive vision of immigration in the United States and modeling that in your personal life, whether that's volunteering for local organizations, talking to local politicians about finding ways for for new arrivals to get professional licensing if they're taking certain jobs, you know, things along those lines, welcoming policies which are applicable both
to new immigrants coming here through the legal immigration system and to people who are waiting in these six, seven, eight year asylum backlogs, because as they go through this process, they have permission to be here eventually. They often get permission to have a work permit. So until we get rid of these backlogs, we have to deal with the reality that these are people. These are people who want to work. These are people who want to contribute. They didn't come here to sit around in a shelter, but one of the reason they are sitting around in a shelter is because Congress in 1996, decided to make it illegal for asylum seekers to get a work permit until six months after they apply for asylum. So literally, we say, you've gotten here, all you have is the clothes on your back. You've sold every possession. You have to make the journey here. Oh, and by the way, and when you get here, you're not allowed to legally work for months getting people to model like better ways to to get people through those initial months of new country. You don't speak the language, but all you want to do is keep your head down and work and find a way to support yourself while you go through this process. Finding ways that communities can help people get to self-sufficiency is something that I think the average person can help with. Whether it is volunteering, donating food, donating clothes, talking to local politicians, you know, building support for seeing this as not just a challenge, but as an opportunity for communities.
Speaker3: [00:41:18] Mhm. Yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:19] Good advice. So here's my last question. Looking into the
future, what makes you hopeful.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:41:26] You know, building off of that last thing. I'm hopeful because there are still people every single day who get up and they go and they volunteer and they help people. In the immigrant rights movement, you come across the most selfless people that you've ever met. You know, people often say like, well, why don't you host these, you know, immigrants in your house? There are people who do that. There are people who take in new arrivals who don't have anywhere to sleep, and let them use the spare bedroom for a few weeks while they get on their feet, or for longer, who make new friends, who help children who are caught up in this thing that their parents are going through, who help them feel welcome, who bring them toys, who help them get integrated into school. And what makes me optimistic is the way that, you know, we're ten years into this in many ways, this increase in asylum seekers under the
Obama administration. There are people who have been volunteering for the last ten years, and there are new volunteers that are coming in every day to take part in welcoming the people to this country. And also, you know, who believe in treating everyone like a person and recognizing, sure, some people do bad things. Let's not pretend that otherwise. Obviously there are bad actors, but the overwhelming majority of people crossing today are everyday folk who want safety and security for themselves and their loved ones. And I'm optimistic because I still see so many people coming forward and keeping that humanity in mind about who these people are, you know, and not seeing them as some scary monolith here to come to steal all of our, you know, to murder everybody. Obviously. Again, yes, of course there are bad people. But in any group of sufficient size, US citizens, immigrants, lawful, unlawful, what have you, there'll be some bad actors, but the overwhelming majority of people are just people who want to make a better life. And we can extend our hands and welcome. And it makes me optimistic to know that there are still people who do that.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:13] Yeah. Hear, hear. That is indeed very hopeful. Thank you very much, Aaron, for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: [00:43:22] Thank you very much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:24] Aarom Reichlin-Melnick is the policy director at the American Immigration Council. Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Mandela Barnes. He's the president of Power to the Polls Wisconsin and previously served as the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2023.
Mandela Barnes: [00:43:46] President Biden in 2020 won Wisconsin by around 30,000 votes. Donald Trump won by fewer than 30,000 votes. So very narrow margins. And when so much is riding on the outcome of Wisconsin, I like to look at us as the anchor of democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:01] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me.
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