David Remnick: The 2024 election will be, well, about a lot of things, not least our democracy, but it seems to me that the subject with the most substance in terms of policy and also the most peril for the Democrats is immigration, and it was very much in the news this week. Politicians on the right have sometimes distorted the situation at the border for sheer political gain, but the numbers of people seeking asylum now are tremendous.

President Biden is saying that he would shut down the border if Congress passes a bipartisan bill, giving him that authority. House Republicans aren't likely to pass the bill and President Biden knows it, but this is a really dramatic change in tone.

President Joe Biden: If that bill were the law today, I'd shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.

David Remnick: For more than a decade, our staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, has been covering immigration, talking to enforcement officers at the border, White House officials, and of course, to the people who risk it all, risking their lives very often to cross the border. All of that has gone into Jon's new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. I spoke with Jonathan Blitzer last week.

Jon, if I turn on Fox, the first thing I see, and the second, and the third is the current crisis at the border. What is the crisis at the border, and how long has it been going on, and how did it start?

Jonathan Blitzer: The crisis at the border is an endless crisis that gets rolled out every election year, and is a reliable winner for Republicans because Democrats are seen as being weak on the border. The sad fact for Democrats is, there really is a problem at the border. The system cannot handle the sheer volume of people who are showing up at the border. What is that a function of?

In large part, it's a function of what's happening in the world, not that there's any room for this kind of nuance or context in the political debate happening in Washington around this, but--

David Remnick: Yes, but give us the nuance and give us the context.

Jonathan Blitzer: What you're seeing in the hemisphere is an unprecedented period of mass migration and displacement, and it is the result of a number of factors. COVID plays a big role. Economies have collapsed. There have been repressive governments in Venezuela, for instance, kind of all of these different regional conflicts, climate change, people who had left their countries and relocated elsewhere in the region, only to find those economies collapsing as a result of COVID.

The population of people who are showing up at the border is changing, which is worrisome for any administration because it has included people from certain countries where historically the US can't deport them. We're talking about--

David Remnick: For example?

Jonathan Blitzer: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua. That has recently changed as a result of high-level diplomatic intervention. The point is the US immigration system at the border and beyond can't easily deal with the kinds of people. You're seeing right now arrivals on the order of 12,000 people a day. These numbers are astronomical. There aren't places to hold all of them.

For as long as there aren't the resources to contain and process people as they arrive, large shares of those people are going to be released into the interior of the country. The Democrats are scared of talking about this.

David Remnick: Why?

Jonathan Blitzer: I think they see a lose-lose with their constituencies. You have the progressive left that's going to oppose any kind of increased enforcement or harshness at the border, which from an operational standpoint really is necessary in some form or another, so you're lose-lose on that side of the ledger.

David Remnick: Let's slow down then. If the progressive left was represented at this table, what would the argument be for not having more restriction at the border?

Jonathan Blitzer: They would say that asylum is worth saving. It's salvageable. There just isn't the political will inside the administration to take the measures necessary to handle all of these newcomers and give them a chance to lodge their asylum claims. The inconvenient fact in that is that the vast majority of people who are showing up at the border would not win their asylum cases.

David Remnick: Why not?

Jonathan Blitzer: The nature of asylum law is such that it specifies a very specific set of forms of persecution someone has to be suffering from in order to qualify for relief at the border for protection. The people who are showing up now are definitely fleeing for their lives in some form or another. It might be extreme poverty. It might be a collapsing government. It might be that their house was wiped out in a hurricane, but those technically aren't forms of persecution as the law has defined that term.

If you want to find some way of treating them humanely, you need to think more deeply about systemic reform. That leads to the obvious problem of Washington and Congress, and there's just no movement there.

David Remnick: Pramila Jayapal, who's the head of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, said the big problem in immigration from her point of view is the fact that you can't pass anything in Congress because of the filibuster.

Jonathan Blitzer: I think it's probably for reasons even beyond the filibuster. The issue is so toxic that any effort to reform the system, which is sorely needed, is dead on arrival. I think one thing the Biden administration has done is they've said, okay, look, the only way to handle the flow isn't to try just to deter people at the US border. By the time they reach the border, it's too late.

Now, the administration is going to want to be more orderly and enforcement-minded at the border in certain ways to try to send a message, but their thinking is, we have to create other pathways, other legal pathways for people to come to the US that doesn't involve their setting out and then arriving at the border and overwhelming our resources.

David Remnick: The Trump solution to this is build a wall.

Jonathan Blitzer: There were two Trump solutions to this. It has to be said that after probably the ugliest moment in recent American history with the family separation crisis, that was a classic Trump policy. That was 2018.

David Remnick: The beginning of the-- Right. Toward the beginning of the Trump administration, or midway through.

Jonathan Blitzer: Midway through. That was basically the government doing the harshest thing it could do to families at the border to try to scare other people out of coming to the US. Nevertheless, within one year, the numbers of people showing up at the southern border exploded, which just illustrates the fact that people who are fleeing for their lives, people who are in states of major desperation are going to think first that they have to get to safety and only secondarily about what the exact border policies are going to be at any given moment.

Trump was struggling with this issue as late as 2019. The two things that he did that were distinct from what the Biden administration has done, particularly at the border, one was a policy called Remain in Mexico, where he basically shunted asylum seekers into northern Mexico and said, for as long as the system delays in processing your asylum applications, you have to stay here.

The second thing that he did, and this was the result of the pandemic, was he basically ended asylum invoking public health authority saying it's just not safe to have people crossing the border. The Biden administration has been in a bind with both of those things. First of all, Biden himself campaigned really strongly against the Remain in Mexico policy when he was campaigning for president the first time. It was a very appealing message.

He said, look, we have an asylum system for a reason. You can't just outsource asylum to another country. To people who work operations inside the Biden administration, at the start of his term, that policy valve wasn't available to them. You had then Title 42, this other measure, this public health measure, which the administration clung to for as long as it possibly could, because it basically allowed the government to expel people off the water without giving them asylum.

The problem with that was they came to rely on that expulsion authority and never really had the wherewithal to begin to build back up the system that Trump wound down. Now, you have a global moment of mass migration converging on the border at a time when resources are down, Congress is refusing to give the president the money that he needs for basic operations. The perfect storm.

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David Remnick: I'm talking today with Jonathan Blitzer. He reports for The New Yorker on politics and immigration, and his new book is called Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. We'll continue in a minute. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm talking today with Jonathan Blitzer, who covers immigration and politics for The New Yorker. Jon's just published a terrific new book called Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, which to my mind is a definitive contemporary history of the immigration problem. We'll continue our conversation. It seems that Congress is on the verge of passing a bipartisan immigration bill, which would include money for Ukraine and Israel. Is that your understanding of where we are now?

Jonathan Blitzer: We keep hearing that one of these days we're going to see the actual text of this bill, and there's one delay after another. At a certain point, the President himself got out ahead of the negotiators to reassure everyone that one of the provisions in this putative bill would allow him to shut down the border and that he intended to do exactly that if the bill actually made it to his desk, but the bill itself hasn't materialized.

David Remnick: What does it mean for Joe Biden to close the border in practical terms?

Jonathan Blitzer: It's an incredibly striking thing to see that he's even saying such a thing. Again, in 2020, I think a big part of his appeal on the campaign trail was that he stood in opposition to the inhumanity of Trump on this very issue. That was one of the main planks in his immigration platform, was we will resurrect asylum and we will restore this fundamental American ethos.

David Remnick: You think of it as a desperate act on Biden's part because of his poll standings vis-à-vis Donald Trump?

Jonathan Blitzer: I see it as a reflection of two things. The first is that this idea of shutting down the border, which did have a concrete manifestation in the form of this technical public health maneuver that the Trump administration put into place, that allowed the government to suspend asylum and just expel anyone who showed up at the border at the start of COVID, that has gotten normalized over the years.

The Biden administration eventually ended that particular policy, but it took the Biden administration a fairly long time to do it, and as a result, you started to see even some moderate Democrats entertaining the idea that it wasn't so crazy every once in a while to stop processing people for asylum at the border.

You see, first of all, the normalization of that idea. I think Biden in a concrete sense, and this is the second point, yes, I think he feels real political pressure here to show that he takes this seriously and that he wants to be tough. I think his expectation is that Republicans aren't really serious about negotiating in any sense, and that maybe he can call their bluff and the public will see him calling their bluff, and that that's a way he can flip the script on Republicans.

Last week, the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said to members of his conference in the Senate, listen we may have to pause on this senate negotiation because our presumptive nominee is running for president on the immigration issue, and we don't want to give President Biden a victory. We want to allow Trump to run successfully on this issue.

David Remnick: Let me get this straight. There's gambling in Casablanca. [laughs] There's cynicism in Washington. The issue that Donald Trump seems to care about most, and certainly his appeal is most intense on in terms of policy, immigration is something that he wants to forestall. He wants to forestall this bill simply because of his electoral chances, just to be clear.

Jonathan Blitzer: Absolutely. One of the ironies of this is the bill itself, the language that we've at least seen from conversations so far around this bill wouldn't really, in a profound way, change the dynamics at the border.

David Remnick: What would it do?

Jonathan Blitzer: It would essentially make it harder for people to pass that initial asylum screening. That's a significant thing. That's a historic change to the asylum system. There's no question. There are other provisions that we're hearing about that would basically say if a certain number of migrants arrive at the border on a given day, the president will have the authority to "shut the border down."

Now, what that means is unclear. What's hung up in these negotiations, of course, is a request, a funding request from the president that would allow them to take some of the pressure off at the border right now. That's what's getting held up.

David Remnick: You write that Stephen Miller's ultimate ambition was to end the asylum system completely, entirely. What can we expect in a second Donald Trump term where immigration is concerned?

Jonathan Blitzer: It's almost hard to imagine they're going farther than they already had. They basically sabotaged the immigration system as we knew it in the previous term. What's so scary to me about the prospect of a second Trump term is that all of the radical things they did in the first Trump term, the Muslim ban, trying to end DACA for legal protection, for dreamers, separating families and the like, all of that is now just part of the arsenal that a government can use and that is less shocking the second time around. They've claimed that they're going to be doing things like setting up internment camps and ramping up deportation.

I actually think one of the darker ironies of the Trump years was that for all of their promises of mass deportations, the chaos and disorder of how they actually enforced that agenda led to more of the same, rather than a huge explosion in deportation. You can be rest assured that they have learned from their mistakes and that they're going to do everything they can to correct anything that didn't go well in the first term.

David Remnick: This is a huge part of Donald Trump's appeal to the American voter. Why is it appealing and to whom?

Jonathan Blitzer: I think that there's always been an assumption that the case for immigration makes itself. That the moral high ground makes sense to everyone, that we should be welcoming, that people who show up in need obviously should seek protection [crosstalk] here.

David Remnick: It's the nature of your country. It's good for the workforce and on and on.

Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. I don't think defenders of immigration have squared the high ideals with some of the practical realities. Sadly, the border, which is a tiny sliver of what the immigration system is as a whole, ends up dominating the entire conversation.

David Remnick: Not everybody comes through the southern border. They often come through airports, right?

Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. There's a whole legal immigration system that you'd want to work in some basic way. In fact, the idea that the immigration system as a whole has been starved of any kind of solutions for decades. The last time Congress meaningfully passed legislation on immigration was 1990.

The world has changed a thousand times over since then. The Trumpian appeal is to point to disorder at the border and say, all of the problems in your life aren't going addressed. Look what we're doing for these newcomers who've earned nothing and who are now benefiting from American largesse.

I have to say, if in a cynical way that makes sense to voters who are frustrated and who are confused and who are scared, I think that the Biden administration should be pointing to things like 8 million job vacancies across the country that need to be filled and they can be filled with workers, with foreign workers. You could have people coming from a foreign country on temporary work visas, and you wouldn't have any of this drama at the border.

You'd have be people coming in an orderly way. It would be satisfying very specific needs in a bunch of states, including red states. It would also incentivize people to come work and then return home. It would create a circular migration pattern rather than this buildup at the border. There are practical arguments too.

David Remnick: Does Trump's argument, does Trump's rhetoric and demagoguery depend completely on mythology and fear, or is there any truth in it? For example, one of the things that he bangs away at is that immigration brings more criminals and crime.

Jonathan Blitzer: This is an easy one because this is a demonstrable falsehood. The Republican line on this, and the Trump line specifically has always been to trot out the families of victims of crime perpetrated by immigrants. These are a tiny, tiny sliver of a minority of cases. On the whole, all of the data supports this, any and all evidence that you could canvas makes very clear that immigrants commit crime at much lower rates than American citizens.

Obviously, Trump and his allies see a benefit to continuing to stay on that same script. What's remarkable actually is how nearly identical the script is on immigration now as it was in 2016. It's the same routine. I was recently at one of these hearings in Congress for the impeachment of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Mayorkas, and it was the same scheme that Trump did on the campaign trail in 2016. They brought family members of people who had died at the hands of some immigrant, and they said in this case, the Secretary of Homeland Security is to blame. This was literally a page out of the Trump campaign book.

David Remnick: I do want to ask this, would all this be happening if Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, had not had the, what would we call it, the political imagination to send groups of migrants to cities like New York. How much did he spark this?

Jonathan Blitzer: Abbott changed the conversation on the border for Democrats in a profound way. Now you see among mainstream democrats, a willingness to take more dramatic action at the border than we've really ever seen, but what Abbott has done is he has really supercharged the politics. It didn't come out of nowhere it should be said. In 2021, he started a massive statewide enforcement campaign that I think ran pretty afoul of federal law called Operation Lone Star.

David Remnick: What was that? What was Operation Lone Star?

Jonathan Blitzer: It was basically to deputize state law enforcement officials to make immigration arrests, and to use money personnel to line people up along the border and go after migrants, engage in racial profiling, really quite dramatic stuff.

In the early days of the Biden administration, when it was clear that Abbott was ramping up this effort, I think there was a certain reticence on the part of the Biden administration to bring the fight to Abbott, say, by suing him for these policies.

Over time, you've watched, as Abbott has ramped up the pressure bit by bit. A year later, that was 2021, in the spring of 2022 is when he begins the busing. Now you have something like 80,000 people he's bused to Democratic cities.

David Remnick: Right now, Republicans in Congress are pushing to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of Homeland Security, which is quite extraordinary. What role will that play in this entire drama about immigration and the political crisis in Washington?

Jonathan Blitzer: I'm covering this story right now, and you have this incredible split screen where certain Senate Republicans are calling Mayorkas to get advice and input on technical solutions at the border as they're having these negotiations about a possible bill. Simultaneously, their counterparts in The House are charging ahead with this impeachment effort. This impeachment effort is purely political. It's a chance for them--

David Remnick: What are the alleged charges? What are the allegations here? What are the charges that they proposed to bring against Mayorkas?

Jonathan Blitzer: The literal charges are dereliction of duty. They're claiming that the secretary is deliberately refusing to enforce the law at the southern border as a way of flooding the country with immigrants, which is frankly an outlandish notion. You could certainly criticize the Biden administration for not being more orderly in its pursuit of particular policies of the border and so on.

It's quite another thing to say there is deliberate malice here and deliberate intent to bring chaos to the border and disorder onto the country. It's really out there.

David Remnick: How far will this impeachment attempt go and what effect will it have?

Jonathan Blitzer: It's interesting. They're going to come close in the house. They've got this razor-thin majority, but interestingly, this idea has come up since really the start of the Biden administration. Congressional Republicans have wanted to impeach someone. Mayorkas was always a good bet for them because there was so much division among Republicans, and immigration was the one issue that united moderate Republicans and right-wing Republicans-- [crosstalk]

David Remnick: Has a cabinet member ever been impeached?

Jonathan Blitzer: The last time was in the 1870s. We're going deep into history here. There is--

David Remnick: It's a very historically minded Congress.

Jonathan Blitzer: [laughs] Yes. This is a teachable moment for the country.

David Remnick: Now, it occurs to one to ask the question, how many immigrants can the United States feasibly handle? Matt Yglesias wrote a book in 2020 called One Billion Americans. He argued that significantly increasing the population was one of the potential keys to economic growth in this country, and at the same time obviously poses societal challenges. Do you think significantly increasing the population is good for the country overall?

Jonathan Blitzer: I think it definitely is. I couldn't quantify it. I couldn't quantify what the upper limit might look like, but I don't think that there is any question that for economic reasons alone, more people coming legally, working legally would be a boon to everyone. I don't think any economists really question that at this point. I think it's a widely shared view that managed immigration is a net benefit to the country.

David Remnick: We're in a building that overlooks, if you go high up enough into the building, then you can see very distinctly in the harbor the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and other symbols of American welcome to immigrants. My grandparents landed in Ellis Island, and Castle Garden, and all the rest. Maybe that was the same with you. All that we've been talking about, how does that square with the American self-image, self regard about its generosity, as well as its practicality?

Jonathan Blitzer: I think it's gotten harder and harder frankly to continue to hold up that ethos as a definitional one to American society. I don't think it's completely lost. It's ironic, given how we're talking about the Biden White House's political lethargy in dealing with immigration. I do think that one of the energizing forces in his campaign in 2020 was to make a strong moral case for inclusion. That gets lost in the political parsing of immigration in this country.

Trump's draconian, inhumane political bent on all of this stuff was a liability for him. That did not help him in the 2020 election. That was because there was a strong, clear message in opposition to that. What I wish there was more of in the political conversation was a yoking of ideals that I think probably majority of Americans believe in some form or another with the pragmatic appeal, which actually dovetails with the moral argument.

David Remnick: What do you mean?

Jonathan Blitzer: Well, one of the most striking things for me reporting on these issues is that I often find government officials who work for agencies that tend to be notorious. Agencies like ICE or Customs and Border Protection. These fearsome sounding agencies where we all assume that it's a rough bunch who work there. A lot of them, quite honestly, make pretty progressive sounding arguments when it comes to specific questions of, what should we do with the border, how should we manage the flow of all these people who are arriving?

You hear very practical unsentimental arguments from them about, all right, listen, the parole system is really our best bet right now, because we can't attain everyone. That doesn't make sense. What I find is when I have those conversations with them, sure, we get in the weeds and we're talking about operations, but those conversations actually square with the more idealistic arguments that we might feel, but that we assume somehow are an inconvenience to the actual practical administration of the immigration system.

If you were to talk to a practitioner, I'm not talking about a professor or an immigration advocate, I'm talking about someone who works for one of these government agencies and has deep experience at the border processing people, you'll hear them say, "Oh, here we go. Another set of apparently harsh enforcement measures that will not really do much. Smuggling networks might respond in a matter of weeks. We might see a dip for a month, and in two months, we're going to have the same problem as before. Now what do we have? We've inherited a system that's even a little bit more harsher, but doesn't address any of the real problems we're seeing."

David Remnick: That tells you what? What is the thing that is absolutely needed at the border in terms of practicality and policy? Stripping away all the rhetoric, stripping away all the ill will and worse, what's absolutely needed?

Jonathan Blitzer: What's absolutely needed, and it scares me to say out aloud because it's so hard to imagine in our political landscape, what's needed is a massive whole of government, this is often said in Washington, a whole of government approach to the issue. Not just the Department of Homeland Security getting more border agents to man ports of entry. You need the State Department involved, you need the Defense Department involved, you need the--

David Remnick: To do what?

Jonathan Blitzer: To open up processing centers in the region all over Latin America.

David Remnick: This is a question of a bureaucracy being overwhelmed above all?

Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. I think the real problem is we are dealing with the arrival of people too late in the process. People are uprooted at rates that we've not seen in generations. That's a function of the world. The US alone can't control all of that or the things they can do to mitigate it. When people are moving at that rate, to just tune in at the border. There are concrete things that would help at the border, and right now Congress is blocking them--funding, more immigration judges, streamlining the asylum process, more border agents, the whole thing.

Fiddling around the margins, it would help, but that wouldn't deal with the overall problem. The overall problem is you have a number of people that no governmental system can process doing all of that processing in the worst possible place, right at the border. If there are ways of beginning that process, of beginning to handle these people, to handle their claims, to understand who's coming, why, and what they need, and what they want.

To do that a little farther from the border. You're hearing as I'm describing this, this is the work of years. This is the work of multiple governments. This is something that no single administration can do overnight. When you really think about it, it seems like an insoluble problem, because the politics just stand in the way. There needs to be some way of keeping the politics at bay while the actual solutions are set in motion.

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David Remnick: Jonathan Blitzer, thank you so much.

Jonathan Blitzer: Thanks, David.

David Remnick: Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, goes deep into the history of our immigration system and into the lives of migrants making this extraordinary and often dangerous journey. I'd recommend it to anybody who wants to understand this current and complicated issue, and the way it shapes our politics.

 

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