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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and now, we continue our election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. We're not just covering the campaign. We're covering many of the underlying issues that are getting ignored with all the campaign news. We're up to issue number 10, legal immigration. In the hectic presidential debate his week, immigration didn't come up at all. Can you believe it, the way Trump ran and has governed with it as such a central tenet of why he's president in the first place? We'll talk Monday about DACA and undocumented immigrants as issue 11 in 30 Issues in 30 Days.

Now, let's talk about the policy changes in the legal immigration process that the Trump administration has implemented, what more they want to do next, and what Biden may do with legal immigration if elected president. My guest is Julia Preston, contributing writer at The Marshall Project and formerly the national immigration correspondent for the New York Times. Hi, Julia, welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Preston: Hi, Brian. It's always good to talk with you. Thank you for inviting me.

Brian: I want to begin on some news. Of course, there are various categories of legal immigration, and one of them is refugees, who the country admits because of their circumstances, their dire circumstances. Yesterday, a story broke about the Trump administration capping the number of refugees that it plans to admit into the country at 15,000 next year. That's a drop from 18,000 this year, though fewer than 12,000 have actually been allowed to resettle in the country so far this year, according to Washington Post, and way, way down from the Obama or Reagan or other president's numbers with respect to refugees. Can you explain what the president did here, and what the arc of history has been?

Julia: Yes. Actually, the number that President Trump is proposing, this 15,000 number, is the lowest number since the Refugee Program in its modern form was created in 1980. To put that in perspective, the ceiling that President Obama set in his last year was 110,000 refugees. This is bringing the Refugee Program down to a very low limit. I think it's important to understand that it has a tremendous ripple effect because the Refugee Resettlement Program is funded by the federal government on the basis of the number of refugees who are going to be resettled.

Across the country, agencies that have dedicated themselves for generations and decades to resettling refugees are now having to shut down because so few refugees are coming in under the Trump administration. One of the details here is that there was a special program established actually by President Trump for allies from Iraq, Iraqis who help the military effort of the United States. The Trump administration set aside 4,000 refugee positions for those Iraqis but only actually resettled 123 in fiscal 2020. That gives you some idea of just squeezing down of this program.

Brian: Where's most of the demand coming from at this point?

Julia: Oh, all over the world, Syria. I mean, there are countries that have huge demand. There are 26 million refugees worldwide, and among them, the United Nations estimates that 1.4 million people are in urgent need of resettlement, Yemen. Many of the countries that have the greatest need are actually on travel ban lists. That's part of the dynamic that's taking place here.

Brian: At the president's rally in Minnesota on Wednesday, he launched into a tirade against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who I believe comes from a Somali refugee background, is that right?

Julia: Yes.

Brian: Then, in that context, he said this.

President Trump: Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp, and he said that. Overwhelming public resources, overcrowding schools, and inundating your hospitals, you know that. It’s already there. It’s a disgrace what they've done to your state. It’s a disgrace.

Brian: Trump, at very least, is presenting refugees here as a public burden and a disgrace when there are too many of them.

Julia: I think, Brian, we have to step back for a minute and see that what's happening in this election is really a confrontation between two opposing national projects, two different ideas of the United States and its relationship with immigration. On one hand, you have the president who-- I think by this time we can use the word xenophobia with some confidence based on the piece that you just played.

He's framing this as immigrants, refugees are a potential threat to our nation. They're going to overwhelm our nation, inundate our hospitals. He's closing the door. He wants to close the door, and he's been doing it quite effectively in his first term. On the other hand, you have Joe Biden who represents the perspective that immigrants have strengthened the United States, that they bring innovation to the United States, that we need the labor that they provide. It really is a very stark and consequential confrontation in this election between the wall and the Statue of Liberty.

Brian: He's also, let's face it, playing on racial fears there.

Julia: Yes, absolutely. This is the most xenophobic, nativist, restrictionist, set of immigration policies that we have seen in peacetime in the United States since the 1920s. You really have to go back 100 years to find a set of policies that are so determined to curb legal immigration to the United States, which is our subject today,

Brian: Right. I want to play a clip of Biden on the same issue. This is him at the Democratic debate, which seems like a million years ago, back in September of 2019. This is technically on asylum, which I'll ask you to explain what the difference is between that and refugee status after we hear this clip of Joe Biden.

Joe Biden: I would, in fact, make sure that there is-- We immediately surge to the border. All those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard. That's who we are. We're a nation that says, "If you want to flee and you're fleeing oppression, you should come."

Brian: This starts to get into a gray area between legal immigration and people who are undocumented because they're talking about people flooding across the border. Biden has been pretty consistent on this issue at least over the last year. What's the difference between refugee policy and asylum policy, and how would you compare Biden and Trump?

Julia: Refugee policy is with respect to people who are outside of the United States and are applying for protection to come into the United States, and it tends mainly to be from very specific war-related, conflict-related circumstances. For our refugees, we have a very strict vetting that includes the United Nations, so there's a very structured process that takes place overseas for people who come as refugees, and then, when they get here, there's a resettlement program. That's the way that we deal with our refugees.

The asylum system is for people who entered the United States and then ask for protection. In recent years, most of the people seeking asylum have been coming to the southwest border, a lot of them have been from Central America, the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. Those claims are, in some cases, processed by asylum officers, but very often, they go into the immigration court system.

Really, we're talking about two different systems here. The difference is that the asylum claim, in recent years, very often, triggered by someone who doesn't have legal status or travel papers coming to the border saying that they're afraid to go back to their country and asking for protection. Again, you couldn't ask for more contrast because the Trump administration, just a battery of measures to close down access to the asylum system for the people coming from Central America. The principal one from President Trump has been-- I mean, it's hard to disassociate this one program from this whole array of shutdown measures, but the big one has been something called the Remain in Mexico Program.

The misnamed Migrant Protection Protocols, this is a program where the asylum seekers are being made to wait in Northern Mexico while their proceedings happen in immigration courts, slogged through immigration court, which is a very slow process. 70,000 people have now been strewn over the streets of cities in Northern Mexico waiting for their proceedings, and that has had a huge impact on dissuading on what I think is it's the main purpose of the way that the president has designed it, which is just to get people to give up and go home.

Brian: To that point, before we go on to other aspects of the legal immigration system, let's talk briefly about immigration courts, which play a huge role in determining who is granted asylum, legally. You've written that under Trump, "Judges and others in the court system say they are facing an unprecedented effort to restrain due process and politicize the courts with the president's hard-line on immigrants and demands for deportations." That came from one of your articles. How much political pressure our immigration courts and immigration court judges under?

Julia: Let me just-- Before I get to that, I just want to close out your subject on asylum because, since the pandemic, and this is true across the Trump administration, in terms of immigration, the Trump administration has evoked the pandemic to radically shut down all kinds of legal immigration systems, but in the case of asylum at the southwest border, basically, the whole system is shut down.

As to the immigration courts, there has been really unprecedented intervention by the department of justice, which runs the immigration courts into every aspect of the system. They've imposed quotas on immigration judges, they have changed by precedential law, they've issued new opinions that have radically restricted the way that many of these Central American migrants can ask for asylum. The justice department attempted to de-unionize-- They attacked the union of the immigration judges.

That's a complicated issue, but basically, there's been such a high level of confrontation between the administration and the judges that the court has been a site of great tension. The main thing is that when President Trump came in, there was a backlog of about 500,000 cases in the immigration courts. Today, we have a backlog of 1.2 million cases in the immigration courts, which is a backlog that, really, this court system, the way it's currently configured, has no prospect of overcoming.

Brian: Listeners, we're talking with Julia Preston from The Marshall Project, long-time reporter on national immigration policy. She was with the New York Times for a long time. Now, she's with The Marshall Project, that news organization, as we're doing issue 10 in our 30 Issues in 30 Days, Election Series. It's legal immigration. If you have a story, maybe you are a legal immigrant or an applicant for a legal immigration status, who's got an experience that you think reflects changes under the Trump administration and you want to tell your story, or if you have a question comparing Trump and Biden for Julia Preston, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

We've been talking so far about refugee and asylum status as two parts of the legal immigration system. Pulling back even further, Trump has proposed that the immigration system as a whole move away from things like the Diversity Visa Lottery and the Model of Family Reunification as primary criterion under which people can get legal immigration status and more toward, what he calls, a merit-based system. Here he is announcing some proposed changes in May of last year.

President Trump: Random selection is contrary to American values and blocks out many qualified potential immigrants from around the world who have much to contribute. While countless, and you wouldn't believe how many countries like Canada, create a clear path for top talent, America does not.

Brian: There's a lot in that little 30-second clip. Let's take the end of it first. Does Canada, which I think generally has a good reputation around the world for its immigration policies, have the kind of merit-based system that Trump wants to move the United States to?

Julia: I'm not sure that's exactly the model, but Canada does have more of a merit-based system than the United States. I will say that this is an idea of President Trump's that is actually well within the mainstream of the debate that has taken place in the United States over many years. President George W. Bush basically embraced the idea of a merit system in his proposals for immigration reform when he was president. The problem has been-- I do think that this is a direction that the country will eventually go to. Joe Biden hasn't framed his proposals in the same terms, obviously, as a merit system, but he's talking also about finding ways to make the employment-based green card system more flexible and more responsive to labor market conditions.

Our system, as it exists today, is just incredibly bureaucratic. It doesn't work for all kinds of people and employers. Across the country, people are just crying out for some kind of fix to the immigration system. This direction that President Trump is pointing to is certainly part of the debate. The problem has been a political problem, which is that-- You remember he's framed this as-- He's framed it repeatedly in very offensive terms to some of the countries and made it clear that he doesn't think, for example, that immigrants from Africa would be as amenable to what he describes as a merit system. He has not been--

Brian: That's such a nice way of putting what he said about s-hole countries.

Julia: [laughs] We are on the radio. I'm trying to--

Brian: [laughs] You're very professional, Julia. You're very professional.

Julia: I'm sure you appreciate the challenge here of not sinking the conversation to the level that it has seemed to go sometimes.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Markle in Richfield, Connecticut, you're on WNYC. Hello, Markle.

Markle: Hello, Brian. First, thank you so much for being our voice. It's been quite a roller course that we've gone through, and I think you've helped us go through it.

Brian: Thank you, sir.

Markle: I'm originally from the northern part of Spain, from the Basque Country. I came to this country maybe 30 years ago. I just wanted to highlight the stark contrast that I've gone through, that I lived through. This was during the early part of the Clinton administration when I first came here on a student visa, and it was quite easy to do obtain a student visa back then. Then, I got renewals of that visa during his administration, and then, working visas during the Bush administration, and that was quite easy as well. Then, I became a citizen finally before Trump got elected.

I did it because I don't think we should be surprised on how incredibly clear his standing on immigrants was. The reason why I did it was just to protect myself. Now, with the COVID, he's just been no different. His dialogue and his stands on immigrants has not changed a bit, even since he was doing his campaign. I would like to offer that maybe we should or he should call the Pope and ask for a prayer for him, and while he's at it, maybe asked to borrow the popemobile and turn it into a Trump mobile and he can continue with his campaign.

Brian: [laughs] Markle, thank you very much. I'm sure that the Pope is praying for everybody even people like Donald Trump who aren't Catholic. Go ahead, Julia.

Julia: I was just going to say that the sequence that the caller just described, every step of that sequence has been made more bureaucratic and difficult by the Trump administration. In terms of the legal immigration process, they have carried through with their promise to impose, what they called, extreme vetting. Just every step of the way, there are new requirements, new scrutiny. The state department and USCIS, that administers the legal system, have been closing down offices, so it's more difficult to gain access to the officials that you need to speak to be able to get legal immigration, to be able to get legal visas to come to the United States.

One of the big issues for people who are in the United States and are really attempting to do everything that they can for the legal system is, what is known as, the public charge rule, which went into effect in February of this year. Just to be clear about this, this is for people who are legally in the United States and they want to become Green Card holders, they want to become permanent residents of the United States, and now, suddenly, they're facing a lot of scrutiny about whether they would or in the past have used a whole array of public programs.

This is not only had an effect on reducing the number of applications for Green Cards, but it also has had a very chilling effect that has been amply documented in immigrant communities, whether or not they're undocumented, of people reluctant to come forward for testing and public health services in the context of the pandemic. This has been the impact throughout the ripple effect, throughout the whole legal immigration system, to just make it much harder to come to the United States, legally.

Brian: I think we have another story like that on the line. Let's take Suresh on Long Island. Suresh, you're on WNYC. I have to warn you that we're running out of time in the segment, so we have about 30 seconds for you. Thank you so much for calling in.

Suresh: No problem. Hey, Brian, long time listener, first-time caller. I'm a little nervous. I make it quick. I sponsored my mother's Green Card under immediate relative category. It is called IR5. The processing has been completed and she went to India for interview, and then, COVID came and her interview was postponed. Then, Trump put in restrictions I think back in April until June, and then, that was extended until December of this year. The processing is in limbo. The other thing is, her visitor visa was also canceled. I don't know the reason for that. She's not able to come to the United States now.

Brian: Julia, I want to get in two more questions for our remaining two and a half minutes before we take a break, and then, the mayor is on next. Is Suresh's story indicative of them just trying to gum up the works as much as possible for legal immigration applications?

Julia: Well, during the pandemic, the Trump administration has basically closed down legal immigration to the United States. It's been a dramatic reduction in many categories of legal Green Card immigrants as well as temporary immigrants. There was a court case this week that is going to allow many of those temporary immigrants to continue to come. The pandemic has allowed President Trump to impose restrictions that he wasn't able to achieve before COVID-19. We don't really have a clear picture of what he would do to lift those restrictions after the pandemic.

In terms of Joe Biden, it's just a very dramatic contrast. I mean, the word Joe Biden-- The priority word for Joe Biden is undo. He's just talking about unraveling so many of these restrictions that President Trump has imposed through executive action, but also, he's proposing ways to, for example, get more people who are relatives, close relatives, of Green Card holders out of the backlogs, so they don't have to be languishing in these huge backlogs. President Biden has a whole plan to reduce the number of people who are in the backlogs, which is a big part of the reason why the system doesn't work very well.

Brian: I guess, in our last 30 seconds, it goes to a fundamental difference between Trump and Biden on what they think immigration is for. Would you say it's that fundamental?

Julia: I would say that this election is so consequential for this, for immigration policy. It really is a choice between, are we going to be a welcoming nation, or are we going to close the door? It couldn't be more stark, the choice that we have here,

Brian: Julia Preston, contributing writer on immigration for The Marshall Project. That's issue 10 of our 30 Issues in 30 Days segment, legal immigration. We will move on to the undocumented for issue 11 on Monday. Julia, thank you so much.

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