Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. The immigration news just keeps on coming. Late yesterday, another federal judge declared President Obama's DACA program unconstitutional. DACA, as many of you know, but some of you don't, is an acronym for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It's the policy under which people brought here undocumented as children, who basically grew up as Americans, for whom this is functionally their country of origin, wouldn't be deported. The latest ruling still protects those who already have DACA status, but prevents others from being given it. This seems headed to the Supreme Court.

New census bureau numbers show the number and percentage of immigrants in the US has been recovering in the Biden years after being greatly reduced as a centerpiece policy of President Trump. The percentage of foreign-born people living in this country had dipped to around 12% under Trump, it's back up close to 14% now. The record percentage, by the way, was about 15% in the 1890 census according to the Migration Policy Institute. Locally, the percentage of foreign-born people living in New York City is around 35%. The record was around 1910 when more than 40% were foreign-born in the city according to stats published by Hofstra University.

Then of course, there's the asylum seeker influx and policy debate making headlines every day in various ways. Governor Phil Murphy, for example, says New Jersey is a pro-immigrant state, but he's rejecting a federally proposed shelter at the Atlantic City Airport. If the governor were to say yes, that would help New York City with what Mayor Adams and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams are calling a decompression strategy. Here's an exchange I had here with a public advocate about that on last Friday's show.

Jumaane Williams: We absolutely need the help, not just money. Money is a part of it. The Biden White House should be helping us with a decompression strategy so that everything is not coming to New York City that has a small landmass area. The governor just woke up and started providing some assistance, but she too was not helping with decompression strategy to help get some other municipalities across the state, and is refusing to receive and accept that right to shelter is a statewide right in the city and only focus on the city.

Brian Lehrer: He used the phrase decompression strategy. By that, do you mean a federally-guided rational distribution of where asylum seekers who need government shelter are housed in their early days here, so the burden doesn't fall so heavily on the few places like New York where they're choosing so disproportionately to go? You never want to tell anybody, "You have to live in this city, you can't live in that city," but is that what you're talking about under these relatively extreme circumstances?

Jumaane Williams: Absolutely, and you said it so much more eloquently than decompression strategy, but yes, absolutely. All of this is a national problem and it needs a national response.

Brian Lehrer: Public Advocate Jumaane Williams here last week. With us now, Julia Preston, veteran immigration reporter, long with The New York Times now with The Marshall Project. Her latest article is called Migrants Desperate for Jobs Trapped in Asylum Maze. Julia, we always learn things when you come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Preston: Thank you for having me back, Brian. We're here again talking about the mess of our immigration system.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Of course, we'll get to your article, but let's talk about some of these news developments first. That clip of New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams calling for federal decompression strategy or a federal decompression strategy, which, as we explained, involves the federal government placing new arrivals intentionally in different places to not overwhelm New York's capacity to deal with so many all at once. I see the Biden administration has identified 11 shelters around the country. New Jersey's governor is rejecting one for the Atlantic City Airport. We're going to talk about that in more detail with our New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon later in the hour. I don't know about the others. Are you familiar at all whether this is a way Biden can help New York significantly?

Julia Preston: I think this is pointing up a failure of our asylum system. It could make a contrast with the refugee system, for example, which is a separate process for people who are coming to the United States and seeking protection. In that system, the federal government and the resettlement agencies are very active in deciding where a person seeking protection will end up living. We don't have any of that in our asylum system, which is so broken.

The clamor that has been coming from Mayor Adams, from Governor Hochul, from the mayor of Chicago, from Boston, the governor of Massachusetts is for the federal government to step in and do more to distribute where asylum seekers will go as they leave the border. At the moment, there is no system in place like that. Essentially, what's happened is that the busing last year by the governor of Texas set up a migrant stream towards New York that the City of New York has not been able to stop. For the moment, it doesn't seem there's a federal plan to try and assist this so-called decompression either except for the shelters that the federal government is offering.

Brian Lehrer: Why are the asylum system and the refugee system different in this respect? I think a lot of listeners probably don't even really know the difference between refugee status and asylum status, maybe a quick refresher from you is warranted, but then why are they different in this respect?

Julia Preston: Because the refugee system was set up after World War II to handle people who were still overseas and who needed protection from political and religious persecution. The asylum system is a stepchild of that system. It was never contemplated to handle the volume of people, the sheer numbers of people who are coming to the United States and asking for protection. The asylum system just doesn't have any of the development that the refugee system has in terms of resettlement, in terms of guiding resettlement and supporting resettlement.

Brian Lehrer: Do you know if President Biden has the power to say, "Okay, New York and maybe other cities, I get it. We're going to do what we do with refugees with asylum seekers starting tomorrow."

Julia Preston: I don't think he does. The refugee process and the asylum processes are largely established in statute. I do think that there could be much more coordination between the authorities at the border, the local authorities in places like New York, the cities, and the federal government. The federal government can't make orders, but it could do a lot more to facilitate a good conversation. The problem is that the tension level is so high throughout the system that it seems unlikely that that coordination would take place.

What I do think is possible is a friendlier conversation within states. I think there could be a more productive conversation between Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul. It seems like that's beginning to happen. The governor could, I think, do more to have a collaborative relationship with some of the localities around the country that might be willing to take asylum seekers based on the fact that, actually, Upstate New York for many years has been incredibly friendly to refugees. The resettlement of refugees has been a highlight of Buffalo, Ithaca. There are cities in Upstate New York that have just been champions of resettling refugees. It's just the politics of this local situation and the crisis level that has made that conversation tense.

Brian Lehrer: I realize you're not a New York State politics reporter but a national immigration reporter. Your impression then is that Governor Hochul could do more to institute the same kind of decompression strategy that Adams and Williams are talking about at the federal level, at the state level?

Julia Preston: I think it's a matter of collaboration, of getting localities to agree to accept migrants to come to their places. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about resettlement, refocusing the resettlement of asylum seekers or these new migrants to other places besides New York City. They're coming to New York because the person before them came to New York and they received shelter. New York is a victim of its own success, I think, in this situation. What this does is really point up the glaring absence of an efficient resettlement process or distribution process as a matter of law in our asylum system. We really need that, and we don't have it right now.

Brian Lehrer: Since you have a national view on all this, are other cities going through what New York is going through with respect to an influx percentage-wise similar in Philadelphia or Chicago? I hear cities like those named but I don't know if they have a right-to-shelter law like New York does, or if that changes the flow.

Julia Preston: No city is dealing with the kind of numbers that New York is dealing with. A couple of weeks ago, the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, declared a state of emergency based on, I think, less than 6,000 people who have settled in Massachusetts.

Brian Lehrer: Doesn't sound like an emergency to me.

Julia Preston: Well, if you're talking about providing local housing and shelter, it felt like an emergency to her. I think she was trying to get out ahead of it. The city of Chicago, the mayor of Chicago, has also said, "We need federal help with this problem." There are cities-- I think of the city of Washington DC was the first city to experience a focus and concentrated influx. Mayors have been dealing with this problem across the country.

Brian Lehrer: Nobody else has a right to shelter in the way that New York does. Is that your understanding?

Julia Preston: I'm not sure about that, Brian, but definitely, the right to shelter law in New York City has been a fundamental reason why this influx has been different, for example, from the comparisons that people have been making to Ellis Island and previous large movements of immigrants into the city, those predated a situation where the city government is obligated to provide shelter to people who don't have it.

Brian Lehrer: My producer, Mary, informs me that Massachusetts does have a different version than New York of right to shelter. It's for homeless families but not individuals I am told. There is that similarity and that difference. My guest is Julia Preston, national immigration reporter for The Marshall Project. We can take phone calls for her on any of this or the DACA news declared unconstitutional by another federal court, but that legal battle continues. Any DACA recipients listening right now who want to call in on your status, or people who think you would qualify for DACA if they were to open it up to more people who were brought here undocumented as children but basically grew up here?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text or tweet @BrianLehrer, or anything on the so-called decompression strategy we've been talking about so far with Julia Preston. Julia's new article on The Marshall Project site is called Migrants Desperate for Jobs Trapped in Asylum Maze. It begins with a story of a man named Juan Carlos Bello, an immigrant from Venezuela, who gets expelled from a shelter in Brooklyn. You want to tell us a little bit about his story as a way into your article?

Julia Preston: I think his story is representative of so many stories. Juan Carlos Bello is from Venezuela. He had a thriving business in Venezuela before he was forced to flee for political reasons. He has been living in a shelter in New York. He's very grateful to the city for that assistance, but basically, Juan Carlos is a working man. He says himself, "I am used to living on what I produce." He wants to work, he wants to be able to send money back to his family. He's never intended to depend on the city government or to live in a shelter. He just wants to get to work so he can start paying his own way. The reason he can't do that is because the asylum statute mandates 180 days before a person can be eligible for work authorization.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Do you want to finish the thought? Go ahead.

Julia Preston: Yes. It's 180 days before you can be eligible for work authorization. Most of the migrants in New York are waiting a year before they're filing their asylum applications. This 180 day count starts when you file your asylum application. Most migrants, because it's a very complex process, and if you get it wrong at the beginning, you really hurt your chances to succeed. Most migrants are waiting until a one-year deadline that exists before when you have to file your asylum application. In practice, most of the migrants who have come recently to New York City, because they believe that the asylum system is the only way that they can get work authorization, are waiting as long as 18 months before they can be legally authorized to work.

Brian Lehrer: This is what we usually hear as topic number one that Mayor Adams is raising with the federal government. I elevated the decompression strategy question to the top of this segment because I think it's really interesting and a potential partial meaningful solution there that doesn't get as much attention. We talked about that, but now on this work authorization issue, again, just as we talked about the possibility of New York state entering into its own decompression strategy agreement, the city and the state at the state level for migrants to be placed in different cities around New York, statewide. New York City and New York State are considering state or city-level work permits because the feds are stuck in the way you just described and other ways. Do you know if that's been done before?

Julia Preston: I don't know for sure if it has been tried before but what I can tell you is that such an initiative, if the intention was to provide a document that would encourage employers to hire someone who does not have legal federal work authorization, that initiative would be immediately subject to a court challenge and would be very vulnerable. I can imagine that this could evolve into some kind of identification system, a little bit like the municipal ID that New York already has where the city would do more to provide a document and perhaps make connections with people who are looking for certain kinds of jobs. The hard reality, I think, in legal terms is that the federal government is in charge of running the immigration system. On this question, a state or local level work permit would be vulnerable immediately to challenge in the courts.

Brian Lehrer: Speaking of challenging in the courts, here's Richard in Brooklyn, an immigration lawyer. He says, calling in. Richard, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Richard: Good morning. The longer I wait on hold, the less I have to say because Ms. Preston is right with everything that she says on the delays in employment authorization.

Brian Lehrer: Huh, validation is a good thing, right, Julie?

Julia Preston: True.

Richard: I'm sorry, man. Sorry, but she knows what she's talking about. What I want to add is, by the way, the last point about federal work authorization being required is absolutely correct because an employer has to verify that somebody has the right to work. There's a list of documents and there's an identity document, but then it has to be a federal work authorization or a social security card that doesn't have any limitations on it. The state work permit is a great idea but I don't think it's going to pass [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Right. I guess, Richard, as a matter of politics, what Adams at the city level or Hochul at the state level could decide they want to do is implement it and then have the fight, as opposed to listen to the advice from lawyers like you and think, "Well, we're going to lose this eventually, so let's not go there." They could implement it. Hope they win in court. In the meantime, some people could work.

Richard: By all means. I think it's worth a shot, and if we lose, we lose. If I can make another point.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Richard: In order to be eligible for work authorization, you can't file the application for work authorization until you're asylum application is been on file for 150 days, then USCIS doesn't even begin to adjudicate it for another 30 days. The system is so overwhelmed. I have clients who have been here forever who are not asylum applicants who just finally could walk there to renew their work authorization, taking six months, nine months for a very, very routine procedure.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a real foundational problem in law schools, large law firms, volunteer agencies. We need many, many more lawyers to create volunteer clinics, where people are helping people file their asylum applications. Asylum application is not just filling out a form saying, "I'm afraid to go home, please protect me and let me file for employment authorization."

It has to be really, really detailed. There's an art to it, because once something is on file, the person has to be able to stand behind it and direct their application. Its accompanied by an affidavit which forms the basis of their testimony. Again, the foundation problems are taking so much time. We need more volunteers who are knowledgeable enough or trained to get the filing applications on [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Lawyers looking for some pro bono work to do. There you go, take that plea from Richard if you are willing. Related to that, Senator Gillibrand was on the program on this last week and said that the system needs more immigration judges, and more immigration courts, because this gets backed up in a bottleneck that exists at various points in the system, including that these asylum applications once they're filed takes so long to get to court and the people remain in limbo all that time in various ways. Richard, thank you for chiming in on that. Julia, here's a text from a listener who writes, "Please ask Julia to finish the story of Juan Carlos. Why did the shelter in Brooklyn expel him?"

Julia Preston: He was expelled because he's a single male. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York is attempting to cut down on the shelter population, and so he was expelled to make room for migrant families who have arrived more recently. He is doing what I think most migrants are doing, which is they have to live. They can't not work at all. Odd jobs all around the city, delivery, restaurant work, they are taking odd jobs to off the books.

Brian Lehrer: Selling candy and flowers on the off-ramps to the Deegan. I've seen them.

Julia Preston: This is the opposite of what the asylum system should be doing. It is creating a new undocumented workforce in the city of New York. It may be temporary. Eventually, many of these folks will go through the process and get their work permits, but for the time being, we just have all of a sudden a large new undocumented workforce in New York. Brian, I did want to point out to you that the federal government has responded after months of Mayor Adams increasingly escalating pleas, shall we say, and complaints. The White House did respond, and they came up with a solution that has actually been there for quite a while now.

On September 1, they started to point this out to people in New York and around the country, which is that migrants who were allowed into the country on a temporary permission that is known as a parole are immediately eligible to apply for work authorization. They don't have to wait the 180 days required by the asylum system. There may be quite a number of those migrants in New York. It's a varied cast of migrants.

If a migrant, for example, came into the United States across the border with an appointment on an app that the Department of Homeland Security has made available, it's called CBP One. This is a new mode of entry that the Biden administration has made available this year. If you came through the border with an appointment on a CBP One app, you were paroled into the country, you received a parole. The people who have received those paroles are already eligible to apply for work authorization, but many don't know it.

Also, people who have come into the country through a parole program that the administration created over the last year for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Venezuelans, those people also have received paroles, and they are eligible immediately to apply for work authorization. There may be many more people out there who still have valid existing paroles, who also may be immediately eligible to apply for work authorization. I'm hoping that your listeners will, if they are engaged in this process of working with the migrants and trying to figure out a way out of this process, of this crisis, that people will be encouraged to check and see if they have a parole that might make them eligible to apply immediately for work authorization.

Brian Lehrer: That's really interesting. I see in your article that you wrote on September 1st, "Department of Homeland Security officials began texting hundreds of thousands of migrants in New York and around the country alerting them that they could apply right away for work permits," under the programs you just described. Hundreds of thousands? I mean, there are only a little over 100,000 in New York in the last year-and-a-half that everybody's talking about. Are almost all the migrants who've been in the news as a group eligible for these work permits?

Julia Preston: I don't think it would be almost all for the following reason. For example, we have the case of Juan Carlos Bello. Juan Carlos came in a year ago on a parole for one year. He was eligible all that time to apply immediately for work authorization, but he didn't know it because the administration was not advertising this reality. Now his parole has expired, and he's in an asylum process, so he will not be able to apply immediately for work authorization. I think lots of the migrants who came last year might also be in a similar situation, but there may be people who were granted paroles for two years, for example, or paroles that don't have an end date.

It was so chaotic at the border in 2022 that paroles were being issued willy-nilly. That may benefit some of the people who are in New York right now, but it could be thousands of people, which would, obviously, make a difference in the situation in New York, where everyone agrees, the migrants agree they don't want to be taking city services for the most part. They don't want to be living at city shelters. They want to work and support their families, and support themselves, and integrate into this wonderful city and wonderful nation that in the past has done such a spectacular job of integrating immigrants into our society.

Brian Lehrer: We've been reaching out to the federal government to try to get somebody to come on and be interviewed about this. All these city officials are coming on, the federal government officials so far, no response. We'll see if anybody takes that invitation. We'll continue in a minute with Julia Preston from The Marshall Project, a news site that covers the justice system. We'll talk next about the new ruling last night declaring DACA unconstitutional in a federal court, and DACA recipients calling in about that. Angel in Glen Cove, we see you. Perla in Brooklyn, we see you. You'll be the first two callers with Julia right after this.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Julia Preston, who covers national immigration angles for The Marshall Project. Some of you remember when she was the New York Times National Immigration Reporter and came on the show many times in that role over a number of years. This news about DACA. DACA declared unconstitutional by another federal court. In fact, we have a snarky text from somebody who writes, "I guess DACA now stands for Declared Against the Constitution Again." Are you familiar with the constitutional arguments?

Julia Preston: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: I'm asking you. Yes.

Julia Preston: I am familiar with the constitutional arguments, but basically, this judge, Judge Hanen in the Southern District of Texas, has ruled previously on DACA and found it to be procedurally invalid and a burden on the State of Texas and other states that were arguing against DACA. His ruling yesterday, he basically finds that the efforts that the Biden administration made to correct the DACA rule to accommodate his objections failed. That the rule is currently the way the Biden administration has presented it and preserved it is identical to the rule that he struck down the last time, and so he struck it down again.

He has done this time the same thing he did the last time he was able to rule on DACA, which is he did not force the program to close. He has left the program in place for the people who already have DACA protections. I think the judge is anticipating that this will go back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and from there it will get to the Supreme Court. For the time being, the practical effect of this ruling is that the status quo continues. The status quo is very problematic, but people who have DACA will not lose their protections anytime soon.

Brian Lehrer: The number I see is around 600,000 people who that applies to, people who came here as children, were really brought here by their parents or other relatives having no say in it as kids. Basically grew up American and were declared immune, at least for now, from deportation by President Obama but the constitutionality of a president doing that being challenged in court as we've been hearing. Angel in Glen Cove, a DACA recipient calling in. You're on WNYC. Hello, Angel.

Angel: Hey, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. This is actually my second time calling.

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Angel: I just wanted to say that, an interesting fact to share is that DACA recipients in the US are the parents of 200,000, if not more US American citizen kids. Two of those kids are my kids. It's really personal and this is, in my personal opinion, is that this is just an attack, continuous attack since the day Trump decided to cancel DACA without any solution in place. It's been a continuous back and forth going to court, waking up in the morning thinking, "When is Judge Hanen going to rule on DACA? What's going to happen?" We had a victory recently at the Supreme Court, which was a half-victory because it's restarted the process to just allow us to have more time.

At the same time, it created a blueprint for the conservatives, the Republicans to keep attacking DACA. Now we know that DACA might go back to the Supreme Court in two years. This Supreme Court that we have now, it's not the Supreme Court that we had back in 2020. It's a tilted Supreme Court that's leaning conservative and we're not hopeful. I think we might be seeing the termination of DACA, even though the Supreme Court has ruled positively in a few immigration items, but most likely this will not be one of them. What does it mean for DACA recipients, for parents, people that just want to work?

At the same time, there's still people in limbo that sent their application that actually USCIS cashed their checks, they paid for their application fee, which is almost $500, and then the application got suspended because of the court decisions. Not only people lost their money, but also they're still undocumented. We have many, many, many young people that are graduating high school and are undocumented with no possibility to legally work in the US. It's unfair. We definitely have to find a solution. We feel like the Biden administration had an opportunity and they didn't do anything regarding not only that, but the overall immigration issue.

Brian Lehrer: Go a little more into that, and I appreciate the clarity and depth of your explanation of the situation. What do you think the Biden administration, which supports the DACA program, could have done more than it has done to protect it?

Angel: There's some bad popularity within the American people when it comes to supporting DACA. I think if you look at the polls, it's like over 75% of Americans think there should be a pathway to citizenship for dreamers. If you really look at the people, the DACA recipients, most of us are students or workers have businesses. I personally work for a non-profit doing a lot of work with the community, even with new arrivals, advocating in my community. I think they need to consider that. Even though I don't like to just support DACA recipients because the people that need the pathway to citizenship is bigger than DACA recipients.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Angel: It's the low-hanging fruit, and Biden couldn't [crosstalk] --

Brian Lehrer: Since there's a lot of public support for the dreamers or the DACA recipients. Angel, I'm going to go on to our next caller but thank you for all of that. Yes, Angel points out something that many of you listening may not know. While DACA recipients are allowed to stay in the country for now and are allowed to work, legally, it is not a path to citizenship. That would take another act of the federal government in order to change. That is correct, Julia, right?

Julia Preston: Yes. I would mention that the crux of Judge Hanen's ruling is he says, "This program is too big and has lasted too long not to have approval from Congress." The crux of Judge Hanen's ruling is something that just about everybody who knows about this situation is saying, which is, "Congress, it's time to step up." Only Congress can open a pathway to citizenship and permanent status in the United States for these dreamers.

We keep going back and around and around on DACA. I think also we should mention and highlight the point that the caller made, which is that there is a whole new generation of, I think by this time, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants out there who are in the same situation that the dreamers were in when DACA was created. They have not been able to get into the DACA program because of Judge Hanen's prior rulings. There's a whole new generation of undocumented youth out there who are really crying out for some form of protection. It's time, it really is on Congress and President Biden to get a permanent solution to this problem.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Perla in Brooklyn, also a DACA recipient. I know I told you you'd be next, but we're getting a call from Mexico, and that doesn't happen every day. Let me squeeze Victoria in Mexico in here next. Victoria, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Victoria: Hello. Thank you. I wanted to ask Ms. Preston what happens to a family, we had a lot of Haitian immigrants go through Mexico, go to the United States, a family that already has children and has a child born in the United States, what is their situation? Is the baby an American citizen and the rest of the family is illegal? Is there no the old uncle baby thing? I don't know. Do they have absolutely no protection, and does that discourage them from applying for legal status, essentially, at the end of the day?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Victoria. I will add, Julia, that this is coming up. I'm sure you've heard it in the Republican presidential primary process where some of the candidates are saying, "No, babies born in the United States shouldn't automatically be US citizens if their parents are undocumented." That might go against the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, but it's a political talking point right now to make those people targets.

Julia Preston: Any person born in the United States is a United States citizen. We do have birthright citizenship. I would remind the Republicans that birthright citizenship was enacted in an amendment to the constitution so that the children of freed slaves would be American citizens. It has a very significant legacy and history in our country, but the immigration system does not allow anything resembling immediate citizenship for the parents of US citizen children.

In fact, you have to wait 21 years before you can apply, if you're a child, to get legal status for your parents, which is the situation of the caller who spoke earlier. He has two United States citizen children, and you could hear the painful anxiety in his voice. He has two citizen children and yet he still doesn't have certainty that he can be there for them, that he won't be deported from the United States sometime in the future. It's really hard to describe how difficult that is and how much anxiety is a permanent feature of life if you're in that situation. Unfortunately, that is our current situation in terms of our immigration system.

Brian Lehrer: Victoria, it's not the answer you were hoping for, probably, but I hope that answered your question at least. Call us again. Perla in Brooklyn, now it's your turn. Hi, Perla. I have to apologize because we've got about 30 seconds for you, but hi.

Perla: Oh, good morning. It's okay. Thank you, Brian, for having us. My name is Perla Silver from Brooklyn, New York. I work with the amazing Make the Road. I just wanted to share how upsetting a lot of us are. I would speak for myself, but I work with the community directly and I know that we are very sad, we're angry, we're frustrated.

I myself have been in this country for 27 years now, that is my whole life. To hear the news that there is now the possibility of deportation, this conversation again. I have a child myself, and how do I explain to my child once again that there may be a moment where I will not be able to take her to school? It's just so many upsetting things that I have to explain to my child of why mommy may not be here tomorrow, or et cetera.

I work with Make the Road, and just to know that we have to do this groundwork directly because nobody else will advocate for us. We have to do it ourselves, the activists, the members ourselves. We have to go to Texas. We took our time off from work. We had to go to Texas just to hear this judge, and now telling us that this is unlawful is complete-- very upset. I cannot find any proper way to say that. Once again, this goes back to the member of Republicans having to continuously breaking our families apart. Republicans want to say that they will work for the working class and they want to benefit the taxpayers working class of this country, but we know that it's a complete lie. In New York, we have a lot of Republican representatives that are--

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me extend you for one more answer by acknowledging that we have a number of callers and people texting us who say the problem is the work. That, finally in recent years, American working-class workers are starting to catch up a little bit in terms of income inequality and inflation outpacing wages, not just in the current wave of inflation, but for decades. Now we're going to get all these new workers to compete with them and push the wage scale down. What do you say to that, Perla, as a member of the activist group, Make the Road, and then we're out of time.

Perla: It's interesting that you ask that question because New York was built by immigrants. They cannot contradict themselves when they make that comment because we are, regardless, working. We want to make sure that we're working with, they would say, "legally". We want to pay taxes. We want to support this great state. Continuing to build this great nation by allowing us to continue working and paying our taxes.

Brian Lehrer: Perla, I'm going to leave it there. I appreciate your call. Good luck to you and your family. We're going to leave it there with Julia Preston who covers national immigration issues for The Marshall Project. Her new article is called Migrants Desperate for Jobs Trapped in Asylum Maze. Julia, thanks for all the information and depth of knowledge that you bring here.

Julia Preston: Thank you, Brian.

 

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