#1651 The Politics of Migration in the Age of Insecurity: From the UK riots to GOP fear-mongering

In that information vacuum, stepped a huge misinformation on social media where someone came up with the idea that the assailant was a Muslim who'd recently arrived in the UK as an undocumented migrant and was known to security services here. Now, this was false. The person who allegedly did this was not born abroad, was born in the UK, the son of migrants from Rwanda, a largely Christian country.

Nevertheless, this took hold and within a day of this tragic killing, far-right people online were whipping up anger. Soon there were protests in Southport against the police and against the local mosque. That lit a fuse, really. In the following days, we saw looting, arson, attacks on police in a dozen or so cities across the UK in some of the worst violence we've seen, really, here since at least 2011.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Now, just to back up a second, the motive of the attacker, do we know what that was in any respect? No. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: No, we don't know what the-- We don't know what the motive of the attacker was. The police have said it's not terrorism-related, so it seems not to have been inspired by any particular ideology, but that's all we know at the moment.

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Then the spread of this misinformation that this was a migrant, new migrant, how did this spread so quickly online? Was it just the nature of bad actors on the Internet and then people jumping on that?

Well, it's a toxic combination of A, far-right commentators who've been allowed back onto a lot of platforms, notably X, formally, Twitter, in recent years by Elon Musk, and have built up large followings there were tweeting this out aggressively and we're using and piggybacking off this rumor to say, "We need to reclaim our streets. We need to protect our society from foreign influences. We need to fight back." This was also being parroted by bots run by state actors in Russia and so forth.

It did tap into an underlying sentiment in some quarters of the population that immigration had run out of control in the UK. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Sure.

Because you have to remember, there is a real problem here, or a real issue here, which is that the government essentially has allowed huge amounts of migration in the last two years, up to 2.5 million people have come and settled here and has not found a way to stop people coming and settling illegally in the UK by sailing in small boats across from France. That's one of the rumors after this killing was that the person who did this had arrived in the UK on one of these small boats from France.

You had this toxic brew going on and it just span out of control. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: You have this tragic incident, the misinformation follows, and then the violence. Were you out in the streets? Did you witness some of these scenes of violence and vandalism? The violence was really quite indiscriminate. That's what's really shocking here, was that it was against-- it wasn't even that targeted.

There were libraries being burnt down, police stations being burnt down, shops. It was opportunistic and it was being committed by people who had nothing. Not all of them are far-right activists. A lot of them were bored teenagers on their summer vacations, or disaffected locals who got carried away. It really did light a tinderbox, this tragedy. It's taken a long time to start to bring under control.

The one thing, if there is a positive to come out of this, it's that last night we expected another evening of mass unrest with 100 or so protests planned across Britain. Actually what transpired was that there were protests, but they were counter-protests, there were anti-racism protests where thousands of people filled the streets of cities across the country to say, "We don't stand for this and we're not going to put up with it. Stop racism and stop the far-right."

As a result, there wasn't any unrest, which is hopefully going to take the energy out of some of this and bring an end to this period of violence.

Or, the rumor in Rotherham was that two women had been raped by asylum seekers and that the authorities had covered it up. And obviously that, you know, for me, that – as a journalist – that would be a very good story if I could stand that up. And I'm just completely unable to find any evidence that that's the case. But it sort of doesn't matter because it, it goes around on social media. People hear it. Everybody has heard… heard it from somebody else.

You know, nobody's the person that it's happened to. NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: And those who are in the streets rioting, injuring police officers, destroying public property. What are the rioters saying about what their intent is? Yeah. It's interesting, because I think there are kind of different groups involved in these riots. So there are the kind of really traditional old school far right.

We used to have a group in the UK called the National Front – well, it still exists, but it's not as significant as it was in the 1970s and 1980s – that was a very strong far-right group. A racist group. And so there are some of those kind of people, but there are a lot of younger people.

And I think it would be naive to say that they're… that they’re only coming for a fight and they're only coming… You know, in the same way that that we might have football hooliganism in the UK, you know, some people will say that they're they're coming for that, they're coming for the sport of the riot and they're coming to, you know, exert themselves and to, to get something out of their system.

There may be a few cases of that – I think there probably are a few cases of that – But there's also, you know, the young people that I heard in these riots chanting things, you know, were saying a lot of the same racist stuff as the older people. So you know, maybe people haven't thought too much about it.

Maybe they're not very political people, but, you know, they they might still use a racist slur because they can and because it makes no difference to them and because they don't really think about the harm that those things can cause. NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: This, this all got started with a rumor that the boy who had stabbed these, these little girls was an immigrant. Have rumors continued to contribute to what's going on?

Either rumors or deliberate misinformation – sometimes called disinformation, I suppose. I think disinformation and misinformation has had a really pivotal role in the last seven days.

This would be his first real crisis – and it is a real crisis. How is he perceived to be handling this and how is he handling this? Keir Starmer is a very interesting character because, when we had some riots, a very kind of different set of riots in kind of urban areas and London and other cities in 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions.

So kind of like your chief prosecutor, essentially making decisions about how these rioters would be handled by the courts, how they'd be prosecuted. And his method of prosecuting was bringing people in quickly, prosecuting them quickly. So there were late night courts running, courts running over the weekend in order to process the large numbers of, of rioters.

And so, so far we're seeing something very similar to, to back then he's, you know, he he's very keen on clamping down immediately on the rioters. And you can kind of see the method in that as well.

The key point you are making is that this does not appear to be over. What should we take from all of this? What does this tell us more broadly about what is happening in the UK right now? I think this year, this summer of 2024, is going to be defined, I think, as being a summer of, of rioting. We may have seen the worst of it.

That, that could obviously be famous last words, but one thing we do know, obviously, in the UK is: when the weather gets worse, we're not going to see people out on the streets in the same way as we do over the summer. NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Mm. We have very short summers in the UK, so you know, we're talking about weeks of this, not months of this, from what I'm able to gather.

And so although the riots, I think, will start to die down in the next couple of weeks the sentiment will not go away. And I think it's something that's going to… It's going to take as long as it took to kind of build it up as it is to dissipate it. NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Mm. And I don't have any answers about what we can do to kind of improve that sentiment. And, you know, that's… It’s something that I feel very worried about.

And I feel… although we, we in the UK rarely descend into any kind of real nationwide violence, you know, there's – people from abroad have been saying that, ‘Oh, you know, it's going to end in a civil war.’ And it's, you know, that's absurd. But, we do have to worry about… about this. SCORING GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Take a look around the California of 2019.

The state is a beacon for progressive politics in the US, a land of environmentalism and multiculturalism, where vegans and Priuses roam, and taco trucks stand on every corner. And it's the center of the hashtag resistance to President Trump and his policies.

Even Orange County, a place Ronald Reagan once described as where [in comic Reagan voice] "all the good Republicans go to die", is going Democrat. But it wasn't always this way. California was once something of a red state, or at least a purple one. It gave the US Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

And then the ad ends with this really hopeful, angelic music as Pete Wilson promises to crack down on "them".

Because before President Trump, there was Proposition 187.

And in the pretty suburban town of Yorba Linda, Orange County, Proposition 187 is about to be born. Yorba Linda is Nixon country, literally. He was born here. Big suburban tract homes that owners try to pass off as if they're in old Mexico, with the tiled roof and street names in Spanish. Not many Mexicans around here though. Just saying. Hi, Barbara.

I'm visiting Barbara and Bob because they ran the 187 campaign. You could say they're 187's unlikely godparents. Unlikely because... We actually did not see illegal immigration as a big problem for us. We live in a nice community. We didn't see it, but we did have a friend by the name of Ron Prince, and Ron was really looking to get involved. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Ron Prince plays a big part in our story.

Lanky, with bushy eyebrows and a comb over, he was a gadfly in local Republican politics. He wanted to do a statewide proposition on anything. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: In California, anyone who gets enough valid signatures, around 400,000 of them at that time, can place a proposition on the ballot about anything. It's a kind of direct democracy you don't see in most states. So, Ron Prince, according to Barbara, wanted to think of an idea that might actually have a chance of passing.

He'd come here in his cowboy boots, and we'd give him a yellow legal pad and a pen. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: And they'd tell him, go find an issue people really care about. And ding dong, on the doorbell on Saturday morning, he said, I think I have one. I just got ripped off by an illegal alien, and he was supposed to be a contractor, and he ripped me off. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: So here's what happened.

Ron said a contractor he was working with ripped him off for half a million dollars. According to Ron, the guy was an illegal Canadian. Later on, reporters would track down the contractor, and it would turn out he was a legal resident. But anyways, Ron thinks: illegal immigration, that's a winner. And he goes out with his legal pad to a grocery store up the block from the Kiley's home and asks people a simple question. Do you believe illegal immigration is a problem in California?

He comes back with pages of signatures. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: On that first time. On that first time. You know, Ron, I think you got something here. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Whether or not Pete Wilson regrets 187, a lot of people will tell you that it had profound effects on California, especially on Latinos in California. In 1994, Gerardo Correa was a high school student who had a political awakening when 187 landed on the ballot.

His entire life, he had assumed that he was just like anyone else in California. As American as a bald eagle. The night 187 passed, Gerardo realized in the eyes of his White neighbors, he'd never be American enough. So, he vowed to do something about it.

During our interview, I asked him a question I've been thinking about a lot. Do you think ultimately 187 won? Well, I think it initially won, obviously, because it passed, but no, it didn't. It lost, and it lost in so many different aspects. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Like which ones? Well, look at the health of the Republican Party in California today.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Every year, Gerardo visits the state capital in Sacramento with the latest class of the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project. It's the group he belonged to when he first heard about 187. Gerardo's now president of the non-profit. When I went to the conference in '94, I sat in the assembly floor and I remember seeing two, maybe three, Spanish surnames. But now I went back and I counted 36 names. So, you talk about impact, you talk about a change.

I mean, I'm looking at this board of legislators. I'm like, there it is. It's right there. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Gloria Molina has a similar take on 187.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: The prevailing narrative is that Wilson's embrace of 187 doomed the Republican Party in California forever after. Wilson and his defenders reject that, of course. But just ask the Latinos who lived through 187 and are still around. Ask people like me. Better yet, ask California's Latino Legislative Caucus. To coincide with the 25th anniversary of Prop 187, they're releasing a short film titled Thank you, Pete Wilson.

But if Pete Wilson and the state GOP met their Waterloo with 187, the proposition didn't suffer the same fate nationally. It inspired dozens of states and cities to craft similar measures.

In one Virginia county, a proposed measure would require all county agencies to check on immigration status, including police, schools, libraries, hospitals, clinics, swimming pools, and summer camps. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: 187 has also manifested itself in the White House. And President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric sounds a lot like Pete Wilson's of 25 years ago.

Barbara Kiley said she'd forward my request to Ron for an interview, but I never heard back from either of them. In any case, Barbara and her husband, they'll take Trump.

For Californians who fought 187, it's déjà vu, all over again. Or maybe it's even worse. Just like Wilson, Trump bashed immigrants, and won. I asked Gerardo Correa what he thought about that. It seems, at least right now on the national scale, that's a playbook that will win just like it did in '94.

Hell, I was half expecting those White boys from Anaheim High to start yelling at me again. But I also saw young Latinos protesting Trump while waving Mexican flags. My generation needed 187 and Wilson to jolt us into activism, and now this generation has Trump. This awakening isn't just in California either. Anthony Rendon is the state's current Speaker of the Assembly. He sees other states going through the same kind of demographic changes that California went through back in the 90s.

And I will say I know the Republican Party gets a lot of shit for only landing D list celebrities, but I do have to hand it to them. Booking the actual pair from the American gothic painting was a pretty good get. And look, it's no accident Republicans were focusing so hard on immigration. Recent polling shows it's the second most important issue among Americans. But a big reason for that is the relentless, bad faith fear mongering around the issue by the Republican Party itself.

Perhaps best summed up by the startling growth this year, of the toxic phrase, "migrant crime". Now, starting in late January, Fox began using it a lot, and always to build a very specific narrative.

Basically, migrant crime is a phrase that seemed to come out of nowhere And then we're suddenly all over the place. Like, "what the sigma?" And "skibbity toilet". And by the way, those are real phrases used by the younger generations, or they were, until I just ruined them by having them slide out of my old mouth.

And as the use of that term skyrocketed, there was a correlating spike in concern about immigration, with the number of Americans who viewed it as their number one issue jumping eight points between January and February. But, this wasn't reflecting anything happening in the real world. Because to be very clear, there is no migrant crime wave happening right now. In fact, there is no crime wave at all.

Crime in general has been trending downward in recent years, including this one, with murder, rape, robbery, and property crime all decreasing, even as talk of migrants committing those crimes has exploded. As for migrant crime, specifically, experts will tell you there is no evidence of a relationship between somebody's immigrant status and their involvement in crime.

In fact, while most states don't track crime data by immigration status, in the one state that does—Texas—researchers have found the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate is roughly 45 percent below that of native born Americans. And yet, despite that, there has been a wave of conservatives claiming there is a wave of migrant crime. And that is almost definitely going to be continuing until November. So given that, tonight, let's talk about "migrant crime".

And let's start with where exactly the term came from. Because if you listen to Trump, which obviously you should not, he'll say it was all his idea.

Although, I will say, he has tried to innovate the phrase. At one point this year, he told an audience that it should be called "Biden migrant crime", but that's too long, which is true. And luckily, he workshopped a solution to that problem in real time. Because Joe Biden allowed this to happen. We will call it from now on, Biden migrant crime. Okay? It's Bigrant Crime. This is, we'll call it, I got it, Bigrant. Let's call it Bigrant. Biden Crime. Oh, that's good. That's... smart.

I think these conditions that many of us are organizing in for this current election, the stakes are higher than ever. And you can see the rhetoric is about… It is about the threat and the fear, fearmongering that the Republican Party is doing, in which Donald Trump has made his main rhetoric and his main charge, even his pick of his vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. He’s not trying to bring people of color, BIPOC voters in with him.

He’s doubling down on a white nationalist, white supremacist platform. So I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that’s a political moment that we’re in. And the conditions are extremely heavy. They’re very difficult. We have a escalating genocide in Gaza and a sitting president who continues to support it while we also have the threat of Trump who’s openly sharing plans to destroy progressive social movements in the United States and communities of color.

So these times are just very difficult, and we’re holding both the urgency of the crisis and this current election, as well as the long-term root causes we need to be addressing and the long-term strategy we have to build in order to end the violence that immigrant communities are facing in all these shifts. So I think that what I would like to speak on a little bit is just the threat of MAGA and what is really the difference between a MAGA administration and a Democratic administration.

Obviously, we know that Democrats and Biden have not delivered on immigration. Everyone knows that. The last attempt to push forward in 2020 and 2021 was not successful, and that Biden has continued to not deliver around asylum, and the way that he’s continued to “close” the border has also been extremely anti-immigrant and led to a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment as well.

But I think we have to be clear that with the Trump administration, they are going to continue to… Stephen Miller will continue to be his senior advisor on this, who was the architect of the Anti-Immigrant Family Separation Program during the first Trump administration, that the defensive layers that we had previously in the courts and the appellate and Supreme Court, that’s not the same as the previous administration. We had the previous Supreme Court who actually made the DACA decision.

This Supreme Court will not do anything that’s going to be beneficial for immigrant communities. So overall, as we know, the environment is going to be more anti-immigrant and more favorable for Trump to exploit in that direction. So I think I just want to be clear that the threat that we face, we do believe it is an existential threat, the drive towards more authoritarianism, towards fascism, and that that’s going to have some very serious consequences for immigrant communities.

And I think that Biden, for all his faults, he is trying to signal that he is trying to do some more proactive immigration. On June 18, he just announced his program for about half a million undocumented spouses who are married to US citizens would meet the requirements for parole in place. They’re trying to signal to Democratic voters that they will not be the same as a Trump administration.

And in terms of what you said earlier about the mythology of immigrant voters being trucked in, driven into the US so that they can influence the results of the 2024 election, obviously, those are factless and baseless, and the reality is that this is their number one issue. They will be using this rhetoric and this message to stoke fears among a white nationalist voting base, and it has been proven to be very effective.

And so I think what’s going to happen this November is going to be… It brings us in two different paths. There’s some very stark differences in the fork in the road depending on what kind of administration we have this year. And obviously, there’s so many things we don’t know, especially given rumors that President Biden might drop out of the race. We’re less than four months out and still, this is the type of year we’re looking forward to. So yes, it’s very tumultuous and a lot is unknown.

And anybody who said that they can predict what’s going to happen and knows, that’s just not true. We don’t believe that. No poll can predict what’s going to happen. These margins are very close. And so I just also want to emphasize that this is not the time to despair, to give up. This is the time to take action and make an intervention.

THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: So I think we've covered that a lot on this podcast, but just to kind of reiterate: President Biden ran in 2019 and 2020 on a set of immigration policies that were sort of directly in opposition to what we're seeing as some of the harshest policies that President Trump put in place.

Things like the so called Muslim ban, the policies of separating kids and families at the border, the Remain in Mexico program at the US-Mexico border, which forced migrants to wait in Mexico for asylum hearings, increasing crackdowns on immigration inside the country as, you know, deportation efforts and, you know, certainly harsh rhetoric around immigration. So, Biden came in with, I think, a much more progressive immigration policy, if you will. It's definitely more immigrant friendly.

And one of the issues he ran on was rather than trying to increase deterrence of migrants at the border, he wanted to address the so called root causes of migration from what was then the biggest group of people coming from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, which were El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

And so in 2021, he issued a series of executive orders very early in his presidency to undo some of President Trump's policies, and he asked Kamala Harris to take point on and run his administration's efforts at the, what they call the Root Causes Strategy, which meant dealing from a diplomatic and development perspective with addressing the so called push factors from migration. And those are things like crime, and governance, rule of law, poverty, lack of opportunity.

So, it was a combination of bilateral relationships with the governments in those areas, both to increase their own border security, but also to create investment opportunities, working with USAID, getting private sector commitments to invest money in those countries to help create jobs. That was her role. Of course, we've seen the Biden administration pivot, particularly in the last year and a half, with regard to the border.

Two more, I would, some say, Trump like policies about restricting access to asylum at the border, asking Mexico to do more to prevent the migrants from coming up through Mexico to the border. And that seems to have been having an effect.

We have seen migration go down in the last few months from the record high it was in December of 2023, but we also should take note that the countries that Kamala Harris was directed to work with, those countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America, no longer represent nearly as large a proportion of the migrants we're seeing at the border.

They're coming from a lot more countries, lots more from South America, especially Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, but also more than a hundred countries around the world. So, that Root Causes Strategy, which was aimed at what was then sort of this large number of migrants from a particular area, probably is a little less relevant today for dealing with the border only because the migration is from so many other places.

JACK MALDE - HOST, THIS WEEK IN IMMIGRATION: And some people have been calling Kamala Harris the border czar. I'm not actually sure if I'm saying that word correctly. Um, is that accurate? THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: I think that's not accurate.

Look, you know, I think Republicans have tried for a very long time to make the state of the border under President Biden a liability, particularly from a political standpoint, and Republicans in the House, since they took back the House two years ago, have been hearing after hearing after hearing about Biden's border crisis, and one of the pieces of that is saying, well, Kamala Harris was supposed to be the border czar and solve all this, and she didn't.

The fact of the matter is, no, Kamala Harris was not named the border czar. Matter of fact, her remit really didn't have anything to do with the border itself. It was this sort of development and diplomatic effort with those countries to reduce the push factors. The border is and remains the provenance of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who to be clear, has faced his own share of criticism from Republicans in Congress, including an impeachment effort over the management of the border.

But I think it's not accurate to call her a border czar, and it should be noted that there is no such title in the federal government of border czar. You know, the moniker of czar is sort of a shorthand for anyone in an executive, you know, branch who's sort of put in charge of a large issue area to come up with policy solutions to work across the federal government in doing that. It's a thing that the media applies, but there is no formal like role that's called a czar in the US government.

I think it's worth reminding people of that. JACK MALDE - HOST, THIS WEEK IN IMMIGRATION: So, prior to becoming Vice President, Kamala Harris held several other public positions. She was US District Attorney in San Francisco, Attorney General of the State of California, and a Senator from California when she ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 2019, before finally becoming Joe Biden's running mate and vice president.

We also know that she's a daughter of immigrants to the United States from India and Jamaica. So with all that having been said, do we know much about where Kamala Harris stands on immigration issues and how closely aligned is she with President Biden? THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: So, I'm going to take that last part first because I think it's worth looking into that a little bit.

It has been a long time since a sitting vice president was running for president when the president they served under is still in office. I think Al Gore and Bill Clinton were the last time we saw that happen, because Joe Biden did not opt to run in 2020, uh, I'm sorry, in 2016. So, this presents a little bit of an issue. As I mentioned, Kamala Harris is part of the Biden administration. She is his partner on the ticket. She was, until recently, his running mate. Now, she leads the ticket.

She has an opportunity to say where she might do things differently than President Biden. But, at the end of the day, I think it's gonna to be very hard for her to say, Oh, the things President Biden did were not things that I would have agreed with, because that would make it seem like she, you know, either wasn't involved at all, or disagreed with things that the president did. So, I think this is a little bit of a tightrope she's going to have to walk.

People are trying to read the tea leaves from where she was when she had all of those previous positions, or when she herself ran for president, or ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019. I think it's worth saying that back then, first of all, she came from the San Francisco Bay area, which everyone knows is a very, very progressive liberal area of California, which is a progressive liberal state for the most part. And so her positions tended to reflect that, but she was a prosecutor.

So I would say that she had a pretty much, a relatively tough on crime image when she was Attorney General of California, however, she supported the law that was passed in California called the Trust Act that protected localities under sanctuary laws. So, that's something that I imagine Republicans might take issue with. In 2019, she and many other of the Democratic candidates supported broadly, for example, decriminalizing border crossings.

There was a Democratic primary debate where they were asked about whether or not they supported that policy. She initially indicated she did, and then sort of seemed to step back. And I think it was unclear by the time she dropped out of the race. But I think, you know, the Democratic politics of the time were very much, you know, wherever Trump is, we're the exact opposite.

But if you look at the Biden-Harris administration, certainly what they ran on in 2020 and where they are today is a different place. And so, it's quite possible that in her time in the vice president's office and seeing what it's like to actually try to implement policies that have effect on immigration and border, she may have shifted her views. And I think that's going to be important for her to delineate as she tries to campaign.

But it is worth saying that as the first generation daughter of immigrants, she has a personal stake in this, too, and that may well impact some of her policy decisions going forward. JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Brian Lehrer Show, explaining the outbreak of riots in the UK. Today Explained looked at some of the grievances of the rioters.

The battle of 187 was told by the LA Times, John Oliver on Last Week Tonight dove into the anti-immigrant rhetoric at the RNC. The Real News Network looked at the Democratic stance and policies on immigration. And This Week in Immigration compared to Biden, Trump and potential Harris policies. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section.

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and often funny topics. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple podcast app.

If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives half of the show, I have a thought or two to add about the way Harris is currently framing her stance on immigration. As I mentioned at the top of the show, people have a lot of feelings about immigration that land on a whole spectrum.

But, as evidenced by people supporting the Trump campaign and the UK riots, those feelings can easily turn into real world action and the left tends to not do a good job addressing immigration because we don't want to make it a big issue. And we don't wanna make it a big issue because the right enjoys a huge lead in polling support for their terrible immigration plans over the lefts' general total lack of immigration plans.

But it is exactly that kind of avoidance of the issue that leads to such low support, and rightfully so. How can people support the Democratic position when no one can even describe what it is? The best we generally come up with is to downplay the doomsaying of the GOP because they're full of shit.

But we don't actually propose policy changes that would address the concerns regular people actually have The kinds of concerns that, founded or not, lead them to support people like Trump or in extreme cases join or support the sentiments behind riots, like what we just saw in the UK. Well, a UK think tank supporting their center-left Labor Party has put some thought into this issue and written a paper with some suggestions for the newly elected Labor Party in the UK to enact.

And it's notable that they came up with some of their ideas by looking at the Biden administration as a cautionary tale of what not to do. They identified three primary concerns the public has about the UK immigration system. Number one, dismay that it appears to be in a state of chaos. Number two, worry that migrants undermine economic opportunities. And three, fear that migrants do not "integrate in their new home".

And that last one, it's important to be clear and honest that this could come from a place of bigotry, but it doesn't have to. Often that call for immigrants to "assimilate" or "integrate" is a dog whistle or maybe a train whistle demanding that foreign born people lose their culture, drop their language, and become Americanized or Anglicised for the comfort of Americans or Brits.

But it's a concern that could also stem from a genuine desire for new arrivals to be able to find a place for themselves within the existing society, rather than feeling like a perpetual outsider. Unintegrated communities may end up being insular, which could breed suspicion and distrust on both sides. And in the worst case scenario, they could end up as ghettos.

So, a desire to see migrants well-integrated in their new home, if it's coming from that positive angle, is a totally legitimate concern. So, the paper makes three recommendations to the Labor government in the UK. Number one, clearing a massive backlog of asylum claims to bring order to the system. Number two, cracking down on exploitation of migrant workers. Exploitation has a dramatic impact on job opportunities and wages being paid in job sectors where migraines are taking work.

And number three, investing in strained public services that voters fear cannot support growing immigrant communities. And then, additionally, and I really liked the sound of this one, they want a "world-leading scheme for local and community sponsorship of refugees and other vulnerable groups that could help new arrivals find a welcoming environment and make voters less likely to see them as foreigners adrift in Britain".

Now diving more into the opinion polls in the UK, it says, "Opinion research found room for center-left leaders to make the case for inclusive immigration policy. Most voters were open to viewing immigration as a helpful thing for the economy and responded warmly to the idea of foreign-born people becoming British citizens". However, the positive vision was contingent. It continues, "Openness depended on voters trusting that labor was serious about bringing order to the system overall".

And so the experts advised, "The center-left needs to project a message of something like control and compassion. The feeling that migration is out of control is a really strong one and just kind of dismissing it is not a good thing to do". So, in the UK, Labor went with the message 'Smash the Gangs' as a way of differentiating between desperate migrants and gangs profiting from human trafficking and other cross border crimes. Right? Control + compassion.

And that helped them in their election that got them into power recently. And this appears to be the strategy we are now seeing from the Harris campaign. They're using her history as a prosecutor and attorneys general in California, and are highlighting that she "took down the trans-national gangs" as part of her work in California.

And the article concludes saying that it will likely help him in the election to recast "the Democratic agenda in more disciplined terms and drawing a contrast with Republicans' raw hostility to migrants". I don't see why Kamala Harris couldn't do something similar, say, 'my main goal is to smash the gangs, not to punish the migrants'. That's the important needle to thread because no one should really be against heightened enforcement against actual criminals.

It's just the framing of all migrants as criminals that we object to. So you need to be able to do both, say both at the same time. Now the one important caveat though to all of this, is that it's really important to invest heavily on making legal avenues for migration and asylum seeking possible because any crackdown on illegal means and gangs without opening up legal pathways will just force the gangs to get more organized and smarter about how they go about their illegal business.

The way to put smuggling and human trafficking out of business is to make it unnecessary. Now, of course, this is where Congress comes in. So, not only do Democrats need to finally face this problem head on rather than running from it, they need a trifecta in the House, Senate and presidency to pull it off.

But part of their messaging needs to be a demand to s mash the gangs in the human trafficking and point out that the way to do that is to make legal pathways abundant and accessible and put the Republicans on the defensive. If they don't support those legal pathways, they are the ones increasing cross-border crime. And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up, Section A: the UK Riots.

Social services are not what they were, people are suffering. Is there a system exploiting that? I suppose you could claim there is. You could say that there is an element of the far-right that is piggybacking on that general feeling of dissatisfaction and blaming those ills on migrants, which is an age-old issue, which is to say, if you're struggling, it's because a foreigner has taken your job or has taken your council house or taken your place in the hospital bed.

That's an age-old tactic and it is very effective. You can see how that could take root. Yes, there is an underlying trend there. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the UK government, effectively, unintentionally, pretty much let in 2.5 million people into the country in the last two years. It didn't control migration properly. It tried to juice the economy by letting in a lot, a lot of workers. That, again, has given the far-right ammunition. It's made the job easier for the far right.

Say, "Look, we've lost control of the borders. Everything's going wrong here. The economy's not delivering for you guys. It's because all the foreigners arrived." Yes, there are underlying trends here. I think those who just say, "Oh, these people are just kind of-- you legitimize what they're doing by pointing to the underlying trends. Well, I don't necessarily agree with that.

I think there are underlying trends and you can say that people are dissatisfied with their daily lives, but obviously this kind of violence is totally, totally wrong. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Can you give us a quick reference? Mods and rockers, a little historical reference for those of us who aren't necessarily familiar with that term. That's something Jay mentioned. Most violence [unintelligible] It's sort of like you punks, I suppose, is how you guys would

[unintelligible] . There was a movement in the '60s where you saw punks and other groups kind of clashing famously on the beaches in the south of England. That was during a time of economic difficulty in the UK.

And they, you know, that is not what Southport is. NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: But then unfortunately, the unrest spread. That's right. Yeah. This had happened on the Tuesday night. And by the Friday, there was a list of places where demonstrations were going to be held, or, you know, they were described as protests.

So fliers were going around social media that said, ‘A protest is going to be held outside this mosque.’ And then we saw a kind of large-scale pockets of far-right riots, a lot of violence in a lot of towns and cities across the UK.

And Rotherham isn't, isn't a place like Liverpool, where there's a large number of anti-fascists and a large number of people who will go there and, and, and stand up to these people. Although there were counter-protesters there, you know, they were immediately cattled by the group of far right and had racist abuse shouted at them, and the police had to take them a mile away to safety. In total, there were about 750 rioters.

They were kind of physically attacking police, you know, physically smashing windows, burning things, you know, the real – as you'd imagine what a rioter looks like – the real kind of hardcore rioters. SCORING They managed to set fire briefly to the hotel with the asylum seekers inside. There were about 240 asylum seekers inside. Which was obviously terrifying. You know, they were… the windows were smashed and the asylum seekers were appearing at the windows.

And, you know, I managed to shout through a window to some of them and they looked… you know, they were all fairly young. The ones I saw, you know, teenagers, early 20s, all looked very scared, worried. I shouted through the window, ‘Are you okay?’ And I was holding, holding a thumbs up, and I was saying, ‘Are you okay?’ And they were, a lot of them were replying, ‘Okay, okay.’ You know, a lot of them don't have good English.

And then one man shouted down, ‘I am not okay.’ So I think there was a real… you know, this was a, this was a very dangerous situation.

And they were just sitting, you know, with their heads in their hands because it had been such a draining and exhausting day. And a few, a few police officers said to me that, you know, it had been by far, you know, the biggest riot that they'd ever attended. SCORING

I think if you look at the post in question, it was viewed by around 2 million people before it was-- if you clicked on it, it sort of disappears. What's been incredible here is that Elon Musk has really lent into this whole protest. He's actually become something of an agitator himself. We've seen him repeatedly repeat talking points from the far-right in the UK. One of the key talking points they have is that there's a two-tier police system in the UK.

It's sort of like the opposite of what you guys saw with the Black Lives Matter, is that the police actually go down much harder on white people than minorities, which is false. Anyway, this trope has been pasted all over X in recent days, and Elon Musk has been tweeting away saying, "Hey, I kind of agree with this, and the government should take this seriously." He also tweeted that civil war was inevitable in the UK because of high levels of immigration.

It's been really quite incredible to see him really lean into this whole thing as opposed to-- Most other people would be trying to say, "No, no, we carefully moderate our site and we make sure that extremist content is not promoted." That's what Meta does and that's what TikTok does. Actually, you've got the owner of the site promoting this stuff himself. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Incredible.

You said that he has allowed back some far-right activists who maybe were on the site before kicked off, and he's let them back. I know that's happened here in the US. Is that also the case in the UK? Yes. Absolutely exactly the same thing happened in the UK. You saw, there's a fellow called Tommy Robinson who is a figurehead for the far-right in the UK, and he was banned in 2018, by what was then Twitter. Last year, Elon Musk led him back on, and he's now got 900,000 followers.

This fellow, he spent time in jail. He's a well-known character. He's a well-known troublemaker on the right, to be honest. This guy, he's on holiday in Cyprus, Tommy Robinson, right now, and he's firing away these tweets claiming that Britain's going up in flames and that people need to start cracking down on immigration and protecting British values.

That's what's happened, is that Musk has been very clear that he wants to protect free speech on his site and that he wants everybody to be able to weigh in equally. The result of that is that a lot of people, it's become a sort of talking shop for some pretty extremist views. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: What are some of the actual groups and political parties on the far-right that are involved here?

Well, that's the thing about the UK, is the UK isn't like other European countries, like Germany. You've got the AFD, or even France, which obviously, Le Pen's movement have kind of gone a bit more mainstream, but started out on the far-right. In the UK, there's actually a kind of proud tradition of anti-fascism. Historically, it's kind of been on the fringe.

In recent years, you've seen a sort of, some people say that there's this politician called Nigel Farage here who promoted Brexit and is very close to Trump, who espoused anti-immigrant views. Some say he's now managed to normalize this debate, all these questions over immigration. There isn't really a far far-right mainstream political party in the UK.

That's why I think a lot of people were surprised by this, because I think for years, everyone thought the far right were a sort of busted flush, and they didn't really have much sway here. Suddenly, to see all these protests in the street has shocked a lot of people. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: It doesn't seem to us over here on this side of the Atlantic, as organized as maybe in Germany or France, the far-right. There's not a figurehead.

There's not somebody that we would often recognize. No. MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Interesting. I think that's what's made it really hard to police, actually. When you talk to officials trying to control this, it's not like there's the head of a group you can go and talk to and say, "Guys, please tamp this down a bit." It's really figureheads firing away on social media and then loose groups of people on Telegram getting together to basically organize a ruck a fight.

It's very hard to know where these guys are going to pop up or what exactly they're going to target or how many of them will actually show up. It's proved a real difficult one for the authorities to manage. JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: California Proposition 187.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: They look around and begin to put together a kind of ragtag Avengers, or Thanos, depending on who you're rooting for, of California anti-immigration hawks. They start with Harold Ezell, who used to work for the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

She's a former crime analyst for the Anaheim Police Department and a petite chain smoker who wears Granny glasses, co-star a group. that leaves cards at businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers. The cards read, Stop the invasion. Close our borders now. Deny benefits to illegal aliens now. More people eventually join, but this is the core of the Pro 187 crew. They're an odd mix of former immigration officials and middle aged suburbanites.

There's eight sections of 187, so I'll just sum up the lowlights. Block undocumented immigrants from social services and public health care. Force workers in those sectors to report anyone they suspected of having no papers to the INS. But the group saves the worst for last. Kids without papers would no longer be able to attend public schools, from kindergarten to college.

The Kileys and their crew know that this last provision is extreme, and probably unconstitutional, but they put it in anyway. So it would gather the media attention, so it would send up the red flags that everybody wanted to talk about it, and everybody would have an opinion about it. And that's when it really took off.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Once 187 is written, the Kileys send it to the Republican mailing lists to see if they can get enough signatures for it to qualify for the November 1994 ballot. Every day, their P. O. box is full. Full of signatures pledging support for their proposition. Full of envelopes stuffed with donations. Here's Barbara's husband, Bob.

Anyways, on June 23, 1994, Ron Prince's crusade qualifies for the November ballot, where it'll go by Proposition 187. By coincidence, the same number that California's Penal Code assigns to murder. The group decides to try to get support for their anti immigrant measure by using a new tagline. Save our state. Who thought of the idea to call this a Save Our State initiative?

They imagined they were throwing out to a drowning California what the group didn't know in that moment. Was that Latinos weren't going to take 187 quietly. That both sides were getting ready to gear up for one of the most dramatic fights in California's political history. One that still resonates all over the country today. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: Back in 2000, I got a Democratic Party mailer that had a fuzzy photo of him with a caption, just when we thought he was gone. He's back!

When I got this mailer, I remembered Wilson's They Keep Coming TV ad, the one that used fuzzy footage of Latinos crossing the US mexico border to imply we were invading California. Now? A few years later, he's the scary scapegoat. Not long after I got that mailer, I wrote an article for OC Weekly. It came out on November 23rd, 2000. Here's what I wrote. Like the Mexican legend of La Llorona, the ghost woman whose story is used to strike fear in the hearts of children.

Pete Wilson's name was invoked in mailers, radio commercials, And a popular song during the recent election cycle. Always to signify something truly horrifying. This was the first article I ever got published. I wasn't even a reporter back then. I was a film studies major in college. But something about doing that story got me. It was like my own little personal revenge on 187. So I framed the mailer, the little story, and my pay stub. 100 for 700 words.

Sadly, freelancer rates haven't improved, but California sure has. So I guess I might as well say it right now. Thank you, Pete Wilson. Without you, I wouldn't have a career. From the Los Angeles Times and Futuro Studios. I'm Gustavo Arellano, and this is The Battle of 187. Part 3?

Barbara Coe, one of the leaders of the Prop 187 move, says her phone has been ringing off the hook since last Tuesday, as individuals and organizations seek help in setting up similar campaigns in New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, even Iowa. The president of Mexico in his final weeks in office has called on Mexicans working in the United States to come home. Remember, Latino voters overwhelmingly reject 187.

Many see it as an existential threat and are terrified that their lives are going to get difficult, fast. That La Migra is going to come knocking on their doors or show up in school and ask for papers. So just a day after the election, before any parts of 187 can go into effect, Federal and state lawsuits are filed, eight in total, claiming that the proposition is unconstitutional.

Portions of Prop 187 were to go into effect immediately, but court orders were issued today holding off the new law until its constitutionality can be examined. The move works. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: The court freezes 187. Most of it won't go into effect until the lawsuit is heard. Which is a big relief for immigrants. Among the plaintiffs, the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF. Gloria Molina serves on the L. A. County Board of Supervisors.

We heard from her earlier. And she tries to convince the county to join the suit. After that, you start getting a lot of hate mail again.

You want your divisive language, or divisive holidays, and on and on and on and on. The place for what you want is Mexico. And it isn't just nasty letters. They were angry. I remember going to Trader Joe's one day and being attacked by a woman there, and talking about, you know, what kind of representative am I? You know, if you're just siding with Mexico, why don't you move to Mexico? And, and, uh, I, uh, Said, thank you for your views. I know you feel that way. I feel differently.

And then afterwards, when I went out to the parking lot to get in my car, I almost could swear she was ready to run me down. GUSTAVO ARELLANO - HOST, THE TIMES: 180 7 hits a national nerve from coast to coast. People wanna rail against immigration, period. Take these callers on NPRs talk of the nation.

In 1994, voters also passed the infamous Three Strikes initiative, which lands hard on Blacks and Latinos. Two years later, voters ban affirmative action. In 1998, it's bilingual education. But while all this is going on, 187 itself stays tied up in the courts. For years. In 1997, a federal judge finds it unconstitutional. AKA, goodbye 187. But, then Attorney General Dan Lundgren, a Republican, he appeals the decision to try to keep it alive.

Peter Nunez is one of the architects of 187 that we heard from earlier. He thinks Lungren isn't fighting hard enough for 187. And just a warning here, he describes Lundgren with pretty sexist language.

187 finally dies for good in 1999, when Pete Wilson's successor, Gray Davis, drops the appeal. In the end, the big parts of it never go into effect. Started with a bang, ended with a whimper. But Latinos from California like me, never forgot it. JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section

and everyone else.

The people that are trying to cross because they are looking for a better life are suffering. They're being sold a bag of lies. And, um, it's not right. It's inhumane.

They are literally just trying to flood the gates.

Everybody like, no, everybody's got to go through the process. Well, process is too long. So I think that there is a way that we could do that.

The Democrats don't ever give us anything on our side. So we've given amnesty before we've tried it. It hasn't worked. And so we're not keen to try that again.

But that image of the guy flipping off the camera was used constantly on Fox from February through early March. It was used in at least Sixty six segments during that period, with the man's fingers blurred out, presumably, to protect the eyes of the innocent children who are forced to watch Fox News at Grandma's while they eat their Dinosaurs Lived With Humans nuggets.

Fox kept hammering their coverage of that incident, with perhaps the apex being a segment where Sean Hannity did an interview with Curtis Sliwa, the head of the vigilante group, The Guardian Angels, live from the U. S. Now, during the interview, Sliwa's fellow angel suddenly mobilized towards something off camera, and he later explained they'd had to get physical with a migrant whom they'd seen committing a crime. Well, he had been shoplifting first.

The guardian angel spotted them, stopped them. He resisted, and let's just say we gave him a little pain compliance. His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations. He's sucking concrete. The cops scraped him off the asphalt. He's on his way to jail, but they'll cut him loose. We gotta take 42nd Street back, Sean. These illegals think they own this street. They think they rule the night. This is our country.

If they can't abide by the rules, then we're gonna kick them back from where they came. JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Hold on. First, rule the night on 42nd Street? I call bullshit. Anyone who lives here knows the night there is ruled by groups of 13 year olds leaving Aladdin on their way to the Red Lobster one block away. Let me say this clearly. Immigrants are not invading our country, and they are not taking over 42nd Street, but if they are, they can fucking have it.

But there's a few other things that feel important to mention about that. First of all, First, you can't just beat someone up if you think they're committing a crime. And second, you should never go out in public dressed like that. He looks like Alan Arkin playing one of the Angry Birds. He, he looks like a divorced strawberry. He looks like if the G. I. Joes had an off hours bowling team. But, but it gets worse.

Because it turned out the man they'd beaten up wasn't actually a migrant at all, and there was no evidence to support the allegation he was shoplifting. It seems like what actually happened is that Sliwa's goons apprehended the guy for allegedly attempting to disrupt a live interview, which is not a crime, and also not what he did, since surveillance footage apparently shows he was just trying to maneuver through the crowd when the vigilantes confronted him.

But, Sliwa said he believed the man was a migrant because he was speaking Spanish. Something that could be said. of about, roughly, 25 percent of this city, including, by the way, me. Qué vas a hacer, Curtis Lee Wa? Soy emigrante, y estoy hablando español. Me vas a mandar? Tú pendejos, hijo de puta? Tu cara es demasiado estúpida y tu cara también. Eres una mierda y no creo que tu mamá esté orgullosa de ti.

And it turns out, even the facts of the original Times Square incident that started all of this fell apart in similar fashion because when more camera footage came out, it revealed how the whole incident had begun and made the NYPD look less like unwitting victims and more like the instigators. NYPD body cam video takes us inside that Times Square brawl that made national headlines.

That and new surveillance video police released raising more questions tonight whether the January altercation should have happened at all. The two officers approached the group of men.

Yeah, if you watch the wide shot it becomes clear that what set the whole scuffle off is one cop choosing to push that guy up against a wall after the other one got called Ugly Betty. And for what it's worth, this is what the cop looked like. And if you're thinking, well he only kind of looks like Ugly Betty, let me remind you, in Latin America, Ugly Betty looks like this, and that is a fair hit. And violence is not an acceptable response to someone being insulted that correctly.

Do you think there haven't been moments when I haven't wanted to throw someone against a wall because they called me worst Sheldon or a less sexual Screech or what would happen if the Rat and the Chef and Ratatouille fucked? Sure, sure, it hurts my feelings mom, but it's also fair and it doesn't justify violence. But wait. Because there's one more twist here. Remember the guy flipping the double birds, who was on Fox News at least 66 times? The symbol of bigrant crime.

Well, funny story, the Manhattan D. A. ended up dismissing the charges against him because it turned out he had nothing to do with the incident. He wasn't even there! The NYPD apparently mistook him for a completely different person for a mystery reason that I'm sure wasn't racist at all. So, he was arrested for something he didn't do. Spent two nights in jail, and then had cameras shoved in his face.

Now, I personally cannot think of a scenario in which flipping two middle fingers is more appropriate there. Honestly, if he could have grown another hand in that moment, I would not have blamed him for throwing up a third bird for good measure. But the facts that came out afterward didn't really matter. Because by then, migrant crime was already out there as a phrase, and ever since, Fox and the Republicans have been hammering the idea that migrants are dangerous.

And because, again, there is no data to back up claims of a migrant crime wave, they've instead had to resort to anecdotes or exaggeration. For instance, the Republican National Committee made a website tracking alleged examples of migrant crime called BidenBloodBath. com. If you go to it, you'll find the names of 13 different states, which you can click on to find evidence of so called migrant crime there.

But for four of those states, when you click through, you'll find all they're able to cite is those states overall rates of fentanyl deaths. And look, those deaths were tragic, but you cannot connect them to migrant crime, given that to the extent fentanyl has been seized at the border, 90 percent of the time, it was seized during legal crossings, and 91 percent of those seizures were from U. S. citizens. Which, of course, they were.

If you want to move drugs across the border, you're going to do it with American citizens because they attract less attention from authorities. I'm not telling you how to move drugs. But if you are going to, that is the only smart way to do it. So I have just told you how to move drugs. And as for people crossing illegally, just 009 percent of people arrested by Border Patrol last year were found to possess any fentanyl whatsoever.

So, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, but I don't know if BidenBloodbath. com Is the reliable source of news and information that we all thought it was. And look, I am not saying that there haven't been individual migrants who've committed crimes. Of course they have, because migrants are people. And some people do bad things. In the same way, some Abba fans and some people with SpongeBob tattoos have committed crimes.

And if it so happens that there is someone out there who is a migrant Abba fan with multiple SpongeBob tattoos, the only thing they're likely to be guilty of is being an utterly fascinating human being. What is your story, dude? I have so many questions about what brought you to this point. The thing is, if you want to prevent crime and death, that's a great idea.

And there are absolutely ways to do that, but when you draw a circle around a few members of a particular group, especially one identifiable by race or nationality, then generalize about what this means about all of them. No matter what you say, you're not having a reasoned debate about crime or safety, you're being racist. And the depressing thing is, all this fear mongering has been effective.

Over 70 percent of Republicans now believe there is a high risk of people illegally coming to the US and committing crime. Something which, again, is demonstrably and provably false.

But Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem. Be clear about that. He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk. Earlier this year, everybody here knows, earlier this year we had a chance to pass the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades. But Donald Trump tanked the deal, because he thought by doing that it would help him win an election. But when I am president, I will sign the bill.

So Arizona, ours is a fight for the future and it is a fight for freedom.

If I was giving counsel to Kamala Harris, what I would say is, “You need to have a primetime address on the issue of immigration. And you need to come to the camera and say, like, unequivocally, 'We are stopping this narrative about immigrants and refugees as a problem, as bringing in crime, as affecting our economy in negative way.'” We have to — she needs to make a statement based in reality — right?

— which is, stop with this notion of the border as a place where people are coming in, and nobody knows. She needs to take the moment, because she can, because she’s the daughter of immigrants. There’s nobody who can better do it than her. Also, Joe Biden’s parting gift — I know people think I’m like out of this, you know, when I say this. Joe Biden’s parting gift needs to be actually for him to say, “Executive order, pathway to citizenship, now.” Why not? What is stopping him?

I mean, even the Supreme Court has said that a president is not liable. He’s not breaking the law. He will actually — if he does that, he will guarantee — I’m saying this, and I don’t like to make these predictions. If they do that, Kamala will win, because all of those immigrants who are questioning her position, when she’s like, “We want to be tough on the border,” etc., etc., they would say, “Oh my god! This is in fact our party. This is in fact our candidate.” And they could win.

I think it would be a game-changer. And it needs to stop, this narrative about criminals and immigrants and breaking laws. That is not who we are. And you have to talk to people who have actually been to the border, like Marisa, like myself, like Oscar, to understand that that narrative is not true.

Now, when you take a people, like vulnerable migrants and refugees, and you have them, like in New York City, what’s happening now — you put them into Roosevelt Hotel, then you’re taking them out, then you’re leaving them on the streets, and then you’re moving them around, and then you’re having them in encampments — this is a recipe for disaster.

New York should be — I’m just saying New York because that’s where I live — should be doing a much better job, because, sadly, that reality is going to create a very ugly, visible situation, where you’re going to have migrants and refugees sleeping on the streets of New York, which is happening now. That is unacceptable. But then again, the mayor of New York needs to do something. Point is, massive change of narrative that only Kamala Harris can do.

And to be able to resist the sort of political ploys of the Republican Party, but then also resist the lack of political courage that the Democrats have shown, there is executive orders. There’s pushing what we can push through Congress.

But there’s also standing up to the likes of Governor Abbott in the state of Texas, who has taken the mantle that was, you know, very much in my home state of Arizona, and standing up to Greg Abbott and the things that he’s doing and that he continues to do, and standing with Mayor Johnson here in Chicago, who has been receiving folks coming, and different mayors across the country, and being able to actually push forward at the municipal level policies around

immigration that I think we have had comprehensive — we have had immigration reform; it’s just been all enforcement. And so, we need to really turn toward the question of legalization. I think also other key issues, the question of care, and how much she’s been a champion on that, labor, healthcare, education. Like, these are all things that I think people would really support.

And finding, you know, the sweet spot between policies that are possible but impactful in our communities, I think, is what people are looking for. I think voters are looking for who gives — who cares about me, who cares about my future. And I think those types of things are things that people would really respond to. JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section D: Migrants.

And often, it’s actually quite disappointing to see how little we talk about where Mexico fits in, in all of this. Much of what’s being discussed is going to have repercussions, not just for Mexico, but for all of Latin America. And so I think when we talk about this, we have to have a regional perspective. And I don’t mean to replicate some of the rhetoric that we hear.

Often, political leaders in the United States talk about having a regional response or about attending to the root causes, but actually involving Latin American countries, migrants themselves as part of this conversation. And what they’ve insisted, I think, at least from what we’ve seen here in Mexico, is that they need to recognize the role that migrants play in the US economy, in the North American economy more broadly.

I think one of the things that we need to talk about more as well is the regional perspective, which is talking about the root causes in a serious way, not in the way that has been done historically by US politicians where they try to frame things in a way that’s, actually, ultimately, going to favor the interests of US capital and the owners of capital in the United States.

These programs that talk about investing in Central America or in Latin America but, ultimately, are all about continuing the exploitation and the oppression of the peoples of Latin America. But actually figuring out what’s going on and talking about the root causes in that sense in terms of what’s driving people to migrate. One of the things we often come across when you talk to any migrant that is crossing through Mexico is that they all say that we would rather stay home.

They are fleeing their situations. It’s not that they’re choosing to migrate. It’s a very different kind of phenomenon. And so if we talk about the root causes, well, what does that mean? And one of the things that I think is often missing as part of the debate is what is US foreign policy? What’s the role of US foreign policy in all of this? And when I mean that, one of the things that I think we should be highlighting, for example, is something that came out of the Palenque Summit.

It was a gathering of regional leaders: Nicolás Maduro, Díaz-Canel, López Obrador, the presidents of Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela were present. And what did they say? Well, we need to see an end to US intervention in Latin America, an end to the brutal blockade of Cuba, an end to the sanctions against Venezuela, and also talking about a way that actually invests in these people’s communities so that they don’t have to feel like they have to flee.

And I think that’s something that we need to hear more in the discussion about this. There are deeply integrated issues, migration and US foreign policy, and often, that doesn’t come up, even though there are efforts to try to amplify this. Like I said, how is it that we’re not talking about what was said at the Palenque Summit? We talk about the Los Angeles Declaration, but why not that one? And I think that’s one of the key things, I would say, needs to be part of this conversation.

How do we get to a point where we’re pressuring US politicians, be they Republican or Democrat, to recognize the world that US foreign policy plays? And I’ll close on this note. When we think about where do migrants come from, they tend to come from the countries that are facing US repression. Right now, one of the greatest communities that is seeing a movement towards the United States comes from Venezuela.

Venezuela, right now, is under a difficult economic situation as a result of US sanctions. US sanctions make it impossible for Venezuela to sell its oil, its number one export commodity, on the international market in a transparent, open way. They have to go through intermediaries, they sell things at a discount. It’s a very important resource to Venezuela’s economy. They can’t benefit from the way that they used to, even with prices being high.

And so that’s why we see the economic issues happening in Venezuela. We’ll try to blame the government and Nicolás Maduro, but I think much of the blame lies with US sanctions. Same with the case of Cuba. In Haiti, right now, the destabilization as a result of historic interventions in that country. That’s why we see migrants coming from this.

And I think the more we talk about US foreign policy as being one of the root causes of migration, the further we can get in terms of this conversation of actually tackling the issue and making it so that migrants leave only because they want to, not because they have to. I’d like to bring in Nana Gyamfi, a long-time attorney with immigration issues and with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Nana, what about this issue of US foreign policy?

And also, the issue that much of the focus has been on Latin American migration, but the reality is, even as Donald Trump said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, that people are coming not just from Latin America, but from Asia, from Africa, from the Middle East. And of course, he was talking about it as they were sending criminals and rapists and murderers and terrorists, all of these countries sending them to the United States.

But there’s just generally been an increase in Black migrants, particularly from the continent, not surprisingly, as we go from the late ’80s into the early ’90s when you see the United States playing out its efforts to push back against leftist socialist governments that were coming to the fore on the continent at that time. And of course, the US intervention, it has always intervened with coups, with assassination attempts, et cetera, on the continent.

And in the Caribbean, you see, again, in the Caribbean, where they were talking about Grenada, Haiti, other places, as you have the US trying to fight to be able to keep its racial capitalist system rolling, the effect has been for people to flee.

And as we often talk about here at BAJI, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, what you see is Black people fleeing from majority Black countries — And also countries that are not majority Black — What Black people were fleeing from the United States, coming from the South to the North, to the Midwest,

You have these US military bases all over these areas in Latin America and Central America and the Caribbean, and those places include places where Black people are living. And the result of that is Black people coming into this country in numbers that really haven’t been seen before, particularly over the last 30 years. And then as I said, with this border, the US-Mexico so-called border, really over the last five years. It is an important conversation to include.

As we know, this country is built upon the enslavement and continued exploitation of Black people, as well as the genocide of Indigenous people. And when we look at who is really being rejected at the border, we’re looking at Black folks, we’re looking at Indigenous folks coming particularly from Central America and Mexico.

A lot of the issues that we face are the result of the same kind of racism, the same kind of discrimination, particularly anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, that we see in the United States.

More Mexicans have been leaving the country than have been coming in over the last 10 years, so that the Mexican percentage of the undocumented population has been dropping precisely because, as you mentioned, there was a doubling of the minimum wage, there was a right of unions to finally break free from government-controlled unions and elect their own leaders. There was a much more vibrant labor movement, and so many people didn’t feel the need to leave as they have in the past.

But I wanted to ask about these class battles within these communities. For instance, one study that I’ve been involved in shows that the Venezuelans, for instance, the Venezuelan migration of the last five years has been the most educated migrant group in American history. 61% of all the Venezuelans who have come to the United States in the last five years have a college bachelor’s degree or higher. The adult US population, only 34% have a college degree or higher.

So the Venezuelans who are coming are twice as educated as the average American, and they are much more of a middle-class migration similar to that, that came after the Cuban revolution in 1959. And once they learn English and adapt to their environment, they will probably be a very middle class and somewhat conservative wing of the Latino population of the United States.

Likewise, some of the migrants that are coming from Caribbean or African countries don’t come from the working classes or the peasants, the peasantry of these nations, but are pretty much often educated or middle strata people who maybe have a different political perspective from the historic migrants from Haiti and Jamaica and other countries that have come in previous decades.

I’m wondering how you see class conflict developing within the migrant communities of the United States and how that will affect how these communities act politically in the future?

Black migrants are not enjoying their lives in Mexico. They are not having a grand old time because of changes that have occurred. Same in Colombia and in other countries. Brazil is probably one of the few exceptions. And the reality is that, that extension, part of the purpose of that is like a continuation of having certain people come over. Remember when Trump was like, why don’t we get Norwegians, and talked about the s-hole countries and who people were.

There’s always been this effort, but it’s been even increased over the past 10, 20 years to have a certain crew of people come. So you can come through this program for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, but you got to fly in. You can’t walk in, you got to fly. You got to have a ticket, you got to have a sponsor.

So someone with money who’s able to not just take care of themselves in the United States of America, but has the capacity to extend care to someone else coming in from another country and say, I got them. I can cover them, also has to be involved. They’ve got to have a job. They’ve got to have all these things. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have working-class people that are going to be able to do that.

But for the most part, even if the person coming is working class, clearly the person sponsoring has got a little bit of funds. I’m not saying they got to be wealthy rich, but they’ve got to have some expendable income in order to make that happen.

And you see the same thing that’s happening in Europe where those borders are being extended into the continent so that, again, you keep people from being able to come in unless they come through these very narrow pathways that I refer to as obstacle courses. They’re actually not pathways. They’re like capitalists, who can make it through, type of energy, where people who are going to come and become part of this wannabe middle class, excuse me, are going to come.

And that is creating a situation in which you have, again, people looking at folks within our own communities in this stratified way. And so, Africans want to be seen as, and talk about the fact that they’re amongst the most educated populations that come to this country, but they’re driving Uber. They don’t want to talk about the fact that they’re driving Uber. Something wrong with driving Uber. You get my point, right?

Because that part of wanting to hold on to this idea that we are middle class is so important and looking the nose down at those Africans that are on the bikes delivering for DoorDash, et cetera, when, in fact, we know that your degree, whether it’s your attorney license, your medical license was torn up and thrown in the trash when you got to the United States, and you had to go through all kinds of hoops in order to become a medical tech and a paralegal

after all these years that you may have been doing something else. That stratification is there, and the embarrassment about not being in this middle class, the respectability politics that I know we’ll talk about later also serves as a sort of class conflict-inducing source.

My father helped to create the cochlear implant here at the University of Chicago, steps away from where we are. So, yes, we are all of those things, Juan. We are the laborers, but we’re also the brains behind this country.

So, that, that has to be so important, because, you know, Juan and I, we’ve been around so long that I know I say, “How is it possible that our Black brothers and sisters and that our fellow Latino, Latina, Latinx and Latine immigrants, sons and daughters of immigrants, are buying into these lies? How is it possible?” It truly is brilliant in the sense of mis- and disinformation.

But what we have to do is to then replace that with — every single one who’s listening and watching this, when people say, “I don’t know what to do,” you know what you do? You go and tell the next person that you see, “Hey, do you see that immigrant doing this job? Do you see the immigrant doing this job? Do you know about my immigrant neighbor?” It has to be person to person and just an onslaught of these other messages to combat what we’ve had to deal with over the last several decades.

And I think there’s really important things that Michelle Obama actually talked about yesterday that I think actually speak and relate to immigrant people, people of color, people who don’t come from money that do something, that do something, so, like, changing the narrative. A lot of us did not have the privilege of being able to fail forward, as like the likes of Donald Trump.

And so, I think there’s a piece there that — because there is real — we have to come out of this with a stronger coalition of communities of color and low-income communities. And I think that there is real jewels in some of the narrative that she was putting out that connects deeply to values that are commonly held across communities.

So, I really wanted to lift that up and also recognize how important of a moment it is and how beautiful it is to see the community mobilizing behind her and how much it’s transformed the campaign. I can say that in Arizona and some of the different states we work in, it is truly shifting at the ground level.

You know, I’m a kid, a Mexican kid, who grew up here on the South Side of Chicago. My mom, who’s 88 now, made the decision of, “Well, we’re Mexican immigrants, but we are siding with Martin Luther King. That is our guy.” So, that notion of the solidarity between Black and Latino communities must exist. JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in.

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