From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's a big take. I'm Wescsova. Today the US braces for a wave of asylum seekers. Pandemic restrictions that made it much harder for immigrants seeking to enter the US are being lifted today, and once that happens, tens of thousands of people a day are expected to cross the southern border from Mexico seeking asylum. That will further strain an immigration system that's already overwhelmed.
The desire for people to come to the country had been almost entirely where the southwest border is concerned people from Mexico. That began to change. We began to see people coming from Central America and coming in family group.
That's dooris Meisner. She was in charge of US immigration during the Clinton administration and she studied this issues for decades. We'll hear more from her in just a bit. First, I want to bring in White House reporters Justin Sink and a Kayla Gardner, who are covering this story. Justin the current controversy at the border seems to be focused on this old and one time obscure provision in the law called Title forty two, which was put into effect
during the pandemic as a way of restricting immigration. How does that work?
Well, I think it's useful to take a step back to before the pandemic and how people were coming to the US. There was a group of folks who had all their paperwork in order and were coming on flights or maybe border crossings, but had gotten their visas, gotten all their paperwork done, We're going through the system as normal. And then there's a wider group of folks who were
coming over without documentation. So there were folks who were sneaking across the border areas where there wasn't surveillance, and we don't know a ton about them because by definition, they were seeking to sort of avoid detection. And then there's a third group who came across the border and ask for asylum. And so what those folks say is that they've got a credible fear of persecution back in
their home countries. So for lots of folks, they're escaping gangs, violence, persecution because of things like sexual orientation or gender, for any of those reasons, an immigration judge might look at their case and say, hey, the United States agrees and thinks that you are deserving of asylum status refugee status
in the United States. But what other folks know is that if you come across the border and claim asylum status, you have to go before a judge, and that sets off a longer process under which you're given a court date, but then released in the country until you have to get to that court date. So some folks think that they'll get refugee status at the end of it and
legitimately are going through the process, but might not. Other folks really want to get through the first part of that process, which is to get a court date and then be released and then can kind of go wherever they want in the country and seek economic opportunities. And so for folks who are coming to the US in search of those economic opportunities, this is a way that they can circumvent the worry about being caught right at the border as they cross.
So some people who are coming to the US just to work have learned that the easiest way to do that is to ask for asylum and then disappear into the country and.
Go to work exactly. And so I think you see critics on both sides of this say it's a process that isn't working very well. There aren't enough judges to adequately look at folks who have legitimate and reasonable fear of persecution, have reasons that they need protection from their home country, And there's also not enough judges to say, hey, this is a case where somebody is just trying to
bypass the line and get another country quickly. What happened during the coronavirus pandemic is a wide array of sort of emergency powers came into effect. So what the Trump administration did was dig up this old law from nearly one hundred years ago and use it degrees.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decided to exercise its authority under the Title forty two of the US Code to give customers of border protection the tools it needs to prevent the transmission of the virus coming through.
And whether it was because they were seeking to legitimately stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, whether it was because they were trying to stop undocumented migration across the southern border, or some combination of both, what ended up happening functionally was that lots of folks who otherwise would have been able to go through this asylum process ended up being returned back to their home countries or returned back across the Mexican border, and.
A kala that caused a huge backlog of people on the border.
So they have now turned away some two million people who have come to the border seeking asylum. Those people no longer really have to go through the same process that they have.
And for years.
It's sort of frustrating for these people who've made this long journey that they can no longer have a chance because of this law.
And what's happening to them are the countries where they came from just taking them back.
In Well, it really depends some countries won't take these folks back. The US has tried to get other countries to take them back. They've had some success with Mexico, with Canada, with Spain, with other allies and partners in the region where folks can go back. Some countries are
taking them back. The administration is doing flights on a daily basis from the southern border back and some are just kind of camped out on the US Mexican border, and these massive towns that have emerged seeking another chance to try to get back into the United States, and this.
Is especially a problem from countries where the US doesn't really have diplomatic relations like Cuba.
Yes, so often those countries that the US has the worst relationship are the ones where the economic situation is the most dire, and so that's why folks are making this journey away from their families and friends. The administration has been trying to address this in many different ways. Vice President Harris has looked to American companies to invest in some of these countries.
Question as I've asked Microsoft to partner with us on what we can do to get people access to banking systems through technology and basically help them with their digital connectiveness. Let's see the people, let's see their needs, and let's focus on it.
And they've also worked with other countries in Central and South America and asked them to take more refugees, to work with the United States to help people who are genuinely trying to get out of terrible situations and just looking for somewhere else that they can go.
It's notable that even though Biden's stands on immigration is very different from Trump's, he didn't repeal Title forty two when he took office.
Exactly. They have continued it over the past something like two years.
Now.
This program was supposed to end in the spring of twenty twenty two, because back in April, the CDC said, the situation of the pandemic has just improved so much, vaccination reads are much higher. This is no longer necessary.
So they could no longer justify it for it tended purpose, which was to protect Americans from the spread of disease.
Exactly, they could no longer justify as a public health emergency. And so basically this was supposed to end last year. But this group of Republican states, this coalition, came together and said, if you end this program, chaos is going
to ensue at the border. So this group of Republican governors follow a lawsuit to prevent Title forty two from ending, and this escalated all the way up to the Supreme Court at the request of the Biden administration, and they decided to tie the end of Title forty two to the end of the COVID nineteen pandemic, which is now May eleven.
And that's the sort of dual purpose when we're looking at the Trump administration. It's, on the one hand, there's
that real public health emergency. On the other it's a way to sort of back into an immigration policy that Republicans prefer, which is that you don't have this pathway open where people can both claim refugee status and also exploit the loophole of the gap between when you're captured on the southern border and when you have to show up to a court date to go anywhere you want in the US potentially fall off the map and disappear.
So the justices ruled that Title forty two was to remain in effect until there was an official declaration essentially of the end of the pandemic.
And Republicans in Congress have been eager to get that, especially because they've wanted to see covid era vaccination requirements, covid era travel restrictions, all these sort of things that
were implemented during the pandemic rolled back. And so even though the Biden administration had planned to let public health officials make that decision, when lawmakers on Capitol Hill pushed for legislation that would have it rolled back in May, ultimately the White House said that's okay, we'll go forward with that date.
We're here today because of the impending end of Title forty two policy. President Biden is laying down a welcome matt to people across the entire world, saying that the United States border is why to but President of Biden's open border policies is going to cause a catastrophic disaster in the United States.
That's Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, and justin Republican governors like him who were arguing that once Title forty two is lifted, there's gonna be a crush of people once again pouring over the southern border. They're not wrong. The Biden administration is pretty worried about this.
Yeah, they're estimating that there could be as many as ten thousand people coming across a day, which is a huge logistical challenge for everybody at the border. So in preparation for Title forty two being lifted, the administration has done a series of things that they hope will sort of stem that flow and also hope will support folks who are working the border at the border patrol agents
right now. But there's a real concern that these steps might not do enough, and we could see, as we did early in the Trump administration, lay in the Obama administration and often happens in summers, a real big push, especially of all these folks who have been pent up waiting for Title forty two to end.
So one thing that they just recently announced is that they are going to be sending one thy five hundred troops to the boarder to basically assist in these first few months now that Title forty two is ending. And they specifically said they will not be doing law enforcement activities, they will not be even interacting with migrants, but they're going to be helping with logistical things like data entry and warehouse support. So they are in some ways trying to prepare for this.
Yeah, And so in addition to those troops, the administration unveiled a whole news set of rules and policies that will mean that these interactions go differently than they did before the pandemic. Back in January, the President announced that he was going to expand parrole so that more people could come through the refugee system. So thirty thousand people a month from four countries Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela
will be eligible for that sort of asylum status. But there are new tougher restrictions for how you can qualify for it. So you have to have checked with every country that you transited through on your way to the US to see if you could be offered refugee status there, and have the paperwork to show that you were denied in those countries.
Instead of just showing up and getting a court date exactly.
And on top of that, you have to use a new app for a smartphone that the government has developed and make an appointment with an asylum officer on the other side of the border. So if you show up and you don't have one of these coveted appointments, you're
sent straight back. The idea is that there are more slots available, there are more sort of legal pathways that exist, but that for folks who don't kind of check all the boxes, and those are hard boxes to check, it's tough to get through if you don't have all your paperwork in order, you don't have a phone. Yeah, and not only are you sent back, you're not eligible to come back to the United States under any sort of legal status for the next five years.
Is there a concern that this is just going to increase pressure people trying to sneak over the border, get through the fence, go across the Rio grind River, all the ways that people have over many years tried to sneak into the US instead of at least trying to go through the process the right way.
Yeah, that's a huge concern of immigration activists who say the system that we had before was ad hoc and broken in many ways, but it did route people towards fairly safe border crossings. And if you remove the incentive for all but the lucky few who get one of these appointments to go through normal, designated pathways to get onto US soil, you really open the door to exploitative and dangerous routes into the US.
When we come back, what other countries are doing to control the wave of immigrants on their way to the US Akayla Winter, Mexico and other countries in Central America doing to prepare for this wave of immigrants, people who are going to pass through their countries on their way to the US, or who are going to be on the receiving end of people the US turns away.
I think the US's biggest partner in this right now is Mexico, and they have basically agreed to accept thirty thousand migrants a month who are turned away from the US, and they've also said they're partnering with the administration in terms of preventing drug trafficking.
We are seeing Colombia Guatemala invite the US in to create processing centers in their native countries so that folks don't make the dangerous journey without having had the chance to do one of these interviews, and it doesn't create
this sort of cycle of displacement, cycle of chaos. Ideally, folks would be able to, if they're genuinely seeking refugee status, either come from or come to Colombia Guatemala, go through these interviews, then buy a plane ticket and fly to the US directly because they've got all their paperwork in order. And so you see these other countries, see countries like Canada and Spain saying if the US is able to process these folks, we might be able to take more refugees.
You see these partnerships developing where they're trying to find ways to quell the chaos. But the real question is are these systems big enough and are the resources there so that people are actually disincentivized from just crossing the border. Illegally, And I think the real worry among activists, among folks in the administration, and certainly among critics is that this system just isn't built well enough right now to stop what could be a really massive search.
If people do have to show that every country they went through they sought asylum and were denied, will the US be able to make better judgments about who the people are who are coming, or is it they'll just be a rubber stamped through all these other countries who kind of want to pass them along.
There's certainly a lot of rubber stamping happening in Mexico in particular. Mexico will essentially give you a document as soon as you apply for asylum saying that it's rejected. This is in certain Mexican states, and then as you work through the system, you might be able to come back and actually in fact get accepted. The US has created this incentive structure for other countries to reject refugee
applications so that people can move along pathways. And so you know, this is an issue that actually hits not just the US but every country along the line and has created political and economic issues. So it's why you hear a lot of talk about trying to come up with unified solutions across the hemisphere, because I think everybody sees migration as a real challenge.
Justin We're also starting to see a little bit of motion in the Senate over this.
Yeah, so there's a bipartisan bill from Senators Cinema and Senator Tillis that would essentially extend Title forty two type restrictions for the next couple of years, with the hope that they could use that space to sort of get the big white whale of Congress, which is a comprehensive
immigration reform bill. This short term bill isn't very likely, it needs sixty votes in the Senate, doesn't seem to have it, and it lacks something that would give Democrats a thing they could point to for immigration activists, something like a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, where they could say, hey, guys, we're not just keeping people out, including legitimate refugees. We're trying to do something that could actually help people who
are really in need. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't seem to have a pult home moment right now.
There's also a proposal in the House from Republicans that proposes resuming wall construction, which we know was this deeply unpopular policy under Trump that has basically stopped under the Biden administration. And they also want to up the border patrol agents to twenty two thousand. It's right now at nineteen thousand, and that twenty two thousand number is sort
of seen as this optimal size for the agency. There are things that Democrats and Republicans agree on with immigration, but there's sort of these two different extremes that they have. They know that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with, but they just see it in two drastically different ways on how to deal with it.
And a Kayla that points to, of course, the politics involved in immigration. And we're heading into another presidential campaign, and the last one, immigration was front and center. Donald Trump made it a centerpiece of his campaign. Do you think that the crisis at the border will once again be a central issue in the campaign.
I think it definitely will. But I think we're definitely going to see it from Republicans. I don't think that President Biden sees this as a winning issue for him, so I don't think it's something that he's going to seek to highlight Governor Rond De Santis, who has been one of these Republicans who've been sending migrants to other cities. It's definitely going to be something that he is going to be hitting Biden on if and when he announces,
and of course Trump as well. He was sort of seen as someone who was tough on immigration when he was in office.
Justin as you continue to report on this, what are you looking for?
I think the biggest thing that we're looking at is the real humanitarian toll that this has the potential to have, because if you have perhaps over a million people bottled up waiting to get across the border, and in fact do sarge across the border, just in terms of food, water, housing, healthcare, basic logistics, keeping families together so that they're not separated, making sure that people are getting to save places, whether it's in the US or back in their home countries
or in third party countries. It is a massive logistical undertaking. And these aren't boxes that you're trying to get from one place to another. These are human beings that have health issues, personal issues, all sorts of problems. Because if they didn't have all sorts of problems, they wouldn't have taken this sort of harrowing journey to the United States
in the first place. There's just this real danger of a humanitarian crisis developing, and I think that's going to be something that we're watching very carefully.
Justin Akayla, thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks so much for having us when we.
Come back, an immigration expert on what a system that actually works might look like. Now, let's hear from someone who's seen the challenges of immigration policy from inside the government and has worked on the issue for years. Doris Meisner was Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service when Bill Clinton was president, That's what the department was called then. She's now senior Fellow and director of the US Immigration
Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. That's a nonpartisan think tank here in Washington. Ms Meisner, how did we get here? Can you give us a broader perspective about what's always been the same at the border and what's different right now?
Well, the same over the years with this problem is that the United States has always been a nation of immigrants and is a place where people want to live and create a future for themselves and for their families. We've always had illegal immigration just as we've had legal immigration, and we have a very generous legal immigration system, but it is focused almost entirely on family members coming for
people who are already in the country. But we do not have a large share of our immigration that is employment based, that is based on people coming to work in the United States who do not already have family ties. The other part of our immigration system is what's known as the humanitarian dimension, and that is offering protection through refugee programs and now through political asylum, which is what's
so much an issue at the Southwest border. The desire for people to come to the country had until ten years ago or so, been almost entirely where the Southwest border is concerned people from Mexico. They were typically young males coming on their own, attempting to avoid the border patrol and we're in the United States. That began to change in the two thousands, and especially in the twenty teens.
We began to see more and more not only Mexicans, but people coming from Central America and coming in family groups and young people unaccompanied. And that was because of changing conditions in Central American countries, and that pattern has continued. It's also people from further south in the Hemisphere and often from other parts of the world. And those people are coming for a mixture of reasons, both economic and arguably political and repression, and they are not trying to
avoid the border patrol. They are trying to turn themselves over to the border patrol in order to apply for protection and safety in the United States. But it has led to our asylum process being deeply, deeply overburdened and unable to decide those cases is in a timely fashion.
And so is this the case of the government simply not keeping up with changing conditions or is it that the politics of America changed along with it.
It's probably both. The systems that we have at the southwest border have been inadequate for these numbers. What we've done in funding terms as a post nine to eleven phenomenon really is funded heavily our border patrol, our enforcement and technology along the southwest border, but we have not funded proportionately what we think of as the downstream agencies that must support that border enforcement mission for it to work.
And to be specific about that, we do not have asylum officers at the numbers that we need in order to screen people that are applying for asylum and decide the cases. We do not have facilities to be able to make it possible to hold people during the period that they're interviewed for removal if they're not eligible for asylum. We do not have the judges in our court system,
which is part of the Justice Department. Nor do we have the resources at the Department of Health and Human Services to place people with sponsors in the United States if they have an ability and are legally eligible to stay here. So this is a cross government system and it's unevenly resourced. So the pieces of the system that need to work together don't work together effectively.
Why hasn't the immigration funding change to meet the changing needs.
Well, let's be clear, it's the Congress's job to fund the federal government, and this administration has been asking for sufficient funding for more than a year, and there have been at least three or four opportunities for Congress to rise to meet those needs, and they have refused to do so for decades. The broad consensus is that there
were policy disagreements. Should you have guest worker programs, what kinds of humanitarian assistance should be given through immigration, but there was a general bipartisan agreement that immigration is a net plus for the country. It's a net plus for our economy, it's a net plus for our competitive edge around the world. It reflects our values as a nation.
That changed with the Trump administration. The Trump administration described immigration and views immigration as a threat to the country.
We need a wall, we need border security.
We got to get rid of catch and release. You catch a criminal, you take his name, you release him, and he never shows up again. He goes into our society.
And that basic, broadly different philosophical outlook on immigration and what it represents has persisted and deepened. So the politics that underlie all of this are certainly an important factor.
One thing the United States has done in recent years is to put more pressure on Mexico, on Guatemala and other nations where immigrants are coming from, in order to absorb the number of people who are coming before they cross the border. Do you see that continuing. Is that a viable part of a solution.
Yes, I see it continuing, And it is a viable part of a solution. Because this has become a hemispheric issue. Until very recently, the western hemisphere has not been a refugee producing region as has been South Asia or the Middle East, but in recent years it has become a refugee producing region. So there is an assumption of shared
responsibility around the world. Mexico is the most important to the United States, of course, because they're on our border, and Mexico's situation geographically has changed dramatic in the last ten years or so. It used to be primarily a migrant sending country. Then it became increasingly both a migrant sending and a migrant transit country. Now it's a migrant sending, a migrant transit and a migrant destination country.
What do you see happening? How do you think that this problem can be eased?
Well, in an ideal world, we would have the executive branch and the legislative branch working together to change our laws and the funding of those laws. But fundamentally, the laws themselves to align with realities on the ground, and those realities on the ground do have to do with the fact that many of the people who are trying to come are not suitable asylum candidates. But asylum is the only possible avenue to get to the United States.
If you don't already have family here, and many of the people who do have family here have family here who are in an illegal status. And that too goes back to the Congress, because we have a country of a foreign born population in the forty millions, and about a fourth of it, or about eleven million, do not have legal status. Now, yes, they broke the law to come, but they've been here more than sixty percent of them
have been here more than ten years. We need a legalization program along with more opportunities for people to come to the country for employment reasons. Now, that doesn't mean that we can take everybody that wants to come, but we could have a rational system that recognizes what today's needs are and that is more flexible and that makes it possible for people to come for work purposes. We
don't have that. And so what the administration is working with and what the Administration is now laying out as it's vision for the post five to eleven period is a whole series of measures which, if they are able to be implemented effectively, do represent the pieces of a
longer term, durable response. That doesn't mean that there won't be illegal immigration, but it does mean that they may have the chance of succeeding in a much more orderly system that incentivizes and provides ways for people to apply for asylum, but at the same time achieves a degree of control along the border so that there are not the chaotic conditions and unexpected, unpredictable surges and flows that
we're seeing today. The next sixty to ninety days is critical in being able to determine whether the immediate response is changing people's behaviors. But it will take longer than that. I mean, we should talk about this a year from now in order to really see whether the broad measures and shifts that the administration is attempting to incentivize in fact take.
Hold, Doros Meisner, thanks so much for speaking with me today. Thank you thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Burgalina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Our producers
are Moberrow and Michael Falero. Kilde Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm wes Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.
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