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Immigrants, we'll add seven trillion with eighty dollars to the gross domestic product of the United States over the next ten years, seven trillion dollars.
You don't worry that bringing all these new people into the workforce, well, it might be good for the GDP depresses wages for Native born Americans.
The Biden administration seems to only be tightening sanctions and expanding the Trump administration's kind of tough policy.
I don't think that President Biden has gotten this right. I don't think the President Trump, President Obama, President Bush, or the presidents before them have.
No one has been willing to take this on.
According to Ice, the like seventy three thousand non citizens with the criminal history arrested just last year, aren't there pretty real concerns. That's just people who were arrested with criminal histories last year.
Today's conversation is going to focus on immigration and the border, and for that we are joined by former Congressman Beto O'Rourke.
Beto, thank you so much for joining us here.
Nice to be with you.
And I was just telling Emily before the program, you know, we were talking about you and I did my first interview with you when you were a city councilman back in El Paso, when you were pushing a we legalization resolution, and we actually have some footage of that we can put at the very end of this clip for people who can who will see both of us as much younger people. But here we are today and so thanks
for joining us. We want to have a kind of wide ranging conversation that if people watch the entire thing, they can come away with kind of a broad understanding of both the the history of immigration, our immigration policy, our current border policy, and what different ideas there are around it, and then they can figure out for themselves
where they stand on this. But you, as a city councilman and then a member of Congress from El Paso, this has been something that is just kind of inherent to policy making.
I suppose that is that fair to say?
Like, what is it what is it like to be a kind of a border city politician.
Well, I'm speaking to you right now from Elpaso, which, with our sister city of Siula quad Is Chihuahua, Mexico, forms the largest binational community anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps the largest, or at least one of the largest anywhere in the world. It's about two and a half million people, two countries, two cultures, two languages, who come together in this one spot in the Chihuahuan desert, in the Rio Grande River Valley and do something absolutely extraordinary.
We're far from the centers of power in our respective countries, like here in El Paso, I'm closer to the state capitals of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Chihuahua than i am to Austin, Texas, my own state capital eight hours away. So you thought Watts is similarly politically and geographically isolated.
So there's this really beautiful.
Symbiotic, interdependent relationship that we have had for as long as we have been communities. In fact, where I'm speaking to you from my living room here in Sunset Heights. Al Passo one hundred and ten years ago hosted a meeting between Pancho Villa and the Chief of Staff the United States Army General Hugh Scott, trying to address US Mexico US Mexico border issues, not too different from the role that Ol Paso could play today.
So we really are at the.
Epicenter of the US Mexico relationships, certainly the US Mexico border.
All the dynamics positive and negative, whether it's the hundreds of billions of dollars of trade that flow through our ports of entry, the millions of legal, documented inspected crossings of people, of travelers, of workers, of students, of tourists, and then yes, the dynamic of unauthorized immigration, and significant challenges when it comes to our border, our immigration system, and the political dynamics that drive elections up and down
the ballot, including the presidency in November. So al Paso in s WHA does our sister city hold a very
special place. And that's why when I was on the city council in two thousand and nine and you interviewed me, we were working on drug policy because at the time set, Wadas was the deadliest city in the world bar none, in large part due to the United States drug interdiction, drug enforcement, drug militarization policies that it created such a premium for people to be able to cross things like marijuana, which seems quoint today, but back then people were literally
willing to die or to kill for the ability to cross it into our community.
So this is where it is all happening.
Yeah, And I'm really eager to get to that point, because when we talk about border and immigration, there's the economic concerns, there's a humanitarian sort of security, drug, all of those concerns. If we start with labor though in the economy, H five N one is just ripping through American dairy farms right now, and a lot of people might not have thought about this in the context of immigration, but there are so many migrant workers, a lot of
them on humanitarian parole. Surely over the course of the last several years, we've seen big increases in that, and I wanted to ask betto about this. This excerpt from an article in Compact this week from Sorobramari, who wrote, farmers and ranchers who hire legal workers will struggle to compete against those who rely on soobs illegal serfs. The more the latter get away with, the more surf or slave life like labor becomes the norm across a whole sector.
America's worst academic isn't an epidemic, is an addiction to cheap and vulnerable labor. It brings together unlikely bedfellows like the farm and ranch lobby and open border progressives in the White House and beyond. Carrying the addiction will require a similar pro worker alliance across partisan and regional lines. I thought this was a good question for you as
someone who's also supportive of progressive causes on labor. It seems to me that there's tension there between you know, people who are concerned for workers and people who are concerned about the border. But how do you see that issue? And are you concerned about all of those workers now dealing with the outbreak of H five N one where they're on the front lines. It's probably not going to get into our food supply, but it may well get into their systems.
Yeah.
I think this is a great point, and it is something that I'm concerned about. I read that expose the New York times led on immigrant child labor. Kids who are working as roofers, who are in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, who are doing some of the toughest, most dangerous, deadliest jobs in America. And they're twelve, and they're thirteen, and they're fourteen years old, and many of them are leaving
these jobs maimed, mangled, or dead. In addition to that, you talk about this permanent second or third or fourth class of Americans that we have essentially created over the last many decades, growing comfortable with the fact that there are people who are struggling to come here, in many cases literally willing to die to get across the US Mexico border to work a job that, for whatever reason, no one born in this country is willing to work.
Many of these same jobs that I just listed earlier, working for substandard wages in some standard conditions, and again very often sacrificing their health or even their lives in process. We the consumer, ultimately, in some messed up way, is the beneficiary of this. It's lower costs, it's more abundance, it's less work for our kids or for us personally. But this is not sustainable, at least from the moral imperative as I see it, and it may not be
sustainable for us economically going forward. The other side of this is that we're missing out on a massive, unrealized windfall if we could only find legal, safe, orderly channels for people to come here and work the jobs that were unable to fill. The last count that I saw is there are more than nine million of them in the United States economy. These nine million unfilled jobs exacerbate inflation, supply chain issues, the life and death of smaller communities
that are dependent upon this labor. And here we have literally millions of people who are willing to work these jobs. So it is absolutely incumbent upon Congress, upon this President, upon both parties to change our immigration laws and certainly our work permission process to ensure that there's a legal way to do this. People come in from out of the shadows. There's no longer the unfair competition that no one except the corporations, the bosses, and ultimately perhaps the
American consumer is good with. Certainly not the American worker, Certainly not the immigrant worker. We can fix this, but it's going to be a matter of political will and leadership from those who are in positions of power right now.
We want to get to some of those fixes towards the back end of this conversation, So people that are curious about that, go ahead, fast forward there. I wanted to go backwards a little bit here and ask you about Kamala Harris's assignment that she was given by the by President Joe Biden go deal with root causes. She famously want of her efforts to keep immigration down was just to say don't come. But she was also supposed
to address what they call these root causes. Now, often on this show we'll talk about the kind of the history of US interventions abroad. Some people think that that's just distracting from the current crisis that we're facing now and making excuses so you don't have to deal with the responsibility now. So I'm curious what you think the
root causes of some of this immigration surge are. Is the history still relevant today or is that kind of some type of a cope And has Kamala Harris actually addressed any of these or from my perspective, seems like this administration is just maybe destabilized things further.
Yeah, there's absolutely a consistent through line, at least in the modern era of American policy in Latin America.
You could go back to.
Nineteen fifty four, for example, when the United States helped lead a coup against a fairly freely democratically elected president in Guatemala, a coolbar Benz Guzman. From nineteen fifty four forward after he was deposed in this US led coup, that country, for lack of a better phrase, has really been a political, a security, a civic basket case that has helped to exacerbate problems in Central America at the
US Mexico border and with our immigration system. You can fast forward to the late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties, to the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, to our relationship with Honduras, which many people referred to as essentially an undisclosed American aircraft carrier or base for American paramilitary sponsored operations in those two other countries, again further destabilizing that region, sending people fleeing by the hundreds of
thousands to the United States in the nineteen eighties, people who were often apprehended, imprisoned while in prison, picking up gang culture in US penal system, and in exporting that back to El Salvador, back to Honduras, back to Guatemala, back to Nicaragua, only to see that come back to us again in the two thousands leading up all the way today. The fix for this is one that I think is going to exceed the portfolio or the mandate or the authority given to.
The Vice President.
It's really going to have to involve a reorientation in the United States foreign policy. I don't know what the answer to this is, but I wonder if we looked at where the Secretary of State and where senior State Department officials spend the majority of their time physically, where they travel to in the world, where we are spending resources right now, where our attention, our focus is, and I would guess that Latin America, the Western hemisphere is
pretty low on the list. Now, granted, you have Ukraine, you have Gaza, you have China, you have so many important places on the world, but none of them are literally physically and culturally and familiarly connected to us the
way that the Americas are. And the longer that we choose because it is a choice to ignore the Americas or to only respond in crisis reactively, the longer we are going to have this conversation on shows like these about what's happening at the border, what's happening with our immigration system this moment, this issue begs for the kind of leadership that only the United States can provide, and that's presidential leadership that's convening the leaders of the Western
hemisphere and looking at a migration crisis that is decades in the making and will require cooperation with all of the people and all the governments in this region, including governments that we don't like that much.
I'll give you just one example.
Venezuela has seen a diaspora of more than seven million people who have fled throughout the region. About five hundred thousand of them of those seven million, put this in context, have come to the United States. Countries much smaller than ours, like Columbia population of about fifty five million, have taken in millions of Ennsolonos. Other countries have taken in hundreds
of thousands and millions as well. So let's try to find a logical, rational, fair, cooperative way to handle this challenge, or we will continue to meet this at the border to the detriment of our country, of our politics and to the future that we could see if we were able to get a handle on this and make the most of those who want to come here and do better for themselves and do better for all of us.
See it's interesting because I actually agree with a lot of what you've said on the root causes, and you know, going back to you know, we were talking about you cover our guns ourselves earlier, and I agree with a lot of that. But it's funny because when I look at what's happening today, and when I look at Big ag benefiting from this migrant work and the manufacturing sector benefiting from this migrant work, I also see the Biden
border policies. This is from the Washington Post, the increases in humanitarian parole over the course of the Biden administration. I look at that almost as a way to or something that has destabilized a lot of these countries because
they've created these pathways. I've talked to people, you know, when I was in matam Moros a couple of years ago, who described it as kind of a super highway through Central America, Latin America up to the American border in ways that are incredibly destabilizing every migrant pays cartels, so that's for each person, it's more money in the pocket
of the cartels. So how do we design a border policy that's at once humanitarian but on the other hand is also understands that, you know, the easier it is to get humanitarian parole or a pathway to citizenship in the United States, the more people you're going to have flocking up through these countries that are already incredibly destabilized and need security in some ways. You know, you don't want to I want to end up subsidizing Buchala. You don't want to end up, you know, with the situation
in Ecuador that Ran and I've talked about before. So it's so complicated. I'm curious how you think about that, Beto.
You know, I see this perhaps a little bit differently, and that is I think the Biden administration was really responding to people who were already coming to this country, and many were coming and crossing in between ports of entry.
They weren't able to get one of.
Those coveted slots for an asylum interview. They weren't able to exceed the quota system that we have for visas for people who are coming from countries that are over subscribed.
In other words, there was really no legal channel for people to come here, and those people, for whatever reason, felt like they could not return to the country from which they had originally fled, and so taking their lives in their hands literally, they attempted to cross in between these ports of entry, you know, fording the Rio Grande River and trying to get through the razor wire that Governor Abbott has put up, or braving you know, the
desert conditions in the summer in Arizona. What the Biden administration did with humanitarian prole was say, look, you are coming, and though we've told you not to come, you know, as Kamala Harris, Vice President, famously said when she went to Central America, you're still coming, and.
You're putting your life at risk.
You're creating, you know, potentially chaos at our border, and it's a real security and political challenge for the United States. We've got to do something about it. So we're going to give you a legal pathway to come here. This is through humanitarian prole and that was extended to folks who are coming from Haiti, who are coming from Nicaragua, who are coming from Cuba, and who are coming from
Venezuela and Emily. When the Biden administration did that, illegal crossings undocumented crossing attempts dropped by more than ninety two percent for these populations. It may not be the perfect solution, and I don't think it is, but absent any action from Congress, this was about as much as a president could do to find that safe, legal, orderly path for those who are coming here. The other thing I would say is that you're absolutely right to focus on root causes.
I mean, we're going to continue to manage this at the border through humanitarian parole or bigger walls or Concertina wire, or deportations or detentions, or we're going to work cooperatively with leaders and populations in the region to address the root causes in their economies, in the lack of the institutions that we take for granted in the United States that make civil society possible, security and safety, et cetera.
We either work on that which is not easy, which is not sexy, which is a long term investment and prospect and diplomatically incredibly difficult, or we will continue to have this problem at our border and in our country.
I have a quick follow up on that. I want to roll this video. We have this as ex.
Two.
This is a Red Cross worker in Mata Moroso years ago now, but he was talking about some of the causes of migration.
My colleagues and I interviewed him. Let's roll this.
Political divid in patrol meno drastic drum.
People are being told in their home countries that there's.
With President Biden. He has policies that are not as drastic.
As as President Trump, and it's just causing a constant flow.
Of people to arrive at the border.
It was quiet, but once once Biden won, another wave of people arrived who thought that the border was going to open.
So I found that interesting because to me and when I've talked to people, you've spent way more time in the border than I have. When I've talked to people, there was a consistent drum beat that people thought Biden was going to be more lenient. And as we saw, we can put ex. One, this is just crossings under Biden up on the screen. As we saw Biden take office,
we did see an increase in illegal crossings. But now what we've seen is increase is also in humanitarian parole because people are being shifted away from I I think when Republicans talk about illegal immigrants right now, it's completely misnomer because a lot of this is actually authorized now,
a lot of this is coming through humanitarian parole. So how is it possible to have a policy where you're getting people into the American economy to get it to where people are being treated humanly and fairly, but also not for that to be a pull factor that endangers people as they're being pulled up by cartels.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I think you make a good point, and I think common sense tells us that following Trump with his vicious nativist, anti immigrant rhetoric, having someone like President Biden, who is known for his empathy, who wants to get America back to its foundational values, including the acknowledgment that we are a nation of immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers from around the world, that that's going to have an impact on the prospective immigrant or asylum
seekers decision on coming to this country. So a great, great point there, But in that graph that you just showed, there was also a pretty significant bump in twenty and nineteen. That's when Donald Trump, of course was president of the
United States. And I just point that out because the dramatic increase that we saw in twenty nineteen, which was some of the highest numbers we had seen in many, many years, followed twenty eighteen, where you had a family separation policy where you had kids in cages, where you had some of the most fearful, hateful, racist rhetoric that we'd ever seen from an American president, and yet you saw the attempts increased dramatically in twenty nineteen.
From twenty twenty going forward, it's a little.
Bit challenging to parse these numbers because you had Title forty two, which allowed border patrol agents to summarily deport without processing, people who are trying to enter this country, many trying to claim asylum. Those people were then free to try to cross again and again and again, and so you may have many crossing attempts that are representative of just a single person trying to cross multiple times.
I guess this boils down to the fact that it has been decades, really since Ronald Reagan was a president of the United States, that we've had a comprehensive rewrite of our immigration, our asylum, our refugee and our border policies to match the conditions as they are today, to match the reality of our country right now, and certainly to match our values who we aspire to be, who we tell ourselves and the rest of the world that
we are at the end of the day. And no, I don't think that President Biden has gotten this right. I don't think that President Trump, President Obama, President Bush, or the presidents before them have.
No one has been willing to.
Take this on and to put in the work and to expend the political capital necessary to get this done. I really think, Emily, it's going to take the next president to use everything they have in the first one hundred days of their administration to make this happen.
The way that LBJ did with civil rights.
In sixty four, the way that Obama did with the ACA in two thousand and nine, it's going to have to be. My hope is that it's President Biden his second term, doing everything he can with what he has to finally end this problem, this current crisis, and make sure that we have laws that correspond with our values, our reality, and the best interests of America.
Obama's effort to do that during his term seemed to be to pretty much appease Republicans on enforcement in order to kind of win some capital, to get some comprehensive deal, none of which seemed to work. In the militarization that he advanced didn't seem to slow much. But I'm curious from your prosuctive you were serving in Congress then while Obama was engaged in that policy.
What was Obama's policy like from your perspective, which parts of it worked, what.
Didn't you know? I think that you're right. I think he was really trying to demonstrate this. This is me guessing. He didn't tell me this. I don't know this for a fact, but I think he and his administration we're trying to demonstrate just how tough they could be on the border and how strong they.
Could be on security issues.
You know, many people derided him as quote unquote the deporter in chief. At that point, he had deported under his administration more people from this country than any administration previously. There were these, you know, so called deportation camps that existed in places like Artesia, New Mexico. I visited one
of them as a member of Congress. It's three hours from Malpasso, which is the closest big city to Artesia, meaning that asylum seekers, refugees, migrants who were stranded at these camps had little recourse to representation, to family, to help, to really anybody, including the media, even knowing that they
were alive. And the the sense was among those migrants and some of the ICE staff that I talked to in Artesia that this was an effort to get people to quote unquote self deport to make conditions so miserable for them, but they'd go back to the country from which they fled and tell others in their hometowns not to make the attempt.
That just doesn't work.
We can be as cruel as we can imagine, and in Texas we've defied most people's imaginations. I mean, it's not just the razor wire on the shores of the Rio Grande, submerged under the water level. It's not the floating buoy barriers with nets underneath designed to ensnare, entangle
and drown migrants who are crossing. It's not just the fact that five years ago, in the entire i'll passive Border patrol sector all of West Texas, all of southern New Mexico, only six migrants died trying to cross in the US, and last year, one hundred and forty nine migrants died trying to cross into this country. It's the fact that we've quintupled border patrols spent over the last
five years. We've more than tripled the size of ice, we are spending ungodly amounts of money, we are building walls, we are militarizing the border. You would think that doing all of that, with all of the death, all the misery, all the suffering that we are seeing, that numbers.
Would plumb it. That's just not the case.
And I think that should break through to both our brains and to our hearts, to show us that people aren't doing this for kicks. They're not coming here to steal our jobs or our kids place in school, or to freeload on free benefits and a social welfare system in the United States. They are leaving because they absolutely have no other choice but to do so.
They're making the same decision.
That you or I would make if faced with the same conditions. And I really do think we have a responsibility to figure out how to humanly address this issue. And yes, from the presence perspective, now without the help of cong Risk. That includes things like opening up more
asylum appointments, more humanitarian parole, more work authorizations. But I take the points that both of you are making that we have to absolutely address the root causes of this work hemispherically with our partners and some folks that we
don't like so much in the region. To address root causes or we're never going to get a handle on this, and that will be to the detriment of our country and politically, it's going to continue to be in albatross around the neck of any Democrat running for office, including the President, because the other side, cynically Donald Trump, who says the quiet part out loud all the time, they
don't want a solution. You know, he infamously broke the border deal negotiated by Senate Republicans and the President because he wants to run on the problem. They can fit their solution on a bumper sticker, build the wall.
Democrats actually have.
To govern, and until we get this right, it is going to be very challenging for us politically, and that leads to all other problems or a number of other problems that we're going to continue to have in this country. So I don't think that there's a more important issue for the president to lead on and if he has majorities in his second term to actually get the job done.
Actually, that's interesting because you don't see it. We keep going back on this. I feel like this is where the impasses. But you don't see it in that. You know, if you look at increased deaths or the humanitarian suffering people going through the Darien Gap and the Darien Gap they say they've seen massive increases, you don't think that's connected to the increase in humanitarian parole in the United States.
And I asked that question again just because like you're talking to these people, is the world I mean, is so heartbreaking exactly because of what you said. It's what everyone would do in these situations when gangs are targeting your family and you know, you have so much more
opportunity in the United States. You know, some of the Haitian migrants, you talk to them and they'll say, you know, they're doing okay in Brazil or somewhere like that, but what they want is the opportunity of the United States. But you don't see that as being connected to the
Biden policy. To think Greg Abbott, Well, he would say, you know, I can put up as much razor wire, but unless the Biden administration decreases the humanitarian parole that it's given, or you know, does detention or remain in Mexico, people are going to keep coming because they're desperate. So those two things, you don't think they're completely correlated.
I don't know if they're completely correlated, but I absolutely can see that that is a factor.
Again, and I mentioned this earlier.
If you know, we're moving from an administration where the president is describing asylum seekers as animals, calling them an infestation and invasion, as are all words that President Trump used inspiring a mass killer to come to all Pass in twenty nineteen and murder twenty three people in the walmart here, claiming that he's repelling this invasion that he'd heard about from Donald Trump, of Hispanics who are coming to politically take over this country if that person is
replaced by somebody who is not as hateful, not as violent, not as vicious, and says, yes, I want to get America back to its fundamental values. I want to treat people with the basic dignity and respect that they deserve could that be a factor.
Absolutely, very happy to concede that.
Very proud of the President, by the way, for representing that value in American history. But the reason I pointed out the significant spike in twenty nineteen under Donald Trump is that he was as cruel a president towards immigrants as we've ever had, and you still saw a dramatic increase in people trying to cross. The one hundred and forty nine deaths that I described earlier. Those are moms
and little babies drowning in the Rio Grand River. These are people whose desiccated bodies were finding in the Chiuahuan desert, who died of dehydration and sun exposure. This is the most miserable way possibly to lose your life. One hundred and forty nine people who died just in this region from which I'm talking to you right now, I'm confident are an undercount, and I'm also confident that their deaths
do not go unnoticed back in their home country. So we've got to ask ourselves, given all of that, why would someone still try to make this journey here? And I don't think it is just because there is a more generous humanitarian bargain to be had under President bid and I think they've they've really lost hope in being able to stay in their home country or being able to go to any other country, because, as I pointed out earlier, in a country like Colombia, they're absolutely beyond
capacity to take any more. We've taken hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and we're a three hundred and thirty five million person country. They've taken millions of Venezuelans and they're a fifty five million person country. You know, maybe a strategy is to help address capacity issues in these other countries. Hey, Columbia, what do you need to better process and retain and help put to work Venezuelans who can't return to their
home country right now? And then, hey, region, how can we work together to address what is happening in Venezuela so people can come back home. I mean, just like those of us here in America, people are proud of their home countries. They love the hometown they come from, they miss their families. They're not leaving for kicks. This is an incredibly arduous, very often deadly journey, and many people want to come back home. Let's help them find a way to do that.
What about the sanctions on Venezuela. We also see a lot of migration from Cuba recently, more people fleeing Cuba now than during the Marial, the famous Mariyal boat lift that gave this country scarface. The Biden administration seems to only be tightening sanctions and expanding the Trump administration's kind of tough policy towards them.
What role do you think that plays.
Well, and even back in coups like in Venezuela and other places.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Our foreign policy has really just been a disaster across the Americas, throughout the Western hemisphere. We are reaping what we have sown over decades. It's a combination of catastrophic disinterest, like literally ignoring what is happening right next door, and
then when we intervene, it is reactively. Whether it's Reagan fighting the boogeyman of communism in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, whether it's a successive administrations that militarize the police forces throughout the Americas to fight our drug war on their turf. Despite the fact that we represent about half or at least a quarter of the global demand for illegal drugs, and those drugs are going to transit through these places, and they're going to hollow out their institutions, their judiciary,
their free press, their civil society. They're free and fair and democratic elections. I mean, we bear some culpability for this, and we should acknowledge that, and we should do what we can to make it right, while also acknowledging that it's not completely our burden to bear, and there's responsibility in these countries certainly as well and throughout the hemisphere.
But I also want to make this point.
We have so much to gain really if we can figure this out. I think the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the last fifteen years, just asylum seekers and refugees have contributed about one hundred and twenty four billion dollars to the net positive after you subtract all of our costs to care for them or to process them, or to in any way handle them, one hundred and twenty four billion dollars to the positive of the United
States economy. Looking prospectively over the next decade, the numbers are even more dramatic. Immigrants, undocumented, legal, processed, citizen, permanent resident, and otherwise will add seven trillion with eight dollars to the gross domestic product of the United States over the next ten years, seven trillion dollars. One trillion dollars will net to federal, state, and local governments in taxa seats.
These are net numbers. Now, imagine if we could get this right and provide safe, legal, orderly pathways for people to come here to work jobs that were otherwise unable to fill, to contribute to the success of our communities, especially small towns that I see across Texas that without the influx of immigrants, would otherwise dry up and die, and also our ability to realize our promise and our potential as a country that stands on the world stage that is comprised of people from the planet over.
It really is the.
Best thing going, and we lose this at our own peril. As you all know, we're not having enough kids in our families right now to replace the population in the United States, to pay into Social Security, to keep it solvent, to work all these jobs that I've been talking about right now.
To Emily's point.
We want to make sure that those who come here to work those jobs are doing these jobs above board and are competing on an equal, fair playing field and
are out in the sunlight. And when we do all of that, when we have regular, controlled, legal, safe, orderly immigration or reports of entry, the real challenges that we have and I and I completely admit that we have some at our border, you know, illegal drug trafficking, illegal human trafficking, modern day slavery that is taking place in the Americas, it becomes much easier to focus on those
challenges right now. Those are needles in the haystack of hundreds of thousands of people who are coming here every month. We regularize the ability for those people to come here, address the root causes, so fewer people are coming in the first place, and we're going to be more effective at stopping the real threats that we face at the US Mexico border.
And on the point about labor, from a macro perspective, it's hard for me to see how bringing in you know, two millions, So if we're taking the humanitarian parole numbers, most of those are most of those people get authorized work permits, a couple million people into the labor force. How that doesn't depress wages? There is competing research on that, but you don't worry that bringing all these new people
into the workforce. Well, it might be good for the GDP depresses wages for native born Americans.
No, I am concerned about that, and I think you raise a really important point in effect that is happening right now because we don't have legal pathways for people to come here and work above board, and they're being paid depressed wages underneath the minimum wage, which is already so low. In Texas it's seven dollars and twenty five cents an hour.
Try feeding your family on one of those jobs.
Now imagine if you're paid five bucks an hour or two bucks an hour, as some of these undocumented migrants are, and now imagine that you're an American born worker who's in the labor.
Pool competing against that.
It's really really tough to get by and incredibly unfair
to Americans first and foremost. So you've just provided one of the most important reasons that we've got to find these safe legal pathways for people to come here and work within the law, to make sure that they're vetted, and also to make sure that they have a pathway that will allow them to escape, you know, a third place or second place level of citizenship ultimately, if they want to to become United States citizen and to enjoy the fruits.
Of their labor.
You know, they're literally helping to build this country up, and we want to make sure that they and their descendants are going to have a place and a future in this country. That's good for all of us. And
as you know, that's the story of this country. That's the story of my ancestors fleeing famine in Ireland to come to this country, probably to work jobs that no one else would take, and then successive generations continue to contribute to the success of their cities, their communities, and their country.
We want that to continue in America.
That's the best part of our story as far as I'm concerned.
But yes, you're right, it has to happen legally.
But to your point about demand, we have nine million unfilled jobs right now. It's absolutely one of not the only, but one of the drivers on inflation, one of the drivers of supply chain issues, and it's really holding back an economy that could go gangbusters if we could find a way to make the most of this unrealized labor pool that wants to come here to work these jobs.
How do you respond to people who say, look, it's all well and good that we're a nation of immigrants, but we're just too crowded now. Rent is too high, housing prices are too high. We just can't take any more people. I'm sure you hear that. What's your response to that?
When you hear it?
It's funny.
When I was running for governor here in Texas, I could point to the abysmal state of public education in Texas, or the fact that teachers are paid less than ten thousand against their counterparts nationally, talk about the power grid failure in twenty twenty one that killed seven hundred people, or the fact that two years after Uvaldy.
We lead the nation in school shootings.
The fact that we haven't expanded medicat or minimum wage is solo. I could make any of those charges and the governor would simply point to the border or raise the boogeyman of immigrants who are coming to take our jobs, or to rape our kids, or to kill our families. Until we address this issue, it will continue to be a distraction. And unlike the economy or inflation, these are things that we experience in day to day life. I know how much more milk costs than it did four
years ago. I know what it costs to fill up my truck when I go to the gas station.
You can't snow me on that. But immigration, unless you're an immigrant, unless.
You work with immigrants, perhaps if you live in El Paso or Eagle Pass or Del Rio or Nogals, this is.
Not something you experience on a day to day basis.
This is something you are told how to feel about by people like Donald Trump or Greg Abbott, and they tell you to be afraid, and they incite so much of that hatred, so much of that violence, like we saw in El Paso, so much of that dysfunction that we see in Congress where you have a border security deal that Republicans could only dream of. Frankly, I was surprised that the President conceded to all of those to all of those demands.
You know, until we solve this, that's going to be the problem.
You all have seen that cartoon where you know, there there's three people at a table, and there's the American worker with his one cookie, and then there's the fat cat CEO of the corporation with the pile of cookies. And the CEO points to the immigrant. He says, that guy's trying to take your cookie. I think we have to focus on the challenges where they really are, hold people in positions of public trust accountable for the jobs they're doing or not doing.
But Ryan to your point, you know, whether it's fair or not.
Until we solve these challenges that we've been discussing the course of this program, it will continue to be a political problem and it will hold us back from addressing the very real challenges that we have throughout this country.
One question on the security point, because according to ICE, there were like seventy three thousand non citizens with a criminal history arrested just last year. I feel like that does go beyond Nagallis and go beyond Egle Pass and
up into different parts of the country. Obviously, there was the tragedy of Lake and Riley earlier this year, so there are and basically other parts of the border are saying there's this influx of Chinese migrants, and you know, there's people who are engaged in demonization, There's no question about it. There are people who are engaged in creating
the Boogeyman's no question about it. But aren't there pretty real concerns you know, even if there's plenty of research that suggests immigrant populations have lower crime rates than native born populations, you're still bringing in some seventy three thousand people. That's just people who were arrested with criminal histories last year.
Yeah, I think you're making the case for rewriting our immigration laws to ensure that there's that legal, safe, orderly pathway for people that we want to have in this country, and it will make us far more effective at being vigilant against those that we don't want in this country, people who have violent criminal histories, for example, or gang affiliations, or who are trafficking in fentanyl or in human beings.
For that matter.
Right now, that we have more than twenty thousand border patrol agents, that we're spending billions more than we ever have, And I think President Biden's budget for DHS, I think has got us almost twice the level we have for border patrol spending alone as what we had in the Trump administration. President Biden has deported I think, far more
people than President Trump ever has. If we don't get to some kind of order, control, legal pathway for people to come here, we're going to continue to put these border patrol agents in this absolutely untenable situation of not being able to effectively interdict and stop the very real threats that we face. Now, all of what you laid out is a serious challenge in terms of those with criminal histories, I for one, am not too concerned whether someone is Chinese.
Or Honduran, or Nigerian or anything else. That really does not matter to me.
But it matters if they have a criminal history, if they pose a threat to this country. Let's make sure that we're more effective. We're only going to be more effective when we have control of our border. We're only going to get that when we have comprehensive immigration reform.
And that's only going to happen when you have really strong leadership at the very top, when you're able to compel members of Congress to actually do their job, and where you have enough popular push from the people of this country to ensure that that there's that level of accountability. Otherwise we're going to continue to have this co again
and again and again. And as a lifelong resident of Elpaso, Texas, I can tell you, going back to the to the nineteen eighties, I am super familiar with this conversation, and it's one of the more disappointing aspects of our political system in this country that we don't see the leadership and the political will to fix this, to get this right. For all of the moral reasons, all the economic, all the humanitarian, and all the security and safety reasons that you're bringing up right now, Emily.
The problem from my perspective with a democratic position is that they seem to be kind of mimicking what the kind of center left Europeans did over the last ten years.
You know, they had a migration crisis out of the Syrian War significantly, and right wing nativists made a huge stink out of it, and the center left parties said, we're basically, you know, as far right wing on the question of immigration as the right wing parties are, but we're just we're just a little bit nicer and friendlier about it.
But they embraced a lot of the same kind of very tough policies.
All this, all the studies in all the common sense shows that that did. That didn't work for the center left parties. They were they basically don't exist anymore and people have moved.
You know, if you have a choice.
Between yeah, then you know, mccron is the only one that's that basically has been able to hold on. Otherwise, at the right wing parties have pretty much been dominant, and it hasn't worked to appease them. It seems seems like Biden's attempt to do that probably goes the exact same direction, doesn't work, just just enables the right. But if I ask myself, okay, well what is the left
position on immigration? Like I know what it is on climate change, I know what it is on healthcare, I know what it is on the economy generally, but what is it on immigration? So if if you were, let's say, running for president again and you're going to do a left wing democratic position of what of what Democrats are for.
When it comes to immigration, not just what they're against, which is Trump being bad? What would that what would that kind of position be?
And it's complicated, maybe it's too complicated to boil down, but I'm curious, you know, what what is the the left position in America on immigration?
I'm so glad you raised this because you know, earlier I was mentioning, you know, the cruelty of the Trump administration, the rhetoric of Greg Abbott, you know, literally on the eve of the Old Passo shooting said Texans, we've got to defend ourselves. We have to take matters into our own hands. And then the absolutely, absolutely cruel way in which he has met this humanitarian challenge at our border.
And you're absolutely right on the part of Democrats, at least nationally, it is a paler version of this, maybe uh you know, kinder or gentler in some way. But you have President Biden saying, give me the authority and I will shut the border.
Down on on day one.
You have the revival of detention, many of these detention camps run by the private prison industry here in Texas. You have a throttling of asylum and really new barriers and obstacles to people who are trying to apply for asylum. If you didn't apply, you know, in countries through which you transitd if you didn't use CBP one which has a very limited number of appointment slots, then you know there is no recourse for you whatsoever, which drives so much of that desperation.
So Ryan, you're asking me, then, what's the positive side of that? I would love.
To hear Democrats say immigration is one of the best things about this country. It is literally what has made us who We are, the dominant superpower in this world economically, culturally, militarily.
You find a way to measure it.
Immigrants have made it happen in this country, and we will continue to be a dominant country in this world, will continue to have a high standard of living, will continue to be a country that we can be proud of if we continue to find a way to legally in an orderly fashion and safely allow those from around the planet who want to come here to do better for themselves, who doesn't want to, but who also want to do better for all of us, which they have.
Al Passo one of the safest cities in America, not despite but because we are a city of immigrants. I mentioned the hundreds of billions of dollars to the positive that refugees and asylum seekers have brought, the trillions of dollars that they will bring over the next decade. If we do not screw this up. This is a great opportunity. It's something that we should be proud of. It is
something that we should be for. It is not something that we should be afraid of, defensive about feeling compelled out of fear or anxiety to agree with Republicans just to try to win the election or to do better in the polls.
Voters can sniff that out.
And if they can have the real thing, you know, real cruelty in Donald Trump, or they can have you know, some you know simulation of it from Democrats, they're going to take the real thing.
I think we have an opportunity here. You know.
President Biden as a candidate in twenty twenty defeated Donald Trump, and the lines on this issue were actually a lot.
Clearer than than they are now.
Trump was, you know, family separation, he was kids in cages, he was cruelty at the border remain in Mexico. The Migrant Protection Protocols the most orwellian named American policy ever. President Biden said, let's get back to who we are as a country of immigrants. Let's treat these people who are coming here humanly.
Let's protect the border.
Let's make sure that we prioritize safety and security.
But there's a much better way to do that.
American voters, for whom immigration was one of the central issues in twenty twenty, as it was in twenty sixteen, as it will be in twenty twenty four.
Chose President Biden on that basis.
I think he has an opportunity to return to that right now, and it's not too late, and it's not news to anyone that he's really.
Struggling with young voters right now.
If instead of conceding the position to Republicans on these issues, he said, you know, in addition to making sure we manage the border better, address legitimate security concerns, manage the flow of people who are wanting to come here, I am going to fight for those dreamers to make sure
that they have a pathway to citizenship. I'm going to do something about the eleven million undocumented who, to Emily's point, are working jobs here that no one else will at substandard wages that are a real threat and danger to the American worker.
I'm going to get this right.
Speak in aspirational, ambitious, strong terms.
Man.
I think that would fire up a lot of young people right now who are looking for a reason to support President Biden in November.
Yeah, I wish Democrats and Republicans had a more serious appetite, and you know, they were more willing to dismiss corporate interests on this question because now that as we've been talking about it reminds me it's sort of like my position on student loans, because I probably disagree with both of you on this, like I don't support student loan forgiveness unless there's also addressing the root cause is because then from my perspective, it thrusts us deeper and deeper
into this cycle, into a vicious cycle. But the last question is kind of about that vicious cycle. I wanted to tee you and Ryan bothap Betze because you both wrote, written, and done a lot of work in drugs in the space of immigration and the border, and obviously fentanyl has become a huge concern for people looking at the border now.
But just even going back decades of failed American drug policy, over the course of the Biden administration, there's been again an attempt to crack down a fentanyl obviously real problem.
We all agree on that.
But from the vantage point of people who have studied this again for decades, what do you make of the Biden era drug policy and as it pertains to migration.
Well, look, I'll start and then I'm interested to hear what Ryan has to say on this. I think the announcement by the Biden administration that they're going to move forward on rescheduling marijuana is a great step in the right direction. It had more of a bearing on the US Mexico Board order when it was illegal in almost
every state in the Union than it does today. So I don't know that that is addressing the border issue as directly anymore when it comes to fentanyl and other illegal drugs that are being transited across through our ports of entry, actually far more than in between our ports
of entry. I think we get back to the core idea that if you know ninety nine percent of what comes into this country is inspected, is doing so legal, that there is an orderly safe pathway for people who want to come here apply for asylum or refugee status, or for temporary work permits, or through our green card system, or citizenship, or join a family member, a lot of ways to do this. If we can get that right, then our ability to interdict and stop the flow of fentanyl,
for example, is going to be that much greater. Until we do that, Given the hundreds of thousands of undocumented crossings, the lack of control we have over our immigration system right now, this will remain the needle in the haystack that unfortunately and tragically is very difficult for us to uncover. I think the Biden administration is doing really the best they can with the resources and the authority and the
appropriations that they have. But what they really need is a comprehensive fix, and that will require Congressional action.
Yeah, I think fentanyl has some unique elements to it because I think there's some significant amounts of China policy related to that. I don't think there's just I just think there's no way that that amount of fentanyl is being produced in China and exported to Mexico and up through the United States without China. You know, China knows what it's doing. Okay, they're they're they're looking the other way or or even worse, actively encouraging I think the ventanyl exporting.
Let's say that about Amlo too though.
Well is an interesting figure too.
But and I'm curious for your take on this because as I've we both have covered the drug war, but uh for so many years and basically every South American and Central American country, like you said, the institutions are being just completely hollowed out and taken over by by
drug cartels and by allies of drug cartels. Ecuador, just in the in the span of the Trump and Biden administration, went from one of the safest countries in South America to one of the most dangerous countries in South America as drug gangs are basically you know, taking the entire country over with the with the help of the US Ambassador to Ecuador, under both the Trump administration and and the Biden administration, it feels like, as in Washington, d C.
You can get you can get psilocyba, and you can get you can get legal marijuana. Uh and with with with enough pro upper education and public health, I feel like you could actually make it so that people can get access to drugs that are currently illegal and that they use on a recreational basis, approach it from a public health perspective, and then basically shut down these cartels because you shut down their ability to exist, and then you give these South and Central American countries a chance
to actually be democracies rather than completely controlled by these cartels. But there must be some advantage to the current situation for US foreign policy, because it just seems clear at this point that you've got to move in that direction, even though that isn't something you can really kind of say as a candidate today, I don't know, like, where do you come down on this as somebody kind of looking back.
I think that's a much better answer and point than the one I made to Emily's question, because this really
is where these two issues intersect. And Emily, I've read some of what you've written about how unwittingly certainly our current immigration system, our current border policies really serve to strengthen cartels, and much in the way that I described, you know, cartels placing a premium on the ability to cross marijuana back in the early two thousands when it was still illegal in the United States and people were willing to literally die.
Or to kill for the privilege of being able to do that.
These cartels are now making billions of dollars on the ability.
To transit human beings into the United States.
And if there is no legal pathway to come here, then perhaps the only recourse you feel, as a young mother with young kids who fears death in your home country is to pay you the thousands of dollars to these cartels. The tens of thousands in some cases to get yourself and your kids across, which by the way, may not work. You might end up dead in the attempt or on the other side. And I think the
same is very true with our drug war. We have unintentional allowed and really supercharged these cartels in Mexico for sure, but Ryan pointed this out earlier. They kind of serve as almost a shadow or separate government at a local level and really in some cases on a national level throughout the Americas, and that is directly connected to United States policy, well intentioned going back fifty plus years to the initiation of the War on drugs, but with disastrous results.
I mean, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and drugs are not less likely to be in the hands of American citizens or even our kids, you know, tragically than they were before. But we have empowered these cartels to the detriment of the stability of these countries, which then exacerbates outbound flow of migrants who are like, look, this is a shit show where I am right now. I cannot stay here, cannot find a job, I cannot protect my family.
I have no choice but to leave.
So yes, these two issues come together in this way, and I think it really speaks to trying to find some common sense in the United States drug policy and addiction policy. We have the largest prison population on the planet and within the most heavily incarcerated country. Texas has
the largest prison population in America. There are so many challenges that we could address if we took the drug war seriously, began to unwind it and replace it with rational, logical, humane policies that make us better and safer and also help to undercut the power and influence of cartels in the Americas.
We can all agree on that. I think there you go perfect tell us.
I would quibble with well intentioned, but that's fair enough. It doesn't actually and the intentions don't matter.
It doesn't point take it better.
Tell us what you're doing with power by people.
We have a group in Texas that is focused on registering voters in a state that makes it hard to register than any other any in the Union. It's also the toughest state in the nation in which to vote, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that you know, in twenty twelve, Obama lost Texas by sixteen. Hillary lost it by nine and then Biden lost it by only five.
And a half.
That's without any of those candidates spending a dime or a minute in the state of Texas.
That's just the natural trajectory of our state.
And so the millions of unregistered, especially young voters out there are seen as a threat by the Republicans.
Who are in power.
And whether you're a Republican, Democrat, independent, unaffiliated, hopefully you believe in free and fair, democratically decided elections. We're something less than a democracy right now in Texas. So our volunteers get certified as volunteer deputy registrars, a requirement under
Texas law. Where there is no online voter registration, no automatic voter registration, no same day voter registration, you actually have to go out there, find the eligible, unregistered voters and take them through that process.
And so our volunteers at Powered by People do that work.
I'm really proud of everyone out there across the two hundred and fifty four counties bringing new voters in and hopefully helping to overcome the serious voter suppression and voter intimidation that we see here in Texas.
All Right, that also has a book out on paperback now called We've Got to Try, which is about the history in Texas of civil rights and voting rights movements, which, unlike most politicians book, I think actually sounds good.
Well, I'm actually going to read this. Most politicians don't write their books.
They just have some staff or write it and they have their campaign by Ted Cruz. Thats right, but thanks, yeah, thank thanks so much for joining us, very much appreciate it.
Thank you, and thank you all for focusing on immigration. I wish that more people were talking about this and doing it in the way that you're doing it by going into the root cause, is talking through what the solutions might be and getting beyond just the talking points and the slogan.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
And if you guys caught this on YouTube, you can go to breakingpoints dot com subscribe to us. You can get an ad free probably if you listen to this whole thing, you got like eight different ad breaks. You don't want that, just get the premium version breakingpoints dot Com and you get an emailed to you on every Friday Friday, the Don Draper Breaking Points.
Right, that's some great sales work, right exactly.
Well, thank you so much better, and thank you to everyone for tuning in. That does it for us today, Ryan, I think we found more common ground than even I expected. Here's my perspective on Beta. You've known him for a long time. I think he's somebody one of the rare people who is genuinely thoughtful and not a robot, even though I disagree with him just about everything. Genuinely thoughtful and not a robot, and he kind of wants to break out of the politician shell, do you know what I mean?
It's almost to me like if you ran.
For Congress, right, And I know that's impossible to ambition, but I feel like there's sort of part of him that's trying to do both, and that's a really hard about something and have heterodot's opinions because everything doesn't fit perfectly into the Democratic party box. I feel like he was pretty careful not to be explicitly directly too critical of President Biden and Kamala Harris and people that he
runs in similar circles with politically. But if he was something that was sort of outside of those circles, I don't know. I actually I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I genuinely appreciate it, because if you want to be able to do both, you have to.
You have to be able to talk to both both worlds.
Right.
I think he's still he's still careful in the sense that he doesn't want a headline that says, like Beto O'Rourke slam Biden Biden at the height of a presidential campaign against Trump. But it takes zero effort to read between the lines of what he's saying that he thinks that Biden is a failure when it comes to his border policies, that he's a paler version of Trump, and that that isn't the way to get there. But he also is willing to grant Biden the reality that he doesn't control Congress.
Right now. The people are coming, so you have to do something.
And so his argument is, look, if it's either they're coming in between the ports and dying by the thousands or given basically you know, asylum, so they you know, come in and boom, rubber stamp and kind of moved through into the system, it's better to have them going through the port of entry. But it's by no means
an effective border policy. I still pessimistic that we'll ever get to one because good conversations aren't gonna necessarily, good conversations don't change the structural obstacles that we that we have here.
But at least it gets it does get you closer at least.
Yeah, And like I, you know, could have kind of going on some of those things, but it sort of we're ad an impasse because I don't think like Fundamentsalge, if.
He's willing to acknowledge, he's like, look, yeah, Biden and his rhetoric and his and being not Trump does bring more people.
Up, right.
And what was interesting about that is he stopped at mostly Biden's rhetoric and without going into you know, he said, it's true that probably granting more people humanitarian parole has brought more people up. I just think the magnitude of the crossings that we've seen. It's true that there was an increase in twenty nineteen, but the magnitude of what we've seen under Biden.
The Red crossworker that I talked to you there like that is.
We're seeing a surge that is significant.
It's not just COVID.
It's almost impossible to say that that's just COVID or US coups in Venezuela, especially when you look at you know, we're opening up pathways specifically for Cubans and Venezuelans and Haitians and you see more. So there is clearly a correlation. And to me, the as I was even just having this conversation, which is one of the things I liked about the conversation, it does remind me so much of what I think about student loans, which is that like, yes,
I think people have unfair debt. I think it was you know, in many cases working class people were basically like bamboozled by the bullshit system. Not to say they don't an agency, but that like this is your ticket to the middle class. We created a very narrow pathway. You have to have a degree for all of these different jobs. And until we fix the root cause. At the same time as maybe we create more lenient pathways, you're going to see more people dying in the Darien Gap.
You're going to see more people dying in the desert, no matter what Biden or Greg Abbott do.
Interestingly, the other parallel is that the reason you have a band aid student aid policy is because you can't get anything through Congress.
Yeah, no, I actually what can the executive do?
And they do something and the Supreme Courts like, ah, you actually can't even do that, Like okay, well that we're going to do it in pieces instead, So instead of like putting a band aid on whom, they put like a five different cut.
Up band aids half the puzzle.
So and it's the same situation with immigration, and it goes back to what we were saring on West Show, where the question becomes like can America actually do anything? Like do we have a political system that is capable of producing enough consensus to generate any policy in any direction? Because so many checks and balances and choke points were built into our system that it has always required some
consensus and we don't really have that anymore. And so it's, like Beto said, the only chance of solving this seems to be Democrats take the House to send it and the White House and decide to put political capital into it in the moment they have that, or Republicans take all three and then you know, look out, like we'll see what they do.
Yeah, I see you, guys. Both as like parallel gen.
Xers, similar hair, similar interests in drugs and politics and one of you went into politics, one of you went into journalism.
Yeah, that's true.
But again, like that's why it's written a couple of books, one on drug policies, right.
Yeah, his book on Texas is kind of like we got people like a Texas version of it, which is one of your books.
He's a better skateboarder by far.
But anyway, all that is to say it was pleasantly he's he's obviously, at least since I followed his career, he's always been a little bit more heterodox in your average Democrat. But because he was so feted, I think by a lot of people who saw him as someone who could get Democrats more power, I was just pleasantly surprised that he wasn't as boxed in as I guess I expected him to be. So it was a great conversation. I'm so happy we focused on the issue.
I wish he'd one instead of Biden. Maybe they would have done something different, could have been interesting.
Maybe maybe wouldn't have had the Arilanrie situation in Haiti.
Oh no way, Yeah, who knows?
Deep states? Deep Ryan?
Yeah, that's true, Deep States, the deep state.
George Sephanopolis, I don't know if you saw this this week, he said, the deep state is full of patriots, so the all right, well that does it for us on today's edition of the show. We will be back here next Friday, well next Oneesday with more next Friday, with more of this format.
We're hoping to have some really good guests.
Yeah, and watch your Yeah, we're hoping to confirm good guests for next week. They're very very close to that. Watch your inbox this weekend for update about Breaking Points. It's not a huge deal, but it's pretty it's pretty cool, pretty cool, pretty cool.
We're excited about.
It and that you will be like.
This.
It won't be I think as impactful as you're thinking to you yourself, and we hope it's not.
Actually and you'll be back here what on Tuesday?
Yes, that's right. I'll be back here with Saga for a bro show on Tuesday.
Bro Show Tuesday, Counterpoints back Wednesday, and Counterpoints back Friday.
We'll see you then,