Jonathan Blitzer Talks U.S. Immigration Reform | Steven Levitsky On Improving Our Democracy

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Tonight cover immigrations for the New Yorkers because your book at Everyone Who Has Gone is here? The United States and Central America and the making of a crisis. Please, welcome to the program, Donathan Blitzer.

Sorry, thank you.

For joining me.

First things first, what are you doing to me? I have a family, I have a life. This is a very long book.

You don't have to read the notes. I didn't have to read the whole No, that son of a bitch.

What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations. In your mind, what has us trapped in this sort of Sissophisian nightmare?

Yeah, I mean for years and years we've watched kind of in this loop. As politicians in Washington say, we can't pass comprehensive immigration reform because of the situation.

Of the border.

And yet the situation of the border is in a state of chaos because we have not passed comprehensive immigration reform and as a result, the asylum system at the southern border has borne the brunt of the otherwise failing system, And so we're stuck in this loop where lawmakers in Washington point to the border to justify their inaction, and the border is in the state of chaos that it is because of an action in Washington, Right.

I almost never hear politicians talking about how many people can you absorb? I mean, when you tell me there's going to be two million people coming through the southern border and they are just you know, being kind of logged and released, that sounds utterly chaotic in a recipe for disaster. But how many people can this country absorb? What do we need for economic growth? What is about or I feel like we never talk about that. We just react to images of chaos.

Absolutely.

I mean, we can't talk about one aspect of the immigration system without view of the other. And so you know, if we're only ever talking about the southern border, we're missing the entire kind of picture that we need to better understand. But just as an example, you know right now, the and you don't take my word for it, I.

Mean that you're you should you should don't You're the only one until you read the footnotes.

You know, the the chairman of the Federal reserve. You know, economists across the country, everyone is pointing to the fact that, you know, immigrant labor has essentially kept this country's economy afloat following the COVID years, and so you know, this is the engine of growth.

The population is getting.

Immigrant labor can be more easily exploited, is paid less, starts to depress wages for a lot of other people.

Is that not accurate? I don't. I don't think it is.

I think it's a much somewhat accurate, reasonably accurate.

Well, until there.

Are ways of absorbing an immigrant labor force legally into the country, there are always going to be opportunities for employers to exploit the undocumented and in the process to drive down working wages. And so the idea is there needs to be a thoroughgoing reform of the system. And the problem is, of course that in Washington that's been done on arrival now for decades, and so we're kind of in this doom loop where the border is the symbol of everything. But obviously in a kind of common

Is to deal with every aspect of the system.

This is where you drop us like a little drop US unshine. And you say, but here's the good.

News, Yeah, go go, what's in here?

I would say the good news is that from a policy perspective, at least doing some of the things to relieve pressure at the southern border are no great mystery to lawmakers. I mean, the problem, of course is the politics, but it doesn't require any great feat of the imagination.

This is not a complexity beyond the imagination of human beings, correct, And we don't have to restabilize areas we destabilized to really get a handle on it. It's about fixing the system of influx.

I mean, I think, you know, overall, the only way to kind of deal with migration trends in the world is to understand the forces in a global context, and that means that the United States has to be more mindful of the consequences of it's foreign policy. It has to work with partners in the region.

You know, all very real locked out when you said you said something about mindful foreign policy, and yeah, exactly, I just started thinking about you too.

In the sphere, I don't know what's going on, but I will say this.

You know, one of the ways, you know, Reforming the asylum system specifically is a complex task, and I do think some hard decisions have to be made about kind of reckoning with the population of people showing up at the southern border and kind of understanding what the lim it's are of the asylum system as we know it.

Branding to say nothing else.

There are things that could be done, basic things like sending more money to the government to hire more asylum officers, more immigration judges. These things sound boring, they sound wonky, and very specifically, Republicans in Congress are trying to block these very straight ahead basic measures from taking place, just basic funding measures, because they benefit from increased chaos at

I mean, they've said it explicitly.

This is the greatest danger to America, you know, maybe ever, and we're not going to do anything because we think it's a great issue. I mean, that's truly devious.

Yeah, and well, and the plot of that playing out was the administration, the Biden administration went to Congress and said, we need more money to increase resources in the southern border.

But they were slow on the uptick as well.

Absolutely, and then there's plenty that the Bide administration could be faulted for. They go to Congress, they ask for money that doesn't work because Republicans say, no, no, no, we want to see further changes to the asylum system as we know it. The administration goes to the negotiating table, makes a series of compromises that Democrats were not comfortable.

Making years ago.

I mean, pretty significant changes just in their own orientation in this conversation, and they finally broke her this deal. I mean, this isn't just a Democratic effort. This is a bipartisan group in the Senate doing this. Before the terms of the deal are even announced. You have Mitch McConnell saying to his Senate members, listen, you know the

It's so tough because you know, McConnell's usually so idealistic.

It's just hard to see. I was shocked.

It's shocking thing. Geez, self serving politics. That's not the guy I know. Everyone who is gone is here, Jonathan Blood. So we're gonna take you right, Pith, great, Thank you so much.

What about the dolls?

Oh my god?

Tonight a professor of government at Harvard University. He is the co author of two best selling books, How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Please welcome to the program, Stephen Levitzky.

Sorry, let's go. What are a bad boy? The book is called The Tyranny of the Minority.

What is so you wrote How Democracies Die a recipe to kill our democracy? And now Tyranny the Minority. What is Tyranny the Minority about?

Well, we wrote How Democracies Die many years ago, now before it seemed so imminent to some of the Americans that that democracy is in danger. We wanted to write a book that described for Americans what it looks like when a democracy gets into trouble. I studied Latin America. My cauthor, Daniel studies Europe and the interwar period. So we've we've seen democracies getting in trouble, We've seen democracies die, and we wanted to describe to Americans what this looked

How do we get out of this mess?

And so the book is an effort, first of all to better understand how we got into this mess, but also to think a bit about how to get out.

So how when you're talking about how we get into the mess, the Constitution is really our you know, touchstone, is that the document that actually got us into this mess.

The Constitution, i should say, is a brilliant document.

Is the world's don't heade sorry.

It is the world's oldest written constitution.

It's done us a lot of good, but it is also part of the problem.

Today.

We have a majority of Americans support democracy, a majority of Americans support the really interesting experiment with multi racial democracy that we are evolving into in the twenty first century. A majority of Americans every day since Donald Trump came down the Golden Escalator have opposed Trump. But we have a constitution that protects, that enables, and that empowers an authoritarian minority party.

And that's problem.

But isn't that the very nature of the Constitution was the contradiction. It's when it was being written, all men are created equal, black people are three fifths. I mean, it's a mathematical equation that from the get go was absurd.

It was absurd. Now, in some fairness to the founders. The elites across the.

World were undemocratic in the eighteenth century, but over the course of two hundred plus years, democracies across the world have gone about fixing the original citizens.

So you're saying that the Constitution was a balance between that ideal and the practicalities of well, how do we let the southern states who have less population not be steamrolled by a pure democracy?

Right? It was a couple of things.

First of all, it was a document created by people who feared democracy, who feared the majority rule.

Because the majority rule didn't exist in the world.

What did they think if it wasn't kings, what did they think it was going to be.

They didn't know.

They were completely new to There had never been a republic like this before.

We'd never had an elected leader before.

The electoral college was a third choice. It wasn't Madison's first choice. Madison designed a system that would have looked more like Europe's parliamentary democracies.

That was shut down.

A number of folks in the convention pushed for direct election of the president, which is what all other presidential democracies in the world today do.

That got voted down, just out because the session.

Not even for a unitary executive, didn't they push for the executive would be a panel, would be a group of individuals.

There were, that was, that was one suggestion. But so they were, they were, they were scrambling, right, they did. They couldn't they couldn't reach a majority, and they didn't know how to elect a president.

So the electoral college was an improvisation. It was an experiment.

Was it an improvisation to bring a compromise to the southern states? Is that because then the north and smaller industrialized and the South and the smaller states. Right, look, so this was the compromise to bring the Union together.

I mean, this is a really tough problem, right.

We had thirteen colonies that were and there was a fear that that they were apart, that there might be civil war, that there might be violence. The Articles of Confederation had failed miserably, and there was a real fear that if we didn't hang together, the Brits or the French would would come in and make things very difficult for us.

The whole project could be blown to bits.

So these guys had to forge a compromise, and they made concessions that were imperfect in fact.

George Washington, let me just say this.

George Washington, just weeks after the Philadelphia Convention, wrote a letter to his nephew describing the Constitution as an imperfect document and saying that it would be up to future generations to improve upon it.

But do you think it's strange then that a lot of the Constitution really is a practical matter, sort of a pragmatic document that is very much nuts and bolts of how do we do this mechanically logistically, and yet we infuse such almost religious dogs. We almost view the founders now in a kind of a fundamentalist way of it was spoken through them from God. It was they were absolutely sure this is scripture right.

We didn't always see it that way for much of you.

As history, Americans, both politicians and American citizens of all types have worked to make our system more democratic. The expansion of suffers, the reconstruction reforms, the progressive Euros.

Oftentimes that was brought through violent upheaval. I mean, the Civil War is what brought that about Suffragette, even the Vietnam War when they lowered the voting age. If there hadn't have been the draft people had gone to Vietnam, I don't think you would have seen the expansion of voting to eighteen year olds.

Constitutional reform is tough, it's costly, it takes work, but we've done it throughout our history. And it's really only the last fifty years only in our lifetimes that we've kind of stopped thinking about how to make our system more democratic. We stopped doing the work of improving our democracy.

Let me ask you, and this is a slightly different point than you know. Some maybe it's the design of the constitution that allows for rural states to have maybe an outsized influence, especially in the Senate, which is a relatively minoritarian body to begin with, one person can blue slip something that people can constantly stop things as one person and that person is always Rand Paul.

Now, but.

Is there also an issue that as the world changes so rapidly, is democracy foundationally an analog system and that in an increasingly digital and fast world it's unwieldy even in its best iteration. And is that what also gives a kind of shine to the idea of dictatorship or authoritarian principles where things can be mobilized more quickly, decisions can be made. You know, democracy is painstaking. It's a grind, it is.

And this is not the first time we've been around this band.

Right in a century ago, whether it was the Russian Revolution or the rise of fascism, during a period of dramatic change, industrialization, the entry into the modern era, people looked around and said, yeah, Stalin, that works better, Hitler, Mussolini.

The trans run on time.

Turns out, in the long run there are costs to dictatorship, and that dictatorships don't They may shine for a while.

But in the long run you don't much like the results. So we always have to be.

We've got old institutions and we constantly have to be thinking about how to improve them. But the basic idea of electing our governments and electing our governments in a context in which we enjoy a wide range of individual liberties, I don't.

Think that's out data right.

That stays no matter what the kids say on I'm gonna say Instagram.

I think the kids are kids get a bad rap. Sometimes they are among our strongest defenders.

Well, you teach them in college, so you see them. I see them. I find them to be fascinating.

You know, there's there's always that Millennias or later or whatever.

There's I don't find that all the.

Ones you're gonna save are emerging multiracially.

Day better. Howbody's got to the charity of the minority. It's available right now. Steven Levitsky, thank you so much for being Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show wherever.

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