Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show The Real ‘Border Czar’ Defends the Biden-Harris Record About this episode Republicans want to label Kamala Harris as the border czar. And by just looking at a chart, you can see why. Border crossings were low when Donald Trump left office. But when President Biden is in the White House, they start shooting up and up — to numbers this country had never seen before, peaking in December 2023. Those numbers have fallen significantly since Biden issued tough new border policies. But that has still left Harris with a major vulnerability. Why didn’t the administration do more sooner? And why did border crossings skyrocket in the first place?
Harris was not the border czar; she had little power over policy. But to the extent that there is a border czar, it’s the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain what’s happened at the border the past few years — the record surge, the administration’s record and what it has revealed about our immigration system.
Book Recommendations:
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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Dara Lind, David Frum, Jason De Léon, Michael Clemens, Natan Last and Steven Camarota.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? There's a reason that at the presidential debate, it was on a question about immigration, that Vice President Harris uncorked her bait about crowd sizes and crowd interest to try to pull Donald Trump down the road to debate ruin. Immigration is a tough topic for the Biden administration, and you can see why on a chart. The way that we measure the flow of migrants to the southern border is by tracking how many encounters our officials there have with migrants. And if you look back to the Bush administration, you see actually fairly high numbers by modern standards, about, you know, times 150,000 a month, sometimes even higher than that.
1:06 Ezra Klein? Under Obama, it goes quite a bit down to often around 50,000, sometimes even less than that a month. Under Trump, it goes even lower than that, some very, very sharp lows, although one pretty big bump in the middle of 19, which then again comes down, and then after that, the pandemic. And then you hit Joe Biden, and the chart just goes wild. It just goes up and up and up. It gets jagged, but we have numbers we've never seen before culminating in 300,000 encounters in December of 2023. Since then, the administration has worked with Mexico and other partners to increase enforcement in those countries. It has passed a series of executive actions on its own, and it has brought those numbers down.
1:51 Ezra Klein? But why didn't they do it earlier? What led to the very high flows in the first place? You often hear Republicans say that Vice President Harris was the borders are. And she did get called that, although it was never an actual title, and she never had any actual power. The portfolio she was given was root causes of migration in Latin America, which she did not have any real power to affect. She could not make Venezuela a non-filled state. She cannot do all that much about gang violence in El Salvador. She cannot change the economic disparities between America and some of these other countries that lead people to make the dangerous journey here. To the extent there's a borders are, or at least somebody with responsibility over the border beyond Joe Biden,
2:35 Ezra Klein? it is the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. And so I wanted to have him on to have a deeper conversation about why the flows under the Biden administration have looked the way they have, what these new policies have meant, what the border bill could have done, and how we should think about immigration going forward. As always, my email, [email protected] .
3:02 Ezra Klein? Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, welcome to the show.
3:05 Speaker 01 Thank you so much for having me, Ezra.
3:07 Ezra Klein? So we had a surge, a significant surge in migrants at the southwestern border during the first three years of the Biden administration. We saw that peak at about 300,000 encounters last December. Those were the highest numbers ever recorded. What made so many more people decide to take the dangerous journey to the United States between 2021 and 2023?
3:30 Speaker 01 So Ezra, I think we have to put that question in its historical context. First and foremost, it is the post pandemic years, I should say, the peak year of 2020. And there was a tremendous pent up desire to leave the conditions in which people found themselves. Violence, financial insecurity, corruption, extreme weather events, totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, the consistent drivers of displacement.
4:12 Speaker 01 We've seen an unprecedented level of displacement around the world. It's the greatest level of displacement since at least World War II. And the United States came out of the COVID-19 pandemic year more rapidly than did other countries in our hemisphere. The economy recovered more rapidly. So not only were the forces of displacement present and some unprecedented, but the attraction of the United States was greatest.
4:54 Ezra Klein? Let me pick into that a little bit. I take your point on the pandemic, though. It really rises most sharply in 2023, not 2022 or even 2021. But I've always found myself a little unsure how to take these arguments about hemispheric instability and economics. I'm not a Latin American history expert, but I know enough of it to know that if you look over the past 50, 75 years, there are many points of really significant and far worse poverty, certainly, but of civil war, of murderous military juntas. There's been a lot of instability that did not lead in those periods to this level of migration to America. So if it is the instability that is the cause, why is it so much worse now?
5:39 Ezra Klein? What is leading to instability, making people more likely to migrate than what appears to me to be similar levels of instability in the past?
5:49 Speaker 01 Well, so I'm not exactly in agreement with the fact that it's the same level of instability. And there's another force at play here, too, and I'll get to that in a moment. But let's take a look at two countries where the situation has changed. The first being Ecuador. Ecuador historically has not been a source country of migration, has not suffered such a significant gang problem, has not suffered such a significant level of narco trafficking. It was a transit country with respect to drugs, not a country of consumption. That has changed dramatically.
6:34 Speaker 01 President Noboa, early in his tenure, if not immediately upon entering office, declared a state of war internal to Ecuador. And we're seeing a level of migration from Ecuador that we never previously have experienced. Then on the flip side. President Bukele in El Salvador imprisoned more than 70,000 suspected or confirmed gang members. The level of violence in El Salvador has plummeted and the level of migration has plummeted correspondingly.
7:12 Speaker 01 In fact, some of the El Salvadorian diaspora have returned to El Salvador. The other factor that is very different, if we look back as long as 50 years, as your question supposes, is that we also have very organized, sophisticated smuggling organizations. No longer do we have the solo coyote or the loose affiliation of people that are moving others, but we have smuggling organizations that are true organizations
7:52 Speaker 01 and hierarchically established and the like, and they're very sophisticated. And they are using social media and online platforms to communicate to vulnerable people and facilitating their transit. And that is something that has grown exponentially, but it's certainly different than even 15, 12 years ago.
8:16 Ezra Klein? So I want to zoom in on that question of communication for a minute. In preparation for this conversation, we spoke to a lot of people who are experts on one dimension or another of immigration. And we ended up talking to them a lot about communication. I had heard quite a bit before now about the rise of these transnational smuggling networks. What I didn't understand or had no texture for was the degree to which they act as marketers. It's not just that you go to them in desperation and pay them. They are actually telling you when to go. They are trying to drum up business. You have to go now before the US does its policy change or before it stops having this new policy that we're able to get you through on.
8:57 Ezra Klein? There's that, and then there's also the rise of just telecommunications over WhatsApp, over messaging platforms of all different kinds, where people have a lot more information flowing back and forth from relatives who might already be settled in the US, from people who are making the journey right now. They see videos of them, right? If you're interested, you can go look at TikToks. Tell me a bit about how that has changed the availability of information, but then also the ability to translate what might be a sort of inchoate desire to migrate into a plan that has architecture, that has people helping you, that has timing and all the rest of it.
9:39 Speaker 01 Ezra, it is such an important point that you're focused on. And let me say that when we speak of the dissemination of information more rapidly and more broadly than ever before, we're not speaking exclusively of accurate information. To the contrary, there's a tremendous level of disinformation that is being communicated. And the most insidious and tragic example of that is the smugglers communicating false information to intending migrants about the Derin, the land very difficult to traverse between Colombia and Panama. People are deceived
10:23 Speaker 01 into thinking that that journey will be quite facile. Some smugglers style themselves as tour guides, when in fact, the journey is treacherous and sometimes tragically fatal. But the smugglers have a communication network on TikTok, WhatsApp, other platforms. They reach individuals who are either intending to migrate or who are considering migration, and they reach them very effectively.
11:03 Speaker 01 On the other hand, there are individuals here in the United States who are able to remain in the United States during the pendency of their claims. And because our system is so broken and those proceedings languish for between sometimes seven and 10 years, they are communicating to their relatives about their ability to work the duration of their proceedings, and it's attractive to others.
11:38 Ezra Klein? Let me hold on that for a minute. So I grew up in Orange County, California. And when I grew up, there was a lot of talk of illegal immigration. And the sort of thing people were talking about, which also fit with the sort of older coyotes, more individual smugglers, was somebody trying to sneak undetected across the border. That was a sort of modal idea of what illegal immigration looked like. That's where you get Donald Trump coming up with a wall, right? If people are physically moving across the border, create a physical barrier that stops them from doing so. That has changed dramatically. And what people are doing is walking up to the border, getting caught on purpose
12:21 Ezra Klein? or having an encounter on purpose with a border patrol agent and claiming asylum and getting themselves into this process, which is, as you say, is quite broken and leads to them often being inside the US for five years, seven years, nine years, with often work authorization. Explain to me what led to that shift? How did we move from illegal immigration is sneaking in to illegal immigration, or at least the kind of immigration people seem to be worried about as a policy question, is presenting yourself in public?
12:58 Speaker 01 The smugglers know the system very well.
13:02 Speaker 01 They have the finger on the pulse and they're seeing an immigration court backlog only growing year over year. They are seeing the duration of immigration enforcement actions extending longer and longer, and they're able to coach intending migrants. That there's not a need to evade law enforcement. Quite to the contrary, one can approach law enforcement, make a claim of credible fear, that initial threshold in an immigration
13:42 Speaker 01 case have a high rate of success under the old standards. We have changed them, and I know we'll get to that in our conversation. But under the old standard, and this is a generalization because it varies according to demographics, of course. But as a general matter, maybe 70% of the population that claimed credible fear had a successful claim. But ultimately, 20, 25% make a successful claim of asylum at the ultimate merits hearing. But that time in between the initial claim and the ultimate adjudication is many years.
14:26 Speaker 01 And so that realization was marketed and is marketed.
14:33 Ezra Klein? So what you're saying in part, and this is interesting to me, is that the smuggler networks, maybe the communication networks, that once they realized the asylum system had broken, had become overwhelmed and created this possibility to be in the United States for an extended period of time before your case ever came up, and that's such a much safer way to get here. It was then able to spread that knowledge in a different way and at a different level, which just makes the risk calculus, somebody described illegal immigration to me as a mass phenomenon made up of individual risk calculations. It makes the individual risk
15:16 Ezra Klein? calculation better. Instead of you have to find your hole in the fence, so to speak, you have this way through. But that it relies on the understanding of not just the American immigration policy system at a high level, but a problem within it. That was it not a problem when I was growing up, right? When I was 12 in Orange County, was the asylum system not broken? Or was this just not understood about it, such that it was a major factor in people's considerations to migrate?
15:49 Speaker 01 I think that the problem has gotten worse. The system is not built for a higher volume of people. And so the pre-existing architecture just continues to break and the backlogs continue to increase. And they increased in the prior administration and they have increased now, of course, until this administration took certain actions. The smuggling organizations have also changed the world of asylum writ large. Because when
16:28 Speaker 01 I first encountered the system from a very, very different vantage point as a prosecutor prosecuting smugglers in federal court, back then, the smugglers didn't control the turf. They certainly traversed it. But individuals fleeing their home countries, they would get to the border wherever and however they could. Now, however, the smugglers control the land. The smugglers can control where and when individuals arrive.
17:08 Speaker 01 And I think the lens through which we consider asylum law has to take that into account.
17:45 Ezra Klein? So you mentioned the actions the administration has undertaken to change this. I'd like to sort of understand the before and after of this. And so I was hoping you might walk me through what it would be like, what would happen when a migrant comes and claims asylum in February of this year, before the June executive actions? And then now? If you came up and presented and said you had a credible fear of returning to your home country, then what was the process and how has that changed?
18:16 Speaker 01 So let's go back before this administration. Let me, the status quo has been as follows. An individual is encountered by the Border Patrol at the southern border. And an individual makes a claim for relief. They claim persecution by reason of their membership in a particular social group. And that has been an intentionally low bar to meet, based on the principle that we would not want to risk returning an individual to a place where indeed they are persecuted. Then their case is pending.
19:01 Speaker 01 And as the backlog has grown and grown, their essentially trial date, if you will, the date on which they will make their ultimate merits claim is set years and years away.
19:19 Speaker 01 That was the status quo. We took a number of measures. First, we sought by way of regulation to empower asylum officers rather than immigration judges that are burdened by overwhelming dockets to make the asylum adjudications. The next thing, major measure that we took, was we promulgated a regulation, the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Regulation, that said that if one does not avail oneself of the lawful
20:02 Speaker 01 pathways that we have built, there will be a presumption, albeit a rebuttable one, but a presumption of ineligibility for asylum. And we premised that on the fact that we had indeed built very significant, safe, lawful, and orderly pathways to reach the United States and access our humanitarian relief laws. We built CBP One app, an app that allows people to make appointments at ports of entry
20:42 Speaker 01 and come at a pre-approved time in an orderly and safe way. We built a parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans that allowed as many as 30,000 individuals from those four countries to be vetted in advance and, if they have a sponsor in the United States, to actually travel safely to the United States via air. And then we had the President's proclamation.
21:17 Speaker 01 Which basically said that the border in between the ports of entry is not the place to make an asylum claim. The lawful pathways are. And over time, we have built the capacity to process people far more rapidly. We raised the standard for that initial threshold of credible fear. We built the capability to return people to their countries of origin more rapidly. And we changed, to use your very correct framing, we changed the risk calculus.
21:59 Speaker 01 Because if people think they have a 70% chance of success and an ability to stay in the United States for multiple years before their final adjudication, that informs a risk calculus. However, if one's chance of success is far, far lower, then the question arises in an intending migrant's mind, do I spend my life savings to pay the smugglers? Do I risk my life on the dangerous journey in the hands of for-profit, rapacious individuals?
22:44 Speaker 01 Ruthless individuals? For a far lower likelihood of success, the question is a very different one, and we have found the answer to be a very different one as well.
22:57 Ezra Klein? Correct me if I'm wrong, because sometimes it's hard for me to keep what was in the bill straight and not. But wasn't there also a dimension of these executive actions that shut down the process if encounters or claims on certain days were above certain levels, basically created a shut-off valve?
23:17 Speaker 01 Yes. The president's proclamation does have numeric limits.
23:25 Speaker 01 But shutting off is a bit of an overstatement because there are exceptions that account for certain exigencies and acute humanitarian needs. So if somebody, for example, is suffering a severe physical ailment that requires urgent medical care, that is an exception.
23:54 Ezra Klein? But rather than focusing on the exception, what is the basic rule?
23:59 Speaker 01 The basic rule says that the border is not the place to make an asylum claim. The standard that one must meet has been heightened. And I think correctly so as a matter of policy. I actually think it's destabilizing, not only for our country, not only for the intentions of the asylum system, for the migrants themselves to set an initial standard that is so disparate from the ultimate merits adjudication. I just think it's a completely broken system. And so we closed that gap by raising the standard.
24:40 Speaker 01 And we also accelerated the adjudication process. People are subject to expedited removal. We tried to conduct the adjudication while individuals are still in custody. And so we stopped the perpetuation of this broken architecture where people are able to stay even with an inadequate case, unsatisfactory case, where they're able to stay for years. That's just a broken model.
25:14 Ezra Klein? So what has happened, as best we can tell, to the volume of migrants, the migrant flow since June?
25:22 Speaker 01 It has dropped dramatically. The number of individuals encountered at the southern border has dropped more than 50%. The current rate of encounter is lower than the rate of encounter at the same time as in 2019. But we've seen a more than 50% drop in the number of encounters day to day. Dramatic.
25:48 Ezra Klein? So I'll admit that this was somewhat surprising to me. So I've been reporting on this back in February. And when I was reporting on this and trying to understand what was happening at the border more deeply, I was hearing a lot about these hemisphere conditions, right? The economic instability, the gang rule, the government collapse in places like Venezuela. And I understood the message of that to sort of be saying, this isn't really up to us. How many people are coming to the border is not up to us. It reflects conditions in other places and we can deal with it more or less humanely. And then there was a bipartisan bill which failed, which we will talk about, and then the June executive actions.
26:31 Ezra Klein? And the flow stopped, or at least seems to have halved or more than halved, pretty rapidly, which is interesting because it implies that we actually do have, through policy mechanisms, a fair amount of control over it. That yes, there's a reality of conditions in other places and that might change the level of motivation to migrate. But migration is a risk calculation and the calculation is based on information that is flowing back in all kinds of different ways about what's going to happen to you and what your likelihood of success is when you get to the border. And that if we change what we're doing at the border, people's decision to migrate or not changes and that that is pretty sensitive to policy.
27:14 Ezra Klein? And in fact, if you do believe it's because of the executive actions, it's rapidly sensitive to policy because the fall happened very, very quickly. How do you think about that?
27:26 Speaker 01 I think that that is partly true. I do think the risk calculation is a correct framing. But it is not only our policies. We certainly are now essentially delivering a consequence regime that is realized far more rapidly than previously was the case. And that is material difference. But that is not all that we have done. And it's very important to place the president's proclamation, the executive action, our successful implementation of it.
28:08 Speaker 01 And I use the term "successful" because that's a very material term. Because we were able to implement it extremely rapidly and that credit goes to the men and women in the Department of Homeland Security. But there are other legs of the stool, if you will, that are part of the equation. One is the fact that we have indeed presented to intending migrants with asylum claims, alternative means of accessing humanitarian relief in the United States. And that's very important as well. One can't look at the executive action in isolation.
28:50 Speaker 01 One has to take a look at it in the context of a suite of efforts. It is the executive action itself. It is the lawful pathways that we have built, whether it's CBP One, the Cuban-Haitian-Nicaraguan-Venezuelan parole process, our family reunification processes with other populations, the safe mobility offices, essentially triage centers that we have established in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, where people can come and make their claim for relief there, whether
29:28 Speaker 01 it be a claim for urgent humanitarian relief, whether it be a claim of refugee status, whether it be seeking to access our agricultural or non-agricultural unskilled labor visas under the H2A and H2B program. We have labor pathways, not only to the United States, but to other countries, Canada and Spain.
29:56 Ezra Klein? I want to interrupt on this because I feel like you're trying to complicate this away from the June actions. And I'm not saying these other actions were not important. But as a policy guy from other areas, I tend to look at the timeline. And a lot of things you're talking about happened much earlier. And the drop, which is sharp and disjunctive inside the data, follows the more enforcement-oriented executive actions of June.
30:20 Speaker 01 Okay. Let me give you one, let me give you another leg, though. You cited at the beginning, you said 300,000 people in December of 2023.
30:30 Speaker 01 The highest on record. The number plummeted in January.
30:34 Ezra Klein? Mm hmm.
30:34 Speaker 01 What executive action did we take between December and January?
30:37 Ezra Klein? Well, I was gonna ask you about this. My understanding is this works in cooperation with Mexico and other transit countries.
30:43 Speaker 01 So Ezra, the third leg of the stool is, in fact, our work with other countries in the region, countries that have been countries of transit and working with them to ensure that they apply their laws of humanitarian relief as well as their laws of border enforcement. And the December numbers in 2023 were so high because the Mexican Enforcement Agency, ENAMI, ran out of funds and therefore there was no interdiction efforts on the Mexican side.
31:23 Speaker 01 And President Biden engaged with President Lopez Obrador. President Biden dispatched Secretary Blinken and me to Mexico. President Lopez Obrador obtained new funding for ENAMI. And the trains now, the conductors of the trains were accompanied by a member of the military that prevented bribes from being paid, migrants from boarding trains and arriving quite fastly at our southern border. There were mirror patrols that were, once again, equipped to interdict individuals along the migratory path.
32:06 Speaker 01 And so the Mexicans were able to ramp up their enforcement and the numbers plummeted in January. And so I adhere to the position that a policy action in isolation would not necessarily work, though be of material impact. And remember the risk calculus. The risk calculus is not in a vacuum. Should I or shouldn't I? The migrants also say, you know what? Should I or shouldn't I place my life and my life savings in the hands of smugglers? Or, and the disjunctive is important here, or am I willing to wait?
32:52 Speaker 01 And seek access to the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan parole program. Am I willing to wait and take my chance at a safe mobility office? And so it's not do I or don't I? But it's do I or don't I? And if I don't, do I consider one of the alternatives that have been made available to me that perhaps previously were less attractive, but now have become more attractive because of the executive action that has been taken?
33:31 Ezra Klein? In 2019, under Donald Trump, and I've asked people about that, that moment on the chart, because if you're looking at the time series here, in 2019, it goes way up. That's an incredible spike. And they tell me basically that the cruelties of the family separation program had come to light, that they sort of eased off because of that. The smugglers took that as an opportunity. But then the Trump administration turned around and threatened a bunch of countries south of the border, primarily Mexico, but not only, with very significant tariffs if they didn't crack down on flow, which is what brought down the numbers again. And then in 2023, my understanding is you guys did not go to our partners with tariffs and tried to do it punitively. But when it got very high, the significant first move for one of them was to try to
34:16 Ezra Klein? rebuild an integrated mechanism here. So what keeps our partners in partnership with us? What keeps them keeping their own enforcement regimes up? What do they want? How do you sort of not have a cycle where after it becomes a very big deal for us and we do deal making, they pay attention to this for a bit, but then, you know, let up on it because it's of less use to them? What are the diplomatic dimensions of this?
34:43 Speaker 01 So they are varied, but let me cite two principles. One, of course, is fundamental, which is the measures that we take must adhere to our values. And I would respectfully and vigorously submit that that distinguishes us from many of the measures that were taken in the prior administration that did not adhere to our values. And the most notable example is one that you have referenced, the family separation policy, the zero tolerance policy, that actually called for the separation of children
35:25 Speaker 01 from their parents for the express purpose of deterring other parents from migrating with their children to the United States. A horrific, indefensible policy. With respect to the other countries, there's a reality here, which is that irregular migration, while the United States might be the destination of choice, because in this administration, our economy has rebounded and is prospering far more rapidly and to a far greater degree than that of any other country in the region.
36:08 Speaker 01 We are the ultimate choice of destination. But the reality is that we're not the only one. And the countries of transit realize and understand that they too are places of destination, not perhaps the top choice, but a choice. And so irregular migration strains Mexico as well because of people settling in Mexico. It strains Costa Rica, Panama as well. Colombia has regularized more than 2 million Venezuelans.
36:50 Speaker 01 So it is a regional challenge that everyone understands requires a regional solution.
37:26 Ezra Klein? So you mentioned a second ago, the cruelty of many of President Trump's measures, though you didn't necessarily identify the name. And I agree with that. But I do want to get your response to the thing I hear often from people who are, I would say, maybe more sensibly on the right of this issue. Which is what they say when they look at the data of migrant flows. Is that Donald Trump was in office, he made very clear, both in policy, but also in word, in deed, in signal, that America was unfriendly to migration in general, but illegal migration in particular. And so fewer people came, for the most part. And when things spiked, he acted very, very quickly to lean on our partners and twist
38:10 Ezra Klein? our arms to bring that spike back down. And then Democrats won in 2020. Donald Trump's actions had pushed the party to be a much more pro-immigrant party than it had been in the past. The rhetoric you would have heard from Bill Clinton was not how Democrats sounded in 2020 about this. The belief was that the Biden administration was a much more compassionate administration, was rolling back some of what Donald Trump did. And the migration numbers soared. And that that itself was a kind of policy failure. That it was not, in a weird way, more compassionate to be more compassionate because it created this sort of chaotic situation that has pushed the politics of immigration in this country quite far to the right. Where what we are talking about now is not comprehensive immigration reform anymore.
38:54 Ezra Klein? It's how to tighten the asylum system and better lock down the border. How do you respond to that?
39:01 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, first of all, it's difficult to not be more compassionate than the prior administration. We, as I said a moment ago, a principle.
39:15 Speaker 01 Of this administration's governance is that we will adhere to our values. And that is a fundamental principle. It's foundational. I don't believe that rhetoric was the draw to people. We were in a period of recovery from COVID. I spoke of the forces that led people to come to the United States. The reality is if there is a, if there's a magnet, if you will, to use that term. It's not a term I like very much, but just for the sake of conversation.
39:59 Speaker 01 The greatest magnet is the broken system that we have. And this administration has taken actions to remedy that. The challenge is that our remedies are not necessarily durable because they are challenged in court. And the enduring solution rests in the hands of Congress. And so we are going to be more compassionate because we ascribe to and execute on our values. And we will not allow ourselves to be unmoored from them.
40:41 Speaker 01 Because to do so, I think threatens much more of our country's identity than how we handle irregular migration.
40:51 Ezra Klein? So by late 2023, the flow at the border is a crisis. When I'm talking to members of the Biden administration, nobody's saying it's a Fox News invention. There is a real sense that the policy needs to be fixed. You mentioned a second ago that the more durable solutions are not executive actions, which is what you would end up doing subsequently, legislation. Negotiations begin again late 2023 in the Senate between Senator Langford, a Republican from Oklahoma, Senator Sinema from Arizona, and Senator Murphy from Connecticut. And the administration gets involved. I believe you were quite involved yourself, particularly as the year went on. When that compromise deal was finished.
41:37 Ezra Klein? What was it able to do? What would it have done? What would it do if it passed today? That you've not been able to do through executive action?
41:46 Speaker 01 Well, not only would that bipartisan legislation have achieved the outcomes that we are now achieving through executive action, but it would have done much more. And one primary thing it would have done, which would have been transformative, is resourced the immigration system that has been perennially underfunded. It would have resourced us to have 1,500 more enforcement agents. It would have allowed us to hire
42:30 Speaker 01 over 4,000 more asylum officers. It would have funded the immigration court system with more immigration judges. Just a remarkable shift in addressing some of the gaping shortcomings in the workings of our country's immigration system, at least in the context of asylum and border enforcement. Transformative changes.
42:59 Ezra Klein? So something I have heard from people who've worked on that bill is that the timing was off, that by the time it was locked, the 2024 election was in swing. And Donald Trump, and he deserves, I think, tremendous blame on this, called congressional allies and killed the bill. At the same time, the bill did not have to, or some deal here, some engagement here, did not have to wait all the way until the end of 2023. The problems at the border were evident well before then. At the debate, David Muir asked the vice president a version of this, something I've heard from border Democrats as well. Why didn't the administration do something here sooner?
43:43 Ezra Klein? Try to build the deal here sooner? Or even do the executive actions sooner? It could have been done in early 2023 and 2022. I didn't quite hear her answer, so I wanted to pose the same question to you. Why did it take till the final quarter roughly of 2023? And then after that, Bill died and until late, actually, in 2024, or June 2024, for the change in policy to happen here? Why didn't you all do this sooner?
44:11 Speaker 01 So let me break that down, if I may, Ezra. Let's first talk about the negotiations. The fact of the matter was that the senators were not lone actors, acting untethered to their respective colleagues, but were rather, and importantly, representative voices. And those negotiations were difficult, and they were ultimately successful. And because those senators had achieved significant compromise,
44:50 Speaker 01 but a really transformative piece of legislation for the first time since 1996, we did not foresee that that bipartisan negotiation that involved a great deal of compromise, that delivered a solution for the American people, would actually be torpedoed because some forces did not want a solution, but rather would like the problem to persist for political purposes. So that is first, let me just articulate that. Then let me step back and speak about the timeline.
45:29 Speaker 01 Because this administration was not passive until those negotiations began. Quite to the contrary. First, let's take a look at what was the reality at the border. Please remember that until May of 2023, we were operating under the force of Title 42, the public health order created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fact that people were subject to expulsion under Title 42, an issue that was quite contested, frankly, by different constituencies. So until May of 2023,
46:15 Speaker 01 We were subject to the Title 42 Public Health Order. In addition, and during that time, we did issue, we did promulgate the asylum officer rule, empowering asylum officers to adjudicate cases. We did promulgate the circumvention of lawful pathways rule. Immediately upon the end of the Title 42 order, people expected pandemonium, and pandemonium did not result. And then we went to Congress, and we sought additional funding for the immigration system in a supplemental funding request. That did not succeed.
46:58 Speaker 01 Once again, Congress failed to act. This administration went to Congress again, and again sought supplemental funding. Congress failed to act, and we went shortly thereafter into the negotiations for bipartisan legislation in the United States Senate. So we certainly were not passive. Not only did we promulgate regulations, we built the lawful pathways that I referenced earlier. We built operational capacity that never previously existed, the ability to remove or return people more rapidly.
47:39 Speaker 01 In one year, we've removed or returned a greater number of people than in any year for, I don't recall the precise number, but certainly stretching well into the prior administration. We've built operational capabilities on the enforcement side that were unprecedented.
47:57 Ezra Klein? And is your view that those capabilities were necessary for what came later to work? Because I take your point, I'm not saying that you all were seized by inaction, but there's a force to what you did in June. Obviously, the cooperation with partners that happened sort of more around December or the New Year was very significant as well. And there are a lot of Democrats, I mean, I speak to some of them who are governing in border states who say, you know, my life would be easier if they had done this earlier, if it was in their power to tighten the border as they now have. And the flow is as responsive to that as it appears to have been. We could have been here earlier and immigration wouldn't be such a tough issue for me right now.
48:42 Speaker 01 A couple of things, Ezra, I don't want to minimize the impact of the executive action that the president took in June. So, please understand that it has had a material, a very significant impact, but we cannot view that in isolation. And please remember that the executive action is the subject of ongoing litigation. We actually have a hearing in that litigation coming up. So the durability is subject to challenge. And it's also important to remember, and this goes back to what we've been discussing, that the phenomenon of migration is by no means static.
49:27 Speaker 01 So had we not had as robust an alternative in lawful pathways as we do now, having built those safe mobility offices, seeing them now really deliver results for people from the countries of origin, from the countries of challenge. We've exceeded the number of refugee admissions for this region than ever before. Building the operational capacity, I don't know that the executive action would necessarily have been as materially impactful had we done it earlier than had we done it now.
50:09 Speaker 01 And to do the executive action at a time when Title 42 is in operation, it's very difficult to take this action out of its temporal and operational context, place it in another point in time, and assume the exact same results would occur. I just don't think migration works that way.
50:33 Ezra Klein? I want to end here by zooming out a little bit to the immigration system as a whole. The fact that Democrats and Republicans now agree that certainly the asylum system is broken. It sort of obscures, I think, their disagreement. You know, James Langford and Chris Murphy might have now similar views on what you could do to tighten asylum. But in general, Republicans largely just want less immigration. Certainly, Donald Trump, I think, just wants to get as close to a closed border as he possibly can. Democrats, I think, have a more complicated set of motivations here. And the immigration system does a more complicated set of things. There's the part of it that is humanitarian.
51:15 Ezra Klein? There's a part of it that is treating immigration as a strategic resource for America, a point of national competitiveness. We can get the best and brightest from the whole world here. And then there's the question of us being able to decide who becomes an American and who comes into our borders. How do you think about what the system should do? From your perspective or from the Biden administration's perspective? What is the point of America's immigration system as a whole? Or at least, what should it be?
51:46 Speaker 01 I think its goals are actually well-defined. We just don't achieve its goals because the system has not been fixed to meet the times in which we live and how we have developed as a country. The three goals are basically economic prosperity, family unification, and humanitarian relief. And let's take, we've been talking about humanitarian relief in the asylum system, which is a companion to the refugee system. They are distinct. But let's take a look at economic prosperity. There is agreement, bipartisan agreement, that our economy benefits from migrant labor.
52:36 Speaker 01 Take the non-agricultural, unskilled visa, the H2B. Republican and Democratic governors, senators, House members implore me to deploy the maximum number of visas available, and they all decry the fact that that maximum number is woefully inadequate to meet their respective jurisdictions' needs. And that's because the numeric limits were set in 1996. We're in 2024 now. If we look north to Canada, Ezra, Canada needed this year to fill its labor needs,
53:20 Speaker 01 700,000 jobs to be filled by migrant labor because those jobs could not be filled by the domestic workforce. And so, Canada decided to invite as many as a million migrant laborers to Canada for the benefit of its economic prosperity. We're stuck in 1996. Talent from all over the world comes to be educated in the United States, some of our best colleges and universities. They develop skills that our companies need and desperately want.
54:03 Speaker 01 The individuals themselves, the students now skilled, want to stay, and our immigration system does not provide them with an avenue to do so. And we lose them to other countries that end up competing with us. What a broken system. And it's broken in terms of all three goals that underlie it.
54:29 Ezra Klein? And when you say that we know what the goals are, we just haven't rebuilt the system or updated the system to achieve them. I recognize this might be a significant question, but what would it mean to update the system to achieve them? I mean, my understanding of the immigration system as a policy architecture is that it has been some time since it has had a fundamental overhaul. There are attempts under Obama, under George W. Bush. What it has instead are a series of patches and updates and tweaks and, you know, emergency bits, sort of layered and band-aided and grafted on.
55:12 Ezra Klein? And so the whole thing has developed a somewhat unwieldy dimension to it, to say nothing now of over a series of administrations, the many, many immigration-oriented executive orders. What would actually need to be done here if we know what we need to do?
55:30 Speaker 01 It would be a very significant overhaul that touches all three goals. Look, there are, of course, voices in our country that don't agree with those three goals. There are voices that don't believe in immigration to the United States that want to change the very identity of this country in that regard. I think that would render our country far, far weaker and far less valued in the world. But it requires an overhaul. I will tell you, I grew up in terms of my federal government service of more than 20 years. I grew up in the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor.
56:13 Speaker 01 And the criminal codes had three goals: punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. And certainly, not all of those goals are always achieved. But one took a look at the criminal code, and it drove to those goals in a rather consistent way, if you will. When I was introduced...
56:39 Speaker 01 To the Immigration and Nationality Act as the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the statutes governing our immigration system, I saw to your correct characterization, patches and Band-Aids and bridges, sometimes broken. One can see a provision promulgated during one administration in tension with another statutory provision codified in a different administration with a different outlook, and those two are in tension, if not in conflict sometimes. It is a reality that an individual can be simultaneously eligible for deportation, we use the word removal now, simultaneously eligible for
57:24 Speaker 01 removal, and naturalization. And when I came to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the outcome that that individual encountered was dependent upon which office was adjudicating the case. That is not functional.
57:41 Ezra Klein? And there's what the system wants. How do you understand what the public wants here? And two data points I'd be curious to hear you reflect on. One is that we had a very low percentage, I think historically low percentage, of the U.S. population being foreign-born in 1970. It's about 4.7%. By 2022, it was about 14%. I've seen estimates for today that it's above 15%, which is levels last seen during the late 1800s, which I think explains some of why immigration has been so central to our politics in recent years. It really has been in people's lifetimes, a very sharp increase in the proportion of
58:22 Ezra Klein? Americans who are foreign-born. But there's also these rapid swings in public opinion. So when Joe Biden came into office, about a third of Americans wanted immigration to increase legal levels here, about a third wanted to decrease. By June 2024, these are both Gallup polls, more than half wanted legal levels to decrease, while only about 16% wanted it to increase. It's a very sharp swing against higher legal levels. How do you think about the, both change in the composition of the country, but also the sort of shifting public opinion around this issue as you do your work?
59:00 Speaker 01 Ezra, I'd want to understand those numbers a little bit better and also try to learn of the polled individuals' understanding of what they're being asked and what they're answering, because I question whether they actually believe in a decrease in the amount of legal immigration as distinguished from reacting to the situation at the southern
59:36 Speaker 01 border. I do think that the public wants order and an orderly system that is functional. And that is not exclusively the province of governance. It is critically also the province of legislation.
59:58 Ezra Klein? I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
1:00:04 Speaker 01 Let me say this, because that's a sweeping question. One of the books that I have read in the past two years that has impacted me considerably and that I consider to be absolutely exquisite in its writing and in its power and in its message is The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. That is one of the best books I've ever read. What I have on my nightstand
1:00:44 Speaker 01 right now is motivated by the US Open. I have David Foster Wallace's String Theory. And the book that I have as its companion is the dictionary, because his vocabulary was far, far greater than mine will ever be.
1:01:04 Ezra Klein? Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, thank you very much.
1:01:08 Speaker 01 Thank you, Ezra. Thank you for having me.
1:01:18 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lynn, and Aman Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Semilouski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Ariel Ruiz Soto, Dara Lind, David Frum, Jason DeLeón, Michael Clemens, Ditan Lost, and Stephen Camerota.
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