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Episode: On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:52:01

Episode Shownotes

If Donald J. Trump wins next week’s election, it will be in large part because voters embraced his message that the U.S. immigration system is broken.David Leonhardt, a senior writer at The New York Times, tells the surprising story of how that system came to be.Guest: David Leonhardt, a senior

writer at The New York Times who runs The Morning.Background reading: Whoever wins the election, seeking asylum in the United States may never be the same.For people fleeing war, the U.S. immigration fight has real-life consequences.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_04
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. If Donald Trump wins next week's election, it will be in large part because voters embrace his message that the country's immigration system is broken. Today.

00:00:20 Speaker_04
David Leonhardt on the surprising story of how that system came to be, the very real trade-offs it's required, and just how little it reflects what Americans really want from immigration. It's Tuesday, October 29th. Hi, David. Hello, Michael.

00:00:52 Speaker_04
It's really nice to have you in the studio. I don't think we've ever done this in person before. I have never been in the studio. I've always been remote in Washington. It is great to be here. Overdue.

00:01:01 Speaker_04
So, David, we're talking to you today because you have been studying an issue that voters in this campaign for president consistently rank among their top concerns, and that is immigration.

00:01:13 Speaker_04
And yet, you contend that the way we talk about this issue, the way we understand it, is very incomplete, and that we tend to think about it in far too narrow a light as a question of what's happening at the U.S.-Mexico border, when there's so much more to the subject of immigration.

00:01:31 Speaker_04
And we wanted you to help us understand that fuller picture, and how and why immigration has become so central to this election, and how it may influence the outcome of next week's election.

00:01:43 Speaker_03
So, that's a lot. Where should we start? Well, first, I understand why people are so focused on the here and now. We've had a historically large increase in immigration under Joe Biden's presidency.

00:01:57 Speaker_03
Donald Trump, of course, made immigration central to his brand even before that increase.

00:02:01 Speaker_09
Our border is open. Nobody can believe it.

00:02:05 Speaker_03
He talks about it all the time.

00:02:07 Speaker_09
We're a dumping ground. We're like a garbage can for the world.

00:02:11 Speaker_03
Kamala Harris actually has talked a lot about immigration as well.

00:02:14 Speaker_01
The United States is a sovereign nation. And I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them.

00:02:23 Speaker_03
She has promised that she will do a better job securing the border than Donald Trump.

00:02:26 Speaker_01
And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.

00:02:38 Speaker_03
And when the campaign talks about it, it's almost always focused on undocumented immigration and the southern border.

00:02:45 Speaker_03
But there's a much larger idea here, and that's that a lot of Americans feel like we have an immigration system today that the voters never chose. It's not an immigration system they want.

00:02:57 Speaker_03
And I think that's particularly resonant because so many Americans feel frustrated by the economic trends in this country over the last several decades. And they put these two things together. They say, hey, wait a second. Our lives are not going well.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
And we have this out of control immigration system. And that is part of why immigration has just become such an intense issue this year.

00:03:28 Speaker_03
So to understand how it is that we got here and how immigration seems to be this subject that never leaves politics, you have to go back much before this presidential campaign. In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1965.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
So David, tell us exactly what happens in 1965 and why it's so important. It's a turning point. For a long time in the 19th century, we didn't really have much immigration law in this country. If you could get here, you could enter.

00:03:55 Speaker_03
That's when a lot of people's ancestors entered. It's when some of my great-grandparents came here. Huge numbers of Jewish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants come here during that time.

00:04:05 Speaker_03
But then, there's really a backlash to the massive amount of immigration. And in 1924, Congress passes this incredibly restrictive law that reduces immigration almost to zero.

00:04:19 Speaker_03
And the small amount of immigration that it does allow, they say, basically can come only from Northern and Western Europe.

00:04:26 Speaker_03
So, it totally clamps down on immigration from Asia, and it sets incredibly restrictive caps on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.

00:04:36 Speaker_04
The goal would clearly seem to be a whiter, more Anglo-Saxon group of immigrants.

00:04:43 Speaker_03
Yes, it was a very clearly racist bill and the goal was essentially to stop the diversification of America that had been happening in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And so that really guides US immigration policy from the 1920s through the 1960s.

00:04:59 Speaker_03
And you can understand why, amid the excitement around the civil rights movement, that people look at our immigration system and they say, wait a second, at the same time that we're passing civil rights bills and outlawing racial discrimination within our country, we shouldn't have an immigration system that is so obviously based on race and national origin.

00:05:20 Speaker_03
And so, what changes are contemplated along those lines? The central figure here is John F. Kennedy.

00:05:28 Speaker_07
It is a proud privilege to be a citizen of the great republic, to realize that we are the descendants of 40 million people who left other countries, other familiar scenes, to come here to the United States to build a new life.

00:05:44 Speaker_03
He's a senator from Massachusetts in 1960, and he's running for president, and he published a book called A Nation of Immigrants, which really introduced that notion into the popular vernacular.

00:05:55 Speaker_03
He himself comes from an immigrant family, from Ireland. He wins the presidency, of course, and he says he's going to fix this broken and racist immigration system that we used to have.

00:06:06 Speaker_08
Next week, we will send to the Congress of the United States our proposals for improving and modernizing the laws which govern the admission of immigrants into this country.

00:06:17 Speaker_03
And he introduces a bill that will do that, that will open immigration to people from all over the world.

00:06:23 Speaker_08
We hope that the Congress of the United States will accept these recommendations and that before this year is over, we'll have what we've needed for a good many years, which is the recognition

00:06:34 Speaker_08
that all people can make equally good citizens, and that what this country needs and wants are those who wish to come here, to build their families here, and contribute to the life of our country.

00:06:55 Speaker_04
And what does this bill, as it's starting to take shape during the Kennedy administration, look like? What are the tenets of it?

00:07:02 Speaker_03
From the very beginning, they separate out two different questions. And this is going to be important to think about this entire debate. Who and how many? So let's start with the who. That is what the Kennedy administration promises to fix.

00:07:20 Speaker_03
And they say, we are no longer going to make decisions based on where people come from. We're going to treat the whole world equal. We are going to change the who of our immigration system. To be much broader.

00:07:31 Speaker_03
To be much broader and really to make decisions based on things like, can you come and contribute to our economy? We don't care where you are from. They also say they are not going to change the how many. This is not a bill to increase immigration.

00:07:50 Speaker_03
So as history fans know, JFK's legislative agenda mostly was stalled in Congress. He's assassinated in 1963, LBJ becomes president, and LBJ takes up JFK's legislative agenda. And so this becomes a bill that LBJ tries to pass.

00:08:09 Speaker_03
And from the very beginning, LBJ and the people who are in charge of the bill, including Ted Kennedy, JFK's younger brother, who is then an impossibly young senator, this becomes the first bill that he is going to try to shepherd through the Senate.

00:08:24 Speaker_03
And from the very beginning, all of them say, we are not changing the how many. And the promise that the bill will not lead to a significant increase in immigration is the number one promise that the bill's supporters make when selling it.

00:08:41 Speaker_03
I've spent a lot of time in the congressional archives reading their speeches and reading their statements. It's the thing they emphasize more than anything else.

00:08:49 Speaker_03
So when Ted Kennedy, the senator who is running this bill in the Senate, opens the hearing to talk about the bill, He says the notion that this bill will lead to more immigration is highly emotional, irrational, and has little foundation in fact.

00:09:06 Speaker_04
Why is that promise so important, David, to those who are crafting this bill? How many stay the same even as the who is vastly broadening?

00:09:16 Speaker_03
Immigration has almost always made people nervous. And it's particularly made people who don't earn a lot of money nervous.

00:09:23 Speaker_03
They get nervous that people are going to come in and take their jobs or they're going to come in and lower wages because there will be a greater labor pool. And that's not a crazy worry.

00:09:33 Speaker_03
I mean, business executives have long lobbied for high immigration in part to keep wages down and have a big labor pool.

00:09:40 Speaker_03
And so there's this underlying worry, even in the 1960s when the economy was quite good, that very high immigration would hurt blue-collar workers. And you can see this in the poll data at the time.

00:09:50 Speaker_03
I mean, pollsters like Gallup asked people, what do you think about changing the immigration system? And Americans very clearly said, we actually would like to get rid of this old system in which we're making decisions based on country.

00:10:03 Speaker_03
But when the poll said, do you want more immigration, Americans overwhelmingly said, no, we do not want more immigration. And the people writing the bill were well aware of that public opinion.

00:10:15 Speaker_04
Got it. And so how do the authors of the bill pull off what I have to imagine is a somewhat tricky balancing act of, making the who much, much broader, but the how many exactly the same.

00:10:28 Speaker_03
First, they're going to set a quota, 265,000 people a year. It doesn't matter where you come from. And they're going to start making decisions based in large part on what you can add to our economy.

00:10:41 Speaker_03
So, by 1965, Robert F. Kennedy, the third Kennedy brother in this story, has been elected a senator. What a family. I know, has been elected a senator from New York.

00:10:50 Speaker_03
And he has this little riff where he talks about the kinds of workers who this new bill is going to bring in.

00:10:56 Speaker_03
And he says it's going to bring in a Korean radiologist, a Japanese microbiologist, a Greek chemist, a Filipina teacher of deaf children, and a Turkish urologist. And then he contrasts that with who the bill will not allow in. ditch diggers.

00:11:14 Speaker_03
And the reason he says that is the United States already has enough ditch diggers, whereas we need more microbiologists and radiologists. But we have enough people in this country who want to be ditch diggers and are ditch diggers.

00:11:26 Speaker_03
And by doing that, he's essentially saying we are not going to introduce a lot of competition for blue collar jobs in this country. And LBJ's labor secretary goes right at this idea of labor competition.

00:11:38 Speaker_03
He says it offers complete protection to American workers from labor competition. And then the second group that the bill is going to prioritize is family members.

00:11:50 Speaker_03
If someone's here and wants to bring her spouse over, if someone's here and they want to bring their kids over, and so the second group that the bill is going to allow in are family members.

00:11:59 Speaker_03
But here's where we get to the wrinkle, Michael, which is many family members in this bill don't count toward the quota of 265,000 immigrants a year. Why not? Well, they weren't seen as threatening to labor competition.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
You can imagine if you're bringing in a young child or you're bringing in a parent or grandparent, they're not going to compete for those ditch digging jobs. relatives are largely not counted toward the quota.

00:12:30 Speaker_03
Now, in the moment, I think it's important to say there were members of Congress and critics who realized that this could be a problem.

00:12:40 Speaker_03
One of them was Michael Fagan, a congressman from the west side of Cleveland, and he said, wait a second, why don't we just set a real cap of $325,000 a year? It doesn't matter whether you're a family member or a worker, you will count toward it.

00:12:52 Speaker_03
And the bill's advocate said, no, no, no, we don't need to do that. The family members aren't going to be a big enough deal. We're going to stick with this idea of a $265,000 a year cap that applies to some people, but not others.

00:13:03 Speaker_04
Hmm. Hindsight's always 20-20, but this does seem like a very big loophole, allowing essentially, if I'm understanding this correctly, a kind of unlimited number of family members to come in and not count against the quota.

00:13:20 Speaker_03
Yes, it does. I think one of the things that happened is that the people raising questions about the quota, like Michael Fagan, were immigration restrictionists. They were often also racists.

00:13:32 Speaker_03
who wanted to keep the United States population heavily Western European.

00:13:37 Speaker_03
And so I think it became easy for the people pushing the bill to just ignore a lot of what they were saying, even though the people pushing the bill were putting in place a system that had this massive loophole.

00:13:51 Speaker_03
And a bill with this big loophole passes, and it becomes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. And LBJ signs it at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

00:14:04 Speaker_00
Distinguished governors and mayors, my fellow countrymen.

00:14:08 Speaker_03
And it's fascinating what LBJ says when signing it.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers from a hundred different places or more.

00:14:20 Speaker_03
He very much adopts the language of a nation of immigrants.

00:14:24 Speaker_00
The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources. because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

00:14:35 Speaker_03
And so he has soaring language about that, but he does something that presidents don't normally do when signing a big bill.

00:14:40 Speaker_00
This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.

00:15:01 Speaker_03
He promises that it's actually not that big of a deal. And that is his way of connecting the salesmanship of the bill, the promises to the American people that this isn't going to change the how many of immigration.

00:15:15 Speaker_00
This bill says simply that from this day forth, those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already here.

00:15:30 Speaker_03
It's only going to change the who of immigration.

00:15:39 Speaker_04
I have a very strong suspicion that the promise that this is not going to change all that much turns out to be wrong.

00:15:45 Speaker_03
You've noticed my foreshadowing, Michael.

00:15:47 Speaker_04
So what actually happens?

00:15:49 Speaker_03
Almost immediately, immigration begins to surge in the United States. And the overwhelming reason that it begins to surge is this loophole that allows many family members to come in without being counted toward the quota.

00:16:05 Speaker_03
So, by 1968, our newspaper, the New York Times, runs a story that says, the extent of the change has surprised even those who fought hardest for it.

00:16:15 Speaker_03
And in 1971, the Washington Post runs a story where they interview Dennis Sentilis, a Greek immigrant in Queens who describes having helped 24 of his family members come into the United States. One immigrant. Yes.

00:16:27 Speaker_03
And so you also start to see this in the numbers. So remember, the cap was $265,000 a year. An actual immigration in 1965, the year the bill passes, is $300,000 a year, a little bit above the cap. By 1970, it's $373,000 a year. This is legal immigration.

00:16:37 Speaker_03
By 1980, it's $524,000 a year. And by 1990, it succeeded $1 million. Wow.

00:16:50 Speaker_04
So hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands more immigrants than the quota envisions.

00:16:57 Speaker_03
Yes. In some ways, the loophole becomes more important than the quota itself.

00:17:03 Speaker_03
And when you go back and you look at graphs that show the percentage of the United States population that is foreign-born, you really see the late 1960s as the point where it begins to rise because of this law.

00:17:15 Speaker_04
So how do Americans react to this influx, knowing that it's not what they had been told would happen?

00:17:23 Speaker_03
Initially, there's actually not that much of a reaction. The growth in the immigrant population happens slowly. It happens over time. So we don't overnight have a massive increase in the immigrant population.

00:17:34 Speaker_03
But one thing that starts to change this issue is in the 1980s and then the 1990s, illegal immigration becomes a much bigger deal.

00:17:44 Speaker_04
Just describe that and how it interacts with the rise in legal immigration that you've been describing.

00:17:50 Speaker_03
Historically, immigration at the southern border, immigration from Latin America, just wasn't a big issue. There actually weren't a lot of people coming from Latin America for many decades.

00:17:59 Speaker_03
Many people in Latin America were too poor to make the journey. It requires some resources, actually, to immigrate. But by the 1980s and 90s, that's changing. And it does become more possible for people to get to the U.S. border.

00:18:10 Speaker_03
And people in Latin America have more money. Transportation is better. People get to the United States. They can call home and tell their relatives that they made it.

00:18:18 Speaker_03
And this, of course, is the era of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, and they don't fix the problem with illegal immigration.

00:18:26 Speaker_03
In part, it's that their backers, of course, are a lot of corporate executives and corporate executives tend to like high immigration, both legal and illegal. It gives them more workers and it can hold wages down for businesses.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
And so this problem starts to build in the 1980s. And by the 1990s, it's really a central issue in American politics. Voters look around and they say the border is chaotic. And to a lot of voters, it feels unfair, particularly to recent immigrants.

00:18:55 Speaker_03
They said, I went through this long process to get into this country. And now I see other people skipping the line.

00:19:01 Speaker_03
And at the same time that illegal immigration is rising, in the background, remember, we still have the legal immigration rising that we talked about.

00:19:11 Speaker_03
By 1990, we've got more than a million people a year coming here legally, in significant part because of the loophole in that law. And so you put these two together.

00:19:21 Speaker_03
And by the 80s and 90s, you really have a very large increase in the number of people who are coming to this country, often trying to get blue-collar work.

00:19:34 Speaker_03
And you begin to see concerns among both Republicans and Democrats and independents about how immigration is changing the United States and how it may be contributing to slow-growing wages for workers.

00:19:51 Speaker_03
And there is one person in particular in Washington, a Democrat, who really tries to address this situation. And she tries to fix the unintended consequences of the 1965 law in the 1990s.

00:20:07 Speaker_03
And I think her struggle to do that really helps explain how we've ended up where we've ended up today on immigration.

00:20:27 Speaker_05
We'll be right back.

00:20:40 Speaker_03
And I bet a lot of our listeners haven't heard of her or don't know much about her, but she really was an icon in the 1970s and 80s in the United States.

00:20:50 Speaker_03
Barbara Jordan grew up in Houston when it was segregated and Barbara Jordan was black and she is a star student and she becomes a star debater in college. And people who do debate often go into politics, and she goes into politics.

00:21:04 Speaker_03
And she works on the 1960 JFK-LBJ presidential campaign. And she rises up through Texas politics a little bit. And LBJ, who's gotten to know her, encourages her to run for Congress. And in 1972, Jordan runs for Congress and wins.

00:21:20 Speaker_03
And two years after she enters Congress... Thank you, Mr. Chairman. She has this signature moment during the Watergate hearings.

00:21:29 Speaker_02
A president... is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.

00:21:35 Speaker_02
If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th century paper shredder.

00:21:52 Speaker_03
where she delivers this thundering speech calling Nixon to task for breaking the law in Watergate. And this is something that millions of Americans watch, and it really makes her famous. She becomes a major civil rights leader.

00:22:08 Speaker_03
She's known for trying to expand voting access for her Latino constituents in Texas.

00:22:16 Speaker_06
Ladies and gentlemen, in case you don't know it, may I now present our second keynote speaker, the Honorable Barbara Jordan, Democrat of Houston, Texas.

00:22:30 Speaker_03
And then in 1976, she speaks to the Democratic National Convention.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
I feel that notwithstanding the past, that my presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not forever be deferred.

00:22:52 Speaker_03
But Jordan retires quite early because of illness. She goes back home to Texas to teach. And then in the 1990s, President Clinton reaches out to her. Both legal and illegal immigration have been rising for years, and people are getting mad about it.

00:23:08 Speaker_03
Bill Clinton needs a way to address it and try to fix the system. And so he turns to Barbara Jordan. She's from Texas, a border state, and she's this renowned communicator of American values.

00:23:22 Speaker_03
So Clinton asks her to lead a commission that will recommend how the country can fix its broken immigration system. And at first, Jordan says no. She doesn't really have any background in immigration.

00:23:34 Speaker_03
But she ultimately becomes persuaded that there aren't many people who could bring the moral authority that she could to this. And also that she spent much of her career thinking about what is America? And this is a central part of that question.

00:23:55 Speaker_04
And so how does she approach this assignment that Bill Clinton gives her?

00:23:59 Speaker_03
Well, she does what commission chairs do. She takes testimony. She travels around the country. She looks at data and evidence. And she ultimately comes to this conclusion. It's a little bit counterintuitive.

00:24:10 Speaker_03
She argues that there's a fundamental difference between being pro-immigrant and being pro-immigration. And she says we are a nation of immigrants.

00:24:21 Speaker_03
But at the same time, she says, that doesn't mean we should always want higher and higher levels of immigration. In fact, sometimes having higher and higher levels of immigration can hurt immigrants.

00:24:35 Speaker_03
Immigrants who came here several years ago are often the ones who compete for jobs with the very most recent immigrants.

00:24:41 Speaker_03
And when immigration gets too high, it can lead to a political backlash that hurts people who came here, often legally, several years before.

00:24:51 Speaker_04
In other words, if you're too pro-immigration, it will undermine the position of being pro-immigrant.

00:24:58 Speaker_03
That's exactly right. It's a version of in-everything moderation. If you really care about the well-being of immigrants, you can't just dial immigration up to too high of a level.

00:25:10 Speaker_03
And once she and the commission settle on these conclusions, Jordan then goes out and presents them to the country.

00:25:16 Speaker_03
And one of the more intriguing places that she does so is at a political convention in 1995 hosted by Ross Perot, who, of course, had run as an independent candidate for president in 1992 and was thinking of running again in 1996.

00:25:29 Speaker_00
It has been my privilege to know her for many years. Let's give her a big hello. Come on up.

00:25:37 Speaker_03
And Jordan goes there and she tells this convention what she has concluded.

00:25:42 Speaker_02
We have concluded that a properly regulated legal immigration system is in the national interest.

00:25:55 Speaker_02
It is in our national interest to unite families and create economic growth and protect those who flee persecution, as many before the immigrants of today seeking freedom in this land of opportunity have sought. But I said, properly regulate it.

00:26:16 Speaker_02
And I mean that.

00:26:18 Speaker_03
And in the speech, she lays out the case for immigration reform, for changing our laws.

00:26:23 Speaker_02
Immigration is not a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to everyone anywhere in the world who thinks they want to come to the United States. Immigration is a privilege.

00:26:38 Speaker_03
She believes, yes, the United States is a nation of immigrants, but both of those words matter. We are a nation of immigrants, and we need a policy that serves the national interest.

00:26:49 Speaker_02
The commission recommendations are intended to continue the benefits of legal immigration while limiting costs. And there are costs. Good things are rarely free.

00:27:02 Speaker_03
She says what many Americans believe, a nation needs to make decisions about who will enter and who will not be allowed to enter.

00:27:10 Speaker_02
We are a country of laws.

00:27:14 Speaker_03
And she starts by talking about illegal immigration.

00:27:17 Speaker_02
For our immigration policy to make sense, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law and those who violate it.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
Therefore, we disagree with those who would label any effort to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is not acceptable.

00:27:38 Speaker_03
She's got multiple recommendations for what the country should do to stem illegal immigration.

00:27:43 Speaker_03
And she specifically says that the country should put in place a system using social security numbers and driver's licenses to make it difficult for companies to employ people who are here illegally, because that will make it much less likely that huge numbers of people want to come to this country.

00:28:02 Speaker_02
the abuse of our economy by unlawful workers and those who hire them, the undermining of wages and working conditions we have fought so long to protect. These are the things that must stop.

00:28:15 Speaker_03
And what about legal immigration? The commission also calls for less legal immigration. It says, look, we need to continue doing many forms of legal immigration. We need to admit members of an immigrant's nuclear family.

00:28:28 Speaker_03
We need to admit highly skilled workers. And we need to admit political refugees who are fleeing oppression. But we don't need to admit so many extended family members who came in through the loophole of the 1965 law.

00:28:42 Speaker_03
And they effectively call for closing that loophole.

00:28:45 Speaker_02
Now, it is not that we believe immigration of extended family members are harmful, but we do not have unlimited numbers of immigrant visas.

00:28:58 Speaker_03
And she also says the commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete with the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.

00:29:10 Speaker_02
Many American workers do not now have adequate job prospects and they're not improving. With welfare reform, many more unskilled American workers will enter the labor market.

00:29:26 Speaker_02
We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder, by having a priority of unskilled foreign labor.

00:29:37 Speaker_03
And overall, they call for a one-third reduction in legal immigration to the United States.

00:29:45 Speaker_04
Which it sounds like would bring the system back to the stated intent, but not the practical realities of the 1965 law. Exactly right.

00:29:55 Speaker_03
And one of the reasons Barbara Jordan wanted to make these changes is she was worried that if we didn't,

00:30:02 Speaker_03
the politics of immigration would become so toxic that a future Congress or president, a future anti-immigration Congress or president, would be able to cut down even on the kinds of immigration that are so important to what this country is.

00:30:18 Speaker_02
We cannot evade the responsibility to make the necessary choices to reform immigration. It's literally a matter of who we are as a nation and who we become as a people. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. One.

00:30:42 Speaker_04
So what happens to these recommendations once Jordan and the commission bring them to President Clinton? Well, at first, Bill Clinton's very enthusiastic.

00:30:51 Speaker_09
In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the work face, as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

00:31:05 Speaker_03
He embraces the recommendations. He suggests he's going to try to get them passed.

00:31:10 Speaker_09
It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

00:31:23 Speaker_03
But almost immediately, political opposition starts forming, and it starts forming on both sides. So on the Republican side, you hear these Republicans saying, we need immigration. It leads to more entrepreneurs. It leads to a larger labor force.

00:31:39 Speaker_03
They don't say it can hold down wages, but obviously that's part of what they want, which of course is exactly why Barbara Jordan wanted to keep down the idea of immigration.

00:31:49 Speaker_03
But you also have a big part of the Democratic Party that is really opposed to immigration restriction. It's civil rights groups. In some cases, it is Latino or Asian-American groups that want to keep immigration high.

00:32:05 Speaker_03
And so, the kind of things Jordan is calling for, polling consistently suggests, are popular. But among activists and politicians in Washington, in many ways, political elites on the left and the right,

00:32:19 Speaker_03
There's a real discomfort with reducing immigration or cracking down on illegal immigration. And so the recommendations largely do not become law. A few things do, such as a voluntary system for checking whether workers are in this country legally.

00:32:36 Speaker_03
Voluntary. Exactly. I mean, this idea that we're going to say to businesses, we're going to let you decide whether you opt into a system that tells us whether you're breaking the law, you can guess how effective that was.

00:32:47 Speaker_03
So for the most part, although some of Jordan's recommendations become law, we continue to have the basic dynamics of the immigration system that the 1965 law gave us.

00:32:58 Speaker_04
I guess I don't quite understand why Bill Clinton would have bowed to those pressures, David, because it sounds like a bunch of elites, activists, business leaders are the ones trying to torpedo this.

00:33:12 Speaker_04
But Bill Clinton has many political gifts, and one of them is to recognize what gets someone elected or reelected.

00:33:21 Speaker_04
And it feels like what Barbara Jordan is really telling him is that high levels of immigration, legal and illegal, are a threat to working class America.

00:33:33 Speaker_04
And Bill Clinton would have understood, I'd have to think, that working-class America is really essential to the Democratic Party that he leads.

00:33:42 Speaker_03
I think two things are happening here. One, the economy just keeps getting stronger over the course of the 1990s, which is a reminder that immigration is just one force among many that shapes an economy, and it's not the main one.

00:33:55 Speaker_03
And the second thing is that political elites really matter.

00:33:58 Speaker_03
And what has happened over the last few decades is that both of our parties became ever more dominated by college graduates and people who had the concerns and interests of college graduates as opposed to working-class people.

00:34:13 Speaker_03
And so Democrats become a little bit less focused on what blue-collar workers want, and we see this with both trade and immigration.

00:34:21 Speaker_03
And in the Republican Party, those same corporate interests that have long had huge sway over the Republican Party do.

00:34:27 Speaker_03
And so when you think of official Washington and the people who are making policy and who are lobbying for it, you just have much less pressure for changes to the immigration system than public opinion might suggest that you would.

00:34:42 Speaker_04
This is reminding me so much of what happened with NAFTA, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is that elites, powerful entrenched forces in Washington, increasingly disconnected from working class America, see nothing but upside in globalization and free trade and don't anticipate the ways in which

00:35:03 Speaker_04
NAFTA will hurt working class America. There's not much dispute that it does. I think that's exactly right.

00:35:09 Speaker_03
And I think one of the real mistakes that proponents of immigration have made, and this is both business conservatives who want more immigration and it's progressives who, from a justice perspective, want more immigration.

00:35:21 Speaker_03
I think one of the real mistakes they've made is they tend to argue that immigration is a free lunch. And in fact, immigration just benefits everyone. And the research doesn't support that idea, nor do people's everyday experiences support that idea.

00:35:36 Speaker_03
Immigration has trade-offs. It has enormous advantages for an economy, but it also has some costs, and those costs do tend to be borne disproportionately by working-class people, and that's part of why so many people are so anxious about it.

00:35:53 Speaker_04
Well, let's talk about some of those trade-offs, and I think it would be helpful

00:35:58 Speaker_04
for you to be as specific as possible about the upsides of higher immigration as well as the cost, because you just mentioned that there seems to be research and data there.

00:36:08 Speaker_03
There is. And let's start with the upsides. The biggest beneficiaries of immigration are immigrants themselves.

00:36:17 Speaker_03
Research suggests that the typical experience is that an immigrant who comes here poor remains poor, but that immigrant's children do significantly better, and their grandchildren do really well.

00:36:29 Speaker_03
And after just a few generations, these immigrants look like Native-born Americans in terms of their outcomes. And then there are other benefits for people who are already in this country.

00:36:40 Speaker_03
Immigrants expand the labor pool, they can particularly cut the cost of services, and they can particularly cut the cost of services that upper-income people often use.

00:36:51 Speaker_03
yard work, daycare, other services where large numbers of immigrants work in those industries. And in the long term, immigrants can also expand the economy. They can create more demand for all kinds of things. They become consumers.

00:37:05 Speaker_03
They become consumers themselves.

00:37:07 Speaker_03
And then, finally, there's a little bit more of a subjective benefit, which is, I think many Americans would say it's just more interesting to live in a more diverse country, a country where fashion and culture and music and all of those things are more diverse.

00:37:22 Speaker_03
Right. And what about the costs?

00:37:24 Speaker_03
Economists have been looking at this for a long time, and I think perhaps the best summary is this 2017 report from the National Academy of Sciences, which brought together some of the biggest experts on immigration in the country and looked at immigration's effect on all kinds of things, including on wages.

00:37:43 Speaker_03
And that report produced a table where they listed a whole bunch of studies, all the studies that cleared their bar for really trying to tell us something important about how immigration affects the wages of native-born Americans.

00:37:58 Speaker_03
And when you look down that chart, you notice something. it is dominated by negative numbers, which is to say that more immigration does tend to reduce wages, particularly of the least educated, lower-income workers.

00:38:15 Speaker_04
Right. And that makes intuitive sense because if you have more people, especially at the lower education and skill level, suddenly seeking the same work, then supply of that work has gone up, and therefore wages for it will go down.

00:38:33 Speaker_03
Of course. It's one of the most basic laws of economics.

00:38:37 Speaker_04
Of course, the argument is frequently made that we are talking here about jobs that non-immigrants in the United States don't want or are unlikely to do. What do the economists and what does the research say about that?

00:38:53 Speaker_03
You definitely hear that argument. And there are some jobs that native-born Americans and immigrants who are already here probably don't want to do. But let's think about some of the jobs we've been talking about in this episode, Michael. Ditch diggers.

00:39:08 Speaker_03
You imagine a blue-collar job like construction, digging ditches, building houses.

00:39:14 Speaker_03
A lot of people who are already in this country and who are struggling to find good paying work would be very happy to do jobs like that, particularly if it paid a decent wage.

00:39:27 Speaker_04
Which in theory might be easier to get if immigration rates were lower.

00:39:32 Speaker_03
Yes, and that's exactly how a lot of Americans feel. And I should emphasize that the qualms that people have about immigration are not just about wages. They may not even mostly be about wages.

00:39:44 Speaker_03
Obviously, a meaningful amount of the opposition to immigration is related to race and involves racism. Obviously, but that isn't the only thing going on.

00:39:56 Speaker_03
Imagine that you lived in a community in South Texas or in a neighborhood in Chicago or Denver, two cities that are magnets for immigrants. And in just a short period of time, the population of your community increased by 10% or even 20%.

00:40:12 Speaker_03
Just think about what that would do to a local school in terms of how many kids were there, in terms of how many of them needed services, like English as a second language.

00:40:20 Speaker_03
Think about the strain it would place on local hospitals and other social services. And then remember that the communities that tend to experience these strains, they're not affluent communities.

00:40:32 Speaker_03
They tend to be blue-collar communities, lower-income communities. They are the ones that are on the front lines of the real societal strains that immigration can create.

00:40:44 Speaker_04
All this, of course, anticipates the rise of Donald Trump as a candidate who, in his announcement for president in 2015, rails against immigrants and the consensus that the elites in both parties have reached, both Democrat and Republican, that high rates of immigration are healthy for the country.

00:41:02 Speaker_04
I'm curious, in doing all this research and all this reporting about immigration, how you look back on that moment.

00:41:10 Speaker_03
Now, Donald Trump, when he talks about immigration, often lies, and he often uses racist stereotypes, and it's really important to say both of those things. And at the same time, he exposed a real vulnerability of the political elites

00:41:26 Speaker_03
A lot of leading Republicans thought that the policies they pursued on both increasing trade and immigration were popular with their voters.

00:41:34 Speaker_03
And Trump is able to take over the Republican Party almost immediately in 2015 and 2016 in large part because he expresses so much hostility to these policies that the elites have been pursuing on both.

00:41:49 Speaker_03
And he speaks to the frustration of so many working class Americans, including Republicans, who for decades have had really slow growth in their income and in their wealth and in other measures of well-being.

00:42:02 Speaker_03
And they don't buy into what was for a long time a conservative vision of more trade and more immigration will help everyone. It is central to Trump's rise as the Republican standard bearer.

00:42:16 Speaker_04
Aaron Powell And David, my recollection is that Trump is not just very critical of illegal immigration, which is probably what he's best known for. But once he becomes president, quite critical of the levels of legal immigration as well.

00:42:30 Speaker_03
That's right.

00:42:30 Speaker_03
So not only is he trying to build a wall at the border and not only is he pursuing a bunch of policies that feel quite cruel, like separating families, but he's trying to put in place the Muslim ban to try to keep out people from predominantly Muslim countries.

00:42:44 Speaker_03
Another example is that he called for a big cut in legal migration specifically by cracking down on what he has described as chain migration, which is the term that opponents use for this extended family migration in which one person comes and brings a relative and that relative then brings another relative.

00:43:02 Speaker_03
And that's what the metaphor of chain is referring to. And Democrats respond to this. by really moving even further in the direction of pro-immigration than they had been in the 1990s and early 2000s. In reaction to him. In reaction to Trump.

00:43:18 Speaker_03
Biden runs for office for president in 2020 sending a message saying, I will be different from Donald Trump. I will not violate fundamental American values in the way he has by separating families, by speaking so cruelly about immigrants.

00:43:35 Speaker_03
And once Biden takes office, he actually loosens our immigration policy in a bunch of ways. This is all very technocratic. It involves things like asylum rules and parole rules.

00:43:46 Speaker_03
But because Biden both spoke so welcomingly about immigration while running for president, including in a debate broadcast by Univision,

00:43:55 Speaker_03
A channel of course watched by many Latinos in this country and in other countries and then loosened policies when he took office.

00:44:02 Speaker_03
You see this enormous surge of immigration to the United States and overall net immigration to the United States combining legal and illegal under Biden. is more than three times as high as it was under Trump. Wow.

00:44:17 Speaker_03
It's about twice as high as it was under either Obama or George W. Bush. And immigration under Joe Biden really is higher than it's been under any president in many, many decades.

00:44:30 Speaker_04
All of this brings us to where we are today and where I think we started this conversation, David, with immigration being a major concern for voters, among their top concerns, and poll after poll after poll showing that voters trust Donald Trump more to tackle the issue than Kamala Harris, which, given the numbers you just described, makes some real sense given that Harris was Biden's vice president and oversaw this major increase in both legal and illegal immigration.

00:44:59 Speaker_04
And it feels like the unique threat that the issue of immigration right now would pose to Kamala Harris.

00:45:06 Speaker_04
is that the entire Democratic Party and brand has gotten to a place where the way it talks about immigration in general is as far away from working class America as one can imagine.

00:45:21 Speaker_03
Yes. And look, Donald Trump is more extreme on immigration than most Americans and most working class Americans are. And polling shows that a lot of people are actually uncomfortable about how he talks about it.

00:45:33 Speaker_03
But the Democrats have moved so far from where people are on immigration that Donald Trump has ended up closer to where many Americans are than the Democratic Party is.

00:45:44 Speaker_03
And so the Democrats are really struggling to get consistent with public opinion on this issue in some ways similar to the way in which Republicans are really having a hard time getting consistent with public opinion on abortion.

00:45:58 Speaker_03
And while abortion is one of the Democrats' strongest issues in this election, immigration is really the mirror image of it, in which a lot of voters don't trust the Democratic Party on it, and it is a reason for them to consider voting for Donald Trump.

00:46:12 Speaker_04
What's interesting of course is that Barbara Jordan was a Democrat and the 1965 law was passed by Democrats and so Democrats could very well and maybe even quite naturally own this subject

00:46:29 Speaker_04
And yet, from what you're saying, the Democrats have drifted further and further from their own legacy.

00:46:35 Speaker_03
That's right. And we've seen Kamala Harris return to that legacy in her presidential campaign. She has really mixed this idea of we need tough border security and we are a nation of immigrants.

00:46:48 Speaker_03
The problem for her, of course, is that she has to both run on the Biden record and there's tape of her saying very different things only four or five years ago.

00:46:55 Speaker_03
But you're right, Michael, that a lot of the old principles of where the Democratic Party was on immigration and where Kamala Harris is now are actually quite consistent with public opinion on this issue.

00:47:08 Speaker_04
What seems very clear in having this conversation with you, and for me was something of a revelation, is how much our current immigration system is a broken promise, right?

00:47:20 Speaker_04
In 65, leaders of both parties said that the law they were passing would not meaningfully increase immigration. It absolutely did by a lot, with real consequences, economic, social, and political.

00:47:34 Speaker_04
Efforts to bring it back to the promises of that law have basically gone nowhere ever since.

00:47:40 Speaker_04
And whether as a voter you are drawn to Trump's very harsh at times approach to immigration, including mass deportations, we haven't talked a lot about in this episode, or Harris' comparatively gentler approach to this question, that broken promise does feel like an important backdrop

00:48:01 Speaker_04
to the question of immigration and this election.

00:48:06 Speaker_03
It is. And it also reminds me of two larger points about our political system. One is that Washington and the politicians who make our policies really have ignored the views of working class people on many issues for a long time.

00:48:23 Speaker_03
And trade and immigration are signature examples. And what politicians of both parties have often done is they've talked down to voters. They've said, no, no, you don't understand. Trade is good for you. Or they've said, no, no, no.

00:48:36 Speaker_03
Immigration doesn't hurt your wages as much as you think it does.

00:48:40 Speaker_03
And voters have rebelled, and they've rebelled for a series of reasons, one of which is definitely that our economy hasn't been very good for Americans who don't have a college degree for several decades now.

00:48:53 Speaker_03
And the second thing is that we live in a democracy. We live in a democracy in which we elect people to pass laws. And when Washington comes to the American people, as it did in 1965, and says, hey, we're going to pass an immigration law.

00:49:11 Speaker_03
And above all, we promise it won't lead to a huge surge in immigration. And then it does lead to a huge surge in immigration. That's not sustainable.

00:49:23 Speaker_03
It simply is not sustainable in a democracy to have our elected representatives promise us one thing and then have it do the exact opposite of what they promised. Whatever you support in immigration, it doesn't work.

00:49:37 Speaker_03
And so as we think about the future of immigration, solving it is going to be incredibly difficult. We continue to need immigration on some level for a variety of reasons.

00:49:47 Speaker_03
But I think we're not going to get to a sustainable immigration system until Washington reckons with the past failure to produce what it promised the American people it was going to produce.

00:50:01 Speaker_04
Well, David, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Much of this episode was drawn from David's new book, entitled, Ours Was the Shining Future, The Story of the American Dream. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

00:50:37 Speaker_04
The United States is warning that North Korean soldiers are now poised to participate in an assault on Ukrainian troops operating in Russia's western region.

00:50:50 Speaker_04
Such an assault would demonstrate that as the United States has feared for weeks, North Korea has officially become a combatant in the war between Russia and Ukraine.

00:51:02 Speaker_04
The United States now estimates that North Korea has sent 10,000 troops to Russia in a major expansion of the war. Today's episode was produced by Rikki Nowetzki, Will Reed, Stella Tan, and Alex Stern.

00:51:22 Speaker_04
It was edited by Lisa Chao, fact-checked by Will Peichel, contains original music by Dan Powell, Mary Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Yamisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley and Chris Wood.

00:51:37 Speaker_04
Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Landferk of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.