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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. If you were listening in the last hour, you've been hearing the BBC's coverage of the insurrection attempt in Russia. I will add for now that Donald Trump seems to have found an insurrection he doesn't support. He posted a short comment over the weekend in support of Putin that said to Americans, "Be careful what you wish for. The next one in may be far worse," meaning whoever succeeds Putin may be worse. He didn't say worse for whom. Trump always finds a way to have Putin's back, doesn't he?

During our second hour this morning, we will have New Yorker Magazine editor David Remnick, who was also a Russia and Putin watcher, in case you didn't know. He's written books on the subject. David Remnick will follow however this still fluid situation might change this morning, and we'll talk about the larger implications of this weekend's events.

Most striking to me is the analysis that Ukraine can now start using the grievances that the rebelling Russian forces have articulated in this revolt to try to go message all the Russian soldiers still in Ukraine, to try to demoralize them, and get them to question whether the mission is worth the risk to their lives, and the way they've been treated, and whether Putin has the power anymore to punish them if they refuse in large numbers to fight.

I'm wondering if Putin really is weaker, so many of the analysts are saying, and we'll get David Remnick take. Does it give any new hope for the freedom of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich or other Americans being held as hostages under phony criminal pretenses by Putin's regime? And does it make it any less likely that Putin will successfully get a lot of disinformation into the social media ecosystem during next year's presidential campaign when he will presumably want to support a Republican nominee over Biden? Questions we will bring up next hour.

Meanwhile, this country in our area have their own issues. The City of New York announced last week that the shelter population is about to reach an unprecedented 100,000 people. It's now at 98,000 plus for the first time they say and half of them, according to the city's data, 49,000 are recently arrived asylum seekers. Before the pandemic, there weren't even a total of 49,000 people in the shelter system. Now there are that many who've come in the last two years, and with the other drivers of homelessness in the city, heading for 100,000 for the first time ever in the shelter system, new statistics from the city released near the end of last week. Mayor Eric Adams.

Mayor Eric Adams: This is one of the largest humanitarian crises that this city has ever experienced. It will impact every service in the city. Why isn't every elected official in Washington D.C. asking the national government, “Why are you doing this to New York?” The national government has turned its back on New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Adams in April. He continues to send versions of that same plea today. That quote from Mayor Adams happens to open a new article in Foreign Affairs Magazine that is the most comprehensive explanation of why this is happening, and things that can be done about it that I've come across anywhere. It's 35 pages long. I learned so much from reading it this weekend. It's no surprise that it's from Julia Preston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered national immigration issues for The New York Times for 10 years, and is now with The Marshall Project, which reports on the justice system.

The article is called The Real Origins of the Border Crisis: How a Broken Asylum System Warped American Immigration. Again, it's in Foreign Affairs Magazine. Julia, thanks for taking this deep dive in foreign affairs and welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Preston: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me back and inviting me. It's a pleasure to speak with you again.

Brian Lehrer: I could pick almost any line from this article to do the whole segment on, so I'll try to pick areas for you explain wisely in the time that we have. You remind us that the US asylum system was created nearly 50 years ago. What kind of an asylum system did they make and why then?

Julia Preston: Well, the asylum system has its origins in the American Refugee Act, and that in turn stems from the Refugee Convention, which the world adopted after World War II. The United States waited until 1980 to create its own refugee law. In part, at that time, the concern was the failure of the United States to take in the Jews who were fleeing from the Holocaust. The asylum system has its origins in an idea of refugee resettlement, but asylum itself was actually created to handle what at that time were considered to be unusual rare circumstances where someone would actually come to the border, the southwest border, for example, and ask for asylum without going through all the procedures of the refugee system. This asylum system was really created to handle small numbers of people on a case-by-case basis.

Brian Lehrer: You write that in the last decade, the asylum system has turned into something it was never meant to be. What has it turned into?

Julia Preston: Well, it has become a system for processing mass immigration across the Southwest border. This was never part of the design. The way the asylum system is set up is it has a very broad opening at the border. If you are a person who has a fear of returning to their home country, and you step on American soil anywhere along the border, even in between a port of entry, that is to say, in between a formal customs border station, you can approach a border patrol officer, and say that you're afraid to go home, and you trigger the beginning of an asylum process.

From there, the process is actually extremely narrow, and to win an asylum case, you have to prove that you meet the standards in the Refugee Convention, which are quite precise and rather narrow, and mostly aimed at people who are fleeing the kind of religious and political persecution that existed in the wake of World War II. Those are not the conditions that most asylum seekers are fleeing today.

Brian Lehrer: How long does it take for asylum seekers to have their claims decided by the courts?

Julia Preston: Well, because you have this situation where you have a wide opening and a very narrow funnel, we have these huge backlogs in the immigration courts. It's worth making that point that a distinctive feature of this system is that an asylum seeker who comes across the border has to win their claim in an immigration court. This is actually an adversarial process where you have a government prosecutor who is going to attempt to prove that that person does not deserve asylum, or in most cases, the role of the prosecutor is to make that counterargument. You have an immigration judge.

At this point, we have more than 800,000, I think it's approaching a million asylum cases in the backlog and it's taking an average of more than four years to get a claim decided. In the best of circumstances, for example, in New York, which is a very asylum-friendly court, one in three of those cases is succeeding. The median for success in asylum claims nationwide is 1 case in 10. We're putting people into a system where they have to make an argument that really they're not-- without an attorney, it's very difficult to succeed in this system and then--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Sorry.

Julia Preston: No, you go ahead. We can talk all day about this.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the stats that you just laid out there, it takes four years on average for an asylum claim to work through the system, and then 90% of those, once they do get adjudicated by a judge, are rejected because they don't actually meet the criteria of asylum under the law. What happens to those 90% of the people? Are they in fact deported?

Julia Preston: It's very unclear and I believe that the answer to that question is no, they're not. There isn't really an established process for the deportation of people whose claims fail in immigration court. In fact, many judges will not issue- -a final order of removal, which is the final arrest warrant, and will just allow the case to fall off the docket but not lead to a deportation. Really, we have an unknown number of cases of families and asylum seekers who are now in the country in this perpetual legal limbo.

Some people would argue that those folks are gaming the system, but I think a better way to think about that is that they tried to do everything that the system asked them to do, but they didn't have the resources to do it. To my mind, that is the definition of a failing system when you put people into it, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they fail, and then you have no response for what to do after that point. This is a system that is, as I say in my article, failing at every step of the way. It doesn't create order at the border. It doesn’t give, and this is very important, it does not give timely protection to people who do actually need it.

There are many people coming from Venezuela, from Central America who their lives have been threatened, their children have been threatened with gang recruitment, sexual violence. There are people, very many deserving people, but they're not getting the protection that they need either. This system is really failing all along the way and now the failures have landed in New York City in a very dramatic way.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we welcome your questions or maybe personal asylum-seeking stories for Marshall Project immigration reporter Julia Preston, her detailed article in Foreign Affairs magazine called The Real Origins of the Migrant Crisis. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call us or text us at that phone number or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Julia, how much do you think work permits, the ability to work legally in this country would reduce the number of recently arrived living in homeless shelters, because for people who have tuned in in the last 10 minutes, we started with the stat that Mayor Adams released last week, that the New York City asylum system-- I should say homeless shelter system is going to hit 100,000 people soon for the first time ever. It has just reached 98,000 people for the first time ever and half of them are relatively newly arrived asylum seekers from Latin America and the Caribbean.

One of the things that the mayor is asking Washington for is for fast work authorization for the asylum seekers. You say in your article permits only become available after a year. How much do you think work permits, the ability to work legally in this country would reduce the number of the recently arrived, at least living in homeless shelters?

Julia Preston: Oh, I think it would make a dramatic difference. This is a group of people-- all of these asylum seekers, whatever the particular situation that caused them to flee, whether or not it meets a definition of persecution as established under American law, I would say virtually all of these asylum seekers, whether or not they're in families or coming as single adults, they want two things. They want to be safe and they want to work. This is a population that is just incredibly eager to work. Many of them have family members that they left behind in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, in Cuba and they really are very focused on getting to work to support themselves and their families so this would make a huge difference.

This is the fourth, in my view, failure of the asylum system. There was a logic 20 years ago or-- it was a number of years ago when the period that you had to wait in your asylum process to get a work permit was extended out to 150 days before you could apply for a work permit and a minimum of another 30 days before you could actually receive it. This is dated from the date when you present your asylum application. The migrants who have arrived in New York, by and large, are completely bewildered by this whole system.

A lot of them know that there's a one-year deadline to file an asylum claim and a lot of them are eager to meet that but they really have very little information about how to do that. In most cases, if you don't have an attorney when you make that original presentation of your claim, very likely, your possibilities of succeeding going forward are even less than they would be. You have a one-year deadline to file your claim. Once your claim is filed, then you have to wait 150 days before you can apply for your work authorization and then you are waiting a minimum of 30 days after that so it's a total of six months minimum before you can get work authorization.

In the current situation, we have backlogs in every area. Every bureaucracy that is associated with this system is totally backlogged. People are waiting another year, more than a year after the year when they presented their asylum claim. Brian, this is crazy. New York State has dairy farms, it has construction projects, it has demand for the labor of these migrants and they are eager to work. Yet this system is standing in the middle of them being able to work legally and they're basically just becoming more undocumented workers.

Brian Lehrer: Biden can't snap his fingers and say, “Okay, for these people who've walked across the border, registered with the asylum authorities and are now here waiting maybe four years for a court date they can at least work right away. We'll give them authorization papers to work.” Can he do that unilaterally?

Julia Preston: I think he could do something unilaterally, but it has to be probably what they call a rule change. There's been so much litigation in the whole immigration system in recent years about how fast you can change rules, what you have to do to change the rules. He could try to do that, but if he doesn't do it in the right way, then the Republicans or some opposition politicians could come in and say, “We don't like the way you changed this rule,” and it could be challenged in the court and get hung up.

I think the Department of Homeland Security is looking at what they can do to make this happen, but the possibility that Biden could just snap his fingers, I don't see that. I don't think that exists.

Brian Lehrer: Joshua in Brentwood, you're on WNYC with immigration reporter Julia Preston, who wrote the article in Foreign Affairs Magazine called The Real Origins of the Migrant Crisis. Hi, Joshua.

Joshua: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm from Brentwood, New York, a high immigrant community on Long Island. People don't think of Long Island like that but Brentwood is. My question is I know there's some I guess controversy on the way the governors have been shipping immigrants to other states and that may be considered a federal crime. Is there a way these immigrants that are being shipped, since they are witnesses of a crime or victims of a crime, can they obtain citizenship this way as a way to ease on that burden that you were speaking of?

Julia Preston: If the question is can they obtain citizenship? We are very, very far from citizenship in any of this process that is-- and when we're talking about asylum seekers.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, let me jump in just for a second. I think Joshua, you're citing a point of immigration law that I'm not familiar with, honestly, that says if somebody is an immigrant here, but not a citizen, and witnesses a crime and reports the crime, then they can be fast-tracked for citizenship. The crime you say many of them can report is being shipped against their will, like trafficked by Governor Abbott in Texas to New York or Martha's Vineyard or wherever, right?

Joshua: Correct. A lot of them are coming to Brentwood too but yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. To Brentwood, which-- you're right. I know that part of Long Island has a lot of Central American immigrants. Julia, first that has to be established as a crime, right? The governors say they're not busing anybody against their will. It's only migrants who actually want to go to New York or go to Massachusetts. First, that would have to be established as a crime. Are there lawsuits claiming that it is? Do you know that part of the story?

Julia Preston: Well, I would make a distinction here between what the Texas governor,- -Governor Abbott has been doing and what Governor DeSantis of Florida has been doing. In the case of Governor Abbott, he has been using Texas taxpayer money to charter buses and send a lot of these buses to New York. He claims that all of these folks have signed waivers saying that they do want to come to New York. To be honest with you Brian, before the governor started paying for these bus trips, the migrants had to pay for themselves.

Most of the migrants who are coming across the border do not want to stay in the borderlands. Some do, some go to Houston or San Antonio, but lots of them don't want to stay there. They want to come to other cities in the United States. The offense if you want, the tension, the friction with what Governor Abbott is doing is that he refuses to coordinate with the City of New York. He's just sending the migrants. They're just arriving. Mayor Adams is furious about this because they don't when these migrants are going to turn up.

What Governor DeSantis did was something different and goes to the point of the caller I think, which is he chartered a bus and then in two cases, airplanes. He put folks on those airplanes without explaining to them really honestly where they were going or what to expect when they arrived. That is in litigation, where there's one case in California, the other case is the famous case of Martha's Vineyard. I don't know where that litigation stands, but that's a very different practice.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting distinction between what Abbott is doing and DeSantis is doing. Let me use that part of the story to take a step further back in the human movement process. Because one of the most interesting parts of your article to me was when you described the changing roles of the human smugglers south of the border, from once upon a time being allies of the Mexicans seeking to come here who would hire them to help cross, to now being oppressors of many migrants and extorting them and worse. Can you describe that change?

Julia Preston: Yes, because for many years, most of the migrants who were coming across the border were Mexican laborers. Mexico has this century-old history of sending migrants legally or illegally across the border to work in the United States. In the context of Mexican migration, the smugglers were basically service providers. They were helping undocumented migrants get across the border and get to their destination in the United States.

What happened when you started to see the Central Americans coming, those were actually legitimate asylum seekers. Those were people who were really fleeing from the situation of gang violence and the breakdown of law and order in their home countries, and you had a lot of families coming. They were coming to Texas. I think we need to focus on what the border is like in Texas. It's a river, the Rio Grande River for 1,200 miles, and so what does that do to the smuggler?

It creates a low-risk situation. All the smuggler has to do is be at the border and in some fashion on a raft or somehow get these migrants across the river, to wade across the river, float across the river and reach the border patrol, ask for asylum, there's no risk to the smuggler at all. The smuggler never has to come into the United States. At the time when that demographic transition was happening, there was also a huge turf war, very violent, bloody turf war taking place among the narcotics cartels along the border. They realized that this was a highly lucrative situation where they could not help the migrants but extort the migrants.

Essentially, the smugglers have become gatekeepers and imposing extortion in very violent fashion all along the border. Now that you have also the introduction of social media, the smugglers have been very successful at controlling the messaging, telling migrants, "Yes, you can get in, yes, you can get in," even when the Biden administration is trying to say, "No, you can't get in." It's become also an information battle between the administration and the smuggling organizations.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to pick it up on that point and expand on it. That was so interesting that the smugglers are in an information war with the Biden administration on what people can expect if they try to cross. We will continue with Julia Preston's take on whether President Biden's latest revisions of his border policies are working and why early returns seem to show they are both working and not working. We'll take more of your calls stay with us.

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Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas: I want to be very clear, our borders are not open. People who cross our border unlawfully and without a legal basis to remain will be promptly processed and removed.

Brian Lehrer: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last month telling people in Latin America and the Caribbean the border is not open. Are people in those countries hearing him? Are their situation is too desperate to even care? They'll take their best shot anyway. Or do they believe the smugglers, in what we talked about before the break, more than they believe Mayorkas or Biden? We continue now with Marshall Project immigration reporter Julia Preston, her detailed article in Foreign Affairs Magazine called The Real Origins of the Migrant Crisis, 212-433-WNYC is our phone number. Let's go right to a phone call. PJ in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, PJ.

PJ: Yes, good morning, Brian, and good morning to your guest. The question to your guest is the international law says that you should apply for asylum in the first country where you land. All these immigrant coming, they crossed several countries and the last country that crossed before the US is, oh God--

Julia Preston: Mexico.

PJ: Basically--

Brian Lehrer: Well, certainly they have to go through Mexico. It depends where they're starting, what the first country they come to is, but we hear your point. Julia is that international law?

Julia Preston: Well, it is not international law, but it is a central piece. The idea that you have to apply for asylum in a transit country on your way to the United States is a centerpiece of the new rule that the Biden administration has put in place. This is quite similar actually to something that President Trump attempted. His attempt was struck down in the courts. Now Biden has come back with a similar proposal, but it has important differences.

The new rule is that if you come to the border between a port of entry, that is between a border station and you don't have lawful documents for entering the United States, you have to show one of two things. You either have to show that you applied for and were denied asylum in a country that you passed through on the way to the United States, that goes to the question of your caller, or you can show that you made an appointment at a port of entry using this mobile app. This surprising innovation that the administration has come up with is the idea of using a mobile app, it's called CBP One. You make an appointment at a port of entry to be processed by CBP, by Customs and Border Protection.

If you can't show either of those two things that you were denied asylum on the way or that you have an appointment for formal processing, then you are denied asylum. You will be quickly processed and now under the new rule, you will be subject to formal deportation, which means that you cannot return to the United States lawfully for five years minimum and in most cases, it's a 10-year ban. Since May, the Biden administration has been deporting a lot of people using this rule. At the same time, people are coming in using this app. It's up to now a thousand appointments a day across the border, which is not a lot, but it is something. It is a significant opening in the border that did not exist before.

Brian Lehrer: Some of our listeners may be hearing what you just said and thinking to themselves, “Wait, you have to apply through an app? Aren't we talking in many cases about peasants who have just hiked hundreds or thousands of miles through jungles and whatever, they have apps?”

Julia Preston: Again, these are the conditions of modern migration, which is that people leave behind everything that they own except a change of clothes, their kids, if they're coming with their kids, and their mobile phone. It is a fundamental tool of migration now. A surprising number of people who are at the border, who've arrived at the border and are seeking entry to claim asylum do have mobile phones, but there's also a substantial number of people who do not have mobile phones and are tremendously disadvantaged in this system.

At the same time, though, it's worth noting that for four nationalities that I talk about in my piece, this is we're talking about Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the administration has opened up this really very substantial new program for legal entry. There are 30,000 places per month for nationals from those four countries if they apply from home. They don't come to the border. They apply from home and they have a financial sponsor in the United States. The combination of all these things, at least in the short term, has caused a significant drop in the number of people who are attempting to cross the border unlawfully without papers.

Brian Lehrer: You mean the Biden system is working?

Julia Preston: Is working is a big term. What I will say is that there has been a surprisingly dramatic drop in the number of people who are attempting to come to the border, cross unlawfully, and request asylum from the border patrol. That number has dropped quite significantly in the six weeks since this new rule took effect. Whether that will be a lasting situation remains to be seen but I do think that this combination of opening up significant legal portals, significant legal avenues for people to come, plus this very tough situation in terms of deporting people who come between the ports of entry, it does have the possibility of lowering the numbers of unlawful border crossers who come in without any schedule and ask for asylum. Those numbers could well go down.

The issue there is how many people who have legitimate asylum claims, who really are fleeing some kind of mortal danger, are getting caught up in that new enforcement regime and being rejected?

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, just based on the way that they apply. Before we go to our next caller, your article is called The Real Origins of the Migrant Crisis. I don't use the word crisis generally to describe the US part of the situation. I tend to think that's a word that's placed upon it by the right who want to demonize the migrants and make the situation for Americans sound worse than it is. You report an estimate of 20 million people in the Western Hemisphere being displaced from their homes. That's the crisis, right? The crisis is for them, not whatever relatively minor effects the US is experiencing. Or do you think that's overstating?

Julia Preston: Well, I guess I do think that the situation of disorder and disarray at the Southwest border because of the holdover policies from the Trump administration, the failure of the asylum system, I do think it's a little bit of a crisis. I do think there has been a tendency of some of the people in the advocacy community to a little bit underestimate how dangerous and how high-pressure this is. We don't do any service to migrants who do reach the border, leaving them on the Mexican side in these overcrowded shelters. We saw what happened in Ciudad Juarez with that just horrifying fire.

There is a level of disarray and disorder at the border that has been caused by these failings of the asylum system that I really do think we need to address it. We need to focus on it, understand what's happening. This needs to be fixed. The good news is, if you read my article, there are already people at the border, and that includes the border patrol, the authorities, as well as the humanitarian groups, the refugee resettlement organizations, there are people there who are poised to begin to bringing these changes even without action by Congress.

If you could just get faster decision-making for closer to the border so that people who have legitimate asylum claims could then go forward in the system, and the system would have some way of mitigating and rechanneling the people who don't have those winnable claims and perhaps they can go into a labor system or some other process, but we just need to take the pressure off the asylum system. It really is creating a situation of disarray and danger at the border.

Brian Lehrer: Nick in Cliffside Park, you're on WNYC with Julia Preston. Hi, Nick.

Nick: Hi. Thank you Julia for your article which sheds a lot of light on the issue. However, I would say that there's a need for foreign affairs to dedicate a whole issue to the genuine actual origins of this problem crisis because it's a result of hundreds of years of the consequences of colonialism, corruption, dictatorships, and a lot of the economic exploitation that originated from the US and US corporations.

In other words, this is a set of issues and problems that took hundreds of years to come to fruition. It's going to take at least another, if America dedicated its whole foreign policy and economic power to solving this problem really, I think we could probably do it maybe within 20 to 50 years. It would take making democracy the primary aim of our foreign policy and justice and getting rid of the gangs and the criminal operations.

It goes beyond South and Central America because we have our own problems in those areas here. If we could transform South and Central America into prosperous havens for democracy, justice, freedom, et cetera, economically, politically, human rights, they wouldn't want to come here. They'd have their own lives and their own places. They don't want to come here. Then once they get here, we have our own hundreds of thousands of them are employed by people who benefit from them being illegal. We could change those policies and find ways for them to work legally here, because we have a surge of people to do that, to do the kind of work they do anyway.

Brian Lehrer: Anyway, Nick, thank you, sir.

Nick: I'm sure you get the gist of what I'm saying.

Brian Lehrer: Yes and thank you for some deep thinking behind that question, Julia.

Julia Preston: I would not actually find very much to dispute in his analysis but I would be concerned about the timeline, which is I think that we need action on this in the near term. It's something that can be done. There are actions that Biden can take to reorganize the asylum process at the border. Also, interestingly, one of the things that I think is a new feature in this, I know that the way that Mayor Adams has spoken about this has been very controversial, but his voice has been of a new and surprising and quite articulate voice bringing forward a new aspect of this debate, which is the advocacy of the mayors, New York, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, the local community coming forward and saying, “This system is not working for us. We need work authorization. We need the federal government to step in and give us more funding for this.”

This is a fair request. The federal government does do this in refugee resettlement. The federal government supports refugee resettlement. Now we have these folks that have come in through another system and it's fair, I think and important that Mayor Adams is articulating a new constituency out there to advocate for faster work authorization, more federal involvement in asylum seeker resettlement, more federal involvement to send asylum seekers to different places around the country where people actually need their labor and are ready to welcome them so that you don't have a situation like New York City where the systems become overwhelmed and then that creates tensions even with other immigrant communities and people who've been here for a longer period of time.

Brian Lehrer: Right. We have calls that we're not going to have time to get to but I want to acknowledge them from people saying, "I'm an immigrant. I've been here for years waiting to go through citizenship. Others like me are going through the normal channels. Now these people are here and getting to jump the line in some respect." Another caller saying, "We already have so many homeless people who've already lived here and so it's putting even more pressure on the housing crisis that is a crisis already preexisting in the New York area." Those local things are real and are being articulated.

Let me close by following up on the last caller's specific point about improving the conditions in the countries that are in crisis and therefore so many people are fleeing there. He talked about long-term, maybe 25 to 50-year solution of improving democracy there, improving safety there. You said we also have to do something right away and so they aren't mutually exclusive. We can have short-term ways to address the sending countries and longer-term ways, but what about the US response in the short term? Vice President Harris, I believe is the one who's been tasked with coordinating US efforts to help with that. What's she doing and to what extent is it even doable by the United States in the short term?

Julia Preston: That's a very good question. I think it depends on the country. I think Vice President Harris has actually been quite effective in terms of the work that she did in Central America, in El Salvador, in Honduras, in Guatemala, attracting private investment, channeling investment by the federal government, foreign investment and setting up programs that create alternatives to gangs and employment at the local level and more safety and better governance in those countries. Brian, what is our solution to mitigate the ascending conditions in Cuba? We've been at a stalemate [crosstalk] with Cuba ever since the revolution.

Brian Lehrer: We can't affect Cuba very much.

Julia Preston: Right. Or Venezuela. What are we to do? What is our short-term option in Venezuela? There are more than 8 million Venezuelans who fled that epic misgovernment. The hospitals ran out of medicines. People can't feed their kids. You're not mitigating the underlying causes in Venezuela in any kind of short-term way. That's a very difficult political problem.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Julia Preston: No, I was just going to say, or Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the case where--

Brian Lehrer: Another left-wing dictatorship.

Julia Preston: Yes. It didn't start out that way but now to the dismay of many Nicaraguans--

Brian Lehrer: Right now, Ortega.

Julia Preston: Yes, so how can we change the sending conditions there? Short of--

Brian Lehrer: You would think as just an addendum that the Republican Party would be the ones welcoming so many migrants from Venezuela, from Cuba, from Nicaragua. These are the future Republicans of America if you look at the history of people fleeing left-wing dictatorships, and once they get citizenship, who they tend to vote for, but obviously that's not the way it's playing out politically in this country right now and that's another segment.

We will leave it at that with Julia Preston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered national immigration issues for the New York Times for 10 years and now is with The Marshall Project, which reports on the justice system. The article is called The Real Origins of the Border Crisis, How a Broken Asylum System Warped American Immigration. Julia, thank you so much.

Julia Preston: Thank you for inviting me, Brian. It's always a pleasure to speak with you.

 

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