Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Hey, guess who was working the weekend shift? The United States Senate. Did you hear? I guess they did not see their shadows on Friday, so they did not go back into hiding for six more weeks of winter, six more weeks of negotiation on a bill that seemed like it would never come on immigration.

They actually finalized the long awaited bipartisan border deal. They actually finished it and announced it Sunday afternoon. Maybe they want it to be done on time to watch SZA sing Kill Bill at the Grammys. Maybe not. Well, maybe Tracy Chapman. Maybe not. Okay, Joni Mitchell. Nothing wrong with that.

Did they even stay up late enough to see her? Did they even know that both sides now is not a song about both sides of the aisle or criticizing both sidesism? Maybe. Anyway, the bill is out. As described on Politico, it would tighten the standard for migrants to receive asylum, automatically shut down the southern border to illegal crossings if migrant encounters hit certain daily benchmarks and send billions of dollars to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan as well as the border.

Politico says, "In addition to mandating a border shutdown at 5,000 daily encounters," Republicans say that's too much, "the bill would allow the President to invoke that authority at 4,000 per day." The bill may or may not have enough votes to pass in the Senate with the 60 votes required to stop a filibuster. Here's the main Republican negotiator, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, urging his GOP colleagues to vote yes.

Senator James Lankford: If we have a crisis on our southern border, and we do have a crisis on our southern border, that is a very real national security problem. We should address that and to do what we can to be able to solve that problem, not just hope it gets better, or hope that an election solves an issue.

Brian: An election solves an issue. Remember, Donald Trump is already lobbying against the deal. Senator James Lankford, Republican from Oklahoma there. We have the perfect guest for this moment, I think, to describe the deal further and to put it in the bigger context of life and politics in the United States and Central America as they intersect around the border. It's New Yorker Magazine staff writer, Jonathan Blitzer, who has a new book called Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. Jonathan, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Blitzer: Thanks for having me.

Brian: We'll get to the details of the bipartisan Senate deal and what good or bad effects it might have on asylum seekers or on people here, but would it be right to say, your backstory of how we got to this crisis point begins with the Reagan administration in the 1980s?

Jonathan: That's right. In fact, it begins even slightly before then, which is in 1980, with the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, which was the first time in American history that the government codified refugee and asylum law in an American statute.

Brian: That would have been under President Carter?

Jonathan: Exactly. Almost immediately, the Reagan administration takes office, and then we see the rubber meet the road on this particular piece of legislation. Of course, it's happening at the height of the Cold War, and so there's a collision of this human rights, immigration law ethos as embodied in the act and the geopolitical reality of the US prosecuting this Cold War in the region.

Brian: Now, Reagan's big scandal in office was Iran-Contra, which included selling weapons to Iran, US-Iran relations, obviously still a conflict today, we'll talk about that later in the show, but selling arms to Iran, why? To use the money to fund a rebel group in Nicaragua, Central America, that Congress refused to fund. That was such an egregious thumbing of Reagan's nose in democracy's face.

He wanted to fight communism that way by funding the Contra rebels. Congress was opposed to arming an insurgent group and keeping the Cold War going in that hot war way, and Reagan found a way to fund them anyway, by of all things, also arming our arch enemies, Iran, as their leaders chanted, "Death to America."

Little bit of 1980s history there. How did that whole Contra thing turn out? Did it start a chain reaction that we're living with the results of today at the border?

Jonathan: Well, it was part and parcel of the US government's approach to the whole region, which was above all other things to contain communism or the spread of leftism. The US government was willing to make all sorts of unsavory alliances, and to do all sorts of counterproductive things to try to set that broader ideological mission in motion. You saw what was happening in Nicaragua.

That was obviously a political liability for the president uncharacteristically because, at the same time, the US government was also supporting a repressive military government in El Salvador and in Guatemala. On that issue, there was a lot less national controversy. For the most part, Reagan was pretty successful in using that issue politically to shore up his support both on a foreign policy level, on a domestic level.

What those civil wars that the US had a hand in in the region started to do was it started to create a new global population of refugee seeking asylum in the US and fleeing violence in the region. You have this circular situation where the US gets involved in the region because it's concerned about the spread of communism, but in the process, through its foreign policy, and of course, simultaneously through its immigration policy at home, it's creating a new population of migrants who then increasingly over the years become really woven into the fabric of American life.

Brian: Your book tells us how at least 40 years of American presidents of both parties got us to this point. Here's the clip of President Obama in 2012. You write about Obama in the book as he announced the DACA program, which, as many of our listeners know, allowed protection from deportation for young people who had been brought here illegally by their parents as children, became of age as Americans.

He made sure to couple the policy with ways he was getting tough at the border, and that Congress was not coming up with policies of its own. Here's Obama in 2012.

President Obama: In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we've tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places. We prioritized border security, putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history. Today, there are fewer illegal crossings than at any time in the past 40 years.

We focused and used discretion about whom to prosecute, focusing on criminals who endanger our communities, rather than students who are earning their education. Today, deportation of criminals is up 80%. We've improved on that discretion carefully and thoughtfully.

Brian: President Obama in 2012. Jonathan, you write about Obama in your book, and how he tried, I think we heard an example of it in the clip, to give Republicans enough of what they wanted to allow a path for law-abiding undocumented people, and certainly that generation brought up as Americans from childhood in the DACA policy. What's the heart of the Obama story as you see it in this context?

Jonathan: There are two ways to my mind to understand that Obama moment in the broader sweep of the history. The first is that, in 2014, you basically have the major collision of two big events. First is just the politics. In 2013, exactly as you heard President Obama describe, there was this steady push toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Quite significantly, in the summer of 2013, there was a bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate. It later died in the House. One of the reasons it did was because it collided with this moment at the southern border, where there was seemingly overnight tens of thousands of unaccompanied children and families from Central America arriving to seek asylum.

There was already a contingent of Republicans in Congress who opposed the idea of comprehensive immigration reform. They were already dragging their feet in the House, but they were looking for a pretext to finally sabotage that bill. With this sudden drama at the southern border, they had exactly the pretext they needed. 2014 to me is a major watershed moment in understanding this issue because the politics and the policy converge and explode.

The second thing that's significant in understanding this moment in history is there's an inflection point in 2014, around the period that you're describing, DACA 2012, 2013, 2014, because for many years, the democratic outlook on how to handle immigration was to address the large population of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Estimates had them somewhere around 11 million.

A big part of the thinking on the Democratic side was, "We need to do what it takes to get comprehensive reform across the finish line to provide relief to this population that's been living without papers in the United States for many years, in some cases decades." At a certain point, the bottom falls out on that agenda because of Republican opposition in Congress.

That really leaves the Democrats in a tailspin because all of this effort over the years, steady and systematic toward that end, suddenly gets redirected. In 2014, there's a new problem, which is people are arriving at the southern border, the center of gravity shifts, and there's really now a human and policy imperative to address these needs at the southern border.

That's a whole new category of policy issue. Democrats were unfamiliar with dealing with that particular complex operational challenge. Republicans started to game this issue out even more politically and so, in many ways, that's where we remain right now.

Brian: What really happened under Trump? His rhetoric, as we all know, is very anti-immigrant. He played that Republican intransigence on that kind of deal you were just describing. That goes all the way back, not just to Obama, but you were saying multiple Democratic presidents ,so that obviously means under President Clinton. They were trying to do the same thing, more border security that the Republicans wanted in exchange for a path to citizenship for law-abiding undocumented people who are already here.

There was, in each generation, a degree of Republican buy-in. John McCain was really not campaigning on any different kind of immigration policy than Obama was in 2008. Correct me if you think that's wrong. As I recall history, they both supported that kind of comprehensive immigration reform.

Then it came close in 2013, 2014, as you were describing, with another bipartisan push, but the hard-line Republicans were against it. Then Trump runs for president in 2016 and taps into that and went on that passion. At least in terms of Trump's victory, do you see that story the way I just laid it out?

Jonathan: Yes, exactly, and one other way of understanding it is essentially to see far-right Republicans during the years you described, during the years of George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama. The fringe members of the Republican Party during those years essentially played the role of spoiler, anytime there was a big piece of legislation that came into Congress.

Brian: I'm glad you mentioned George W. Bush because, in fairness, he wanted that too. He had been governor of Texas. He had a fairly enlightened, if that's the right word, view or at least willing to compromise complex view of immigration, and he got stymied by his own party even as president.

Jonathan: Yes, there was a lot of overlap between Moderate Democrats and somewhat Moderate Republicans on this issue. The people who were able to sabotage these deals in congress really gained, not just in prominence, but in influence around the time that Donald Trump arrives on the scene.

I'm thinking about the likes of Jeff Sessions in the Senate, who was notorious all the way through for being in the wilderness on these issues, for being seen as fringe and kooky and really quite out there, but who finally saw in Trump an opportunity to weaponize this issue and Trump did it on a scale and with a level of successfulness, honestly, on the campaign trail that no one had ever really demonstrated before.

What you start to see during the Trump years is a real inversion of what, in the past, was a grudging consensus about the need for there to be, say, more legal immigration or eventually some solution at the border and beyond.

Trump pretty systematically tried to sabotage, not just the legal immigration system, but also to exploit flaws that needed to be dealt with and that could have been dealt with in the asylum system, in the refugee program, and really use those weaknesses to run the systems into the ground. We've basically been dealing with the wreckage ever since.

Brian: I guess that's a partial answer to the next question I was going to ask you because Trump's rhetoric, as we all know, has been very anti-immigrant, build that wall, and they're bringing crime and drugs, all of that. There was a family separation policy that drew such a human outcry and a backlash while he was president, but what's the actual Trump administration border legacy?

Jonathan: I'm glad you ask it like that because I think there's this assumption right now when you look at how Republicans perform in polls on issues related to the border and immigration. There's this widespread misimpression that Republicans have more of a commitment to order at the border, and I do not think that that's the legacy that Donald Trump can campaign on.

You mentioned the family separation crisis from the summer of 2018. The idea of that, of course, was to address a population that had posed real operational challenges to American border authorities, which was families coming to the US seeking asylum. There are very strict legal restrictions on how the government can process and handle families because there were children that the US government owes particular deference to, and the Trump administration's approach was, okay, we're going to brutalize these families at the border as a way of deterring other families and persuading them not to come.

You obviously saw this horrific period, a real low in American history, and it was utterly counterproductive on top of it all. The next year in 2019, the number of people showing up at the southern border exploded, and so this idea that a tough border policy could somehow rewire pressures in the region or the wider world is a complete pipe dream, and it always has been. It's somehow metabolized in our politics this notion that the tougher you are, the more orderly you are, and that is really not the case.

Brian: Jonathan Blitzer is my guest if you're just joining us. New Yorker staff writer, who has a new book called Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. We're going through some of the important points in his book and in the context of today's news as a setup to the bipartisan border bill that came out of the Senate just yesterday afternoon, and we'll get to that.

Your book, tell us its big geopolitical story and all this history that we've been walking through throught four individual stories. I want to give you a chance to tell at least part of one. Maybe the story of Lucrecia Hernandez Mack, a doctor who is politically active in Guatemala, but really pick your one.

Jonathan: Oh, well, I'm delighted that you mentioned her. Lucrecia is an interesting case because she comes from a very distinguished family of activists in Guatemala. She's the only of the four characters who is not an immigrant. She figures in the book precisely for that reason. I wanted to show people just beyond the broader story of the US government and the wider region what the reality is like in some of these countries.

The role that the US is played in creating some of those conditions but also, what the Democratic fight has consisted of in these places to show the odds that a lot of these activists, policymakers, and eventual immigrants are up against.

The idea of the book was to find a few different characters. There are two from El Salvador. There's another from Honduras. The idea is to tell the story of a profound shift that we saw that basically took root over the last decade and is even beginning to shift again now, which was, in the past, the typical profile of someone who showed up at the southern border was that of a Mexican male crossing looking for work.

What began to change in the late 2010s and that really exploded in 2014, was that you suddenly had arriving on a massive scale families from Central America seeking asylum, and this post real operational and administrative challenges at the US border. The book is the story basically of how that moment in 2014, because of the way we tend to understand these dynamics in the US filtered through Washington politics, seemed like a complete surprise. It seemed like it came out of left field that suddenly all these people should show up at the border.

The idea of the lives of the characters who figure in this book is to show that this plot really began, in many ways, in 1980 and steadily advanced through the '80s while the US was involved in all of these Central American civil wars, because of the broader Cold War ideology that govern life in Washington.

Then in the 1990s, how American deportation policy, an immigration policy at home started to affect violence in the region, and how some of the violence in the streets of American cities started to spread and metastasize to the region, all of which contributed to the fact that, in 2014, people were fleeing exactly that when they showed up at the southern border.

Brian: Just one thing on that 1980s context that you just mentioned again, and we talked about before, if the US was supporting the fighters, either-- Well, let's say the fighters against the left-wing governments like in Nicaragua, or supporting the right-wing governments like in El Salvador and that contributed to where we are today.

Where does Venezuela fit in, which isn't technically in South America, but such a big source of the asylum seekers today? The biggest, I think that's a left-wing authority authoritarian state under Maduro, previously Hugo Chávez. Why do Republicans or right-wing policies take any of the blame if they do for asylum seekers from there?

Jonathan: Well, what we're seeing right now is even a new shift. My book is interested primarily in essentially the last 10 years of history. Over the last 10 years, the story has been the story of the US and Central America. Now, Central Americans continue to show up in huge numbers at the southern border seeking asylum.

To give you a sense of the world historical nature of this moment and the fact that in the hemisphere we're seeing mass migration on a scale that, honestly, we haven't witnessed since the Second World War, the numbers of Central Americans are even being eclipsed by other populations. This is where Venezuela fits in.

Over the last several years, millions of people have fled Venezuela. That has really changed the dynamics at the border. Some of the underlying structural problems remain the same. The US has never meaningfully updated its immigration system writ large and its asylum system at the border specifically. The profile of Venezuelans showing up at the southern border poses particular challenges to the asylum system as it existed in the past.

The asylum system was basically meant to deal with people who were suffering identity-based persecution. The terms of the statute are pretty specific and narrow in that regard. When you see people fleeing Venezuela right now, you see them fleeing for their lives for sure, but it doesn't map so plainly onto the definitions set forth in the statute from 1980.

The question has become, in Venezuela, what does the US do to address this flow of people in a humane and in a thoughtful way when the legal tools aren't really there? Adding even another layer of complexity to this is the fact that, until very recently, Venezuela would not accept American deportation flights.

This is something that's often overlooked in the conversation about US deportation policy. There's a huge level of diplomacy that goes into who and how the US can carry out these deportations.

Brian: Oh, because we can't just kick people out somebody has to take them back?

Jonathan: Exactly. Exactly. For the last couple of years, and this has started to change as a result of high-level diplomatic interventions, but you were seeing large numbers of people showing up at the southern border from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, three governments that, because of deeply strained diplomatic relations with the US, would not accept deportation flights.

The US had this very acute problem of, okay, what do we do with this population when it shows up at the southern border? Now, essentially, the way I assimilate the broader reality of what's happening in South America with the kind of existing situation that I read about in the book is essentially to see that what the Central American crisis brings into view is how US foreign policy and the wider world animate all of these dynamics we see at the border.

Because of just the utterly bruising politics in Washington, there have really been no meaningful efforts to reform the system. What happens is, when Congress doesn't pass laws to expand other forms of legal immigration, the pressure point shifts to the border.

People who don't have other options in terms of legally immigrating to the United States, say for jobs or to reunify with family members living here, is they increasingly try their luck at the southern border. That's what overwhelms the system, and that's what ends up really undercutting the asylum system, which was never designed to manage this kind of flow of people. The scale is just too vast.

Brian: Listeners, there's your 20-minute history class. Before we get to the breaking news, a reminder of some historical context from Jonathan Blitzer's new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. You all get an A in this history lesson because the only criteria is showing up, and there you are.

We'll continue in a minute with Jonathan's specific take on the bipartisan border compromise announced by the Senate yesterday and take your calls, so stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and if you're just joining us, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer is here with his new book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis and to give us his take on the bipartisan immigration deal coming out of the Senate announced just yesterday afternoon after months of closed-door negotiations.

Again, if you haven't heard the basics on this as described on Politico, I'm reading the Politico version, "it would tighten the standard for migrants to receive asylum, automatically shut down the southern border to illegal crossings if migrant encounters hit certain daily benchmarks and send billions of dollars to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan as well as the border."

Politico says, "In addition to mandating a border shutdown at 5,000 daily encounters, the bill would allow the President to invoke that authority at 4,000 per day." We know the Republicans say that's still way too many, and that's one of the reasons it might not pass, even though a bipartisan group of negotiators has come up with the bill.

Jonathan, not to get lost right away in some of those weeds, I assume you've been paying attention since you wrote this book. What's the headline from this deal according to you?

Jonathan: I see two headlines. The first is the conversation on immigration generally has shifted increasingly to the right over the last couple of years to the extent that, right now, the context for understanding what is being touted as a major cut at immigration reform is something that's relatively narrow. It's something that's much less ambitious than we would've seen in the past.

Democrats are much more willing than they've ever been in the past to go to the negotiating table without simultaneously trying to secure things like legalization for undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The first thing to take stock of is just how this conversation has increasingly drifted rightward over the years as a result of the acute political pressures that emerged from the southern border.

The second headline on the actual specifics of the bill is, I have to say, under the circumstances, given how conservative the cast of the conversation has become and given how quick the White House has been to try to flex its muscles and demonstrate that this shows their seriousness about cracking down to the southern border, I actually think it's much more of a mixed bag than I would've expected.

It really does seem to be a compromise of the different elements at the table. Just as you see harsher measures such as changes made to standards by which someone would be able to pursue asylum, or you see measures like allowing the president to declare a border emergency and "shut down the border," there are also built into some of that protections that I frankly would not have expected to see in this bill under the circumstances, where it seemed like the Republicans had such an upper hand going into the negotiations.

Brian: For example, from that Politico description that I read, it would tighten the standards for migrants to receive asylum. Is it clear to you how?

Jonathan: Yes. The first step when someone seeks asylum is to pass a preliminary screening known as the credible fear interview and, essentially, what this--

Brian: Like in the first contact with somebody from the government like near the border when they present themselves as an asylum seeker. Right?

Jonathan: Exactly, and the structural problem right now that exists in the system is the immigration courts are so badly backlogged that it takes years between when someone first passes that initial screening and when they eventually come before an immigration judge to have his or her case be adjudicated. Many instances--

Brian: The Republicans complain, yes, that's three or four years that they can be in the country and they don't want that number of people to just be in the country without being determined to be legitimate asylum seekers.

Jonathan: Yes. Quite honestly, I think there's a lot of bad faith on the Republican side in these negotiations in general. Actually, that's not such a crazy criticism of the situation. The system can't function. In a certain sense, it's not humane either for people to be forced to live in limbo like that for so many years. It really does incentivize people who don't have strong asylum claims to come pass the initial hearing, which has a very high grant rate, and then just stay in the United States.

There are people who have very legitimate claims that tend to get swept away in this broader dysfunction. It's not an unreasonable thing for legislators to want to solve. One of the things that this bill does is it basically makes it a little harder to pass that initial credible fear screening.

It also codifies things that were already a part of that screening and the government's handling of an immigration and an asylum case. For instance, when you're presenting an asylum claim on arriving at the southern border, you essentially have to prove that you're being persecuted and that there wasn't anywhere else in your home country that you could flee to to reduce the threat that you faced.

That was a kind of uncodified but widely acknowledged burden that an asylum seeker had to clear in order to pass these screenings. Now, that is codified in this bill. There's no question that these are significant changes to the asylum system, and we've not seen them ever before. That aspect of the bill is conservative. It's noteworthy, and it's something probably that the Democrats felt like, under the circumstances, they couldn't quite fend off given the political pressure around this issue.

Brian: Let me get this straight. Somebody who walks across the border and claims that they're seeking asylum, what they encounter is somebody from the border patrol, basically a cop. Not a judge in a court, not somebody with a deep knowledge of Guatemalan politics and who's in danger from there, say a cop. If that cop says, "No, your story doesn't sound credible," then the person gets turned back?

Jonathan: Well, technically, there is a core of government agent at a different DHS agency called USCIS, which is Immigration Citizenship Services. Those asylum officers are the ones who conduct these initial screenings, but an important part of this bill, and something that I think is quite positive about it is measures are taken to make sure that border patrol agents are not part of these screenings.

Even if the resources are spread thin at the border, the idea as codified in this bill is border patrol agents aren't qualified to conduct interviews that are this sensitive. The bill specifically mentions these asylum officers to conduct these interviews. What's more, it tries to create a broader staff of asylum officers to handle the whole of someone's asylum claim.

What happens right now, and what's gumming up the system in many ways, is you pass this credible fear interview that's conducted by an asylum officer. Then, eventually, your case makes its way to an immigration judge. Right now, because of the backlogs, that takes years, but it should be said that there's a lot of variance among immigration judges.

Depending on where you seek asylum, whether it's in Texas or Illinois, the rates at which asylum is granted vary pretty sharply. The system is really, as it exists right now, not only inefficient but quite unfair. One of the proposals that left-of-center policy experts have been making for quite a while is that there needs to be a dedicated core of asylum officers who handle the whole of someone's asylum claim.

They're, in theory, specifically trained in understanding the details of these claims, and what's more, they're able to move the claim more speedily than a judge who's backed up with all these other cases. That's also in this bill. That reflects something that democrats have wanted for some time that I do think is a meaningful fix to certain aspects of the technical problems of the border.

Brian: Listeners, now we're going to get to some of your comments or questions on the Senate immigration deal as announced yesterday or anything for Jonathan Blitzer from the New Yorker about the contents of his book we've been discussing, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, as some people already are, 212-433-9692.

The first question I'm going to give you from a listener comes in a text message, and they were responding to the title of your book, the subtitle, The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. The question is, what exactly is the crisis to be solved?

I'll note that immigration advocates say it's not a crisis. Crisis is an anti-immigrant propaganda word. It's just a lot of people who are a tiny percentage of the US population, like a lot of people came in the past to better themselves in this country.

Jonathan: It's funny. The word crisis has gotten co-opted right now by Republicans attacking the Democratic administration, but I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that the humanitarian crisis is real. The crisis at the core of my book is that there are people who have been fleeing for their lives from Central America because life in the region has become too dangerous, unsustainable, in many cases uninhabitable, all the result of a complex tangle that also involves the United States and its foreign policy.

People showing up at the southern border seeking protection, that's one of the humanitarian crisis that the book gets into. Then what happens next, and to me, a key part of understanding the broader crisis as the history of it plays out, is that there is a certain promise that existed in the US asylum system that I basically don't think was ever fully delivered.

Now, we've moved to a moment where the global migration phenomenon has evolved to such complex levels that asylum law on its own doesn't deal with that population and doesn't deal with some of those realities. Even the asylum system as it existed, say, in the 1980s, just to give an example. Because of US Cold War alliances in the region, the State Department intervened in asylum cases so that when you had Salvadorans or Guatemalans showing up at the southern border in the 1980s seeking asylum, those asylum claims were rejected.

They were rejected at rates that were so high that there was eventually a lawsuit. The government had to recognize and acknowledge that it had been systematically discriminating against Central Americans when they sought asylum. To my mind, these are different layers of the crisis.

Now, when we get to the present moment, the word is fraught, obviously, because the idea is that we have to crack down more. Anytime someone acknowledges that the situation of the border is hairy, that tends to lead to very, very conservative policy outcomes.

The way I understand this is to essentially say, right now, there are huge numbers of people seeking relief at the southern border. The relief they're seeking is real. Their needs are urgent. The US has an obligation legally, morally to respond. What makes the crisis particularly sinister is there are very concrete specific things the US government could do to reduce pressure at the border.

It wouldn't solve the broader dynamics of the region. It would not be a silver bullet. But for partisan reasons, for the usual cynical Washington reasons, one of the parties primarily is blocking even the basic commonsensical changes that need to be made at the border down to the level even of funding.

Yes, we see the crisis turn into this mismanaged public relations scare tactic, but I do think the underlying human reality is that there's real urgency and need at the border.

Brian: Mycah in Flatbush, who I think is no fan of the Senate bill, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mycah.

Mycah: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I just, in hearing the details of the bill, the bipartisan bill, I was struck at how the Democratic Party has essentially signed on in many ways to this vicious right-wing xenophobic agenda that they are constantly giving SOPs to the Republican Party, constantly buying the framing that the Republican Party is pushing on this question and, despite being the supposed left-wing party for our country, is largely signed on to much of the xenophobic project of the Republican Party.

Despite the fact that we are a country, as your guest well knows, and I'm sure has explained in his book, the United States is the reason why so many migrants from these countries are fleeing here because we have caused chaos through our foreign policy over the last couple decades.

In hearing about this bill, I'm just very struck at there seems to be a lack of a robust defense on the part of the Democratic Party for immigrants in this country. They're happy to sign up to basically whatever kind of framing the Republican Party wants.

Brian: Mycah, thank you very much. On the other side of the coin, it may be dead on arrival in the Republican House. Here is Speaker Mike Johnson on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday. This is before the announcement of the deal by the Senate in the afternoon, but the gist still applies. Here's what Speaker Johnson says The house would do.

Speaker Mike Johnson: We would reinstitute remain in Mexico, which would stem the flow by probably 70%. We would end the catch and release, the release, the mass releases of illegals into our country that's happened. This border is out of control.

Brian: That's speaker Mike Johnson. We also have Donald Trump urging defeat of the deal. Jonathan, here's a related question from a listener, text message that says, "How does it serve Trump's interests to oppose any legislative fix to the border crisis?"

Jonathan: These are both good questions. Just to take the most immediate one, and then to go back to Mycah's comment, which I think it has to be reckoned with, the question about how this benefits Trump is the predictable Trump thing, which is the more this situation gets played up, the more chaotic the situation becomes at the border. The more generalized suffering there is and partisan bickering, the more of a claim he can make that he uniquely is able to fix the situation. He's obviously always campaigned on this issue.

He's weaponized all of the resentments and disagreements around this issue to try to consolidate his support. I think the current toxicity around immigration in Washington plays into that directly. He's riding high. To Mycah's point, I'm in agreement that the Democrats have really seeded a lot of ground here, and that they have really bought into a framing that was handed to them by Republicans. There are actually, I think, interesting backstories to how this particular capitulation came to pass. I think the short of it is, essentially, that the Biden administration panicked in its early days. I think the border dynamics are incredibly complicated.

They would be complicated on a good day, but they were especially complicated at this moment of time when there's mass migration at new heights, when you're coming off of the Trump years when the system was deliberately subverted. You're coming immediately off of the COVID pandemic. There were all of these complex things.

Brian: People see what's going on in New York and Chicago and Denver. The crush on municipal services.

Jonathan: This gets back to Mycah's point. I do think that there was a very specific turning point in the Democratic discourse around this issue, and that dates to the moment in the spring of 2022 when the governor of Texas started busing asylum seekers to blue cities. Obviously, New York is front and center there, so is Chicago, Denver.

You had basically local city and state officials really start to panic, really start to become overwhelmed by the cost of handling the situation, the complexity of handling the situation. I think that was a real pressure on the White House. I do think that there was more the White House could have done to offended that off at an earlier stage.

I think in many ways, the big story around this bill and around these negotiations is that the democratic position is changing. There's a real acknowledgement that they need to look tough. I do think that that basically has meant buying into this frame.

As an example, I'm just sitting here with the text of the bill, and I'm trying to, under the circumstances, and maybe this sounds resigned of me, but under the circumstances where the politics are what they are, and it's obviously distressing for all kinds of reasons.

I'm very interested to see how particular provisions of this bill play out and to see how the Republicans might press their upper hand. For example, one of the most distressing things about the rhetoric around this bill is how the president rushed out to say-- even before the negotiations had ended, even before the bill had actually materialized, he rushed out to say, "Listen, one of the things in this bill that will empower me as president, that I plan to make use of, is the ability to "shut down the border."

Now, obviously, it's incredibly striking to hear someone who in 2020 campaigned on the exact opposite, make this point now, and it shows how much the political winds have changed. Then you dig into that provision. Obviously, that provision is problematic for all kinds of reasons. What it essentially says is, when there is a certain number of people who show up at the southern border, the government has to cease processing asylum claims.

Brian: 5,000 in one day.

Jonathan: Yes, exactly. There are different benchmarks. It's 5,000 average over the course of one week, or 8,500 in a single day. What does it mean then for the US to basically "shut down the border"? The shutting down the border thing is a bit of rhetoric that is frankly baffling. The president cannot shut down the border. Millions of people cross every day, including legally at ports of entry.

What it refers to, this notion of shutting down the border, is that they'll stop processing asylum claims. In a certain sense, that's already happening right now, because the resources aren't there to meet the needs of people arriving.

One of the things that struck me about the language of this bill, again, I'm clear-eyed about what it means that a democratic president is talking almost gleefully about shutting down the border, but built into that provision is the idea that there are 1,400 asylum slots at every port of entry during that state of emergency.

What the government is trying to play with is the idea of-- it's trying to disincentivize people to cross in between ports of entry. It's trying, I don't think all that successfully, and I don't think this bill does it, to direct people to ports of entry where there's more resources, more infrastructure and the means to process people's claims.

There has never been, to my knowledge, a numerical ceiling set for how many asylum claims authorities are supposed to process at a port of entry. The flip side of this emergency declaration is this 1,400 figure, which I have to say-- I was surprised to see it. That number itself is a relatively positive development, obviously, in this broader context, in this broader tangle, that Mycah and others are rightly distressed by.

I say that just to show that, when you really dive into it, there are some striking and interesting aspects to this deal.

Brian: One more caller, the opposite number of Mycah I think. David in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. David, with apologies, we have 30 seconds for you.

David: I just wanted to raise a hypothetical which I think is relevant. Let's say, one day, every single person from Venezuela woke up and said, "Hey, we're going to come to the United States. They can't really stop us." It got to a point where there were hundreds of thousands of people marching up trying to cross the border. The United States faced a breakdown of society to the point where our kids couldn't go to school, our police couldn't police.

There were massive slums and villages popping up. At what point would the president send the National Guard down there to stop it? I think that's relevant because I think there are a lot of people thinking right now, if this isn't a national emergency, why can't Biden do more as the most powerful person on the face of the earth to stop this? Thank you so much.

Brian: David, thank you. One last response, Jonathan, and then we're out of time.

Jonathan: It's funny. I actually think one of the most concrete things the administration has done in dealing with the reality that you rightly identify, that huge numbers of people, unmanageable numbers of people are leaving a need to leave Venezuela, is actually to create-- there's a program that fortunately remains intact despite this bill.

I expected this program to get dismantled in some fashion in the bill and it wasn't, and that is a parole program that allows a certain number of Venezuelans to come to the United States legally every month through an application process they set in motion before they leave their home country or before they come to the US Southern border.

One of the striking things about what the administration has tried to do, and it's not gotten that much attention, and I think it's actually an important way to deal with the reality of mass migration in our world, is to recognize that, if you give people legal ways to come to the United States, there is a way for the government to manage that situation. The knockdown effect will be, there's less chaos at the border.

When the US government use this parole program to deal with Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. By creating these avenues for people to come legally, you saw a 90% drop in how many of these people from these countries showed up at the southern border. There are levers that can be pulled that are not just harsh at the border, that actually I think, sued everyone and would actually bring a broader order to the system.

Brian: New Yorker, staff writer, Jonathan Blitzer, obviously following all the details of the Senate immigration reform compromise that was announced yesterday, and also the author of the brand new book which gives decades of context for this, really, really, really good. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. Thank you so much.

Jonathan: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Brian Lehrer and WNYC. We turn the page. Much more to come.

 

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