Ep 9: Immigration Crisis: How We Got Here - Part 3

Why does immigration reform keep failing in America, even as the crisis at the border grows worse? Join me in the 3rd episode of my immigration series, as I  unpack the political drama and real-world consequences of decades of broken promises and missed opportunities. From the Clinton era to today, I’ll trace how border policies have evolved, why bipartisan deals keep collapsing, and what’s driving the surge of families and children arriving at our borders. Join me as I take an in-depth look at  the human cost of Washington’s gridlock and what it means for the future of the country. Don’t miss this revealing look at the forces shaping one of America’s most urgent—and unresolved—challenges. 

Transcript

Raheel Khan: 0:25

February 7th, 2024, the US Senate after months of intense negotiations finally has a bipartisan immigration deal on the table. Republicans had pushed hard for tough border security measures, and Democrats, believe it or not, agreed to what was arguably the toughest border bill in decades. It literally had everything Republicans claimed they wanted. So what happened? 49 Republicans voted against it, only four voted for it. Even Mitch McConnell who had actually pushed for these negotiations in the first place voted no. How come? Well, you heard it in the clip above. Donald Trump told Republicans to kill the bill so he could run on immigration in 2024. They did exactly what he asked. Welcome back to Khannecting the Dots. This is episode three of my immigration series, and today we're looking at how close we've come to fixing immigration and why time and time again we keep failing because here's the dirty secret about immigration in America. We know how to fix it. We've known for decades. Other countries have functioning immigration systems and we've had bipartisan agreements on the table multiple times, agreements that could have made a real difference. So why don't we fix it? The answer shockingly, isn't about policy disagreement. It's pure, unadulterated politics. It's true that immigration is a hot button campaign issue for both parties, but when it comes to actually passing comprehensive reform, Republicans have generally been the ones to stand in the way. But before we delve into this political soap opera, I wanna explain something that rarely gets covered clearly, and I think it's crucial to understanding why our whole system is so broken. How does someone actually become a US citizen. Given the complexity of our immigration system? If you're anything like me, you've had a vague idea at best, but never knew the full answer. This confusion isn't accidental. Politicians have kept the process opaque for years. Let's start with the basics, which often get jumbled together. What's the difference between a visa and a green card? Think of visas like temporary permission slips. They're like hotel reservations for the US that lets you enter for tourism work or study, but they always come with an expiration date. Green cards, on the other hand, are more like buying a home. They grant you permanent residence, allowing you to live and work indefinitely in the U.S.. Here's the crucial part. Green cards are the essential first step towards citizenship. Unless you're born in the United States, you simply can't become a citizen without one. Now, you don't necessarily need a temporary visa first to get a green card. It just really depends on your situation. Take for example, if you're already here legally, such as a student, worker, or tourist. You can sometimes apply to change your status. If you're outside the US, you'll apply for something called an immigrant visa, which is different from those temporary visas and will allow you to enter the country as a permanent resident. There are multiple paths to get a green card. Let's look at a few of them here. Family reunification. This is the largest route by far. About 65% of all legal immigrants come through family sponsorship. US citizens can sponsor close relatives like spouses, unmarried children, parents and siblings. Green card holders can sponsor spouses and unmarried children. The huge catch here. Strict per country caps, only 7% of green cards can go to any single country each year. Regardless of how many people from that country are eligible and waiting. The result? Waits can be shockingly long, up to 20 years for siblings from Mexico, or even 24 years from the Philippines. Employment based immigration. This covers skilled workers. People with advanced degrees and investors, but there are only 140,000 employment based green cards available globally each year. And guess what? The same 7% cap applies here too. So countries like India, face wait times that can spend decades effectively putting entire careers on hold. Diversity visa lottery. Each year, 55,000 green cards are awarded by random lottery, but you must be from a country with low recent immigration. So major countries like India, Pakistan, China, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria are excluded. There are also minimum education or work requirements. Millions of people apply, and even if you win the lottery, you still have to go through the full immigration process. Refugees and asylum. Refugees apply from outside the US while asylum seekers apply from within. Annual admissions typically range from 50,000 to 125,000, though this number can fluctuate pretty dramatically depending on who's in the White House. Temporary Visas. Student, tourists, and temporary workers don't automatically get permanent status. Some people do manage to transition. Maybe a student gets a work visa, then finds an employer to sponsor them for a green card. But this process is long, incredibly uncertain and offers absolutely no guarantees. Even after getting a green card. Citizenship isn't immediate. You must wait three to five years before you can apply. During that time, you must maintain a clean record. Learn English, and study civics. In the best case scenario, marrying a US citizen. Tomorrow you're looking at at least three to five years from start to citizenship. For most, it takes much longer. For millions more, there simply is no legal path available. This is why there are over 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States for most. It's not a matter of choice. The math just doesn't add up. The legal routes are so limited and backlogged that there is no realistic way to come here legally. I know that's a lot of policy detail, but understanding these mechanics is crucial to understanding our system and the problems in it. Politicians and pundits love to talk about getting in line, but for most people, that line is so impossibly long that actually waiting for results can take a lifetime. Or there's just no line at all. So how did we get here? Let's dive into 30 years of political failures. Let's go back to Bill Clinton in the 1990s, because this is really where everything started to go wrong. I talked about some of his policies in my last podcast, but let's take a refresher. Even though Clinton inherited a recession. He managed to turn the economy around, which gave him a lot of goodwill and a real window for comprehensive immigration reform. But instead of using that economic strength to push for real change, Clinton made a choice that still haunts us today. Rather than fixing the system, he decided to split the difference. Give Republicans more border enforcement and give Democrats, well, really not much of anything. Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 was supposed to deter immigration by making border crossings more dangerous. And it worked sort of, it did make crossing more dangerous. It shifted crossings from San Diego to places like Tucson, Arizona and El Paso, Texas. People started dying in the desert in record numbers. But here's what it didn't do. It did not reduce immigration. By pushing crossings into more remote deadly areas, it completely ended the circular migration pattern that had worked for decades. Suddenly crossing back and forth became way too dangerous, so people who came simply stayed permanently. The border militarization after Operation Gatekeeper was staggering. In 1993, border enforcement cost about a billion dollars per year. In 2024, over$18 billion, and frankly, with diminishing returns. But Clinton's biggest disaster was arguably NAFTA. The theory was simple. Create jobs in Mexico and Mexicans won't need to come to the U.S.. Unfortunately, it had the exact opposite effect. NAFTA destroyed small scale agriculture in Mexico by flooding the market with subsidized American corn and wheat. Millions of Mexican farmers lost their livelihoods, and so what did they do? They headed north. So we integrated our economies without integrating our labor markets. That, my friends, created exactly the pressure cooker of illegal immigration we're still dealing with today. Now, fast forward to George W. Bush. He actually understood immigration better than most politicians. As governor of Texas. He'd seen firsthand the benefits and negatives of immigration and its real impact on the economy. As a result, he made immigration a top priority from day one, from the very start. Bush began working closely with Mexico's then President Vicente Fox. Together, they kicked off serious talks about transformative changes, finding a way for millions of undocumented immigrants to get legal status and setting up a robust guest worker program. While they didn't nail down every detail before everything changed, this was shaping up to be the kind of major immigration reform we hadn't seen in decades. Then 9/11 happened suddenly. Immigration wasn't about economics anymore, it was about security. The Department of Homeland Security was created and immigration enforcement was moved to an agency focused on terrorism and threats. This was a profound shift that we're still stuck in today. For the first time in American history, immigration was primarily viewed through a security lens rather than an economic one. But Bush didn't give up. In 2005, senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy drafted comprehensive reform that unfortunately went nowhere. In 2007, Bush tried again with a compromise that actually had bipartisan support built off the framework of that 2005 reform. So what killed it? Three forces: fierce Republican base opposition. Democratic Union opposition, and something that's rarely discussed, massive protests that completely backfired. In 2006, pro immigration groups organized huge marches across the country. They thought they were helping, they weren't. While many waved American flags. Others waved Mexican flags and carried signs in Spanish. This unfortunately solidified conservative sentiment against them, and the bill Republican Senator Trent Lot actually said They lost me when I saw so many Mexican flags. At the same time, anti-immigration groups saw their membership surge. Republican offices were flooded with angry calls. Conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity then turned the word amnesty into a political death sentence. Any path to citizenship, no matter how long or difficult became rewarding Lawbreakers. The word amnesty itself became so toxic that Republican politicians still can't say pathway to citizenship without facing primary challenges today. Well meaning advocacy tragically likely hurt the cause, a pattern that is unfortunately repeated itself many times. After eight years of Bush, Barack Obama was elected on the promise of hope and change. When running for president, he promised to deliver comprehensive immigration reform. A big hope for advocates who thought their moment had finely come. And yes, Democrats controlled Congress, but the reality was more complicated. As soon as Obama took office, the country was facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. His first job was to stabilize the economy and prevent a total collapse. Once that immediate crisis was addressed, he and Congress turned to another huge priority. Healthcare reform. Passing the Affordable Care Act took up almost all the political oxygen in Washington. Meanwhile. Immigration reform required 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. Even with democratic majorities, that was a tall order. Republican leaders, especially Mitch McConnell, made it clear early on that their main goal was to block Obama's agenda at every turn. In fact, McConnell famously said his top priority was to make Obama a one term president. So, while healthcare reform was absolutely critical, it came at a political cost. By the time the A CA passed Democrats had lost momentum, the Tea Party was on the rise, and the window for sweeping immigration reform had slammed shut. With immigration reform stalled in Congress. Obama took a different approach, one that would earn him a controversial nickname. He became what many called the deporter in chief. Why? Because he believed that by ramping up enforcement and showing Republicans, he was serious about border security, he could build the political credibility needed to finally get comprehensive reform passed. Here's a surprising number. Obama deported more people than any president in American history, over 3 million during his eight years. Despite that massive number, and to no one's surprise, Republicans didn't give him any credit. Instead, they used his deportation numbers to argue he was weak. Because there were still undocumented immigrants in the country. The bitter irony. Obama actually proved that enforcement only approaches simply don't work. Despite record deportations, people kept coming. In fact, the 2008 recession did more to reduce immigration than all his enforcement measures combined. Obama's one moment of real hope, came in 2013 with the"Gang of Eight". Four Republican and four Democratic senators who spent months negotiating comprehensive reform. This bill wasn't just comprehensive. It would have fundamentally transformed America's immigration system for the better. Let me break down what was actually in it, because it's stunning how close we came to solving this. For the 11 million undocumented immigrants at that time, it created something called registered provisional immigrant status. Basically a 13 year pathway to citizenship. But here's the catch. They'd have to pay fines, back taxes, learn English, pass background checks, and meet employment requirements. This was absolutely not amnesty. It was earned legalization with real consequences and requirements, but the bill went way beyond just dealing with undocumented immigrants. It would've eliminated the family visa categories for siblings and adult married children of US citizens. You know that chain migration that Trump always complained about in his first term. Instead, it created a new merit based point system. Giving permanent residency based on education, skills, and English proficiency. And here's something that would've been truly revolutionary, A new W Visa program for lower skilled workers that for the first time ever would've allowed them to eventually apply for permanent residency without needing employer sponsorship. Think about that, a legal pathway for the very people who had been crossing the border illegally for decades. The border security measures were also massive. They proposed doubling the existing border patrol force, creating 700 miles of fencing and allocating$46 billion in border security funding. And here's the kicker. None of the undocumented immigrants could even get green cards until all these enforcement measures were operational first. The Congressional budget office ran the numbers and found this bill would reduce the federal deficit by nearly$1 trillion over 20 years while boosting GDP by 1.4 trillion. The bill would've paid for itself and then some. The bill passed the Senate with a huge 68 to 32 vote with 14 Republicans voting for it, including big names like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Marco Rubio. Those names probably sound familiar. Three of the last four are still in the Senate today, while Marco Rubio has one of the most important positions in today's government as Secretary of State. Sadly, when the bill went to the house, it died. Why? House Speaker John Boehner refused to even bring it up for a vote, using the excuse that it wouldn't pass with the majority Republican support. But the real reason was he was facing the surging tea party movement, who were adamantly opposed any immigration bill that didn't focus solely on enforcement. The final nail came when majority leader, Eric Cantor, widely expected to be the next speaker, lost his primary election to a tea party challenger who campaigned specifically against immigration reform. If a member of leadership could lose over this issue, any Republican could. But despite all that, most experts actually believe that if Boehner had brought the bill up for a vote, it would've passed with enough support from Democrats and moderate Republicans. So comprehensive reform died again, killed by politicians too afraid to lose power and influenced by toxic messaging. Now let's step back and examine what was happening at the border during those Obama years. Because the roots of this crisis didn't sprout overnight, but a lot of those changes came to a head during Obama's terms. As I mentioned earlier, Clinton's border militarization effectively ended circular migration while the 2008 recession delivered a fatal death blow to economic migration. Construction, and other heavy immigrant sector jobs vanished overnight. Net undocumented immigration actually hit zero with the population stabilizing around 11 million. But by 2011, something entirely new was happening. Families and unaccompanied children from Central America started arriving, and they weren't just seeking work, they were literally running for their lives. Let me give you the numbers that tell the story. Unaccompanied minors surged from about 16,000 in 2011 to almost 39,000 in 2013. By the summer of 2014, border patrol was picking up over 1000 kids every single week. Families from the Northern Triangle, that's El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala became the fastest growing group at the border. So why the sudden shift? Because the Northern Triangle had become one of the most dangerous places on Earth. In El Salvador, the homicide rate was more than 25 times higher than in the U.S.. Gangs like MS 13 and Barrio 18 ran neighborhoods extorting businesses, threatening families, and killing anyone who refuse to pay. Studies found that more than two thirds of migrants had family members who were murdered, kidnapped, or disappeared. One MS 13, member Chillingly told NPR, my job is to collect extortion. If they delay payment too long, we kill the person. It's obligatory. She added that after giving someone 24 hours to pay. We found their houses empty. They had to leave because they say they don't have enough money to pay the extortion. On top of the violence, central America was getting hammered by climate disasters, droughts, destroyed crops year after year in what's called the dry corridor. By 2016, more than 6 million people in the region were food insecure. On top of all that, here's something we don't talk about enough. Guns. Every year, hundreds of thousands of firearms, many from the US were being smuggled into Mexico and Central America. Between 2014 and 2016, almost 70% of crime guns recovered in Mexico, and nearly half in El Salvador and Honduras were traced back to the U.S.. These weren't just hunting rifles, these were military style weapons that made gang violence, even deadlier. And let's be honest about the American handprint here. Sadly, it extended way beyond guns. During the Cold War, we supported dictators and fueled the civil wars like in Guatemala, where 200,000 people were killed. Later, we deported gang members back to Central America without warning local authorities helping to spread gang culture. Trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA, think NAFTA, but for Central America, hurt local farmers and workers, but didn't create legal pathways for them to come here. By the 2016 election, this new migration crisis was front and center. Donald Trump wasn't just campaigning against illegal immigration in general. He was focusing in on this specific wave he called the asylum seekers. An invasion warned about tough people, maybe we don't want in our country, and famously promised to build a wall to stop what he saw coming. His rhetoric tapped into real anxiety about what was happening at the border. He oversimplified it and cast, the immigrants, as the villains blaming undocumented persons for all the problems in America. Of course, the situation is far more complex than anyone could solve, but when people are afraid, they often look for simple solutions to complex problems. So they voted Trump in to fix it. So when Trump took office in 2017, he didn't just continue the enforcement heavy approach of his predecessors, he turned it up to 11. Donald Trump ran in the most restrictionist immigration platform in modern American history. Build the wall. I. Ban Muslims. End birthright citizenship, mass deportations. Yes. Even in his first term, he kept talking about wanting to end birthright citizenship. His Muslim ban started as an explicit proposal for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States after courts struck it down repeatedly. The final version banned travel from several Muslim majority countries and a few non-Muslim countries, which the Supreme Court upheld. Another defining policy was the migrant production protocols, which came to be known as the Remain in Mexico policy. This policy forced asylum seekers to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities. About 60,000 people were returned to Mexico, where they face kidnapping and violence. Human rights first documented at least 636 cases of violent crimes against return migrants, although this was likely a massive under count. But despite all that, Trump's overall deportation numbers weren't actually that different from Obama's. They were just meaner and more chaotic. Total deportations were actually lower, about 1 million over four years, compared to Obama's 1.5 million during his last four years. What Trump did do was dramatically cut legal immigration. He slashed refugee admissions from 110,000 to just 15,000 the lowest Since the modern program began. He made it much harder to get work visas and tried to end family reunification. Trump also implemented more aggressive interior enforcement. Ice workplace raids increased by 60% in his first year. Targeting not just individual workers, but conducting mass arrests. Sometimes over 100 people in a single operation. Trump understood something, previous Republican presidents missed. His base wasn't just opposed to illegal immigration. They were opposed to immigration, period. Even Trump, despite his political power and fanatical fan base, the MAGA movement couldn't get comprehensive reform done. His one attempt in 2018 failed when neither party trusted him to stick to any deal. After the chaotic immigration debates during Trump's first term, Joe Biden came into office promising to create a fair and humane immigration system. He certainly tried to reverse Trump's approach, but he ran into the very same political reality that has stymied every president since Reagan. Strong Republican opposition to solving the immigration crisis. But Biden also inherited something far worse than what Trump had faced in 2016. During the Biden years, what had been primarily a northern triangle crisis exploded into a hemisphere wide collapse. The numbers are staggering. In fiscal year 2021 alone encounters with people from Ecuador, increased eightfold. Venezuela went from just 1200 encounters in 2020 to nearly 48,000. In 2021, Haiti jumped from about 4,400 to over 45,000. Cuba from just under 10,000 to over 38,000. Why this sudden hemisphere Wide shift? Because multiple countries collapsed at once. Venezuela's economic meltdown created the largest displacement crisis in Western Hemisphere history. 7 million people have fled. Haiti faced multiple disasters, devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2021. Hurricane Matthew in 2016, political chaos. And then the 2021 presidential assassination. Nicaragua's, Daniel Ortega crushed the political opposition, jailing opponents, and forcing dissidence to flee. Cuba cracked down a mass protest throughout the country. The COVID pandemic made everything worse. Displacing Venezuelan and Haitian refugees who have been living in other South American countries and climate disasters kept coming. Honduras and Guatemala got hammered by back-to-back hurricanes in 2020 and displaced at least 1.5 million people. By 2023. Biden was politically vulnerable on immigration with over 2 million border encounters annually. Republicans saw a huge opportunity and demanded border security measures as a price for critical Ukraine aid. What happened next was remarkable. Senator spent 10 weeks negotiating the toughest border border security bill in decades. This was one tough bill and essentially everything Republicans had been demanding for years. I. It would've given the President authority to shut down the border when encounters reached 5,000 per day for seven days or 8,500 in one day. It completely reformed the asylum processing with much higher standards. It provided$20.3 billion for border security more than Biden originally requested. And yes, it would've required continued construction of Trump's border Wall. Like I said, this was a Republican dream. The Border Patrol Union, the same union that had endorsed Trump, actually endorsed this bill. So what happened? You heard it up at the beginning. Donald Trump thought it was more important to run on immigration than to solve it. In January, 2024, Trump started calling Republican senators. His message was simple. Don't give Biden a win. Keep the border chaos going so I can run on it in the election. And they listened. This moment perfectly captured 30 years of immigration, politics. A bipartisan solution killed not because it was bad policy, but because solving the problem would eliminate a valuable political weapon. So let's step back and look at the deeper pattern we've uncovered here. What we've traced through 30 years of American politics isn't just a series of policy failures. It's something more fundamental about how our political system responds to complex long-term challenges. Think about what we've seen. Every single president, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden knew the immigration system was broken. They all had experts telling them what needed to be done. The policy solutions have been sitting on the shelf for decades. But here's the sad truth. The closer we got to actually solving the problem, the more likely politics was to kill it. The Gang of eight Bill in 2013, it passed the Senate with bipartisan support and would've solved most of these issues. Dead on arrival in the house because of primary politics. The 2024 border deal. It gave Republicans everything they said they wanted for years. Killed with a phone call because solving the problem would hurt Trump's campaign. This reveals something crucial about how immigration politics actually works in America. For many politicians, immigration isn't just a problem to be solved. It's a powerful political tool. Republicans often rally around border security and cultural concerns while Democrats focus on compassion and immigrant rights. But the reality is that the biggest roadblocks at fixing the system have come from Republicans, opposition to comprehensive reform. Especially efforts that include a pathway to citizenship. For many Republicans, fear and enforcement remain strong motivators, and without that political leverage, the incentive to compromise diminishes. Meanwhile, Democrats have generally pushed for solutions but have been stymied by this resistance. I. As a result, the human cost has been staggering. We've militarized our border, turning it into a deadly obstacle course that's killed thousands. We've separated families for decades through backlogs and caps. We've created a population of 12 million people living in the shadows, vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Most tragic of all, we've met a genuine humanitarian crisis, people fleeing violence, persecution and climate disasters, with walls, detention centers, and political theater. The shift from economic migration to asylum seekers fundamentally changed what we were dealing with, but our political system didn't adapt because the politics were too valuable. What's happening now under Trump 2.0 isn't an aberration. It's the logical endpoint of decades of gridlock and half measures. When you refuse to solve a problem for three decades, eventually someone comes along who promises not to manage it, but to wage war on it, and that's exactly what Trump is doing. Mass deportations, military involvement detention camps, think Guantanamo Bay, emergency declarations. Where about to see what happens when the world's most powerful country treats immigration, not as a policy challenge, but as an existential threat. We spent this episode looking backward at 30 years of failure. But history doesn't end here. What happens next will determine whether this becomes a story about American democracy's ability to course correct or about how fear and political opportunism finally broke our immigration system beyond repair. Next episode, we examine what that breaking point looks like in practice. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing and sharing with a friend. Until next time, stay curious, stay critical, and stay connected.