Ep. 24 - Border Reality: Perception vs. Policy

The border debate is loud, emotional, and often totally detached from how US immigration law actually works. I wanted to do a real-world self-check: what changed between Trump, Biden, and the current backlash, and why does it feel like the system keeps swinging from chaos to crackdown? What I found is less about slogans and more about incentives, capacity, and one word that gets abused constantly in cable news: asylum. 

I break down the difference between asylum seekers and traditional legal immigration, why asylum is a narrow protection mechanism, and how unclear rules can send powerful signals during a surge. Then I walk through the receipts I’ve been digging into: asylum application spikes, border apprehension trends, and why those numbers mattered politically. I also tackle a persistent myth head-on as a former county clerk: non-citizens can’t vote in federal elections, and the evidence for meaningful “illegal voting” simply isn’t there. 

Finally, I connect the policy choices to the political outcome and the bigger structural problem. When Congress refuses to legislate, executive actions start to look like intent, and every administration change becomes a perceived rewrite of the law. If you want a border that’s orderly and humane, the fix isn’t just enforcement. It’s a clearer legal pathway, better-funded immigration courts, and legislation that actually matches reality. 

Subscribe to Radical Moderate, share this with someone who argues about the border, and leave a review with your biggest question about immigration policy.

Transcript

Welcome And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back, everybody, to the Radical Moderate Podcast. I am your host, Pat O'Brien, and this week's episode is a continuation of our discussion about immigration policy in the United States and how we find ourselves in the situations we do when you've got this mammoth presence by ICE and situations happening in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, resulting sometimes in the death of Americans. And quite frankly, a pretty big backlash against that from I think middle America and just saying, I don't I don't know that that a lot of things that are happening uh with ICE are a great idea. But having said that, uh, that's where we're at. And so in last week's episode, I really focused on the history of immigration uh policy with the focus on the United States Congress. And where we concluded was ultimately, since 1986, the Congress has just failed at the job. And I I can go back, you can go back and listen to that episode, uh, but it I don't think it's a close call. I just think they've failed at their job, and there's reasons why they have. So what where where have we ended up? Like, where does that leave us? And I think what what I want to what I want to talk about this week is a little bit more of the perceptions around this and the reality of immigration policy and and try to bring it home in terms of things that you hear in the news and and the back and forth that that seems endless and unfixable, that I really think there are solutions to. So I'm gonna kind of start from the premise that and and in the timeline, I should say, of really the Barack Obama second term, Trump won, Biden, and Trump two terms to kind of focus you in. What I think is going on here is that when the United States Congress started having failed attempt after failed attempt, particularly at the end of the W. Bush administration and then beginning the first term of the Obama administration into the second term, when it when everything was failing, people started resorting to executive orders and presidential power. And I it just it's popped, it sticks in my mind this rally. I couldn't tell exactly where it was, but I believe it was toward the end of the Barack Obama administration. And I remember uh President Obama getting shouted down by what I what I would describe as Latino activists, people who thought he needed to be doing more to help people come to this country. And what I mean is like undocumented people, whether that meant amnesty or whether that it meant just letting people in through asylum, which is going to be a big part of this episode. I don't know exactly what they wanted. They may not have known exactly what they wanted, but I remember them trying to shout him down. And his response was basically, I'm following the law, and what you're asking me to do is not follow the law. And they were like, no, you you have the power. And I'm thinking he doesn't, and he's being responsible by not overreaching with power that he doesn't have from the Constitution. The Congress has the power. Now, the frustrations of Congress not doing their job, I mean, it's real, and I think that's ultimately where we have this has to be solved is through congressional action. But be that as it may, so where are we? Well, the first thing I want to say is I went back and did a deep dive of what I'll call border control during the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration, and then you know, where we are now. And here's here's where I'm landing on this to kind of set the stage for you. Um, I think Joe Biden did a pretty pisspoor job on controlling the border. I'm gonna come back to that. I'm gonna have some receipts on that. But I want to touch on first this concept of perception and reality. So you have heard whether you're a hardcore Republican or whether you're a very liberal Democrat, you have heard the claim that Democrats want open borders so that illegals can go vote. You've heard that. And and you you've heard that as you know related to the 2020 election. You hear that with voter ID, which I, by the way, I have no issue with somebody wants to show a driver's license or there's a requirement to show a driver's license when you go vote. I did that this past week when I voted in a primary in Arkansas. We've got zero issue with that. Now, telling people to get their birth certificates, telling people to get their passports, I think it's a bit much, especially for somebody like me. I'm 56 years old and I voted a billion, not a billion times. You get it, I vote a hundred times, whatever. Um, it's stupid to make me get that requirement, but I would do whatever I had to do. Maybe, maybe you start with people 18 to do that. But the bottom line is you've heard this idea that Democrats want open borders so illegals can vote. I'm gonna come back and break that down in a minute. But then you also hear uh related to that that undocumented immigrants can vote. They can't. Okay, they can't. We just you've got to be factual on this program. I'm a former county clerk. I know how voting works, I follow this stuff very closely. People who are not citizens can't and don't vote. They don't. Now, to the extent they've ever it's ever happened, there maybe there's a couple hundred cases over a decade in the entire country that this has happened. It's so rare, it's irrelevant. It does not affect elections, it's got no consequence. So just just quit talking about it. I mean, I know that that's not gonna, you're not gonna quit talking about it, but I'm telling you, you can if you don't believe anything I ever tell you, just believe that I know how voting works and illegals are not voting. It's just not it's not happening. So let's go back to though, what are we hearing in the news, Pat? So here's what you had in Trump won, I think. He he he did understand, probably from a business perspective, supply and demand. And where he wanted, what he wanted to do is he wanted to really shut down the border. And that meant creating less demand for people wanting to come to the U.S. Mexican border. I'm just I'm guessing that's what he was all about when I look back at his rhetoric and all that. And I'll just say, let me just say, okay, I think it probably worked to some extent. Not what I would have done. I would have passed, I would have made Congress pass legislation of let's do this in a rational way, the way that a you know, a Chick-fil-A drive-thru works, getting people in and out, like let's do it smart. But that's not the way he wanted to do it. He wanted to be tough on the border. And so that's what we got. And let's just say in general, that that worked. I mean, I don't want to quibble at the margins here. Let's just say in general that what Trump did in his first term in general worked. He had a policy called Remain in Mexico, which I probably is debatable of how well it worked, but let's just for these purposes assume it worked. So then we moved to the Biden years. And keep in mind COVID was going on, and so there were some special things related to the border with COVID, but let's throw that out too. I was curious more recently, especially I guess in 2024, when the campaign between initially Trump and Biden, then Trump and Harris was going on, of like, what did happen during the Biden years? I kind of moved on. I just had other things going on in my life. I got married, you know, I met the love of my life and and eventually got married uh, you know, during the Biden administration, and you're coming out of COVID. I mean, I just had other things to do than keep up with the border policy, but I kept hearing that there were issues. And so here's what I found with my research. And here's the premise that I'm gonna throw out to you today, today in the rest of this podcast. I think the Biden administration screwed up on the border. And I think specifically what they did is they did not understand the law of supply and demand. And during a time period where there was a surge of people trying to come into the United States through the southern border, something that probably had to do with instability in their country and all that, but it was uh from a historical perspective, there was a surge. They, being the Biden administration, allowed the rules to be too loosey-goosey, not defined enough, not clear enough, too ambiguous, and that sent the wrong signals. And in specifically, when it comes down to people seeking asylum. Let's remember that word for a second, uh, asylum, because that is that's really what it is, folks. It's different than immigration. So I'm gonna break that down for you. Let's get some definitions here. Asylum's not a traditional immigration pathway, it's a protection mechanism for people already inside the United States or at the border, or at the border. That's the very important part of the statement, who fear returning home due to persecution. And it's typically going to be like religious or political persecution. Okay, that's really what asylum is going to be. Now, that's the definition. Traditional legal immigration is when people are coming through official channels, they have a family member. It's uh they're they're hired for a job, they're working toward a green card, they win the diversity lottery, they're a refugee. You know, think of refugees from Ukraine coming over. That's your traditional pathway. And I think what happened here, I'm not going to call it a loophole because it's legal, but I think the Biden administration didn't understand, one, the reality of the situation, that there was a surge during that time period at the southern border. And then, second, someone within the White House, I don't know who, but somebody within the White House made a conscious decision. We're going to loosen up how we approach asylum claims. And I think that was ruinous. I think it was disastrous for the Democratic Party. And I think it in many ways cost the Democrats the White House. And I think it allowed Trump to come back for a second term. I think it was two issues, inflation and immigration. I think that's it. Inflation, I don't think there's much the Biden administration could have done. I really don't. You can blame them all you want. That's fine. I don't care. I don't think that's the case. I don't think, I don't think that's how economics work. It was a global inflationary period, but that's fine. But immigration was in his control. It was in his White House's control. And I'd love to have somebody from the Biden White House come and debate me on this. I'd love to be wrong on this. And let me, real quick, uh say this. Um, Joe Biden came to one of my uncle's funerals in Sioux City, Iowa in December of 1989. I have my entire life, the O'Brien's have loved Joe Biden. I know people, I know people, I don't know if they still do, but I know have cousins who had Joe Biden's phone number, cell phone number. Like everything I've ever heard is he an incredibly decent human being. And that's what I choose to believe. Having said that, my research tells me that they really screwed up on the border and it and it really had everything to do with the way that they handled asylum. And let me let me get let me give you some numbers here. So what I'm gonna call an anomaly, you know, and a signal that maybe something's wrong, is if you look at the numbers of what was going on with asylum applications during a very tight period during the Biden administration, what you're gonna find out is there was a massive surge. Okay, so in fiscal year 2021, there was about 90,000 applications. The next year, 2022, it goes up to 266,000. The next year goes at 23, it goes up to 513,000. The next year, 2024, it goes up to 910,000. That's 10x. We we started 90, we're over 900,000, and then fiscal year 2025 was 874. Now Trump's coming into office at that point. And if you look at it though, um, and I have, these numbers were not normal. Like this surge that transpired, this was not normal. And it's it's hard to find some research on this that's super accurate. And so some of this is feel, some of this is me trying to extrapolate and and and give paint the best picture that I can, the most objective picture that I can. But I also went back and looked at border apprehensions. Okay, so apprehensions meaning you're getting there's activity at the border, somebody's getting caught, there's an encounter, something is happening because that's a signal also of what's going on. And this for this one, I went back 20 plus years, and I'm gonna throw out some numbers for you, years and numbers to you. So between 2004 and 2006, which was uh the W. Bush second term, you had between right around 1.1 to 1.2 million apprehensions every year. And for those of you who listened uh to my previous episode, you know that the George W. Bush tried to create, he tried to lead to comprehensive immigration reform, but he couldn't get it through the United States Congress. But in 2007, it goes down to 850, 2008 down to 700, 2009, down to 540. These are apprehensions, okay? A little different than asylum applications, but the say, but but it it's uh indicative of what's going on at the border. 2010 and gets down to 447,000. And then between 2011 and 2018, these apprehensions, okay, so a seven-year period, these apprehensions stay in a very tight window of about 300,000 to 400,000. And that's that's good. You go back to the Bush years, you're over 1.1, you've cut that in a third, right? Like that's good. Something's working. Now, again, Congress could have fixed all this, I believe. I don't know if I've said it on this particular episode, but I've said it many times. The solution to illegal immigration, the solution to illegal immigration is a better, more efficient process for legal immigration. Most people, the great majority of people want to do it legally. It's too hard, it's too complicated, it takes too long. Just you just that's I think that's it's an opinion, but I think if you were to research this as much as I do, you would consider that statement factual. But these apprehensions spiked in 2019 to 850,000, but went down in 2020 to 400,000. Of course, you're at the height of COVID. But then, this is telltale, in my opinion. During the Biden administration, 2021, apprehensions go up over 1.6 million in 2021. In 2022, they go over 2.2 million. Keep in mind, I was talking about a three to 400,000 range of apprehensions. You get to 2.2 million in 2022, 2023, 2,050,000. 2024, 1,362,000. But also Biden changed his own policy mid-year, and the numbers literally went down immediately. The numbers now, the Trump won Trump's first year in Trump 2.0, he got it down to 240,000. Folks, that's that's him following up on what he said during the campaign. That's him doing the job he told you he was gonna do. There's probably a lot more data that we could go through to determine whether or not the Biden administration messed up with the border. I don't really, I'm gonna move on with life and say I think they they messed up. They didn't control the border. And by not by not controlling the border, they allowed the narratives of Democrats want open borders to perpetuate. They gave people something to hang their hat on because it must have been chaotic if you were a border patrol agent uh during the Biden administration. It must have been chaotic to see the level of asylum applications that are getting filed, the apprehension numbers. I think this is where when you hear, you know, about that they're eating the dogs and cats, like I think all of that stuff is coming from conscious choices of the Biden administration. Now, I don't have Joe Biden's cell phone or anything like that. And I'm not close to anybody in the Biden White House, but I bet this is Arkansas, and there's probably people who worked in the Clinton administration who worked in the Biden administration, that sort of thing. I bet within two degrees of separate uh separation, I could probably find somebody. Here's an open invitation. If you want to come on the show and say, Pat, you got it wrong about Biden. He did a great job on the border, and here's the receipts, here's the documents, get a hold of me. Reach out to me, uh, the Radical Moderate Podcast, Pat O'Brien. I'm easy to find. I don't think I think I'm right though. I think Biden did a poor job on the border, and I think that's why a lot of what's going on right now in the first year of Trump, and we're moving to the second year of Trump. I think he and his administration, and Stephen Miller in particular, are looking at this situation and they're saying the Democrats exposed their flank. They lost the election on immigration. We, we, the Republicans, and Donald Trump campaigned on immigration. The Democrats fell right into our trap the way that Biden handled the border. And now we are going to do whatever the hell we want. I think that's what's going on. And in that sense, in a pure political sense, I think it's Joe Biden's fault. And I hate to say it, I voted for him. I uh voted for him in 2020. I didn't get a chance to vote for him in 2024, but I voted for his vice president, Kamala Harris. Um, in you know, separate issue. I'm not making her responsible. She was the vice president, but she had to own the legacy of the Biden policy. And uh I think it was a failed policy on the border. That that's uh I've I've put a lot of research into this. Um, maybe I'm wrong. I'm always reserved to be uh willing to change my mind if somebody can show me some evidence, some data to show that I'm wrong. So, you know, where does that leave us? Let me go back to to some of these, you know, kind of ideas of uh of policy and the perception of policy and where we end up with that. So when Congress fails to legislate, executive actions look like policy shifts. The policy shifts look like intent. So what I mean by that is when George W. Bush and Barack Obama could not get big immigration reform passed, they were left with no tools in the toolbox to do anything about immigration except talk about it and then use executive orders and that sort of thing. Obama was called the deporter-in-chief by some people. Like deportations under the Obama administration were at least as robust, at least as robust as the Trump administration, both one and two, quite frankly. Uh, I think Joe Biden, though, he changed the narrative with an unforced air, politically unforced, uh, because I don't think there was a big constituency screaming for this that I'm aware of. I think there was, you know, I think they Joe Biden was elected to get us out of COVID, to pass some bills related uh to, you know, the CHIPS bill and then the infrastructure bill. Like, and he did all that. And he, I would say he did a great job on all that. And I think he just, I don't know, he fell asleep with the switch or he was under. Unaware immigration wasn't his thing. And he let some people, I believe, just have the wheel on this deal and ran the political interests of the Democratic Party into the ditch. That's where I that's where I land on it. But it goes back to the Congress not doing their job. And so, you know, while this immigration debate just feels very partisan, I think it's really more structural. It's just a legislative vacuum. Now, we as voters can only do so much. And, you know, my ask here is that you just stay informed. Uh, you know, but I think the reason why you're seeing what you're seeing with the Trump backlash is what I'll call it to the Biden term, is all of the narratives that Democrats want open borders make more sense. They seem to have more credence because of the way that the Biden administration handled their affairs. I want to reiterate that um I don't believe that the Democrats quote unquote have want open borders. Uh certainly this Democrat voter, traditionally Democrat voter, doesn't want that. And this radical moderate doesn't want that. I want a legal pathway for and rules that make sense and are clear through legislation. That's what I want. We need a 1986-level immigration reform landmark act that, like we had with Ronald Reagan and Timp O'Neill. That's what I want. That's what I stand for. But in the interim, there's not a lot we can do. And so for those of you who are mad at the Trump administration, I mean, go vote for a different Congress person, you know, go vote for a different senator, focus your energy on that because Trump ain't gonna listen to you. You know, I don't know that he's necessarily gonna listen to people who voted for him on this particular issue, but he's certainly not gonna listen to people who hate him and who didn't vote for him. He has no incentive to do that. Um, having said that, if you believe that there's a lot of illegals voting in California, Texas, wherever, I'm telling you, I see no evidence of that. I just don't. I don't see it. And we had uh, you know, in 2020, we had lawsuits about the elections in general, when what I would say Trump was a sore loser, and he brought somewhere between 50 and 60 lawsuits, jurisdictions all across the United States. Um, and he lost every one of them. Every one of them. I mean, there was no evidence to show that there was fraud, and there's there's no evidence to show that there's any level of significant uh votes being cast by undocumented or illegal people here in this country. Not saying you can't find maybe even a couple hundred cases over a decade, but out of a couple hundred million votes, okay? So, like just something that's just not a problem. Believe what you want to believe. But I'm telling you facts as somebody I was a county elected official for six years. I was a prosecutor previously. I know how this stuff works. You just the when you're being told, maybe a better way to put it, when you're being sold this idea that Democrats want open borders, they're that's how they're gonna take over the country because those open borders are then gonna turn to people who are here illegally in this country, and then they're gonna go become registered voters. I mean, just to be very straightforward, I think that's bullshit. I don't think that's what's going on. I just see no evidence of it. Um that's not a partisan view, that's a lawyerly evidentiary-based view of the situation. So to kind of, as I move toward a conclusion on this episode, I just want to say, you know, the breaking news here, I guess, is that I wanted to do a self-check on the Biden administration specifically. I wanted to understand more about asylum, and and I have, and I've concluded that they they did a bad job. Now, let me say, and I'll I'll really finish the episode with this thought. I'm not gonna name anybody, but I know people who have come to this country and uh have asylum applications. I know some people who are in that situation. And the people that I know, and it's obviously very anecdotal, but these are good people. These are people with legitimate reasons for leaving where they left. And these are people who then got work authorization in the United States and who were holding down jobs, paying their Social Security taxes, paying their income taxes, raising children in this country. However, and remember, asylum, I talked about earlier in the show, asylum's different than your traditional path, right? So you get it, if you don't remember anything from this episode, remember that. Asylum's like, it's like a parallel trajectory, like they're trying to do the same thing, but it's a totally different thing under the law. And asylum is very narrow. So I talked about the asylum applications that kind of spiked, but the the grants of those applications really didn't spike. It's very hard to ultimately win asylum in this country. And for reasons that I don't fully understand, but probably includes underfunding of courts, uh, in the right kind of courts, these asylum applications can take years, like 10 years, to be decided. And there are probably people, and I'm just kind of, you know, giving you a guesstimate here, but there's probably people who showed up in our country in 2016, 10 years ago, and they've been doing the right thing, and they they had what I would call a credible application. They presented themselves at a port of entry, could be an airport, it could be a border station. They they did everything, they followed the law as they know it, and as has been stated by the Congress, they followed the law at the time, and they're paying taxes, and they're good citizens. They might be members of your book club, this sort of thing, raising families, good people. And one day they may have to go to an asylum court, and a judge may say, I know it's been 10 years, and I know thought I know you thought you were gonna be able to stay here, but you're not. It's actually over. And it's heart, it would be heartbreaking. Uh, but that's the reality. And folks, it goes back to the system is broken. And so, well, I'm gonna give Joe Biden blame for not doing his part. I think Bill Clinton did a great job on the border. I think Barack Obama did a great job on the border. I think Joe Biden did a really bad job on the border, and that has led to the consequences that I think you're seeing. I think it, I think it really had a lot to do with Donald Trump beating Kamala Harris, a lot to do with it. And now Donald Trump's gonna be in charge. And so maybe the lesson is don't ever make that mistake again. The Democrat, the Democrats will get the presidency at some point again. They need to pass immigration reform if Donald Trump doesn't do it first, and then they need to just follow the damn law at the border and not allow the narratives to to spin up that the borders are open. Uh, folks, immigration is one of the biggest topics that I care deeply about and I try to be informed about. I hope I gave you something this week as a takeaway. Uh, for now, though, that is the POV of POBIC.