Debunking Immigration Myths with Sociologist Ernesto Castañeda

Immigration remains one of the most contentious issues in American politics, often shrouded in misinformation and political rhetoric. In this episode of Faithful Politics, hosts Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram sit down with Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, sociologist and director of the Immigration Lab at American University, to explore the realities of immigration in the U.S.

Castañeda, co-author of Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions, provides a data-driven perspective on widespread myths about immigration, covering topics such as crime, economic impact, and border security. He explains why undocumented immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens, why the border wall is largely ineffective, and how mass deportations could devastate the economy.

The conversation also touches on the political discourse surrounding immigration, highlighting how anti-immigrant rhetoric affects elections and how Democrats and Republicans alike misunderstand voter attitudes on the issue. If you want to separate fact from fiction and better understand the real effects of immigration, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Guest Bio:

Dr. Ernesto Castañeda is a sociologist, professor, and director of the Immigration Lab at American University. He specializes in migration, urban issues, health disparities, and political mobilization, with a focus on Latino and immigrant communities in the U.S. and Western Europe. He is the co-author of Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions, which takes a data-driven approach to debunking common myths about immigration.

Resources & Links:

📖 Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions – Columbia University Press: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/immigration-realities/9780231203753

🔗 Ernesto Castañeda’s Immigration Lab – American University: https://theimmigrationlab.org/

📊 Follow Ernesto Castañeda on

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, we are so happy to have you here. I am your political host, Will Wright, and I am joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? doing well thanks Will Hey, and this week we have with us Ernesto Constantiniera. wait, Constantiniera. I practiced it. I was practicing before recording. He's a sociologist and director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at the American University. His work focuses on migration, urban issues, health disparities, marginalized populations and social movements, along with immigrant integration and ethnic political mobilization in the US and Western Europe and has laid all of this out in his latest book, Immigration Realities, Challenging Common Misperceptions, a book which he co-authored with Karina Sion, and they take a data-driven approach to debunking widespread myths about immigration. So hey, welcome to the show, Ernesto. Thank you so much Will, thank you Josh, it's a pleasure to be here with Yeah, I'm normally a fairly humble person, but like I'm feeling a little bit like big headed because I got two last names correct. And yeah, I'm feeling like I could just tackle the world because yeah, I'm pretty good. anyways, yeah. So tell us tell us a little bit about yourself. I know I kind of, you know, I was pushing through this this bio of yours, but you are you are the sum of more than just the words I'm reading. So tell us about yourself. Thank you so much. So yes, I'm a professor. I teach at a university in the sociology department. But I predominantly lead this research center, the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, where we work on grants, sometimes government-supported, sometimes nonprofit, USAV, projects to go into Latin America and look at issues of development, politics, economics, or looking at the well-being overall of Latinos in the United States. So from political behavior to health outcomes to migration patterns, et cetera. So we have a big research agenda. We have staff and a number of student researchers with me in the office. And also I direct a big project of the center, which is called the Immigration Lab, where we also have people in the field, students learning to be researchers that go and interview dozens of immigrants, recent arrivals, so people that are settled, and look at how they view politics, how they view faith, how they view... the present in the US, the future, the situation in their countries of origin. And we try to talk to the media and kind of inform on what's happening on the ground in immigrant communities in Latin America and try to bring research. of the cutting edge into public discussions because a lot of my, like this book that we're gonna talk about today, Immigration Reality, we work on it for over seven years. So academic research can take a long time. I am particularly slow. I take a lot of years before I publish a book, but conversations about immigration happen. every day and they can change a lot from week to week and there's a lot of misinformation, a lot of falsehoods, a lot of misstatements, sometimes on purpose, sometimes just out of ignorance that in the immigration lab we want to get into these public conversations bringing data, stories, narratives to change the picture because it's a much more complicated one and also it's much simpler than sometimes people imagine. That's so awesome. What got you interested in this field of study? Yes, so I came to the United States as an international student to study genetics. So was really into the lab sciences, but then little by little I discovered the social sciences and became really fascinated. So I wanted to do my PhD on the topic. And I came to New York some years ago and some colleagues, some professors were doing research with recent, it was early 2000s, recent immigrants, which were a growing community in New York City. And they needed somebody that spoke Spanish, that could interview them and learn about their experiences and go to the towns where they were coming from and understand why they were leaving. So I'm from Mexico myself, was born and raised there. Bilingual. So I became part of this research project and I became fascinated and it was so easy for me to talk to people like a human being and ask them about their families and they were missing their kids back home and you know normal things and so was able to gather a lot of data really quickly. A lot of people have written in academia about Mexican migration to the U.S. so then I complemented that for my doctoral student looking at Muslims in Spain and France and how that the role that religion played and how they the way they were racialized or talked about in the media, how it was similar or different in Western Europe and in the United States. And then I lived for some years in the Mexican, US-Mexican border teaching there. And I have been in Washington DC for 10 years. So I have a little bit of some experiences living in California, New York, Texas, Virginia now, working in DC, and also comparing this to what's going on in England, where I spent some time, Paris, Barcelona, and having done a little bit of field work in Mexico but also in North Africa to look at the similarities and differences. So that's a little bit of kind of where my bio and my research interests come in. But mainly the reason to write this book is because there's a lot of misinformation about migration. Part of it because a lot of the times people don't take the time to talk to immigrants or they feel that they don't want to poke around and ask them about something that may be very delicate like their immigration status. But then what happens is that some people in some, you know, they interface with immigrants a lot of the time. They don't react it because the immigrants may pass as locals or the assumption may be that they're just undocumented and they're asking about it they assume it but most immigrants in the US are not undocumented so they they book here is trying to fit that gap and really tell us what's going on. because oftentimes we hear platitudes about immigration when it's positive. It's either, the US is a country of immigrants or the moral imperative, right, of being the good Samaritan, welcoming the stranger, things that religion teaches us. And then we sometimes people help immigrants out of this religious commitment. I did in this study is see what the data was showing, what... the research of other people was showing. And I'm lucky to report, the take away from the book is that this is one of the... maybe rare cases, who are doing the right thing, morally, religiously speaking, and doing the thing that is in the benefit of the country, and also the thing that benefits immigrants. So doing the thing in a humanistic sense, in a religious, Christian sense, or other traditions. And what is just in the self-interest of the US, growing the economy, becoming more influential in the world, getting wealthier, continuing our culture, expanding, et cetera. All points for a pro-immigration policy. But unfortunately, the public thinks that immigrants are bad for a number of reasons and politicians are really afraid to give a positive image of immigration. So that's what we're trying to fix in the book because the data, the history, historical record and all that is on the side of a more humanistic, more open immigration policy. Yeah, I I love the fact that our country has had so much immigration. It's enriched my life so much. Right. The idea that we're all immigrants, obviously, you know, that's true for me, even though I was born here. My you if you trace my lineage back, we came here in Jamestown, immigrating from. immigrating from Europe. And so we came here. I know there's a lot of there can be a lot of controversy around colonialism, you know, but you know, the reality is what it is. And my family got planted in this nation and we all have come from somewhere eventually. Right. And when you trace it back long enough, and I think it's so important to understand the plight. of immigrants. of my really, really, really good friends have been born in other countries. Getting their perspective is fascinating to me to see how they just think in ways that challenge me. And I love hearing their stories. And it makes me really sad. you know, thinking about how much misconception there is. And you've alluded to that. And even I'm very ignorant of all the misconception. I I've heard the platitudes. I've heard, you know, the stereotypes in my life, but even the data. And I'm a data guy. I want to see what's going on, what's really happening, why people are even saying these, where these stereotypes are even coming from. And you've started to talk about this this thrust that's there, that's inspiring you to write this book. But I got to even dig a little deeper. Why is this book necessary now? And even thinking about the public discourse, specific events in recent years, how have they shaped the direction of our book or have they? And has it always kind of been something that, you know, is this like a perennial, what is called evergreen topic? or is it really important right now that we're getting this correct? Well, things, but Josh, it's a continuous issue. see nativism, exclusionary words and discourse, racism. It's recurring theme in American history and the history of many other countries. But particularly today, at this moment in 2025, it's important that the public gets more informed about immigration. this book is written for a wider public because we say early on in the book that There are experts that study migration. I've been doing it for 20 years and still there are things I don't know. So we shouldn't expect that everybody should be an expert on immigration. Nobody's an expert on theology and cannot be, right? There's specializations. So there's people that we study immigration as a process for a living. Then there's people that specialize in immigration law, which is a different aspect. And then there's a lot of people that specialize in different particulars of points in history, places of origin, et cetera. So... Nonetheless, a lot of citizens, they are often asked what's their view on immigration. And they are, Paul's take really seriously what they think, which is something that we do in democracy. But a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people are very open to give their opinion and their preferred policy for immigration when they would not do it about other areas. And then also, I also tell my students that not because you have been an immigrant yourself or your parents, You may have the experience and you have a lot to share and it's a particular Experience you have been through but that doesn't make you either an expert on immigration largely understood So that's why you have to there's a lot to learn from reading a book like this one or others that summarize the hundreds of researchers in the US and other countries that spent their lives looking very deep at the different aspects around immigration. So this book, more than anything, is a summary of those studies coming from legal studies, criminology, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, so mainly social scientists, but responding to, we sometimes open the chapters with quotes from news media articles that that's how most people learn about immigration, is from the news stories we see, which tend to be very pressing. by definition. The headlines have to be catchy, so they have to be a little alarmist. And oftentimes they talk about the exception of the things that are not the most common, but the most extreme. So that's why it's important to provide a larger context about how to understand the headlines that we offer here, even before this administration. So that's one of the reasons. And the book is indeed organized in 10 chapters. And each chapter is responding to a misconception, to a myth. That is something that is very commonly said and we try to show with a lot of data, a lot of numbers, a lot of studies, some argumentation, why it is wrong in the empirical sense, in the data sense, numerically, it's incorrect. We cannot tackle all the stereotypes, all the stigmas, we just tackle 10 out of many more that we could have addressed in other books. But we also do something in this book that some colleagues criticize, but I think it's very important and also put this book apart from other very similar books that are coming out around this time, is that we also are very open to make a moral case upfront and to say we think that in a humanitarian context that places human life and dignity as a goal and human rights as a given and all these things, then we say of right whether this policy has negative or positive effects in that moral sense, but also we talk about the effects on the economy, on the domestic product, on businesses and all that. And again, for enough immigration, these two arrows go in the same direction. So it should be much easier than we make it to be. I have two questions. The first one is just more definitional, if that's a word. But like when we talk about immigrants, we hear a lot of different names for them. We hear illegal immigrants, we hear legal alien, we hear whatever. And I'd love just to kind of get your sense of like what's... In your opinion, what's the most respectful term to categorize these folks? Thank you, and yes, exactly. Just starting with the terms is important because sometimes people are shy to ask, but that's key because we don't understand the same things. We were asked recently by this venue, The Conversation, to do a piece defining 10 terms. And the first one is immigration. So the way we understand it in academia and in the law is that an immigrant is somebody who was born in a different political unit, a country most of the times, and goes to a different country. So a Canadian coming to the US, an Indian coming to the US, and an American citizen moving for good to Germany and other country. So crossing these international borders is what makes an immigrant. Immigrant is from the point of view of the country they arrive to. So a Canadian arriving to the US, he's an immigrant in the United States. But for Canada, he's an immigrant with an E, somebody that left the country. And then sometimes they do it for political reasons, Syria or places, they are exiles. They're not going to be able to return safely until that regime ends, unless they want to come back and start a... the Bolshevik revolution like Lenin and other people, they're going to exile, prepare a revolution and then come back. But most other exiles wait until Castro or the dictator dies for that regime to end and come back. Most of the time people come for economic reasons, but today a lot of people are coming escaping violence and war. So we have people from Afghanistan, people from Ukraine, which are immigrants too, because they are... They're coming escaping for their life, but they're here in a temporary status. So I'm already, I'm already confused in the public. So maybe we'll restate it. Immigrant is a category from the point of view of the state. They're human beings like everybody else. They may have different religions and origins, but the state is the one that cares because they don't have the citizenship by birth. But a lot of the people naturalize and they... may die as citizens of the new place where they go to. And this is actually very much the case in Western Europe and the United States. Then there's this idea of, like we're hearing before, of people that arrive to Jamestown or in the Mayflower and then they stay forever in America. They burn the boats, right, and they don't plan to come back. But historically speaking, for whatever there's data, Polish people coming to the US in the 1800s, people from Italy, people from Eastern Europe many places It depends on the group, but between 30 and 60 % of them, so 50 % in average, half of the people that immigrate to the US after some years are like, thank you, I'm going back to Turkey, I'm going back to Israel, wherever I'm from, I'm going to go back. I studied, I worked, I saved, I did my purpose, now I'm going to retire, I'm going to go back to die in the home country. So immigration takes into account that it's a one and done, but oftentimes it's more visiting, going back and forth. And again, a lot of people self-divide. not because they don't love the country, not because they are forced to, but because they have family members that they want to go back into. again, don't, cameras are not in the airport seeing the people that are now, okay, I'm going back to Puerto Rico, I'm going back to the Dominican Republic. That is something that the media captures, but in social science, we see a lot of it. So migrant is a word that I prefer because that incants any movement. Going into a new place, leaving a place, moving temporarily, moving for good. And again, a lot of people may go to, they leave Haiti, they go to Chile, they work there for some years, there's no job. The pandemic happens, they leave Santiago, they go north, they arrive in Tijuana, Mexico, they work there for little while, then they arrive to Texas, then they go with their family members in Florida. There are some years they are sent somewhere else. So a lot of the people, once you move a place, it's very easy to move. So that's why there's a demand for labor. in Springfield, Americans are very reluctant to move nowadays. People that don't have a college degree are very likely to move the county that they were born into. People with college degrees and higher, around half of them have lived in two or three different states than the ones they were born into. But the rest of America, we are moving within the US, which is called internal migration, the least. that we have in American history. So a lot of the time was the expansion West and moving to California, going to Haiti, sorry, going to Hawaii, going to Puerto Rico. We don't have that anymore. So people are very settled. And again, most people now move for educational reasons. Where a lot of the internal migration is happening and where real migration is happening is within China. As we have moved our factories, it's a reality, to places like China, people have had to leave their families in rural, internal parts of China and move to the coast to work and send money back home like international migrants do. So it's internal migration. But for a long time, it was illegal in China to move states or provinces, you didn't have permission, but people did it for economic reasons. So a lot of the de-industrialization and kind of more sedentary patterns that we see in the US today are connected to increased mobility and an increase in the standard of living of people in China. So even internal migration mechanisms have a lot to do with relationships between countries. So what I'm saying is that we had to look at migration as something temporary, as something not only from the point of view of, these people arrived to my city. to my place which is not the same as a house because it's not your house you don't determine who's going to move into Richmond Virginia who's going to move into Washington DC it's open doors within the US and people come and go all the time and nobody complains that all people from Arkansas cannot live here they do and with international migrants people for cultural reasons and the states get very picky and just two more distinctions to to finish Only 3.5 % of the world population lives in a country different than the one they were born into. So people like me that I was born in Mexico, live here. I'm an exception worldwide, only 3.5%. Some countries receive more immigrants. In the US right now, probably around 14 % of the population is foreign born. That's been the case in most times in US history, except for the generation when the baby boomers were growing up. when Trump... Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, when all those folks that are in power were coming of age, there was a historical law in immigration. And the US has historically grown because of bringing people from abroad willingly or not willingly. But slavery, colonization, immigration have been the way to grow the population and the economy. Except after World War II, during the baby boom period, where the babies born in large numbers were the ones that grew the population and grew the economy and they happen to be white and we are still a lot of people were more age I still cannot opening to the idea that after 1965 there were more people from Asia, from Latin America and then maybe the Caribbean or Africa coming in, they still see that as an aberration. But if we look at the 250 years of American history, we are in a very, very, very common, very normal mundane period when migration is just another fact of life. I don't know if that helped. And then the legal immigration is just this fixation that that historically there was a way to come legally, which wasn't the case. People just came because there was a famine in Ireland and they were coming for opportunity, religious persecution. That's why a lot of the people came to the US to have this freedom of religion. That's still the case. So there was not a way to come legally until it became illegal to migrate to the US if you were from China with the Chinese Exclusion Act and then from Japan. So there was clearly racial and white national discourse. in Congress on the record talking about protecting the white race. was the Christian way of life in a way. That's what the Congress people were using. then the big immigration law in 1924 that puts quotas for countries in the world is trying to keep to favor the crops of the US. So meaning English, Protestant, Germans, Northern Europeans at the expense of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans. which more Catholic or Jewish were seen as a problem for a lot of people in power at the time. some of the discourses and things that we see today, again, are echoes from history. So the legality is something that that becomes a new thing only in the 1900s and is first applies against Asians. And then after the Bracero program ends with Mexico and people keep coming informally to work in agriculture in the Southwest and other places, then this label of of illegality, criminality is a stigma. a social stigma of being a second class non-citizen really becomes associated. And then in the 80s, there's this group sponsored by John Tanton, an open anti-immigrant, open white nationalist who funds all these organizations that have for decades been pushing that we need to have control of our borders, illegal immigrants, or the legal term is illegal aliens, which is dehumanizing. That's why we try not to use it. But that was it. legal term until Biden changed it. Probably the administration is going to change it back. But this legal thing is yes, some people come without visas or actually half of the people that are undocumented in the US today came with a visa, entered legally, but they overstayed their visa. like expats in Mexico, they enter legally but then they just continue their period. Or some of them cross indeed through the desert without going through customs, which was a big deal. want to pay if you're bringing things from abroad. In medieval cities, it was very important to go through the gates to enter into Paris so you will pay your taxes to the Lord locally. We still think about that, customs and border enforcement. But most Latinos, most Asians, most Black people in the U.S. today are citizens, speak the language, are legal. We're talking about maybe now 40 million people that are undocumented or illegal in the U.S., which is a lot of individuals, a lot of suffering, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of people in limbo. But we're talking about 3.3 % of the residents of the U.S. So it's really also not going to make or break the country. we're talking about a very small percentage of our population. It shouldn't be anything to lose sleep over. Okay, let me stop here. thanks. Yeah, that was a very good explanation that answered a ton of questions that I've always had just when talking about immigration. yeah, so that was extremely helpful. if you could, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about crime and migrants in this country. you know, I'll just... A little bit of background. My mom was born in Vietnam. came, she immigrated here in the 1970s sometime. Depending on who you're listening to or talking to, there seems to be two like contradictory thoughts about migrants in the country. One thought is, you know, my mom never commits any crime, is an outstanding citizen, which she is, you know, and I love her. And then on the other side, you've got my mom is a, you know, like gangster boss of some like crime syndicate. It's just like, it's just committing crimes and you know, like, like crazy. So like, what's, what's the real story on, on crime and folks that come here? Thank you Will, I really like your framework because... Alright, let me talk about the reality and then about the image. the stereotype out there is that an arrogant is very gender and is very racialized. So men of color, black or brown, that are foreign born are assumed to be criminal in national discourse, in representations, in the media, and there's a lot of data that that's how the police profiles them. Before... Frisk and the Frisking policy in New York City, was data recovered that, stop on Frisk, that there was a lot of racial profiling, no doubt about it. So that's the stereotype and again, the way that a lot of the authorities work and deportation numbers historically, since Bill Clinton, we see that is brown and black men from the Caribbean and Latin America that are mainly deported. regardless of criminal records. what the data shows is that the takeaway is that criminal rates, so the probability of doing a crime, is much lower for the foreign born than by those born in the United States, whatever race or ethnicity they are, whatever class. But even then, we have data that shows that those who are undocumented or illegal are less likely to commit crimes than people that have papers. In some numbers, it's let's say out of a hundred, it's fifty of fifty people that are US citizens. commit crime. again, this is just to give the proportions. Then 25 will be the number for the ones born abroad, and 12.5, so half of that, a quarter of that. That's what I'm using these numbers, which are completely fictional, just to give the percentage of the proportion, meaning that a non-documented immigrant is half than a documented migrant to commit crime, which is half than the U.S. citizen to commit crime. Now, in other words, we know that most American citizens don't commit violent crimes or property crimes most of the time, most often. It's very rare. It's a minority. People commit crimes all the time. Yes, we have a judicial system to deal with that. And it's very good in the US. mean, there's this overall little impunity. Then a... The people that are immigrants are also less likely to do so because they're coming here for the American dream, to study, to start a business, to work really hard for the future of their kids. So they have a lot invested in the migrant project that they don't want to ruin it by committing a crime and jeopardizing their legal status if they are green card holders. Then the ones that are undocumented, they're especially worried about doing anything that could get them stopped by the police for a headlight or seeming to be driving under the influence of alcohol, selling drugs. The risk is literally being sent back to a country that they spend a lot of money to come here. They have probably family members here or family members there that depend on their income here. They will spend some time in prison and then be deported. a stigma in their countries of origin of being a failure because they couldn't succeed in the U.S., being deported, which is a stigma, and then being seen as criminals because they were coming from prison or were expelled for committing a crime. So there's a lot to lose. And then your children that could have become citizens in the U.S., then they also lose that opportunity if you were going to be to bring them or raise them in the U.S. So for all those reasons, there's a lot of incentives that why an immigrant wants to Be especially. careful because it's not only about a fine or being told not to do that by the police, but the police take is much more. So it's not that immigrants are more moral or more necessarily, it's those incentives. Now, going back to what you were saying, Will, it doesn't mean that everybody that commits crimes that are citizens or white, and they commit crimes, not everybody is a bad person necessarily. It be a bad situation, they may be drunk, something bad happened, and there was accidents. Immigrants that are illegal, they are not perfect, They are human beings like everybody else, so they will have more flaws and more strengths. And so are undocumented immigrants. They are people like anybody else, so they are not angels. They don't have a shortcut to heaven. They struggle like everybody else, right? But these discourse, especially around refugees, people escaping from an enemy regime or somebody that helped the US forces in Afghanistan and Vietnam, in other places where the US have been involved historically, we have that duty to help them and we feel this sympathy. But then, for example, when the DREAM Act has tried to be installed, it hasn't been successful. But it's like, look at this valedictorian student. She's a very straight-A student. She's doing this volunteering, very active in her church, blah, Or look, they are serving in the military. We create these images of the perfect person as the perfect immigrant as deserving of status. But then if somebody was a little bit imperfect, maybe they drank and drank drank one time, or they are found to have marijuana once in a while or something, then, OK, these are bad immigrants. We should deport them. So that's also the pressure that an immigrant has to feel to be perfect. And no matter how well you behave, you're still going to be seen as a potential criminal. So it's a lot for an immigrant to deal with and also a lot of immigrants from Latin America at least that I talk to a lot. If they don't have papers, again, most of time it's not because they don't want to, there's not a line to get into, they will love to have papers and regularize. They will be able to pay $10,000, they'll pay them. Learn English, no problem. You put the conditions, they would do that. But there's not a way for many of them to regularize. Since 1986, they have been no amnesty and it's very hard for many people to get legal status. So they are called illegal by others, are called wetbacks, they are called other things. And I tell them that it's the law that puts them in that situation. It's not the morality or their internal moral compass of religiosity, faith, et cetera. It's really a legal structure that puts them there. Nonetheless, many of the people internalize that and feel ashamed, feel dirty, feel sinful because of that legal status in which they are, which is also, it's a heavy thing for them to to continually atone. I mean, that's heartbreaking. That's heartbreaking. You know, I'm a pastor and I have a lot of compassion for people that are feeling that sense of shame and, you know, I hate that they have to feel that way. You know, it's a tough thing because, you know, it's a complex issue. It feels right, it seems to me and that's, mean, from what you're saying, it's very, very complex. You know, we don't, we want to have some kind of pathway to citizenship, it seems to me. We want to have, we don't want to just have open borders. It seems to me again, like the... having no, you know, no, uh, that just doesn't seem like a, like a good policy to just have a massive influx of people that we maybe can't take care of. And Igor, you can, you can speak to that. I don't, I don't have the data, but just the concept itself, right? I'm just thinking conceptually that it doesn't seem like that would be like the right path forward, but it's weird to me that people, it seems like people cannot find a way to become citizens that are here illegally. Like what is getting in the way? Why is this so difficult to establish something where people could say, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to go through this checklist. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to hear the requirements. Here's what you need to do by this time. Like, is there anything like that? And how are we stacking up against other countries that are that face similar situations maybe in Europe, maybe in Asia. I'm not really sure how you know, I'm not sure which countries people are trying to get in more than others. I don't have that data. But how does the US stack up? How how is our immigration system doing as compared to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, something like that, or the European Union. I'd love to get your insight on that. Yes, Josh, a lot of great questions in there. you were talking a minute ago about our immigration system not been working well because there's not a way for people to realize the status even if they want to. So that's an agreement. People on the left or the right agree that our current immigration system in the US, the legal system doesn't work because there's not enough pathways to come legally, especially if you are lowly educated, doing quote unquote low skilled jobs. And a lot of people are living in the shadows undocumented right now with that vulnerability, with that shame. nothing that has been done to fix that. And this was something that was created by US immigration laws. That's what I was saying earlier, they have changed through the decades. So the only ones that can help, that created this and can fix it is Congress. And in order for this to happen, you will have to be a bipartisan agreement to get the majorities that you need. You'll have to have the pastors, the academics, the nonprofits. enough Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of Congress and without a presidential veto to get a new system to create that checklist, those compromises that people agree that that will be fair. And that's a moral, that's a political, that's a big discussion that should be had. But we are not there yet. We haven't been there since the early 80s when we had the immigration reform that Reagan signed into law. That's why a lot of people were able to regularize their status. And that was the president of Notre Dame, Notre Dame University, I was going to pronounce it in French, sorry. In Notre Dame, he was a... a pastor, a religious scholar, a priest, a Catholic priest, and he brought his religious faith along with a Republican and a Democrat, one from the House, one from the Senate, and they did the Masoli-Simpson Act, and that's what regularized the number of people. And they said, okay, but we are not going to, it's on an open border, we don't want any more people to come, we are going to penalize if people get hired and they're undocumented. So they regularized the status of 2.5 million people that were in the country. at that point undocumented, but they failed in how to prevent that from happening again. So here we are again 40 years later. They didn't solve the issue to the future. They solved it retroactively. So we have the challenge of how to regularize in a way that the... populations, it's as fair the people that are in the country that have been paying taxes, being here for 10 years, whatever conditions you want to put and the other ones and ask them to leave, that could be fair. And then also how you do it in the future. And that was the second part of your question. How do other countries do it and what's happening in other regions? First of all, is that through most history, most of the time, immigration has been something voluntary in a way that families or individuals It takes a lot to be a pioneer and leave your country, go to another place. It's a lot. So, or war, right? There was a lot of people displaced with World War II. So for example, Jewish people ended up in, some of them ended up in New York City, some ended up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, looking for the same economic opportunities in places at the time that were booming economically. So people go to global cities like New York City, Paris, London, Barcelona, because there is... There's jobs, there's opportunity, there's growth, but also because there's people from all over the world, there's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of exchange of ideas, there's inter-religious dialogue. So what makes these cities so special, Venice and historically Rome, Istanbul, it was this confluxion of cultures and people from around the world. So you could say that those cities being rich attracted immigrants, but then the immigrants increased the richness. and the imperial and trade and business impact and reach of these cities. So it's the same today. Who are the places that have more immigrants? They're the richest countries in the world. So Western Europe, Scandinavian countries, the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the US. That's basically it. And those countries work really hard to reduce the number of people that they see coming as poor or needy. So a couple of the stereotypes are that people move to places that have a strong welfare state. But if that was the case, then people wouldn't be coming to the US, right? Everybody would be going to Sweden, for example. Much, much real welfare state, free access to health care, things that they have in Canada, we don't have in the US. But in terms of absolute numbers, the biggest amount of people are coming to the US. So it's not the welfare state. Because in terms of proportions of foreign born, France, Germany, Spain and the US will look very similar. Places with many more foreigners are Switzerland, which per capita is wealthier, is happier than us. Saudi Arabia. and the Arab Emirates, Dubai and other cities couldn't survive without immigrants, couldn't grow, couldn't have the buildings they have built without people coming from other countries. What those countries have done is much worse than what the US does. Because then foreigners from India, from the Philippines, etc. They go legally, they work. Sometimes they can bring family members, sometimes not. Often they come single. They cannot convert, they cannot bring the Bible, they cannot proselytize. So there's a lot of limitations to their religious freedom. But more worrisome, they can never become citizens of the United Arab Emirates. to be forever foreigners. Even the children born and raised there, they'll never have access to the benefits of being a citizen of those. So that's something that becomes an intergenerational second-class status of non-citizen. So it goes towards the creation of a caste system. So that's something that these are rich countries that got rich really quick. They have very small populations and they don't have the environment. So they needed these foreigners to come. That's a model that we don't want. There's a model of other rich countries like Japan, Korea, China, grew a lot with investment from the US with technology, investment in education, blah, blah, They are decreasing. Those countries are going down economically speaking. Their growth rates are decreasing in the case of China or negative already like Japan because the population is declining, more deaths than babies like we have in the US and most parts of the world now. But they don't have immigration. They have decades of making it really miserable for a non-Japanese to move to Japan, even if they were Korean, very hard for a non-Chinese that is not a millionaire to have a good life in China, they're gonna pay the cost for that. They're gonna shrink population-wise economy. And yes, there a lot of people, but still, if you're a city or a country, you wanna keep growing in the system that we have, economically speaking. So people are going to... places where they have family members already established there. And that's often the case because the country, so France had a big impact. presence in Algeria, in Morocco, for a time in Vietnam. So a lot of people go there, right? The US had a presence in Central America during the civil wars in the 80s. We had a presence in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. People from those countries live in the United States. So the colonial past, like those people from Pakistan, from Bangladesh, from India, in England, because England was there. So those partners, those partners that get established with the colonial process, they continue after independence and they become migration patterns. So it's not random. And again, the majority of the people want to stay home. They want to stay with their family members, with the churches, with the pastors. They don't want to go far away if they can avoid it. So even if you had, again we can discuss later on, but even if you had open borders like we have within the United States, in theory we could all live in what's your favorite state? Hawaii, California, you name it, Puerto Rico. We could move there, the three of us legally tomorrow. We probably are not going to because we have something that ties us to where we are. And again, everybody could move. but we don't, right? In Europe, any Italian could move and be in Sweden. Any British could move and, well, before, every person living in the north, cloudy, rainy part of France, they could move to southern Spain. Most people working age, most young people don't want to do that and don't do it. So what we see is people displaced by war, by other issues that are the big issue, and then the displacement is just an after effect of that. Last example of how you question us, how the US compares to other countries. Anglo colonies, Canada, New Zealand and England, they have a point system when they are very selective of who immigrates legally. So if you have a college degree, if you have a PhD, if you're a scientist, if you're a top artist, you get points and it's easy for you to migrate legally. if you have a lot of money. So that works for them because they need to attract people. But there's also a lot of people that come undocumented. There's a lot of illegal immigrants from Africa and other parts of the world living in England, living in those countries. So it doesn't really solve for that problem. then it's the US, we don't have to do that because the talented, the smartest of the world, the crop of the crop, they already want to move to our universities, to our cities, to our economy. So we don't have to, we didn't have to use to compete and to make people to come around. We don't know who will be in 10 years. If we're in that position, that will be bad for the US. And then the US has a lot of different immigration realities. So if you're in New York, you can have your culture, your religion, where you have, you're respected in the streets for the most part. In Barcelona, it's copying that model. And because they have their own language in relation to Spanish and Catalan, they're very good at respecting the people from Bangladesh, Pakistan as Muslims, and they give them money for the the religion. People from Latin America, if they want to venerate the bridge in Guadalupe, they can do that and they allow them to do that and they give them resources for that and respect that. Immigrants in Barcelona become Catalan and learn the language very quickly because they are able to keep their, for the Colombian, Ecuadorian, wherever they're from, Moroccan, and they can also become, become, become, Barcelonians is not a contradiction. It's very successful for the economy, for the mental health of the people and for the political project of Catalonia. In the US, New York has that, San Francisco some cities some others not so much, Arizona but France has this model where it's very hard to be undocumented, most people are actually documented so once you get deported because you cannot rent an apartment, open a bank account, get a cell phone without showing your papers, it's a very... the state has really control of everything going on so it's very tough to be a foreigner and then if you speak, if you sound, if you think like the elite in France it doesn't matter if your parents are from Asia, Africa or whatever you become part of the elite it's very cultural but if you want to be non-Christian, which is the majority, non-Catholic. You want to be that very publicly, there's no place for you. You have to assimilate, and the Republican, in the French sense, is you have to think as a collective and don't, or deal with the state as an individual, and ask for welfare benefits or for religious accommodations one-on-one, but not a religious congregation or a pilgrimage. Again, Catholics do it, but if you're a friendly, other religious minority, that is looked upon. You don't want to be. you don't want to participate, and the left, the center, and the right are against that. It creates a lot of conflict between the minorities and the majority group, a lot of unemployment, a lot of discrimination. It's not the model that America wants to follow. The US is so good at making people from all around the world, in two generations, the children of, it doesn't matter where your parents are coming from, you're going to think very much like everybody else in America. We are very good at making the problem of people from around the world, they become American really quick. So much by the third generation, many people become anti-immigrant. It's again a story that repeats itself because we're very good at recreating what it means to be American and creating a better culture with contributions from around the world. But for English and American mainstream culture is going to win because it's so prevalent in the US and around the world. So immigrants don't pose a cultural threat to American culture. That's really enlightening. I swear, I'm learning so much from this interview and I just want to thank you. We're not done yet. I have a couple more questions, but I just want to interject that for a second. I love to switch gears and talk about solutions for the immigration problem, if you will, in the country. I know as a student of politics, been following the immigration debate for several years. And it seems like the latter part of Biden administration, they had a bill that was a bipartisan bill by Senator Langford. He's a Republican senator for Oklahoma. And it had a lot of provisions in it, from my reading anyways, that would have, you know, ease some of the congestion at the border, you know, by bringing in more beds, more judges, you know, all the sort of like structural elements you need to accommodate for the influx of migrants. I know Congress just passed recently another, you know, quote unquote immigration bill called the Lakin-Reilly Act, which is named after a person that was killed from somebody that migrated to this country. Very unfortunate, but this bill purports to solve a problem that it doesn't really solve. And at least again, in my reading, because the nature of the bill is, you know, if you are jaywalking and you don't have papers, you're going to jail. But because there's a shortage of beds, we can only fit so many people into the detention center. So we bring in this jaywalking migrant, but then we release, you know, a MS-13 person because there's not a bill. I know in your book you mentioned some solutions to include your thoughts on a border wall. I'd love for you to maybe first talk about the border wall, whether or not this is an effective tool for this problem. And then if not, what are some solutions? Sure, well, so the portal wall doesn't work. I can see how it can be appealing, it's a good symbol. Again, people tend to think of a country like a house. It's not the same, but you're like, okay, I feel afraid in my house was the best way. I'm to put a fence around it, cameras control, and then nobody's going to come and rob it. That makes sense if you are a rancher, if you have a house and you're in a high-crime area. That's the most rational thing to do. And I can understand that feeling. Countries are very different, especially the US, when a lot of trade, a lot of back and forth happens in both the northern and the southern border of the US. There's millions of people coming and going all time and it's a circular thing so you need to have that open to trade and it is. The border wall is the idea again that Mexican immigration has been going on for more than a hundred years but Mexico is a country that is also getting older so the percentage of people now that are new immigrants that are coming from Mexico is smaller than it's been in over a hundred years. So the idea was when the Bracero Dislegal West Guest Worker Program ended, then people would come through the urban areas, San Diego, El Paso, other border areas, and then get confused with most population locally who are Latino too. Then little by little we started policing those cities, then people would move to the desert. And then it's like the idea is, okay, if we wall the desert and the areas close to the city, then people will stop coming. And again, it's a good logic. It makes sense intuitively. But what happens is that then you stop the... the flows of the rivers in the border. You stop wildlife from crossing naturally, from coyotes like the animals to other fauna that gets affected by this. For people that live there and commerce, then you have to go around a long distance to get to college, to go to the hospital. And again, it's both ways. But in terms of immigration, when it was informal, you would pay a guy to cross you to the desert to get to a job that was waiting for you. Then we see that more and more, and this is going on for many decades, but now it's more dangerous and more expensive than ever to pass the border without permission, without being detected. And whenever that happens, the number of migrant deaths increases. There's more people that succumb to the desert. They get injured, they fall. And there's colleagues that count and find human remains in the US-Mexico border, in border areas all the time. Very similar to what happens between Africa and Europe. People going into boats to try to make it, and around half are going to drown. So it's a big human cost to this. And we're talking about women, children, 90 % non-crisis. criminals who die in the process. On necessary costs that the North seems to be willing to have so that it doesn't seem that they are open. But most importantly, the two things. The more expensive it is to cross the border, the better business it is. So the more more organized crime now really is starting to enter more than ever before because it's more profitable nowadays. We're making it in a way that it's going to be more profitable to traffic people than to traffic drugs. So then people are going to do it. And then the only ones that can do these tunnels underneath the wall that people are doing that we just find one in Ciudad Juarez del Paso no long ago, it's the drug traffickers that had that type of money that infrastructure. to do that investment that they know is going to pay off as a business, illicit business down the line. But that's like all the organized crime can do that. The Mexican government is not in the business of doing that. You're not going to have a legitimate business doing that. It's not American businesses. It's going to be organized crime doing that. It's not terrorists. It's not to bring down the US government, but it is to make money with illicit drugs and then trafficking people. So for Mexico-US trade, and more and more we see now that coming to Canada also, so many legal flaws. The fentanyl is in going up coming up from the north. It's not the main issue. It's not but it is coming more. It's been more manufacturing Canada and coming from from the the northern border that is more open. But it's because there's no avenues to come legally. People would rather pay a lawyer and an earner and have money to stay in a hotel and and to have money for savings until they get a job so they don't have to rely on a shelter in New York City or another city. So we're creating those problems. And then after the pandemic what we have seen is a decrease in Mexico and migration and an increase in people coming from escaping organized crime, gang members in Guatemala, in Honduras, escaping the political regime of Maduro, if they are journalists and they escaping political persecution, people escaping organized crime in Ecuador, etc. So they were coming to the border wall, which was the way you have to build it. You have to build it on US land, all of it. Both sides of the border have to be on the US. So if you step outside of the world, in most places you're already in US territory. So then US law kicks in and international law kicks in. So you can raise your hand and say, Hi, I'm Ernesto. I'm asking for asylum. Please take me, take my digits, take my name, take my photo, take my details, put me in the system and take me to the immigration judge so I can make my case for asylum. The Biden administration didn't have the amount of personnel and all that to do that in a fast way. So you will see the lines of people from Haiti. countries lining at the border but they were not trying to rush and to pass undetected and to pass illegally they were following the law the news kept calling and illegals at the border blah blah blah but no they were asking for asylum that after the Holocaust and World War II we said never again so if people are escaping religious persecution genocide etc we're gonna welcome them rest of the world so people are coming that to make that case so again you can you go to the wall and the wall becomes the place when you are a border patrol okay take me and that's what was happening. So the border wall could be beautiful, but it was just an infrastructure for the arrival of people asking for asylum. So what is happening now is that Mexico is the one that is now not letting people get to the border because the wall can be there, but it's not going to stop somebody asking for asylum or a minor that the US could say, okay, you are less than 18. I had to treat you in a particular way. have to treat your support, your rights or a family unit unless Trump wants to separate them again. You have to, cannot imprison a family. a unit for so long there's not enough units and it's also against US law. So again a wall it's irrelevant in those contexts. Man, is that's probably the best explanation I've ever heard of like what's really kind of going on with the US law and why, you know, it's just so symbolic. Hey, let's build a wall. Let's build a wall. And it gets people riled up. But then there's no sense of actually what happens down there on on the border. And how do people actually get processed? I've never heard about the US asylum. They never talk about that in any. any articles that I read it just it's there's so much that it's just there's so much ignorance that reigns in this and now I just really appreciate your I appreciate your heart I appreciate the book that you've written I appreciate you coming on here Ernesto and spending some time with us how can people follow your work and how can they yeah keep keep being a part and and be positive change in this in this immigration issue Sure, so I live in the immigration lab. not the one at Stanford, but we are at American University and we have a number of social media accounts and we have a blog where we try to either that or something called aula.net where we publish lot of short pieces where we talk about the importance of asylum, are refugees, what are the pros and cons for the general public and that's like a public service that we do that we spend a lot of time to get the things out there and the most active in blue sky. I'm loving the conversations there and the freedom of expression and everything. That's where I post the most, or Ernesto Castañeda. the books, the Immigration Reality is on Amazon, but it's published by Columbia University Press, a non-profit, so if you go and buy it from their website, it's better for them. They don't make a lot of money selling books. It's a good university, but the press, know, it's a struggle. So if you can buy it from them, it's better. Or an independent bookstore in your neighborhood or independent bookstores online, they will also get the book to you. But yeah, it's also in Amazon. on if it's more convenient. And I have published another book about Central American families and separation also in the last few months. if I made real quick, if I didn't reply, we'll answer about politics. Can I talk about it for two minutes? All right. Perfect. I remember that I didn't address that and that's faithful politics. politics is very important here because at the end of the day, this is a political question. Again, the data and ethics goes for helping the immigrant. How we do it, how we solve, what are the solutions? I can give a number of them and there are some proposals in the book, but there has to be political will among independents, Republicans and Democrats, among different churches. So it's important that we have these conversations. And right now, 2025, we see this talk and this place about trying to do mass deportations. And a lot of still the polls, most of the people prefer an amnesty that became a dirty word at some point, but it's not a dirty word, a regularization. a pathway to citizenship, then they favor deportations. That's across the board, all parties. The Republicans less so, but the independents and Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of regularization, very opposed to deportations. So first of all, it has become polarized, but it's the Republicans driving the expulsion, which is just a fact. It used to be more bipartisan. Most Republicans used to be more open to business-friendly policies. So that's one thing. But then the politicians have become more extreme, it seems, in their language. So that's one thing that seems apparent. We did a study here in the Immigration Lab where we have been looking at the campaign materials of candidates in competitive races. And we've been calling that races that have been won 10 % with a 10 % margin by one party or the other. And something very interesting that we have seen since 2018. First of all, the number of people using anti-immigrant campaigns has actually gone down. It's less and less candidates that do so at the governmental, senate, and house level, the federal house. And what is also very interesting is that in 2018, having an anti-immigrant campaign or a pro-immigrant campaign, was 50-50 who was going to win if you correlated those two things. But then since those elections, and it replicates beautifully in 2024 and 2022, in competitive races, any states across the country, the candidates that did not have an anti-immigrant campaign campaign were more likely to win than the ones that were anti-immigrant. So there's this false belief amongst consultants and advisors for both parties. And the problem being the ones advising the Democrats that if you have a pro-immigrant discourse or votes or policies that you're supporting, you're going to pay for that in the polls. But that is not true. It's actually the other way around. You're going to benefit from that because more communities are going to come and support you. And if somebody is going to vote for the no immigration for building the world, your candidate is one candidate. It's the guy whose issue. So and we see that in Europe a lot. When center or center left parties validate the anti-immigrant discourse of the extreme right, they end up strengthening the right discursively, but also they do better in the elections. So the Democrats, they think it's not to move to the center or to compromise with immigration. It's the opposite to go for values and speak against mass deportations like they are very openly doing right now. The ones that lost the elections. Now they are criticizing Trump for the mass deportations. I think rightly so. But when they were campaigning, many of them were shy and rather not say anything. They were not saying yes, go migration, go deportations, but they were not making the positive case about what's happening in 2022. Another data from the Migration Lab. In 2022, immigrants saved $81 billion of money to their countries of origin. We did the calculation. And that results at end of the day, they contributed $2.2 trillion to the U.S. economy. That's 8 % of the GDP. Just recent immigrants that send money abroad, which is not all immigrants. Many of them are going to be undocumented. So that's larger than the economy of Canada. So if you deport all immigrants, so let's say you deport half of undocumented immigrants and their family members don't follow them, you're going to have a decrease in the economy of 4%. That will be worse than we had during the pandemic, worse than we had during the 2008 crisis. At a time when population of the US is going down, we need more immigrants. And the GDP growth of the US in the last years has been 2.42%. So if you deport half of the immigrants, you're already putting all of us in a crisis mode. for no real need. Most of these immigrants are people of faith, are Christian, are Catholic, are evangelicals, and they are not trying to change the country. They want to be part of the mainstream. They want to be part of the big group. They want to show that they belong so much that many of them did vote for Trump. So it's not a replacement. It's a reproduction of the American culture and ethos and moral values that immigrants are doing here. But the Democrats have to be more clear that they propose something different, that they are in favor of immigration because of all that it brings and not be afraid that if they are seen as pro-immigrant, stuffed on the border, all these things, that they're going to lose elections. The data shows that it's actually their way around. So that's again, just to bring it briefly back to politics. It's a big issue and again, there's a lot of misunderstanding there by candidates. I love that and I hope that the people who are listening are really paying attention when you're saying that immigration is not a, it's something we need to embrace and we need to as a people and I feel very strongly about this. It makes us better and I really hope that we can start to change minds and this will take a little bit step towards that. Ernesto, thank you so much for being on the program. a real pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much Josh, thank you so much Will for the invitation. Have a good one. And to our listeners and viewers guys, thanks so much for joining us. Make sure you share this. If you're watching on YouTube, like and subscribe, hit the notification bell. We try to get you really thought provoking content that adds value to your life, that gets you thinking about things in a different way. And I know that this conversation has been no different than any other and it's a level of sophistication in the way that it's helped you think. So please share this. Please support us in that and until next time guys keep your conversations not right or left but up God bless we'll see you next time