A Nation of Immigrants Votes for Deportations
Hello and Happy New Year!
We are back, and we’ve got a lot of exciting things in store for 2025 that we are eager to tell you about soon. But for today: immigration, deportation, and the American Dream.
Despite its reputation among many on the political left, the United States has welcomed more immigrants than any other nation in history. Today, the U.S. is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. Even amid a heated political battle over the future of immigration, it’s undeniable that a core part of America’s national identity is its image as “a nation of immigrants.”
“We are the descendants of 40 million people who left other countries to come here to the United States to build a new life. To make a new opportunity for themselves and their children.”
– President John F. Kennedy
On the iconic Statue of Liberty are the welcoming words of Emma Lazarus:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Many Americans proudly trace their ancestry to those who migrated to the U.S. in pursuit of the American Dream. Most take pride in knowing that people around the world dream of building a life in the USA.
But immigration in the U.S. has always been complicated. Today, the country is also home to the largest population of unlawful migrants on Earth. In recent years, the U.S. southern border with Mexico has been cited as one of the most porous and chaotic in the world. Additionally, the U.S. has the most backlogged immigration courts globally.
Our episode today examines how the U.S. immigration system became so stubbornly, frustratingly, and dangerously chaotic—from legal loopholes exploited by cartels to the failed legislation of the 1990s aimed at curbing illegal migration, and from the enduring challenges of enforcement to the growing calls for building a wall and mass deportations.
Our guests are David Leonhardt, Senior Writer for The New York Times and author of Ours Was a Shining Future, and John Sandweg, former head of ICE under President Barack Obama.
As always, we love hearing from you. Send us an email at: hello@reflector.show
-Andy and Matt
Really enjoyed this episode. It felt educational, fair to the different perspectives, and had the right amount of depth when getting into some complicated issues.
Thank you for such a great episode! It's rare that I consume a piece of media about immigration that sheds light and not heat.
As an immigration lawyer that represents businesses in nuclear fusion, advanced robotics, biotech, hard sciences, etc. I am very familiar with the lack of home-grown talent in these areas. I add cost to the hiring process. If there were American PhDs and engineers in those fields, they would hire them and avoid spending money on me. However, there aren't a lot of plasma physicists working on the first wall problem inside a nuclear fusion reactor. My joke with folks is that if we get commercially available fusion, you can thank me that it happened in America because it's highly likely that I worked on one or more of the visas for the physicists involved. While many of my clients' employees can qualify for an O-1 extraordinary ability visa if I can put someone on an H-1B visa I do because it's a lot more objective.
The adjudication of extraordinary ability visas and green cards is insanely bad, unpredictable and often nonsensical. The criteria are also geared towards academics so it gets even tougher for folks who aren't in that space. I am tasked with explaining plasma physics to a non-technical immigration officer. It is maddening to get a request for evidence where the officer says that a MIT professor in physics isn't credible to discuss the international or national reputation of the O-1 applicant.
I wish folks could understand that for the very highly skilled it is incredibly difficult to get work permission in the U.S. -- it is not easy.
On the H-1B program I do think it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that my PhD super specialized level beneficiaries are competing against entry level tech folks who will be at the big IT contracting companies. I think reform is needed.
The other tough part about getting rid of per country quotas for employment based green cards is that you would basically cut off all green cards to every country in the world but India because of the existing backlogs. I think it would last 10 years of India only immigration. I would have to go back to the math. Backlog changes have already wreaked havoc for religious worker green cards in the EB-4 category.