The Crisis at the U.S. Southern Border, With Dara Lind

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is U.S. immigration policy. With me to discuss the crisis at the U.S. Southern border is Dara Lind. Dara is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a freelance journalist covering immigration. She previously reported on U.S. immigration policy for Vox, where she co-hosted the podcast The Weeds, and at ProPublica. Dara recently wrote, "What We Know about the Senate Negotiations That Could Wreck Asylum in the U.S.," for Immigration Impact, a project of the American Immigration Council. Dara, thank you for coming on The President's Inbox.

LIND:
Oh, thanks very much for having me.

LINDSAY:
If we may, Dara, I'd like to start with trying to get an understanding of the nature of the challenge at the southern border. As I understand it, over the past three years we have seen a surge in people crossing the southern border. The number of people apprehended for crossing the border without documentations in each of the past two years has exceeded 2 million. That compares with a number of less than five hundred thousand over the prior decade. Why are we seeing this surge?

LIND:
So there are a few things going on here, obviously. First of all, it's important to remember that it's still been a little bit less than a year since the end of the Title 42 policy which was put in place in March, 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and was kept in place despite ostensibly being a public health measure, was kept in place through last May because-

LINDSAY:
So let me stop you right there.

LIND:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
For people who don't remember what Title 42 was or are just sort of lost once we start invoking different sections of the federal code, what did Title 42 do?

LIND:
At the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration identified a previously extremely obscure provision in federal law that allows the president to prohibit the introduction of people or goods if there's a concern about introducing diseases into the U.S. and said that because of that and because of the concern about COVID-19, that people could not enter the U.S. without papers. And what that ended up meaning in practice was that the federal government argued because this is a public health law, not an immigration law, we're not bound by the process that immigration law specifies for what happens when we apprehend someone. Which meant that they didn't have to give someone who said that they feared return to their home country or return to another country, they did not have to screen them for asylum, which is what immigration law requires.

So what in practice that meant was that certainly during the remainder of the Trump administration and to a lesser extent during the Biden administration. The Biden administration was never implementing Title 42 at all for all people at all points. It was kind of a patchwork of here and there, and sometimes families would be included and sometimes they weren't. But when Title 42 was being enforced against someone, they could, depending on what nationality they were, they could be sent to Mexico in a matter of hours or they could just be held for a few days and then summarily return to their home countries. Technically not deported, but without any chance to seek asylum. So-

LINDSAY:
Okay. So Title 42 comes to an end a little more than a year ago?

LIND:
Yeah, a little less. It was May of 2023.

LINDSAY:
Seems like more than a year ago, but I'll go with you that that is in fact less than a year ago. So that's one factor. What are the other factors at play here?

LIND:
The trends that we've seen over the last... I would identify the beginning of what we're seeing now, this kind of border and immigration regime, I would identify the beginning of that as sometime about ten years ago, 2013, 2014. You may recall that there was a border crisis in 2014 under Obama that was largely unaccompanied children, mostly teenagers from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. That was kind of the first iteration of something we've seen over and over in the subsequent time period of there being more people coming in than the federal government has infrastructure or resources to process and the resulting bottlenecks get called a crisis. Sometimes that looks like overcrowding in border facilities or people including children dying in border facilities because of lack of medical care. Sometimes it's, as we see right now, people getting released into communities that do not have the resources to take care of them or support them. And the federal government doesn't have legally any responsibility for such people, and so the bottleneck happens at that point.

The thing that has united all of these is that there is, in many cases, people are not single adults who can easily be deported. That means that in some cases they're unaccompanied kids, in some cases they're families, and in many cases they are expressing a fear of return to their home country, which again, under immigration law obligates the U.S. government to at least give them a chance to argue that they should be able to present an asylum claim here.

LINDSAY:
Dara, can I ask you to drill down on that a bit?

LIND:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
Because I see a number of words tossed around in these conversations and I'm not sure they mean the same thing. I often hear the word migrant, or you can hear immigrant, you hear refugee, you hear asylum seeker. Are those categories all the same or are they different?

LIND:
I personally, and this is a bit idiosyncratic of me, I think that migrant is an appropriate umbrella term, and that's because asylum and asylee and refugee both refer to specific legal processes in U.S. law and in international law.

LINDSAY:
These are subsets in a way.

LIND:
Yes, exactly. There are lots of people who argue that because the historical implication of the word migrant has been economic migrant, which in U.S. law and generally is kind of seen as in opposition to you are either a political refugee or you're an economic migrant, that using the term migrant is inappropriate when we're talking about people who are in large part fleeing some form of persecution. The reason that I find that unhelpful right now is that we're dealing with a tremendously diverse population of people coming in. This is what experts call mixed migration. Some people do in fact have fairly straightforward asylum cases based on political persecution in countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Of course, many of those people don't themselves understand that that is what they have. It is really impossible to overstate the level of ignorance of U.S. immigration law, even among citizens of the United States, much less people who are coming into the U.S. for the first time.

LINDSAY:
Just on that point, I believe it's the Refugee Act of 1980 in which Congress put into law a UN convention for granting asylum to migrants who, and I'll quote it here, "A well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion." So if I understand you correctly, people are coming in and claiming a right to stay in the United States because they believe they qualify for asylum.

LIND:
Well, what's interesting is that when the government gets super, super overwhelmed in terms of its ability to process people, which is what we've seen over the last year, instead of bothering to ask because that requires someone to be held in custody, it requires an asylum officer who's available to interview them, et cetera. The U.S. has often just taken large swaths of people and said, "Okay, we're going to assume you're claiming asylum. We're going to stipulate that part of the process. We'll put you straight into the queue for an immigration court hearing, which is what would have happened had you passed your screening interview." And so what we're seeing right now is that a lot of people are just being assumed...It's as if they're being assumed asylum seekers by default. That means that I have anecdotally seen some people who don't necessarily understand that what they're doing is starting an asylum process.

This is especially true for people who are...The U.S. government has created an app called CBP One that allows people to schedule appointments at ports of entry, therefore preventing them from having to commit a federal misdemeanor by engaging in illegal entry. And many of them do not understand that the point of that appointment is to start an asylum process. It's just that they understand that as being a way to get into the United States. And so it's this coordinate plane, right? There are people who have stronger claims and people who have less strong claims, and then there are people who have a lot of knowledge of the system and people who don't. And there are people in all four of those quadrants. For every former teacher from Venezuela who says that the reason she left Venezuela is that she couldn't get a job, but then when you drill down on it, she had to leave her job because she was engaging in anti-government protests, which means that she is, in fact, under U.S. law, a conventional asylum case. There are people who when asked about what they think about their likelihood of asylum or what their plans are for their asylum case will just kind of say, "I am not really thinking about that."

So it makes it awfully difficult, especially because here's the other really big part, when we talk about how diverse the population of people coming in is, in the twentieth century, it was assumed that the typical person coming in at the U.S.- Mexico border was a single Mexican man looking for work. And then a decade ago it started to be the case, and eventually more informed news consumers updated their priors on this, that most of them were coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. That's not true anymore either. And it's not that it's been replaced by another subset of countries, although Venezuela is a much bigger population, Cuba is a much bigger population than it used to be, Haiti.

But in general, it's just more diverse and it's not limited to people coming in, people in this hemisphere either. The root through the Darién in Panama has become a fairly well-established smuggling route for both people who have come through, people coming up from South America, people coming from the Caribbean to South America, and then coming up, and people flying into South America from Africa, from South Asia. And all of that means that it's really, really hard to make blanket assertions about, oh, these people do or do not qualify for asylum. In theory, there's supposed to be this entire court process to decide that, but to an extent, that wasn't the case seven years ago, much less twenty years ago. It's really hard to look at this population and go, well, we can predict how this process is going to end for all of them.

LINDSAY:
Okay, understood. So we have a change in the composition of the migrant flow into the United States.

LIND:
Yes.

LINDSAY:
It's part of the reason behind this surge. I'm curious as you look at it, Dara, my understanding is that there's a fairly large backlog of asylum claims in the United States, numbers I've seen, eight million. These are not all asylum cases that began when Joe Biden was president, they date back to the Trump administration. So help me understand it. When someone comes across the border and they are detained or apprehended or they come in to a port and make an application, with that many people, where do they go? What happens to them? I hear a lot about the phrase, "catch and release." Can you help me sort of put that all in perspective?

LIND:
Sure. So I want to talk about the court backlog first because as you're implying, it is absolutely the reason that you have this enormous gap between what happens to people when they initially cross and the ultimate resolution of their cases. U.S. immigration courts are not part of the Department of Homeland Security, which is what takes care of most...All of the agencies that work at the border are affiliated with DHS, but immigration courts are under DOJ. And partly because of that, and partly because it's just much easier for Congress to say, "well we're dealing with immigration by giving money to enforcement," the budgets of the enforcement agencies have grown to a much greater extent than the budget for the immigration courts. And so while there has been some effort over the last couple of administrations to fix that, it still lags woefully behind.

And so what you end up having is people getting taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection, which itself doesn't have the resources for all of them, although it's...I'd put a pin in that because I personally am of the opinion that there has been an underinvestment in processing by CBP, that there's been a lot of effort into making it harder for some people to stay rather than building out the infrastructure that's going to result in a more consistent application of the law across the board.

But regardless, CBP has many more resources-

LINDSAY:
CBP being Custom and Border Patrol.

LIND:
Customs and Border Protection under DHS, and they have many more resources than the immigration judge who's going to be hearing the case at the end of the process. And so immigration court has been backlogged since, I remember in 2008 I was hearing stories about how the backlog was a whole year. And that includes not just people coming in, but also people who are apprehended in the U.S. and have the right to court hearing before they're order deported. But there's been a really, really substantial growth in the last few years from newly arrived people trying to make a claim. And so because if you either pass your initial screening interview or you're not even given a screening interview because they don't have the resources for it, then there's just this, okay, you're in wait-and-see mode. People will be released with sometimes ankle monitors, sometimes they have a cell phone given to them by the government that has one app on it, and it's the app that is used to monitor their case. And they're given an appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is the agency that's responsible for interior immigration enforcement, in the community where they say they're going to be ending up in the next few weeks or months depending on how backlogged ICE is.

And so the Biden administration, I think one of the things it doesn't get a whole lot of attention for that it has changed is that it's really scaled up its use of monitoring in what's called alternatives to detention. There are a lot more people, but a lot more of them are being monitored either because they have ankle bracelets on or because they're in a case management program where someone is responsible for calling them up and making sure they have the information and that they know where they're supposed to go, then would've been done or possible in the past. What they're supposed to do with themselves is unclear. Right?

For most of the people who are coming in, especially between ports of entry, don't have the ability to work legally in the United States until six months after they've filed an asylum application. Which means that especially for people who likely have a strong asylum claim and for whom it's really, really important to get all of that right and to get all of the evidence together to find a lawyer to make sure you're doing everything correctly. There's this really strong counter pressure to submit an application that may not be fully complete or maybe kind of rushed so that you can start the clock on your work permit. And even then, it's a matter of months.

So what we're seeing in U.S. cities, which to an extent we haven't seen before, partly because the composition is different, partly because people who would've been detained under previous administrations are instead being released on the margin. And partly because a lot, a lot of people via word of mouth, are going to a few cities and instead of-

LINDSAY:
And you're seeing pushback from those cities because they don't have the absorptive capacity. We saw that in New York City where the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, quite publicly appealed to the Biden administration to do something.

LIND:
Yeah. New York is struggling. Chicago is struggling. Denver had been kind of a counter example to New York and Chicago for much of the last year, but Denver is also at this point kind of running up against the limits of its resources. And this is a challenge they've never had to deal with before. They are responsible for housing people who legally cannot earn money for rent, who legally cannot earn money for food. And there is, as I mentioned in passing before, there's no federal obligation. Something I often think is important to point out is that immigration law says that asylum seekers aren't supposed to be the same as economic migrants, or they don't need to be. That having a claim of persecution is sufficient to get you into the U.S. It's not something where you also need to have relatives here or you also need to have a job already.

LINDSAY:
But the flip side is true as well. Asylum is not intended to be a vehicle for people who are coming here primarily for economic reasons to get into the country by saying, "I'm suffering from oppression."

LIND:
Absolutely. And this is where I think we're seeing one of the unintended consequences of the weirdness of that division. The people who are in the best state coming in, the people who have the strongest support network are people who are coming here because they can find work under the table, or they're coming here because they already have relatives, which is to say they're coming here for reasons that are independent of whether they have an asylum claim.

LINDSAY:
Well let me ask you about that because I've seen statistics suggesting that something on the order of 60 percent of all asylum cases are decided against the applicant, and that's even taken into account the fact that many people apparently don't show up for their court hearing. To what extent is that a function of rushed applications, as you alluded to a moment ago? How much is it because maybe the standards of evidence are too high? How much of it is because many of these people, in fact, are abusing the system?

LIND:
So when we talked earlier about how different the composition is than even five or ten years ago, this is where it gets really, really hard for me to...What we're seeing with cases that are getting decided this month is a reflection of people who were coming under a previous regime essentially, under different composition. And so many of the people who were coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador had arguments that they couldn't return to their home country without being in physical danger. But it wasn't necessarily because of government, it was because of gang violence. And so you have to, an asylum case is always going to be very, very fact dependent on what exactly happened to you and what exactly are the conditions in your home country. But many of those cases were falling into this very complicated bit of law and higher standard that they would have to pass because they weren't alleging that the government was persecuting them.

LINDSAY:
This is the claim that people are leaving because they're worried about criminal violence in their neighborhoods, their town, the rule of gangs and the like.

LIND:
Right. To oversimplify, the modal case for somebody coming in and say 2015, 2016 was "I was approached or my child was approached for protection money or to join a gang, I refused, and a relative of mine was injured or killed. And so I knew I had to flee." In some of those cases. It's a, "...and I tried to report it to the police, and the police did absolutely nothing about it," or "the gang then heard that I'd tried to report it to the police," which does give you a certain nexus to, okay, we can argue that there is a government element here. But in some cases it's just, sorry, just because you're in danger doesn't make it an asylum case. It has to be a case of government persecution.

LINDSAY:
But didn't the Biden Administration broaden that provision back in 2021 to make it easier to claim asylum based on gang violence, drug violence and the like?

LIND:
This is actually not really, and in fact, one of the many problems with the asylum system is that the standard for asylum depends on where you're filing your court case. Immigration courts are under the DOJ, but they're also overseen by the federal court system. And so in the fifth circuit in Texas, you're going to have a much harder time making an asylum claim than you are in the ninth circuit in California. And while the Biden Administration keeps saying that it's going to put out a regulation that tries to set more consistent standards across the board for some of these...you mentioned the five traditional grounds for asylum earlier, the membership in a particular social group, that's kind of the elastic clause there, right? That's where you would see someone arguing, okay, "I'm a member of a particular social group, which is teenagers targeted by gangs." And that's a really, really on the bubble. Some judges are going to say yes, some judges are going to say no. 

And so in theory, if you could create a regulation that says across the board it's this, that would make it a lot less geographically dependent. Because getting back to something you mentioned earlier, people who don't show up for their court hearings, there's some anecdotal evidence that some of that is word of mouth goes around that a particular judge or a particular court is really harsh. And so people who settle in North Carolina, for example, find out, "Oh, it's actually going to be really, really hard for me to make an asylum claim. I shouldn't stick my head up and risk getting apprehended. I should just go underground." It's really hard to know how much of people who don't show up is that versus people may not stay in the same place.

And the government isn't exactly proactive about notifying people when they have a court date that changes or a court date is coming up. I'm in touch with someone who is the most proactive person I've ever seen in terms of trying to navigate the system. And he had found out the night before his hearing, because he happened to log on, that the hearing had been rescheduled and he had to drive to the courthouse anyway. Because he wanted to make super-duper sure that it wasn't going to become his problem. So it's just this is a creaky and inconsistent and under-resourced system. And so it's not surprising that you get really creaky and inconsistent results out of it with a lot of people just either evading or falling out of the process before it's finally resolved.

LINDSAY:
Dara, getting back to the question of the causes of the surge in people coming across the border. How much of that is a function of the policy choices the Biden administration made? As I'm sure you know, plenty of critics of the president argue that he has contributed to the problem by relaxing a number of restrictions on immigration, but also point out a number of the president's supporters make the same claim. They're glad that he changed things like parole for people. So help me understand the elements of the Biden administration's policy that may have contributed to this or may not have or have been unfairly criticized for having done so.

LIND:
The question of what are called push versus pull factors is anyone who says that they know exactly what is going on there is lying. Because the thing you have to remember about people making the decision to migrate is they're not doing it with perfect information at all. They're doing it through a combination of word of mouth of people who they may know, who may have already tried to come into the U.S.: mass media, social media, WhatsApp, TikTok, et cetera. And a lot of that information is being perpetrated by smugglers. And so you'll have a situation where any headline that could imply either that the border is about to be open or that the border is about to be closed, can get taken out of context and used to the hilt.

So it means that sometimes in retrospect, you can hear enough consistent things from people coming that you can piece together what the dominant rumors may have been, but they're not necessarily things that bear a relationship to the reality of U.S. policy. And that means that when you're having the discussion of, okay, how responsible is U.S. policy for this? The real question is to what extent is the fear of encouraging people because they don't understand what's going on to come to the U.S., to what extent is that a deal breaker that that should shut down any other equities that you want to consider in terms of having an immigration policy? Parole is a great example of this.

LINDSAY:
So explain to me what parole is.

LIND:
Yeah. So parole is actually one of those terms in immigration law that means three different things, which is not helpful.

LINDSAY:
This is why I did not go to law school.

LIND:
I didn't either. At this point, I'm not sure that I could respect it enough. But there is a concept called humanitarian parole, which is the government gives you the ability to temporarily enter the United States and work legally, either because there's significant public benefit or because there's kind of an urgent humanitarian need. So that's been traditionally used for people who have rare medical conditions and are getting treatment in the United States, for example. But it's also been used in some cases for the Afghan evacuees after the fall of Kabul because it's the largest scale tool that the president has available to say, okay, these people, they don't have full legal status, they have no way of getting a green card, but they're going to be for the moment able to be in the United States. They're tolerated. They're not violating the law by being here. So the Biden administration's use of that both in the Afghan and Ukrainian cases, and with this program that it created about a little over a year ago for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, which allows people in the United States to apply to sponsor somebody from abroad from one of those countries. And if they have the means to support them, and they're selected because there's just so much more demand than there is actual applications, that person can come in. 

Now, there's some evidence that being able to apply for parole under this what's called CHNV program, reduced people from those countries coming to the U.S.-Mexico border because they had a line to get into. But there's also some evidence that people who hear that there is a way to come legally, who don't necessarily understand what way that is, that they are going to come and then say, "Well, I would like to get parole." So it means that when you have a conversation that's primarily about pull factors, it's a very, very, very limited conversation because it prevents you from having any equities under consideration other than the fear of encouragement. And that's not something that's in the U.S. government's control. 

And so where I've been for a bit is that the more reasonable approach, instead of trying to hit the exact correct combination of information and policy that's going to finally pierce through and that everyone or a critical mass of people will get the message that they shouldn't come, that the answer is instead to acknowledge that that's not something in the U.S.' control. And that the U.S. should instead be putting more investment into what is in its control, which is what happens when someone gets into the U.S.

LINDSAY:
Well let's talk about that then. In terms of what it is the U.S. government should do, Dara. I mean, you've described a creaky, antiquated, overwhelmed, dare I say, broken system faced with a flood of people, many of whom are coming with what would be considered to be legitimate claims to get into the United States. They are fleeing persecution or oppression, but also a large number of people who are coming who aren't fleeing persecution or oppression, they're coming for economic reasons, so they have an incentive to game the system. Meanwhile, we have a political system which is unable to adopt immigration reform. We have this bipartisan Senate bill, whether it was good or bad, what was notable was it did not go forward, leave it to people to decide the political merits and factors driving that. Given that context, what do we do?

LIND:
So some of the problems here are hard problems. It's worth bearing in mind that the housing crunches in large U.S. cities are things that are not only being caused by new arrivals. And so it's important to bear in mind that these are running into things that are affecting the population as a whole, but there's also some low hanging fruit. The federal government has taken such a hands-off approach to what happens to people when they're released from custody that it's not doing anything to routinely and openly communicate with cities that are...if three thousand people in a week say that they are going to New York City, the government isn't...there's no standard practice of picking up the phone and calling New York City and saying, you have a lot of people coming your way. Much less of trying to do anything to match people who may not have a strong preference for where they want to go to help them understand that there are some communities that really want new workers and might be willing to put people up for a while if what they get at the end is an expanded labor force.

So even just kind of coordinating information between border communities and interior communities between the U.S. government and local governments would be helpful. We've actually seen that with what Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has been doing for the last couple of years in terms of busing people out of Texas to other major U.S. cities. In cases where there's been some kind of coordination where people know that when a bus is coming, especially when the city government knows when a bus is coming, they can be there. People aren't getting dumped on the street, they're getting given bus passes-

LINDSAY:
But that wasn't how that started originally. My sense originally was buses or planes just arrived and people got off, oftentimes having been misled by what they could expect to see when they arrived.

LIND:
So the efforts that Ron DeSantis did, people very much appeared to have been misled. The Abbott buses, it's a little bit harder to tell, and it does seem that most people were asked, "Do you want to go to New York? Here is a free bus." As opposed to having to pay your own way on Greyhound. But you're right, the Abbott administration has not done anything to try to coordinate this. It's been NGOs because when people are released from federal custody, they're often released into the care of shelters. And so there were a couple of shelters where Texas authorities were picking people up from that would then call D.C. or call New York and say, "Okay, we're having a bus come." The Abbott administration has since cracked down on that and said, "We will stop working with you if you continue to provide any information," which leads to... one can reasonably infer that that's because they're not interested in an orderly handoff, they're interested in the optics of people being stranded.

But when there was enough coordination to have that, I'm thinking in particular of Philadelphia because the very first bus that Abbott sent to Philadelphia, the government was already on the ground. They had local nonprofits that they were working with. They had the entire system in place. And so when all of that is there, you don't have the people crowding in bus stations because they don't know where to go. You don't have people showing up at the headquarters of the New York Housing Authority because that's the address they have. And so that sort of thing is just for that matter, making sure that cities know how to apply for the existing federal money for grants. It's just low hanging fruit that the government could do.

LINDSAY:
I take that, Dara, but it just seems to me that that is putting a very small bandaid on a very big problem. So are we really facing a situation in which we're going to continue to have this very big problem unless Congress can come around and pass comprehensive immigration reform of one sort or another?

LIND:
I think that we have a fundamental conceptual problem in the way we talk about immigration and especially the border, that the number of people who are taken into custody in a given month is seen as a reflection of whether the border is secure or not. With more people getting taken into custody, being seen as evidence of a less secure border. That means that even in a situation where everybody is getting immediately apprehended and deported, it would still appear that the U.S. government isn't doing enough. Which gets us back to what I was saying earlier about this very limited...the idea of a solution that stops people coming into the U.S. to begin with. You're either doing more to encourage Mexico and other countries to externalize enforcement, which is the subject for at least a whole other podcast, or you are trying to kind of hit this deterrence combo button.

If we accepted that that wasn't actually the measure of security, that either you want a situation where you're minimizing the number of people getting released into custody. Okay, that's a lot more investment in detention infrastructure, a lot a lot. Not just ICE, but also border stations that are not used to housing large numbers of people. If you're trying to minimize the wait time before someone hears their case, then you're going to be investing a whole lot in immigration judges and investing in asylum officers. One of the things about the Senate bill that, as you mentioned pretty immediately died, was that it took a lot of these cases out of the courts entirely and created a new system that would've been resolved within six months. Which there's an argument to be made that that is not only better from the perspective of the U.S. government, but that having that level of certainty is better for someone, especially a positive answer in six months is better than a positive answer in five years. And there's an argument to be made that a negative answer in six months is better than a negative answer in five years. 

But all of that would require us to move beyond the idea that we're only going to declare the border solved if we can go back to April, 2020 numbers. The best thing politically that ever happened to the Trump administration on this was that the pandemic shutdowns of Spring 2020 happened throughout the world, and so there wasn't a smuggling infrastructure that was moving for several months of that year. And so that really did reduce the number of people who were trying to come in through the U.S.-Mexico border. But you can't have a pandemic every year, and so-

LINDSAY:
We don't want a pandemic every year, is how I would put it.

LIND:
Right. And so you have to look at other metrics for what we're going to do to declare the problem solved before we can come up with what those solutions would be.

LINDSAY:
And on that point, I'm going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. Dara, I want to thank you very much for helping me pierce some of the complexities of immigration policy and immigration law. My main takeaway is that it's even more complex than I thought with many more intersecting variables. I think we will have you back on The President's Inbox sometime in the future to talk about some of these other potential ways of addressing immigration challenge.

LIND:
Yeah. I promise it really is complicated, it's not just me trying to come back on your podcast.

LINDSAY:
Very good, Dara, and thank you very much for joining me.

LIND:
Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen. And leave us a review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.