Trump's Immigration Policy, With Edward Alden (Transition 2025, Episode 9)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the ninth and concluding episode in a special presidential transition series on the President's Inbox.

Since election day, I have been sitting down with experts to unpack who will staff the Donald Trump administration and how it will likely approach the many foreign policy challenges it faces. This week's topic is Trump's immigration policy.

With me to discuss how Donald Trump is likely to handle immigration matters is Edward Alden. Ted is a senior fellow at the council and the Ross Distinguished Visiting Professor at Western Washington University. He has written extensively on U.S. economic competitiveness, trade and immigration policy. His newest book, which was released just last week and was co-written with Laurie Trautman, is When the World Closed Its Doors: the Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. Ted is also the author of the Great Deportation of 2025, which recently appeared in Foreign Policy. Ted, thank you for joining me on the President's Inbox.

ALDEN:
It's great to be here with you, Jim. Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Now, Ted, before we begin discussing Donald Trump's plans for U.S. immigration policy, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of When the World Closed Its Doors. To do so, they should go to cfr.org forward-leaning slash giveaway. Let me repeat that, cfr.org forward-leaning slash giveaway. There they can read the terms and conditions of the giveaway and register their entry. The registration for the giveaway will remain open until January 27. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of When the World Closed Its Doors.
If you are still searching for a pen to write down this information, don't worry, we have posted the link to the giveaway in the show notes for the President's Inbox on cfr.org. With those logistics out of the way, Ted, let's talk about Trump's plans for immigration.

Now, this is a pretty big topic and we can talk about the border, we can talk about deportation, we can talk about legal immigration, let's start with the border. Give me a sense of, one, where things stand on the border, both southern border and northern border, and a little bit about what the problem is that Donald Trump thinks he's going to fix.

ALDEN:
Thanks very much, Jim. So, let's start with the southern border with Mexico, since that tends to be the focus of most of the attention. There have been issues with that border going back forty-plus years, and concern on the U.S. side that it doesn't have control over who enters and under what circumstances. The numbers have grown in recent years because you have asylum seekers from all over the world. Traditionally, it was Mexicans trying to get across primarily to work, over the last decade many more Central Americans, South Americans, Chinese, Indians, others from across the world trying to use Mexico as a back door into the United States.

This was really Trump's signature issue, to some extent in the 2016 campaign, but even more in the 2024 campaign. He is promising to use a variety of deterrent tools to try to dissuade people from crossing that border illegally and then requesting what's known as asylum or protection here in the United States. He starts with a pretty good hand. The Biden administration saw this problem really get out of control in the first couple of years after President Biden took office, but then instituted a strategy, sort of a carrot stick strategy, making it easier for some people to come legally and increasing the penalties against people who cross the border illegally. And the numbers have come down dramatically, so President Trump is inheriting a reasonably good situation on the southern border.

LINDSAY:
Well, help me understand that a bit, Ted, because-

ALDEN:
Yeah, of course.

LINDSAY:
... a year ago this was a big issue and the complaint was that the Biden administration had neglected the southern border. We had this big move to get behind a bipartisan border bill. It looked like that was going to come forward, and then Donald Trump announced its opposition to it, and it went by the wayside, even though it had been crafted by some fairly conservative members of the United States Senate. I believe Senator Lankford of Oklahoma was leading the way on that score. So Biden then moved, did he fix the problem or not?

ALDEN:
Well, the problem is never going to be fixed. That's one of the fallacies about border management that we tackle in this book. I tackled it in my first book about the post-9/11 border measures. You don't fix a huge, long open border like the United States has with its neighbors, you manage the problem more or less effectively.

And it's fair to say in the first couple of years that the Biden administration, the problem was not managed effectively. There was a lot of outrage over the Trump policies, particularly separating parents from their children as a deterrent measure, and forcing asylum seekers to wait on the Mexican side of the border, extremely dangerous, vulnerable to the cartels and to all sorts of crime while they were waiting for their hearings in the United States. So, what the Biden administration did was it lifted those measures, but it didn't put in place new deterrents of its own. And the result was... Plus the sort of pent up demand from the Covid years. There was a significant drop in all sorts of border crossings during Covid that we talk about in the book. And so, there was this pent up demand that exploded in the first couple of years of the Biden administration.

Then well before Congress ever got in the game, the Biden administration reworked its approach, and it was essentially on the one hand, create a bunch of new legal pathways, particularly for people from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Nicaragua, from Cuba, and at the same time say to people crossing illegally, "Unless you can present a really compelling case, we're going to turn you back. If you crossed the river somewhere near El Paso and try to get into the United States, we're going to send you back." So, this combination of carrots and sticks really brought the numbers down dramatically.

Now, of course, the Trump folks don't like the carrots and we'll talk about deportation, and a lot of those who were brought in under Biden faced the immediate threat of removal. The Trump folks want to go back to a pure deterrent strategy, and it didn't work all that well the first time around. Initially, first couple of years, the numbers fell because the smugglers were trying to figure out the new regime under Trump. Once they did, the numbers rose again. So, the notion that you can solve this problem purely through deterrent measures is a fallacy, but that's what the Trump folks are going to try to do. It's what they tried term one, they're going to try it in a more dramatic way in the second term.

LINDSAY:
On that score, Ted, do you expect the Trump administration to resurrect that bipartisan border bill that seemed on the verge of passing last spring? Or do you think Trump is not going to go to Congress and ask for more authorities?

ALDEN:
No, he will go to Congress. It's very clearly going to be the first major piece of legislation out of the Congress. There's a debate going on right now among Republicans whether to do a standalone border bill, or whether to try to fold it all into a giant reconciliation bill, which then doesn't face the sixty-vote hurdle in the Senate. The latter looks like the more plausible strategy.

So, I think what we're going to see is an amped up version of that already reasonably harsh Senate bill. And there are other measures in place that would empower states, in particular a bill named after Lakin Riley, who was a victim of a murder carried out by an unauthorized immigrant.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, the house passed that bill last week.

ALDEN:
Yeah, that would empower... And the Senate looks like they're going down that road, that would empower the states to play a much more active role. So no, we're going to see congressional action, and it's going to go well beyond the bill that we saw.

LINDSAY:
Ted, is that a significant change in immigration policy in the United States? Because my impression was is that traditionally immigration policy and enforcement was handled by the federal government, not by state governments. Do I have that wrong?

ALDEN:
That would be a very significant change, to increase the power of state governments. It is Federal jurisdiction. Could run afoul of constitutional restrictions, courts might strike it down. But there's a bunch of new stuff in that bill, and there's going to be more in the coming bill. So no, Congress is going to be a big player, this will not just be the administration.

LINDSAY:
And I would imagine if you do go down this road of giving more leeway to, or a role to states, that you could see disparate treatment depending upon which state we're talking about.

ALDEN:
I think that's right. I think Texas, you would see the hardest line measures, California the most permissive, likely, somewhere in between with Arizona. I don't want to exaggerate. This does not suddenly displace the federal government's role. It just gives the states more power to intervene and shape border enforcement than we've seen in the past.

LINDSAY:
And I would imagine in states that aren't border states, that may have a high population of migrants, could move on that score as well. I'm thinking for example of Iowa where there are a large number of migrants who've come to work in things like meatpacking and the rest.

ALDEN:
Yeah. Potentially, so there's a lot of new ground that we're going to tread in the next few years.

LINDSAY:
So, as you look at that, is the deterrent effect going to lead, or does the Trump administration imagine that cracking down on the border will lead people who are currently in the country to leave in large numbers?

ALDEN:
So, we're sort of conflating two things there. So, the border measures particular, the hope is that it will deter more people from coming.

LINDSAY:
No new entries.

ALDEN:
Yeah, no new entries. So, it may do that for a while. If we look at the historical record, the smugglers figure out ways around the new restrictions and the numbers surge again.

LINDSAY:
Because enormously profitable, right?

ALDEN:
Enormously profitable, and gets more profitable the more you crack down, because the harder it is to cross the border the more the smugglers charge, so that has been the story for decades now. The other piece is that the Trump administration is promising the largest deportation in American history. Details are still being hashed out. We don't know everything they're thinking about, and that's more likely to affect, for instance, someone working in an Iowa meatpacking plant. And the administration's hope is that this threat of internal enforcement actions and removing people might cause some people to self-deport, to leave on their own. We'll see how that plays out. I think that effect is likely to be small. There are a lot of challenges the administration will face in trying to remove the numbers of people it wants to remove. It's talking about a million a year, which is more than double what we've seen in modern times. There are challenges, but they've made their intention very clear, no question, that's what they're going to try to do.

LINDSAY:
And my understanding was during Trump's first administration, his administration deported roughly 1.5 million people over four years, which is about half of the number that Barack Obama deported during his first term, so it is a sizable increase over what we've seen before. Walk me through how can Trump do that? What are the constitutional or statutory authorities that make this possible? Does Trump have to go to Congress and get new authorities?

ALDEN:
There's three big limitations on deportation. One is the court system, that people who face removal have a right to petition their case to courts that are part of the Department of Justice. The second is detention space for holding these people while you're awaiting their removal. And the third is the willingness of countries to take their citizens back. Not every country is willing to allow its deported citizens to return home.

The Trump administration thinks it has a potential response for each one. More money from Congress to expand deportation spaces, possibly to expand the immigration courts. I think the administration is going to put a lot of pressure on foreign countries to accept removals from the United States. So, that would be sticking with the system, but there's also a lot of talk about trying to use more extreme measures.

For instance, there is a provision known as expedited removal, which is often used to deport recent arrivals without their cases going through the courts. The Trump folks are talking about expanding that to anyone who's been here two years or less, just doing that under executive authority.

There are limitations in manpower, ICE agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the ones who carry out these arrests. There's talk about deploying the National Guard in different ways, using old statutory authorities like the Alien Enemies Act, I think, if I'm getting the name correctly, and other long dormant powers. So, the administration is trying to figure out how to bust through those limitations. There'll be court challenges for sure, but they've signaled they're willing to go a long, long way down this road.

LINDSAY:
Now on this score, these logistical obstacles that the Trump administration will face, if it does launch a mass deportation campaign, do seem to be significant. When you talk about the courts to the extent they need to go through courts, isn't the problem right now that the immigration courts have a massive backlog? I think it's something like three million cases.

ALDEN:
Yeah, they do. I think if the Trump administration sticks to the usual path of allowing the court system to operate the way it's operated, that will be a real limitation. But as I said, they're looking for ways around this. They do not want their agenda to be stalled by the immigration courts, and so they're going to test the legal limits of what it is that they can do. And I think they can go a long way.

LINDSAY:
And on the issue of detention space, I think I read that currently the U.S. government has something like forty thousand beds, and that's a much smaller number than a million people a year. So, Congress would have to appropriate a fair amount of money very quickly, and you would have to ramp that up, correct?

ALDEN:
Yeah. That would take more money. Though if they do expand expedited removal, those cases operate pretty quickly. The detention spaces get taken up by people for court dates that take a long time. So yeah, I think this bill that the Congress is talking about would almost certainly expand detention space. But there could be other measures designed to streamline, and that's where they want to go. The Trump folks do not want to be constrained by the immigration courts in carrying out what they see as a top priority of the president. They're going to look for every way around that they can find.

LINDSAY:
And on this issue of getting home countries to take back their citizens, what happens if countries say no? For example, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, maybe China. You mentioned that Trump wants to coerce countries into accepting them, but a number of countries that have been sending refugees to the United States, people claiming asylum, are countries that are already under a fair amount of economic pressure from the United States.

ALDEN:
There may be limitations to what can be done there. I think a more plausible angle is to pressure Mexico to take some of these folks back, to deport them to third countries of one sort or another. Obviously going to be harder in the case of a country like China. But if there's one thing we know about the president, he's willing to use unorthodox means, right?

LINDSAY:
But they're not always effective.

ALDEN:
Well, they're not always effective for sure, but what he has threatened... We haven't talked about the northern border at all. He's threatening twenty-five percent tariffs day one on Canada, unless Canada increases its internal border security so people aren't crossing from Canada to the United States.

LINDSAY:
Is that a significant problem?

ALDEN:
No, it's a small problem, but it's grown from where it was five or six years ago. Some tiny percentage of the fentanyl coming in the United States comes through Canada, and a very tiny percentage of the unauthorized migration, but the numbers are growing. So, one could imagine a negotiation in which the Trump team says to Canada, "Well, if you want to avoid those twenty-five percent tariffs, you need to take in some of these people we want to remove that we can't send back to their home countries. You take those in, yeah, we'll think about removing the tariffs."

It's hard to talk about this stuff because you and I, Jim, have both grown up in this rules-based system in which there have been violations of the norms, but we basically understand them as being widely accepted. Donald Trump does not accept these norms. He's willing to do things that no other presidents have done. And so, I think we have to use our imagination in thinking about how they might tackle these issues.

LINDSAY:
I understand that, but by the same token, it's not as if Canada doesn't have levers it can push in retaliation.

ALDEN:
Really? Come on.

LINDSAY:
A lot of American energy comes from Canada.

ALDEN:
Yeah. Okay. I've been deeply engaged in this debate because of my ties to Canada, the Canadians are terrified.

LINDSAY:
No, I understand they are.

ALDEN:
About Trump's annexation threats. About the tariff threats. So yeah, Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario has said, "We'll cut off energy exports to the United States if the U.S. goes ahead with these tariffs." That's doable, I suppose, but we're talking about a ten-to-one economic relationship. Canada is wholly dependent on exports to the United States. In a knock-down, drag-out punch-fest on who can hurt whose economy more, Canada loses that battle.

It's not to say that they might not try to hit back, they probably will. I don't really expect things to get that bad, but the notion that, oh, Canada has leverage and therefore Trump won't do this, I don't think that necessarily follows. The United States has far more leverage than Canada has. The question is how far is the administration willing to go? What sort of price is it willing to pay to do that?

LINDSAY:
Well, that applies on both sides though, then it depends upon what price the Canadians are willing to pay or absorb.

ALDEN:
It does. But this is not a relationship of equals, right? This is a giant and a very small country.

LINDSAY:
Understood in that score, but there's a long history for the United States in which weaker countries frustrated the objectives of the United States.

ALDEN:
Well, but we could go back and forth on this. I read Power and Interdependence when I was in grad school as well, but I think that was a period where the United States was much more constrained by the rules and norms of the international system, and we're moving into a period where it's less constrained. So, I don't know if that old pattern of small countries being able to play weak hands effectively works as well as it used to.

LINDSAY:
Well, but domestic politics doesn't cease, and to the extent to which Canadians could make influential groups in the United States feel pain, that could be a game changer as well. I just think they're-

ALDEN:
We may not agree on the outcome, but these are the right questions.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm not even sure what the outcome is. I just I want to flag that it may not be an immediate surrender-

ALDEN:
I agree with that.

LINDSAY:
... by the Canadian government. If there is a Canadian government, which is a whole nother-

ALDEN:
Which there isn't at the moment, right?

LINDSAY:
But talking about how the Canadians might retaliate, likewise how the Mexicans or others might retaliate, takes us into the issue of the economic consequences of a large-scale deportation effort. And I've heard a lot of people talk about the American agricultural industry, American meatpacking industry among others, that would be badly hurt if we did see large-scale deportations. And I've heard two responses. One is that, well, the Trump administration is going to focus on criminals first, and so that won't be an issue. And the second one is that it won't be as dramatic as perhaps a lot of the social media discussion makes it out to be. How do you tease that out, Ted?

ALDEN:
Yeah, it's a hard one. So, if they just go after criminals, that's more or less what the Biden administration and the Obama administration and others did. That's not what they're talking about. They're talking about starting there, because those folks are a little easier to find and remove, but the Biden team did a lot of that.

So, it's going to go beyond that. We all know the sectors that are going to get hit, in the short run agriculture being one, construction being another, hospitality industries of various sorts. I think we could see significant impacts in those industries. Broadly, I think the one thing we can say with confidence is that this will be inflationary. One of the reasons the last eighteen months of the Biden economic record look pretty good is we had huge inflows of migrants, roughly three million last year, which is two and a half times the normal amount. Again, a kind of post-Covid rebound. Some of that being the people who were coming in under these temporary programs that the Biden folks set up. All the economic analysis says that was very important in contributing to strong U.S. economic growth and weakening of inflationary pressures.

You start removing people, given that labor demand in this economy is still pretty high, look at manufacturing where manufacturing is growing again, labor demand is very high. I think the effects are clearly going to be inflationary. Longer term, if this becomes the new status quo, businesses will find ways to adjust through automation mechanization, in some cases maybe no longer growing certain crops in the United States because it's cheaper to grow them in Mexico, or somewhere else, and bring them in.

So, I think longer term sectors will find ways to adapt, but short run I think there will be disruptions and it will be inflationary. And the real constraint of all this stuff is markets. If you get a strong negative market reaction, because investors are saying, "This is really disruptive, this is hurting important sectors of the economy." That could be a far bigger constraint on President Trump than anything else we're talking about here, because he really cares about the market, sees them as a kind of symbol of his performance. So, I expect both on the trade and immigration issues, the markets will be something of a constraint on his actions.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk a bit, Ted, about legal immigration. Do we have a sense of whether Trump 2.0 is going to seek to curtail the numbers of people who come into the country legally? I've heard some Trump supporters say no, other Trump supporters seem to be gung ho to reduce the amount of legal immigration. Of course, related to that was the recent MAGA civil war over H-1B visas, which are visas that allow highly skilled workers to come into the United States, and there are pros and cons to that program. But walk me through what you expect the Trump administration is thinking about legal immigration.

ALDEN:
Yeah, this is a fascinating rift in the MAGA world. Trump speaks out both sides of his mouth on this one. He will often say, "We want high skilled immigrants, we want the right sort of immigrants, we just want to stop illegal immigration." But if you look at his record in the first term, his Department of Homeland Security used a whole array of regulatory tools to make legal immigration in the United States much harder. And then of course, when Covid hit, there was a shutdown in processing, so the numbers dropped really dramatically.

And if you listen to someone like Stephen Miller, who's going to be a deputy chief of staff, will direct a lot of the policy on this, Miller does not like legal immigration. He sees migrants as competition for American workers, thinks they hurt American workers. So, that was very much the tenor if Trump one. You couldn't get congressional action because they didn't control the Congress, but at the regulatory level in the department there's a lot of effort to curb legal migration.

Now, term two, you've got this new role for the tech magnates. Elon Musk, most prominently, who are outspoken defenders of the H-1B program, they say, "Look, our companies wouldn't exist if we didn't have all these talented migrants coming to the United States through the H-1B program. We should expand that program." And you've alluded to the coverage on the Twitter war between Laura Loomer on the one side, a voice for the, maybe we call it the Steve Bannon wing of the party. You can pick your terms. But no legal immigration, these people compete with Americans. Americans should be doing these jobs, We should keep them out. And Elon Musk saying, "Well, I'm sorry. Americans can't do these jobs, we're not educating enough of them, we need talented foreigners." We don't know where that one's going to come out.

LINDSAY:
Do the Bannons and Loomers have a point? Because as I understand it, whatever you think about their broader politics, what they have argued is that this is an easy way for tech companies to undercut American workers, relieve them of any incentive to want to invest in their own workers in American education. Is there merit to that argument?

ALDEN:
There's some, but it's a very static view of the world. If you look at the best research out on this stuff, folks like Giovanni Peri at UC Davis and others, the net economic effects of high skilled immigration are overwhelmingly beneficial. H-1B workers for one, a lot of them are getting paid a lot of money, working in Google and Meta and other places, so the argument that they're undercutting American workers is pretty weak. We know a lot of these folks go on to spin off new companies, which then employ Americans. There are knock-on effects. The notion that the American worker is somehow worse off because of the H-1Bs coming here, I think is a pretty weak argument.

The other point you make about lack of investment in the workforce though, I think is a good one. There has not been enough focus on making sure that Americans, both in universities, but in more hands-on training in the companies, are developing the kind of skills they need in the tech world. We're seeing this most prominently in the semiconductor industry, where the Biden administration is trying to expand semiconductor fabrication here in the United States. And we don't have the folks, a lot of them not four-year college people, but community college-trained people with the technical skills, that those fabs are going to need.

And so, I do think for the companies, immigration has been a way to get the folks they need at lower costs. So, I buy some points of that argument. It doesn't mean I think it'd be a good idea to restrict the H-1B program. We are in a competition with China for global dominance in the industries of the future, such as AI, and our immigrant workforce is a big, big advantage that the United States has.

LINDSAY:
Do we see any evidence that Trump 2.0 wants to invest in training those workers are going to be needed at the fabs that TSMC and others are going to build in places like Arizona?

ALDEN:
Want to, actually do, are two different questions. I worked with a bunch of the Trump officials in the first term when we produced our CFR-sponsored task force on the future of work, and there was a lot of interest in the Trump folks about apprenticeships and other programs to try to develop the American workforce. At the end of the day, they carried through on almost nothing. And if you look at the agenda for the second term, extending these very expensive tax cuts, it's going to require expenditure reductions in other areas. I wouldn't hold my breath for significant investments in the U.S. workforce coming out of this administration.

LINDSAY:
Well, the issue of the explosion of red ink, which seems likely, gets us back to how markets are going to react and what the knock on consequences of that will be. Nothing may happen, or it may be quite disruptive, we'll see.
I want to get back to the broader issue, Ted, if we could about borders, because you've just come out with this brand new book looking at border closures in the wake of Covid-19, and I know you have some lessons from that. I'd like you to describe it, in part because I'm reading the news these days, as I always do, and I'm seeing a couple of troubling stories. One has to do with an outbreak of something known as human metapneumovirus in China, which has a lot of China's neighbors worried that this may be the beginning of something not necessarily of the same extent as Covid-19, but could be troubling nonetheless.

And likewise, there's been a lot of concern about bird flu in the United States, and recently we saw a case of someone in Louisiana having died from coming into contact with infected birds. So, as we think about this, and again, my great hope is that these become stories that two years from now we say, "Whatever happened with that?" But obviously it could go in a different direction. How are you thinking about the issue of border closures and maintaining borders in this world, which as you pointed out, the old rules-based order has come apart.

ALDEN:
Yeah. Thanks for that, Jim. I don't know any more than you do whether either of these will result in a Covid-style pandemic. I'm not a public health expert. Talked to a bunch them in the process of doing this book, there is a consensus that for a variety of reasons, climate change, closer interactions between human and wildlife, we're more likely to see a growing number of pandemics in the future. Not going to be a hundred years like it was between the Spanish flu and Covid, so I think that's likely. If you ask me how countries will respond in the next pandemic, they will do exactly what they did in Covid, and they're going to shut their borders. They will probably shut them more quickly than they did last time.

There's been some effort to rewrite the international health regulations to expand cooperation, but it's not going to restrict government actions on that front. The most interesting lesson, I think, out of the book, and it's broader for the management of borders, we don't make the claim in the book that closing borders or restricting travel was ipso facto a bad idea during Covid. A lot of cases, it was a good idea. Covid was spread by people moving around and breathing on each other. There were reasons to restrict movement, including borders.

But if you look around the world, the places that did well were the places that coupled border restrictions with other effective actions. In the case of the pandemic, those being domestic health measures. South Korea is an outstanding example. South Korea never actually closed its borders. You could go there if you were willing to quarantine in a hotel for 14 days. So, people who had urgent need to go there for family or other reasons could go. But South Korea, when it had outbreaks, had an incredibly effective contact tracing system that was good at snuffing out new outbreaks before they spread widely.

Taiwan was similarly good at this. If you compare it, say, to New Zealand and Australia, which also had tough border restrictions. They were terrible at stamping out outbreaks, which meant they had to keep doubling down on the border restrictions in order to try to keep Covid at bay. And I think there is a larger lesson here for border management. We talk about borders, and it's going to be on steroids in this new administration, in this extremely ill-informed way. That, "Oh, we're worried about migration or drugs. We just need to shut the border. We need to close the border." Well, there's no historical examples of where that's been effective. You're not going to stop fentanyl at the border. You're not going to stop cocaine at the border. You're not going to stop desperate asylum seekers at the border. It's not to say that border measures don't matter, but they have to be done in cooperation with a whole bunch of other things, a lot of them being diplomatic, working with our neighbors effectively. And the Trump folks have no understanding of this at all, nor do a lot of the growing nationalist movements in Europe. This is the classic nationalist playbook.
We have a foreign problem, and a way to keep it out is to seal our borders. Never worked in the past, didn't work during Covid, not going to work in the future.

LINDSAY:
On that sobering point, I'm going to close up the President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Ted Alden, Senior Fellow here at Council on Foreign Relations. Ted is the author of the new book When the World Closed Its Doors: the Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. Ted, thank you very much for joining me.

ALDEN:
Great to be with you as always, Jim.

LINDSAY:
This presidential transition series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, 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 Justin Schuster, with recording engineer Molly McAnany, and director of podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra.

This is Justin's first show with us. Welcome aboard, Justin. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.