U.S. Immigration Policy, With Edward Alden

LINDSAY:
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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 of the southern border and other issues in U.S. immigration policy is Edward Alden. Ted is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at CFR and the Ross Dist visiting professor of business and economics at Western Washington University. He's the author of the book Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy. Ted writes a Column for Foreign Policy, recently wrote a piece titled When Goods Move, but People Don't for Barron's, and another piece titled More Lost Chances on Immigration Reform Hurt The U.S. Economy for cfr.org. Ted last appeared on The President's Inbox in December to discuss President Biden's "America First" Economic Policy. Thanks for coming back on The President's Inbox, Ted.

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

LINDSAY:
I will admit at the top, Ted, that immigration is a big complicated and controversial topic. So with that warning, I'd like to begin by talking about the one issue under the immigration umbrella that's getting the most media play, and that's the situation at the U.S. southern border. Can you give us a sense of how things are playing out right now on the U.S.-Mexico border?

ALDEN:
Thanks very much, Jim. I'm going to start with a real 30 thousand foot overview. I mean, the problem at the southern border is that lots of people have been showing up mostly from Central America, South America, Haiti, across the region, showing up at the border, crossing illegally and claiming asylum. And the numbers are of a scale we've never seen before. I mean, even in the 1990s when it was mostly young Mexican men coming over to look for work, the numbers were not as big as what we have seen in recent months at the southern border. And that has got both sides screaming, right?

The Republicans are saying, "This is outrageous. This is Biden's open borders policy. We have no border. Our security is fundamentally under threat." The administration has been doing some things to try to discourage people from crossing illegally, that has President Biden's Democratic allies saying, "This is outrageous. This is a violation of human rights. You're just behaving like President Donald Trump." So the administration is really caught in a bit of a vice with extremely strong criticisms from both ends of the political spectrum to any effort to deal with the issues there at the border.

LINDSAY:
So Ted, why is it that people are coming to the U.S. southern border? How much of it is push, problems in their home country? How much of it is pull, that is opportunities here in the United States?

ALDEN:
I mean, there's no simple answer to that. The truth is both. I think in some places you would have to say the push factors are bigger. You look at Venezuela, I mean the Venezuelan economy has collapsed in various ways. You have a dysfunctional political structure. There are 2 million Venezuelan refugees in Columbia right now, so they're not all coming to the United States. So you'd have to say that's a big push factor. Haiti is another country where you'd have to say push factors are primarily what's going on. But you also have people showing up from Central America where the economy's even doing a little better from Ecuador, people continuing to come from Mexico. So from other places where you'd have to say the pull factors are probably stronger. We have a massive labor shortage here in the United States right now, so there are a lot of job opportunities for people who can make it into the United States and succeed in staying even temporarily. So I would argue it's fairly evenly balanced and varies from country to country.

LINDSAY:
So Ted, help me understand the terms of art used in the immigration debate. What I hear a lot about recently is talk that people are coming seeking asylum, but asylum has a particular meaning under U.S. immigration law. And my recollection is if we were to go back a decade, two decades ago, we weren't seeing this number of asylum seekers even though the world had lots of problems twenty years ago. Why the explosion in people seeking asylum?

ALDEN:
Yeah, we are trapped by these categories in various ways. And again, I'll try to give kind of the simple version. I mean, if you look at what was happening in the 70s, 80s, and in very large numbers in the 90s, it was sort of what we conventionally think about as illegal or unauthorized migration. People were sneaking across the border, evading the border patrol and coming and finding jobs here in the United States, again, as I said, mostly young Mexicans. Well, as a result of a lot of money spent on the border building fences and hiring 20 thousand border patrol agents and putting drones and everything else, it got a lot harder to cross the border illegally. And those numbers came down for quite a few years. In the late aughts, I guess we would call it the early 2010s, the numbers came down pretty dramatically.

Then you had a variety of things going on in the region, political instability in Central America particularly, and people figured out, well, it's hard to come the old way. It's harder to sneak around the border patrol than it used to be, but if you show up at the border and say, "I am fleeing violence and persecution," it's a fairly low bar to be allowed to stay in the country and have your case heard. And that's what's called an asylum claim, these are asylum seekers. These are laws that go back to the end of the second World War when the western world, including the United States, horrified by the fact that we turn back Jews who are trying to flee Europe incorporated into their laws asylum protections, which basically save people who are fleeing persecution or torture on grounds of religion or their political opinions or other factors. They have a right to request asylum in the countries in which they are arriving.

That's when these laws were formulated. They were codified in the United States in 1980, and a revised version in the 1980 Refugee Act. And basically what it says in the United States is if you have a credible claim that you are fleeing persecution and violence of a sort that you may qualify for asylum, you get to remain in the United States while your case is heard. The third piece of this, I'm sorry for this being so long, there is a huge backlog. So we have immigration courts in the Department of Justice that hear these claims, and the typical claim takes four, five, six years to resolve. Meanwhile, these people are here in the United States, they're able to work.

If you're fleeing a country where your economic prospects are few, where you may be facing criminal or gang violence, that doesn't necessarily qualify you for asylum, but you want to get out of your country because it's dangerous, that's a pretty good deal. If you can make it to the U.S. border, you're looking at a significant period of time where you're going to be safe, your family's going to be safe, and even if the end of the day you lose in the immigration court, you're probably not going to be deported, so you'll remain here unauthorized. So there's a lot of incentive for people to come and do this.

LINDSAY:
So help me understand what has in fact been done at the border to keep people from crossing? The Trump administration famously pursued its wall policy, "Build a Wall," was the chant you heard at a lot of Trump rallies, whatever it became of the wall.

ALDEN:
So you can basically think of this in two ways. If you want to discourage people from arriving illegally at the southern border, you can do one of two things. You can make it easier for them to arrive legally or you can deter them from arriving illegally.

Under the Trump administration, the policy was all deterrent. So there were a whole series of things that we all remember, families would arrive and the parents would be separated from the children. The goal there was to get the message back, "Don't show up at the border as a family because we're going to strip your kids away and you're going to hate that, so don't do it." The Trump administration established the "Remain in Mexico" policy. So if you arrive at the border, you make an asylum claim, we'll hear your asylum claim, but you're going to rot in Mexico for a couple of years while you wait for that determination.Trump administration forced Guatemala and other countries to agree that they were safe third countries. So anybody transiting through these countries would be ineligible for asylum in the United States because they should have applied in Guatemala.

The Biden administration now, and we can talk more about these details, and they're really interesting. There's some very novel stuff going on, and it's too soon to know what the outcome will be. Biden administration is trying to do a bit of carrot and stick. They're reviving some of the Trumpier measures and getting screamed at by their own party for it. So trying to increase deterrence so that people don't arrive illegally at the border, but they're also trying to increase the legal pathways for people from countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti and Cuba, sort of entice people to go through the proper route. And we're just in the early days of whether that experiment will work. But those are sort of your two choices, make it easier to come legally or make it harder to come illegally or some mixture of the two.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'll have to say, Ted, I feel like you teased me by saying there are details. I have a PhD, so I love to wallow in details. So walk me through some of the things the Biden administration has done, particularly in recent months to try to stem the flow of migrants or asylum seekers.

ALDEN:
So there's some really fascinating things going on because this is not a new problem. I mean, we saw huge numbers early on in the Trump administration came down as a result of the pandemic. We saw them in times in the Obama administration. You go back to the 90s and you've got the Mexican surge. So this is a longstanding problem. The Biden administration is looking at what's on the horizon. One more detail, what is still in place at the southern border is COVID era restrictions known as Title 42 with some significant exceptions, and there are real exceptions. If you arrive at the southern border now and claim asylum, you're going to be turned back because you're a COVID threat. Even though everything else has gone in COVID, we're still turning away people's southern border's COVID threats. Well, that goes away in May. It might go away earlier depending on what the courts do, but at the very least, it goes away in May when the COVID emergency is going to be lifted.

And so the administration is looking at that saying, "Okay, we lift Title 42 and the numbers which are already unprecedented are going to get even larger. There are a lot of people waiting in Mexico for Title 42 to be lifted. They're going to flood into the United States. So what do we do?" So the administration has been trying little by little to shift the incentives. So starting with the four countries I mentioned, Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba, the administration is now allowing as many as 30 thousand people per month from those four countries to be "paroled" into the United States. I'm air quoting here because it's a term of art, but it basically means they can come and live here for a period of at least two years. They're not going to be given asylum status, so they can apply once they're here. They need a sponsor. So they need somebody in the United States to say, "I'm going to support this person when they come."

There's another innovation going on there, which is pretty interesting, but basically saying, "Okay, if you follow this legal channel, you show up at a border..." In fact, you have to sign in on an app to make an appointment at the legal port of entry. "If you have a sponsor, you can come legally to the United States. If you show up the border, we're going to turn you around except in quite rare circumstances where you can show exceptional need." Well, this began getting rolled out at the fall, and the numbers of people arriving between the ports of entry from those four countries have dropped dramatically, roughly by 90 percent in all four cases.

So what the administration is doing now is trying to roll this out for everybody trying to arrive across the southern border saying, "Look, there are avenues to come here and make your asylum claim properly at the ports of entry, but if you arrive and cross the Rio Grande or come into the country illegally in some other way, the presumption is going to be that you're just going to be turned back, that we won't even hear your claim," again, some exception, but the presumption will be, "No, you're not going to be eligible for asylum if you swim across the river and make the claim when you get into Texas."

LINDSAY:
So Ted, help me understand why it is that Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans are beneficiaries of this parole, again a term of art, as opposed to Yemenis or Syrians or Chinese or Argentines.

ALDEN:
Well, there are others who have benefited from versions of this, the Ukrainians, the Afghanis, the sponsorship programs actually were rolled out for those countries first. I think the particular reason these countries are being focused on is that we've seen the biggest increases in people arriving at the southern border crossing illegally and making their claim. So that's where this gets into politics. You've got an administration that looks at the southern border and says, "Look, we got to admit it, we disagree with the Republican rhetoric, but face it, the border down there is out of control. These are numbers that we cannot deal with as an administration."

That's a political problem for the president. He knows it's a political problem. And so the goal here is to try to get that situation under control. And I think the rationale for these four countries is you get the greatest bang for the buck. Let's start with these where we've seen the big surges, pilot test it with respect to these countries, and then if it's successful, which it appears to be from the early numbers, roll it out more broadly, which is what the administration has proposed to do in May when Title 42 is going to go away.

LINDSAY:
Now we've been talking about the southern border, Ted, but the United States also has a northern border. Are we seeing any changes in terms of people trying to come across the northern border?

ALDEN:
Yeah, the changes are actually in the other direction. I mean, our listeners are probably familiar with the stunts that Ron DeSantis and the other southern governors have pulled to fly asylum seekers north to New York City or to Martha's Vineyard. Well, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has been doing the same thing in New York and saying, "Why don't you head north and cross into Canada and make your asylum claims there?" So what we have in fact seen is a significantly growing surge of asylum seekers who've arrived in the United States who think their odds are better in Canada, and they are going up through Quebec at a place called Roxham Road. And this has become a big political problem in Canada. Canada is actually seeing a sort of small version of what the U.S. is dealing with at the southern border. So the flow is actually in the other direction. Asylum seekers already in the United States, headed north to Canada thinking their odds are better in Canada than they are here in the U.S..

LINDSAY:
And Ted, what about people who come to the United States not by going over the land border or either to the south or to the north, but who fly in or otherwise arrive in the United States potentially on visas that they then overstay, they never return. Has that problem become worse? Has it eased up?

ALDEN:
Again, part of what we're seeing is just the nature of the challenges changed quite dramatically. I mean, if you were to do a timeline, you'd say, "Okay, in the 90s, it was mostly people coming across the southern border," though there were lots of people overstaying visas in the 90s. By sort of late 2000s, 2010-ish, as the flow across the southern border had decreased, there were more people overstaying visas than there were crossing across the land borders. I haven't seen the latest number on visa overstays, but it continues to be a significant issue. Of course, in order to overstate, you have to get a visa in the first place. You have people who are braving the journey across the Darien gap between Columbia and Panama to make it north to the United States, one of the most dangerous regions in the world. These are people who can't get visas to the United States.

So the visas system provides a sort of relatively high barrier. People before they get visas are vetted by Dtate department officers basically looking at the criteria of, "are you going to overstay this visa or not? And if we think you're going to overstay the visa, you're not going to get it." So there's a bit more control in that environment than there is at the southern border. I think that's why there's all this focus on the southern border. I think politically the issue is not just that there are people here who shouldn't be here who have an unauthorized status, but I think it's the perception of chaos and disorder at the southern border that's the heart of the problem.

LINDSAY:
Okay. If we may, Ted, I want to sort of open up the aperture and talk about the U.S. immigration system more broadly. You have written that it's broken. Almost everyone I talk to regardless of political party thinks it is broken. There's the question of why we haven't been able to fix it, because the problems are long-standing. But before we get there, I'd like to get your take on what do you think the major problems or flaws in the U.S. immigration system are?

ALDEN:
That is a big issue. Some ways haven't changed that much from when I was part of the council in Foreign Relations task force back in '08, '09 with Jeb Bush and Mack McLarty when we delved into all these issues when the Obama administration was looking at immigration reform. What are the problems? It's a system that's not focused on helping the U.S. economy especially. Our legal immigration system is largely dependent on family ties. You can bring not just your immediate family, but your parents, your adult children, your brothers and sisters, there are long wait times. But the system is not particularly geared to the economic needs of the U.S. economy. That's not a sensible way to run an immigration system in countries where immigration is popular like Canada or Australia, that's not how they do it. That's a huge problem, long bureaucratic delays and backlog. It's a hugely inefficient system.

That's a huge problem. It's not a flexible system at all. I mean, I think we would all logically say that in a period we are now where we've got huge labor shortages, those labor shortages are contributing to an inflation problem that seems to be very hard for the Federal Reserve to get under control. You would want to bring in more immigrants to fill those jobs, but our system isn't flexible. The quotas are controlled entirely by the Congress. Other countries don't run their immigration systems that way. So that would be kind of my hit parade. But there are a lot of other problems with the system. I mean, the basic problem is it's ancient, right? The laws under which we're still operating were all written in the 1960s. There were some tweaks in the 1990 Act, but almost everything about the way we move and live and work as people has changed fundamentally in the last sixty years, and our laws have not changed at all.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk a little bit about how the U.S. immigration system is set up. You said something I think, which is very interesting, is that other countries don't do it this way. You mentioned Australia, you mentioned Canada, countries that have reasonable amounts of immigration and those policies enjoy public support, something that I don't think is the case here in the United States. And I'll admit, our society is more polarized on pretty much every issue, so we have to take that into account. But what is it about the Australian or the Canadian system that gives them more public popularity? Is it that just more efficient or do they do immigration in a different way?

ALDEN:
I think there are two things. One that's critical of the way the U.S. does things, the other that I think is more a function of geography. The difference, going back to what I was saying earlier is I think these systems are very clearly geared to try to bring economic benefit to Australia and to Canada. Those countries are searching out immigrants that they think will be helpful to their economies and the populations understand that. And so I think there's broader support because of the sense that immigration is bringing a general good to the country. I mean, we all know from the research, the primary benefits of immigration go to the immigrants. They're often moving from poorer countries to wealthier countries, there are enormous benefits.

But there are these knock-on benefits for the societies because they fill jobs that might otherwise not be filled. They start companies that might not otherwise be started. Immigrants on the whole tend to be more entrepreneurial. They file patents at higher rates. So there are a lot of these general benefits. The Canadian and Australian systems really take advantage of that. The other that's more accidental is that they don't have the same problem with illegal immigration. I mean, Australia's an island, and also if you look at Australia's policy is pretty harsh, right? I mean, people who arrive by boat in Australia are turned away. People seeking refuge there are kept on islands offshore. It's a pretty brutal policy.

Canada has a more generous, welcoming policy, but because of geography, hides behind the United States. Most of the problem is coming across the southern border. The Canadians are pretty insulated from that. So the debates are just different here. So much of the immigration debate is focused on the problem of unauthorized migrants, or in the case of asylum seekers potentially authorized, but just in numbers that the system can't really handle whereas that is not as much of a feature in Australia or Canada. I mean, if you look at Europe, the debates there are a little more similar to what we see in the United States, some balance between, yes, there are real benefits from immigration and Europe is even more of an aging society than we are, but you have the same problems of border control there that you have here.

LINDSAY:
Well, and that certainly showed up in Britain where it wasn't an issue of border control because people had the legal right to come to Britain to work, and that led to a backlash that helped fuel Brexit back in 2016.

ALDEN:
Just quickly on that, Jim, I mean it's interesting how the Brexit debate was partly about the Polish plumbers coming over, but it occurred in the midst of the European refugee crisis when very large numbers were coming from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Africa. If you look at the ads that were run by the UK Independence Party during the Brexit campaign, they featured these images of dark-skinned refugees headed for the UK. So it wasn't just the Polish plumbers, right? It was this fear that the UK was losing control over its borders, a debate, not unlike what we hear here in the United States.

LINDSAY:
Point taken. I want to actually go a little bit further on this issue of economics because I want to take advantage of your expertise thinking about and writing about American economic competitiveness because I understand the argument for refocusing the U.S. immigration system so that it brings in more of the talent that matches what the economy needs. Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, says there are something on the order of 3.5 million fewer workers in the workforce now than would've been the case given the trends before the pandemic.

I see numbers as something on the order of 10 million jobs remain unfilled here in the United States, but there's also a trade-off there in terms of bringing talent in from abroad versus nurturing talent here at home. I often hear people who are critical of these proposals argue that there actually aren't shortages, there are talented people here in the United States with the skills to do jobs, it's just that American employers don't want to pay the wages needed to attract them. In essence, what happens is these immigration programs become ways to bring in cheaper labor to price out American workers. How do you think through that line of argument?

ALDEN:
Yeah, that is a great question. I think the answer is that both of these things are true to some extent, and what's so frustrating to me about the immigration debate is we just refuse on both sides to deal with these nuances. Yeah, I mean, there's no question, the United States should be doing a lot more in its own schools, for instance, to develop the STEM workers that we're going to need for the future in elementary schools and high schools, in universities. There's a desperate need to develop our own workforce. If you bring in unlimited numbers of workers from abroad, whether for lower end, more menial jobs or for very high end technical jobs, on balance that's going to have the effect of driving down wages. That's simple supply and demand. So the notion that very high levels of immigration are somehow a solution to all these problems, I don't think that's correct. I think we need to find a balance. 

On the other hand, we know, and there's a lot of good research on this, that the United States has been lucky, and the Canadians are having this experience now attracting a lot of tremendously talented immigrants from abroad. You look at Silicon Valley, I mean, the story of Silicon Valley is to no small extent a story of immigrant entrepreneurship of smart immigrants coming over and starting companies that then end up employing tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans. So there are enormous spinoff benefits to the native born population from these immigrants coming here. So both these stories have elements of truth, and I think the question is trying to find a balance. 

And this is not all a sort of Silicon Valley story. You look at something like farm workers, right? There are a lot of farm jobs that require manual labor picking strawberries and fruit crops and other things. The farmers say, and there's no reason to doubt them, the evidence is pretty clear, that they just cannot get American workers to do that kind of work, even as they begin to raise the wages. I mean, they can't pay people $75 an hour to do those jobs, but even when they increase the wages to $25 and $30, they can't find American workers. And so you're probably going to need an immigrant labor force to do that unless we want to import all our food. So there are all these complicated trade-offs. And again, if we had a more flexible and nimble immigration policy, you could try to adapt. You could constantly be trying to find that balance, but instead, you've got these unbreakable political divisions, Congress controlling all the quotas and Congress not willing to act on any of this. And so basically, we just keep yelling at each other with administrations having very few tools to try to find the right balance here.

LINDSAY:
On this issue of farm workers, I saw a statistic, I think in one of the pieces that you wrote, Ted, that the Department of Labor estimates that almost half of all farm workers in the United States are actually undocumented.

ALDEN:
It's just historically the way it worked. I mean, my brother owned a farm in Washington state for a long time. He hired undocumented workers. He said it was way easier and they'd recruit their friends, and that was what everybody in the region did. That's been true across California. That is less true than it was twenty years ago. I mean, partly because of the increase in enforcement at the border, it's been harder for people to come. I mean, historically, there was a sort of seasonal labor flow. I remember talking to Jeff Flake years ago down in Arizona. He was the Republican member of Congress at the time, became a senator, now ambassador to Turkey, I think. His family owned a ranch down there, and they would hire illegal migrant workers. But these guys would just come up from Mexico and they'd work six months and they'd go back home.

He said, "We began cracking down on the border in the early 90s." They couldn't do that anymore, so they'd come up and they'd bring their families. But anyway, increasingly you are seeing farm workers who are coming under the legally authorized program, which is known as the H-2A farm workers program. There's been a big increase in uptake, and the Biden administration wants to see those numbers grow further. Again, the strategy of trying to discourage the illegal entry and make it easier for people to come under the legal programs. And there is a big legal farm worker program that is getting bigger.

LINDSAY:
So we have this system of immigration that pretty much everyone agrees is broken. They've agreed for more than a decade that it's broken, it needs an overhaul. We've had a lot of talk about compromised bills that could address some of the most significant issues in the U.S. immigration policy, but we never seem to get to the fix, Ted. Are there any reasons to be optimistic either in terms of a big fix or in terms of smaller fixes?

ALDEN:
I mean, there's no reason at the moment to be optimistic on a big fix. There's not going to be any significant immigration legislation in this Congress. We'll see what happens after 2024, but this has just become a fundamental fissure between the two parties, and I don't see any signs of it healing in the near term. The Biden administration is trying to be especially creative at using executive authority. And this is not new. I mean, listeners will remember the DACA program for young people brought here illegally by their parents. That was an Obama administration executive initiative that was put in place because Congress couldn't pass the Dream Act. So administrations have been doing these things at the executive level for a long time. The Biden administration is pushing the envelope further and further. I mean, this program to allow legal temporary admission for Haitians and Nicaraguans and others, that's a stretch of legal provisions that allow for humanitarian parole. I think when the Congress wrote that law was intended to be used much more selectively, not for these huge numbers. 

What's happening as a result of this is that every one of these things is going into court. Every time the administration announces a new initiative, the state level attorneys general in Republican states usually led by either Texas or Florida, sues in the courts, a lot of these cases are going before judges who were appointed under President Trump. And so more often than not, the Republican states are winning these cases, and the policies are often enjoined and blocked temporarily than it's moved up through the appeals courts. A lot of this stuff will probably end up in the Supreme Court. So as you well know, anytime presidents are relying solely on executive power, their position is weaker in the courts, and all of the stuff that the Biden administration is doing has the potential to get shot down by the courts.

LINDSAY:
But I would imagine having the courts step in and make these rulings, whatever their legal basis, and I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to that question. You end up with an immigration policy that is even more confusing and more conflicted than the one you started out with.

ALDEN:
Yeah, I can't say it any better than that. That's exactly what happens. And not only more confusing and more conflicted, you end up with a kind of on and off switch, because the administration puts in place these rules, and then it gets sued, and then it takes a bit of time before the district court judges rule. And as you know, state level court judges can stop national programs. And so the tap gets turned on and off, which makes it very difficult for the administration to carry out any sort of consistent policy.

LINDSAY:
And there's obviously a vicious cycle here, which is that Congress can't come together to pass legislation to address a problem that pretty much everyone across the political spectrum agrees exists. Then they turn and want the president to do something. Presidents choose depending upon their political preferences, a solution, they stretch their executive power because they want to get things done. The opposing party cries fall. We go to the courts, lather, rinse, repeat seems to be the mantra.

ALDEN:
Yeah, absolutely. And to be fair, under Republican as well as Democratic presidents. I mean, if there's a President DeSantis in 2024, the administration's approach to this issue is going to change fundamentally and radically, and the attorneys general and Democratic states are going to sue to try to block whatever a President DeSantis is doing. So yeah, this could go on for a long time with pretty messy consequences.

LINDSAY:
On that bipartisan, albeit somewhat depressing note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Ted Alden, the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council, the author of the forthcoming book, When the World Closed Its Door: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Border Control. Ted, thank you for joining me.

ALDEN:
Great to be with you, Jim. Thank you.

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