This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, April 19th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Biden administration made big promises with respect to immigration,

pledging to undo a good deal of the economically harmful

immigration policies of his predecessor.

And after failing to lift the cap on refugees

and currently defending policy decisions at the Supreme Court, it's left many people to wonder if the Biden team is credibly committed to immigration reform.

Cato's David Beer comments.

I remember you mentioning that Joe Biden essentially had no reason to back down on his campaign

promises related to immigration.

So where do we stand now with his attempt to do right by refugees

trying to enter the United States? Well, part of his campaign, a major part of his campaign platform for immigration was a promise to increase the refugee cap to 125,000.

This would not be the highest refugee cap ever.

The most ever allowed was 200,000 in 1980.

So this promise, you know, he reiterated it.

It was one of his first things that he reiterated after he won election saying that he was going to increase

the cap to 125,000.

Then after he became president he announced that it was going to be a cap increase of 62,500.

The existing cap under Trump was the lowest on record since 1980 the lowest number was 15,000 and that's what he had proposed.

They were currently on pace to do just 4,000 of that 15,000 and that was largely because President Trump had

also imposed all sorts of new requirements for refugee status. If you were a political refugee, you were

there were no cap slots allotted to you under the refugee cap. And so there was both this issue of the new

requirements as well as the fact that the cap was historically low. And this week the administration initially

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