During the Cold War, we could stir up a bunch of hysteria over a common enemy.

We couldn't have done that if we weren't so white.

We're bringing back what amounts to national origins quotas, which was our immigration system for a lot of the 20th century from 1921 to 1965.

Hello and welcome to opening arguments. This is episode 1217, which weirdly were you having to be recording on 1217, something that definitely threw my mind for a quick loop where I was like, well, did I name it wrong? Yeah. And then I went into an existential crisis for a second. No, we're all good. I'm Thomas. That over there is real life immigration attorney Matt Cameron. How are you doing? Hey, all right. Happy to be going into overtime a little bit from Wednesday to pick up on a piece we didn't get to talk about.

And then also are going to give you some recent news to put that piece in really depressing context. So that's what I'm here for. We're doing this way later than normal because we wanted to make sure to catch Trump's announcement thingy that as you're hearing this, I'm sure you've already found out was a dud,

which is good. It's actually good. Yeah. Consider what it could have been. There's a certain

weirdness where you were like, oh, is he announcing a war, a bombing? And then he starts doing

his normal like Biden ruined everything and I'm great. Just ranting. And then there's the part of

your dumb brain that's like, oh, I thought it was going to be a war.

And you're like, wait a minute. This could have been an email. Wake me up when there's a war. It's like, no, I'm glad he's doing his dumb crap. Yeah. I was worried. Were you worried? A little bit. I was because of just the way things have been pulling together with this Venezuela thing. but you know another pep rally about how much everything sucked I guess last year even though

everything's actually objectively worse now. Yeah, cool. Just remind everybody, that is fascism. When you say out loud that everything was terrible before I personally fixed it. I just want to remind you that. Yeah. And when you Baghdad, Bob, you know, like everything's crumbling in the background and you tell people not to believe their lying eyes or whatever. Yeah. So we, we're doing a late recording. I feel like it's like a more intimate like OA after dark. After dark. That's right. But I'm glad we stayed up for that to find out that the nothing. Yeah. Which is good. Again, it's good that it was nothing. We foolishly thought we were going to have time for more stuff on the Wild Card Wednesday episode, which I hope you all have listened to.

I know that's a different format, but this one was, I think, particularly meaningful near and dear to our hearts.

Yeah.

Because what the New York Times is doing is just, it's really, really bad. It's just an indicator of a societal thing that's really, really bad. I mean, it's one thing to make fun of the Federalist and, you know, the National Review, which we do all the time. But sometimes, you know, we just have to point out what the New York Times is doing because it's terrible. It's just terrible. I really appreciated that we took the time on that one.

Yeah, so I hope you caught that. And that was a long one. So we are going to talk about an amazing

federalist article that says we should go back to 1920s immigration policy. Now, I'm not a historian

or an immigration attorney. I don't know if that's part of your curriculum, Matt, but was that good? Was it a good policy?

I do actually teach immigration policy.

I know quite a lot about this.

And I mean, when I see that headline that we're going to see in the Federalist, what I see is the equivalent of, hey, Jim Crow was fine.

Let's do that again.

It's really just about the same.

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