This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 7th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How important has immigration been to America's global position?

Tim Kane in his new book, The Immigrant Superpower, How Brains, Braun, and Bravery make America stronger, lays out his case for why immigration makes America great.

The United States no longer has a president engaging in, at least on this subject, the subject of immigration,

broad scale sort of demagoguing the issue, using immigrants as a scapegoat for a lot of problems that the U.S. faces, and

has that president has been replaced by somebody who, as far as I can tell, would very much like to run away from this issue as much as possible.

So in general, how do you rate the difference between the relative openness of a President Donald

Trump and a President Joe Biden? I wish I could say that President Biden was this pro-immigration president

that I've been hoping for.

In fact, we've seen some really disturbing trends.

The head of DHS, President Biden's appointee, Mayorkus, told Cubans that

were coming across the water to Florida that there's never a good time to immigrate by sea, which seems a bizarre

statement from a country that traces itself back to the Mayflower voyage. They've

literally sent refugees back to Venezuela to that horrible communist dictatorship, and time will tell if they're going to embrace Ukrainian refugees.

So on refugee policy, they're actually the

the Biden presidency is not an improvement.

We have seen some states in the wake of this Ukraine situation, governors like Jared Polis saying, if you've got

Ukrainian refugees, we'll take them.

And that of course is very promising, least at the state level to signal an openness

on individual states to immigrants.

You know, it's not really you know state by state it could be could vary widely

...