It's the Brian Lersho on WNYC. Good morning everyone. On this sizzling hot summer day we've

put together some recent conversations we like having, including Ben Smith on some oversized

personalities not named Musk or Zuckerberg whose rivalry gave birth to digital media as we know it.

Also a visit from the Swedish death cleaners, not as scary as that sounds, actually a kind of

cathartic thing that you do while you're alive. But let's start here with some things you probably

don't know about why we have today's asylum surge with immigration reporter Julia Preston.

We spoke right before the city saw its shelter population surpass an unprecedented 100,000 people

recently, with at least half of them according to the city's data recently arrived asylum seekers.

I'll point out that before the pandemic there weren't even a total of 50,000 people in the whole

shelter system. Now there are that many who've come in the last two years not to mention the

other drivers of homelessness in New York. Mayor Eric Adams had this to say about the influx of

migrants back in April. This is one of the largest humanitarian crises that this city has ever

experienced. It will impact every service in the city. Why isn't every elected official in

Washington DC asking the national government why are you doing this to New York? The national

government has turned its back on New York City. Mayor Adams in April and that quote from Mayor

Adams happens to open an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that is the most comprehensive

explanation of why this is happening and things that can be done about it that I've come across

anywhere. It's 35 pages long. I learned so much from reading it. It's no surprise to me that it's

from Julia Preston. The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered national immigration issues

for the New York Times for 10 years and is now with a Marshall project which reports on the

justice system. The article is called The Real Origins of the Board of Crisis,

how a broken asylum system warped American immigration. Again it's in Foreign Affairs magazine.

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