The Real ‘Border Czar’ Defends the Biden-Harris Record

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Republicans want to label Kamala Harris as the border czar. And by just looking at a chart, you can see why. Border crossings were low when Donald Trump left office. But when President Biden is in the White House, they start shooting up and up — to numbers this country had never seen before, peaking in December 2023. Those numbers have fallen significantly since Biden issued tough new border policies. But that has still left Harris with a major vulnerability. Why didn’t the administration do more sooner? And why did border crossings skyrocket in the first place? Harris was not the border czar; she had little power over policy. But to the extent that there is a border czar, it’s the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain what’s happened at the border the past few years — the record surge, the administration’s record and what it has revealed about our immigration system. Book Recommendations: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead String Theory by David Foster Wallace The Dictionary Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Dara Lind, David Frum, Jason De Léon, Michael Clemens, Natan Last and Steven Camarota.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. There's a reason that at the presidential debate it was on a question about immigration
0:28.5	that Vice President Harris uncorked her bait about crowd sizes and crowd interest to try to pull Donald
0:36.4	Trump down the road to debate ruin. Immigration is a tough topic for the Biden administration.
0:44.7	And you can see why on a chart the way that we measure
0:49.3	the flow of migrants to the southern border is by tracking how many
0:53.6	encounters our officials there have with migrants.
0:57.6	And if you look back to the Bush administration,
0:59.6	you see actually fairly high numbers by modern standards, you know times 150,000 a month
1:04.7	sometimes even higher than that under Obama it goes quite a bit down to often around
1:09.8	50,000 sometimes even less than that a month.
1:14.0	Under Trump it goes even lower than that.
1:15.8	Some very, very sharp lows, although one pretty big bump in the middle of 19,
1:20.0	which then again comes down, and then after that the pandemic.
1:23.4	And then he hit Joe Biden and the chart just goes wild.
1:28.2	It just goes up and up and up.
1:30.2	It gets jagged but we have numbers we've never seen before culminating in 300,000 encounters in December of 2023.
1:39.0	Since then, the administration has worked with Mexico and other partners to increase enforcement in those
1:45.1	countries. It has passed a series of executive actions on its own and it has brought
1:49.7	those numbers down. But why didn't they do it earlier? What led to the very high
1:55.2	flows in the first place? You often hear Republicans say that Vice President
1:59.3	Harris was the borders are and she did get called that although it was never an actual title and she never had any actual power.
2:06.0	The portfolio she was given was Root Causes of Migration in Latin America,
	...

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