What we've essentially seen over the years is the degree to which the conversation about

immigration generally has been hijacked by a kind of cheap political debate about the border.

And really, if you talk to smart people, if you talk to

serious people, whatever their political bend is, if they are actually meaningfully engaged in

trying to think through these broad demographic questions of our time, what you start to hear

in kind of in different forms, different configurations is a pattern of people saying, okay,

we have to find ways of drawing pressure away from the

border itself, whether that means processing people in their home countries or beginning to

think of legal avenues for which people can apply, you know, in their own region. There's got to be

some way of moving this drama, this human drama and this political drama, away from the southern border.

Hello, and welcome to why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

By the time you hear this, it will be the second Trump administration.

And if there's a single area of policy focus where they campaigned on the issue and they're

going to do things on that issue, it's immigration.

They didn't really campaign on tax cuts for rich people and like cutting the corporate tax.

That wasn't the central focus.

They're going to try to do that.

There's a whole bunch of things they seem to want to do maybe like including wars of imperial conquest to capture territory which they didn't really campaign on the one thing i think you could

say that they ran a campaign on was massively restricting immigration in the United States and massively deporting

people who were here out of status. And they're going to try to do that. And by the time you hear

this in your ears, there may be already doing versions of it that are along a scale from continuity

to some radical new horror.

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