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This is On Point. I'm Magna Chakrabardi.

David Beer joins us today.

He's director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute.

David, welcome to On Point.

Thanks for having me on.

And by the way, I do appreciate how in your Twitter slash ex-bio, you explicitly say

libertarian, not left. Point well taken. Okay. So let me ask you this big broad question.

Is there a way for us to estimate the number of legal immigration applications pending in the United States right now?

No, because really right now, we are in an information blackout by this administration.

The last information that we have about the backlog is really from before major policy changes were enacted.

So, I mean, you're looking all the way back into June where already at that point, it was 12 million applications for various benefits, all different types of things, everything from work authorization to renewals of status in the United States and elsewhere.

So that gives you the scale of how bad it was as a starting position.

We're in a situation now where so many people

are being blocked by various policies that we really don't know the scale of what we're dealing

with. So we're not just talking about asylum cases, right? This is, I don't know,

fiancé visas, student visas, is it like H1B?

Is it all of them?

Yeah, this is a total picture.

This is everything that you could apply for through our immigration system.

And it's all, you know, it's the pending applications that are going through that process.

Okay.

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