This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 5th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

After the travel ban, after separating families at the border, after turning away people seeking asylum or refugee status now come proposed changes to the

broad immigration system. How is the Trump administration taking aim at

legal immigration? David Beer is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. He says the apparent immigration. migrants. Let's go back in time just a little bit here, and how did immigration legal immigration

ebb and flow during the Obama years? Generally, legal immigration was trending upwards during the Obama years and in particular in the

years of 2016 and 2015, you saw a bit of an uptick.

Particularly 2016 was somewhat of an outlier year in that it was saw the biggest increase of any

year during the Obama administration. Now is that in part because we had this

financial crisis right as he was coming into

office and that legal immigration had had declined?

No actually.

Okay. In fact, legal immigration trends, when you're talking about permanent residency, are a little

bit divorced from the economic trends, so there is a little bit of an effect but because we

force legal immigrants to wait so long in order to come and or receive permanent residency if they are already here,

there's such a long cue that economic trends don't really affect their numbers very much and so it's really other factors that result

in these these trends upwards or downwards.

Okay so what what did cause that? these trends upwards or downwards.

Okay, so what did cause that uptick

toward the end of the Obama years?

Well, a couple of things.

Number one, we started to increase the number of refugees that were allowed into the United States.

And so the refugee program expanded, so that resulted in a few more individuals coming in from abroad.

...