This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, August 6, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When evaluating the relative effectiveness of border protection and the desire among

would-be legal immigrants to come to the U.S.

One metric doesn't get its due, the number of current job openings in the United States.

Cato's Alex Narasta details why the simple explanation for border crossings deserves more consideration.

So between the Trump administration and the Biden administration, what do we know in terms of the differences between apprehensions or interactions at the

border between U.S. law enforcement and people trying to cross the border.

Donald Trump inherited a fairly stable border with around 4 to 500,000 apprehensions of illegal immigrants per year.

And with a few small exceptions, like a big surge in 2019,

it was relatively stable around those numbers. What happened, though, around COVID is that President Trump, due to the pandemic instituted an order called

Title 42, which changed Border Patrol policy from taking illegal immigrants and putting them

in detention facilities and putting them through the justice system and then deporting them to basically just pushing them back over the border almost

immediately and that happened at a time when the numbers of people crossing

also collapsed due to COVID and everything else that happened in April of 2020.

Since then, however, the numbers have been escalating, the numbers of people coming across the border

and being apprehended have escalated dramatically.

So we haven't seen a change that appears to tie in with a change in administration.

Like, explain to me what what policies have changed

from Trump to Biden with respect to operations at the border. So title 42 is still in

effect along the border right now. But President Biden has liberalized some rules,

has liberalized some rules about asylum, sent a lot of messages about how we're going to be more open without doing a whole lot.

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