Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is John Herschauer, Associate Editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is my colleague, Stephen Melanga. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal's senior

editor. He writes about a range of policy areas, including state and local governance, economics, and

immigration. His work has appeared in several outlets, including the Wall Street Journal,

where he appears regularly, and of course, City Journal. We'd initially brought Steve on to discuss

his excellent feature from our autumn issue, no, you're not imagining a migrant crime spree.

But with Donald Trump's decisive election victory and his cabinet beginning to take shape,

we wanted to broaden the discussion to include not only Steve's

excellent reporting, but the incoming Trump administration's immigration agenda. So Steve, thanks,

as always, for joining us on 10 blocks. Immigration was obviously central to Trump's campaign, and as you

note in your piece, one reason for that was just the overwhelming surge of migrants who entered

the country under the Biden administration.

Can you walk us through some of the changes that Biden made at the federal level that just facilitated this massive flow of migration?

I would say there's several crucial changes, including essentially a change to immigration law, really,

which said that people who are asylum seekers who come to this

country seeking asylum have to wait outside the country before their cases are heard in order

to determine whether they qualify for asylum, because only about previous to this, only about

15% of people who came and requested asylum actually qualified, you know,

under the portions of the law, which allowed asylum for people who were being persecuted,

and, you know, maybe for religious reasons in their home country. So what the Biden administration

instead did was let these people come in through the border, gave them a date in which their case would be heard,

and then released them into the country. And oftentimes those cases, because of the backlog that grew,

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