Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by one of the country's leading experts on immigration law and policy,

Aaron Reckland-Melnick. He is policy director at the American Immigration Council.

He has testified a number of times before Congress on issues related to immigration.

You may recently have heard him on Chris Hayes' podcast discussing recent changes to immigration

law.

But more importantly, for the purposes of the current affairs podcast, Aaron is a dear old friend of mine. We went to undergraduate together and we did

mock trial and it's really nice to see you again, Aaron. It's so nice to see you, Nathan,

and congratulations on everything that you've done here at Current Affairs. Well, we were just

discussing. It's a little surreal for us to be together here because when we

were 20, you were a junior barrister in Mark trial tournaments, and I was your witness.

And I played various different colorful characters on the stand, and you were an attorney

interrogating me.

We were babies doing this in a fake way, and then we

became adults, and now we're adults, and you're genuinely, one of the country's leading

immigration experts. I run the second largest socialist magazine in the country, and it's very

strange. It is strange, and I will say this. This is entirely true.

The public speaking skills and ability to think quickly on my feet that I learned from mock trial

has actually served me incredibly well in my professional career.

So I'm sure you probably had something similar.

I don't know, because I was playing kooky characters, as you say, most of the time.

I wasn't an attorney in the mock trial for the most part, because that made me very nervous

...