WTH Is Going On With America's Immigration Mess? Nicholas Eberstadt Explains.
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The aftermath of Biden’s open border policies continues to haunt America as the consequences of mass illegal immigration continue to snowball. Changing attitudes towards, net positive, productive legal migration reflects the sentiment stirred up by the surge in illegal immigration we experienced the last four years. How does this affect workforce participation and address population decline? What role does the welfare state play? How are foreign adversaries using this mess as an opportunity to establish influence operations through universities, social media, and in foreign born communities? Has something changed about the nature of illegal migrants to America? And where is an immigration reform bill in Congress to address these issues permanently?
Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute where he researched demographics, economic development, and international security in the Korean peninsula and Asia. He is also a senior advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research, a founding board member of the US Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, and has served as consultant or adviser to the US Government and international organizations. His most recent book is the Post-Pandemic Edition of Men Without Work (Templeton, 2022). His demographic work on immigration focuses on societies facing population decline and the crucial role of skilled immigrants, both of which he addresses in his Working Paper, “America’s Immigration Mess: An Illustrated Guide.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:07.1 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.5 | What's really going on? |
| 0:12.0 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.5 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.6 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.7 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.0 | What is going on? |
| 0:20.0 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:29.9 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:31.6 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.4 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.6 | What the hell is going on. |
| 0:35.4 | Mark? |
| 0:35.7 | What the hell is going on, Danny, is we're going to get down to the bottom of the immigration problem today. Because the reality is nobody knows all the numbers. Nobody knows how many people came in. What are they doing to the economy? There's a lot of people speculating out there. But we've got the world's greatest demographer at AEI, Nick Eversat, and he has produced a report called America's Immigration |
| 0:55.2 | Mess and Illustrated Guide in which he dug through all the numbers and what we found is that a lot of |
| 0:59.7 | the data is really bad. But based on what can be known, Nick has come up with the numbers and the |
| 1:05.1 | data to explain the immigration mess. First of all, I think he dismisses a lot of tropes. So, |
| 1:10.6 | for example, you know, |
| 1:11.7 | there's a tendency to think that a lot of immigrants in the United States are Mexicans. The number of |
... |
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