WTH is Going On with Title 42? Andrew Selee on our Broken Immigration System
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2023
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
This Thursday, the COVID-era immigration policy Title 42 will expire. Initiated by the Trump administration, it allowed for the expulsion of migrants at the border under a public health directive. It lifts as numbers of encounters at the border continue to skyrocket – instances grew from 646,822 in 2020 to 2,766 in 2022, and have already surpassed 1.544 million this year. These are staggering and historic numbers. Border Patrol cannot handle the sheer quantity, processing centers are overrun and inefficient, legitimate asylum seekers and migrants are being delayed access for years while the US government attempts to handle the illegal entries. Title 42 was not meant to be a sustained solution, but its expiration – without a replacement policy in place – means that this summer will see a humanitarian tragedy at the US southern border. Notably, polls show that the American public is not very divided on this question; by and large, Americans support and encourage legal immigration, and condemn the chaos – the humanitarian disaster, financial confusion, and resource misallocation – that is the result of loose and unserious border policy. And yet, Administration after Administration, Congress after Congress, drags its feet and leaves policy stopgaps to the courts.
Andrew Selee is the President of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a global nonpartisan institution that seeks to improve immigration and integration policies. He also chairs MPI Europe's Administrative Council. Prior to MPI, Dr. Selee spent 17 years at the Woodrow Wilson Center where he founded the Center’s Mexico Institute, and served as the Center’s VP for Programs and Executive VP. He has also worked on staff in the US Congress, served on the Board of Directors of the YMCA, and is a columnist for Mexico’s largest newspaper El Universal. His most recent book is Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell is talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:36.9 | Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Mark, what the hell is going on? |
| 0:43.8 | What the hell is going on is this week. Title 42 is going away. Title 42, for the few of you who might not know, is the public health measure that the Trump administration put in after COVID. |
| 0:54.9 | Pandemic began that allowed our government to send back migrants at the border. And it has been used |
| 1:01.1 | to expel migrants at our border 2.6 million times over the last three years. And it's going away, |
| 1:08.0 | which means that it's probably going to be more than 2.6 million over time, |
| 1:12.3 | because once it goes away, more people are going to come because they think they can get into the country. |
| 1:17.0 | So we are bracing right now for, if you thought the border crisis was bad over the last, |
| 1:23.7 | and getting worse over the last three years, you ain't seen nothing yet. |
| 1:26.8 | Because people are kind of be coming. |
| 1:28.6 | They're already coming in advance of the lifting of Title 42. |
| 1:32.3 | And this problem is getting getting a lot worse before it gets better. |
| 1:35.3 | Mark, do you have the numbers for people? |
| 1:37.0 | Because I think that nothing illustrates how big of a problem this has become better |
| 1:43.2 | than looking at the exponential growth of numbers of, |
| 1:49.0 | and maybe you can also help me understand the difference between what the Border Patrol calls encounters |
| 1:54.1 | and how many people are actually showing up, because I don't actually get it. |
| 1:58.0 | Well, so in terms of encounters are the people who are actually |
| 2:01.9 | encountered by the Border Patrol and either expelled or processed or allowed into the country. It's |
| 2:08.3 | anyone that comes into contact with the Border Patrol. Then you have what are known as Godaways, |
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