Ali Noorani [00:00:18] You know, there’s one thing that we just don’t talk about nearly enough, and that is legal immigration. So this week, a deeper dove into the future of illegal immigration.
Todd Schulte [00:00:28] How are we going to build the nation that we know we have to be and the notion we can become? We saw an armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. And to me, like the central project is how do we build a more just world, a more just nation, one where everybody has the opportunity to belong and to count as an American? We haven’t done that in this country.
Ali Noorani [00:00:51] From the National Immigration Forum, I’m Ali Noorani. And this is Only in America. In both rhetoric and policy, the Trump administration created an intensely hostile climate for immigrants, whether through a xenophobic comment or a new restriction on visas. It was always clear that Trump and his closest advisers sought to fulfill a very particular vision, one of a more isolated, closed off America. We often saw this play out in headlines decrying the mistreatment of asylum seekers at the border or families torn apart by increased interior enforcement. But some of the most far reaching consequences of this anti-immigrant vision came from Trump’s consistent attacks on illegal immigration. The public charge rule, the discriminatory travel bans, the cuts to visas for students and high skilled workers. All of these policies combined to lead to a dramatic decrease in legal immigration. In fact, back in July, the National Foundation for American Policy projected that from fiscal years 2016 to 2021, legal immigration would decrease by forty nine percent, with overall levels dropping by more than half a million people. But the Biden administration has made it clear that they’re going to do things well a little differently. Rescinding the travel ban was among Biden’s first actions as president, and his administration has announced further plans to remove barriers to legal immigration and to promote citizenship. It’s all amazing news and a great first step towards restoring the legal immigration that strengthens our nation. But a truly successful legal immigration system will take more than undoing Trump’s policies. It’s going to take an overhaul of a long outdated system that cannot meet our modern immigration needs. So where do we go from here? What actions can Congress and the Biden administration take? And how do we modernize an immigration system in a way that can respond to our dynamic needs?
Underwriting [00:03:20] Support for the National Immigration Forum comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement and strengthening international peace and security and from Humanity United. When humanity is united, we can bring a powerful force for human dignity.
Ali Noorani [00:03:44] My guest this week is Todd Schulta, Todd is the president of Fwd.US, which advocates for immigration and criminal justice reform forward. Fwd.US has long been a critical partner of the Forum, and they’re a key part of the immigration advocacy space. They’ve done some incredible work on the full range of issues, including the border response to Dreamers and DACA recipients. And what are their main focus areas, in fact, is protecting and strengthening legal pathways to immigration. Todd and I spoke about how Congress and the Biden administration can tackle the remnants of the Trump era and why a broader vision for a legal immigration system is vital for our nation’s future.
Ali Noorani [00:04:21] Hey, Todd, thanks for joining. And before we kind of jump into the issues. Tell me a little bit about fwd.us. And, you know, even before that, how you found yourself kind of working on immigration, because a lot of people, when they get involved in immigration, although some of they can’t get out so how did you get involved?
Todd Schulte [00:04:34] I want to thank you for for having me and just start by saying it’s obviously such a big admirer of the work that you do, National Immigration Forum does and have the podcast. It’s great. I’m a first time participant, long listener. And, you know, by way of background, I had, you know, for kind of the first decade of my career really working on a more traditional electoral and democratic governing politics. I’ve done House and local races and presidential work. I’ve been a chief of staff for a member of Congress on the Hill. And I’ve been drawn to a political work in general, really with the belief that, like policy change was such a big lever for improving the lives of so many. And, you know, for me, what unites the work that we’re doing on a day to day basis on immigration policy and fwd.us is a bipartisan immigration organization that does criminal justice reform and immigration policy that unites that kind of day to day work with these larger causes. How are we going to build the nation that we know we have to be and the nation we can become? We saw an armed insurrection at the US Capitol. And to me, like the central project is how do we build a more just world, a more just nation, one where everybody has the opportunity to belong and to count as an American, regardless of their immigration status, regardless of their race and their religion? We haven’t done that in this country. To me, what drove me up to politics was this broader project of how do we actually become the multiracial, multi-ethnic, diverse democracy that we have to be? We have to be for the people here today. The people who will be born in the future, for other problems we need to solve. And it becomes just like unbelievably just depressing system to stare into and understand that despite the great, amazing, welcoming sense that we have done it very I’ll be very perfectly parts of our country’s history. We have a fundamentally broken system of immigration laws. The minute you work in government, the minute you see people caught up in the system from a personal perspective that comes out. And so in 2013, having come off the I finished organizational priorities USA helping to reelect President Obama, had the opportunity to get involved with helping to start this group with leaders in the business and technology community was really the vision of how do we bring together folks from everywhere, from the immigrant rights movement to the business community across the ideological spectrum and say, how do we really push through at the time what we call comprehensive immigration reform, but a fundamental overhaul of the immigration system that works for today’s economy, that works for today’s families, that is functional, that is humane, and that is what we have been working on in ways big and small for the last couple of years. And there’s a long answer to it. But I’m but I’m doing it here with you today, so. Yeah.
Ali Noorani [00:07:34] Well, I mean, let’s talk about not just the last couple of years, but really the last four years. And, you know, so much of the debate has been dominated by what Trump did around the border and child separation, treatment of dreamers, refugee resettlement. But above all of that, there is a much bigger goal that the Trump administration had, so kind of unpack that for me.
Todd Schulte [00:07:54] Yeah, I think that’s like really that probably the central I want to say at the beginning, misunderstanding of what the Trump administration was about. You know, from the minute the guy came down the escalator and made these demagogic comments about immigrants and Mexicans, you know, you saw a lot of people dismiss it. I mean, first, it is an entertainer. But, you know, people dismiss it all. That’s just about the border. All that’s just about the wall. And I want to put those I don’t want to say just about there, but that was what people would say. And you would see these excuses made for it. And he was building on a tradition that existed for a long time in this country, which is people say, oh, I just want people to come the right way, or there’s this good immigrant versus bad immigrant or oh, I’m not for illegal immigration, I’m for legal immigration. But we just can’t get to that right now, but really what you saw, I think, with Trump is someone who took these instincts he had the xenophobic instinct and kind of grafted it on to this very serious policy architecture that existed for for a generation in this country, which is let’s talk about border security. But actually, let’s make our central goal just shrinking the number of immigrants coming to this country. Let’s make our central immigration cutting legal immigration advocates. And the reason for that is simple. If your goal is to reduce the number of people who are immigrants, children of immigrants in this country, like a ton more people come legally than who who cross the border illegally or who come legally and overstay a visa like five, six, seven times as many people are coming legally and staying. And so what I think you saw was, you know, from day one of the Trump administration, you saw the attacks on Muslims and the Muslim travel ban. You saw efforts to rescind DACA. But if you remember, there was a moment there where the president had the ability to do this big bipartisan deal. He could have passed the DREAM Act and he could have gotten twenty five billion dollars a year for border security. And he said no. And he said no because it didn’t come with cuts to legal immigration. So that’s I’m excited to kind of talk about today is after four years of Trump and these kind of unprecedented assaults on legal immigration, you know, we have a hole to dig out of it. I think that is such an important thing. But ultimately, we’ve got to get not just back to where we were four years ago, but build a modern working legal immigration system for the future.
Ali Noorani [00:10:10] So, you know, like the folks at the Migration Policy Institute have tabulated, I want to say four hundred changes to the immigration system put in place by the Trump administration. So we don’t have time to talk about all 400, but I might quiz you on all 400.
Todd Schulte [00:10:23] I will tell you, they’ve tracked four hundred. Another person I think is over nine hundred now. When it was about seven hundred, someone said to me, well how many of those do you do like? And we kind of zip through, and I said there’s, there’s three that seem to be somewhat helpful technical improvements to make immigration easier, two of which involve reducing the number of faxes and duplicate faxes you have to send. So it’s only the ninety nine point nine four five percent designed to reduce immigration to this country.
Ali Noorani [00:10:54] So out of all those changes, where do things stand in terms of the three to five issues or efforts to cut illegal immigration? You know, what were the things that the Trump administration put into place then? We can talk about what a Biden administration should be doing to address those issues.
Todd Schulte [00:11:11] So legislatively, they attempted to pass what they call the Raise Act. They claimed this was to move to what they called a merit based immigration system. I want to be very clear that it’s not the case. The Raise Act cut legal immigration to this country by 50 percent. It would be the largest cuts to legal immigration since the racial quota laws in the 1920s. It thought the family based immigration system, which constitutes about 60ish percent of the the number of people get a green card each year. It cut the family based immigration system by eighty five percent. It made the employment based immigration system substantially more difficult, and it eliminated the diversity of estimates, some of the negative changes. Now that did not pass Congress. It did not even receive 50 votes, let alone 60 votes. And that failed. And really what they set out to do when that failed was, through a series of executive actions, restrict immigration in this country, largely doing so by either trying to outright eliminate visa categories or immigration programs, whether that was shrinking the refugee program, I know you talked about that in other categories, whether it was some kind of outright ban for these programs, they did these travel bans, they were also another tactic is they make immigration much more burdensome and challenging and expensive. You have to pay more money. You have to go through additional vetting. You have to go four times at the consulate at the same time as they were cutting the number of people who would process this. It was really like an all of government approach that they did to make immigration harder. A couple big things they did as well, in addition to that, were you see things like the public charge memorandum, which is designed really as kind of a not even just a wealth test on immigrants, but a subjective test that if you use a benefit, you may use the ability to be caught later. Those were all like for a long time, quite frankly, largely, they made things more difficult on the margins. They sent a signal to this country that America was not going to continue to want to be the top destination of talent for the world, but we fought a lot of those off in court. And really until the fall of 2019, we were able to hold that back. And then the pandemic came, and under the pretext of covid, they went through what, I just want to be clear, have they been successful would have been absolutely the largest restriction of immigration in American history. The Cato Institute said that their plans would have cut illegal immigration into this country by 92 percent. Where we are today is there are a number of restrictions that exist on immigrant visas, the ability of people to come to the United States and eventually get a green card. There’s a number of these pandemic restrictions on nonimmigrant visas, efforts to rescind things like and stop things like H-1B visas, L-1 visas, and then they also made efforts to just like hurt the family members of people who are here today. Efforts to eliminate the ability of high skilled immigrants spouses to work. And so really across the sector, you have a mixture of where things are held up in the courts. But immigration has been cut to this country by this, probably by maybe by a third right now in terms of who will be able to come, maybe 40 percent and we’ve got to dig out of that hole quickly through a series of legislative and administrative actions in the next administration.
Ali Noorani [00:14:20] Let’s start with the administrative actions and again, kind of differentiating from the encouragement the advocates are offering to the Biden administration your on DACA or refugee resettlement. But really kind of these issues around legal immigration would have been changed through executive order by Trump. What should and how could Biden reverse those changes?
Todd Schulte [00:14:40] I think on the first thing, they’ve made commitments on day one to roll back the travel ban. And it’s really they work in a couple different ways. There’s like general travel bans, but there’s also in the cases of a few other countries, including Nigeria, it’s really more of a naturalization ban, which is just deeply awful. And for a country who is a family friend podcast, I won’t repeat the president’s terms, but clearly, like kind of a deep anti-Muslim anti black racism, this infected the president’s immigration policy towards black immigrants, made it so that people from Nigeria could not come and naturalize. So they’re going to get rid of these travel bans, these other bans on day one. That’s really important. Two there’s these other covid restrictions on nonimmigrant visas and visas. Now, I want to be clear, if there are health and public health reasons that need to be travel restrictions, that is a totally reasonable thing. If there is a reason that traveling needs be restricted, that’s fine. That is not what they have done. They have just banned visa categories, right? And so these are restrictions on a variety of these categories. Folks who are coming in as guest workers into various sectors, manufacturing, some cases agricultural goods, less so, less restrictions there. Biomedical research, for example, as we seek to build back from covid, has been restricted to be able to go to international students for universities. So these kind of guest worker and international student programs rolled back there. The third is these covid restrictions on the ability for people in the employment based immigration system to get a green card has been more challenging. And then for they’ve been trying to make a family based immigration system more challenging. And you know, what we think is really important is they roll back all those categories of restrictions to get back to where they work. Next step is how do they modernize systems that are things that they can do to modernize the legal bureaucracy of immigration under existing law? We think that’s important. And the fourth category, and I’m happy to talk more, which is it? Look, ultimately, we need Congress to act here. And I’m happy to talk- I think that’s just such an important thing, is there’s only so much that can be done to improve immigration through executive action, and we ultimately need Congress to come together and work to get something done to fix a long, broken immigration system.
Ali Noorani [00:16:54] So let’s talk about that a little bit, because, you know, within a week or two, you’ll have a leader, Schumer. He’s just a much bigger supporter of immigration than McConnell has ever been. So how does a Chuck Schumer thread the needle towards constructive immigration reform?
Todd Schulte [00:17:10] Yeah, and I think there’s a lot we don’t know. Are we doing things on 50 or 60 vote margins to give voters a sense, mean Congress has effectively, in terms of the legal immigration system – I’ll set-aside enforcement here for a second. We kind of created the modern immigration system fifty five years ago in 1965, but really, like the legal immigration system, high skilled immigration system as well, it was a function of a 1990 congressional action with like what I would say a tweak in 1998, so to put that into context, our legal immigration system in this country predates the fall of the Soviet Union. It predates the rise of the World Wide Web. India and China had not entered the global marketplace. There was not the global rising middle class. The modern global economy didn’t exist. If you look at migration patterns to the United States and how they’ve shifted over the last 30 years and being responsive to that, the world of 1990 is so radically different in the world of today. So how do you get Congress together to fix that and what do you do? I think the first thing is in terms of how you do the work is and this is the work that you will do so well as you can outside of D.C. and you make sure members of Congress, if you’re into people who matter to them in their district, and they understand these stories, that’s not just employers, but it’s employees, too. It’s not just the people who are speaking, churches, but it’s the people in the pews who were there on Sundays. It’s immigrants and their families and it’s their neighbors, too. And I think that’s such an important part. What we’d like to see on the legal immigration system, is there areas to make it so that it should be easier for U.S. citizens and LPRs to adjust for family members to come to the United States, right? If you find the person that you want to spend your life with, America should be a place that makes it exceedingly easy for you to bring your family together here. So that’s the first thing. I think there is improvement to the family based immigration system that we should be able to agree upon. The concept of family and family unity is so important. The second is in terms of the employment based system, and we should have the ability to allow people to come to this country to work. That gives them the ability to do so. It gives companies the ability to recruit folks to do that, but it gives workers like basic rights. And whether that is the ability of a software engineer in Silicon Valley to come on an H-1B visa and get to a green card and change jobs or if it’s the ability for farm work to adjust status and become a citizen, we should we should be able to do that. We think the best approach is a little bit TBD, right? What we will be really focused on outside of how this legal immigration system, and I know you all, too, as a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented and whether or not we’re passing one big bill or a series of medium-sized big bills, we just want to see Congress, both parties, prioritize this issue right out of the gate. That is such an important thing to prioritize this issue in the weeks to come.
Ali Noorani [00:20:01] Let’s take a step back, because I think right now, you know, I’m all caught up in kind of the events of January 6th, Georgia, the election in November. But let’s kind of think about kind of having this conversation in March of 2021 or beyond. The economy still struggling. Millions of Americans are still out of work. How do we as advocates need to have the conversation with the American public about the value of immigration moving forward?
Todd Schulte [00:20:27] I think the first thing to understand is you need to both need people when they are a little bit, but realize that when we have conversations on the point you raise, which is like this idea of somehow or another, that immigrants are somehow competing against Americans, that is just completely factually untrue in terms of how the economics of this work out. We are going to be able to rebuild this country better if America is the top destination for people from around the world, that that is a grad student coming here to work on ai for more efficient agriculture or whether or not that is a mother who is willing to do what you can to survive persecution in her home country and bring her kids here on her back. Those are people we want here in this country, and those people we want here in this country as we recover from this pandemic. I think one lesson from the pandemic is we’re not all in this together in terms of these things. We’ve seen this in how it’s been frontline workers. It’s been black and brown and immigrant and indigenous communities have borne the brunt of this. But how do we build back so we are in this with a more equitable footing moving forward? I think, like basic treatment for immigrants is so important. And if we’re talking about people coming here in the future, we can either be the country that develops the vaccine or we can’t. It’s a choice. And we won’t win by default any more. We can either be the country that builds the generation that says this is how we’re going to decarbonize our technology, and it can be a huge economic win or that can be someplace else. We can make the choice to do this, but if you think and you’re talking to somebody, if you think that in the midst of a pandemic, but somehow if we’ve purged the Central Valley of California farm workers who weren’t born here, somehow what’s best for America is to throw those people out and have a bunch of native born Americans like drive out to the Central Valley if they can figure out how to pick lettuce, which is really hard. That’s not the right way to go before a growing country. If we’re a country that welcomes and accepts people, that’s going to be best for all of us. And the ability to have people come and contribute right away is so important. We should have everyone on a level playing field. We should give people legal status so that employers can’t undercut wages. But that’s how we’re going to grow back together.
Ali Noorani [00:22:41] What makes you optimistic about the next four years?
Todd Schulte [00:22:45] Look, I think if you look at public opinion data, despite the fact that this very sophisticated and visceral anti-immigrant movement policy architecture has been kind of trying to dismantle the immigration system, that while they have done incredible harm to human beings, they failed from their perspective. I don’t say that to be spiteful, although I don’t wish them luck in any of their endeavors here. But they look at this as they fail. They have not accomplished their long term goals. Number two, why am I optimistic? Because public opinion, support for immigrants and immigration is at an all time high, whether that is support for DACA recipients and the outcry trying to DACA, whether it was the fact that the zero tolerance family separation policies, the border or the biggest story in the world. The outraged reaction against that for three weeks, public opinion is is on our side to get this done. And I think, you know, of the leaders know that it is our job to push and pull and do all these things with policy makers. But I’m optimistic that after four years of Trump, and understanding like who is bearing the brunt of this pandemic right now, but after four years of Trump on this, I’m optimistic the policy makers will say if we’re going to call somebody an essential worker, they deserve legal status. And if we’re going to say that we value immigrants, we want to do this. We got to fix our legal immigration system if we want to live up to the ideals of the best of what this country can be. We need to have a system of laws that actually reflects that. And, you know, I’m optimistic. I’ll tell you, when you’re all watching what was happening at the Capitol, know, I was on a call with with a couple of Hill offices right before that, and it was to talk about what policy can get done. And then quickly, within a couple of minutes, people said, got to go, got to go. And then later that night when I was texting people to see how they were doing, they they appreciated what they said. And they call you tomorrow. We got to get back to work on this. Like, this is ultimately about the question of like, how do we build the country we need to be? So that makes me optimistic.
Ali Noorani [00:24:39] So last question for you, and just to finish this sentence Only in America…
Todd Schulte [00:24:44] Oh, boy. I think only in America is the imperfect journey to define what we can be America. It is the driver of the best of our angels, and at times the worst. Only in America is that like perpetual struggle of defining what it means, a place that we have to draw inspiration from. And that’s way more than a sentence. But but I would just close by saying, you know, I think in times like this, it’s important. You hear people say like, this isn’t who we are, but we are many things. We contain multitudes. We are absolutely what we saw. And we are absolutely the people who hours later said we got to go back in there and we’ve got to do this peaceful transfer of power, that that’s what America is. And how do we live up to the best of what we can be, as I think the challenge of our times.
Ali Noorani [00:25:34] Hey, Todd, thanks for joining. And before you go, I just also want to thank you personally, but also all the folks at fwd. We work with you all practically every day, and you’re just one of our best and strongest partners and a lot of different ways. So really appreciate what you all do.
Todd Schulte [00:25:49] Thank you. That’s very kind. And we feel the same, my friend.
Ali Noorani [00:26:04] Todd Schulte is the president of fwd.us. You can learn more about Todd and fwd.us’s work at ImmigrationForum.org. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Only in America, wherever you’re listening to this episode. Stay tuned for next week’s preview of our upcoming season on immigrant health care and vaccine access amid covid-19. Only in America is produced and edited by Joanna Taylor and Becka Wall. Our artwork and graphics are designed by Karla Leyja. Me, I’m Ali Noorani, and I will talk to you next week.