Ryan Grim

So, you know, there's like debates about this that, oh, a lot of people were deported at the border inside of the country.

Not so much.

And the problem with that is you get this insane backlog of asylum claimants.

And that hurts actual asylees because you have so many economic migrants crowding out people with legitimate claims.

And so my perspective is there needs to be limits.

I consider myself a social Democrat, an old school social Democrat.

And in the olden days, social Democrats were more restrictive on immigration.

You're more of an AMLO.

Yeah, not because immigrants are bad or anything like that.

It's just there needs to be limits to these things.

Just like you want to have controls on capital, there needs to be limits on immigration, thoughtfully.

And the same thing with deportation.

A critique I would have of what I've seen now under Trump is you just have this deliberate abuse, what I find to be gratuitously sadistic policies.

People are detained for a year on end.

I have a line in the piece that's like, deportation should be neither pleasant nor deliberately performative.

Like Chris Kobach, former attorney general of a Kansas Republican, he stressed that the best way to do this is to have a national regime of E-Verify on employers, meaning you punish employers for contracting illegal labor.

And that would be a lot more efficient than having an $80 billion ice.

Yes, it would.

Well, and the economic conditions of these countries, whether it's Cuba or Venezuela, is extremely relevant to our incursions into those countries continuing under the Trump administration.

Absolutely, yeah.