This week’s podcast is a rebroadcast of the September 14 House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing entitled, “Terrorist Entry Through the Southwest Border.” The hearing examined, “the national security implications of the Department of Homeland Security’s open-borders agenda, including how the Biden Administration’s policies have led to record-high encounters of aliens on the Terrorist Watchlist as well as the mass release of unvetted aliens into U.S. communities.”

Todd Bensman, the Center’s Senior National Security Fellow, gave testimony first. In it, he explains how the current immigration crisis at the southwest border has elevated and exacerbated the homeland security threat of terrorist border infiltration to discomfiting levels.

On this episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, we are joined by Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County, Ariz., and Andrew Arthur, Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. Cochise County is located along Arizona’s southeastern border with Mexico, and Sheriff Dannels and his colleagues have had to deal with the border crisis firsthand. This week’s topic is a rather grim one – the deaths of illegal immigrants at the border.

Both guests recently testified at a joint House subcommittee hearing in Arizona on the effects of the border crisis on American communities and explain on the podcast how the level of security at the border under the Biden administration has never been lower, which is luring more migrants to put themselves in harm’s way by hiring smugglers to bring them to the United States.

San Jacinto county is located north of Houston and over 200 miles from the southern U.S.-Mexico border. This rural county and the surrounding areas, including Liberty County, have seen an explosion of migrant settlement and increasing cartel activity.

In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers joins guest host Todd Bensman to discuss how lax federal border security is straining the ability to police his jurisdiction. Sheriff Capers explains how, with a small county budget and reactive policing, there is a need for increased cooperation and funding from both the state and federal authorities.HostTodd Benman is a Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Center for Immigration Studies hosted a panel discussion entitled “Parole and the CBP One App: Fact and Fiction”. Speakers examined the legality of the CBP One App scheme, the number of entries, legal challenges, and the myths put forth about it.

Mark Morgan, former Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, joined Center for Immigration Studies experts to discuss how the Biden administration took the CBP One smartphone app – a tool originally designed to smooth legal cross-border traffic – and turned it into a means of facilitating illegal immigration.

Congress created the first guestworker programs to fill labor shortages on a temporary basis, without displacing American workers or abusing the foreign workers.

Over time, the programs have multiplied and expanded, such that now close to a million people a year are imported for both less-skilled and professional-level jobs. American workers are, in fact, displaced, the “temporary” foreign workers often stay permanently, and are often exploited. Is it possible for guestworker programs to work as Congress intended?

A new government report confirms that the Biden administration’s policies accommodating illegal immigration are harming the legal immigration system.

On this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Elizabeth Jacobs, the Center for Immigration Studies director of regulatory affairs and policy, joins host Mark Krikorian to discuss the findings and implications of a congressionally mandated annual report from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, an independent office within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Several studies and books have highlighted how migrants, either within one country or from one to another, transmit certain elements of their culture to their descendants rather than fully assimilating to the new culture. This has been observed in the migration of Southerners within the United States, for example, as well as among immigrants coming from abroad.

On this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jason Richwine, resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, joins host Mark Krikorian to discuss his recent academic journal article on cultural persistence among immigrants and their descendants, specifically examining savings behavior.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently uncovered what appears to be deliberate participation in alien smuggling by the Department of Homeland Security. Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, revealed the facilitation of illegal entry of large numbers of aliens across the Rio Grande River. George Fishman, the Center’s senior legal fellow, joins Parsing Immigration Policy to examine the legal implications for the Biden administration as he detailed in a recent report.

If proven, these allegations would constitute criminal violations of the federal anti-alien-smuggling law, with the greatest culpability falling on the members of the Biden administration who came up with the scheme and ordered it carried out.

Conflict has erupted at the Texas-Mexico border between two different arms of law enforcement – Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP has been instructed by the Biden administration to bring migrants they encounter into the country, after which they are released with a notice to appear, and then put on a bus to an American city of their choosing, essentially assisting migrants in their illegal entry into the U.S. Texas DPS has taken border enforcement into its own hands, physically blocking migrants from entering along the Mexican border with Texas and arresting illegal migrants for trespassing when they cross.

To discuss this “border cold war”, Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Texas-based senior national security fellow, joins this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy. He shares what he saw firsthand during his visit to Eagle Pass, Texas and the cross-border town of Piedras Negras, Mexico. Bensman explains that migrants will call out to Border Patrol for assistance when stopped by Texas DPS, as they are almost guaranteed entry to the U.S. once in CBP custody. Bensman points out the irony of the situation – “Not so long ago, immigrants trying to cross illegally would hide from the Border Patrol, but now they’re sort of like the saviors.”

Sanctuary jurisdictions are states or localities that obstruct the enforcement of immigration laws and shield criminals from federal authorities. And Washington sends millions in funding to them anyway.

On this episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, host and Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian is joined by the Center’s Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan to discuss a new report that details how much money the federal government has given to sanctuary jurisdictions. Vaughan explains, “The Department of Justice has a number of law enforcement-related funding programs that give money for various purposes to local and state police, and a very large share of that money … goes to jurisdictions that are actively subverting the enforcement of the immigration laws by the federal government, the same federal government that’s giving them money.”

This week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy covers the impact of immigration on the American education system. Two experts from the Center for Immigration Studies join us to discuss this issue. Steven Camarota, Director of Research, talks about the impact of both legal and illegal immigration on public schools throughout the United States, which was the subject of a recent report that provides a visual representation of the impact on the education system in each community. Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow, focuses on how a recent influx of illegal immigration has affected one specific community outside Houston, Texas.

The findings in Camarota’s report show that students from immigrant households account for an enormous share of public school students in many areas. Moreover, a larger share of students from immigrant households come from low-income families and speak a foreign language at home, creating significant challenges, often in areas already struggling to educate students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy is an immigration roundup, discussing two issues in the news. The conversation highlights the recent extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for multiple countries, and how the anti-enforcement efforts of Vice President Kamala Harris when she was in the Senate contributed to a child migrant labor explosion, and the present opportunity to change that policy in the forthcoming DHS funding bill.

The Trump administration attempted to allow the “temporary” protection (including work permits) for illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua to expire, because the natural disasters that had been the reasons for that designation had long passed. It was stopped from doing so by the courts. (Hurricane Mitch, the reason that illegal aliens from Honduras and Nicaragua who were in the U.S. when it struck their home countries received this status, happened more than a quarter century ago.) Elizabeth Jacobs, the Center’s director of regulatory affairs and policy, explains in this week’s episode that the Biden administration has rescinded the Trump policy and renewed the “temporary” protection yet again.

This week’s guest on Parsing Immigration Policy has over 35 years of experience in immigration policy and activism, perhaps more experience than Mark Krikorian, host of the podcast and executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Joe Guzzardi is a California native whose journey through immigration activism began when he was teaching English as a second language to adults in the Central Valley.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly three million illegal immigrants, included a requirement to “learn English.” The INS defined this as 40 hours of English/civics instruction and the ability to show basic knowledge; as a result, enrollment in English classes went through the roof. Guzzardi noticed that many students had been living in the U.S. for years before taking the classes, but came speaking little or no English. The 40 hours of instruction were not sufficient to provide students with English language skills, yet he was pressured to sign-off on their having achieved basic knowledge.

The CBP One app is one of the latest tools the Biden administration is using to funnel illegal immigrants into the United States, while obfuscating the true scope of the border crisis. As Mark Krikorian, host of Parsing Immigration Policy and executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, puts it, the app allows illegal immigrants to “essentially schedule their illegal immigration into the United States.”

Andrew Arthur, the Center’s resident fellow in law and policy and a former immigration judge, joins this week’s podcast to discuss the creation of the CBP One app and how it operates. At its inception during the Covid pandemic in October 2020, the CBP One app was intended to allow legitimate travelers to schedule appointments at ports of entry to limit the amount of time that travelers were spending face-to-face with CBP officers.

The Guatemalan Highlands have a low homicide rate and strong family and community structure. For those in this region, immigration to the United States is an economic decision and usually means paying smugglers to send a teenage family member to find a job and sending money home – in the past couple of years under the guise of seeking asylum. But the strong appeal of migration northward has had a staggering impact on communities, destabilizing the family structure, putting the minors in harm’s way, and causing financial harm.

Dr. David Stoll, a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, has spent decades doing field research in Guatemala in the Mayan town of Nebaj. He has documented the migration stream to the United States from 1997-2005 and the crushing impact of the collapse of jobs in the U.S. in 2006. The U.S. jobs had been the only hope for most to pay back the high-interest smuggler loans. The result was a devastating town financial crash that included many families losing their homes.

The H-1B visa program, the largest U.S. foreign worker program, was created to provide temporary workers for employers unable to find American or green card workers for a specialty occupation, like computers, engineering, science, and technology. Over time the program has been abused by employers who are not experiencing labor shortages and by outsourcing firms.

The result has been the displacement of Americans workers and the exploitation of H-1B workers. There are, however, reforms that can bring the visa program back in line with its original design of being temporary and limited to high-skill occupations where there are no Americans or green card holders qualified for employment.

The Center for Immigration Studies hosted a panel discussion on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, discussing the present and future role of “gatekeeper countries” in controlling illegal immigration to destination countries in both Europe and North America.

The number of illegal arrivals to a country is partly determined by the policies of its neighbors (the “gatekeepers”) in trying to stop, or at least slow, the transit of migrants. In the age of mass illegal migration, gatekeeper states must be part of any durable solution – even if it requires attention, and sometimes financial investment, from the destination country.

Title 42, the public-health rule that allows the Border Patrol to expel border-jumpers without a hearing, ends tonight at 11:59pm. It remains unclear how the Biden administration plans to enforce the border, which is already being flooded by migrants who are crossing by the thousands.

Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Senior National Security Fellow, joins this episode of Parsing Immigration Policy from Matamoros, Mexico, located right across the U.S.-Mexico border from Brownsville, Texas. Bensman has interviewed migrants who have made their way to Matamoros from all over the world with plans to illegally cross into the U.S. Large encampments have formed in Matamoros, filled with migrants who are hoping to be able to enter the U.S. once Title 42 ends. As Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center and host of the podcast, puts it, these migrants are essentially “waiting for the first sign of weakness from this administration.”