Latest / America's Why Project / Episode 8: Talking About Migration, Part 1: ‘It’s Complicated’

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Episode 8: Talking About Migration, Part 1: ‘It’s Complicated’ · America's Why Project

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the America's Why Podcast.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm your host, Matt Leventure.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm joined today by Sorab Amari for an exciting and important conversation about a critically important topic in contemporary American politics, the issue of immigration.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Our title for today's session is Talking About Migration.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: And to provide a little bit of background on this, we're going to be talking not only about the issue of how people come across America's border, but more broadly about the phenomenon of global migration.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: The UN estimates that as of 2025, 117 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes by conflict or violence.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And many millions more have migrated voluntarily in search of better opportunities.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: So migration is really a global issue, not just an American one.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sora Bahmari is the U.S.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: editor of Unheard.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to that, he co-founded Compact magazine, and he spent nearly a decade as an editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, both in New York and London.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: He also served as op-ed editor of the New York Post.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: His books include Tyranny Inc., How Private Power Crushed American Liberty, and What to Do About It, as well as The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: So Rob, in contemporary American politics, immigration has become the hottest of hot button issues.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of important things get lost in the heated debates on this subject.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: As I just mentioned, of course, immigration is not just an American phenomenon, it's a global one.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: But the other aspect of immigration that I think is really, really important to keep in mind is that one doesn't begin as an immigrant, one begins as an emigrant.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, to become an immigrant, one first has to leave one's home country before arriving in a new one.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So to understand how best to respond to immigration, we need to start by asking a prior question.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Why do people emigrate in the first place?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: You yourself are an immigrant.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you might tell me a little bit about your family's migration story.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: How and why did your family emigrate from Iran?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And how and why did you become immigrants in America?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, it's good to be with you, Matt.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I was born in Tehran, Iran, uh on uh exactly six years to the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile to herald the Islamic Revolution.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um my story of immigration really has to do with that.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I was a had the Iranian revolution not happened, I very likely would not have become an immigrant, which I think is very true of lots of Iranians, especially Iranians of a certain generation.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm now 40 years old.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um when the revolution happened, I had an uncle residing in Utah, of all places, um, studying industrial agriculture at Utah State University, uh, planning to return home very much.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: But then the revolution happened, and like many Iranians, he decided to stick around.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: He was in Utah, so he married um a Utah woman, um uh and he settled basically in rural Utah.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: And uh my mother, uh his sister, uh didn't plan to immigrate either, but then you know, conditions worsened under the Islamic Republic.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: My mother was an artist.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh my father was also uh he was an architect.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so, like any Iranians, like many Iranians, if you have if you have relatives who can get you out, you do everything you can to do that.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And in our case, what that meant was um that my uncle applied for us to join him via what's called the family preference visa program, aka like Donald Trump's chain migration.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so you know, he applied for us to get the green card uh in 1990.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't until 1998 that uh we were approved and did receive the green cards.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I had this picture uh, you know, that I was coming to America, you know, watching Iran American movies and and TV shows when I was in Iran.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: I sort of thought it would be like kind of Manhattan, you know, this kind of decadent city, extremely individualistic, um, and uh uh, you know, like a picture taxi driver or something like that.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I was excited by that prospect.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, imagine my surprise, we like flew across the Atlantic and we didn't stop anywhere close to Manhattan.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: We made our first stop actually at Minneapolis, St.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Paul, took a connection flight to Salt Lake City, Utah, um, and then took another drive like two hours north of Salt Lake City to the town where my uncle had settled, like extremely rural, extremely LDS Mormon.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that's my yeah, that's my personal story.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we I I people always say sometimes I'm even incorrectly referred to as a refugee.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a refugee, I'm a uh legal migrant who um, you know, my parents were opposed to the Islamic Republic.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: They were very secular, they drank, they immersed me and themselves in Western books, movies, and ideas, which at the time in Iran, now things are very much loosened, and we can get into that.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: But at the time it was all contraband in a way.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but they weren't dissidents.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, they weren't political cases, they weren't facing prison or anything like that.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was a combination, I guess, of wanting to be free, um, the kind of American promise, and the economic aspect too, of course.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and um but and and a and a sort of general, like I said, kind of political migration, but not necessarily asylum.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't come as asylum seekers.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think that's a brief and decent summary of my migrant origins.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot for that, for that initial family history.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and let me start by asking uh a question that maybe gets to some of the tensions and even paradoxes of of this difficult topic.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: You yourself and your family members uh were the benefits uh beneficiaries of uh preferences based on, for example, family connections or the the what President Trump calls chain migration.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and subsequently, in your writing and research, you've come to be a strong critic of some of those very policies uh uh that benefited you personally.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I I wonder how how do you try to square that circle of being supportive of immigration as a path to opportunity, as a path to becoming an American, achieving the American dream as you have done in such amazing ways, with the need or your your sense that it's very, very important to regulate and restrict immigration.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great question.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I should say, not to get bogged down in my biography any any deeper or further, but just very briefly, as you mentioned in the introduction, I started my career at the Wall Street Journal uh editorial pages, which are famously um uh pro-open borders or used to be.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Let's not say open borders, I uh just to be fair to them, but they they they believe in um making it easy to move to the United States.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think they've also shifted in tandem slightly, uh in tandem with uh GOP electorate or maybe the American electorate at large.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I started my career there, and at the time, this was in when I started was 2012, the journal still largely held its um pro-immigration uh stance, and I I certainly had no reason to challenge it.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: In part I was young and I sort of this was the job, and that's the position that the editorial page took.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I was I had joined as a as a as a as a some editorial and opinion person, so you sort of adapt to the worldview of the place um that you work at.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I actually was sent abroad.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: I, you know, I said I was sent by the Wall Street Journal to London to help edit the opinion pages of the European edition of the Wall Street Journal, which no longer exists.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's now only one global edition.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: But at the time there was something called Wall Street Journal Europe that was published out of London.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: And um I would uh write editorials for that edition.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes when the issues rose to enough kind of news urgency and importance, they would be picked up and run in the US edition as well.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um and this was around the time when there we were just seeing the kind of beginnings of what now, in retrospect, looks like a mid-that mid-2010s ferment of populism across the developed world that took the form of, for example, the Law and Justice Party coming to power in Poland, um, the return to power of Viktor Orban in Hungary, of course, much more uh kind of tectonic events, namely Brexit and the uh nomination of Donald Trump as the GOP's uh presidential nominee.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um and a lot of my colleagues in that kind of, let's say, uh you know, uh elite conservatism or even neoconservatism greeted the rise of these movements uh initially with like horror.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so did I.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: I was I sort of took it for granted that the kind of program of uh globalization, corporate-led globalization, which meant the free movement of goods, services, capital, and of labor, was a good thing.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, was it was a was a net positive for the world, for the recipient countries, for the um countries that sent migrants, and this kind of general uh model of globalization that was in place in the two, you know, at that point was worth defending.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I, like others, you know, my colleagues and many others were like puzzled, especially in my case, because I had been sent abroad, I've been sent to Europe to kind of preach, you know, free markets and free minds and all the kind of libertarian or you might say neoliberal program, and then to see back home, you know, my own party or our party um turned toward some sort of populism that was a restrictionist on immigration, and also, by the way, um, parted ways with some of the other orthodoxies around free trade, around entitlements, and so on.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it was puzzling at first.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I evolved on the issue in part by asking myself, like, wait, you know, this happened, and I'm not gonna just set myself in opposition to the Republican electorate, and indeed the national electorate.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna try to find out why it is that a model that's worked very well for me and myself as an immigrant.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: I've come, you know, when we first arrived in the United States, very kind of dire circumstances, the typical like immigrant, even though we were middle class to even upper middle class in Iran, when we came, you know, the currency exchange rate was so brutal that we ended up with not very much money.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, the first place I lived in was a trailer park, you know, in a town called Logan, Utah.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: From that to, you know, within like a decade or a decade and a half, I'm interviewing prime ministers and writing for the largest circulation paper in the United States.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, that's worked out well for me.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: What's wrong with this system?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: But I felt I had to listen to you know, lots of, especially working lower middle class people who were not happy with not just the immigration aspect, but the whole kind of deal that had gotten out of corporate-led neoliberal style globalization, the policies that I promoted at the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, there was a period of soul searching, I would say, in the mid-2010s, especially after the election of Trump, where lots of reporters and public intellectuals and writers tried to do that, but then like they moved on very quickly.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I sort of had to be like explore what had gone wrong with globalization.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's one aspect is a kind of intellectual journey, and it gets complicated.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: Again, I don't want to make it too biographical, but around the same time it was also received into the Catholic Church.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now what mattered in for this story in the Catholic way of thinking is just in general the idea that the purpose of politics, the why we form political community, is not to maximize individual autonomy or individual liberty, but rather to promote the common good of the whole.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so Catholicism and its whole kind of Aristotelian way of thinking about social order offered a whole new set of vocabulary and a conceptual framework for understanding the world that was very different from the liberal, and I mean classically liberal one that uh had guided both the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by extension myself earlier.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's the intellectual side of it.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: The practical side of it, I'll get into it, I'll only allude to it briefly because I know you're gonna ask me a more detailed question, was that was also when there was a massive wave of migrants coming from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: In 2015, 16, it really the numbers became very huge.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: And eventually, um, it really under the leadership of then Chancellor, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the it reached uh you know a million newcomers who mostly went to Northern and Western Europe.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and the experience of seeing that and thinking about what it would do to politics and social cohesion in these European countries, um, and the fear I had, and you know, that I think has been kind of vindicated that it would empower parties of the right that are a lot more, let's just be frank, a lot nastier than uh kind of mainstream center-right conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: I was really worried about what that would do.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that fear has been vindicated in terms of what's happening to the politics of uh Europe and the United States.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: That experience of seeing the numbers and thinking about what that would mean for Europe also made me question the model of relatively open borders that um I had just adopted as kind of a default Wall Street Journal type worldview.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's such an uh interesting and heartfelt answer.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I really appreciate your description of your personal journey.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I want to uh give a But I didn't answer your core question, Matt, which is fair enough.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I will just say this.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, I don't come at the uh immigration question from the point of view of like blood and soil.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: We must preserve heritage America because I'm an immigrant, my wife's an immigrant, she's from China, our children are, you know, that it is that kind of an only in America type of thing where you know the uh father is an Iranian journalist, mother is a Chinese architect, and the kids have these you know, Habsburgian names.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: My, or at least my son does, his name is Maximilian, and my daughter's name is Serafina, it's an Italian name.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's a kind of very only in America, only uh in immigrant America type of story.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't come from it from that perspective.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think about it as in terms of the material common good, the social stability and cohesion of the United States.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And to how do I square the circle is basically my as an American, my prime loyalty or sense of duty is not to the kind of amorphous, vague class of potential would-be migrants to the United States, but to the well-being of the United States.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so if there is, first of all, this kind of democratic, small D-democratic anxiety about um the numbers of newcomers, whether or not the country can or should accept and assimilate them among my fellow Americans, I respect that first, um, rather than like my own class of people who like me may want to move to the United States.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, I mean, just the kind of economics of migration, whether or not it works for working class, middle class people here, uh, all of it's that I prioritize that over like potential migrants who maybe where I was 25 years ago.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: So at one level, it sounds like your conversion experience to Catholicism has been really formative in your in your thinking.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and what I'm hearing you saying is that America benefits from including immigrants, that it enriches the American experience and obviously helps individual immigrants and their families.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, the nation needs to maintain a sense of cultural cohesion in order to be a healthy community.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair to say?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's in most of my writing, I actually emphasize um economic issues around immigration more.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, since leaving the Wall Street Journal, another aspect of my evolution of my thinking is um has been uh away from, in general, the kind of uh model of neoliberal economics as well, and a an appreciation for, and in fact, really a project to try to revive what you know might be called in European terms social and Christian democracy, in the in American terms, of the New Deal order.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think we need an economy in which politics circumscribed the economy rather than the other way around.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, the there has to be, and this is a very, again, a kind of cat classical and Christian idea, that there is a primacy of politics.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um in other words, we it uh we need to be able to subject our economic arrangements to the same political give and take that we expect in other realms of life, right?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: So that you know, how we organize the economy doesn't suddenly become a matter of mere rights talk or mere um expert economic determinations, but rather has to be subject to um contestation, small D democratic contestation.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is the core kind of social democratic, Christian democratic idea or the New Deal idea.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so, in terms of immigration to the United States, what that means is we have to be, and I am certainly wary of um just saying that immigration as such benefits like all Americans as such.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's a kind of uh, it's actually a kind of libertarian slate of hand where people say, like, uh, well, it you know, it it it makes goods cheaper for all of us.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, actually, you know, if I hire an illegal immigrant um to clean my house and therefore pay her under the table wages which aren't taxed and which are less than a legal uh you know person would command, uh as a legal cleaner would command, like Americans as such or society as such has not benefited in the aggregate.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: I've benefited, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Just in the same way as if you buy a sneaker made in a sweatshop rife with exploitation and and and labor brutality, like the it is an amorphous class of Americans as such, or consumers as such, haven't benefited, you've benefited individually.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: And there are others who lost out in in various ways.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: For example, people whose jobs had been offshore in Nike's quest for ever lower labor costs and wages.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, same thing here.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: We have to be careful about like you know who benefits from what sorts of immigration.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: What we've seen, and this usually To be the consensus actually on the left.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a there's a 2006 column I I love to always point out by Paul Krugman.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the way I often present it to audiences when I'm having the immigration debate is I'll say, well, of course, as Anne Coulter, you know, this kind of right-wing immigration fire brand or Steve Bannon has said, um, migration, low-wage migration uh primarily hurts workers with less education uh because the workers who are coming in have, you know, uh can command even lower wages, and it strains the uh public services available to um the poorest Americans.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um and only after reading the quote do I reveal that indeed it was not Steve Bannon or Ann Coulter who said that.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was Paul Krigman.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: It was for the same reason that Caesar Chavez, the great um uh uh farm worker activist, uh, was a ferocious opponent of uh illegal immigration and just uh kind of wage cutting uh by way of, or we might call wage arbitrage, using immigrants as uh growers' means to try to undercut other workers.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's the same reason that A.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: Philip Randolph, the great civil rights uh and labor leader who helped organize Dr.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: King's March on Washington, was also a free fierce restrictionist.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: Or Barbara Jordan, the first African-American woman elected to Congress from the South since Reconstruction, wasn't a restrictionist.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: She was a protege of LBJs.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: None of these people were like, you know, nationalist, you know, blood and soil partisans.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: They were old school labor progressives.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: And now I know I realize the labor movement's divided on this, and it's it's not a I'm only presenting one side of the story, but there was a kind of position of the old labor left, of much of the mainstream of the Democratic Party that was suspicious of immigration and saw it as a way, a means by which employers could import sort of people who are accustomed to lower wages and therefore undercut the wages and bargaining power of native-born workers or citizens.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, that's often been my the way I go at it.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: I now I won't rule out the kind of cultural issues.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I believe in the great American engine of assimilation.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, right, I I yeah, I'm I would say I'm a product of it myself.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: My wife is, my family is.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: However, as Barbara Jordan said in her report for the Clinton era U.S.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: Commission on Immigration Reform, she chaired it.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: When you keep piling on the numbers, immigration, that great engine of assimilation begins to struggle, right?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: And because society, the larger society doesn't have time, doesn't have the resources.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, especially with that kind of family-style migration, you begin to have really, really dense ethnic clusters, whether right now in the news is Somalis in Minnesota with sort of immense welfare fraud that's becoming under scrutiny, or whether whoever it might be, Italians like a century ago, and there are they don't have those, they don't face those pressures to like you know adopt American ways and to assimilate.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's an issue.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, again, um immigration is uh fine, I'm an I'm an immigrant myself, but these are areas where we I think we should be able to have you know debates, and we should be able to say, no, like low-skilled migration doesn't make sense, you know, especially in an economy in which we're saying that lots of uh high-skilled jobs may not be returning, we're gonna have service jobs.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you then import lots of low-wage service labor?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, or the question of immigration uh assimilation, it's legitimate for, for example, my New York neighbors, people who live in the in the Navy yards, to primarily a middle-class African-American neighborhood, that was pretty fed up with the Biden wave of migration because it was changing the character of that part of Brooklyn.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think it's funny that like a lot of times in our partisan frame, people who are African-American are thought to be like they must be part of the Rainbow Coalition and favor lots of immigration.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, they didn't.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you saw the kind of some of the sharpest moves to the right in place in blue cities and blue states where you had the migration wave and you had this kind of frustration with what was happening under President Biden.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: So long-winded answer, but all of which is to say um where I come from this is obviously partly about cultural cohesion.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a perfectly legitimate concern.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: But there's lots of material reasons that were legible to progressives and leftists of an earlier generation.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: Even Arthur Schlesinger, the great um New Deal historian, mid-century historian, one of his last books was a denunciation of uh of like failed assimilation policies and his fears about a multicultural America, a certain kind of multiculturalism that didn't impose duties of reciprocity on newcomers and didn't demand that they um that they assimilate.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: So I, you know, in a lot of my conversations about this issue, I often just it's very surprising to audiences.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: I will I'll quote an Arthur Schlesinger or I'll quote a Barbara Jordan, and um, like I said, I'll be like, wow, this crazy Stephen Miller said this, and then I will only afterward reveal that it was no, it was like some canonical New Dealer.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh one of the things that's striking to me is that you're giving very long answers to my questions, and that seems to me to be an indicator that this is really a question that you struggle with.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe the short answer would be it's complicated.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: So you're you're genuinely open to the to the complications and the and the tensions.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think this is a conversation that we could continue for hours.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and we have only a limited amount of time today, and I certainly would welcome the chance to to invite you back and and uh continue to dig down into certain deeper aspects of of uh uh of the complexities of this issue.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: But to keep us on our on our appointed rounds, uh I'm gonna move us to a lightning round uh format here.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: I promise to keep the rest of my answers super, super brief.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: I promise.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna start I'm gonna start with a question that will make it extraordinarily difficult to adhere to those rules.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that is related to one aspect of what I'm hearing from your answers.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Namely, one of the questions about this issue is to whom do we owe our primary allegiance?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, do we owe uh our allegiance to the economic well-being of Americans of various classes?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the very wealthy, you pointed out, are often supporters of immigration because it allows for cheap labor, but working class people are often hurt by competition with cheap labor.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there are tensions within our community, but there are also tensions between a kind of sense of universalist obligations to humanity and a sense that no, our primary obligation is to our fellow nationals.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm also the son of an immigrant.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: My father was born in a Jewish family in Berlin in the 1920s, he fled Nazi Germany in 1935, he arrived in America in 1941.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but six million other Jews were not so lucky, partly because countries around the world refused to accept Jewish immigrants during the economic hardship of the Great Depression.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: Should the United States and Western European countries have accepted more Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think I'm with the sort of general historian's consensus on that, that this was uh an extraordinary uh campaign of an attempted and partially successful uh drive to exterminate a people.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and therefore I think um it was incumbent on uh on West you know the rest of kind of Western powers then, not least the like the Roosevelt administration, one that I by the way I greatly uh admire FDR in many ways, but this was like well very much seen as one of his great failings.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: So yes, they should have.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: And if we're facing a scenario like that where it's a mass-scale you know, industrial machine for murdering a people, an entire people, is afoot and that peep those people are on the move, then yes, I think it's it, you know, we we should we should be uh uh open to fulfilling, including our uh these are legal obligations under various uh um refugee treaties.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: However, again, I promise to be brief, um, I do think we we should be wary of like, you know, thinking about every scenario in the world in through a prism of a of like Nazi Germany and Holocaust because it was such a kind of extraordinary situation.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we should also think about um ways to assist people where way that where they are.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I, you know, in terms of the European refugee crisis that I mentioned, for example, I remember um a writer, Douglas Murray, you might be familiar with, he's much more restrictionist on immigration than I am.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: But when the initial crisis happened, he said, look, you know, I think saying, you know, get on, you can move here and we'll process you here will just invite lots of economic migrants into Europe uh uh who are not really refugees.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it makes it would make a mockery of the asylum system.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't we set up processing centers, you know, elsewhere so that those who are really refugees may be granted the right to move, and those who aren't will be directed to other ways of trying to migrate.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: And if they don't have a case, then they don't have a case.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: And at the time, like I said, I was with the Wall Street Journal and we were very pro-migration.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, this is a terrible op-ed.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: But in in retrospect, a decade later, maybe more than a decade later, I think Douglas was right.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: That would have been a better model for if you think about the uh, you know, kind of global common good, not just as the rights of migrants, but the kind of ability of recipient countries to accept newcomers and the potential social economic destabilization could result from that.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: All of that should be taken in a kind of prudential way rather than kind of absolutist cases, especially pegged to this very emotional history of the Holocaust.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um as a counterpoint to your answer just now, uh the industrial killing machine uh of the Holocaust really wasn't put into effect until the early 1940s.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and so in the mid-1930s, when millions and millions of Jews were trying to flee, uh uh from well, I mean, many of those millions were in Poland and the Soviet Union and the and other places that weren't under Nazi control at that point.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: But nonetheless, when millions of Jews were trying to flee before the war, they were turned away.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: When they were trying to flee, Western Europe and the United States were in a deep economic depression.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: So accepting them would have been or could have caused economic hardship for people in the US and in Europe.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: And when they were trying to flee, there's also a possibility that the Nazi regime could have infiltrated the West with spies who were not in fact Jewish refugees.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: So how is that a clearer case than what's going on, say, uh in Syria in 2015?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean first of all, the uh the nature of the kind of uh the the sort of overtly uh anti-Semitic policy of Nazi Germany was clear before the kind of death camps got operating.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I think that that's a that's a I think a meaningful uh distinction.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um in the case I mean the case of the civil war, and I think the reason why it can't be sort of so easily compared is because there you have really a it's a civil war between uh a terrible Ba'atis regime, um, and on the other side you have you know essentially jihadist groups of various stripes, one of which now, you know, essentially, or one of those factions now is uh has has attained the presidency in Syria, and you have this bizarre spectacle of President Trump hosting a former Al-Qaeda-style warlord, not Al-Qaeda-style, a literal, like most wanted Al-Qaeda operative in the White House.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um, you know, I mean I just I just see a distinction, and that's why I suggested, because there were genuine people who were coming out of that as refugees, but there were also lots of other people.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: I was in the ground embedded with them who were not.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't even Syrians.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: They were from elsewhere in the Arab world, but a lot of them would lose their identity deliberately, they would get rid of their passports.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: This is well documented.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because if they had their passports, then they couldn't claim to be Syrian.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so they would make it all the way to Europe, and then, you know, good luck with all the various kind of human rights conventions, you know, actually getting from the point from that point to a removal order to actually getting them out of the continent.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think that's you know, we have to make prudential judgments on the in the case of World War II.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, it became clear that there's this is a uh a systematic policy uh against this one people.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think there there was a case for making kind of uh greater admissions than the Western powers ultimately did, and you various officials could claim innocence, I didn't know, whatever, but whatever, like making kind of giving some of that forgiveness to historical actors in the moment not having perfect sight of what's happening.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: I don't first of all I don't see the context of of uh of of the Syrian uh case as similar because I see that as a civil war between you know two equally unpleasant ideologies.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um and second, I would say, you know, yes, you know, even there we should be able to accept refugees.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, we're obligated to accept refugees, but not on this model of go ahead and come over, and you you don't have to declare uh your uh asylum case in the first country in which you land, which often would be, for example, Greece, but to modify what's called what was called the Dublin rule to allow people to land in Greece but not claim an asylum in Greece because presumably the welfare state isn't as generous.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, lots of economic migrants got in and went to Germany and Sweden mostly.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um Afghans who, you know, well, Afghanistan is unpleasant, but that doesn't mean that they have a proper asylum case.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: It was net a lot of these cases were never properly adjudicated.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, the model I'm offering is not even for Syria and Afghanistan today, don't admit anyone, but have, you know, kind of outside the borders processing centers so that you don't become kind of a magnet for human smugglers who earn like$2,000 per head.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: I that when I reported on it, I embedded with a group of migrants, and that was the price.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: I basically went and lived with these smugglers in Istanbul before they take these people from Turkey's Western Shore up through the Aegean Sea and into the European mainland.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: The price was$2,000.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: And lots of the people who were there were not, I mean, they told me they're not refugees.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: They just think, well, here's the opportunity to come in because Angular Merkel has said, we're Schaffendas, we can do this, we can absorb these people.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I just think we should we should be careful about making the historical distinctions between about the conflict and other opportunities to protect the truly vulnerable, admit them if necessary, without basically flinging the gates open to economic migrants in a way that makes a mockery of the entire asylum process.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Sorab.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna call an audible here.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I had originally written out a list of questions for us to discuss in the space of 40 minutes because we try to be mindful of our listeners' busy schedules in scheduling these podcasts so that we make them bite-sized descriptions of very important topics where you gain one or two insights about an issue that uh we can delve into in more depth than in our usual conversations.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: What I've taken from our conversation so far is that it's a fool's errand to try to talk about immigration in 40 minutes, and that once one delves into it, their levels of complication are just immense, and there's no way to provide a short answer that's fully satisfying.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I'm gonna ask is whether you'd be willing to stick around for a while, either today or another day, uh, so that we can do another episode, continuing this conversation, and thinking more generally about the future of global migration over the coming decade, the coming generation, because I think this is an issue that's not going away.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: If anything, it's gonna get a lot bigger in American and global politics.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh uh, with your indulgence, I wonder if we might be able to continue this conversation in a next our next episode or another episode.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: Delighted to do that, Matt.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: I really enjoyed this.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: Partly the reason you aren't able to ask all your questions is because I give gave long-winded answers.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you and I told you beforehand I'm verbose.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um but really it's because they're complic, they're complicated and difficult questions.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is the benefit of you know, some people like the two of us sitting together to have this conversation as opposed to what takes place on Fox News or MSNBC, where you know, I've I do sometimes go on those and there'll be like 30 seconds, immigration, yes or no.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you're like, well, by the time you say well, they're like segment over.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for coming, Sarah Abamari.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: So um, so yes, absolutely.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_02: I can't do it today because I have a hard noon, but I would be happy to do a kind of part two like next Friday.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that would be great.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And uh to that point, we try to avoid the gotcha format here because we want to open a space where people can really talk in a genuine way.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so I very much look forward to welcoming you back uh to the America's Why podcast uh to talk in more depth about the broader issue of global migration and how best to manage it over the coming generation.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Sora Bamari, thank you so much for your time.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's truly been an honor to uh talk with you, to hear your insights, and we look forward to talking further.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Likewise, I look forward to part two.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the America's Why Podcast.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Our music is by James Fernando.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: For more information and to join the conversation, please visit our website at America's Why Project.com.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: See you next week.