The Immigration Election: A Crisis on the Southern Border

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • The Southern Border & Immigration Issues

  • The Political Roadblock to Immigration Solutions

  • Outside of Politics: Scruffy Hospitality

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EPISODE RESOURCES

In addition to our Quarterly Book Club (starting in February) where we’ll be reading The Big Break by Ben Terris* and Her Country by Marissa R. Moss*, we’re returning to the basics with Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville.* We’ll be reading Democracy in America slowly (it’s dense) over the next six months and discussing monthly on our Premium Channels on Patreon and Apple Podcast Subscriptions.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

[00:00:29] We are so happy that you're joining us for a new episode. Today, we're going to talk about immigration. News outlets are declaring this the immigration election. We can see that many of our political leaders would like for that to be true. We want to get focused today on what we're actually talking about. What are we trying to do at the southern border and how can we do it? And we hope that this conversation will add something new to the discussions you're hearing everywhere about Texas and the courts and their razor wire and the busses. And then Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about scruffy hospitality, what it means to have people over without needing to put a whole Martha Stewart worthy event together. That topic feels a little bit more related to immigration to me than I expected when we were in the planning process, Sarah. So everything today is about how do we welcome people in and do it in ways that are manageable and healthy and good for everyone?  

Sarah [00:01:16] Before we get started, we wanted to talk about our democracy in America. I'm going to call it a reading group. Beth, how do you feel about that? We're just going say it's a read-along group.  

Beth [00:01:24] I like it.  

Sarah [00:01:25] Okay. So we're going to read it slowly because it's a beast. There's a lot in there. It's not something you want to just plow through in a month. Alexis de Tocqueville seminal text on American democracy, Democracy in America. So we've all started reading. Beth and I are going to discuss the first part at the end of February on our premium channels. So you're absolutely welcome to read along. But if you want to hear our conversation of democracy in America, you're going to want to join us on Patreon or Apple Podcast subscriptions. Now, because this is slow and as we roll through this book we might come up with some ideas or some of you might come up with ideas, this could expand. We can have a study guide. We could have some interactive elements. We don't know, guys. The world is our oyster as we work our way through Democracy in America. And this is not to be confused with our actual book club. We partnered with Lisa from the Bookshelf in Irvington, Virginia, to do boxes. That book club goes on semesters, and this semester we're reading The Big Break and Her Country. We're talking about industry towns. We're going to have such cool conversations to share with you about both of those books. We're still doing those and having our premium events surrounding the books in the book boxes as well. Content for both of those are available to our premium members. So we just wanted to give some more clarity and information to our book club and our read-along of Alexis de Tocqueville is Democracy in America?  

Beth [00:02:45] Next up, let's spend a minute thinking about the US-Mexico border.  

[00:02:48] Music Interlude.  

[00:02:58] Sarah, one of our listeners, Sarah B, I'll call her, put a question to asked about immigration that she prefaced as like: maybe this is a dumb question. And as usual, when someone says, maybe this is a dumb question, they're usually asking the smartest question. And I think that's what happened here. She asked, what do people mean when they say the southern border is not secure? What are we trying to do here? Do we want no one crossing or we just want more secure than it is? Like, what is the goal? And so I thought that was a great place to start. And also just what are we even talking about when we say the southern border? As I started learning more about this razor wire conflict between Texas and the federal government, it really focused my attention on the fact that most of the border that we're talking about with Texas is in the river. It's in the Rio Grande. It's not like a border on land. And that just sort of changes your perception when you think about building a wall or whatever solution we might be discussing.  

Sarah [00:03:53] Well, yeah, I think her question is not only good, but prescient because it's going to be the issue of the election as every cover story from The Atlantic to The Economist to The New York Times will tell you right now. And I think that's the hard part to hold with immigration, is we have a very, very hot political topic. Especially on the right, I think that they figured out, well, we lost abortion as a way to make people afraid and get voters motivated, so we'll just going to have to cling to immigration. We learned this week that Donald Trump killed the bipartisan immigration bill because he wants it to be an issue during the election. So we have to hold the political calculus with regards to immigration. Then I think what you named is so true. We have the reality on the ground that most people don't really think about in their day to day lives. You'll get immigration as a top issue in the New Hampshire primary. Friends, why is the southern border on your mind? And then this reality that, like, what is it like for the border towns? What does this really mean? What does it mean for the people crossing the border? There's just a lot of pragmatic reality that I think sits below the surface of this very hot political topic we talk about all the time.  

Beth [00:05:00] One of the smartest things that I read this week was that immigration is really salient for Republicans right now, because the Trump presidency basically radicalized a lot of Democrats around immigration. And I think that's probably true for me in a sense. When families were being separated at the border, it put me in such an emotional place that I could hardly see anything else. It's hard for me even now to say there is a problem at the border, because there's a pull in me to so empathize with the people trying to cross the border, and to feel so guilty for some of the cruelty that we've done in trying to manage that border. And I'm trying to re-calibrate because I see that the flow of people coming in as it has increased for a huge variety of reasons, is not good for those people or for the border communities.  

Sarah [00:05:57] But, again, that's a really interesting political versus pragmatic reality when we talk about immigration. Because, absolutely, I step foot in Mitch McConnell's office for the first time over the separation of children at the border. It was a heinous, despicable act. And also President Obama arrested and removed more undocumented immigrants during his presidency than Donald Trump. They called him the deporter in chief for a reason. So it's like there's this pragmatic reality at the border where you have a Democratic president who was deporting way more people than Donald Trump, who radicalized and really changed the conversation in a way that further obscured what was really going on.  

Beth [00:06:44] So then what are we trying to do? It was helpful for me to just think about this is like a little under 2000 miles of land, and it's mostly privately owned. It spans four states, crosses almost every kind of terrain. It's really interesting. Desert, mountainous plain, the border crosses almost every kind of terrain. Most of it is the Rio Grand River. All of this pursuant to a treaty that we have with Mexico. And we do have fencing on about a third of it. A little over a third of it is fenced. And then there are vehicle barriers in some of the more remote areas. And then we have virtually fenced areas where we've got towers and cameras and radars. And I don't know this, but they use these aircraft that are kind of like blimps to monitor the border so that agents can be deployed and respond. And we've talked on this show before about how most of our border enforcement approach was driven by this sense that mostly men were coming from Mexico for work in the United States. And then that really shifted as more people started to come from Central and South America seeking asylum. And now, because more air travel happens from countries all over the world, the development of airports in third world countries has allowed more people from everywhere to fly into countries like Ecuador that have very lax visa requirements and make the journey. So we see more people coming from China, from parts of Africa. So the current situation has changed in part because transportation has changed throughout the world. Social media has made it easier for people to connect. We do have cartels that use people and that sell false promises and hope about what will happen when they get here. They're just a huge variety of reasons in addition to the Biden administration's softer rhetoric about the issue that have brought so many people here.  

Sarah [00:08:44] Well, I don't know about the softer rhetoric. We just recorded an episode on our premium channel. We talked about Instagram, and every other reel is a play on Kamala Harris going, "Don't come." When she said that speech like, "Don't come." I think that they've hash in the rhetoric but didn't hash in the process. And people communicate that back to their friends and family and the coyotes exploit that. They say you can't get asylum if you cross illegally, but they don't arrest and deport people if they cross illegally. So I think it's a kind of a mix of the two. The numbers are really where I try to ground myself, and I try to think about what is the problem and what are we trying to do. I was reading The Economist. I don't know where they got the statistic. They didn't sign it, but they said 160 million people would come to America if they could. Like in some sort of global survey, 160 million people, if given the chance, would come to America for a better life. And when you say more people from places like Russia and China and India, I just want to put a few numbers on that, because more is really not capturing the breadth of this. In 2021, 4000 people came from Russia at the southern border. Last year it was 43,000. It was 450 from China. Last year it was 24,000. And you're exactly right.  

[00:10:10] They're flying into places where they don't have visa requirements, like Ecuador, and then taking the same dangerous track that so many people from Latin American and South America do. And so we're talking about a massive flow of humans. There's really great revisionist history that names what you said, like, when we were trying to stop people from working. I mean, first of all, that was an important point. We could have asked, why? Why were we doing that? They were going home. They were just coming-- but if you think about it, it was during the 80s and 90s, unemployment wasn't low. You had all these changes with NAFTA, kind of makes sense when you put it all in that perspective. But right now, with this flow of humanity that The New York Times did this really great graphic where you could kind of track it down and you start with 3.1 million attempted crossings from October 2022 to 9/23. Three point one million attempted crossings. Now, 600,000 of those people just make it across undetected. They just slip right on in and people are mad about that. That's a lot of people.  

Beth [00:11:07] It's a lot of people.  

Sarah [00:11:08] When they say the border is unsecured and you say 600,000 people make it across undetected, that's what some people are talking about and that's fair. That's fair. So then you have 2.5 million who have an encounter with border protection. That's 83% outside of ports of entry. In that very dangerous terrain, people die. Thousands of people die trying to cross those deserts and mountains and rivers because we said, well, we want to secure the border. So that was a place where we tried to do so. We want to secure the border, we're going to focus on ports of entry. What did people do? They just went, "I'm not going to go that way. I'll go another way." So you have 2.5 million encountering border agents outside those ports of entry. Now for a while they were being you have half a million under title 42. We've allowed that to lapse. We've talked about that a lot on our premium channels and on the show. But 1.9 are processed under title eight of the immigration laws. Then you have almost 200,000 expedited removal, almost 200,000 that voluntarily depart. So you have 1.5 million new cases inside our immigration system. And over the course of the year, about 2700 were granted relief towards permanent residency. So you start with 3.1 million attempted crossings and you end with 2700 cases of relief. Now those are from the crossings. You get a lot more cases moving through the system that have been in there for years. But that's just that's hard to wrap your head around. And all this rhetoric and all this-- it's hard to wrap your head around just the breadth of the border, much less the amount of people, the different types of people trying to cross the border, and then all the pass they take once they cross. And that's just the southern border, Beth. What if they're flying in? What if they're coming from Canada? It boggles the mind, truly.  

Beth [00:12:46] So if I try to break all of that apart, I say step one. I'm so glad that people want to come here. I want to be a place people want to come.  

Sarah [00:12:55] Yeah. Wouldn't the opposite be a terrible problem? Yes.  

Beth [00:12:57] Yes. I read a piece from the Cato Institute, which is kind of libertarian leaning think tank, and they said, listen, other than tanking our economy, we are always going to be a place that people want to come. And so, truly, the only solution to illegal immigration is a stronger legal immigration system. That's a libertarian think tank saying, if you want to deal with this problem truly, you have got to fix the legal side because we will always have people trying to get here as long as we are a free and prosperous nation. And I would like to stay a free and prosperous nation. So that's the first thing that comes to mind for me. The second thing is, in addition to people being upset I think about the disorder of 600,000 people slipping in undetected, people staying forever, is the fact that asylum has become a workaround to a broken system. And this is where social media plays a factor too, right? Lots of people have learned to come and say, "I have a credible fear of persecution in my home country," and their credible fear does not hold up under the definition of credible fear in our asylum laws. But if they say that, they can stay for a very long time because we have just a totally insufficient system for adjudicating those claims. And I think people are upset about that. And I don't think that they're wrong to be.  

Sarah [00:14:29] I read that even doubling the number of judges wouldn't clear the backlog of those cases till 2032. It's a four year average to get an asylum hearing, and it's totally inconsistent. There was a Texas judge who denied 95% of asylum hearings, and then a San Francisco judge that denied 1% of hearings. So total stereotype, exactly what you would expect. You're talking about being inside just the asylum system for years. Four years. And I think we have to increase those requirements. I think a lot of experts inside the immigration system say those requirements were written and designed for a different time. In this piece of the New York Times, the two experts were like, as heartbreaking as it is, we simply cannot take every refugee from every failed state. We cannot do that. And I think that's hard. That's hard to hear. What if it's a child? What if it's a woman? It's hard to say we cannot take every refugee from every failed state because there are many of them. Are we going to admit every citizen of Haiti? Because that is a failed state right now.  

[00:15:34] And I think that is hard and so limiting, that humanitarian parole, which is the second step inside of asylum, which we've decided some states like Venezuela or Nicaragua will give you humanitarian parole. But, again, that's just temporary. It's parole. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's just temporary. So I think raising those requirements, asylum seekers, that's a tough pill to swallow if you're on the left. But being a barrier to that and saying we're not even going to discuss that, when we know we have this backlog, is not moving the conversation forward. Not that I'm even giving the benefit of the doubt that the other side wants to have a conversation right now. Because, again, we're talking about a pragmatic reality inside this political system. But I do think that in this new era where we're not talking about men from Mexico coming over to work, we're talking about something very, very different, including people coming all the way from Russia and China. And we have to talk about that.  

Beth [00:16:26] One of our listeners, Sergio, sent me a really good piece from the Migration Policy Institute that talked about how we've had this unspoken agreement in Congress, probably dating back to 9/11, when the southern border started to really be treated as a national security issue, not just as sort of an administrative or economic issue. And that agreement has been to just keep putting more money and more emphasis into law enforcement at the southern border. That we're just going to apprehend people there, and that's going to be our focus. And this policy institute says that's one piece of the picture, and that's what we're talking about when we talk about adjudication. So you do the law enforcement, but then you have to figure out how do I know what this person's status is and what claims they might make and what rights they have. And then what do we do in the meantime? Because there's always going to be some wait time for that process. So what's the situation in terms of education and medical care and shelter and work authorization. And then if we are going to remove people, how are we doing that and where are they going and how are they getting there? And if they have a right to be here, where are they going and how are they getting there and how are they going to integrate into those communities? And Congress has just left those questions to the executive branch. So you hear right now from a lot of Republicans like President Biden has all the authority he needs. He doesn't need any more authority. And President Biden is saying, give me the authority and I will do more. Even that debate, to me, still seems focused on law enforcement at the southern border instead of the rest of those pieces that would actually get to what I think most Americans are unhappy with.  

Sarah [00:18:02] Yeah, I think the law enforcement discussion is difficult because it's not invented. Everyone is concerned about the flow of fentanyl over the southern border. It's the number one source of drug overdoses. People are dying, and that is real and concerning. But just ask yourself in the most cynical way, do you think that drug cartels are sending fentanyl on the backs of people crossing the Rio Grande and risking their very valuable products in barbed wire? Does that sound like a smart business decision to you? Do you not think that they probably have more established routes? I was very encouraged that the Biden administration sat down with China to discuss the chemicals that flow to Mexico to make the fentanyl to begin with. You want to talk about law enforcement, and I think that is a completely valid concern. We are not talking about barbed wire on the Rio Grande. That's not where the fentanyl is coming from, friends. Let's talk about this in a real way. And I think with regards to what happens once they come, there was a moment, a very small moment, Beth, when I was like, dang, this bussing in the most politically pragmatic way worked. It said, what are we supposed to do with all these people? If we're at this Texas border town and our population doubles in a week, what would you have us do? So if you want to be a sanctuary, be a sanctuary. We'll bring them right to your doorstep.  

[00:19:28] I don't know if it was fair, and it was obviously like a stunt in a lot of ways, but it did create movement. It created energy. It said, do you see the struggle? Do you see that we have to do something with this flow of people across the southern border? I think the glimmer was when the bipartisan deal was coming together and I thought, okay, so this worked. We forced-- we being Greg Abbott in Texas and Florida, forced the hands of these blue state mayors and said, you made them a very motivated constituency within the Democratic Party to say something must be done and then to kill it, to just follow Donald Trump down the hall, to say, no, no, we want to fight about this during the election. It just removed all of that in the most heartbreaking and just depressing, cynical way. To say we spent $75 million as the state of Texas, we moved all these people into these cities, we strained resources, we put people at risk to prove our point but we don't really want a solution, that's not what we mean, it's just depressing.  

Beth [00:20:28] That's the problem with this entire issue. You're never just talking about one thing. If we want to solve the problem of fentanyl, I agree with you. I think that's a problem. I think it's an emergency. I think it requires a serious law enforcement response as well as a diplomatic one. I think those pieces are moving right now. That is a different problem than 14,000 people in Eagle Pass, Texas. There's a different problem, the problem of what happens when people get here. I think the busses were done in a way that was incredibly harmful to our sense of national unity. Had it been done with any coordination, I think it would have been a pretty decent idea. Like in my mind, if we could come up with a system where the federal government coordinates immigration hubs almost in the style of airline hubs, where you're you're saying to people, who are you connected to here? Where do you ultimately need to go? How can we get you there? And then in those same places as the transportation hubs, you have courts sitting all over the United States. Once you get there, first person you're going to meet is the caseworker for your immigration matter. And these are the dates, and this is the person who vouches for you attending these court dates. And we're going to keep it moving. I don't know. I think there was the beginning of a good idea in the bussing. It's just been done in a way that's cruel, because you're taking people from Venezuela and dropping them in Chicago in the harsh winter with no one prepared for them to come. I mean that that's not okay. But certainly moving people out of Texas is okay and should happen.  

Sarah [00:22:14] And I think the other difficult part of this is there is this very dated understanding of what that strain looks like when people come. I would have conversations with people where I'd say, "Well, we need more people to work," and they be like, no, we don't. There's this ingrained idea that any immigration takes American jobs. The narrative that was built that immigration is a threat to you, and your job, and your work is set in concrete, even though opposite. Friends, opposite. When we are talking about our aging population and the fact that we have very low unemployment, we want more people to come here. In a same New York Times piece, they said maintaining our historical population growth of 1% would suggest admitting nearly 4 million individuals a year. So if we just want to stay the same-- I think one of the biggest challenges, truly, in immigration is almost a manifestation. I know we're talking about immigration as this underlying problem where all these different things manifest. But I think if you dig even deeper below that, it's a manifestation of these massive demographic changes happening across the globe. Like Latin America has an aging population because their young people are immigrating for a lot of other reasons. But that demographic idea that like, hey, do you know that we don't have enough people in the United States to maintain our processes and systems and industries? I think the answer is no, they don't. People don't know that. They just know that more people is a threat. It's a threat to our resources. It's a threat to our jobs. And when you're in that orientation to threat, you cannot see clearly. You cannot think clearly. And, look, immigration isn't an immediate solution because we tell people they can't work once they get here, which is stupid.  

Beth [00:24:02] And you got to put those on the board too as a separate problem. What's going on with our economy? What's going on with our labor market, what's going on with our birth rate? All of those things go on the board. You have to put conflict. How many people from Afghanistan are we going to admit? How many people from Ukraine are we going to admit? I think this is one of the challenges of Congress doing good immigration legislation, because there does always have to be an element of flexibility. What's going on in the world. But I think that 4 million number is really helpful, because probably part of what we need is for Congress to say to the executive branch, this is the total number that we feel we can admit every year in the United States. Now, let's divide that up through various channels. To just say to people, there's a rationale for this. Hello, America. We've decided that this is the beneficial point for us. We are doing this in a selfish way. Okay. And now let's think about what we do next.  

Sarah [00:25:01] Yeah. When I read that number, I was like, okay, well just put a number on it. But the problem is the people in Congress are no one or everyone. Truly, that's the debate. The debate is absolutely letting no one or absolutely letting everyone. And that's not getting us anywhere. And I think Americans can kind of put themselves in that camp. I don't think it's just Congress that orients itself in that way. I think a lot of Americans, the answer is everyone or no one. Well, that's not a process. That's not helpful. That's not going to move this conversation forward. I read that and I thought, I'm going to say that every time immigration comes up in my life, "Did you know that we need to admit 4 million people a year to maintain our historical population growth? And do you know what has fueled America hegemony around the world, besides our very excellent geography? Population growth. So unless you want to have no one to pay your Social Security, then you better get comfortable with admitting a lot of people to the United States."  

[00:25:55] Music Interlude  

Beth [00:26:05] So back to that Migration Policy Institute piece, which I thought was so good. It says, "These are the things that you have to do. You have to figure out what you're trying to accomplish. Be precise about the problem." And they say right now the problem is control, not security. And that sounds right to me. I think there are, of course, some security issues at the border. I think there always will be. But mostly the problem is control.  

Sarah [00:26:30] But can I stop you? Because I think articulating there always will be is important. There always will be. Like, walk the border. You can't. Because some of it is in water. So stop acting like we can secure the border. It is too big and it is too complex to tightly control in the way you have in your mind like a moat around a castle. That ain't never going to work y'all. Just let it go.  

Beth [00:26:52] They also say Congress has to get involved. The executive branch has been going this alone for decades. It's not working. Congress getting involved would also help us figure out in the executive branch who's doing what. I think we've learned pretty decisively that we don't want the Department of Homeland Security doing social work at the border.  

Sarah [00:27:10] Absolutely not.  

Beth [00:27:11] But someone needs to be doing social work.  

Sarah [00:27:13] Yeah. And some children have still not found their families from the separation during the Trump presidency. So, yes, I think that's a bad idea. Agreed.  

Beth [00:27:19] So we need some focus for these agencies, but also with real cooperation and partnership among those agencies. In addition to our executive branch not being able to do this alone, the United States cannot do it alone. And we see right now, the Biden administration has been working with Mexico to strengthen Mexico's enforcement of its immigration laws. And in January, the Mexican law enforcement efforts decreased migration to the southern border by 50%. It's come up a little bit since then, but it is still lower than it was in December just because of that cooperation between our two countries.  

Sarah [00:27:56] Well, this part really frustrates me because to have this isolationist orientation, to say we want to secure that, we don't want to let anyone in, oh, and by the way, we want to stop all foreign aid. Our foreign aid has dropped 0.2% of our gross domestic product. What do you think will happen if you stop giving aid to Ukraine and Russia rolls in on a tank? You think they're all going to stay there? If we turn our backs on the world and say, America is for Americans only and we're going to put up a big old fence like and we just let everybody go. I mean, it's such a good use of money. If you want to spend to secure the border, you have to send it to other countries. I know that is in a way paradoxical, but if you think about it for like two hot minutes, it's really not. And to continue to cut foreign aid while crowing about immigration and the risk of refugees and migrants flowing across the border is maddening.  

Beth [00:28:59] I have to give Vice President Harris a lot of credit here, though, because she has been pretty creative at getting the private sector involved in that foreign aid process in Central and Latin America. So she has facilitated a number of companies going into these countries, Honduras, Guatemala, and really investing there. Because part of what happens is if you're most industrious, bright people leave those countries to come to the United States, the brain drain becomes part of the crisis in the country as well. So you need people to not only get foreign aid from the United States government in the form of training them to do better security, better law enforcement, better education, but you do need the private sector there to say there are jobs here for you. There's a career path here for you. That is very long-term work that will not bear fruit during this administration or the next, but it is important and good work. And I think that her office doesn't get enough credit for how hard they're working that problem without support.  

Sarah [00:30:05] Well, I mean, it's just with good faith. And when you look at some of the solutions coming from Texas, I don't think there's solutions in good faith. That concertina wire hasn't dropped the flow coming through Eagle Pass. And that's not decreased the flow of people trying to get through. It's just cruel. It's just cruel. People have died. I read a an interview with a couple that owns land. Their land is there. And they were thrilled by the idea. And they're, like, now all we have is small girls wandering unattended and bodies on the banks of our property. So it's like it is very difficult to take any of this seriously when it's so often feels-- to quote a piece I didn't even really like at the time, which is cruelty is the point. That's what it feels like. It just feels like we'll be mean enough. We'll take your children away, or we'll let you die on the banks of the Rio Grand and then people won't come. And just beyond the ethics of that, it's not actually working. It's not actually working. Your cruelty is not a solution. It's not working.  

Beth [00:31:04] If you don't believe the dangerousness of the wire, you should look at a picture of the bank of the Rio Grand. There are so many places where it is so steep and slippery. So someone who gets to that wire has already crossed into the United States because, again, some of the border is in the water. So they're already in the United States. They already have the right to apply for asylum. They are already, under U.S. law, treated as an applicant for a mission. But then they go up this slope and there's the wire. And the only thing that's going to happen is that you slip back down into the river and get carried away by its currents. So I understand that people like me have lost some credibility on this issue because I have been so emotional about it, and because the way I responded to the Trump administration. I am being very precise about that particular problem. I do think there's been sloppy reporting about the Supreme Court and the concertina wire. So I keep seeing from Kentuckians-- I follow a lot of Kentucky legislators on X. And that's about all my feed is anymore. It seems to be the best way that I can keep in touch with Frankfort.  

[00:32:20] So many of them are talking about how Governor Beshear ought to stand with Texas and defy the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court hasn't told anybody to do anything. Texas put up the wire. Sometimes Border Patrol agents cut it because they needed to cut it to help people or to otherwise do their job. Sometimes they cut it to arrest people. This is kind of a same team situation, but they cut it and Texas takes them to court and says the federal government is trespassing on our property by cutting this wire. And that gets all the way to the Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit tells the federal government you have to stop cutting the wire. All the Supreme Court says is, no, they don't. And it goes back down to the lower court for an actual trial. But the Supreme Court did not say Texas can't continue to put the wire up. The Supreme Court did not say that Texas can't fix the wire that's been cut. All they said is like status quo continues. Texas does what it's doing. Border patrol responds as it responds. And the Border Patrol can cut Texas wire just like it can cut a fence of a private property owner within 25 miles of the border, if that's what they need to do. I feel like when we get into this arena where we're talking about defying court orders and Texas declaring war, this is dangerous territory. So everybody being really precise about what's happening is important.  

Sarah [00:33:47] Yeah, but Governor Abbott's not going to be precise he wants that. He wants that tenor in the argument. He wants that Civil War language. That is what they are fueling the base of the party with right now. It's this like a civil war is coming, be prepared to fight it. Again, because they lost one of their primary emotional issues. Because I just want to be clear, there's not just one side here being emotional. They lost their emotional motivation and issue with abortion when Roe v Wade was overturned, and they know it. They know it. And so they need to fuel that fire of fear that motivates their base and says you are in danger, and the only way to secure yourself and your family in this country is to vote for us, to fight for us, to do whatever we tell you to do because there is danger, danger, danger. It's like that orientation to being prey. I listened to Hidden Brains new series US 2.0, and they talked about we evolved as prey, not predators. And so it is very easy to push a human's buttons and say, you're in danger, you're prey, be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. And it's very motivating and they know that. And that is exactly what Governor Abbott is doing. I've just stopped believing that he actually wants to solve this. I've stopped believing that he cares about these border towns taxed to the utmost of their capacity. I think that he has found a political issue that is easy to manipulate, that is easy to look like a tough guy. We're reading a book that really talks about foreign policy and using foreign policy, even when it's an unpopular position, to make yourself seem like a good leader as a presidential candidate. And I think this strength orientation, this you're in danger, you're prey, I'm the strength, I'm the tough guy, I'm the strong guy who will protect you, is just the bread and butter of MAGA right now. And he is at the center of that.  

Beth [00:35:47] It is hard to believe that anyone is in solution mode when what we see is this group, Chris Murphy, James Lankford, Kyrsten Sinema. So a Democrat or a Republican and an independent in the Senate who have been for months working on what they wanted to be a bipartisan framework on immigration, that would tackle this problem in the law enforcement sense, but also beyond it working to speed up asylum.  

Sarah [00:36:18] Some of the solutions we've discussed. Absolutely.  

Beth [00:36:20] Yes. And they have been working and working on this. And Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, has said dead on arrival. Mitch McConnell has now said we can't do anything that undermines Trump, and Trump doesn't want this. And Trump is out around the country actively campaigning against this. So it's like it's an emergency from Republicans, but it's an emergency that we definitely don't want to do anything about until January of 2025. And it's hard to take that seriously.  

Sarah [00:36:50] Yeah, because I don't think they're serious about solving it. I think that's why you can't take seriously because they're not serious.  

Beth [00:36:55] We also have an effort to impeach the secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. The Homeland Security Committee voted on party lines to recommend two articles of impeachment. One for refusing to comply with federal immigration laws, and one for breach of the public trust because he has said to Congress that the border is secure. Again, I think we need to focus on that distinction, like, it might be secure and still disorderly. It depends on what we're talking about. Neither of those have any precedent as a high crime or misdemeanor, which is the constitutional standard for impeachment. And impeaching cabinet officials is something that we don't really do. Last time it was attempted was in 1876, when a defense secretary was accused of taking kickbacks in government contracts. But this is just not a path forward. Either you want to solve this problem or you want to just blame people for not solving it. And I think we're squarely in the blame category.  

Sarah [00:37:54] Well, and I think what's frustrating is that their rhetoric is making more impact. The idea that a border wall is rising in popularity among Democrats, what? I think it's because it's such a concrete thing that people can understand. That they get it, they hear it. It sounds like a solution. Maybe not a great one, but it's better than nothing. And because this is such a complicated system, we're going to have to figure out a way to talk about this that doesn't require a degree in administrative law so that people get, like, this is an issue and we care about it, and we're going to pay attention to it, and we are paying attention to it. That has impact because the wall is dumb, but people are busy and so it connected. And that needs to be like an accepted political reality so that there is something to answer. I'll tell you what I'm going to start saying in my life. Did you know that we need to admit 4 million people a year in order to maintain our historical population growth? I just need something to connect.  

Beth [00:39:04] I think that my hook like that is this piece from the Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh. We'll put it in the show notes. To me, this is the money line. "Other than crashing the economy, expanding legal immigration is the only reliable way to massively reduce illegal immigration without committing crimes against humanity." And I think that that's correct. And, look, we have some success under this administration. First of all, President Biden has not done nothing around immigration. He's taken 535 executive actions on immigration over three years. Trump took 472 during his entire presidency. So he has not been sitting still. The parole initiative to allow Americans to sponsor Ukrainians, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans for temporary residence where you can live in the United States for at least two years. That gets people legally flying here instead of making dangerous journeys. It's not perfect. We need more resources for processing those folks, but there is a foundation to build on there. And that is the kind of system where you could say, here's the cap, this is the total number of these that we're doing, and here's why we picked that number, America, because it's the number of people our labor market needs. I think that's a really positive direction to go.  

Sarah [00:40:18] Yeah, I was really encouraged in particular by the app, but I was reading this book called Re-coding America, where it's like we need people to see technology as a part of the government, not just as this tool. The sort of status position in the government is setting policy. If you're going to work in government, you want to be high up setting the policy. And we don't give enough status to what flows after that. And that is what we desperately need inside the immigration system. We don't need more people up at the top giving us ideas. We need really smart, thoughtful people involved in the process of instituting that policy. And that's true for a lot of places in government, but I think it's particularly true of immigration. And I think you see that here. It's so big. Even if the clouds broke open and the angels sang and Congress decided, no, we're going to go to work, we're going to do our jobs, and we're going to pass this massive immigration bill, much like the infrastructure bill; there has to be an army of very smart, dedicated people saying, this is the purpose I'm looking for. To go out and institute this policy and figure out the problems and figure out the fact that the app is great, but these are the issues and this is the software code we need to fix it. We need that flow afterwards. I think that's true of a lot of places in American life, and I think this is one of them.  

Beth [00:41:47] And this is also a place where we need federal coordination with the states. Federalism is implicated in immigration in every way, and not just in the strained way that Governor Abbott is pushing that tension into the system. But we absolutely have to have coordination between the federal government and state and local officials all over the country. We have listeners who every day are that army of smart people working charitably and in social services organizations to try to alleviate suffering around the southern border. And that will always be needed too. I think that's another mindset. There will always be some security issues at the borders. There will always be moments of disorder. There will always be poverty and exploitation. We're not going to fix this, but there are also a lot of really good ideas about how it can be much, much better than it is. So we'll continue to follow those ideas here. And if you are so inclined to mention to your Senator that you would like to see that bipartisan legislation taken up on the floor, we encourage you to do that.  

[00:42:56] Music Interlude.  

[00:43:07] We always end our show talking about something Outside of Politics. Sarah, when you said the phrase scruffy hospitality to me, just as an idea of a thing to talk about, I was immediately in. I wanted to learn more. I'm very into this idea. So tell us what scruffy hospitality is.  

Sarah [00:43:23] Well, I read it in the Today Show email, which is just really a grab bag. Let me tell you guys, it'll just be like this mass shooting happened and also scruffy hospitality. But it really caught my eye because I have been articulating this for years. I just didn't have a cute name for it. And so has the guy that the article is based around. It's Reverend Jack King. He's an Anglican priest and he wrote this piece 10 years ago about the gap between our day to day home and the presentable, acceptable for hospitality version and sort of shrinking that gap. Which is something I feel like I even said it on the Nuance Live or somewhere. Which is the reason my husband and I host semi often and have friends over for dinner and do this, is because what I try to do is lower my expectations a little bit for what I want my house to look like when people come over. For example, my children's clean rooms are not spotless because my children are upstairs and I don't go upstairs that often because I don't like the states they keep their rooms in and so I just avoid them. But I don't worry about that. If there's dirty clothes around on the floor when somebody comes over, who cares? They're not eating in my kid's room. And then I try to heighten the expectations around what my house is like day to day. My countertops are clear, my floors are clean, my bathrooms are clean. Not all of them, but the ones that a guest would use. I try to keep those clean all the time. Every day. I try to keep things picked up, is what I would describe it, so that the gap is not huge. Because if the gap is huge, you won't have people over because you'll be like, oh, I got to pick up this, I got to do this, I gotta blah, blah, blah, and then you won't do it. So I love it this thing I've kind of instituted in my life, I've got this cute name and it's getting some attention.  

Beth [00:44:57] We also host often. One of the best things we've done this year, we bought a ton of target made for college plates. Just plastic. They're just light gray and light pink plastic plates and bowls, and they are so easy to run through the dishwasher and then they're just so light. You just grab all of them at one time and put them back in. It's so easy to clean up when you have something like that. And it makes me feel better than using paper plates, but it's not the work of using nicer dishes. So kind of getting into that mindset that I don't have to do my fanciest serving of anyone while they're here. I don't have to get the China out. I don't have to even get my glass plates out. I can just serve people. We can have a good time. It can be super casual, and then I can make the cleanup pretty easy on myself.  

Sarah [00:45:50] Yeah, I think that's key. I think having some easy meals or just ordering takeout, who cares?  

Beth [00:45:57] Yeah.  

Sarah [00:45:58] And also I think when you keep your house a little bit cleaner, then maybe you would if nobody ever came over. It also clears up mental space and sort of reduces your stress so you have that margin, that capacity to host people. I think that's what it does for me. Clutter stresses me out. So when the clutter is not around, when my husband is like, well, do you want to have somebody over tonight? I can say yes, because I don't feel like I have to go clear the clutter, you know what I mean? And I think once you get in the habit of keeping it that way, you build the smaller daily habits that don't feel like a big production. I was thinking about this with my laundry because my husband has bought this massive laundry basket and guess what? It's just made his laundry procrastination worse. Not surprising. I keep super lightweight mesh pop up laundry hampers. I do like one small load of laundry. The only thing I fold is tee shirts. Everything else is just kind of thrown in a drawer. I can do my laundry and put it away inside like five minutes or less. And that's by design because that makes me more likely to do it and keep it out of the way. And I think you think if I do it more often, that's harder. But it's not because you're doing it in a way that is less stressful and involves less effort than these big-- when I see people's couches full of laundry, it stresses me all the way out. I don't fold my kids laundry. They sure throw their tee shirts in a drawer then they pull them out and wear them. Who cares? It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to them. But finding those little points where I can just make those everyday tasks easier and quicker so that they can get done so that then the house is in a place that we can have people over.  

Beth [00:47:40] I think the biggest thing about this whole idea is just deciding that it's important to have people over. Once you get in the habit of having people over there, it gets easier and easier. You figure out this is how I like to do the drinks. This is what I like to serve. This is where I like to put things. But you have to just decide I want to be a person who hosts because I want to be with people. And honestly, they're just not a lot of people who like to host, you know what I mean? In so many places, if you are going together, it's going to be you. You just have to raise your hand and say, I'm going to be the person. We had such a fun party here. I won't get into all the reasons why, but basically we were playing a game on New Year's. My neighbor said something hilarious about the grocery store, so we decide for his 40th birthday in a couple weeks, we're going to have a grocery store themed party for him. It was the easiest thing I have ever done, because I went to the deli and bought all the things because it was on theme. I made nothing because that was kind of the gist of the whole deal. I got some balloons, I made a little Price is Right Google Slides game. We guessed the prices of all kinds of things at Kroger. It was super fun and so easy. And it was kind of like a treat to have really nice deli sandwiches and really nice deli condiments to go with it. And I think once you just get in your mind it's okay, I'm not proving anything to anyone. When I host, we're just gathering and we're trying to make it memorable and fun and easy. It enriches my life so much to kind of always be planning the next thing. It's kind of a way that my brain rest. Like, what are we doing next? And how can that be fun?  

Sarah [00:49:16] Well, I think I also started hosting more when I decided it was for the experience and not for the photos, because there was a time there in the early aughts where it was for the photos. We were all wrapping water bottles. Why? Because that improves someone's experience of a party. No, it just makes a cute picture. And so I let go of that and just thought like, well, it doesn't matter. One of our favorite things we do every year is my holiday open house. I don't have great pictures from that. Who cares? Because that's not the point. The point is not a beautiful table. The point is that we gather around. Not that I don't love a beautiful table, I do, but I think once I let go of that-- because I think party planning, especially if you're getting ideas from the internet, like the Martha Stewartization of parties, which is you should have these beautiful spreads and these beautiful photo layouts of the party. But that's really not the point. I mean, if it's a point for you, fine. But it's not the point for me.  

Beth [00:50:03] I have to remind myself to take pictures even when we get together now, because it's not what it's about. I try to take some pictures just because I don't want to be a person who only has photos of my kids. And I can get in that space too where it's like our gathering is not worthy of a place in my camera roll, so I kind of have the opposite problem. But I have fully released the idea that it always needs to be pretty or perfect, because it just needs to be. Well, thank you all so much for being here with us. I hope that you feel a sense of wonderful, cozy, scrappy lived in hospitality around this podcast. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday for a new episode. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.  

[00:50:42] Music Interlude.  

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. 

Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement. 

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. Jessica Whitehead. Samantha Chalmers. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family. 

Sarah: Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller. 

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