When people talk about the crisis at the border between the US and Mexico, what specifically are they referring to?

The Department of Homeland Security keeps track of a statistic called “border encounters” at the US border with Mexico. This includes primarily the large number of people who try to cross the border without documentation, or illegally, and aren’t crossing at a formal port of entry. It also includes people who do try to cross the border at a port of entry but who are then found not eligible to be admitted into the US.

In the past three years, under the Biden administration, the number of these border encounters each year has been more than quadruple the average of what it was throughout most of the previous decade, under the Trump and Obama administrations.

The system for processing all these migrants has been entirely overwhelmed. And if you’re a politician or a pundit or someone else pushing an agenda, the temptation is to make it political. To argue that this is either all Joe Biden’s fault for being “too soft” on immigration, or the fault of Donald Trump for not fixing the problem sooner, or Congress for refusing to collaborate on a bill that would address the issue.

Today’s guest does something different altogether. Andrew Selee is the head of the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, which is the think tank Cardiff turns to when he wants factual, nonpartisan, non-stupid commentary on immigration—but especially when he just wants to inform himself on the topic outside the nonsense of how debates on immigration tend to play out in public.

So Cardiff speaks with Andrew about the real, fundamental reasons behind the crisis at the border, and what can be done about it.

They also talk about legal immigration, which despite many problems has actually been a kind of quiet success of recent years.

Other topics they discuss include the two eras of border management, the multi-layered effects of the pandemic on immigration, and a new idea for how to reform immigration to become more responsive to the needs of the US labor market.