Immigration Law and Policy: What’s at Stake in November?

KEVIN COPE: All right, welcome, everybody, to this panel, which we're calling immigration law and policy, what's at stake in November? This is sponsored by the Immigration, Migration, and Human Rights Program. My name is Kevin Cope. I'm an associate professor of law and public policy here.

And I want to start just by thanking the people who made this possible, specifically, Rebecca Klaff, Mary Wood, Gary Banks, and all of their teams, which are still working to set up chairs for you here, as well as our co-sponsors, specifically, the Miller Center at UVA, and in particular, Cristina Lopez-Gottardi Chao, as well as the American Constitution Society at UVA Law, and the Federalist Society at UVA Law.

So I'll start by introducing our panelists. Then we'll each give some preliminary comments and then we'll get into the discussion. So first of all, joining us from Washington DC, up here on Zoom, is Stuart Anderson. He is executive director of the nonpartisan public policy research organization called the National Foundation for American Policy.

Previously, he served as executive associate commissioner for policy, and planning, and counselor to the commissioner at the Immigration and Naturalization Service 2001 to 2003 and as staff director for the US Senate Immigration Subcommittee. He was the director of trade and immigration studies at the Cato Institute, where he researched the military contributions of immigrants and the role of immigrants in high technology. He's the author of a 2010 book on immigration, which is a comprehensive examination of US immigration policies and their impact on the nation.

Here, at the end, is Tanisha Cruz. Cruz is the founding attorney at Cruz Law PLLC. She is the daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and has dedicated her legal career to the practice of immigration law. She previously served as a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center, LAJC, with the immigrant advocacy program and was director of the Immigration Law Clinic here at the law school.

At LAJC, she focused primarily on managing the Virginia Special Immigrant Juvenile Project, which is an award-winning collaboration between LAJC and pro-Bono attorneys across the state, which has saved over 100 children from likely deportation. In 2016, she won a Lassie Award from the Virginia Poverty Law Center for achievement in immigration law.

Professor Amanda Frost is the David Lawton Massey Jr. And John A. Ewald Jr. research professor of law and the co-director, along with Camilla Sanchez and myself of the Immigration Migration Human Rights Program here. Her scholarship has been cited by over a dozen federal and state courts, and she has testified on immigration issues before the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees. Her other writings have been published in numerous outlets, including the Atlantic, New Republic, and The New York Times.

She's also worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee previously and served as acting director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University. Her 2021 book, You Are Not American Citizens, Stripping From Dred Scott to The Dreamers was named a new and noteworthy book by The New York Times, Book Review, and was short listed for the Mark Linton History Prize.

And then finally, Jennifer Lawless is the Leona Reeves and George W. Spicer professor of politics, a professor of public policy, a Miller Center senior fellow, and chair of the politics department here at UVA. Her research focuses on political ambition, campaigns, and elections, and media, and politics.

She was previously a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and she currently serves as co-editor in chief of the American Journal of Political Science. She's authored or co-authored eight books, and her latest one from 2021, called News Hole, the Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement, won the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. All right, so let's have a brief round of applause for our panelists.

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So as of today, 20% of the world's migrants live here in the United States. And in fact, there are nearly 100,000,000 first and second-generation immigrants in the United States, which is the largest of any country, and which makes up about 30% of the population. And yet, when it comes to policies and attitudes, the United States has always been somewhat ambivalent about immigration and immigrants.

In 2024, Americans named immigration as the most important pressing issue facing the country, more than even inflation and the economy generally. And also this year, Americans support for immigration hit the lowest levels since soon after 9/11, with 55 support, according to a Gallup poll, for decreasing immigration, including authorized immigration, and just 16 support for increasing it.

But these overall numbers mask important partisan divides. So only 10% of Republicans want to increase or maintain immigration levels, while about 2/3 of Democrats do. And indeed, the candidates in 2024, former President Trump and Vice President Harris, seem to reflect these differences. They certainly have diametrically different visions for immigration, law, and policy.

And yet, the parties have not always been so far apart on their preferred approaches. There have been areas of relative agreement on things like border security, where both parties have generally favored more and more security and spending at the border, and on things like the DREAM Act, DREAMers, so children of unauthorized immigrants.

In fact, about half of all Republicans favor some sort of pathway for US citizens to become-- I'm sorry, for immigrants who entered unlawfully to become citizens if they meet certain requirements. And almost 2/3 of Republicans support a similar policy for those brought to the US illegally as children.

So with that in mind, I'd like to first ask each of the panelists to give a very brief overview of how this upcoming election may affect immigration policy and immigrants going forward, or conversely, how immigration issues will affect who is, in fact, elected in November. So we'll start with Amanda Frost.

AMANDA FROST: Great. So I'm going to summarize very briefly here and then get into the weeds in a minute. The potential Harris administration immigration priorities. So Professor Cope, if you could just pull up the slide. I'm going to start by, just as I said, giving an overview of what I see as her three most important immigration priorities. First and foremost, controlling the southern border. This was a huge problem for the Biden Administration.

They have recently pulled those numbers down through a number of initiatives that I'll talk about in some more detail, what are called carrots and sticks, which are really more stick than carrot, but provide various ways of controlling the border, most notably an executive order in June 2024, referred to by some as the asylum ban, that turns away people coming to the Southern border seeking asylum when the number of people coming each day are over 2,500.

And that has been very effective in reducing the numbers at the southern border and very important politically to the Biden-Harris Administration and to a future Harris Administration. In addition to controlling the southern border, I think a President Harris would also want to regularize the status of long-term undocumented immigrants.

Again, in keeping with the Biden Administration's policies on this, most notably, I see her wanting to continue Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. She does not have the authority, nor does Biden, to give people who arrived as children in the United States legal status. But she can give them a promise not to enforce immigration law against them. And probably, most important, work authorization.

And the Biden administration recently announced a similar program for the spouses of undocumented citizens who'd been in the US for more than 10 years-- I'm sorry, the spouses of US citizens who had been in the US for more than 10 years and don't have status through a parole in place program.

And finally, Harris has said she wants to modernize what she refers to as quote unquote "broken" immigration system. There are a number of ways she'd like to do that. Again, I'll speak in more detail about them as we get further into the panel. But those include streamlining the asylum process and expanding legal immigration.

KEVIN COPE: Great. Thanks. Stuart Anderson, could you give us a brief overview of what a second Trump administration might look like for immigration law?

STUART ANDERSON: Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me here, including the Federalist Society, who extended an invitation, as well as the other sponsors. I think if you look at the past month, Donald Trump has said that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats.

And over the weekend, he said immigrants are attacking villages and cities throughout the mid-west. So I think it's safe to say a second Trump administration is not going to be a wildly pro-immigration administration. And in fact, if you look at the past, his previous term, it gives you a preview of what the priorities are going to be.

And I think, first of all, we should look for legal immigration will be reduced through pretty much ending refugee resettlement. I think high-skilled immigration will be reduced, or at least, encumbered greatly, such as making it very difficult to get high-skilled visas.

And I think that we've heard a lot about Trump plans on mass deportation. I think that they're going to focus on the easiest part of that, which would be to try to remove or simply just not renew and forced out of the country hundreds of thousands to really start to get well over a million people who have different forms of legal protection that could expire, such as people on temporary protected status and people who were allowed into the country on humanitarian parole programs.

The irony of the Trump focus on illegal immigration is apprehensions at the border are now called encounters at the border by border patrol agents are actually been lower the past two months than the final month of Donald Trump's term in office. So to the extent that a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for less illegal immigration, you actually have seen, at least in the past months, through a variety of mechanisms, lower immigration during the Biden and Harris Administration than you saw during, even, the end of the Trump Administration.

KEVIN COPE: Great. Thanks. Tanishka Cruz, in addition to what has just been said, what are the most important issues in this election to immigrants and would be immigrants?

TANISHKA V. CRUZ: So I think the word "priorities" is probably the most important one because it's that shift in priorities that makes a difference in how the system operates and functions. I saw a slide that Professor Frost put up about modernizing or the need to modernize our system. The chaos that ensues when there's constant changes that are implemented, further breaks an already unsustainable system. We have over 3 million people who are currently in removal proceedings, so that's active deportation proceedings.

So under President Trump's administration, we did have this mass deportation priority. There was, actually, I would say, no priorities under President Trump. If you were undocumented and you weren't born in the United States, you were a priority for deportation. So that's increased everything from detentions that we were seeing across the board.

And there was no rhyme or reason. Whether you were committing serious crimes in the United States or very minor infractions, there was no differentiation. So what it did was it just inundated more people into a system that already is having a lot of trouble.

Under the Biden Administration, there has been a shift in the sense that we are still dealing with people who are in active removal proceedings, only now, we have a different set of priorities. So you have people who are committing serious crimes, people who are getting involved in terrorism or gang-related violence, and those who are recent arrivals to the United States, those are this current administration's priorities.

But the ability to have the Department of Homeland Security in the position to make a decision about what cases they want to prosecute and which cases they don't want to prosecute is an effective tool when you have over 3 million people in this system. And that backlog is significant. So I think that bringing in another administration is definitely going to create more chaos than stability in this process.

KEVIN COPE: Thank you. And Jen lawless, could you give us a preview of the role of immigration issues on the outcome of the election?

JENNIFER LAWLESS: Yeah, so we have a close election. I don't if anybody has seen the news. Basically, although public opinion data reflect that immigration is an important issue for people when it comes to the extent to which immigration affects vote choice, the story is a little bit more complicated. The economy is still the most important issue to Democrats and Republicans alike.

Moreover, health care, Supreme Court appointments, foreign policy, each of those issues ranks higher than immigration when it comes to how people are going to decide to vote. When we break it down by party, though, that goes away. And for Republicans, immigration is the second most important issue. For Democrats, it goes all the way down.

So what we see is a situation where the campaigns and the candidates are talking past each other because Donald Trump and JD Vance can use immigration to mobilize their base, not in a way where there's nuanced conversation about these differences in policies or preferences. And Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz are focusing on other issues. Among Democratic women, for example, abortion is actually just as important as the economy. And so we have these competing issues, and I think that plays an important role.

The other point that I would make just from the outset is that although there are differences in terms of the extent to which Democrats and Republicans think that immigration is important heading into the election cycle, when you look at single-issue voters, immigration is not the most important issue for anyone.

And so again, abortion is and abortion is also on the ballot in a lot of states, where people are going to actually be casting ballots to either restore Roe v Wade protections or not, which helps the Democrats. The Republicans don't have on the ballot a yes or no to mass deportations or a yes or no to the kinds of policy preferences that Republican supporters like. So the extent to which these issues can be used and mobilized vary as well. So only time will tell. But it's not a simple referendum on what immigration policy should be.

KEVIN COPE: OK, so our first topic I want to talk about is what Stuart and Jen have already alluded to, which is the southern border and unauthorized immigration and enforcement there. So as Stuart already mentioned, over the past few years, there was an enormous surge of encounters, at least according to the Border Patrol, reaching an all time high of just over 3 million encounters in 2023 at the Southern border, which was up from 1.6 million in 2021.

And in the end of 2023, the monthly total hit 250,000. But over the last several months into 2024, those numbers have tapered considerably. The last number I saw, you may have more recent ones, was down to 60,000 from 250,000. So 60,000 in July.

And indeed, there's a lot of widespread discontent with how the government is handling this issue with both Republicans and Democrats. Just 18% of Americans say that the government is doing a good job, although there are significant partisan divides here, as 70% of Republicans describe the border situation as a crisis, which is 22% of Democrats doing this.

And as Jen mentioned, this has been one of the main themes of the Trump campaign more than the Biden and now Harris campaigns. They have argued that, essentially, Biden and Harris have rolled out the welcome mat for anyone who wants to enter the southern border.

So I want to ask the panel, and starting with Amanda, how much has-- and I just gave you some numbers. But how much have the numbers at the southern border increased? How much more demand has there been? Why has that happened? And then I'll ask Jen how this narrative has been used to influence the election.

AMANDA FROST: Great. And would you mind calling up that slide that I have with the border numbers. So a couple of things, as you'll see very vividly from the slide I have that maps the number of encounters over the course of three administrations. So first of all, I'll just say an encounter is defined as a non-citizen who is physically apprehended by Customs and Border Protection within 100 miles of the border during a 14-day period after entry.

And what really matters is that we compare apples to apples, which I believe we're doing with this slide using CBP data. And you'll see under Obama, the numbers moved around a bit. Then under Trump, they fell massively at first, then rose and spiked up, despite the fact that there had just been in place many harsh enforcement measures, including family separation.

Still, they were spiking up. Then they fell precipitously due to COVID, and then they were coming back up again when Trump left office. And then you see the reality of the Biden administration's first few years in office, which is an enormous increase. I think it's fair to call this a crisis.

Everybody from every political party and every approach to this issue called the first couple of years of President Biden's administration a crisis at the Southern border. It was unmanageable. It was overwhelming. It was very difficult for everyone involved. I just have one slide to show that image. This was in December of 2023, when the numbers were spiking.

But you'll also notice from this slide that the numbers are now coming way down, as Professor Cope said, below the numbers when Trump left office. So there's a couple of initiatives that the Biden Administration and, I think, Harris will continue that led to this.

One is the June executive order I already mentioned that turns away from the Southern border everyone who comes, or almost everyone, when the number of encounters is over 2,500 a day. So as I said, some people refer to that as an asylum ban. It is currently being litigated, as you can imagine.

There's also the Customs and Border Protection Mobile App, which allows people to obtain appointments for asylum, but only through an app. And they cannot come to the ports of entry and seek asylum without getting one of those appointments first through the mobile application. That has also been litigated.

And finally, a creative use of parole, a parole in place program. And I think people often don't realize, I know I didn't, that so much of immigration enforcement at the southern border is really about diplomacy and diplomacy with Mexico. So we got Mexico to agree to take 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti who we would expel into those countries in return-- sorry, who we would expel into Mexico in return for the US agreeing to give parole to 30,000 people from those countries who applied from abroad.

Again, the effort being to control the numbers coming in to the southern border. So I think that tells a lot of the reason why a lot of the story as to why those numbers are decreasing and we see such low numbers today compared to the highs of the Biden Administration.

KEVIN COPE: Thanks. Stuart, what's your take on this?

STUART ANDERSON: Well, I think that's an excellent summary, and I think that it's a tribute to Donald Trump's marketing prowess, that many people think that he, quote, "solved" the problem at the southern border, when, as the data shows, that illegal entry, as measured by Border Patrol Encounters, actually doubled while he was president.

I don't think it was his fault, in that, most of that was an increase from Central America and people having difficult situations there. But I don't think what happened under Biden has, quote, "been his fault." I think the Biden Administration could have done a number of things better. And I think the biggest mistake they made was not explaining to Americans from day one that this was a hemisphere-wide refugee problem.

8 million people have left Venezuela. Actually, I think it's now more than left Ukraine after the Russian invasion. And you look at oppression in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and other problems, and particularly the economic problems that festered during COVID. And then once people could move, they moved outside of their countries. And then some decided, obviously, to come to the United States because of the draw of the stronger US economy.

And so I think by failing to do that, as well as allowing some governors, like Texas Governor, to send people to certain cities rather than coordinated themselves and spread people out around the country, I think the Biden Administration made a number of mistakes.

I think that one of the things that was a good policy was the humanitarian parole policy that was alluded to. One of the things that people don't realize is that illegal entry, as measured by Border Patrol Encounters, actually declined by about 90% from the countries that participated in those humanitarian parole programs. We're talking about Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti. In addition, with Haitians allowing more to access the asylum system via the ports of entry.

The Venezuelan numbers haven't been enough because of the demand. But what it really points to, our research shows, is that if you really want a quote, "solution," what you really need to do is make it easier for people to come in legally. That would bypass the smuggling organizations.

We also found, back in the 1950s, that the equivalent of work visas via the Bracero Program, so a dramatic increase in the use of farm workers legally, and it led to an over 90% decline in illegal entry during the late 1950s. So I think that either administration is going to have problems if they try to keep a hold on the border by only using enforcement mechanisms or policies related to asylum.

Obviously, the cooperation with Mexico is going to be key, and it's been alluded to how some of that cooperation has been gained. But there are court cases now that would eliminate the humanitarian parole program. And I don't think, contrary to the Trump Administration idea, that policies like Remain in Mexico are going to be re-implemented in Mexico if Donald Trump wins.

KEVIN COPE: So we'll come back more to this. I want to ask Jen in a few minutes specifically about how these issues are being used in the election. But for now, I want to turn to business and immigrant visas. So Donald Trump himself, if not the campaign of Donald Trump, has floated the idea of giving green cards to all or nearly all college graduates, which would represent a sea change in how we allocate immigrant visas in this country. And I don't know how much that idea has been fleshed out, but I'd be interested, again, Stuart, in you're telling us a little bit more about that plan and whether you think it would actually come to fruition under a second Trump administration.

STUART ANDERSON: Well, it's a great question. It got a lot of attention when he mentioned it. But the context of that was he was on a podcast with campaign funders, essentially, people who just had a fundraiser for him, and they were all Silicon Valley people. And Trump agreed with them that it was hard to get highly skilled, talented people in the tech fields.

And he floated this idea of giving everyone who finished school in America as an international student a green card. His campaign backpedaled pretty much almost immediately. And it seems very hard to believe that this would actually be a serious legislative proposal by Trump because I think the most important thing people need to look at whenever people running for office say something is look at what they've done more than what they say they're going to do.

And during his term of office, you saw H-1B visas, which are the high-skilled visas, temporary visas, you saw them being much more difficult for employers, not only to get, but to actually get renewals of the existing employees. The denial rates because of different policies increased for maybe 3%, or 4%, or 5% to well over 20%. Many people couldn't get renewals and had to leave the country.

You saw proposals that were struck down because of technical administrative violations, not necessarily because of the substance, which courts didn't get to, such as trying to price highly-skilled immigrants out of the labor market by boosting the required wages that would have to be paid by employer by, in some cases, over 100%. And the last effort by the Trump administration before he left office was to make it extremely difficult for employers to be able to obtain high-skilled visas.

So I think even if Donald Trump remembered that he had made this promise or mentioned this in the podcast and it was put together as some sort of legislative proposal, I think the people that he's going to bring in have shown that they really do not like high skill immigration any more than other types of immigration, and they would make sure that something like this wouldn't be able to pass Congress, such as by attaching provisions, such as ending family immigration, or other measures that they know Democrats wouldn't support.

KEVIN COPE: I want to invite anyone to comment on-- assuming the green cards for all college grads is dead in the water, some of the other items that Stuart touched on. Do we know? Do we have any preview or information on how a Harris Administration would push for changes to business visas, immigrant visas, or do we not know?

AMANDA FROST: Well, I'll just jump in and say one of Vice President Harris's comments that she's made a number of times, including at the debate, is that she supports the bill that was proposed in the spring of 2024 that had bipartisan support, but that President Trump instructed Republicans not to vote for. So at the end of the day, it didn't pass. And she said if she's president, she would continue to push that bill.

That bill does a number of things. But relevant to your question, that bill would increase legal immigration. And that, again, is an effort to fix the quote unquote, "broken" immigration system that she refers to. And I think that would be in line with this idea of increasing skilled immigration.

So right now, the employment-based visas, people that can come to the US on a green card because an employer has sponsored them or they're high-skilled, that is limited to 140,000 visas a year for a country well over 300 million people. And that number was set in 1990 before the internet. So we need to change that number. And the proposal, the bill, would. It would increase it by 13% and would also increase family-based immigration.

So I think she would support legislation that increased the ability of skilled immigrants, in particular, and people educated in the United States to come in and stay in the United States. That seems to be pretty desperately needed. And she supported that.

KEVIN COPE: Let's turn to the so-called DREAM Act and the DREAMers, which was another pathway for people to remain in the country indefinitely or permanently. So I think alluded to it earlier, but I'd like to hear from Amanda again. The DREAM Act was proposed over a decade ago and never was enacted, although, there was bipartisan support to some degree. More recently, President Obama introduced the DACA program to protect children brought to the country illegally. So what prospects are there for those sorts of protections under either Harris or Trump. We'll start with Amanda.

AMANDA FROST: Well, I would say, in terms of the executive action and its executive order, DACA is not a pathway to lawful permanent residents, or green card status, or citizenship. The people on DACA are in a very tenuous situation, where at any moment, it could change, as they well-know from under the Trump Administration when he attempted to end it.

So it is not a stable status, but it does promise a forbearance and, I believe, from deportation. And I believe Harris would continue to give that group that promise in two-year chunks, a forbearance from removal. And it gives employment authorization. So I believe that she would continue to do that.

Whether her administration would be successful in getting the DREAM Act enacted into law, I don't think I can predict. This seems like the most sympathetic group of people, but, really, no president has succeeded in assisting this group. And there's been efforts to do so for well over a decade, I think over 20 years.

KEVIN COPE: And there's huge public support for it, too, across both parties. So Stuart, former President Trump has been a bit ambivalent about the DREAM Act especially. He at one point said that he would like to see it enacted, which would be consistent with the feelings of most Republicans even. What do you foresee that he would try to do if he were re-elected?

STUART ANDERSON: Well, I mean, I think it's interesting. Despite a lot of his rhetoric, I think on some of the legal immigration issues, if he was left to his own devices, he would actually be a little more pro-immigration than people would expect. I think we saw that in his statements on high-skilled immigration. I think we've seen that in the past on his statements on DREAMers.

I think if he was left to his own devices, he would have cut a deal last time he was in office with support for legalization for people who were here in DREAMers status, or I guess, it's technically not a status, but in DREAMers protections, in exchange for being able to build his border wall.

But I think that the staff he has, such as Stephen Miller, they intervened to make sure there wasn't a deal last time on DREAMers. And I think that it's hard to believe that they wouldn't intervene again given the policy priorities that have been sent out. Again, anything is possible.

And probably, if some of the, what people might consider more extreme immigration measures were allowed in in exchange, it's possible that there would be a deal on DREAMers. But I think it might be a tough sell for Democrats if there were too many extreme provisions. And I would say the DREAMers community has been pretty good about the idea that they don't want to gain approvals at the expense of other people.

KEVIN COPE: Tanishka, how is this uncertainty about DACA protections and even the possibility of permanent protection affecting your clients or others like them?

TANISHKA V. CRUZ: It affects them deeply. I've been working with some kids for as long as 12 years now who have just been renewing their DACA status. So they are now professionals, and nurses, teaching, doing a variety of different jobs, and rely, and depend on their employment authorization in order to continue to work.

They've graduated college or established businesses and are just contributing. And it's just difficult to live a life where you can't take the next step, or you can't continue to move forward, or constantly feel that the rug is going to get pulled out from under you tomorrow if there's a new administration. So it's been fairly difficult. It's also limited new people who are eligible to apply. The Biden Administration reopened the DACA program, but then there was litigation that came in that enjoined the ability for USCIS to take a decision.

So the issue at this point is that these deficits and problems that we have with these antiquated laws are being dealt with these executive actions that are then subject to the whims of whatever new administration comes in. So right now, we have this parole in place program for spouses of US citizens, and that's been passed and there's seemingly a lot of support for it. But we're rushing to get a lot of things filed and put through into the system. But it's already been enjoined.

That program is specifically designed to address the 1996 IRAIRA laws that created these 3 and 10-year bars, which are very punitive, which I think at this point, we're ready to accept that maybe, at that point, it's just not something that's working anymore. So now, we're trying to fix decades-long issues with these executive actions that are just untenable in practice. I think the clients get their hopes up and they see that there's progress, and then it goes away. So it's a lot of up and down.

KEVIN COPE: So let's talk more broadly about the humanitarian programs which Stuart already referred to in Trump's comments about Haitians in Springfield, and also about refugees. So we have programs. We have the asylum program, which we've already touched on, which is people coming to the southern border who are claiming that they would face persecution in their home country can claim asylum, although, most aren't successful.

We have a worldwide refugee program, where people are preselected before they come to the country and are brought in that way, run partly through the State Department. And then we have this temporary protected status program for people who are already in the United States, and there's some disaster in their own country, natural disaster or human-made. And this allows them to stay indefinitely, if not permanently. So we have asylum, refugees, TPS. How are these likely to be affected by, first, a Harris Administration, Amanda?

AMANDA FROST: Yeah, first, I just want to echo what Tanishka just said because both in terms of working with clients and also teaching this subject, it is so difficult now because you say, well, here's what the law says. Let's look at the text. But wait, there's an executive order that massively changes the situation. But wait, it's being litigated.

And finally, sometimes the immigration officials are incredibly hard line and follow the written law to the letter. And sometimes, they overlook very clear requirements in the law. And it's difficult to teach, which is hardly the least of the suffering going on here.

But it's also difficult to help clients, and very difficult to be immigrants in this situation. So I just want to echo that. In terms of your question about what this election would do to change the status of these various groups of people. So first, I would expect that the Harris Administration would continue to keep those refugee numbers high.

The executive branch sets the number of refugees who can come to the United States, and would continue to keep those numbers high, would continue the vetting process, and moving people into the United States at the same rate. I think that system has worked fairly well and it has not created chaos at the border. It's alleviated chaos at the border. So that's helpful.

Temporary protected status, that's something that President Trump limited and tried to end for a number of countries. The Biden Administration has added countries to that list. I just want to quickly say, because JD Vance was on record about this, so I don't about all of them, but certainly, some of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have TPS, or temporary protected status. They are lawfully in the United States. That is a lawful status.

INA-244, a provision of federal law, allows the president to designate a country as one for which you can grant people who are already here protected status. That's because the country is undergoing maybe a civil war or an environmental disaster, like an earthquake or a hurricane. People who are in the United States at that point get to stay because to return to their home country would be dangerous for them and may be difficult for that country.

So there are countries on that list. We can certainly have a debate, policy-wise, as to whether we should keep countries on that list. But to call people here on TPS as not being legal is wrong. I am pretty confident that President Harris would continue if she becomes president with designating countries and continuing to give status to people through TPS.

Finally, asylum. I'll just say, we see her cutting back on asylum through her support of the Biden executive order entered in June 2024, which really limits the ability to seek asylum at the Southern border. And that's to avoid the kind of chaos that we saw early on in the Biden Administration at the border.

KEVIN COPE: Stuart.

STUART ANDERSON: Well, I would say, as I mentioned at the beginning, that I think every single person in temporary protected status, I think every person in DACA status, and again, these aren't technically status, but for our purposes, we'll call them a status, and I think everyone who's been admitted via humanitarian parole in different forms, and whose term of being allowed in will expire, I think every one of them would be at threat of being removed if Donald Trump comes into office.

I think that'll be one way he'll engage in what he's called a mass deportation, is by simply not renewing people and trying to compel them to leave or through whatever means possible. I think when we also look at other policies, such as-- I wrote a Forbes piece, I have a Forbes Column, if folks are interested, that look at a lot of these issues on, at least, a weekly basis.

And I wrote about that you might see a renewed policy of family separation at the border. And even though there's been a lawsuit that says that the executive branch is not supposed to do that again, I think we need to seriously consider a term called agency non-acquiescence, which is a fancy way of saying that people in the executive branch ignore judicial decisions.

And I know that's not an easy thing to talk about because we're supposed to be a country where you do things based on the rule of law, and judges issue orders and people follow them, but I think there's a very real chance, at least selectively, that judges will simply be ignored in some cases.

And given other rulings, I'm not sure what the recourse is going to be because I don't think Congress would be effective in being able to prevent it from happening. And so I think it's something we need to consider going forward, is that even though it's nice to talk about what the law is, I think we might also think about what would happen if the law becomes simply ignored.

KEVIN COPE: One area where the courts condoned Trump's policy was his travel ban initially to seven Muslim majority countries, although in response to court decisions, that was modified and included a number of other non-Muslim majority countries.

And then eventually in Trump v Hawaii, that third version of the program was validated. So Stuart, do you foresee something like a travel ban focused on Muslim majority countries or focused on anyone else, any particular other countries resurfacing under a Trump Administration?

STUART ANDERSON: Yes, that's a great question. And I think that's actually an area where they wouldn't have to go against a court decision because I think the decision that you just discussed gave wide authority. And in fact, not only was the so-called Muslim ban put in place last time, Donald Trump said he's going to do it again.

During COVID, he used what-- and for those who are interested, it's 212(f) authority as part of the INA, that if someone wants to look it up. And he used it during COVID to block the entry of almost all immigration categories from people coming from outside the United States, as well as temporary visa holders, H-1B, L-1Vs, several other visa categories.

And that's what the authority allows. It allows you to prevent the entry. So if someone's already in the country, such as an international student who tries to move to H-1B status, you wouldn't be able to use 212 authority for that, but you would be able to use it to block people from coming into the country. And I would expect that authority to be used quite significantly.

KEVIN COPE: Before we open it up to questions, I want to finish by giving Jen some more time to elaborate on the impact of these issues and how they're likely to be considered by the electorate, how the campaigns are likely to use them in the closing months.

JENNIFER LAWLESS: So it's not good. And that's my technical assessment. Basically, I mean, we've heard about lots of nuances regarding policy, lots of complicating factors, differences in what a Trump Administration would look like and what a Harris Administration would look like, differences in what a Harris Administration from a Biden Administration would look like.

At the end of the day, voters don't know any of this. And the campaigns used to-- and when I say "used to," I mean, prior to 2015, used to have an incentive to communicate accurate information because they were held accountable when they didn't. Donald Trump changed that. And so when Stuart said something like, we should look not at what Trump says, but what he does, in real-life, that's true.

But in the political world we live in right now, Trump says, I built a wall, and it's beautiful, and they demolished it. And his supporters say, OK. Trump says Kamala Harris is a border czar, and 56% of Americans, actually, based on a current poll, believe that that was a title given to her and that that was her responsibility, that there are people--

KEVIN COPE: [INAUDIBLE]

JENNIFER LAWLESS: No. That would be no. The most recent data show that literally 52% of Republican voters believe that Haitian immigrants are taking and eating cats and dogs in Ohio. Now, that would be worrisome enough, as a lot of conspiracy theories have garnered support. But in this case, the media have consistently debunked those myths.

A Republican governor in that state has said that it's not true. And the actual cat in question, Ms Sassy, has come forward as alive, and well, and hiding in her basement. And so what we're able to get people to believe in this day and age, I think, it just changes the way that issues, like immigration, play a role in the election.

The other thing I would note is that the media environment is so much different now than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Not only do we have a 24-hour news cycle, but we also have a social media environment, where things get disseminated before they get fact-checked.

There are now alternative facts that people glom onto based on the outlet that they're looking at. And if you turn on Fox News on a daily basis, you literally see an example every single day for many, many hours of a person who crossed into the United States illegally committing a crime.

Overall, the crime rates of immigrants are way, way, way lower than they are among others, especially of illegal immigrants because they don't want to get caught. They know that they're here illegally, but it doesn't matter because anecdotal evidence in a lot of these news outlets has trumped any sort of systematic evidence.

So the challenge for this election cycle is for the Democrats and the media to debunk the myths that the Trump Campaign is putting forward. But that Trump supporters are among the most loyal supporters we've ever seen for any presidential candidate. And they really, really care about this issue. So it's very, very difficult to move forward on that, which is why I think what we're seeing are the Democrats not really focusing that much on immigration.

They'll say that they disagree with his policies. They'll say that they would treat the immigration process with more humanity than he is. But in terms of getting into these kinds of nuances, they're not doing it because, ultimately, the election is going to be decided by several thousand voters in seven states. And for those voters, having a nuanced debate and discussion when only one side is willing to do it, just doesn't make sense.

The other thing that I would say is, it's not like the Democrats are having these nuanced policy discussions about all of their issues either. I mean, I don't want to suggest that on one side of the aisle there are basically Oxford tutorials going on, and on the other side of the aisle, there aren't. It's pretty low-brow on both sides.

But the lack of accountability, the lack of facts, and the fact that Donald Trump took a risk in 2015 by just doubling down on things that were blatantly inaccurate and blatantly false and hasn't been held accountable for them has just snowballed, and snowballed, and snowballed.

So what I would say, at the end of the day, is that to the extent that the Democrats are able to chip away even a little on the margins regarding immigration in battleground states, they have a very good chance of winning the election. And to the extent that Donald Trump is able to mobilize people based on immigration in those states, he has a good chance of winning the election.

But to return to the point that I mentioned initially, immigration is competing with abortion. And the Democrats have an advantage because abortion is actually on the ballot. But this is not going to be an election where there are deep conversations about nuanced immigration policy.

And then just as a final word, I would just say, I ran for Congress in 2006 in a Democratic primary. And I remember, at that time, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Ted Kennedy were all together working on a comprehensive immigration reform bill. And the big debate there was a path to citizenship versus asylum.

So in the course of 18 years, we've moved so much on this issue in a direction that is counter to what mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats had advocated for just 18 years ago, that it's a little bit unsettling to think about what the future would even look like because this is one of those issues where people dig in their heels and it's very easy to spread misinformation.

KEVIN COPE: So two of the main things, if you listen to the Trump Campaign, are, as we've, of course, said, the crisis of the southern border and also the cost of living. I drove by the BP down the road. Gas is down to something like 290 now, which consumers can see immediately. And there's actually some thought that the price of gas could impact the election, especially when it's so close. But what about the decreasing numbers at the border? Are voters likely to actually process that, and is it likely to make any difference?

JENNIFER LAWLESS: No. I mean, I don't think they know what the baseline numbers were. I don't think that they understand what a decrease means. I don't think they have the information to gauge whether a decrease is significant or marginal. And the two sides are providing totally different views about the extent to which--

I mean, the Trump Campaign is not saying border crossings are down. And so what do you do with that? And it's the same thing with gas. I mean, he's saying gas prices are up. He's saying inflation is up. He's saying unemployment is up. None of those things is true. And here we are.

KEVIN COPE: Does anyone else want to add to that? Hopefully, something more hopeful.

AMANDA FROST: Yes, yes. Absolutely. More hopeful. But could you pull up a slide?

KEVIN COPE: Yeah.

AMANDA FROST: So I was going to say, I mean, I think if we were approaching this issue, hopefully, as thoughtful voters and not just as tribal partisans, we would recognize, one, that the border truly did get out of control under the Biden Administration. That was not entirely that administration's fault. It was a response to COVID and some world events.

But I also think that administration had some very problematic approaches to immigration to begin with that led to that. So I think that's fair. And that led to slides like this. And there are many worse ones. I decided not to show them, of people scaling walls and this invasion rhetoric looking like it was true. And this would be on replay on Fox News. So Harris needs to avoid this.

But on the more hopeful side, this is another important image. This was during the Trump Administration. He put in place family separation that took away children from parents. And the public outcry was enormous. And Americans took to the streets and everyone condemned it. And they ended it.

And that, to me, says, you can-- it takes a two-year-old crying, but sometimes you can cut through some of the tribal partisan rhetoric and get people to respond. And I just learned from Tanishka that this child you see crying there is today in Charlottesville and on a pathway to legal status. So that's a lovely end. I often show this slide, and I did not know that.

KEVIN COPE: All right, thanks so much. And please join me in thanking the panelists.

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