[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC STING] - Hi, everyone.

Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with a very important conversation about immigration with Amy Torres, Executive Director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

Amy, good to have you with us.

- Thank you so much, Steve, for having me.

- Put things in perspective.

We're taping at the end of June 2023.

What is Title 42 and where is it today?

- Sure, Steve.

So it's certainly not lost on me that today's conversation is happening on World Refugee Day.

We are in June, which is Immigrant Heritage Month.

And I think it's really important to understand that colloquially, we sort of use words like refugee and asylum seeker to describe people who are fleeing for their own safety, right?

Trying to protect themselves, trying to protect their loved ones.

But, it's really to important to understand that in US immigration policy, these words, refugee, asylee, they're actually very restrictive, coded definitions that change over time.

And we saw that with Title 42, right?

There was a real restriction on the internationally-recognized right to asylum.

There were barriers put in place that made it very difficult to file for asylum.

And we saw it again when Title 42 ended and the Biden Administration proposed their own new restrictions that, in many ways, went further than Title 42 to make it even more difficult to file for asylum, to come to the US, and stay here and seek safety.

I think we've heard a lot over the last few months about a border crisis or a migration crisis, but really what we're facing in the United States is a policy crisis.

We have a deeply broken immigration system that means that it's more difficult than ever to try to come to the United States and even more difficult once you're here to be able to legally stay here.

- But Amy, can't we have both a crisis at the border and a terrible situation in terms of immigration reform, which has not happened, regardless of all the rhetoric around it?

Can't we have both?

Aren't there both situations?

- I think it's one and the same.

It is a crisis of border policy.

Look, I'm a Rutgers student.

My first internship was on Ellis Island in the Immigration History Museum, and it may surprise many folks to hear that US policy right now for immigration is more restrictive than it's ever been.

When folks say things, like, "My family came here the right way," or even, "I came here the right way," over the last 15 to 20 years, we have a radically different change in how we define migration.

So whereas in that golden era, you really only needed to buy your ticket on a ship, right, or a boat.

That's all you needed.

You didn't need an employer to sponsor you.

You didn't need existing family members to sponsor you.

There weren't caps on families for how many people they could sponsor.

Those are all the reality of our immigration system today.

And if you were to fail your interview or if there were to be any issues in your application process, you can now, under the new Biden policies, be banned from applying again for the next five years.

And look, it's every single facet of our immigration system from entry at the border, all the way to applying for naturalization.

In New Jersey alone, at the end of 2022, there were over 41,000 backlogged naturalization cases.

41,000.

That's nearly the same size as this year's graduating class at Rutgers.

So we're really looking at a whole system failure to address these issues.

And we see it manifest, yes, at the border, but we also see it manifest when people fall out of status because they're applying for things that don't get processed in time because, again, from top-down, the system is broken.

- Amy, what do you think the implications are when someone who is an illegal immigrant, someone here who is not here through the legal process, is involved in a crime and there is appropriately so significant media attention?

Now, some media organizations have a propensity to cover those cases however they choose to cover them.

Someone might argue disproportionately.

That being said, to what degree do you believe that contributes to and what else contributes to what is clearly an anti-immigrant sentiment in this country?

- Yeah, I think let's start there, Steve, because I think the anti-immigrant statement is holding hostage this larger conversation about what it means to seek justice, seek belonging, to include people in the United States.

I think it all gets so wrapped up in this conversation that is, in many ways, engaging in the root of that discriminatory conversation is a losing battle in itself.

We should recognize, and it is the case, that we have a criminal legal system that deals with criminal cases and we have an immigration system that deals with immigration cases.

But what actually happens is the immigration system feeds off of holes and gaps that exist in our criminal legal system so that people can be denied due process.

Let's say I go out to party with friends on a Friday night and someone tries to start a fight with me in a bar and accuses me of assault.

If I am not a US citizen, ICE could look at me and say, "Look..." - Tell everyone who and what ICE is, please, Amy.

- Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

So ICE could say, "Look, you've been charged," regardless of whether you have an attorney, regardless of if the charges are dropped, regardless of anything that happens, even if you're found not guilty, right?

Or if you're convicted and served your sentence, you can be deported or you can be detained.

So essentially, what they're doing is undermining our existing criminal legal system by trying to rip folks away from the due process laws that we have in hand.

But I think what is actually another part of this conversation, Steve, is people talk a lot about trafficking, they talk about concerns with smuggling.

Those are very real and valid concerns.

But if you care about trafficking, stopping trafficking, stopping smuggling, you should care that restrictive immigration policy actually increases the opportunities for those folks who are trafficking folks in, exploiting people, smuggling.

In some languages, they're called coyotes; in some others, they're called snakeheads.

It increases the opportunities for those folks to take advantage of people who are legitimately seeking safety and have fewer, and fewer, and fewer opportunities in the US to do so.

- Real quick on this.

There are governors in places, Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis in Texas and Florida and others who have proactively, assertively put immigrants, those who are coming in on buses and ship them to places around the country.

Talk about it.

- You said it yourself, Steve.

These are governors who are chartering their own private planes, their own buses, they're purchasing their own tickets.

It's governors, heads of individual states, many of whom have 2024 political ambitions.

It's governors that are making this decision.

It is not the federal government, right?

If we were to truly be seeing this like border crisis or these words that they're using, like overrun, overwhelmed, right?

We would see the federal government step in, but it's not.

It's individual governors who are exploiting people at the most vulnerable point in their lifetime for political gain.

They are taking people, often selling them false promises, and then it's not that they're sending them to any old place.

They choose places that they think will score them political points: sanctuary cities, places like outside the Vice President's home, Martha's Vineyard.

There's all of these places that they think are gotcha destinations to prove their own points that are also often deeply rooted in racism about what they think is happening with immigration.

The truth is, since Title 42's end, there has not been a meaningful increase in folks that are applying for asylum at the border.

And so, we're seeing these people who are, again, at very vulnerable moments in their lives being exploited for political gain.

- Amy, let's continue the conversation in a future segment.

It's complex, it's important, and it's not going away.

Amy Torres, Executive Director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

Thank you, Amy.

- Thank you so much, Steve.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

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