- Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with an important conversation about immigration and related matters with our good friend Amy Torres, Executive Director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

Amy, great to see you again.

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

- Website's up.

Tell everyone what the organization is all about.

- So, New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice is the state's largest immigration coalition.

We bring together over 55 different organizations from every corner of the state to fight for policies that empower and protect New Jersey's immigrants.

- Okay, here we go.

I read a whole, I'm one of the few people who still reads different newspapers every day.

Yes, I go online, I read as well.

One of the newspapers is the New York Post, virtually every day.

Okay, let's start with it.

Crime, New York City, the Migrant Crisis, another assault, a murder, it's out of control, Mayor Adams in New York, and Mayor Adams is, if you will, a proxy for every other urban mayor across the country even though they don't all see it the same way.

It's a crisis at the border.

Crime, hyperbole?

- Absolutely, you know, I think what we're seeing and what we've seen in cities like New York and all across the country are a few different things.

One is asylum and immigration policy is absolutely a federal issue, and we must squarely place blame with the Biden administration for not doing enough to solve long-term problems.

But what we're also seeing in cities is this manifestation of things that we know have been an issue for a long time.

A chronic lack of housing and transitional shelter, deep cuts to human and community services and higher thresholds for screening people for eligibility for basic services that allow them to integrate into society.

So are an influx of newcomers putting strains on city resources?

Maybe, but also we know that those resources have been chronically underfunded over time, and we're just seeing a new scapegoat that's easy to sort of beat up, right, because they're the newest to arrive and those with the least political voice.

- Along those lines, we're taping this program on the 16th of June, the graphic, excuse me, July, I apologize.

The graphic will come up.

It's a few days after the assassination attempt against President Trump.

Policy issues still matter.

President Trump, former President Trump may be in a position to become president again.

We don't know.

He has made it clear that his immigration policy will be dramatically different from what it is right now in the federal government.

Close the border, shut it off, turn off the spigot.

No more immigration until we figure out, I'm not sure what.

You say?

- So Steve, the border is effectively closed right now.

The executive order that the Biden administration put in place in June said that once crossings reach a certain threshold, the border is effectively closed.

So we do see right now, the very same policies that we were hearing in 2018, in 2019, proposals from the Trump administration are actually being implemented by the Biden administration right now.

The future proposals that former President Trump has been talking about on the campaign trail are really scary, right?

There's some really awful things that are being proposed, being proposed by right wing think tanks.

But the reality is is that right now detention numbers are higher than they've ever been.

Deportations and expulsions are continuing to grow, and the border is effectively closed.

And that has real repercussions for when we talk about all of the things that immigration hawks claim to care about, right?

They claim to care about trafficking and gang violence.

They claim to care about, you know, labor issues and having people smuggled in and out, right?

Shutting down the border only incentivizes those bad actors to prey upon the vulnerable families that are just trying to seek safety and refuge.

- But Amy, there are millions and millions of Americans, many folks in New Jersey who argue, and many of them come from immigrant families.

My family came from Italy back in the, actually my grandfather came here in 1919 from a small little province in Italy, Southern Italy, poor, had nothing, and that's why they came here.

But there are many of those same, the descendants of those immigrants and others who argue that was a different kind of immigration.

This is totally different.

This is outta control.

The crime is outta control.

Now you said it's hyperbole, it's, okay.

But the perception right now, Amy, and you know it better than I do 'cause you work in the field every day is that it's out of control, and we need to do something drastic.

Talk to those folks, please.

- Yes, so Steve, I love that you shared the year that your family came here, 1919.

Let's take a look, and.

- My grandfather, Luigi Cavello from Avellino in Italy, please.

- Yeah.

I mean, you know, when we're talking about that golden era of immigration that a lot of us in the popular consciousness imagine, you're absolutely correct.

It was a totally different type of immigration, not because of the reasons that people were fleeing, the same things, right?

Famine, political violence, you know, discrimination at home, war, all of these pressures that force people to leave, right?

Those things largely remain the same.

What is very different is our domestic immigration system.

You did not need to demonstrate high skilled eligibility just to be able to come to the United States.

You did not need to have a family member already here.

You did not need to demonstrate credible fear.

You did not need to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars just to start the application and screening process.

I fully agree that we should return to an era that people remember from the past, right?

That, well, my family came here the right way.

You know, even though they didn't speak English, they integrated and found a job right away.

When we're talking about the headlines that we're seeing coming out of major cities, those asylum seekers are forbidden from working.

They are not authorized to work.

That's very different than how things were.

- Hold on, Amy, are you arguing there are not the quote unquote open borders that many people, because you just described all the things you have to have in place to get here.

And then we're seeing video of people, children, often unaccompanied by parents who's coming across a body of water, who's climbing through whatever.

Open borders, not true?

- That's actually the situation that was the case in 1919, is that you only needed to pass a health screening.

You did not need to do anything except for pay for your passage, a ticket on a boat.

- And now you believe it's much harder.

- It's absolutely much more restrictive and much, much harder to be able to come to the United States legally.

And the reason that we're seeing a rise in unaccompanied minors is that a lot of these restrictions still don't apply to children.

And we see families making an impossible choice in these border communities in Mexico and other parts of Central America, making the impossible choice that at least my child will be able to go the right way.

Let me send them so they can try to have a chance, and I'll try to go another way, either by waiting or going through some other irregular means.

When we talk about concerns for children, and we talk about concerns about trafficking and crime, it's a result of the policies that we have today.

We are forcing people to make impossible choices about their safety, about criminality, about who they trust, who they pay, who preys upon them because of the restrictive policies that we have in place.

In 1919, the only barriers that we had at the southern border were to prevent cattle from crossing from one ranch to another.

And even at Ellis Island, once you passed a health screening, there was no other documentation needed.

And you often hear people repeat that, this too in their own oral histories about their families.

Oh, someone changed my name.

- That's exactly right.

- If you needed documentation, right, there's no reason that that should happen.

We're living in a very, very different era than even my parents' generation and my grandparents' generation.

Immigration has radically changed, and in many ways not for the better.

- Amy, let's make a commitment to each other.

We'll continue this very complex and important conversation.

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

We in agreement on this, ongoing conversation, Amy?

- Absolutely, and it has not gone away presidential cycle after presidential cycle.

Until we have comprehensive immigration reform, we can continue revisiting this conversation, Steve.

- See how Amy got the last word?

We'll continue the conversation.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

Funding has been provided by The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

Rowan University.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Wells Fargo.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Johnson & Johnson.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Newark Board of Education.

And by New Jersey Children’s Foundation.

Promotional support provided by BestofNJ.com.

And by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

- I'm Tim Sullivan, CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Since joining the NJEDA, I've been struck by the incredible assets and resources that New Jersey has to offer.

The NJEDA is working every day to grow New Jersey's economy in a way that maximizes the values of those assets to benefit every single New Jersey resident.

This includes more support for small businesses and a focus on reclaiming New Jersey's position as a leader in the innovation economy.

Visit njeda.com to learn more about how NJEDA is building a stronger and fairer New Jersey economy.