Caitlin Dickerson: Focusing on migrant numbers alone is misleading

Joining me now is Caitlin Dickerson, a staff writer for the Atlantic covering immigration and immigration policy. She was on the show last week, and since then she has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her investigation into the Trump administration's family separation policy. Caitlin, congratulations on that and your important reporting. You and I have been talking for years about this, and I'm glad that you have the recognition that you deserve on this. In a series of tweets this week, you criticized what you describe as doomsday coverage about this. The idea that there's going to be this influx, and sort of it speaks to the way Donald Trump used to talk about this invasion from the South. As Julia said, it has not materialized into what a lot of coverage anticipated that it would materialize into, but tell me a bit about how we should be covering this.

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much, Ali. I really appreciate it. It's always great to be with you. And what I was writing about in those tweets was in no way meant to minimize the amount of resources that the border patrol requires to process people in large, large numbers coming into the country, nor is it meant to minimize the strain that cities feel when they immediately arrive in those first days and weeks afterward. But my concern is that, having covered immigration for years now, probably once a year, maybe once every other year, there's some sort of surge or expected surge that creates a panic. The news cycle that's been in my mind a lot this week is the caravans of 2019.

You remember how much focus and sort of fear there was about large numbers of people in caravans coming to the United States. And what was the ultimate impact of that when people arrived? And I don't think that most Americans felt a difference in their quality of life. And in fact, far fewer people than were initially anticipated arrived in the country. I think that the real focus on these scary eye-popping numbers that grow each year, I often point out the last administration to break records with border crossing was the Trump administration. So we're looking at not a surge that's come out of nowhere, but an upward trend. And I think that focusing on those eye-popping numbers without doing the deeper reporting, some of the things that you and I have talked about, why are people coming here? Because there are so many available jobs, in part, because American employers are desperate to employ them. But when you just show these numbers, I think it really fans the flames of fear.

And in some ways, that's understandable. There are so many Americans who are struggling right now, struggling to provide for their own families, and they see these scary numbers, and they don't really know what it means for their quality of life, and they sort of assume the worst. And I think we're at this intractable place with immigration and immigration policy and an overhaul that's desperately needed. And so I think it really behooves all of us as journalists to cover this story with nuance and not play into, I think, hysteria that really inflames people on both sides of the debate. So in a lot of cases, there are mayors and county officials and governors who are asking for emergency help from the federal government. And in some cases, it's because they want the resources to deal with the migrants. But you have an example.

This city, New York City, like the country, very low unemployment rate. The country has a 3.5% unemployment rate, and we don't give birth to enough people to replace our workers. So we desperately need immigration. A lot of these migrants show up in New York City, get work within a few days. That's right. Sources that I've spoken to at the migrant shelters in New York City say that within days of arrival, everybody who's staying in the United States, they're not going to be able to get a job.

And so I think that the migrant shelters have a job. They're heading to construction sites every day. They're cleaning houses, cleaning offices. They're cutting lawns. And so I think it really calls into question the fear and the scariness that is implied by these big numbers alone when they're kind of covered in a vacuum. And it also undercuts, in a way, the argument that these are people trying to exploit the American system, take advantage of us when clearly Americans are benefiting from the services that they're providing. And again, Ali, I just feel like I have to underscore, in no way do I want to underestimate or minimize the amount of resources and the strain on a city like New York City.

But at the same time, we've been dealing with homelessness, and we've struggled to help New Yorkers living in poverty for a very long time. And I think that Eric Adams, our mayor, and his focus on migration really lessens the pressure that he faces to address those issues that existed far before anything changed along the border. And so it's just, it's up to us as journalists to be a little more sophisticated in the way that we cover it and make sure that we're not playing into the sort of fear-mongering over pre-existing issues. One of the pre-existing issues, by the way, is that this has not been a matter that's been dealt with in a comprehensive way. I don't know. You tell me the number. 20 years, 30 years.

We have had, both parties deserve blame for this. There is a sophisticated issue around the immigration that we need in this country, and a separate but related issue relating to the security of the southern border. How do you delineate or combine the two? There's border security and there's immigration. For some Americans, they're exactly the same thing, but they're not. They're nuanced and they're different. That's right. So the last major overhaul of our immigration laws was in 1986.

I even admit this was before I was born. There was a tweak in the 90s, but since then it's been static. Of course, since then, the reasons that have been pushing people to the United States have changed dramatically. Our labor market has changed dramatically. Just about everything has. The laws haven't caught up. Part of the reason that they're stuck, as you pointed out, is this linking of these two topics, immigration and legal immigration.

That means giving people access to visas, either because they have relatives living in the United States or they have a job opportunity. And then on the other side, we have border security. So trying to minimize organized crime, crossing the border, trying to minimize drugs and human trafficking, crossing the border. The two things get mired together and it creates stagnation because Republicans won't accept new. This is a very brief summary, obviously, but the Republicans won't accept new opportunities, new legal pathways for people to come into the country without harder restrictions, Democrats, the inverse is their position. And so you end up getting stuck. There's a congressman, Tony Gonzalez, a Republican out of Texas, who has made some really interesting comments on this.

And what struck me is that some of his comments seem more to the left than the Democratic Party, even the progressives in the Democratic Party. He said, these are two separate conversations. He's a military veteran. He's very concerned about organized crime and drug cartels. But he says it really doesn't have anything to do with someone seeking asylum. And the fact that we haven't updated our immigration laws is why you're seeing the Biden administration place these additional band-aids on access to asylum, which is a really big deal. It's taking us back in time, not restoring the asylum system that existed before the pandemic.

And as its critics have said, is violating perhaps domestic and international law. I also think that more band-aids, more restrictions on asylum could likely lead to an increase in illegal crossings, because we've seen again and again these band-aids just do not work. Yeah. Caitlin, you have been our go-to for years on this topic. And like I said, I'm glad, again, that it's been recognized with your win of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Please keep on doing this, because this issue is not going away. We haven't fixed it, as you said, since 1986.

Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Ali Velshi