Comprehensive border and immigration reform has eluded policymakers in the U.S. for decades. As global turmoil and conflict grows, questions and concerns still remain about the economic, security, and humanitarian justification and rationale for immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees seeking entry into the U.S. Vitriolic rhetoric, which has largely impeded meaningful progress, has only intensified in the months leading up to one of the most consequential elections in history. In the midst of all of this, somewhat of a miracle has materialized: bipartisan collaboration. Our guest this week served as the chief negotiator of a border bill that was negotiated between Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy is the junior U.S. Senator for Connecticut and is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. He joins WITHpod to discuss what has historically hindered a significant revamp of American immigration policy, how he was able to help broker conservative partnership, his concerns about “unaccountable elites, the fall of American neoliberalism and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Chris Murphy: I think our inability to sort of talk thoughtfully about border security, I think has provided an opening for Republicans, an opening that we don’t need to give them. So that I think is what’s happened over the course of the last six months, is that we’ve begun to take seriously the rules. And that combined with our belief that immigrants are an important part of our country, all of a sudden makes a lot more people take us seriously on the broader issue of immigration and border security.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
One of the only things Republicans like to talk about policy-wise is the border and immigration. It’s striking. Once you get out past that, there’s this enormous drop-off in any kind of substantive contentions they’re making or issues they’re pointing to. It’s like their safety blanket policy-wise. And I will say this. Unlike a lot of the other stuff, which is complete nonsense or really fabricated, it at least is recognizably politics. They’re basically saying, here’s an issue, a problem and we have a solution for it, which is at least recognizably politics as opposed to like everything they’re doing, Trump is doing on like political economy or like tariffs is just like invented nonsense basically. Like it’s not even legible as recognizably politics. And it’s also the case that like Republicans and Donald Trump have had a huge advantage on the issue of immigration.
That advantage, I think, has closed a bit. Democrats have been sort of on the defensive about it. And a huge part of the debate now, and again, this is like the one place where there is like a recognizably legible debate on policy, has to do with this border bill that was negotiated between Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans painstakingly. It took months behind the scenes negotiations, which they then came forward with. It was endorsed by President Biden. He said, pass it and I will sign it into law. And immediately Donald Trump came out to say, do not pass it. We do not want to give basically Joe Biden a victory, Democrats a victory. We want the border to remain as visible a problem as possible because obviously that will help us politically. He said that. He said, blame it on me.
Now in the DNC, you saw people and you’ve seen Kamala Harris say this in one of her first two ads, have talked a lot about the border bill. And there’s a bunch of stuff in that bill and often we kind of refer to it without digging into it. I’ve been doing that on the show a fair amount partly because immigration policy is very complicated. It’s one thing I’ve learned in covering it. Honestly, I’ve been covering it for 20 years. I started writing about McCain-Kennedy.
So today I wanted to sit down with the chief negotiator of that bill, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who I actually want to talk to about a bunch of things, who I think is one of the most interesting, thoughtful, fertile-minded politicians in America. I really like talking to the Senator on my show. I think he really thinks deeply about issues. And him being the point person on this really was striking to me. And we’ve talked about it a bit on air. We haven’t really been able to delve into the details. And so Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, it’s great to have you on the program.
Chris Murphy: Yeah. Awesome to do this with you.
Chris Hayes: Let’s start with just talk me through the actual like coming about of this bill negotiation. Who initiated? How did you end up in the negotiations?
Chris Murphy: So two things are happening at the end of 2023. First is we’re trying to find a way to unstick the Ukraine aid bill and Republicans are telling us that the only way we will stick it is to put a border bill on top of it. And that was a message they delivered very clearly. Second thing that’s happening is that the numbers at the border are getting really high. So as you get into the fall and winter of last year, we were starting to see six, seven, eight thousand people show up every single day. The cities are getting overwhelmed. The housing shelters are at capacity. This is becoming a real logistical problem for the country.
So what happened was, for those two reasons, it became pretty clear that we needed to at least entertain the idea of making some changes in law that brought some order to the Southwest border, both because it could get the Ukraine bill done and also because we needed to change the laws. And the group that started working on it took a little while to form, but it became a really small group. It was James Lankford who just kind of has the most knowledge about the border. He’s not just doing the talking points. He’s actually taken a lot of time to study it, but he’s a really conservative Republican who’s trusted on policy and he’s pretty hardline.
Kyrsten Sinema is always in these rooms, right? She’s just a good bridge between Republicans and Democrats, and she’s really good at organizing these big, complicated negotiations. And then why am I there, right? Because I’ve never really worked on the issue of border policy before. I’m not an expert on immigration, but it seemed like the only way you were going to deliver this compromise was to have a progressive Democrat in that room. I just happened to believe that as a political matter, Democrats needed to recenter the way in which we talked about immigration, but I also had worked with Kyrsten on the gun bill.
We knew we could get these big deals done. And so the three of us started out in the fall of last year on a journey that, as you mentioned, took way too long, four, five, six months to produce that bill. It became a very big bill, much bigger than I think we anticipated at the beginning. And I’m actually pretty proud of it and I’m glad that Kamala Harris is still talking about it.
Chris Hayes: One of the ironies I’ll just note is having followed this was the Ukraine aid. Originally the idea was, well, we all support Ukraine aid. There’s bipartisan support for Ukraine aid. So there doesn’t have to be an incentive for Republicans to vote for it. The incentive is that they substantively believe that we should support Ukraine in its battle against Russia. And then they all made this kind of blanket across the caucus demand, including Mitt Romney, then Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell saying, you have to give us something on the border. And then the irony is in the end, after all the negotiations, after being like, okay, and then coming up with this bill that was endorsed by the Border Patrol Union, which if you know their politics tends to be pretty hard line. Donald Trump killed it. And then the Ukraine aid just passed without anything, which was the full 360 of that journey.
Chris Murphy: Yeah. And what were you left with? You were left with a fundamental reordering of the politics on immigration that hurts Republicans. As you mentioned, the gap between voters’ opinions of the two parties on the issue of immigration has been cut in half. And so, yeah, it’s a real interesting turn of events. The Ukraine aid happens and Republicans’ political positioning on the issue of immigration is dramatically weakened. I’m not telling you that I saw any or all of that going into it, but that’s the byproduct.
Chris Hayes: No, I mean, you thought this bill was going to get passed, right? I mean, were you surprised when Trump came out to be like, kill it, and then they all literally took 48 hours and then they all just said, okay. Was that surprising? It was surprising to me. Was it surprising to you?
Chris Murphy: Well, I mean, let me sort of chart this for you. So for most of the negotiations, I did not think we were going to get a bill. I did not think we were going to pass it. I mean, there were a lot of moments, and of course, I’ve come to really appreciate and respect James Lankford, but James Lankford sort of had a history at that point of always being interested in talking to Democrats but never really being able to deliver a big tough compromise. So there were many moments where I thought, well, this is all intentional. Republicans picked the issue of immigration as the hill to die on because they knew we couldn’t get an agreement and then they could blame it on —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: — they could blame the failure of the immigration talks as the reason why they cowed to Donald Trump on the issue of Ukraine. But Lankford kind of outsmarted them. He’s so earnest and he was so determined to get a result that he just stuck with it and stuck with it. And I was naive enough to stick with it and stick with it to the point where by the time we had gotten the bill done and had done the hard work of we thought building about 20 Republican senators who are going to support it, yes, I did believe that Saturday, Sunday when we unveiled the bill that we were going to actually pass it because McConnell was in the room for all of it. His people negotiated the bill. And as we were ready to release it on Sunday night, we really thought we had probably 40 Democrats and about 20 to 25 Republicans. We thought we had enough to pass it.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about the substance here and I want to sort of set. There’s two issues I think to sort of think about. And one I think is useful for liberals to hear because I think that there’s so much propaganda and demagoguery about the border that it can become very easy to tune it out because it’s so gross, honestly. Like the way that it’s covered on Fox is like, even the drone shot, it’s like, these aren’t human beings. These are basically insects and animals. Like the way that it’s shot is to portray to people a sense of like zombies or foreign invasion, right?
But on the merits, like I was pretty blown away to look at the numbers that were happening at the Southern border when it was at its highest in end of 2023, we’re basically rivaling Ellis Island at peak. Now, I think we all think Ellis Island is great and, you know, many of our, like, including me, our families literally came through there. So like, I’m not like, oh, well, they should have shut down in Ellis Island. But the thing about Ellis Island is, it did at least exist for that purpose with a process to do it —
Chris Murphy: Right.
Chris Hayes: — whereas that’s not the case at the Southern border. So you have this kind of crazy situation where you have Ellis Island numbers along a border that isn’t like, designed in any way to do the thing that Ellis Island was actually engineered to do, which to me is sort of a useful way of thinking about the problem that isn’t like, oh, these terrible disease-ridden foreigners are coming here.
Chris Murphy: Yeah. And we’re also have a much more mature system of immigration laws in which we have made as a nation, some very concrete decisions about how many people are going to be allowed to come into the country. We have achieved some level of political consensus around that question. And that to me is an important consensus. It is what allows us to hold together this experiment and agreement around how you become part of this club. And when that agreement becomes shattered, and that’s really what was happening at the end of last year, you were having 10 times the number of people showing up on any given day than we were equipped to handle.
It does cause a lot of people in this country, not just hardened MAGA conservatives, but a lot of middle of the road folks to kind of, you know, question whether there’s, you know, any rules at all. And that I think compromises people’s sort of belief in the sanctity of the collective when there’s no clear understanding of how you become a member of it. So this was a legitimate issue at late 2023, and it was happening for a host of understandable reasons, but it deserved for Congress to address it.
Chris Hayes: So I think maybe it’s useful to talk in three lanes about the sort of policy here. One is the nature of asylum, because these are people, you know, in 1994, for instance, right? If you’re coming across a border, you’re not presenting to a border patrol person, you’re trying to avoid border patrol. You’re trying to sneak into the country and then find a place you can get a job, right, and off the books. So there’s something different happening here. So there’s the asylum issue. There’s the sort of legal nature of asylum. Then there’s the sort of processing logistics of stuff. And then there’s the legal pathways. Like if you want to come to the country legally, which people do, how do you do it? So let’s just start on asylum. Like what is your understanding, again, on the merits, as opposed to the politics of what is and isn’t working about the asylum law we have?
Chris Murphy: So if you are in an emergency circumstance, if you are fleeing violence or terror or torture, historically, there are two ways to get to the United States. One is the refugee system, right? And that is a system where you’re processed outside of the United States. You often have to wait in a line. There’s a certain number of refugees, around 100,000 that we let in every year. But then we have always allowed this other way, asylum, for people who are in true emergency circumstances, people who cannot go through the refugee system, people whose life are legitimately in jeopardy, so they have to just show up, show up at the border, and we will process you through this sort of emergency system, the asylum system, and give you a chance to stay.
The problem is, is that there’s way more people that need to come to this country for legitimate reasons than we can handle through the refugee system, and the traffickers figured out that if they just rushed the border with way more people than we could handle, then the people coming to apply for asylum would be led into the country and essentially stay here for 5 to 10 years before anybody looked at the validity of their claim. And they’d get that benefit of 5 to 10 years in the country, even if they didn’t have a valid claim of asylum. And it turns out less than half of the people who show up and claim asylum actually qualify for it. And so that legitimately looked to Americans to be really unfair that folks you know, we’re waiting in line and then there’s a group who weren’t coming to the border, getting into the country and getting 5 to 10 years here without having to prove the legitimacy of their claim.
So that’s a really important problem that needs to be fixed. And you either fix that by pushing more folks onto the refugee system, broadening up that pathway or making changes to the asylum system so that you don’t give people that 5 to 10 years, that you adjudicate those claims much more quickly.
Chris Hayes: And that 5 to 10 years, because I know people that have court dates. And again, I just want to say here, like, I’m a real bleeding heart on this issue, like fully, like just where I come from and there are people that I love were trying to come legally to this country who I think would be a credit to the country and, you know, I’m rooting for them in some cases, like trying to help them and, you know, through obviously legal means and such things like that. That 5 to 10 years is a product of, again, I think going back to this Ellis Island idea, it’s a product of the fact that like the of the system to process people, adjudicate their claims, and decide whether those claims are legitimate under American law, right, which is partly in former international law, that capacity is just way smaller than the number of people. And so there’s a line, and the line takes a really long time. What is that capacity choke point? Like, I think that’s part of the bill, right? I mean, part of the things that you were guys trying to address, and the parts that seem to me like the most favorable to progressives at least, or things that Democrats were sort of holding up as an important step was increasing that capacity so that you’re actually not just throwing people’s claims out, you’re actually processing them, but you’re processing them in a timely fashion.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, I think I’d identify two choke points here. One is right at the beginning, there’s a screening that happens when you show up at the border. And that screening, which is in the parlance of immigration law called a credible fear screening. Do you have a credible fear that if you went back home, your life would be in jeopardy. That screening was a pretty low bar. And so lots of people were passing that screening who didn’t end up actually qualifying. And so that sort of loaded up the back end of the system with lots of people who actually didn’t have legitimate claims. The second problem is that the back end of the system itself was just really Byzantine and cumbersome. We were dealing with these claims, and still are dealing with these claims, in traditional courts of law. They’re immigration courts, but they, you know, sort of have all the trappings of a normal civil procedure. And then if you lose that claim, you actually have the right to go into the federal district court. That system sort of worked okay when it was hundreds of people showing up on a weekly basis, but that level of sort of bureaucracy and formality just didn’t work when it was 9,000 people coming every day. So those were the two issues that we tried to attack. We tried to raise the bar on the screen.
Chris Hayes: On the credible fear interview, the first thing, the first pass.
Chris Murphy: Right, first thing. So turn more people around immediately based on, you know, just building in some higher bars for proving that your life was going to be in jeopardy. And then second, just making that second process move a lot faster, not taking it out of the court system and putting it with a lawyer, but a hearing officer, somebody who could dispense that with that claim in a handful of days rather than in weeks and months. And listen, that does panic civil liberties advocates, right, because that is less due process.
Chris Hayes: Less process, yup.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, it’s less process, but it does mean that all of that happens faster. And here’s what you’re trying to impact. You’re trying to impact the decision-making of individuals who are going to pay these cartels to bring them to the border. If they really have to think deeply about the merits of their claim, because they know that they’re going to get judged immediately, then they’re going to think twice about paying cartel $5,000 or $10,000 if they don’t think that they have a good claim. But if they don’t worry about that question because they’re going to get into the United States for 10 years no matter what, then they’re going to take their chance and pay for that journey. So you’re trying to alter the calculus of somebody who’s coming to the border, who probably is just an economic migrant, not a political migrant, not somebody fleeing terror or torture, not that the economic migrants, the people who are fleeing economic destitution are any less compelling. It’s just that the law actually doesn’t say that they have a right to come here through the asylum system.
Chris Hayes: And then there’s this big, I mean, there’s this amazing piece Caitlin Dickinson did for “The Atlantic” about sort of, you know, she walks with people as they cross the Darien Gap. And there’s a number of things that are interesting. One of them, when you talk about the traffickers is it’s a business for them. Obviously, it’s incredibly lucrative business. And one of the things they do is like, they do a lot of bait and switching. Like one of the things she talks about is there’s this walk through the jungle that’s incredibly treacherous where the traffickers are like taking videos of people on the first day when like people are like filled with energy and hope and they’ve just gone in and then they’re posting this on social media. Like it’s a walk in the jungle, and then like four days later, people are wrecked. They have illnesses. I mean, it’s just total desperation. And it’s an advertising situation. It’s a genuinely a marketing situation and like a really shady bait and switch one where you’re saying to people, here’s what the experience is going to be like. It’s not that hard, and then it’s really brutal.
Chris Murphy: Well, and then listen, on top of that, I mean, you have, you know, really awful violations, right? You have a ton of violence and rape and sexual abuse that happens to women along this journey. And then the price is never the price. So you are given a price upfront. And then in many cases, either before you cross the border, and sometimes even after you cross the border, you are then detained by the cartels and given a second price, right, that you will be allowed to cross or you will be allowed to be led into the country if you pay double what the initial price was. It’s an unbelievably inhumane way to come to the United States. For some people, it is their only recourse, but you really want to build an immigration system in which as few people as possible are forced to go that route, which is why, and we’ll talk about this at some point, the bill also expanded those legal pathways by the biggest numbers in a generation.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, we’re definitely going to talk about that because I think that’s really in some ways where like the whole ball game is in certain ways. But just to stay on this, I mean, one of the things that’s really difficult about this, and again, like I’ve covered this a long time and I’ve gone around and around, you know. These are, by and large, I mean, I’m not going to generalize, it’s hundreds of thousands of people. Some of them might be awful people and violent. A lot of them are incredible folks that would be a credit to the country if they were here, right? The question of how much you can change the decision-making at the margin, right? This question of deterrence.
And when you’re sort of face to face with what people are willing to do, I mean, it’s so shocking. And in some ways inspiring, right? I mean, like we’ve all got stories of the people that got up, that made me an American, who did crazy stuff. My great grandmother was on a ship that cracked in half and they got rescued. You know, everybody passes these stories down of this like incredible will and like a lot of these folks have that. And the question of is there a level of deterrence and hardship that can turn them back around when what they’re fleeing even if it isn’t a textbook credible asylum claim, but is just something miserable enough that they’re making this decision that is the most difficult decision a person can make.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, and listen. I think about this all the time, especially since I’ve spent the last year living this policy. I’d like to think that I’m the kind of parent who would choose —
Chris Hayes: Exactly
Chris Murphy: — to go through that horror in order to save the lives of my children, or at least give them a shot to lead the kind of life that I wasn’t able to live in a place like San Pedro, Sula, Guatemala. And I don’t know that I would be. It takes a level of courage and care and concern for your children to do that. That is, I think, foreign to a lot of us. So like start there. I think the answer to your question is that we have sort of found out the answer. So right now the numbers of people presenting at the border are low comparably, right? Thousand people, 2,000 people a day compared to 9,000 last year. And that is largely because the Biden administration, whether or not they have the legal ability to do this, decided to implement the changes in asylum that we wrote as part of that law and to turn a lot of people around, regardless of the legitimacy of their claim, because they significantly raised the screening bar. So the word has sort of gotten out that it is much harder to get into the United States today. It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder. You have a much larger chance of being turned around and it has caused a lot of people to decide not to pay the cartel. So the deterrent, I think we’ve proven that the deterrent does have some impact.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I’ll just play devil’s advocate for one second here because I know that, you know, I’ve talked to immigrant advocates. I mean, one of the things they’ll say is there’s push and pull and you’ll see these numbers sort of go up and down. And we will try to press a button and the button will seem to work, you know? And this, again, this has been a confounding issue for not just us, but, you know, all of Europe, like all of these places that are dealing with similar questions, starting in 2014 with the Obama administration. Like, people have pressed a bunch of buttons that seem to work for a bit and then reset, you know, and partly because that thing that you talked about, the fire inside a parent who’s like, this situation is not good for my kid and I need to get him out is so powerful that in the aggregate and in the long run, the equilibrium is people want to come.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, I mean, one of my colleagues got up in the middle of the debate in our caucus on this issue and said, listen, we’re not going to solve this problem until America sucks. And we don’t suck yet.
Chris Hayes: That’s exactly right. That’s 100% the correct way to say that.
Chris Murphy: Right, like, I mean, we’re still the place where —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chris Murphy: — everybody wants to come because we are a great nation and for all the, you know, flagellating of ourselves we do, it is still a place that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: — everybody in the world wants to be, especially if you’re in a hard circumstance and want to get to a safe place. And so it is also true that we don’t really know what’s going on at the border right now. So yes, it is true that the numbers are not 9,000. The numbers are 1,500 today, but that’s the number of people who present themselves at the border. What happens when the rules change and when the bar is raised and when there’s more people being turned away, is that the cartels just sneak people in, just bring people in around enforcement. So, you know, we don’t actually know whether there’s a substantially lower number today than at the end of last year, because it may be that once the rules changed, a lot of the cartels just move people into the country around law enforcement.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: So the second tranche of this stuff was the sort of money for border enforcement, right? So there was going to be a bunch of more border patrol hired, billions of dollars in the budget towards CBP. Tell me about that part of it. And that’s the part where I think it does feel a little bit like we’ve been on a one-way ratchet for as long as I’ve studied this issue, which is the idea is more border security and then you can get to the place where you can have a comprehensive immigration bill and we get more border security. If you chart how much money we spend on it, it keeps going up and up and up and up. Some people make the argument that what used to be in the sort of pre-militarized border, a lot of back and forth, that was particularly true of Mexico, that’s different than I think folks coming from Central America, got cut off because we made the border so hard to cross. So people used to come for the season, they go back to their families, then they started migrating. What would the border provisions do and how confident are you that those would be effective?
Chris Murphy: Well, first of all, it’s important to know that this bill didn’t have any new funding for border wall construction. And so, when we talk about the billions of dollars in border security, none of that is for new border wall funding. But it is true that under current law, when you cross the border and have an asylum claim, you are actually supposed to be detained while that claim is being processed. Only when the detention capacity is exhausted are you allowed to be let into the country. That’s existing law. So yes, part of what this bill did was to create more detention capabilities so that more people would actually have their claim processed while they were in detention. That’s current law and that is part of the deterrent effect that you are not going to be able to be released while the claim is pending.
Second, a lot of that money goes into the creation of this new asylum processing system whereby the claim is handled in a matter of weeks rather than years. So to do that, we had to hire literally thousands of new asylum hearing officers. So we did that as well. And yes, there are some new border patrol officers here. It is important to know that while we do have a lot of border patrol, there’s still more police officers in the New York City Police Department than there are border patrol officers. So in comparison to some of our other law enforcement outfits, you know, this is not approaching the, you know, the size of the U.S. Army. So we did have some more people hired to patrol the parts of the border that don’t have structure on them.
Chris Hayes: Then the Border Patrol Union endorsed the bill, which was interesting. Did you know that was going to happen?
Chris Murphy: Well, we did because we sought their endorsement —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: — and we consulted with them throughout the process. I mean, this is just politics.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: If you want to try to pass a bill with conservative support on the issue of immigration, you do need to have some conservative verifiers. And by the way, it wasn’t just good enough to have the Chamber of Commerce and “The Wall Street Journal.” They only speak to a declining subset of Republicans these days.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Chris Murphy: So the border patrol, you know, they are tapped into the vein of the MAGA wing of the party and we needed at least a handful of those votes. It didn’t hurt that the bill also improved salary and benefits for those that are patrolling the border, which we should have done regardless, but that helped to win their support.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about the third tranche, because I don’t know how much the border bill dealt with this, but my basic take on this is America remains, when you pull it, a more pro-immigration place than a lot of other Western democracies. It’s because we have a different tradition than Sweden or Belgium or these different places that were born of European nation states and have this sort of sense of what Frenchness is and, you know, independent. That’s changing, obviously. France has become a very cosmopolitan society and they have their own issues on this.
But U.S. openness to immigration seems higher, even at the same time, all of these Western democracies are dealing with both a lot of people that want to come, building multiracial democracies, and some part of the public sentiment that’s like, ah, this is too much. And my general feeling about the U.S. is that people basically want people to come the right way, and they’re pro-immigrant as long as people come the right way. And I think that often people don’t understand how hard it is to come the right way. If you’ve ever had someone in your life, and right now I have three different people in my life who are across the spectrum of like social capital, socioeconomic status from different places in the world, trying very hard to come the right way. It is so hard to come the right way.
Chris Murphy: That’s so right. And depending on where you’re from, it can be, you know, just unconscionably hard. So if you’re coming to this country from Mexico, from India, from Pakistan, you are on a waiting list because we only allow a certain number of people in from certain countries. You’re on a waiting list of 20 to 30 years, shorter from some other nations, but we have, you know, relatively low numbers of people on an annual basis that we allow to come here to reunite with family or to take a job. And that backlog is in part what causes people to come here through other means because they want to be reunited with their mom or, you know, with their spouse and we make it so hard for you to do that through other mechanisms.
And so, you know, that’s one of the important things this bill did, was one of the compromises in the bill was to add a new amount of both employment visas, people coming here to work and family visas, people coming here to reunite with family. It would have represented the biggest expansion of both categories, you know, in 25, 40 years. Certainly not big enough to clear the backlogs, but it would have sort of cemented this idea that Republicans and Democrats both support expanding those visa pathways to come here, which is really the way we want people to come here. Ultimately, Chris, I just think we’re going to have to reconsider whether we have the pathways right. I mean, I think we may —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: — need to think about having a third employment pathway to get to the United States that is maybe not a permanent pathway, but allows you to essentially do what a lot of these asylum seekers are doing. They’re coming here for 5 or 10 years. They’re working here for a period of time. They’re filling a labor need that exists, but they’re not tied to one employer, right? They actually can participate in the labor market.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: And then they go back home after 5 or 10 years. That actually may be a new visa category we need to take a look at to allow people to come here in a different way than you do for temporary work right now, because in that system, you’re tied to one employer.
Chris Hayes: Right, the employer sponsors you, which again, I mean, I’ve known people on these employment visas and it’s like, everyone’s got bosses. Everyone deals with their boss. Now imagine your boss controls whether you stay in the country or your kid keeps going to their school.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, not a great system to expand upon. So allow people to come into the country for a period of time. They just enter the labor market, but their period is not infinite. It’s not a pathway to permanent citizenship. Lots of people would take advantage of that. It would scratch an itch that we have in our economy and maybe release a political pressure valve because we are now filling that labor need either through people in the completely sort of shadow part of our labor economy or through this temporary asylum system that is really not how the system was meant to be used.
Chris Hayes: You know, I had a conversation to one of the people that I know relatively close with who’s an asylum seeker. I’ll sort of anonymize his details, but you know, from Central America, came. The thing that precipitated the departure was a 14-year-old boy who is basically going to reach this point in their neighborhood where you join the gangs or else, basically. Didn’t want that. Left. Came here. Still has a house that, you know, sibling is looking after. And I think ideally would maybe be here for five years while the kids move through the period in which they have that acute threat basically from gang recruitment, but also loves his homeland and loves the city he grew up in and misses his family and misses his home, which was like a much nicer setup like trying to grind it out and maybe wouldn’t go back. I do think that there’s some demand for that. Not everyone, but I don’t think it’s crazy to think that.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, I think we have not, you know, made any significant reforms to our immigration system and the pathways to get to this country since the 1980s and the world has fundamentally changed. And that was part of my hope here was that this was going to be, you know, a signal that Democrats and Republicans could come together to make some, but not all of those structural changes. And one of them to my mind would be, you know, more temporary pathways for people who have either temporary need or, you know, want to make some money, but don’t necessarily need or want to be here permanently.
Chris Hayes: Maybe the final place to go here and then we can sort of segues usefully of, I think part of the hardness of the pill to swallow for, again, bleeding heart liberals like myself is just like, okay, fine. Like if we feel like we can come together on these basic principles of an immigration system that is in the national interest is orderly and humane, right? But retain a vision of this amazing nation bound by a creed, people from all different places, self-aware about the fact that like, I’m only here because some people made this journey, et cetera. There’s a conversation to have. But it’s also the case that like the most prominent elements of their coalition, particularly the nominee for president and his chief advisor on this issue, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance and his convention speech just like flatly have this kind of blood and soil vision of nationalism where like, we don’t like these people. They’re not us. Keep them out. Stephen Miller’s in a podcast talking to Steven Bannon about how there’s too many South Asian CEOs. I mean, it’s like just the grossest way to think about all this. And so there’s some question of like, can you really deal with people like when the thing that’s animating them is something that’s like not just wrong, but actually offensive and, you know, deeply repellent to my conception of what this beautiful nation is.
Chris Murphy: My opinion is that that position, that blood and soil position is unpopular.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: Is that people in this country, many very conservative people do love and appreciate, right, the living in a melting pot. They do have a self-awareness of the fact that we are all here. Most of us are here because of those courageous decisions that our ancestors made and they do not want to abandon that beautiful, wonderful foundational part of America, but they legitimately care about the rules. And they think the rules are being regularly and fundamentally broken in a way that makes them kind of feel bad about the whole system of immigration. And so to me, Democrats need to honor people’s feelings about how the rules are being regularly broken. We need to show an earnestness about enforcing the rules and modifying the rules so that they can be more easily enforced. That broadly is the sort of concept of border security. And that a party that is vocal about border security and about a rules-based system that is also a party that is loudly pro-immigrants.
Chris Hayes: This is key, yes.
Chris Murphy: And believes that this country is stronger because of our past and our future commitment to immigration. That is a 60 to 70 percent party, right? That’s where 60 to 70 percent of the country is. That’s a winning electoral strategy. But I think our inability to sort of talk thoughtfully about border security, I think has provided an opening for Republicans, an opening that we don’t need to give them. So that I think is what’s happened over the course of the last six months is that we’ve begun to take seriously the rules. And that combined with our belief that immigrants are an important part of our country, all of a sudden makes a lot more people take us seriously on the broader issue of immigration and border security.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think it’s part of my frustration. I was trying to do this on the show a fair amount was, it did feel like a certain point, they were so obsessed with the border and there was kind of nothing on the other side such that you get just this sense of like we’re sitting here in America and we’ve got a pizza pie and it’s got eight slices and these people are just coming and just grabbing slices and that means you’re not going to get any. And that is fully the narrative. I mean, people who don’t watch Fox News, I cannot overstate how central it is. It is the thing. I mean, every hour. Like it is constant. And this idea that like, wait a second, it doesn’t quite work that way. Like there’s actually like, there’s lots of pies. And in fact, like the only reason we eat pizza here in the U.S. is that like some immigrants came and brought pizza over. In fact, the whole notion of us having pizza is because we have, you know, Italian Americans. God bless them. So that idea of like, it’s not just the people coming are going to take something from you, but actually it’s great that people want to come here and a lot of them are great people who are going to do great things and like, you know, and I thought the DNC did a good job of that, partly because Kamala Harris is, you know, nominee of the party is quite famously the daughter of immigrants.
Chris Murphy: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And I thought that she did a really good job of that part of the story not being left out in the convention.
Chris Murphy: Yeah. And again, like I said, this is where the broad cross section of Americans agree. They feel good. And it’s part of what makes you uniquely American, right? I mean, this is part of what most people really love about their patriotic identity.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: Is that it is founded in this story of immigration. And it is true, right, that we still live in a society of abundance, and we just choose to deny that abundance to certain people. But there are these moments like the end of last year, where there are actually not the resources available to take care of everybody.
Chris Hayes: Correct. Yes.
Chris Murphy: We did actually get to the point at the end of last year where there were choices being made by city and state governments, you know, as to sort of —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chris Murphy: — who got access to housing and who got access to —
Chris Hayes: Room. I mean, there were just not rooms —
Chris Murphy: To space.
Chris Hayes: Not lawyers. I mean, that’s one thing that I’ve encountered in New York City is you can’t find an immigration lawyer.
Chris Murphy: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, again, there’s just a mismatch between supply and demand. I mean, you’ve got this system now with all these people, they’re running these pro se clinics and stuff. And I’ve, again, working with some folks and trying to help them in their path. And like, there’s not an immigration lawyer. So if there’s not an immigration lawyer, it’s like, there’s a lot of other things that are not available.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, and at a moment like that, when the arguments that the right are making, that there isn’t enough to go around.
Chris Hayes: Yes. That they’re taking your pizza, yes.
Chris Murphy: Is matched by evidence of that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Chris Murphy: — real visual evidence of it, even if it’s temporary evidence.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chris Murphy: That’s a moment where, as a political matter —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: — Democrats have to take that seriously.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: There was a piece about you in “The New York Times” op-ed pages that was really interesting. There’s a reporter, I guess, has been spending some time with you sort of talking about how you view politics. You wrote a really surprisingly excellent book for a U.S. senator that you clearly, I think, wrote yourself about violence, about gun violence, but a really deeper inquiry into like America and violence and that the guns are a huge part of it. But there’s also something deeper. It’s (ph) been a pretty violent place in comparative sense for a long time and in different ways. And this piece talked about the way that you’ve been trying to think about the word that I would use for it is alienation, but people’s sense of not belonging that is independent of, maybe triggered by, but independent of the material wellbeing. It’s not just a question of they’re in bad shape materially, ergo they’re frustrated, which I think is the, the kind of left story we tell about this alienation, but actually something a little bigger than that about how people do or don’t feel connected to their institutions and society. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about that.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, well, those two exercises are connected. So I’ve spent the last 10 years in and around the gun violence epidemic. I wrote this book trying to talk about America’s unique experience with violence. And I did come to the conclusion that it’s much deeper than just the story of the gun. But in that work, you spend a lot of time thinking about the young men who end up pulling these triggers, not just the mass shooters, but the young men who feel such a sense of hopelessness in our cities that their sense of self and power gets rooted in their ability to exercise lethal violence. And what you find are exactly what you describe, young men who were just deeply alone, deeply alienated, do not sort of have a sense of belonging to anything meaningful and do not wake up with a sense of purpose in the world, which causes sometimes their brain to break.
And so, yeah, that study did cause me to sort of take a broader examination of what’s happening in this country so that more and more people are reporting not just feeling so lonely that they end up engaging in lethal violence, but just more generally unhappy and generally disconnected than we have ever seen in sort of self-reported studies before. And you see that every day in the rates of self-harm and the rates of addiction and the rates of political instability, all of that is a symptom of a country that is feeling something and, as you mentioned, it’s a feeling of disconnection. You know, it caused me to just sort of step back and say, you know, what does the evidence tell us leads to a happy life? It is like right there in the Declaration of Independence. Like my job is actually supposed to be to create the conditions upon which people can exercise a right to pursue happiness.
And as you mentioned, as it turns out, happiness data tells us that, you know, well, the job and the career are not immaterial. It really is about your relationships. It’s really about whether you feel that you were a part of something bigger than you. And it just felt to me like government was so hyper focused on this sort of neoliberal materialistic conversation about wealth and income and career, and not talking about relationships and connection, the common good, and the community. And so, yeah, I’ve sort of tried to start a conversation or at least educate myself on how would government go about sort of changing its focus or sharing its focus between this historic hyper obsessiveness on economic wellbeing to a conversation about spiritual wellbeing, which has to do with a lot more than just the job you have. I think it’s a really hard thing for government to do, but I think it’s actually vital work today because something is eating at people living in the Western world and people living in this country. And it’s not just the fact that they’re not making as much money as they’d like.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I strongly agree with all of that. I think a few things. One, when you look at the data, there’s a really direct correlation between material wellbeing and self-reported happiness up to a point, right? So like if you’re super poor, it’s very hard to feel very happy. But when you get to a certain point and the point is lower than I think people, you know, $80,000 a year, there’s a certain point, and then after that it’s like, there’s basically no correlation. In fact, sometimes there’s negative correlation between, you know, material wealth affluence and self-reported happiness. And that’s sort of true for societies too, where it’s like this sort of necessary but sufficient idea. Like there’s a certain amount of material comfort that’s just necessary to flourish and feel happy. But then they become pretty unlinked.
And for me, and I love for you to respond to this, I have found that the Biden presidency really challenging and confounding. Because at some level, from the perspective of political economy, much of what the Biden administration has done has taken seriously the flaws of neoliberalism, really altered the trajectory of the kind of like free trade, kind of redistributive, you know, tax cut vision, and really taken seriously industrial policy and like, bringing factory construction jobs and high wage union jobs and like trying to create senses of place around this stuff. And they’ve done an amazing job on it. And I think it’s been the best macroeconomic stewardship of my life.
And yet like people are like, this sucks. And it really does confound me. I mean, because I do think the policy has been pretty great. And I do think part of the sense of malaise is post COVID trauma, which I think is sort of underappreciated, but I do think there’s also something deeper, which just like there’s something about, whether it’s how we get our news through the world and the sort of way the attention economy works or mass secularization, I don’t know what it is, but like there’s something eating at people that Donald Trump’s version of this sort of coalition of the kind of anti-establishment, rejectionist is appealing to certain kind of folks that are kind of free-floating electrons that they’re not bound to other stuff that is having some political consequences.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, and Donald Trump is also creating community, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Chris Murphy: I mean, you are part of sort of a club of iconoclasts —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chris Murphy: — which gives you meaning in and of itself. And what’s interesting is that part of, I think, what’s happening around the Harris campaign is a similar sense of communion —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: — that was really never a part of the Biden coalition. Biden was about just putting an adult back in the White House to save us from the wreckage of Donald Trump, but you never felt like you were part of something bigger than yourself.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: I also think it’s due to the fact that while the Biden administration has been doing all of this great work, sort of delivering a post-neoliberal vision of our economy, they don’t talk about it very often in the terms that people would relate to.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: You know, there’s a bunch of things that people are feeling. But one of them is just a sense of powerlessness, right? Sort of whether there is angry at Google and Amazon as they should be, they generally know that the rules that matter in their life are being set by, you know, unaccountable elites. They generally feel that even if I was to work a whole bunch harder, I don’t think I would be doing much better because all of the power and money is reserved at the tippy top. And even though Biden, I think, has been smart enough to know that we need to turn the page on neoliberalism, he’s not practiced in that kind of rhetoric, right, in talking about power, who has it, who doesn’t have it, and how I’m going to transfer it from these people to these other people. And I think that’s what’s missing here is the storytelling.
Chris Hayes: I think that’s an astute point. And I think in some ways, one of the things I find confounding and downright frustrating is they’ve actually been walking the walk more than talking the talk. And what it’s ended up being is they’ve gotten kind of the worst of both worlds because the people at the tippy top, like they hate the FTC. They hate Lina Khan at the FTC. They hate all the stuff they’ve been doing on corporate power. They hate the fact that he walked a picket line. It drives them crazy. So in their actions, they have alienated a lot of those powerful people. And yet rhetorically are still associated as like part of the system in the institution. And so have this weird situation of having kind of really walk the walk on a lot of this stuff. And yet the guy who’s going to give a bunch of tax cuts to literally the wealthiest person in the world, you know, like is going to be the one that blows up the system. And it’s like it’s a frustrating state of affairs from where I sit.
Chris Murphy: Well, here’s the other part of that conversation around rhetoric. We sometimes sort of label Republican grievance politics in a pejorative way, right, that there’s —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: — something illegitimate about engaging in talking through people’s grievances. There’s actually not, right?
Chris Hayes: Grievances are what democratic politics is about.
Chris Murphy: Right, and so you actually have to spend some time a lot more than we do walking through what people’s grievances are, showing that you understand them and care about them. Arguably, Republicans spend 80% of their time on grievance and 20% of their time on solution. Democrats are sort of the opposite. We spend 20% on grievance and 80% on solution. And people is just like, wait a second, like just relate to me for a little while, like understand how I’m feeling. And then we can go on this journey to talk about the bulk negotiation of prescription drug pricing, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: But like, I’m not ready to start there.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
Chris Murphy: I’d like you to talk a little bit about why I’m hurt with that kind of being spiritually by a healthcare industry that gouges me and sees me simply as a source of profit. So that’s part of the problem too.
Chris Hayes: I had this metaphor about the Obama administration post Great Recession where I was thinking about, let’s say you have a house, you’re in a one room house, okay, and it’s got three leaks in the roof, and you got the little pots out across the room. And then someone from the government comes and they’re like, great news, we passed a bill for a leak repair bill. The guy comes in and he fixes one of the holes and then he leaves. And then the president’s like, we increased roof waterproofness by 33%. Like that’s a good number. Like things got better. And then you’re there like, well, I still got two leaks. And it’s like —
Chris Murphy: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — both sides are true. Like you did do something good. It is better that I have two leaks rather than three, but it’s a little hard for me to get super jazzed about my life and my house when I’ve still got two leaks. And I think a fair amount of that, you know, making marginal progress can read to people like that in their lives when they’re juggling a bunch of different problems.
Chris Murphy: Well, and also, it also sort of makes you angry if somebody shows up and starts clapping for the fact that they fixed one leak, right? We still like, I’m happy for that, but you know —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chris Murphy: — you still need to commiserate with the fact that my house is flooding. And that’s a little bit of what we do is that, yeah, we’ve done some good stuff, but there’s still a lot more to do.
Chris Hayes: Final and I don’t want to keep you too long because you’re a United States Senator. You’re back in session, have work to do. But you walk across the state every year, which I’ve always thought was interesting. And I just maybe end on this idea of like, I think people think of politicians, I think people don’t quite appreciate how much being a politician in a representative democracy really is representative. It’s not just like, you’ve got your ideas and your agenda and the stuff you want to do, and then you go to folks and try to get elected, or at least if you’re doing it right. But like, you actually do have to go and like, see what the people you represent think, what they’re angry about, where they’re at, and try to represent them.
Chris Murphy: Yeah, and I don’t know whether it’s harder today. I’ll just say it’s hard because you have to pierce through illusions of what matters. And the reason that I do this walk every year is because it becomes this annual grounding exercise for me. I’ve done it 10 years in a row. And with some exceptions on the margin, nothing has really changed about what people care about. The first year I did this walk, when I was talking to a hundred people a day, most all of them do not watch MSNBC or Fox News or CNN, but they really have opinions and they’re willing to talk to me, especially when I don’t show up in a suit and tie, when I show up in a baseball cap and T-shirt and shorts. And it’s all the same thing every year. It’s the amount of money they’re making, the amount of money they’re spending, it’s the quality of their schools, it’s the safety of their neighborhood. I would say the thing that’s changed the most in Connecticut over the last 10 years is that housing and rent is just like, just dominating discussions now in a way that it didn’t 10 years ago. But they tend not to talk about the stuff that’s in the temporary headlines. They really tend not to care about the horse race.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: I did the walk in March and it took until day three before anybody talked to me about Donald Trump or Joe Biden. I don’t know. I mean, there’s a temptation for me to look at what tweets got the most retweets and think that that’s what I should work on the rest of the day. And the walk is just a way for me to remind myself, no. Like that’s —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chris Murphy: — that’s a different conversation than the conversation that’s happening amongst the people that I represent.
Chris Hayes: Chris Murphy is a Senator from the great state of Connecticut, the nutmeg state, a state you can walk across. You can’t do that if you’re in Montana or Texas. You can do it in Connecticut.
Chris Murphy: And I used to do it side to side, but since I had a little titanium screw put in my knee during the pandemic, I now do it north to south. So I went from a hundred miles to 70 miles.
Chris Hayes: Oh yeah, that’s probably for the best. Senator, it’s always great to talk to you. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Chris Murphy: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Senator Chris Murphy. I should note this conversation took place before Vice President Kamala Harris gave that big speech in Arizona about border policy, which I think you could say fairly roughly hues to what Senator Murphy was laying out in this conversation. We’d love to hear your feedback. I think it’s a complicated, contentious issue. I feel torn in a bunch of different directions on it, both in the substance and the politics. So e-mail us withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on Threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky and what was formerly known as Twitter. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
Also last week, I got something wrong when I was talking about my new book about attention capitalism, which is coming out in January. That URL is sirenscallbook.com, sirenscallbook.com.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.