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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Immigration. It's the system that brought you Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma, and me. And yes, obviously, fuck, marry, kill, respectively. -♪♪ Immigration is the subject that Trump campaigned on the hardest.

Speaker 1

00:16

And as president, his tone hasn't exactly softened.

Speaker 2

00:19

I told my people yesterday, our country's full. We're full. Our system's full, our country's full.

Speaker 2

00:25

Can't come in. Our country is full. What can you do? We can't handle anymore.

Speaker 2

00:30

Our country is full. Can't come in. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1

00:32

He's right. He's right. Our country is totally full.

Speaker 1

00:35

I mean, just take a look at it. The thing is absolutely packed. There is simply no room here. I mean, maybe if 1 of these guys dies or something, but until then, there's just nothing we can do.

Speaker 1

00:46

But look, it is obviously not that simple. And in Trump's more reflective moments, seen here, he actually claims that there is 1 kind of immigration that he wants, legal immigration. It's the thing that he and his political allies will tell you they love.

Speaker 2

01:00

I want legal immigration. I want great people to come in. I want legal immigration.

Speaker 3

01:04

I believe legal immigration is good for our country. I believe illegal immigration isn't. My views on immigration are simple, and I've summed them up many times in just 4 words.

Speaker 3

01:15

Legal, good, illegal bad.

Speaker 1

01:18

-♪ ♪ -♪ I do not like that man, Ted Cruz. I do not like him in the news. I do not like what he just said.

Speaker 1

01:26

I do not like his boxy head. I do not like him wearing glasses. I do not like him kissing asses. I wish he'd never get 1 vote.

Speaker 1

01:32

That Mantec Cruz can lick my scrotums. But, look, here's the thing. If you take all of them at their word, we actually agree on this. Legal Immigration is good.

Speaker 1

01:46

That is a popular opinion, both among those who see immigration as foundational to America, and among economists who largely agree that it increases economic growth. About 13% of the people in this country are immigrants, three-quarters of whom are here legally. So this system affects a lot of people. And with all the talk about illegal immigration, the flaws in the legal pathway, which arguably help fuel illegal immigration, often get ignored.

Speaker 1

02:11

So tonight, let's talk about our legal immigration system, because there are a lot of misconceptions about a process that, to be fair, most Americans have never experienced. And a key misconception is captured in a phrase that you hear all the time, both from politicians and from ordinary voters.

Speaker 4

02:27

We want, to let people in legally. Get in line, and we want to let people in legally.

Speaker 2

02:32

They have to do it the right way. They have to get in line, come legally, and wait in line like all of them.

Speaker 5

02:38

There are a lot of people from all around the world that are in line and waiting to come in here. And I don't think that they should be able to come in ahead of all these people that have been really struggling to get here.

Speaker 1

02:51

Right. Get in line. And look, I know that is an appealing phrase, but it's significantly more complicated than that, as you can probably tell from that woman's reaction. I'm guessing the closed captioning for which is probably, woman thinking, the fuck?

Speaker 1

03:05

Because the truth is, for those who want to come here, there is no 1 line to get in. The lines that do exist can be prohibitively long or have sudden dead ends. And for many people, and this is really important, there simply isn't a line at all. And if you think, well, hold on, my ancestors waited online, not necessarily.

Speaker 1

03:23

For America's first hundred years, there were no federal immigration laws. So coming here the right way, basically just meant not slipping as you walked down the gangway. Now, since then, our immigration system has evolved into 1 with complicated and convoluted restrictions. Take country caps.

Speaker 1

03:39

When it comes to most types of green card, which allow you to be a lawful, permanent resident, No more than 7 percent of immigrants accepted each year can come from any 1 country. What that means in practice is that big countries with a lot of would-be immigrants like China, India, and Mexico are subject to the same numerical caps as tiny ones like Malta, which is so tiny, that's actual size. In fact, that's actually Malta. We borrowed it and put it in this box to show you how small Malta is.

Speaker 1

04:10

And it's not just numerical caps. The whole system has a lot of restrictions on who exactly can come here. In fact, the best way to understand it is that there are just 4 paths to permanent residency or citizenship. Family, you're related to someone who's already here.

Speaker 1

04:25

Employment, meaning you were offered a job here. Good luck, you won the Visa lottery, which I'll explain later. Or bad luck, you're a refugee or seeking asylum. And the number of people going through each path is by no means equal.

Speaker 1

04:37

Proportionally, they should probably look a lot more like this. So, let's start with the way that most immigrants come here. Family sponsorship. About two-thirds of green card holders come through the family-based system, which makes sense.

Speaker 1

04:50

Families provide support, and some, I'm told, like each other. -...like each other. -...like each other. But to Donald Trump, family-based migration is a scourge, as you can tell from how he refers to it.

Speaker 2

05:02

Chain migration is not a good thing. Chain migration is bad. We have to end chain migration.

Speaker 2

05:10

Then you have chain migration. Chain migration. A guy comes in, stone-cold killer in many cases. A guy comes in, and then you have to bring his aunt, his uncle, his father, his grandfather, his grandparents.

Speaker 2

05:28

His third niece by a different marriage.

Speaker 1

05:31

-... Okay, That is so wrong in so many ways, it would honestly be hard for a fact checker to assess it. That couldn't even be described by the Washington Post's bottomless Pinocchio, which is an actual thing they do now, and which, For the record, sounds like an all-nude strip club for wooden puppets. --LAUGHTER --Because...

Speaker 1

05:50

Because bringing family members over is not nearly as easy as Trump makes it sound. For a start, you can only sponsor close relatives. At most, that is a spouse, child, sibling, or parent. No aunt, no uncle, no grandparents, no third niece by a different marriage.

Speaker 1

06:07

And anyone who comes in has to pass rigorous background checks, which tends to weed out any stone-cold killers. And that chain, as you definitely should not put it, can move very slowly, because those country caps that I mentioned earlier apply to many categories of family-based immigration. So, if you're trying to bring your sibling over from China, the government is currently processing applications from 2006. If they're in India, 2004.

Speaker 1

06:34

From Mexico, January of 1997. That's 22 years ago. And who knows what they'll be doing 22 years in advance? Aside, of course, from Pat Sajak, because I guarantee he'll still be standing by a wheel, selling vows he doesn't own until the fucking son dies.

Speaker 1

06:54

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ And yet, the family sponsorship system is still seemingly too permissive for Trump, who wants to limit it to just spouses and children. Meaning you could no longer sponsor, for instance, your parents to immigrate here. Although, interestingly, he seemed fine with 1 high-profile exception.

Speaker 6

07:13

President Trump's in-laws slipping in and out of a Manhattan federal building where they took the oath of U.S. Citizenship. Sources tell ABC News that First Lady Melania Trump sponsored her Slovenian-born parents, Viktor and Amalia Novs.

Speaker 1

07:27

Chain migration! Look, look, look, that is obviously hypocritical. That's obvious.

Speaker 1

07:34

And I know... I know it's not the important part here, but I should point out Melania's mom is 74, making Trump exactly 1 year younger than his mother-in-law. And While there are plenty of spouses out there who probably should be closer to their in-laws, that is simply not the way to do it! So that is the family-based path, which of course only works if you have a close relative in America, and it frankly doesn't hurt if she happens to be in a loveless marriage with the president.

Speaker 1

08:01

Now, if that is not an option for you, you might try the employment-based path. The way that pathway usually begins is an employer in America sponsors you, and you come here on a temporary work visa. But it is temporary. You might be able to renew it if your employer likes you, but there can be limits on how many times you can do that.

Speaker 1

08:20

And even getting a work visa in the first place can be very difficult. You have to fit within narrow categories. There is R1, that's for religious workers. P1A, That's for athletes.

Speaker 1

08:31

H2A, that's for farm workers. C3PO for effete British robots. And R2D2 for their common law husbands. It's a...

Speaker 1

08:39

It's a complex system. I, myself, came over on an O1 visa, which is for persons with extraordinary ability in the arts. And I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking.

Speaker 1

08:51

No, no, no, no. I know what you're really thinking deep down, and fuck you! -♪ Yeah! ♪ -♪ Yeah!

Speaker 1

08:57

♪ Certain work pieces are so hard to get, highly skilled people get turned away. Take Kunal Bal. He's the founder of a very successful Indian company called Snapdeal. He went to college in the U.S.

Speaker 1

09:11

And just watch as he's interviewed on stage at a conference in India about why he ended up creating a company there rather than staying here.

Speaker 7

09:18

I got a job at Microsoft. I was quite happy. You know, the Indian tech guy wanting to work at Microsoft.

Speaker 7

09:25

And they applied for my visa, which got rejected. Now you're stuck and you're getting deported back to your country. What do you do?

Speaker 1

09:31

So he decided to come back and start a company here. Thank God. Okay, well, I'm glad that that story worked out well for India, but it's frankly not a great result for America, is it?

Speaker 1

09:40

Who helped educate him, and then for some reason, forced him to go innovate somewhere else instead. Honestly, I respect Kunal Bha for not going full pretty woman on a U.S. Immigration office. Big mistake.

Speaker 1

09:52

Huge. And it is worth noting, just getting a work visa does not mean you're going to end up staying here, because converting it into a green card can be difficult to practically impossible, depending on your skill level and where you're from. You need your employer to choose to sponsor you again, and there aren't many green cards to go around. Only around 140,000 of them are granted every year.

Speaker 1

10:16

Basically, think of getting a work visa as getting a backstage pass to see BTS. Sure, it'll allow you to hang around for a bit, but you're probably not gonna end up becoming part of the band. And look, I can tell you from experience here, living on a visa can be very stressful and involves having to jump through endless costly hoops. I used to have to file for extensions to my visa every year, hoping they'd be granted, and had to leave the country every 11 months to go to the American Embassy in London to get a physical stamp in my passport, allowing me to travel.

Speaker 1

10:47

And I was constantly, constantly worried that I would not be allowed to come back. And here's the thing, even when you are approved for a green card, there might not be 1 available for you, because those country caps that I mentioned also apply to employment-based immigration. So if you come in from, say, India, your estimated wait time can be ridiculously high. Watch as 1 boy living in America finds out how long his dad might have to wait.

Speaker 8

11:12

So, your dad has applied for a green card for himself and your family, and the U.S. Government looked at this application and approved it. The problem is that there's a waiting line for green card, and that line is really long for India.

Speaker 8

11:26

It'll very well be about 60 years by the time your dad gets a green card. And if I'm doing my math right...

Speaker 5

11:34

Dad will be over 100 and I'll be 71.

Speaker 1

11:37

Well, well, nearly, your dad will be dead, but yeah, you will be... You'll be 71. Or dead, or dead, you could be as dead as your very dead dad.

Speaker 1

11:45

But overall, your point is a good 1 there, kid. So together, the family and employment paths make up around 80% of legal immigration. But what about if you are not related to somebody here and you aren't already highly skilled? Well, that brings us to the luck categories.

Speaker 1

12:00

If you are lucky, you could come to America through something called the Diversity Visa Lottery, which I'll let the president explain so that you know exactly what it isn't.

Speaker 2

12:09

They call it Visa Lottery. I just call it Lottery. Where countries come in and they...

Speaker 2

12:14

Put names in a hopper. They're not giving you their best names. Common sense means they're not giving you their best names. They're giving you people that they don't want.

Speaker 2

12:22

And then we take them out of the lottery. And where they do it by hand, where they put the hand in a bowl, I probably, what's in their hand are the worst of the worst.

Speaker 1

12:33

Okay. There's just not time to break down how wrong everything he just said was, but suffice to say, Trump can expect a visit from bottomless Pinocchio any day now, Because everything about what he just said is wrong. The country the person comes from is not involved. They don't give us anyone.

Speaker 1

12:53

The people who win are vetted, and obviously, it's not done by hand. 22 million people applied in 2017. Does he honestly think we made 1 of those spinning bingo hoppers for 22 million ping pong balls? What actually happens is, anybody who lives in a country with low immigration rates to the United States can enter themselves into a computer-run, non-bowl-based lottery...

Speaker 1

13:18

For the chance to win something called a diversity visa. And out of the millions of people who enter, only 50,000 win. So, your odds of winning that lottery to come into the country are about the same as your odds of getting shot once you get here. Basically, if you win, congratulations.

Speaker 1

13:35

For now. -$1,000. -$1,000. So, so the Visa Lottery is the longest of long shots.

Speaker 1

13:42

It's honestly barely even worth talking about, which brings us to our final category here, bad luck. That is basically refugees and asylum seekers fleeing terrible situations. And America has long prided itself, with some reason, on the fact that it's led the world in terms of refugee resettlement, accepting more refugees annually than any other country. But, as you probably know, Trump does not care for that.

Speaker 1

14:04

He has attacked the asylum system repeatedly, and while Obama set the annual cap on refugees at 110,000 in his last year in office, Trump slashed it to 45,000 the next year, and 30,000 the year after that. At this rate, next year's cap will be reduced to just Zayed, at which point Trump will probably make his campaign slogan, Get Rid of Zayed. -♪ Get rid of Zayed. -♪ LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE ♪ And if you're thinking...

Speaker 1

14:30

If you're thinking Trump might have a change of heart, if you just heard what some of these refugees are fleeing, you're wrong about that. Take Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was abducted by ISIS in Iraq. She fled to Germany after they killed her family, won a Nobel Prize for her advocacy, and actually got to tell her story to Trump's face in the Oval Office recently. And what you're about to see is the second time she specifically mentioned to him that her family was killed.

Speaker 1

14:55

And watch just how little he has been listening.

Speaker 9

14:58

All this happened to me.

Speaker 10

14:59

They killed my mom, my 6 brother, they left behind them.

Speaker 2

15:03

Where are they now?

Speaker 10

15:04

They killed them.

Speaker 1

15:06

What are you doing? Where are they now? She just told you 3 fucking words ago.

Speaker 1

15:13

That is the U.S. President displaying a level of indifference to human suffering rivaled only by robots and house cats. -...and they really don't give a shit. -...and things could get even worse.

Speaker 1

15:26

There are now reports that Trump's White House is weighing whether to cut the number of refugees we admit to 0 next year. 0. And if they do that, then please tell me, what is the right way for refugees to come in then? And that is the point here.

Speaker 1

15:41

For all of their talk about how fine they are with legal immigration, This administration has worked hard to reduce it as much as possible across the board. In his first year, Trump supported a bill that would have cut legal immigration into this country by half. And while that bill went nowhere, he's made countless procedural tweaks gumming up the process for coming here legally, which helps explain why the time it takes to process an application has jumped 46 percent since 2016. Some immigration attorneys are now calling those changes the Invisible Wall.

Speaker 1

16:14

And Just last month, Trump put another brick in that wall when the administration issued what's called the Public Charge Rule, making the path to permanent residency much more difficult for any would-be immigrant who fails to meet income standards or is deemed likely to use public assistance like food stamps, public housing, or Medicaid. That could profoundly change who gets to call this country home, advantaging the well-off and disadvantaging anyone they ever think might have greater needs. And when Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked how this could possibly square with America's ideals.

Speaker 1

16:52

His answer wasn't great.

Speaker 11

16:54

Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus's words etched on the Statue of

Speaker 4

16:58

Liberty, give me your tired, your poor, are also part of the American ethos?

Speaker 2

17:03

They certainly are, given you're tired and you're poor, who can stand on their own 2 feet, and who will not become a public charge.

Speaker 1

17:10

Hold on there! That's not what it says, is it? You can't just add lines to a poem that totally invalidates its premise.

Speaker 1

17:17

You can't say, in the words of Emily Dickinson, because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. And then we totally fucked a lot. Death has a big fat dick. You can't do that!

Speaker 1

17:29

You're fundamentally changing the intended meaning. Also, it's not just that his addition to the poem is terrible, it's that what he took out is really important there. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Because as corny as it might sound, America at its best isn't about who you are when you arrive.

Speaker 1

17:48

It's about who you want to become. The yearning part fucking counts. And that doesn't have to mean that everyone who wants to come gets to come. But if you are going to say, get in line to people, you should at least make sure they actually have a line to stand in.

Speaker 1

18:02

And right now, these are the only pathways that exist. And we should be having a serious conversation about whether they work smoothly enough, which they do not, whether this is the right balance between the categories, and whether we've defined the categories correctly. I think Trump, for his part, has made it pretty clear that his ideal system would be in 2 tiers, split evenly between rich Norwegians and future wives. -♪ ♪ -♪ Personally, personally, I think a lot more people should be let in in general, but I will admit, this is subjective, and I am biased here.

Speaker 1

18:32

I have been through this system and I can tell you, it's rough. When I finally got my green card years ago, it was sent to The Daily Show and they surprised me with it at work, presenting it to me with a slice of apple pie and a Budweiser as a joke. Thing is, I was so relieved, I nearly burst into tears. And that is when I realized I had been worried about my immigration status every single day.

Speaker 1

18:54

And I was very, very lucky. I had a lot of help, and more importantly, I had a path to come here. It's the path that has led us all to Sad Zazu's mildly interesting explain train. But for many people, there is literally no way to come in the right way.

Speaker 1

19:10

And if I was 1 of them, and Donald Trump told me to just get in line and come in the right way, I think I would have been well within my rights to quote the other immortal words of Emily Dickinson, hope is the thing with feathers. Also, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, you fucking idiot. Death has a Big fat dick.