Steven Malanga joins John Hirschauer to discuss his feature article, “No, You’re Not Imagining a Migrant Crime Spree,” and the significance of illegal immigration in the 2024 presidential election.
Audio Transcript
John Hirschauer: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is John Hirschauer, associate editor of City Journal. Joining me on today’s show is my colleague, Steven Malanga. He’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal’s senior editor. He writes about a range of policy areas, including state and local governance, economics, and immigration.
His work has appeared in several outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, where he appears regularly, and of course, City Journal. We’d initially brought Steve on to discuss his excellent feature from our autumn issue, “No, You’re Not Imagining a Migrant Crime Spree,” but with Donald Trump’s decisive election victory and his cabinet beginning to take shape, we wanted to broaden the discussion to include not only Steve’s excellent reporting, but the incoming Trump administration’s immigration agenda. So, Steve, thanks as always for joining us on 10 Blocks. Immigration was obviously central to Trump’s campaign, and as you note in your piece, one reason for that was just the overwhelming surge of migrants who entered the country under the Biden administration. Can you walk us through some of the changes that Biden made at the federal level that just facilitated this massive flow of migration?
Steve Malanga: I would say there’s several crucial changes, including essentially a change to immigration law, really, which said that people who are asylum seekers, who come to this country seeking asylum have to wait outside the country before their cases are heard in order to determine whether they qualify for asylum, because previous to this, only about 15% of people who came and requested asylum actually qualified under their portions of the law, which allowed asylum for people who were being persecuted, maybe for religious reasons in their home country. So what the Biden administration instead did was let these people come in through the border, gave them a date in which their case would be heard, and then released them into the country, and then oftentimes, those cases, because of the backlog that grew as more and more people came, were a year or two in the future. In addition to that, one of the things that the Biden administration did was they also issued an executive order saying people who were in this country either awaiting an asylum hearing or because they had crossed illegally, any of those who were guilty of a crime, especially a felony, could not automatically be deported. They would have to be given a hearing. And only those people who were judged to be immediate threats by the courts to the public safety would be deported.
One of the things that also did is it created a big backlog in hearings about people for deportation cases, and especially for deportation cases of known criminals. Those two things in general, this long, long list of people, waiting within the country for asylum, together with the list of people who were no longer being deported, just because they had felonies on the record, but rather they had to be judged by a judge, a special judge to be, whether or not they were actually public safety threats, those two things essentially allowed not only millions of people to stay in the country, but on top of that, it allowed probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who were here illegally or were waiting for asylum who had criminal records to stay in the country. And those two things, I think together, really turned a country against Biden’s administration immigration policies, and we saw that in the election. The country, two-thirds of the country favored Trump over either Biden or Harris on the issue of immigration, and we’re seeing now, with the coming Trump administration moving quickly on these issues, this is going to be a dramatically different approach to immigration, and particularly to illegals under Trump.
John Hirschauer: Yeah, and so you note that obviously, Trump had rode this popular wave on the immigration issue to the White House, and specifically, there was a lot of support, surprisingly, from some people’s perspective, for mass deportations. There was a September Ipsos poll that found a majority of Americans in favor of mass deportations. So let’s start, I guess with the political question. Do you think that a mass deportation policy will remain popular even after images inevitably emerge of children crying in families homes being raided? What is kind of the political future of a policy like that?
Steve Malanga: Right. So we’re already seeing questions about that, particularly questions related to, for instance, separating families, because in some cases, of course, you have ... Well, first of all, if you have a child who was born here, that child is an American citizen, but if the family is illegal and they are deported, the child isn’t going to stay here alone, so they’re going to wind up going back. And the Trump administration has already said, “We’re not going to separate families, but just because a person is an American citizen, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to keep them here, that if their family is going back, they can return with the family.” But that’s going to be a big issue, no doubt about that.
I think Trump himself, when he was actually asked by the Wall Street Journal about these issues of mass deportation, he listed a series of priorities, and I think that’s what we’re going to see. The priorities, first of all, include the known criminals. And as I say in my recent story on that, there are something like 450,000 convicted criminals who are on, what’s known as non-detain lists. And the non-detain list means that even though they’re here illegally and they’ve committed a crime, they’re not on the list to be deported. So we think the first thing that Trump is going to do is go after the gangs, the criminal networks.
In my piece on crime, I go into a lot of detail, not just on some of the kind of horrendous individual crimes that got people really upset, but on the criminal networks that are operating here, and they’re really operating these widespread criminal enterprises, something like 2,500 illegal marijuana growing operations in the state of Oklahoma alone, that being engineered by Chinese nationals, who basically, and Chinese gangs that came across the border. In Montana, Mexican gangs have cornered the market on opioid and methadone, selling in that state, particularly on things like Indian reservations. We know state by state, we know California, there are both Chinese and Mexican cartel gangs operating there. So there’s these widespread criminal networks, burglary gangs coming from places like Chile and Colombia to work in the United States. So we think that Trump is going to, first of all, focus on those individuals, on the individuals, also who came here illegally and weren’t properly vetted, which was a big problem at the border, weren’t properly vetted when they came in, and it’s only later when they got here and started committing crimes that we found out what their backgrounds were, people who were members of Salvadorian gangs, Venezuelan gangs.
So even he indicated that’s going to be the first priority. And I think he talked about some of the more sensitive cases to the Wall Street Journal, and he said, “In some of these cases, we’ll let a judge decide,” which I thought was very interesting. So I think he understands that just the blanket policy might include people that would be very sympathetic individuals, and that he’s going to see how that kind of evolves. There’s so much that needs to be done, just I think, to correct the actions of the Biden administration in terms of the kind of individuals who are let in, also beyond the actual known criminals. There are many, many people who’ve been let in, who don’t really have the skills or the wherewithal to necessarily support themselves in the United States, and they would clearly be a burden on both state and federal budgets for years to come, and I think that those people will also be probably likely on that deportation list.
So I think that there is going to be priorities, and inevitably even so, of course, you are going to see those stories about separating children and so forth. We’ll see how this plays out, but the fact that even a significant number of Democrats in that poll you mentioned, said they would be in favor of deportations, tells you a lot about the mood of the country right now.
John Hirschauer: No, absolutely. And you mentioned the Oklahoma story, which I found just particularly fascinating from your piece. Basically, for those who haven’t read your piece yet, there are these cartels of illegal immigrants that are basically undercutting the state’s legal marijuana program, selling higher THC content marijuana, and just kind of putting to bed all of the pro-legalization arguments, actually. It was fascinating to read, but kind of pivoting to the issue of immigrant crime, which was the thrust of your City Journal feature, you take to task kind of this idea that we hear all the time in the media, that, “Immigrants are no more likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.” This emerged from a study in Texas that you cite, this canard. Could you kind of unpack for us what the data actually says on immigrant crime?
Steve Malanga: Well, there have been a couple of studies based on Texas incarceration data, and one of the reasons it was based on Texas was because many states don’t track, whether the number of illegals or just the number of immigrants in general in their systems, in their prison systems, and sanctuary cities do this, some people say purposely. There is another program that actually reimburses states for the cost of incarcerating illegals, and the reason it does this is because the federal government is supposed to be in charge of securing the borders. And so when illegals come here and they create crime and a cost to the states, the states can get reimbursed by Congress, in order to be in reimbursed, the states have to file detailed records on the people that are incarcerated. And so even though a lot of these states don’t make this information public, it does exist within the federal government, because states do want to be reimbursed. They do want their money.
And studies, which have looked at this data, find that there’s a far higher degree of immigrant crime than is reflected in the study on Texas. Ironically, or interestingly, even the data from this other data set does show that immigrant crime levels in Texas are, as a percentage of the number of immigrants there, is not as high as other states. People theorize that this is because Texas has an active policy of tracking down immigrants, of incarcerating them, and as a result, immigrants are essentially, even though they’re coming over the border, they are getting out of Texas. I mean, you can see the result of what I would call the perverse incentives of sanctuary cities and states that a lot of these folks who are coming over the border are making their way to New York, they’re making their way to California, they’re making their way to Illinois. In Illinois, several legislators have said that Chicago’s sanctuary city policy is the reason that they are attracting and have created such a problem in that city where they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on immigrants.
So these other studies suggest that the rate of crime is far higher. Regardless of how we debate this issue of whether it’s higher than the American rate or not, the fact of the matter is that we probably have, and no one knows for sure, five million to seven million additional immigrants, either asylum seekers or illegals who have snuck over the border during the Biden administration. As one whistleblower, who was a border agent said to Congress, “Even if only a small percentage of these people are breaking the law, it still means tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of criminals in this country who shouldn’t be here.” And when you look at that and you look at the cartels, you look at the gangs, when you recognize, and we’ve seen this in testimony in Congress, that many of these international gangs essentially responded to what Biden was doing in the same way that just ordinary people who were trying to get into the country responded, they came here, you realize that this is a significant problem, whether we acknowledge that they’re committing crimes at higher rates, at the same rate, that there are simply millions of people here who are here illegally, who were allowed to enter the country unvetted, or without being properly vetted.
And so this is a problem that the Trump administration says is a very high priority for obvious reasons. The polls show that Americans think it’s a very high priority.
John Hirschauer: You certainly want to take voters at their word because they do say that they are concerned about immigrant crime, but I do think that those concerns, which are, of course, first of all, about criminal behavior by illegal immigrants, also are indirectly, I think complaints about, or can be complaints about the other costs that are associated with illegal immigration beyond just criminal activity. We’ve reported on some of this at City Journal, the effects that massive illegal immigration can have on local cultures and labor markets. I wonder if you could kind of expand a little bit on the negative effects of illegal immigration beyond just crime that maybe drove some of Trump’s support among these concerned voters.
Steve Malanga: Right. And this has become a very big issue. You see a lot of journalists now asking Trump, “What’s your deportation plan going to cost? How much is it going to be?” and you’re seeing a lot of big numbers thrown out there. Trump has responded by saying, “It doesn’t matter if these people are committing crimes. If they’re committing murders, we have to get rid of them.”
That’s one answer, but that’s only a partial answer. The other answer is that illegal immigration itself is extremely expensive to the country. I mean, I don’t think this is it. I’ve been writing about this issue for years and years ago. You’d have to explain how.
I think that the headlines of what happened in New York and what happened in Chicago, people now understand this. I mean, New York City is spending two and a half billion dollars a year just providing services to illegals. That’s supposed to go up to $5 billion a year within a couple of years. Chicago has spent, I think $800 million. A bunch of Republican states, 18 Republican states, sued the Biden administration over their immigration policy, again, because of the costs to the states.
And they all laid out, there are some obvious costs. The big cost is uncompensated healthcare. Ron DeSantis in Florida was saying that hospitals were spending about $350 million a year on care for illegals that no one is compensating them for, except, of course, the state has to pick up that budget. In the lawsuit, Texas said that social services alone for illegals was costing them $850 million a year. Indiana said it was costing them about $900 million a year.
Iowa, small state like Iowa said they’re spending $400 million on social services a year. Now, there are people who say, “Well, yeah, but if we just give these people social security numbers and let them work, everything will be fine.” The problem with that theory is that most of this immigration is a very low educated individuals who don’t speak English. Most studies have shown that illegals have, in general, a high school education or less. One thing that means is that they themselves, for most likely, won’t ever earn enough to pay enough in taxes for what they will cost cities and states, and there was a study, goes back a couple of years.
It was done by the National Academies of Science, I think back in 2015, ‘16, which looked at the net loss per state, and in terms of just state taxes, what the states have to pay versus what they give back in terms of the jobs that illegals get. And when you look at studies like this, the thing you have to remember is it isn’t just the cost of social services, for instance, like welfare and Medicaid, that we need to give to these people even once they’ve joined society. We all, all of us, we all benefit from a certain amount of government spending. Public safety, roads, bridges, education, those things are very expensive. And most of the studies have shown that these individuals, even if they work because of their education level, won’t begin for 20 years to pay.
Maybe their children would attain a level that they would begin to pay back. So the costs will be out of balance for not just the next few years, but maybe for decades. So the costs are quite staggering, and the deportation, the deportation costs, we’ll have to see what they are, but if you do any kind of rational summing up of what it’s costing us right now, it’s terrifying, and that was a headline that we used when we referred to our look at the cost of illegal immigration for the Biden years.
John Hirschauer: Yeah. I mean, this is just like a tremendously charged issue on both sides for a lot of voters. Voters in both parties feel very strongly on humanitarian grounds, kind of on different humanitarian grounds, that their position is justified. I guess kind of when we talk about border enforcement, immigration enforcement in general, we’re really talking about two groups of people broadly, right? You have the economic migrants, many of whom came here illegally, but they’re nevertheless hardworking and generally law-abiding, and then you have the criminal elements, which are involved in human trafficking, gang activity, that sort of thing.
Given the cost that you just laid out on the one hand, but also our desire to have kind of a humane immigration policy on the other, I mean, should our response to these two groups be the same or different from an enforcement perspective in your view?
Steve Malanga: Well, I think there’s a couple of issues here. First of all, the priority should be the criminal element, without a doubt. But the second thing to remember about, and the asylum program is meant to be a humane immigration policy, but the second thing to remember is virtually everyone who lives south of our border in every country is living in a place that has a standard of living substantially below the United States. We could not possibly ever accommodate all of the people who want to come here to make their lives better. It’s simply impossible.
We’ve made it worse by, in places like California and New York, actually giving government benefits to illegals, but kind of no questions asked government benefits. Milton Friedman, the famous economist once said, “You can’t have open borders and a welfare state.” Well, that’s exactly what we’ve had in the Biden years, and you can see the results of it. There are simply limits to our own capacity. Also, whenever anybody makes the humane argument, they don’t think about the implications for lower income Americans.
One of the things that’s been a real eye-opener during the Biden years has been the extent to which minority communities, low-income communities, in urban areas, and citizens have complained about the extent to which the government is now spending money on migrants and not on their communities. So there isn’t an unlimited amount of government resources even in the United States. And I think probably, fundamental to a lot of the change in attitudes is when we saw what was happening in New York City, when we saw what was happening in Chicago, and people from communities in those cities were arguing that they’re not benefiting from that money. Why is the government’s priority to attract people from elsewhere? There’s two sides to the humane argument, and even in a place like the United States, where resources are enormous compared to some of these other countries, that’s an argument that carries weight, and it clearly carried weight in some of these cities.
I believe that’s one of the reasons why you saw neighborhoods in traditionally true blue democratic places like even Philadelphia, where they went much more strongly for Trump than historically they’ve gone for Republicans.
John Hirschauer: Well, that argument certainly won the day earlier this month. Steve, thanks very much for this overview. Don’t forget to check out Steve Malanga’s work on the City Journal website. We’ll link to his author page and to his feature in the description. You can also find City Journal on X @CityJournal, and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi.
As always, if you like what you’ve heard on today’s podcast, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. Steve, thanks again for joining the show.
Steve Malanga: Thank you.
Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images