Why America can’t seem to fix its broken immigration system

NPR’s Juana Summers talks with Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s senior adviser for immigration and border policy, about why America has struggled to fix its immigration problem.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The situation at the U.S. border won’t get fixed any time soon. This afternoon, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan border package that was intended to decrease record numbers of illegal border crossings. This is the latest challenge, but the U.S. immigration system has not been working for decades. The last significant reform was 1986, and presidents and Congress have been trying to fix it and change it ever since.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

So why can’t America fix its immigration problem? That’s one of the questions I put to Theresa Cardinal Brown. She’s the Bipartisan Policy Center senior adviser for immigration and border policy. And she spent years working on immigration policy, including under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I asked her if she saw any similar challenges across administrations.

THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: Both President Bush and President Obama were trying to pass comprehensive immigration bills. And at that time, comprehensive immigration reform was widely understood to consist of three major components. One was reforms to the legal immigration system most often related to balancing between family-based immigration and employment-based immigration – temporary worker visas, what the caps and annual limits should be, legalization for the undocumented in the United States and then border security – which during those years, was really about how do we prevent and deter unlawful migration of Mexicans from Mexico ’cause that was the majority of what was happening at the border. Both presidents tried to do this on a bipartisan basis, and there were bipartisan efforts led – both times in the Senate, but in the House and the Senate – under both administrations.

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