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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

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DANIEL:

In a rally at Madison Square garden New York, just over a week from the election, Donald Trump took to the stage with a vision for the first day of his presidency.

Audio Excerpt - Donald Trump:

“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history and to get the criminals out.”

DANIEL:

Trump is promising to deport more than 11 million people if he wins the election.

Audio Excerpt - Donald Trump:

“The day I take the oath of office, the migrant invasion of our country ends and the restoration of our country begins.”

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DANIEL:

Immigration has been one of the most pressing and divisive issues of the race, with fears of ‘border chaos’ and misinformation about immigrants eating pets dominating.

But the facts about immigration tell a different story.

Today, investigative reporter for ProPublica Mica Rosenberg on the real ways immigration is affecting America.

It’s Wednesday October 30.

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DANIEL:

Your investigation starts in a town called Whitewater, Wisconsin. Can you tell me about the town and what happened there?

MICA:

So this is a story that actually my colleagues at ProPublica reported out for months. They went to Whitewater, Wisconsin, and found that there had been a big increase in the number of Nicaraguan migrants arriving in the town in the past couple of years. And this is a relatively small town, sort of a college town but a lot of the Nicaraguans were coming to work in factories there.

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“Since 2022, around 800 - 1000 migrants from Central and South America have come to White Water, Wisconsin…”

MICA:

The local police chief was really getting bogged down because a lot of the new immigrants were driving without licenses and the small police department was overwhelmed with more traffic stops and lack of Spanish speaking staff.

And so in late 2023, he actually wrote to President Biden asking for some federal funds to help hire more people.

But the letter came to the attention of former President Donald Trump.

Audio Excerpt - Donald Trump:

“Not far from where we are today in a small, very beautiful town of 15,000. Whitewater, you know Whitewater? Kamala has flooded the town with an estimated 2,000 migrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua… diseases are speaking like wildfire… the police say they cannot handle the surge in crime, the town is in big trouble.”

MICA:

And he promised that voters, you know, voters that he would conduct the largest deportation operation in American history.

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“We have no choice, we have no choice, we have no choice!”

MICA:

It was not the intention of the chief, to sort of become the centre of this national talking point. And he really had just wanted to get a little more, more help to deal with the problems that he was seeing on the ground.

DANIEL:

Are there stories like that everywhere across small town America? Or is that just an outlier?

MICA:

There have been cases, other cases like Whitewater. Another one that spilled into the news was in Springfield, Ohio, was a place where many Haitian migrants were arriving. And, you know, they were working in factories there. But, you know, Trump also seized on that place.

Audio Excerpt - Donald Trump:

“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats.”

MICA:

So, you know, that's what we were hoping to do with this reporting is to look into many of these different places, you know, not just Whitewater, but we have stories from Denver, Colorado, which is another place that has been a flash point about migrants.

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“In less than 24 hours, 16 buses packed with migrants arrived in Denver. The city of Denver confirms nine busloads arrived last night.”

MICA:

And from Del Rio, Texas, which is on the border.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter:

“The number of migrants waiting under the bridge there continues to rise. Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano says the tally stands at 10,503 migrants, many of them Haitian.”

DANIEL:

You’d think from Trump's rhetoric that America is in the midst of an unprecedented immigration crisis, so how does the rhetoric match up to the data?

MICA:

What we found is that there's definitely been, you know, clearly a big spike in the number of people that are coming to the U.S. border in recent years. But it's not exactly unprecedented, in part because, you know, in the past there was a much larger number of people who were sort of uncounted and apprehended and the majority of them were coming from Mexico.

But something that is distinct about what is happening now is that with more Central Americans coming in and more recently, people from South America and from either even further afield, sometimes as far away as China, India, West Africa, coming to the border,

Many of them don't try to escape. People now are turning themselves in and asking for asylum. And you know that in combination with a change in the demographics of people that are coming from new countries that hadn't come before has created a really different dynamic around the country.

DANIEL:

Coming up after the break – why more people than ever are turning themselves in at the US border and the political maelstrom that’s followed.

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DANIEL:

Mica, you said that America is not in the midst of an unprecedented immigration crisis, it’s just that more people than ever are turning themselves into the authorities rather than trying to escape from them. Why is that?

MICA:

So starting as far back as in the Obama administration, there was a trend of more children who were coming by themselves or families. And under U.S. law and international law, there's certain protections that asylum seekers and children and families can seek protection. And there's legal restrictions on how long they can be detained. And, you know, how how they can't be returned to some place where they could face persecution or danger.

And so, many of those people, because there wasn't kind of space or appetite to, you know, detain children and families, ended up being released into the United States and so over time, word got out that, you know, if you turn yourself in, you might be able to be released into the United States.

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“The girls, like everyone here, are now just waiting to turn themselves into Border Patrol. Virtually all will seek asylum in the U.S., a legal protection that takes years to formally determine.”

MICA:

And that process can get you into, you know, a very backlogged court system where you can live in the country while you're waiting for your case to be decided. And in some cases, you can, you know, apply for work permits, apply, you know, for some benefits. So that's a phenomenon that has, sort of, grown over the years.

But, you know, that, that is something Trump has latched onto.

Audio Excerpt - Donald Trump:

“The United States will not be a migrant camp. And it will not be a refugee holding facility, won't be. You look at what's happening in Europe, you'll look at what's happening in other places. We can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.”

MICA:

When he took office after Obama he said that this asylum process, you know, they viewed it as a loophole, you know, as migrants sort of taking advantage of the system and did a lot to kind of crack down on the process, you know, which was, you know, a lot of immigration advocates said that there were people who were facing legitimate harm, you know, who suffered because of that.

Audio Excerpt - Speaker 1:

“A new directive by the Trump administration Zero tolerance is to prosecute all such migrants criminally, which means by law, parents and children must be separated.”

Audio Excerpt - Speaker 2:

“Tearing children from the arms of their mother and their father is not the right decision. It has got to stop.”

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“Some call the place Ursula. After its street address, others label it in Spanish, La pereyra, the dog kennel.”

MICA:

And he's now just ratcheting up some of that rhetoric, but calling out some of these, you know, different communities.

DANIEL:

Trump has succeeded in making this election about immigration above almost anything else. So how has Harris responded to that?

MICA:

I think one really surprising thing about this election is how, you know, the Harris campaign has taken a much harder stance on border security.

Earlier this year, they put a more restrictive ban on seeking asylum at the border and made it more difficult. And they said as a result of that, you know, illegal crossings have dropped and, you know, more people are being processed and quicker through the system and more people are being deported.

The Trump campaign has really tried to paint her, you know, with this label of border Czar, which she and the Biden administration says is a role she never actually had. She was given a mandate to address the root causes of migration from, you know, a very specific reason in Central America. And obviously, that's a very difficult and long term task and it's hard to see results from something like that in the short term.

And so, it was something that, you know, her allies say that she made progress on. But, you know, it was kind of a difficult political situation for her to be in. So I think, from those early days, she somewhat distanced herself from the issue. And now on the campaign trail as she's running for president, she's really focussed on the border enforcement side of things as well as, really trying to pin the blame on Trump for not backing a bipartisan border deal that would have addressed some of these issues.

There's a lot more nuance and complexity and historical context around these issues that don't really lend themselves to soundbites or campaign ads. And that's kind of left people who are in the middle of these debates out of the conversation, and there’s a gap now between rhetoric on the campaign trail and then how people are feeling about the issue, and then you know, the sort of real facts on the ground.

DANIEL:

Well, thank you for bringing data and nuance to this discussion, Mica. Thank you for joining us.

MICA:

Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news,

Australia is calling on Israel to abandon two bills that restrict operations of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Foreign Minister Penny Wong stated that UNRWA does life-saving work and called on Israel to comply with the ICJ order to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

The new laws take effect in 90 days, with the body’s commissioner general saying “these bills will only deepen the suffering of Palestinians”

And, the Prime Minister has dismissed questions about his relationship with former Qantas boss Alan Joyce. A new book about the exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge claims that while he was transport minister, Albanese had a direct line to Joyce which he used to score flight upgrades.

It alleges he received more than 20 upgrades declared on his register of interests, and upgrades for his former wife that were not declared.

In response, the Prime Minister said he has been ‘completely transparent’ and the claim was an attempt to quote ‘sell a book’.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. We will be back tomorrow.

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