Immigration Facts in America (The Wall, Deportation, and Immigration Courts) from the show Adam Ruins Everything

This is the script from the show "Adam Ruins Everything". In this particular episode, Adam Conover walks through three different topics:
1) How a border wall will not solve anything,
2) That mass deportation in America has a racist history and that it has shown that it does not work

3) The American Immigration Court System is a mess. 

What I've done is created a blog post by typing out the script from watching the episode. I've left some of the "comedic bits" out and tried to keep the quotes. I hope you read everything because it is so important and I want to spread the truth. Try to read with an open mind and feel free to do your own research. I'm not getting any money from this and if the people from the show read, I hope they allow me to keep it up. 

The quotes in quotation marks are from a character in the show, but they are important questions so read them as such. They will be in red and bolded. 

1) How a border wall will not solve any problems of American Immigration to and from Mexico. 

“a wall would stop illegal immigration and force everyone to follow the law”

Adam Conover:

Building a wall practically impossible

•   It would cut through 2,000 miles of rough terrain
•  Cutting through mountains, rivers, villages, and even peoples homes
• The cost would be around 15-25 billion dollars ---- 
• This would be the most expensive infrastructure in American history,
• costing more than 20 Hoover Dams and NASA’s entire annual budget
• This also includes the astronomical cost of staffing and maintaining the wall – taxpayers would be stuck paying (because Mexico’s not paying for it! -Marlo)

“It’s expensive but once it's built it will work”

Adam Conover:
Increasing security at the border will never stop illegal immigration

• An estimated 27-40% of all undocumented immigrants in America, came here by plane

These immigrants didn’t sneak over the border, they came here legally, through passport control then just overstayed their visas.

“even by your estimate of visa overstays, the wall would stop about ½ of America’s 11 million illegal immigrants”

Adam Conover:
No, it wouldn’t because of a little something called

                                   “circular flow”

•   For decades, immigration into the US was a circular flow; 
• people would come, work for a bit, and then after they were done, go home to their families

                 Douglas Massey, (professor of Sociology at Princeton):

•  When the Regan, Bush, and Clinton administrations drastically increased border enforcement in response to public opinion, they stopped that circular flow. 

               Adam Conover:
                          Not by keeping people out, but keeping people in.

               Douglas Massey:
                           As it got harder to go back and forth, people crossing the border deciding they would be better off just staying in the US

                           Ironically, this increase in border enforcement caused the number of            undocumented immigrants living in the United States to skyrocket by 248%.

                Adam Conover:
                           It’s counter-intuitive but building the wall wouldn’t stop people from coming in, it would stop them from going back.

Douglas Massey:
- In fact, the whole idea of building a border wall is misguided.
- The Mexican economy is doing quite well and population growth has slowed down so there’s not much pressure to immigrate. 

      

          The number of illegal border crossings is at an all-time low.

Border Control Apprehensions: 

1986- 1,692, 544

2000 – 1,676,438

2015 – 337,117

Adam Conover:
We probably have the most militarised border between any two nations at peace. So the real issue isn’t people coming in, the fact is, they are already here. 

• Nearly 1 out of every 30 people in America is an unauthorized immigrant.
  
  The only thing a wall stops is a discussion of actual solutions.

“The Wall isn’t the answer, millions of people are already here, we need to deport them! Yes, deportation is the answer!”

This brings me to part 2.

2) That mass deportation in America has a racist history and history has shown us that it does not work

(A new character who is not a source, but is used in the show -Marlo)

Alfonso:
Mass deportation always ends in disaster.

“why wouldn’t we deport people who came here illegally?”

Alfonso:
America’s deportation history is a disturbing cycle:Our story begins in 1846, when President Polk provoked war with Mexico as an excuse to seize their land.

Adam Conover:
Are you talking about when the US straight up attacked Mexico and took millions of square miles of their land just because we could?

Alfonso:
President Polk’s war seized land that now includes:
Texas, California, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas, Utah, and Oklahoma

                                   https://paulkiser.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/americas-hostile-takeover-of-mexico/

“All these states were part of Mexico? So the people living there were Mexican?”

                     Alfonso:
                     Yes. But in the year 1930, President Herbert Hoover blamed those same Mexicans for the Great Depression.

• Herbet Hoover, 1930 – “I urge the strengthening of our deportation laws so as to more fully rid ourselves of criminal aliens”
• During the 30’s and 40's, local and state officials deported up to 2 million Mexicans.

“But if they weren’t citizens…..”

                     Alfonso:
                     Actually, more than half of them were American citizens.

                     Adam Conover:
                     During this period (1930s and 1940s), the US deported nearly 1 million of our own citizens, just because they had brown skin.

            Alfonso:
            Soon after the deportations, WWII began. 

• The United States changed their minds and decided they do need Mexicans after all. 
• Congress enacted the Bracero Program and welcomed Mexicans to the US to fill jobs left behind by soldiers.

“See, they came here legally and they helped win the war! That’s an inspiring American story”

Alfonso:
yes, very inspiring. It inspired a new wave of mass deportations. 

• After a decade of inviting Mexicans in, in 1954, President Eisenhower declared: Operation Wetback. (yes they actually called it that!)

Adam Conover:
Not only were these programs explicitly racist, they were a human rights disaster.

Thousands of families were detained and separated:

• They were crowded onto boats described as 18^th century slave ships. 
• And those who went by sea were lucky. 88 braceros died after being left in the desert. 

Not only was this program unconscionably inhumane, it destroyed the image of America as a bastion of freedom and equality for a generation of Mexican Americans.

Alfonso:
Let me be very clear. These mass deportation programs are one the most shameful acts in American history. They solve nothing. Their only outcome was suffering and death.

“I didn’t know our history was so horrible. Things are different now. We’re better, right?”

Now onto part 3

3) The American Immigration Court System is a mess. 

(A character in the episode mentions that the Department of Immigration wants to deport her.)

Adam Conover:
The US immigration courts are a mess. It’s not just pieces that are messed up, the whole system is messed up (changed slightly -Marlo)

”But abuela didn’t come here illegally, she just lost her paperwork”

Adam Conover:
All kinds of people are scooped up into these courts:

•  Some were apprehended at the border or committed a crime. 
• Others were picked up for a minor traffic violation.
• And some just lost their paperwork. 
• Some came here legally, others, not so much.

The purpose of this court is to determine which is which.

 Here’s the problem:

• less than 2% of what we spend on immigration annually is devoted to these courts.
• There are just 57 immigration courts across the US. 
• We have 30x as many Radio Shacks as we do immigration courts. 
• The immigration courts currently have a backlog of  489,000 cases.

This underfunded system has so few immigration judges
     - that each one handles 1,500 cases every year and
     - unlike regular judges, they can be fired for not working fast enough.

Even worse, the vast majority of respondents go through this system without a lawyer

“wait, what about public defenders?”

Adam Conover:
Nope. Unlike regular, or lets be frank, real courts, immigration courts do not provide lawyers.
Even to unaccompanied minors.

Not to mention the sever language barrier. In some cases, interpreters are only available over the phone.

“This has to be an exaggeration, it cant possibly be this bad.”

Adam Conover:
No, often it’s much worse: 

•  Some detention centers are so remote, that defendants can’t even be physically present in court. 
• So the government conducts hearings via Skype or televideo.

Think about it. That means you can have a hearing where the judge is in the courtroom, the translator is talking over the phone, and the defendant is on a webcam. This is really happening in immigration court rooms across America as we speak. And it’s no surprise that under this cockamamie process, huge mistakes happen constantly.

Professor Jackie Stevens: (Department of Political Science, Northwestern University):

                            This system regularly deports American citizens

In fact, in 2009, I got to know a man named Mark Lyttle. 

• He is a US Citizen with mental disabilities who was deported in what is known as a mass removal. 
• The judge asked a group of 30 men over televideo to raise their hands if they objected to being deported. 
• The judge recorded seeing no hands

Adam Conover:
When he later told them he was born in North Carolina, nobody listened.

Professor Jackie Stevens:

         He was deported to Mexico.
         When officials there discovered he wasn’t a Mexican citizen, they deported him yet again to Honduras. And they deported him to Guatemala.

Adam Conover:
Police in Guatemala finally found Mark Lyttle sleeping on a park bench thousands of miles from home.

“So he finally got to go home, right?”

Professor Jackie Stevens:
Yes, but when he arrived in Atlanta, he was detained again.

“How awful”

Professor Jackie Stevens:
Yes and shockingly common:

• According to my research, more than 20,000 US citizens have been detained or deported since 2003.

Adam Conover:
This system is so broken that natural born citizens like you or me are deported all the time. Whether you’re conservative or liberal, or somewhere in between, you have to face the fact that what our immigration system does to people is contrary to every American value.

 (/End transcipt)

Here is a link to all of Adam Conover's sources:

http://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/blog/adams-sources/adam-ruins-immigration.html