With harsh rhetoric from President Trump, who wants strict new limits on refugees, asylum seekers and some other forms of immigration, to calls by several Democratic Presidential candidates to decriminalize all border crossings, the immigration debate is increasingly dominated by slogans rather than substance.

Hopes for a comprehensive and humane overhaul of U.S. immigration law have all but disappeared for now.

"The reality is illegal immigration has come to be THE conversation, says our guest, Andrew Selee, President of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, which seeks to improve immigration policies through fact-based research. 

"Most immigration in the United States is legal immigration," he says. "What we're not talking about is that most people are legal immigrants, and that most people are coming Asia, rather than Latin America."

Also, he says: "immigrants on average have a higher education level than native-born Americans, which is something few of us realize."

In this episode, we unpack the myths about migration and look at potential solutions-- including ways to speed up the backlog of asylum cases, the benefits of a more merit-based system of legal immigration, and a path to legal residency for many of the millions of undocumented people now living in the United States.

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