 Kato's Alex Nowarasta, who is an immigration liberalizer, had a pretty good Twitter thread over the weekend, contextualizing all of this stuff. And even in the middle of that, he had this following thing that caught my eye. Quote, the immigration court backlog is currently about 3.3 million. Those migrants are going to be waiting, working and living in the United States for a long time and many won't leave even if the court orders them to go. That's just crazy untenable, isn't it? I mean, not just as a kind of practical thing, but certainly as a political thing. Yeah, I mean, Alex is basically always right about everything with respect to immigration. I associate myself with him. I can't think of a time that he's been wrong. So I think that, you know, his persistent efforts to point out what the status quo really is are really important. Like, they're here. They're already here. And that's again why I think this invasion language is so weird and so unhelpful. It's not like... This isn't a Mars attack situation. It's not a Mars attack situation. And, you know, the Martians are already among us, I guess, and it's fine. It's more like Alien Nation, which was itself an extended sci-fi parable about immigration assimilation. Great movie with Mandy Katinken. So as with actual aliens, when they come, we would be better off to welcome them, to talk with them, to have them, you know, to treat them with respect, to not have them risk their lives to come here. I can't speak to how the actual alien invasion is gonna go, but we already know what happens when we let people in. And, you know, when we let people in, and Nick is correct to note that the border is a mess, but one solution, which I know is not on the table right now in our current political climate, but one solution, one way to prevent a messy, deadly, confusing, politically polarizing, playable disaster at the border, is to just let people come here, to just make the doors of legal entry to throw them open wider. And it doesn't mean we have to let every single person come here, although I think maybe that would still be the way, honestly, but... The vast majority of people who don't have communicable diseases and don't have criminal histories. Take your astros in leave. Like, I just think in the end, if we are looking for a solution to this truly horrible situation, both at the border and all these people who are living within the country, who are being told at any time, you know, maybe your status will be revoked, maybe you will have to be thrown out, maybe you'll have to choose between staying where your life is and going into hiding, or going back to a place that you left for a reason, I just think that we could just choose more openness. That is really an option and I think the only morally defensible one, but I also think a really pragmatic one. I genuinely think that this is doable. And Alex, as usual, has like some excellent concrete steps that we can take, including stuff like, you know, getting the, you know, simplifying and speeding up the paperwork backlog for people who are already here. One of the points that Alex makes in that post that is very good is that this is a demand issue and this is a demand side issue because the US economy is in some ways, especially with regards to the job market, actually doing pretty well. And like there are a lot of job openings, especially for lower skilled labor. And so people want to come here. And so to me, the operating metaphor here is not movies from the 1990s about alien detectives or alien invasions. Instead, it's prohibition. And people resist this metaphor when it comes to immigration because they see it as something fundamentally different. But it's really very similar in so many ways because there is a demand for something. With prohibition, it was alcohol. With immigration, it is good jobs and a better life for your family. And that demand is not going to go away just because you try to put an artificial barrier in the way of it, right? Instead, people are going to try, they're going to try to get it through means that are more dangerous and more chaotic. And it's going to create a secondary market in violence and criminality. That is what happened in prohibition and it's what is happening with the border. And if you want to tamp down on crime and if you want to make it harder for gang members and violent people to come in, to cross the border, then what we need to do is we need to say people who are obviously peaceful and just want to come here and work and contribute to the economy, they can come in and there's an easy and straightforward process for them to do that. And then we're going to focus our efforts on catching the actual bad guys who want to come over here and do bad stuff. It'd be nice to hear a president who has the bully pulpit really come out and say exactly that, that we're a nation of immigrants and that everybody who wants to live and work peacefully is welcome here. It does cause disruption. We're going to meter it out. So it's not like a billion people coming in the first year or anything like that, but we're going to expedite it. Right now, as much as anything, and this is true not just of immigration, but it's true of economics, it's true of foreign policy, we don't have a national meta narrative of like what is America about? And as a result, you start to see people knock off things. Forced Republicans to say that they don't want anybody new in the country because things are perfect the way they are. Forced left-wingers to admit that we cannot admit people and not that this happens, but it's the fear, you can't just bring in a lot of people who are immediately going to go on welfare rolls, which by the way, if we continue with current asylum policy, if you bring people in and they can't work, that's like fucked up beyond belief. Let people come here and live and work openly and honestly, they don't get welfare, they don't necessarily get citizenship, but they do get legal status and they're going to move into the parts of the country where there are opportunity and that will take care of all sorts of problems rather than cause any. But we need to be talking about why immigration is important to the country, not just in economic terms, but also in kind of national and identity terms. And we also need to talk about the fears that people have where part of this is a larger anxiety that's throughout the country in all different ways about the future, about how things are shifting radically out of the world that most of us grow up in and didn't like when we had it, we wanted it to change, but now we look back nostalgically as if, you know, the 1970s when immigration was very low is somehow a good thing. I mean, fashion? Yes, it was a great thing, the 1970s. And it's pretty good in music, underrepresented, yeah. Proc rock and bell bottoms, bring them back. Matt likes the colors. Elephant, elephant bottoms, bell bottoms, elephant bottoms.