Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from producer Raymond Rapada. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren If there’s one thing consuming Washington this week — it’s immigration. Republicans traveled to the border to accuse JOE BIDEN of creating a crisis. The White House fired back. A GOP committee signaled it would move forward with the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS, while Senate negotiators and Biden administration officials continued to try reaching a deal on border policy changes. It’s a mess. And it’s coming against the backdrop of local leaders across the country pleading for more help. West Wing Playbook called one of those leaders, Denver Mayor MIKE JOHNSTON, to talk about how his city’s managing. This conversation has been edited for length. How has the border crisis affected your city? Denver is ground zero for America’s migrant crisis because we are the single largest recipient per capita of migrants of any city. We are averaging about 200-250 people that arrive every day by buses from the border. We have more than 4,500 people in the shelter system on any given night. Our migrant arrivals over the last year have added 5 percent to the entire city’s population alone. What have you learned from the migrants you’ve spoken to? I’m a Spanish speaker. So I spend a lot of days just talking to migrants when they arrive. There was one gentleman who followed me around for about a half an hour waiting patiently to talk. He said, “Mr. Mayor, look at me, I have strong hands. I have a good back. I have a big heart. I walked 3,000 miles to get here. All I want is a job. I just want to work, and I can help you.” And that is what I hear every day, all day. And I think the challenge we find is they get to the country, they get paroled in on an asylum case. Many of their court dates for their asylum claims are 2028 or 2029. And in the meantime, they cannot work. What do solutions look like? For us, if we have federal resources, and people arrive with work authorization, we’ve been very successful. We have welcomed 37,000 migrants to the city, and only in the last two months have had our first 3- or 400 show up homeless. But once those work authorizations ran out in August and September, more and more folks arrived without the ability to work. The reason this supplemental is so important is that it has more administrative capacity at the border, so you could resolve asylum claims in 90 days instead of in six years. Does the political division on immigration in Washington reflect what you hear in Denver? I get calls every day from employers who are frustrated because they want to hire these migrants because they have open jobs, and we’re telling them they can’t. That’s above my paygrade, that’s for the Congress to decide. The reason why conservatives should be excited about this is, if you grant people work authorization, then they can do what they want to do — which is support themselves. And that means we need far fewer federal dollars to be able to support them. If we’re not going to grant them work authorization, we’re going to have to provide almost perpetual public funding to support them. What have the communication lines been like with Mayorkas and the White House? Mayorkas is probably the most responsive Cabinet member I’ve ever worked with. I’m in regular touch with Tom Perez [director of Office of Intergovernmental Affairs] at the White House. He’s also been very helpful. They’re trying to figure out how they can get the contours of what cities need on the ground into a package they can get through both houses of Congress. Will 2024 be any different in terms of how voters weigh the immigration issue? If we go into 2024 and have $180 million budget hit to support migrants in this city — that would be catastrophic. It would be twice the size of cuts we took during Covid. Twice the size of cuts we took from the 2009 and 2010 recession. So I think the challenge will be if the newcomers keep arriving without work authorization and without resources, the impacts it will have on cities will be dramatic. And I think the responses will be dramatic. MESSAGE US — Are you Homeland Security Secretary ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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