WSJ What’s News - President Biden Tasked Kamala Harris With Immigration. How Did She Do?

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

P.M. Edition for Oct. 14. WSJ immigration reporter Michelle Hackman on Kamala Harris’s role in President Biden’s border plan. And the Journal’s Justin Lahart discusses the U.S. economy under former President Trump and President Biden. Plus, WSJ reporter Sean McLain explains why used EVs are selling for bargain prices. Tracie Hunte hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Courage. I learned it from my adoptive mom. Hold my hand. You hold my hand. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care at adoptUSkids.org. You can't imagine the reward. Brought to you by AdoptUSkids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. How do Trump and Biden compare on the economy?

And did Vice President Kamala Harris succeed in her immigration assignment? This is not an election where Harris is expecting to win voters on the issue of immigration. She is just trying to neutralize their concerns as much as possible so that potentially they'll vote for her on other issues. Plus, why used electric vehicles are selling for bargain prices.

It's Monday, October 14th. I'm Tracy Hunt for the Wall Street Journal. This is a PM edition of What's News, the top headlines in business stories that move the world today. Let's start with the presidential election. Back in May 2021, President Biden gave his number two, Kamala Harris, a big job. Lead the administration's efforts in addressing the root causes of migration from El Salvador and other northern Central American countries.

Now that Harris is running for president and immigration is top of mind for many voters, the issue has become a political liability, as Republicans exaggerated her role to label the vice president as border czar, though her initiative was much narrower. Joining us now is WSJ reporter Michelle Hackman to help us take a closer look at how Kamala Harris tackled immigration. So Michelle, what was her strategy? So we wanted to write this story because Harris's assignment has been deeply misunderstood.

Historically, most illegal migration were coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. And Biden thought this would be a great assignment for his vice president, Kamala Harris, to figure out if there were ways to make those countries more livable, more prosperous, so the people actually would decide not to leave rather than tackling it on the front end here at the border. LESLIE KENDRICK Is there any way to tell if the work that she did on this issue using this strategy worked?

KAMALA HARRIS Harris has secured about $5 billion of private investment in the region. So a lot of American companies are doing really tangible things like opening new factories to slightly more intangible stuff, training small businesses in the region to use mobile payments or open new bank accounts, things like that. What we have found is that a lot of that investment has really improved the individual lives of people it's touched, but it's hard to tell whether that has had the trickle-down effect yet of having people say, oh, wow, you know, there are actually better opportunities for me now. I thought about coming to the United States and now I'm not going to come. I think that's a longer term bet.

But overall, border crossings have been going up. The story that everyone's familiar with is that border crossings have shot up over the last four or so years. But really interestingly from these three countries historically that have been sending a lot of asylum seekers, border crossings have actually gone down and by a lot. The vice president has been claiming some amount of success for that, that her initiatives and focusing so much on the region has been a factor. And it's really unclear and it's hard to say whether that's the case, but it is an interesting

pattern. What are Republicans saying about what's going on at the border? Republicans have made immigration one of the central issues that they're campaigning on. And they have attacked Kamala Harris because from the very beginning they called her the borders are they complained so much that she hadn't gone to the border that she actually you know this is back in 2021 paved and made a border visit she went again as a candidate and so this has become a sort of a real liability for Harris because she's been so closely

tied to the border and because the border's been so chaotic for the last few years. However, when you actually ask Republican businesspeople, do they support this development work in Central America of bringing more investment, more jobs, more opportunities to the region, people are supportive of that idea. Michelle Hackman is an immigration reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Electric vehicles have gone from pricey purchases to some of the biggest bargains on the used car lot as resale values for the vehicles have tumbled. According to the car shopping website Edmunds, the average selling price of a three-year-old electric vehicle was about $28,400 last month.

That's less than that of a gas vehicle of the same age and a 25% drop from the start of 2023. Joining us now is Wall Street Journal reporter, Sean McLean. So Sean, why are we seeing this dramatic drop in price? Well, a couple of market dynamics are happening right now. The first of which is new car prices are the number one determinant of used car prices. Usually there is a significant discount on a used vehicle price compared to the new vehicle price and what's happened over the past year and a half is that car companies because demand from consumers hasn't been what they expected they've overproduced and

as a result they've started discounting they've started offering cheap leases which is pushing down the resale value of recently purchased EVs. What could this mean for the EV market? Well, it means a couple different things and it depends on who you are. One, if you're in the market to buy an EV these days, it's probably never been a better time. You know, there's a lot of good cheap deals out there.

Now, for dealers, this is less good news. So you're taking these vehicles and trade in and it's a harder calculation for you to figure out how much you should pay the owner of that vehicle to trade it in. And finally, the biggest outstanding question is what this means for the car makers and their lending arms. They're selling these vehicles based on how much they think that vehicle will be worth in two or three years. Now because the prices have dropped so quickly, a lot of those calculations are probably off. So unless the new car market rebounds and prices go back up, we could be seeing a situation

a couple years down the line where somebody is gonna have to pay for that mismatch and residual values. And the jury's still out on who that's going to be and how much that's going to cost. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Sean McLean. Coming up, the economy under Trump and Biden. How do they compare? That's after the break. Former President Donald Trump is running on his economic record from when he was in office. And while Vice President Kamala Harris isn't at the helm at the White House, President

Biden's economic record is effectively hers. So with three weeks until the presidential election, we wanted to compare the economic records of Trump and Biden. Joining us now is Justin Laihart, an economics reporter with the Wall Street Journal. So Justin, let's start with some key numbers. When it comes to GDP, unemployment, and job growth, how do these administrations compare? Former President Trump, the economy under his watch was doing pretty well right up until the pandemic. So from the end of 2016 to the end of 2019, GDP is doing pretty good.

Job growth is doing pretty good. Then the pandemic hits and that just changed the narrative a lot. GDP growth, you know, over his four years in office was down to 1.8%. And while unemployment was getting better after the initial pandemic shock, it was still above 6% when he left office. And under Biden? Under Biden, GDP is quite strong. But through the second quarter of this year, GDP is higher than economists thought it would get before the pandemic started. And then as Biden comes in,

job growth is extremely strong, partly because the economy is coming back from the pandemic. What about inflation? Yeah, so inflation is the opposite for Biden, you know, it was quite bad. During the Trump years, inflation was very cool. People really didn't notice it. Right now, inflation heated up a lot. Lately, it's cooled.

But the level of prices is really much, much higher than it was when Biden's term started. How about household income? Median household income under the Trump administration rose pretty well. For Biden, that's not what happened. After adjusting for inflation, the median household is making more now than they were in 2020, just a tiny bit more. You know, part of this was that inflation really took a bite out of what was going on with people's incomes. I am curious, how does inflation distort people's outlook on the economy?

One of the things that we've learned over the past four years is we really, really, really don't like inflation. We haven't had this sort of inflation experience in a very long time. And it's really difficult to deal with. Even when people's wages are going up more than inflation, people don't think that they're getting higher wages because inflation went up. They think they're getting higher wages because they're doing a good job, because they've got promotions, because they work hard.

So even if their paychecks are doing better, right, it's still very upsetting to see inflation take a bite out of that pay increase. Of course, we've been talking about what the economy looked like under Trump and Biden. But to what extent can a president actually, you know, take responsibility for these outcomes, whether positive or negative? So the economy is really, it's big, it's complex. So you know, a president's influence can be fairly muted. But when it comes to what people are thinking about when they vote

It really comes down to the person who is in charge Justin. Layhart is a Wall Street Journal economics reporter. Thank you so much Justin All right. Thanks very much in Markets all three US major indexes rose today Continued strength in Nvidia stock helped drive the S&P 500 up 0.8% to a fresh record, while the Nasdaq ended up 0.9%. And the Dow rose 0.5%, crossing the 43,000-point milestone for the first time. The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for

work that advanced the understanding of differences and prosperity between countries. The work of the three economists is based on the history of colonialism and the different ways in which national experiences have affected institutions, such as the protection of property rights or the way in which political decisions are made. And a historic mission to Jupiter's icy moon Europa has blasted off, marking the beginning of a decade-long endeavor to find out whether the moon is habitable. The uncrewed NASA spacecraft, Europa Clipper, will travel 1.8 billion miles, settling into Jupiter's orbit in 2030, where it will spend four

years helping scientists assess whether Europa has the conditions necessary to sustain life. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bansi and Pierre Bienneme with supervising producer Michael Cosmitis. I'm Tracy Hunt for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.