The US House member Mike Lawler attempted on Sunday to tease out two pressing issues facing the new Congress beginning in 2025, telling an American political talkshow that this was not the moment for his fellow Republicans to have a “food fight” over leadership in Capitol Hill and that the country “needs an immigration system that works”.

Both issues have dominated political headlines in recent days, as potential policy splits become apparent between far-right congressional Republicans and the executive team being assembled for their party leader Donald Trump’s second presidency beginning in January.

Lawler told ABC’s This Week that the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, should be re-elected despite Republican infighting over whether he should keep the position after his handling of negotiations over a government funding bill.

“Mike Johnson inherited a disaster when Matt Gaetz and several of my colleagues teamed up with 208 Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy, which will go down as the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in politics,” Lawler said, referring to the spectacle of mutinous Republicans led by Gaetz in the fall of 2023 taking the speaker’s gavel away from McCarthy.

McCarthy left Congress months after his removal. Gaetz also left Congress in November in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the House ethics committee from releasing a report which found “substantial evidence” that he paid for sex with a minor, among other serious violations of congressional rules and laws in his home state of Florida.

“Removing Mike Johnson would equally be as stupid,” Lawler – a New York representative – remarked. “The fact is that these folks are playing with fire, and if they think they’re somehow going to get a more conservative speaker, they’re kidding themselves.”

Lawler said: “We can’t get anything done unless we have a speaker” – including certifying Trump’s victory in the November election, which is scheduled to take place in early January.

“So, to waste time over a nonsensical intramural food fight is a joke. And I think my colleagues, if they didn’t learn anything from the [outgoing] Congress, it should be that we absolutely do not need a fight over the speakership,” Lawler said.

Lawler won a key New York congressional race in November by a 57% to 41% margin, affording him a significant platform within the party. On Sunday, he also used that platform to weigh in on immigration as the party attempts to reconcile a hard-line, anti-immigration faction with the economic need for both high- and low-skilled workers in various industries.

That conflict broke out into the open last week when Trump’s most prominent backers from the tech industry – including SpaceX, Tesla and X’s Elon Musk and the AI-crypto czar David Sacks – clashed with the ultra-right Trump supporter Laura Loomer after she made reference to “third-world invaders” purportedly taking desirable jobs from those born in the US.

On Sunday, Lawler weighed in on the side of the tech leaders like Musk, who himself had dismissed far-right proponents of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (Maga) faction “contemptible fools” and “unrepentant racists”.

“We need immigration,” Lawler said. Mentioning that his wife is an immigrant, he added: “We need an immigration system that works, that is legal, and I fundamentally believe that you need to have a system that is focused on our economic needs as a country and a more merit-based immigration system than anything else.

“I have been through this process with her. It is a fundamentally broken system.”

The New York Republican also pointed out that H-1B visas, which often go to skilled tech programmers and are being fought over, amount to just 65,000 visas with an additional 20,000 for applicants with master’s degrees.

The visas, he said, are “critical to our economy, and as President Trump said, it’s a program he’s used over the years for his businesses, and it’s something that has obviously been beneficial to our economy”.

The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna of California, who is seeking common ground with the so-called “department of government efficiency” that Trump wants Musk to lead, said on Sunday that the debate over H-1B visas for the tech industry was missing the point. If the US did not celebrate “the talent and genius and skills of people of diverse backgrounds” while also seeking to limit undocumented immigrants, the country would not lead the world in Nobel laureates in physics, medicine and chemistry, Khanna said.

“If there was some problem with the culture we wouldn’t be the world’s greatest economy of 30 trillion,” Khanna told Fox News.

But Khanna also argued that the H-1B system keeps foreign workers in limbo because they are less able to negotiate salary and benefits compared with domestic hires – and they are hurt by unfair labor conditions.

The system, he said, “needs major reform – and if you don’t see that either you don’t understand what’s happening or you’re not being truthful.”

The larger question, Khanna added, was not over H-1Bs and getting into “epic fights on social media” – but how the US had lost existing industries to foreign competition.

“The real challenge in America is, how did we lose steel? How did we lose aluminum? How did we allow for de-industrialization?” Khanna said. “You want to bring back new jobs, you need to have the investment in reindustrialization of America in places left out. And that’s what we should be talking about.”

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At least 174 people were killed on Sunday morning after a South Korean passenger jet crashed and burst into flames on landing, according to local authorities, in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters.

The Jeju Air flight was returning from Bangkok with 181 people on board when it failed to deploy its landing gear, skidding down the runway before it struck a wall and was engulfed in fire at Muan International Airport in the south of the country.

Two crew members were rescued from the aircraft’s tail, according to the national fire agency, but most of the passengers were feared dead, officials told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. More than 30 trucks and several helicopters were deployed to the disaster.

Of the 175 passengers, 173 were South Korean, while the remaining two were Thai nationals, according to the transportation ministry. There were six crew members on board.

South Korea’s acting president Choi Sang-mok — who assumed office on Friday after his predecessor was impeached by parliament — vowed to “dig into the cause [and] and take steps to prevent any recurrence of similar accidents”.

“This is a grave situation. We will do our utmost to cope with the damage,” he said from the scene of the crash.

Local television news footage showed thick smoke billowing from the wreckage of the aircraft, a twin-engined Boeing 737-800 jet.

The transport ministry said the airport’s control tower had issued a bird strike warning about a minute before the pilots called mayday. The crash occurred five minutes later.

Ministry officials said they had retrieved the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders in their investigation into the crash. The pilot was a veteran with a flight record of more than 6,800 hours.  

Muan airport would remain closed until January 1, the ministry said.

Jeju Air, a South Korean budget airline that was established in 2005, activated emergency protocols. “We offer our deepest condolences for the victims and bereaved families. We feel great responsibility and will do our best to find out the exact cause of the accident,” the company’s president Kim E-bae said in a televised statement.

The airline said the plane, which was 15 years old, had undergone regular maintenance, and no malfunctions were reported when it departed from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport.

Boeing also said it was in contact with the airline regarding the incident.

South Korea has suffered several fatal aircraft disasters, although the country’s safety record has improved in recent years. According to government data, South Korean carriers had 67 accidents during the past 10 years, which resulted in 59 deaths.

In 1983, a Korean Air flight was shot down by the former Soviet Union, killing all 269 people on board. In 1997, another Korean Air flight crashed in Guam, which killed 228 of the 254 people on board. In 2013, an Asiana Airlines flight crashed as it prepared to land in San Francisco, killing three people and injuring 187.

The disaster on Sunday was the second fatal plane accident in recent days. On Wednesday, an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger flight crash-landed in Kazakhstan after being diverted over the Caspian Sea from Grozny, killing 38 of the 67 people on board.

US and Ukrainian officials have blamed Russian anti-aircraft fire for the accident. Russian authorities said heavy fog and a flock of birds caused the diversion, but have also said that it occurred while Ukrainian combat drones were attacking nearby cities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised to Azerbaijan on Saturday for the “tragic incident”, but did not comment on the allegations of Russian interference.

In our last episode of 2024, we go for a walk.

Earlier this year, NPR’s immigration reporter Jasmine Garsd and Code Switch producer Xavier Lopez spent a day in one of their favorite places in the world: Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York.

It’s a place they share with one of the most diverse communities in the world, a place where immigrants from around the globe gather to relax, recharge, and reconnect.

Today on The Sunday Story, you’ll hear an excerpt of an episode from NPR’s Code Switch podcast. You can listen to the full episode here.

And finally, we have a question for you. What’s a place that you visit regularly–a place that lifts you up? We’d love to hear you tell us about it. You can send us a 2-3 minute voice memo at upfirstsunday@npr.org. Bonus points if you include sounds from the space you’re in.

Make sure to tell us your name and where you’re speaking to us from, and we might share it in an episode in 2025.

Thanks for spending your Sundays with us this year.

This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan. The featured Code Switch episode was produced by Xavier Lopez, Jasmine Garsd, Margaret Cirino and Christina Cala. It was edited by Courtney Stein and Leah Donella. Gilly Moon and James Willetts mastered the episode.

We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.

Listen to Up First on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.