Let's Find Common Ground - Immigration: Is There a Way Forward? - Sue and Jeff White Dialogues

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

CPF Director Bob Shrum joins immigration experts, Andrew Arthur, Steven Davis, Deisy del Real, Ed Goeas, and Ehsan Zaffar, for a discussion on the future of immigration policy. They discuss the current immigration system and policies, amnesty, immigrant's contribution to the U.S. economy, and immigration reforms possible in today’s political climate. We are immensely grateful to Sue and Jeff White for launching this nonpartisan dialogue series at USC. Featuring: Andrew Arthur: Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at Center for Immigration Studies Steven Davis: Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) Deisy del Real: International Migration Scholar; USC Assistant Professor of Sociology Ed Goeas: Republican Pollster and Strategist, Spring 2025 Fellow; USC Center for the Political Future Ehsan Zaffar: Professor at ASU’s College of Law; Executive Director, The Difference Engine; Civil Rights Attorney Bob Shrum: Director, USC Center for the Political Future; Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics, USC Dornsife

Welcome to Let's Find Common Ground from the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. I'm Bob Shrum, Director of the Center. And I'm Republican Mike Murphy, Co-Director of the Center. Our podcast brings together America's leading politicians, strategists, journalists, and academics from across the political spectrum for in-depth discussions where we respect each other

and we respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations. I'm Bob Shrum, Director of The Center for the Political Future here at USC Dornsife. Welcome to the latest event in our program series and podcast, Let's Find Common Ground. Today's subject is now at the center of public debate, immigration, is there a way forward? And let me thank Jeff and Sue White for making this program possible. I will engage the panel for 50 minutes or an hour,

and then we'll open this up to audience questions. There was a time when I was teaching a course on the relationship between policy and politics, when I taught an entire class on the history of immigration policy and its political and policy fallouts. Let me just briefly say, just as background, that for almost the first century and a half

of the American Union, with the shameful exception of the discrimination against certain groups, especially the Chinese, coming to the U.S. was pretty much open to everybody, although the immigration came primarily from Western and Northern Europe. In the 1920s, Congress enacted and the president signed a racist immigration law that used national origin quotas

to explicitly limit immigration from much of the world. President Kennedy wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, that called for reform, and it was finally enacted, the reform, in 1965, signed into the law by LBJ, after Ted Kennedy led the fight for it in the Senate. Ronald Reagan, Kennedy, and others in the House and Senate then worked together to pass an amnesty in 1986

that legalized millions of undocumented immigrants. Since then, with minor exceptions, we have been largely deadlocked on this issue as the number of immigrants, both legal and illegal, significantly rose over the years. The issue is obviously deeply contentious. With us here today to explore whether there is a way forward are, and I'm not going to do this in the order in which they're sitting, Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. Steven Davis, senior fellow and director of research at the Hoover Institution

and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Daisy Del Real, an international immigration scholar and the appointed delegate an international immigration scholar and the appointed delegate of the American Sociological Association to the International Sociological Association at UNESCO. She's also an assistant professor of sociology here at USC. Essence Zafar served as senior advisor on civil rights at the United States Department of Homeland Security, and he is the founder of a truly innovative entity, the Difference Engine at the Arizona State University Center on Equality.

Ed Goaz was president and CEO of the Terrence Group, one of the most respected Republican survey research and strategy teams in American politics for 35 years. We're also happy to say he is a spring 2025 fellow here at the center. As I go through these questions, I'm going to throw them to one person, but then everybody else should feel free to weigh in.

So I'm going to start with this, and I'm going to give this to Andrew Arthur first. Who should be permitted to immigrate to the US? Should the criteria be work skills, country of origin, family stability, or refugee status? By the way, we have to trade microphones back and forth. Normally, I don't need one of these. My voice is pretty loud. I was a judge for about eight years and I had to issue my decisions orally. So it really trains the old pipes. But to answer that question, I turned to, you know, what Barbara Jordan had to say.

Barbara Jordan was a Democratic congresswoman from Houston, Texas. If you know Sheila Jackson Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee took Ms. Jordan's seat. Ms. Jordan was a civil rights icon and an antagonist of Richard Nixon during the Watergate hearings. But in 1994, President Clinton appointed her to be the chairman of the US Commission on International Immigration Reform, or chairman of the US Commission on Immigration Reform. And after two years of study, she said, absent compelling circumstances, immigration to the United States should be based on skills.

And she actually explained what those compelling circumstances were. She said that they were immediate relatives, so spouses and minor children, and asylum and refugee. So her vision, and the vision of the commission, she died before it ended, but it bore her name, the Jordan Commission, was that we want to encourage immigration to the United States that will grow the economy. She also wrote a fascinating piece for the New York Times, September 11th, 1995, called the Americanization Ideal. It's only 735 words at Sherry Preeve. But it's probably one of the best explanations of, you know,

how foreign nationals become, how immigrants become Americans. And I highly recommend it. But yeah, so her vision was that we would base it on skills. And part of the reason was that she thought that immigration should have a focus on the least advantaged Americans. And she said that those least advantaged Americans were inner city youth, members of minority groups that had been traditionally discriminated against, and immigrants who hadn't, legal

immigrants who hadn't yet adjusted to life in the United States. So that's why she put the focus on skills. And you know, I agree that's probably going to be the most popular way that you can frame immigration policy. Someone else want to weigh in on this? Yeah, go ahead. I want to amplify, I largely agree with that, but I want to explain part of the benefits of a skills-focused immigration policy for American citizens and for America's role in the world. And I'll do it by example. So I suspect some of you probably seen the movie Oppenheimer about the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb.

It's worth recalling that episode because the Manhattan Project was to a very significant extent the Manhattan Project was to a very significant extent powered by immigrant scientists. Okay, in many cases, Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe for obvious reasons. It's worth thinking for a moment how the course of events would have been different had the United States not developed an atomic weapon in time to bring a more rapid end to the World War II, or even worse yet, if one of our adversaries had developed it first instead. This is a vivid example, but there are many others. Now, the United States became a leader in many fields of biochemistry and genetics after the war, in considerable part because of immigrant

scientists who come to the United States in the 30s and 40s often again from Germany and other places in central Europe who were at that time the leaders in the field and they drew more American scientists into their fields. I'll give you one more example Jensen Wong CEO of Nvidia you know the maker of the chips that are powering the many of the advances in AI that we hear about all the time. He himself is from Taiwan, by the way, but he mentioned in the course of his conversation with Condoleezza Rice, director at the Hoover Institution, that 75% of the engineers at Nvidia are immigrants.

Now I could cite you academic studies and so on, but the larger theme point I'm trying to get across is now and throughout our history, much of the commercial and scientific innovation enterprise in the United States has been very much propelled by first generation immigrants and second generation immigrants who are often more likely to be attracted to the STEM fields. That's good for all Americans.

It's good for, if you think it's important for the United States to retain its leading role in scientific commercial innovation and in its military capacity. And I do agree with all those things. Hi. capacity and I do agree with all those things. Hi, well I agree that immigrants bring their skills and talent and help the U.S. economy grow. I completely agree with that. I think the moment we start thinking about skilled migration we start creating a class barrier to legal status. What does that mean? That means that lower skilled immigrants tend to be derailed to temporary worker programs that do not provide a pathway to citizenship or lawful permanent residency. And then they overstay their visas and stay undocumented. And I want to propose something different. I am proposing that instead we should expand the legal pathways of entry in legal residency to the United States even more, regardless of skill level or class background of the immigrants, because

we both, we need high skill immigrants and we need lower skill immigrants to work in construction and farming and agriculture. And the reason for this is simple. Most of the people in the world do not want to migrate. Only 3.6% of the entire global population migrates. Most people want to stay where they're born or in the country where their people speak their language, share their culture, where they feel most comfortable. So if you let people go to the United States with legal status, that means that they can leave the United States and more easily reenter if it ever

makes sense, whether it's because we need scientists to help us with national security, or if we need agricultural workers for like the season to do the harvest. And then they can go back home with the investments they gain to diversify their economic wellbeing back in their country of origin.

But the moment that we start creating restrictions on legal immigration, we start creating restrictions on legal immigration, we start creating undocumented populations because people will migrate regardless of your immigration laws. And if there is no legal way to migrate, they're going to migrate without authorization. And I think across the political spectrum, nobody really likes undocumented immigration for two reasons. On the left, you can say people who love immigrants, who are relatives and friends with undocumented immigrants don't wanna see their loved ones hurt.

And just in the US, 22 million people here in the United States have relationships, family members, friends who are undocumented. And from the more conservative side, people fear undocumented immigration because they don't know who has come in. They don't know if it poses a security threat. But if you let people migrate legally more easily, you can both not harm people, but also know who's in your country, do the biometric background checks that you need to do to make sure that they're not going to harm U.S. security. And in a way, it also helps perpetuate like natural

economic demands for skilled and low-skilled labor. Awesome. So I think in general agreement with what's been said here, I'll just add a little wrinkle to this. I think we think of immigration when we talk about skills-based migration and so on and so forth, as our perspective is like, what do we need? What does the United States need? Right? And I think one additional reframing or way to think about it is what is our impact on the world? Right? And how does that drive migration to this country. So there are places where the United States takes actions, for instance, in Afghanistan, where we undertook military action, which creates populations that when we depart are stuck there and subject to violence.

We've also taken lots of political action in Central America, so on and so forth. And so part of our immigration policy, it behooves us to consider when we're out there, whether for a good reason or a bad reason, and doing things in the world and creating populations that are then dependent on our largesse or our support, and absent that they are subject to violence or death, what is the pathway for those?

And we do have some pathways that are built for that, but the proposition should be that those should be expanded and certainly should be more effective than they are instead of creating a situation where there's several years of wait time for those populations that are stuck in those countries. Ed, does the public understand any of this? Well, it goes back and forth.

First, I'd like to, I'm here on the panel on immigration because it comes from my heart, not from my head. I've done a lot of work on immigration over the years. I did all the immigration polling for George W. Bush when he was president. Interestingly enough, at the same time, I was also doing polling for the Catholic bishops on immigration during that period of time. Because at that period of time, the Catholic Church was looking at the immigrants coming from South America, Central America, as boosting their volume of Catholics in this country. It was interesting by the end of the four years, they stopped the polling because they were finding all the immigrants coming in that were Catholic,

were finding the Catholic church in America to liberal, and they went off to evangelical churches, which is why it's all this big boost of all the evangelicals. But I come to it, I just want to tell you a little bit of background on my story. I grew up in Army brat. My family was, I know the immigrant story. I was a direct descendant of a famous humanist from Portugal in the 1500s, who was put to death under the Portuguese Inquisition. And my family then went to Macau for 300 years and then Hawaii in the 1840s. My father, when he was young, walking home after serving mass one morning, saw the smoke coming up from Pearl Harbor and all he ever wanted to do is go in the military, which he did.

I went to 15 schools in 12 years, graduated from high school in Heidelberg, Germany, so I had a lot of exposure everywhere. But one of the stories I like to tell about him, he always kind of taught me lessons. In 1957, by the way, he went to Vietnam and Korea and got three Bronze Stars and died of Asian Orange when he was 61. But in 1957, in 1959, I was on a ship on the way to Germany the first time and the news came that Hawaii had been made a state. And he knew it was coming, and he took a flag out of the suitcase that he had hid.

And we as a family sat in the middle of the Atlantic and sewed a star on that flag. He also had a cigar box. I was seven. You know, dad is that candy. No, my mom and uh your mom and I plan on having more kids which just totally went over my head. And a year later, my brother was born in Frankfurt and as he was prone to do, I was the oldest son. He said, come here, I want you to see this. And he had the cigar box. And he took the

cigar box and asked for the head nurse. And when he talked to her, he said, in this box is dirt from America. And you will put it under the mattress where my child is being born because I want him to be born on America's soil. Which I get a little bit crazed when I hear what Trump is trying to do on birthright citizenship. It is just such a deep tradition in this country and so real in this country. And I think it's unfortunate. We, I think everyone on the panel has been right on what they're saying if you put it together as a whole. The problem in this country is that right now we're trying to deal with two problems. We're trying to deal with border security problem which is

separate than the immigration problem. Our immigration system has been broken for 40 years. And it's been broken because we haven't allowed the speed limit of legal immigrants to come in to this country to supply the economic needs that our country has. And quite frankly, discussions about high-skill workers have distorted that because they put such an emphasis on high-skill workers that it even lowered the amount of medium and low-skill workers coming into this country. So what we have to do first is fix the

border problem, but then we have to fix the immigration problem. And the immigration problem is in 1908, they put a million people. Before then, they were right. If you got to the border and you didn't have cholera, you're on your way to becoming a citizen very quickly. But they then put a limit of a million a year. I think when Reagan changed it, moved it up to 1.2 million, that got squeezed by an emphasis on high skilled workers. And the bottom line is the reason why we have a border problem is because we haven't allowed

enough legal citizens to come in to meet our country's economic needs. And until we do that, those that are illegal are going to see the jobs here and they're going to figure out a way to climb over, dig under, or swim around whatever barriers we put up. And so part of what we have to do is we have to clean up the border problem, but we need to do it in a way that we then open the door for fixing real immigration in terms of fixing the right speed limit of illegals coming in to meet our country's economic needs and the demands from outside this country. That's how our country was

built. So, and the last thing I will say, and this is the last shot I'll take at Donald Trump, is that there is a segment, and I think this is unfortunate, I fought against it as a Republican, at my Republican firm. There's a segment of Republicans who want no immigration in this country, legal or illegal. And what's unfortunate is the rhetoric that Trump is using today about illegals is poisoning the well for all immigrants and how they're viewed. During the Bush years, one of the things we found is the best way to encourage immigration reform is to remind people of their story about immigration. Because once you remind them of their story, they then relate to the new immigrants wanting to come in. This raises so many possible follow ups.

Let me just do a couple of them. There seems to be general agreement here, even though there might be differences over skills versus unskilled, that we need immigration and we need legal immigration. How do we determine the appropriate number of legal immigrants? Stephen, you want to start? Sure. A couple things. First, I just want to reiterate one point I do think came up previously.

We do owe a special obligation to, say, people in Afghanistan who helped out US military forces, and I just want to endorse that point. obligation to say people in Afghanistan who helped out U.S. military forces. And I just want to endorse that point. I think the challenge in your getting to it is how do we construct a politically durable immigration policy that achieves the benefits that we've been talking about on this panel with different degrees of emphasis. And I think getting control of the border is one issue, one aspect of it.

I do think it's possible to get control of the border, even with a restrictive immigration policy, like it or not, and I don't like the way Trump has gone about it. He's had tremendous success in reducing the inflow across the southern border because he's altered the incentives. I think there were far more humane and

durable ways to achieve that same end. But I do think it's a political precondition, and I gather maybe everybody shares this, that getting control of our borders in a way that is transparent to the American citizenry is an essential political precondition to a sound immigration policy. Okay? And you do that by making it clear that if you cross the border unlawfully, your case will be adjudicated very quickly and you will be returned. We haven't been doing that. And so people come here with cases that take years to adjudicate. They hope

that they'll be able to stay. It's a very natural impulse, but we have created the incentives that got worse under the Biden administration until the very end for people to enter unlawfully. So the extent of unlawful immigration is only partly about the restrictiveness of lawful immigration. I'll say one more point and then I'll turn it to somebody else. One of the reasons I outlined the economic benefits of a focus on high-skill immigration earlier, but there's a second reason and I'll put it on the table in my view because some people may differ, disagree about this claim. I think it's easier to construct a politically durable policy with vigorous immigration if you start with highly skilled people because the benefits that they bring to American economy and society are easier for the

average voter to see because better educated people tend to integrate more quickly and assimilate more quickly into the society. I am also in favor of broader immigration, but politically it's easier to start, I think, with highly talented people and build that political support for robust immigration policy. But if we don't have the less skilled folks, how are we gonna rebuild after say the Palisades fire,

and how are we going to harvest all the crops that we have in central California, which people don't understand is actually the agricultural heartland of America more than the Midwest. Anybody can pick that up. You know, it actually is, it's an interesting question. It's one of those things that comes up all the time. And you know, I got some, you know, great political thinkers here with me. And I think that we can all agree that immigration played an outsized role in the last election. I

think that between immigration and inflation, those are the two issues that drove the election. And Donald Trump himself says immigration is really the one that put him over the top. And he's the guy that won. So he probably has a better perspective on it. And it's important to take a look at who voted for Donald Trump, who came out, of course, broad spectrum of people voted for both candidates. But I think that we could accept the fact that candidates. But I think that we could accept the fact that, you know, many people who view themselves as forgotten Americans, even if they're not, are people who were, you know, more predisposed to vote for Donald Trump. I live in western North Carolina, I live in a region of the country that used to be mill country. And all around me, I can see crumbling mills that, you know, NAFTA eventually drove out

of the United States. People are hurting. The labor participation rate for native born men ages 18 to 64 right now is 75.6%. Almost one quarter of all working age men are out of the labor force. To give you an idea what that looks like in the past, in 2006, it was 80.5%. In 2000, it was 82.6%. So we have a huge population of people who are working age,

but not working in this country. When you look at all the problems that we have, drug addiction, crime and violence, domestic violence, I was a judge judge and I can tell you right now drugs, unemployment and violence all work together. So you know I think that as you talk about you know we need additional people to come here. If you want to build a durable immigration policy you first start with the people that you have here. Putting a larger proportion of those working age men to work is going to be a way that you

will build the economy and you will create a need for people to come here skilled or unskilled. And if you don't address that, I mean, you could say that it's a good idea or a bad idea, but the fact is the only way to have a politically durable way of doing

this is to address those forgotten Americans or those people who view themselves as forgotten Americans who looked at what happened at the border over the last 10 years or over the last four years and weren't happy. Yeah I'll agree with most of kind of what you said, but I'll add a few thoughts. Political realities are also created, right? So we did study a couple of years back that looked at unemployment rates within the larger undocumented population, and they tended to be lower based on our survey than in the legal population, so to speak, in the United States. The only difference

is that these people are working lower than subsistence wages. They are living with families in unsafe housing, 12, 20, 30 people in a house, right? So they're accepting a lower standard of living, but they're working, right? And I think if the conversation, there is a tie, a deep tie between economic inequality, which is rising in this country since 1978, and this feeling that the reason why this is happening or blaming immigrants, right? Instead of, it's harder to address economic inequality,

it's easier to say that guy or that girl, whoever from El Salvador is the cause of your problems. They have jobs, they're working. And there's lots of Americans that are legal that will refuse to take those jobs and will not work. So part of kind of looking at immigration, the way we talk about immigration is not just the reality on the ground, but the message that our politicians tell people kind of the blame game that goes on rather than saying they're contributing to the economy.

And so can you and here's our plan to do it rather than saying, let's kick all of these folks out. Because, as we know, not to get into this, if you're going to get to it, but I'm intimately familiar with the costs of deportation and removal. It is a highly, highly inefficient system of dealing with folks that are in this country on an undocumented basis. I would also, I just want to throw out, this election was not about immigration. This election was about border security.

Two very separate issues. One may be caused by the other not being fixed, but it is Two very separate issues. One may be caused by the other not being fixed, but it is two very separate issues. And the one thing I've seen in the polling is that the rhetoric coming from Trump about illegals and the criminals and the type of people that are there, it's made the American public start looking around and seeing more brown faces, more black faces,

more different faces and more black faces, more different faces, and being uneasy about it. And that's the result of the focus on border security, not a focus on immigration and whether our policy is correct. The interesting thing I think we keep ignoring when we talk about long range immigration control is the amount of money that employers spend defending their people that they have trained to work in their industry. They are spending a tremendous amount of money trying to keep them there and to save them and to get them into the process. Why don't we put that on the

front end? Why don't we identify people wanting to come into this country on high-skilled, medium-skilled, low-skilled, and then put them together as a list and almost act as an employment agency for all the workers in this country, all the companies in this country, and have them pay $2,000 for a low-skilled worker and $5,000 for a medium-skilled worker and $10,000. The system could pay for itself if we were smarter in how we're approaching it on the front end as opposed to the back end. I'm gonna push you in a minute on that

and on public opinion, but Daisy, I wanna give you a chance first. Yeah, on this issue with borders, I think we need to differentiate things here a little bit because a lot of the people who were waiting at the border to enter the United States were asylum seekers and according to our laws right now they have the right to go up to the border and seek asylum. It's either that or wait in a refugee camp to be resettled somewhere in the world. So it is one of the main avenues that we have to protect people who are fleeing catastrophes, civil wars, persecution.

And a lot of the people who were in the border in the US during this camp last presidential campaign were from Venezuela, which has an autocratic regime that has the economy has completely collapsed. People are being persecuted. They're fleeing the country, essentially a quarter of the population has left. They also included Haitians who have had terrible natural

disaster catastrophes, and the government is also collapsing. And so you have legal pathways for asylum that people were trying to follow. They weren't getting their cases reviewed fast enough. There's a lot of backlog. There was a lot of efforts from the US government to tell people to wait in Colombia, to wait in Mexico, to wait in Guatemala,

and not just let them enter and apply for asylum, have their case review in a court, and then let the system decide whether or not they should get asylum or refugee status. So a lot of this rhetoric about the borders are like out of control, it's really false. I think it was a political strategy. The Biden administration tried to create

a border control bill with bipartisan support. Trump deliberately said, I don't wanna sign, don't sign that border bill because I want to run on immigration, immigration wins both. So chaos or the perception of chaos helps this like very right wing perspective on immigration. It creates a sense of urgency and threat

about the other like non-white immigrants and it helps perpetuate this policies. But also sociologists have studied this. Does border control actually work? That's a question that I think it's a research question. It's a question that we really need to ask. And Douglas Massey, who's an incredible migration scholar at Princeton University and his colleagues examined how immigration authorities had increased their budget on border patrol. And the more they

expend our tax dollars on border patrol, the more the undocumented population increased in the United States. And this is because it became more dangerous to enter and leave the United States so people who used to be seasonal workers or who used to want to leave were forced to stay in the United States, settle and then bring their families undocumented. And so some of the solutions of border enforcement, like we need to think a little bit about whether or not we really have as a country the resources to control every single entry point into the United States. The United States has a vast territory.

Some countries have already realized that they can't control every single possible legal or unauthorized entry points. So they focus more on how do we like get the most out of the immigrants who are here? How do we legalize them so that they can work legally and pay taxes and contribute to society faster regardless of their skill level? Let me follow up on that before I press add on something else.

After the shameful history of the US in the 1930s, in terms of turning away people who were seeking asylum and who were sent back to certain death in Europe. It was in the late 1940s that Harry Truman and the U.S. began to say we have to treat people seeking asylum in a different way. And right now you're correct that legally they have a right to show up at the border and say, I want asylum. But that brings a large flood of people in the case of place like Venezuela. Do we have to change that? Do we have to change the way we deal with asylum?

I have a very quick response and then I'll let the other panelists answer. Most of refugees and asylum seekers in the world live in lower income countries. So more Syrians live in Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey. Most Venezuelans live in South America, primarily in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile. The United States gets a small portion of all international humanitarian immigrants or asylum seekers or refugees. This is the same for the European Union because these wealthy countries have figured out multiple strategies to keep asylum seekers away from their territory so that they don't ask for asylum. So I think also I would push back in this myth that everybody's coming to the United States. Actually everybody's

going to neighboring countries and most of them are settling there. We can look at the statistics and we can see the countries that received the largest number of asylum seekers. By the way, our asylum system is based on the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 protocol

to the 1951 Refugee Convention. We didn't actually sign on to the 1951 Convention. We did sign on to the 19671 Convention. We did sign on to the 67 Protocol. But Truman did begin to leave in a lot of, let in a lot of refugees. And that's actually, you know, this is, and you know that we could have a whole panel about that because even before we had signed on to the uh 1967 Protocol, we ran our own Quasi-immigration uh asylum system and it probably worked better than the asylum system that we have right now. You

know, we focused on the displace Persons Act uh as you're aware of uh and we you know found ways for people to come into the United States. So, but you know, we in nineteen eighty, we adopted the system that we have right now. The three largest asylum receiving countries in the world right now are the United States, Germany, and Mexico. Every country in the Western Hemisphere, except for Cuba and Guyana, is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention of the 1967 protocol. You can go to any one of those countries and you can receive protection. And one of the things that we saw and you know when we talked about the large number

of Venezuelans that we saw in the United States, the difference, the reason that there were that the number of apprehensions at the border increased is because the law right now requires every person who shows up at the border and requests asylum to be screened by an asylum officer and then be detained. And they're supposed to be detained until the moment they're either released into the United States with asylum or until they're removed from the United States. the Biden administration ignored that in 88.5% of all cases involving people who weren't expelled under Title 42. And Bob, if we want to have a whole Title 42 session, that's another conversation for a different day. But again, I was a judge in immigration in a detained court. And there is an uneasiness in the United States with the idea that someone is an asylum seeker, but we hold them until we can make that determination.

When I was a judge, I could generally get to a determination in about 21 to 28 days. Right now, if you're not detained, you're going to be in immigration proceedings for anywhere between four and 10 years. And then there's an entire category of cases that are administratively closed for 17 years. And then there's an entire category of cases that are administratively closed for 17 years. So the asylum system when it's actually enforced at the border really does work. We know that because prior to 2009 when the Obama administration began ignoring that congressional mandate, releasing people into the United States, about four to five percent of all of the people who showed up at the border in the ports actually requested asylum. The rest of them, they were trying to sneak in, they couldn't. And we got to those cases very quickly.

Daisy made the point before, I think we need to expedite the speed at which we make these determinations. But in order to do that, you need to keep the numbers low, which means you need to follow the rules that Congress has set. Leah Moses, district court judge down in Texas, in ruling in favor of the Biden administration in a case involving cutting razor wire

that the state of Texas had put up about a year and a half ago, said, the immigration system, as dysfunctional as it is would work if it were simply allowed to work. Unfortunately egotism and political rancor has entered the conversation which is why I'm glad that we're having this conversation but you know that's how it's supposed to work and that's how it probably should work. Nelson I think you want to say something you had to deal with this. Yeah I don't know if I want to say something. I mean I look this is going to be something. Um, I mean, I look,

this is going to be a hot take, but I think the asylum system in this country is broken, right? Uh, and part of the reason why is that, uh, we, what we really need is we need a multifaceted approach to dealing with people who come to the United States, uh, who are undocumented. In many cases we call them undocumented immigrants, but by and large, many of them are undocumented. In many cases, we call them undocumented immigrants, but by and large, many of them are refugees. I was one.

I was a refugee to the United States. I came through, I didn't come through the land border, but my family applied for a refugee entry and that's how we came in. Many people are seeking asylum, but maybe the way that they enter into the United States should be through a different pathway. And so the only option they're offered in many cases is to seek asylum.

And then that places a burden upon the judicial system and the immigration system to then adjudicate and consider their application. And were there other ways, looking at you you Congress, to other pathways for them to come in and work that were not complicated? We have visa systems, for instance, that are quite complicated for folks to address and assess and even find out that that's a pathway. And so a lot of folks are being told, at least this is what we would witness, showing up to the land border, southern land border, and applying for asylum, which in some cases

is the way to go, to your point. It does work if it's properly run and properly funded. But in many cases, that is not what folks are seeking. And so part of the solve on this is to think and I think everybody here will agree is for Congress to take leadership and to actually think of more intelligent and sophisticated ways to create pathways for entry and exit to the U.S. for folks that want to be here. I will say one thing I always what I always think is that if folks want to come to this country if they're willing My family was willing to live in refugee camps and travel thousands of miles to come to this is a it's terrible for them

From a humanitarian perspective But it is we should be happy that people are willing to do this to come to this country the problem starts happening when people Are like, you know what? Not gonna go to the US. I'm gonna go to this country instead. That's where the action is. That's where I'm going to make a life that will say something about how vibrant our country is. Right. I mean, there is something attracting people to this country. We just have to give them a way to come here safely and contribute in a way that also advances the national economic interest of this country. Uh and contribute about 18 hours a day. And that is that if you have areas of the world in which we know that there are conflicts that we know, you know that they're not the midst of war but you know there are issues there and you talk about you know encouraging people to come to the United States why don't we prioritize those countries first, you know, to, you know, facilitate the Venezuelans who would want to come to this country. Again, you that's why we prioritize those countries first. You know, to facilitate the

Venezuelans who would want to come to this country. Again, we have limits on the number of people who come here, but there's some fine institutions of higher learning in Venezuela, a lot of good doctors, engineers, people who can contribute. the United States is family based. Remember when Barbara

Jordan said it should be skills based, about 61%. You know, which if you think about it in terms of the University of Southern California, imagine that, you know, the class of 2030 is based upon people who graduate in the

class of 2025 and then their brother and then their sister and then from from that point forward. You can actually marry up the two things. You can marry the humanitarian instinct, which is a huge part of the United States, to the need for labor and skills in the United States. And again, we could have another panel on that,

but I think that's actually a great solution. Can I just make one point? Sure, I gotta get to Ed and some of the political context of this, but go ahead. So there's been a very useful discussion drawing out the broken nature of the asylum system. I just want to add one point. In the near term, the next few years, we need many more immigration officers and judges to adjudicate the backlog quickly.

That backlog doesn't serve anybody's interest. And we have to get out of this giant hole that we're in now in that respect. And that also requires an act of Congress, as I understand it, to appropriate the funds to hire the officers and the judges who can adjudicate these cases. OK, we can.

I want to have a specific question for you. OK. The thing I look at is in 1908, when we put a million people allowed in here, question for you. Okay. Is you Do you know how much bigger our economy is today than in 1908? I checked yesterday. It's 962 times larger than it was in 1908. And we've only increased it by 20% of the sweat there. And as much as we talk about backlogs, what if in the 40 years since we changed it to 1.2,

we had 500,000 more per year over that 40 years. That's 20 million people. That is exactly how many illegals they say are in this country today. So we wouldn't have the backlog if we had fixed it right in the first place and adjusted our increases that we allowed based on our country's economic needs and the draw that we're bringing of people coming into this country. We hear about violence all the time in the news, yet we rarely hear stories about peace. There are so many people who are working hard to promote solutions to violence, toxic polarization,

and authoritarianism, often at great personal risk. We never hear about these stories, but at what cost? On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists, storytellers, and peace builders who are on the front lines of both peace and conflict. You can find Making Peace Visible wherever you listen to podcasts. We seem to have some common ground both on what to do about asylum and on the fact that we need immigration for the country to succeed economically. We also, people have noted this, face the problem of a lot of political rhetoric out there, which tends to delegitimize

the idea of immigration. So whatever immigration reform regime we establish is going to require broad public support. So Ed, I'll do this to you first. How have public attitudes toward immigration changed over time? And how, if possible, can we overcome the apparently entrenched divisions in our public life and our politics about this issue? Your client, George W. Bush, tried with with Ted Kennedy and John McCain and couldn't get anywhere. Right. And and you know, what's interesting,

one of the things I saw in the polling with George W. Bush, he moved in his first election, he got 31% of Hispanic vote. In the second election, he got 45% Hispanic vote. The story that I know that made me very sad. Well, except the story that was never told that we were able to track down, is that increase of 14% all came from Hispanic families who had a member of their family in the military. And it was a result of how he handled 9-11 that he increased the Hispanic vote, not because of what he was doing on immigration. And it tells you the type of people that we want to get here.

People that want to be Americans, want to be part of the American model. So I don't know who said it earlier. But unless we fix the system, and I worked very closely with James Langford. I was, I think I maybe misled him saying, look, the immigration border problem needs to be fixed first before we get to immigration. And he put his whole effort on working with Democrats to get a beginning compromise to start on the problem.

And how the hell can the president of the United States say kill the bill because I want to campaign on an issue when he's at the same time telling the country that it's the most critical issue in this country, but let's delay it eight months to do anything about it. Cause I want to campaign on it. Someone should have called him on it. Someone should have, and it should have been on the Republican side. So, but how do we shape public opinion and anybody can address this so that we actually don't end up like Japan where we exclude immigrants and we go into a prolonged economic slowdown, which is what the Japanese have faced.

Yeah. There's many parts to the answer to that question, but we've already discussed some of it. So I'll mention something that hasn't come up yet. It's important to recognize that the cost and benefits of immigration, both lawful and unlawful, are highly unevenly distributed across different parts of the country in terms of geography, income classes, and so on. There really are some communities that find their school systems, their local health care systems, their social assistance programs overwhelmed by large influxes of immigrants. And because

immigration is a federal policy, it's the federal government that is responsible for the flows of immigration, in my view, there's a role for the federal government to step in and provide assistance to the communities that are really bearing the fiscal burden side of immigration. And there is a fiscal burden side. There's a fiscal benefit side as well. So part of what I think Trump has played on is highly visible episodes, which are not representative, but make for good TV, make for good political rhetoric, demagoguery.

It's to point out the problems that exist in some places. And it's a policy failure and also simply unfair to those people we're asking to bear the burden of immigration that we haven't done more to deal with that. So I think part of building the durable coalition, political coalition for immigration, I don't think we're going to become Japan but not going closer in that direction, is to also have a set of policies that even out the cost and benefits across different parts of the country. Heson, did you want to say something? Yeah, I mean I'll say something, I'll add to that a little bit. You know we are a dying country And when I say dying, I mean that without immigration, the population

in this country is on the decline. We are increasingly getting older and we are not at a, our birth rate is not sufficient to sustain our population. Right? So part of the political calculus is reframing immigration, not as just a crisis at the border and all of that, and I'm not going to get into how a lot of that is just not right, but reframing that without immigration, there is a crisis in this country. There's a crisis, an economic crisis, an innovation crisis, an aging crisis, right? And that we need, we must have immigration in order to stay competitive, in order to surprise. You brought up Japan. Japan has one of the lowest birth rates on the planet.

And they, yet they continue, now they're kind of freaking freaking out about it but they continue to push back on comprehensive immigration so a lot of this is restructuring and and and reframing how we think about it make the word crisis and immigration not just of a border crisis but of a existential crisis yeah by the way when you say we're getting older, I have to comment that I resemble that remark. But you're hardcore. I mean, you know, you're getting into fights. I'm going to turn this over to the audience in a couple of minutes, but I want to throw

out one last maybe controversial question. I described briefly the history of immigration policy and some of its uglier aspects when I was introducing this panel. Is resistance to the changing character of America, which is becoming a majority non-white country, is there a danger that that will take us back to a time when we overtly, explicitly preferred some racial and ethnic groups and excluded others. Only if we let it, right? Only if we as a population allow this to happen.

There is a danger of a minority population feeling anxiety and angst and a loss of political or economic hegemony taking steps to protect their interests. On the flip side, I tend to be more of an optimistic and positive person, even though I work in civil rights. I feel that we are well past a tipping point and the larger crises that will confront us will be those that are more class and economic based over time. Not to say that racism is going away, sadly, or is dying, but those are the larger, look what we've been talking about here primarily. And so my approach to this is that those are the things that kind of unite positively or negatively the people in this country.

And you can see it in the results, whether some people like it or not. And I'm a progressive politically progressive individual. But Donald Trump did take a large share of a vote from people of color, which was unprecedented given given how people were analyzing his his campaign. his campaign. And so I think I am not too worried on that front unless we as a people, and I don't want to get into the fact that how we are advertised to and spoken to is a big part of it and the role of money in politics and things like that. Okay, anybody else have a take on this before we go to the audience? Let me just ease his mind on one thing because the talk about have a take on this before we go to the audience? Let me just ease his mind on one thing, because the talk about Trump getting more of certain

groups in this election, it's a false read. Trump got three million more votes than he did last time. Harris got six million less votes than Biden did. And believe me, the three million votes didn't come out of the six million votes. And so all the various groups voted are all based on exit polling that you had a different makeup of the exit polling. He could have kept the same percentage as what he had the first time of African Americans, but because there were so many less on the other side of the equation didn't turn out, it makes

it look like he got more. So I just want to say, you know, I keep hearing people ringing their hands over that. Yes, certainly not a mandate. But it is different from the makeup of his prior, from 2016, certainly. Any quick takes from? I just want to push back a little bit. Yes, we on the premise of your question, Bob. Yes, we have ugly episodes in immigration policy in the United States. You mentioned the 1920s, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But it's worth remembering that over the broad sweep of history, this is one of the most welcoming societies to immigrants in the history of the world and remains so today. And it's part of the reason why people want to come here. So we shouldn't entirely focus on the negative aspects of our immigration policy. And I guess it's consistent with what I understand

to be the thrust of some of the other comments is despite Trump's victory, there is an idea of an American that isn't based on your race, your ethnicity, your religion. It's based on your adher, your ethnicity, your religion, it's based on your adherence to a creed. Yeah I had to ask that question because I think it's an important question but I tend to share the view that over time people are going to resist that. Yes.

I think about this as short term and long term. So short term we have a crisis in terms of political crisis where everybody's civil liberties are at risk right now, not just immigrants, we need to fight for those. But I think what a lot of the panelists here have highlighted is that Americans right now want solutions for their economic uncertainty, for the cost of living, for precarious unemployment, potential automation that's going to increase and displace workers. And so we need to also think long term of like how we can tap into that disappointment or that hypocrisy that's going to be exposed in the future to elect leaders that are actually going to solve problems that people care about instead of giving them a third target over here to focus on

and say that if we close the borders, you're going to pay less for groceries. And I think right now what we're seeing, especially with this trade war with Canada and Mexico, which are our biggest trading partners in the US, is we're going to have an increase in the cost of living again. But also there is an interconnectedness that goes beyond the United States that I think you've discussed it and how the U.S. is not just isolated making policy for the U.S. We have foreign policy. We have immigrants who are Americans in Latin America. We have many expats as they people like to call them who moved to Mexico for the retirement. And so I think moving forward, we want to envision a solution.

We have to take into account how we're interconnected across borders, how our economies and our societies, our families sometimes are living across all these borders in close proximity. And if we're going to have immigration policies, we need to level the playing field. Just like it's easy right now for Americans to go to Mexico, retire, work, become a nomad in Mexico City, it should be easy for Mexicans to come to the United States, live, work, retire and live legally. And so to do that, we need regional, more like international agreements within the bordering countries, our main migrants sending countries to the United States which tend to be in Latin America,

and really create policies that facilitate legal migration because there is already an interconnected economy that's unfolding between the countries, between our societies. And for me, the future that we need to think about is more of like exposing those connections. I think people right now are very aware of how tariffs are actually going to affect everybody badly. It's going to affect Canadians badly, the Americans badly, Mexicans badly. And like we're seeing that interconnectedness, but I think it runs much deeper in a discourse that really brings that out can help us move forward. Okay, I want to turn this over to the audience. Oh, you gotta let them talk.

Okay, go ahead. I love to hear myself talk. I actually agree with everything that I hear on this side of the dance. And it's important to note the fact that, you know, most people forget this. There was a huge wave of anti-German hysteria in the United States in 1917, 1918. Yeah, Oregon outlawed the speaking of German. Before the First World War, there were a thousand German language newspapers in the United States and 500,000 students went to German language schools. By 1920, that was all gone.

There was no more German language education in the United States and those German newspapers dwindled to about eight. So this was a huge thing. And one of the things that people have said in the past was that it was this huge wave of migration that had happened in the 1890s that created disruptions. And there may be something to that. I don't wanna, I can't really comment on that I'm not a sociologist.

But in the 1890s which would have been that precursor period about 14.9 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born. Today 15.5 percent of the population is foreign-born. We actually have a higher proportion of people. The American culture, and I'm here in Los Angeles, which is the center of American culture, does a really good job of integrating people in. Even people who aren't in the United States get very sucked into American culture. You know, I think about one of my favorite buildings, the

Thomas Jefferson building, the Library of Congress. If you think about the Library of Congress, it's technically the Thomas Jefferson building. If you walk around, there are freezes on the front of the 36 races of men. If you could imagine that when that building was built in the 1880s, 1890s, we were like breaking people into small groups like that. I think of the story of my great grandparents, Billy Maligan, my great grandfather married Stella Shoemaker, my great great grandmother. And there was a German Catholic church and an Irish Catholic church. And Billy started going to the German Catholic church and

the priest came over and said to him, Billy, you're breaking my heart, you left the church. Because we literally differentiated between two different groups of Catholics. People in America today, I couldn't agree more, are, you know, more vulcanized, if you would, based on on economic terms and on religious terms. There are, you know, if you go to an evangelical church in the south, you're going to see all races of people in that evangelical church because, you know, that's just sort of how the separation happens. So yeah, I don't really worry, Bob, that that's going to happen.

But we do have an economic issue. Okay, we have time for 10 minutes of questions. Go ahead. Thank you so much. My question request for comment will be a follow on to two interesting points that Ms. Del Real made, but could be for anyone, the experts on stage. Just to contextualize it, I'll say a couple things about myself, my own fathers and immigrants. I'm a candidate for California state legislature in the single most ethnically diverse district

in California. I try to be an economic realist and my pro-immigration stance comes from that or tries to. A couple points you made was that folks will migrate regardless of the laws of a country and then raising the question does border control work? And I just wanted to say that there could be a difference between the laws on the books and the laws that are enforced. And maybe if there wasn't daylight between those, there might be more of a correlation between the laws of a country and whether people migrate. And the category of law that I would bring up is American labor law. The people on stage are more of an expert than me, but I think we haven't enforced our

labor law for a few decades now. And then maybe if we did, and maybe we don't really want to, I don't think the United States really wants to enforce its labor law, but if we did, maybe we wouldn't need any border control because nobody would actually be able to work here. The question is, we should sanction employers who hire undocumented immigrants? I just sort of weave it into the conversation. Like you mentioned, people will migrate regardless of your law, right? But as far as I know, we don't enforce our law. So why don't we? And what would it look like if we did? Okay. So just to clarify the point, one of the points was as you increase border surveillance and technology and enforcement, people go through more dangerous routes, but still enter the United States. So you're still enforcing the border control law, spending more money and doing it, but people figure out ways to overcome it in terms of enforcing American labor law, right? I think historically business lobbies have been pro-immigrant

and they like undocumented immigrants in particular because they're more easily exploitable. If you want a cheap rotating labor force, you can easily fire all your undocumented immigrants. Don't give them any severance. Don't necessarily pay their wages because they're so vulnerable. You hire and you set.

And so I think there's been an agreement between business lobbies and the US government to kind of uphold that, like not enforce that. Is it going to be enforced now? I think in this political climate where we have very wealthy billionaires running the show, highly unlikely. And if I could comment on that, sorry, if you want to go. When I was a trial attorney at San Francisco for the INS, I was the employer sanctions counsel.

I had jurisdiction to do exactly what you're saying from an immigration standpoint. Do you know how big my jurisdiction was for one lawyer? From Kern County to the Oregon border. The two thirds of the state of California was my jurisdiction. So, but you know, and I think uh Daisy's point is well taken. And I'm

gonna, you know, take it one step further. An employer that is willing to cheat on the immigration laws cheats on every other employee, every other labor law that you can imagine. They're not gonna follow wage and uh hour laws. They're not going to follow OSHA regulations. If you're paying people under the table, if you have a compliant population of

people that you can work, you could exploit them. You can cut all those other corners. I talk to employers across the United States all the time who are upset. They know that the guy who's a roofer or doing the other thing, that they do have an unauthorized population working for them and it's killing, it's killing their business. We need to enforce all of those laws because that's going to be the best thing for workers in the United States. E-verified, electronic verification system, talk about how business doesn't like this going on. In 1986 we created the employer sanction system, which is when we verified that people could

work. We didn't have computers. So it was done on paper today. It's still done on paper, even though we have computers, there is a pilot program authorized by law, the president could actually make it mandatory, where everybody would have to go online to verify the employment eligibility of their employees. That doesn't happen. But if it did, when you talk about, we haven't talked about amnesty, we've alluded to it. But you know, if you really wanted to legalize the population of people who are here illegally, create political

momentum, that's the way to do it. If you, you know, take away the workers, you're actually probably going to reach consensus a lot quicker than you think. And I know there's examples of underpayment of illegals, but I also know my family's from the agricultural community in Fresno and they pay top dollar to pick the peaches to do the different things. They quite frankly they've tried to get others to come and they work for about two hours and they I don't want to do this and they leave. And it's not because of the pay, it's because they don't like the hard work that is there. And so I think a lot of times there's a lot of talking about

the underpayment of the workers. There's a lot of overpayment of the workers too, just to get them to do the job and their work out there. And I think it's overplayed. I think the one thing we're not talking about is no matter what we do to fix the system, we have to have part of the problem the system is broken is that such a backlog and until we number one come up with the right system and improve it but also have a time period to do away with the backlog,

the problems are going to still exist. So we have to have kind of a two-phase problem on working in any immigration reform. Thank you for being here. Two comments. Number one, I'm not sure we really want to fix the border problem because it's been this way for over 40 years. Like drugs, I don't really think we want to solve it because if we really wanted to, I think we would have a while back or earnestly had, we would enforce the laws that are there. Number two, I read in WAPO or Bulwark, an established magazine a couple days ago, that the law. I think if we had a law that we honestly had, we would

enforce the laws out of there. Number two, I read in WAPO or Bulwark, an established magazine a couple days ago, that a lot of businesses are stressing, please do not come and do a massive clean up of their businesses because like

you said, e-verification has not been used for a long time and everybody knows they are hiring illegal immigrants as Trump is for his business. So they've already said just stay away, don't bother, which is a threat flag that they do. So those are just comments and whoever wants to say anything. Anybody want to respond? I largely agree with you. It's a matter of whether we want to enforce our borders. There are episodes in US history in the past where we've successfully closed borders. After 1882, we largely prevented Chinese immigrants from coming to the western United States. It was much harder to police borders then than it is now, and they were a big part of the workforce in the western United States at that time. We talked about the

restrictive immigration legislation in the 1920s that very much clamped down on immigration. Shamefully, we did, as you also mentioned, Bob, we kept most Jewish refugees away from the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s. So yes, it's not a good idea in my view, but it is within the power of the government, if it wants to, to exercise tight control over its borders. And I'll actually, I can actually give statistics that support this because I was looking at them

this morning connection with something else. Trump said, President Trump said that, you know, we have had the lowest number of illegal entries, you know, in history and people came back and said, no, they were lower in 1968 or something like that. We can look at border patrol statistics and know how many people actually weren't apprehended. I can tell you how many apprehensions there were to a seven digit number, six digit number,

but we know how many people actually evaded immigration before and I believe somebody on this panel talked about this, that we tighten up the border people, we no longer have the circular flow of people in and out of the United States. In 2003, 2004, we only caught about one out of every three people coming illegally. Today, it's up to about 78%. It's a 1,954 mile border. It's tough to patrol the whole thing. So we're actually doing a much better job of that now. And again, we talked about George

Bush and about how he wanted an amnesty. I mean it's it's no secret. And to do that we had a huge border crackdown and a huge immigration deportation program. President Obama did the same thing. I served under both of these presidents. So you know it is one of those things the two things do go hand in hand but you know it's important to understand that border is a lot tighter now than it's ever been. First of all, thank you very much for this engaging discussion and pleased to see that there actually is quite a bit of common ground. But the one question that you didn't actually come up with an answer for was, practically speaking, how we get to the next level of immigration where it's, and I think some of

them, some of you touched on some points. So for example, first of all, separate the border problem. Secondly, skills-based. And thirdly, there may be some ways to attack and maybe separate economic and political immigration from each other. But I think you also have to come up and responding to Bob's question with what's the number? And we didn't get an answer to that. The initial, I'm not talking about a number

that's here long after I'm gone, but I'm talking about a number that perhaps we see as we move beyond this current political phase into something perhaps in three or four more years. I would like to say that we shouldn't have a number. We shouldn't have a number because how are you gonna know how many people you're going to need? How are you going to determine? It's kind of the moment you creating numbers, you impose a

restriction. Um, setting saying that we value this kind of immigrant versus that kind of immigrant, an immigrant whose high skill versus low skill, you create a division. Um, in the moment you say you don't value one more than the other, you start justifying taking their rights, allowing their undocumented exploitation. And so I don't think we should have a number. I think we should just let people come and then let them be legal so that they can leave. Because one of the things that most undocumented immigrants struggle with is that once they enter the United States, it is extremely hard to exit and reenter. So they are willing to be separated from

their children for decades. This is mothers and fathers not see their Children grow up because it's so hard to re enter the United States. But if they're here documented, they can leave, retire, come back if they want to. I think we should allow this more circular flows to exist and stop putting so much restrictions on them. Since this might be a place where we don't have common ground. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. So let me say two things. I do think we need to regulate immigration flows. I think that's the only politically viable solution. And within that, there should be some room for this circular flow. But to your point about the number, one way to think about this is, how has the US economy and society evolved in recent decades? Population growth of one or 2% per year net. Okay, well, what's happened in the last three years has came up a little bit earlier. The US population has been growing about 1% of year in the last three years. This is after the COVID disruption. That's mostly net migration. So if we think that we are accustomed to an economy and society with population that grows 1 or 2% per year, I think we have to recognize as well that unless there's dramatic changes in the fertility patterns of American-born persons,

most of that net population increase will need to come from immigrants. That gives you at least a ballpark way to think about a number. Your question, I'm thinking, what's the way forward? Is this kind of a question? And I think a lot of what's, it's really weird to have a panel where everybody kind of agrees from different sides of the political spectrum, which is why this is so maddening is because you have a policy area where people from the left, the right, the center, libertarians, conservatives, progressives, generally agree that immigration is good for this country. It's needed for a variety of purposes, which you've heard today, that there should be comprehensive immigration reform.

And yet for the last several decades, because of a variety of maddening reasons, nothing kind of happens. And so what you end up having is a lot of what you've heard about today. You have increased border enforcement and all of the negative externalities that arise out of that in terms of how we treat people and sometimes when they come to the border in terms of the, you know what, it's billions of dollars. It's the largest part of the Homeland Security budget is border enforcement. I would rather have those billions of dollars be spent on healthcare, right, rather than

moving people across the border. But there are, when Congress is not taking a leadership role and when the people that elect those individuals are not electing them on the basis of taking that leadership role and just electing incumbents again and again, and of course, the role of money in that political election and influencing the vote is a big part of the reason

why they keep getting elected again and again. That's when you start seeing these efforts like border enforcement and trying to reform asylum laws and executive actions. Now, there are some radical for some folks proposals that do exist in terms of what is the way forward. One of those is empowering states. When you start losing, when the federal government is unable to or unwilling to take a responsibility or leadership role, you may have to start creating bespoke solutions that are state-based. So California has different needs in terms of vis-a-vis immigration than, for instance, Arkansas.

So that's kind of one way to kind of work through these issues. We've also tried DACA and DAPA and a lot of these executive actions. But at the end of the day, the way forward really, and it's like we're a broken record here, is for Congress to really take this up and do something about it. And if they don't, we should stop electing them and putting them in positions of power.

Okay, you have a minute. I think there's a couple of things you have to deal with. Number one, if we have 20 million illegals in this country, most of which who have found jobs, who have found things that they're doing in this country, we need to figure out how to update that because that's the undercount that we've had coming in because of our economic needs in this country. They're here because we didn't allow enough legals to come in and they came here for their jobs. And you have to get caught up on that. But I think you then have to develop some type of,

at least for not the other forms of immigration, but for those that you're looking at the economic driven, I disagree that you have to qualify some of them as low skilled, medium skilled, high skilled. Otherwise, what happens is what has happened in the last 20 years, is we put the focus just as low skilled, medium skilled, high skilled. Otherwise what happens is what has happened in the last 20 years, is we put the focus just on high skilled and we squeeze out all those workers that need to come here.

So I think there is a way to develop a sliding scale need of how many you allow to come in every year based on the economic growth of this country. Now I think if you did that, you would then right the ship in terms of where we've been so wrong for the last 40 years. I think we're going to conclude on that. I want to thank Jeff White for a terrific question. I want to thank Jeff and Sue for making this possible. This panel gave me hope, and that's not always easy to find these days. I want to thank everybody who is here with us, those who are watching on Zoom or Facebook

Live and all those who will hear this enlightening discussion on our podcast, Let's Find Common Ground. I think today we did find some common ground. And I would also invite you all to join us on April 3rd for our annual Climate Forward Conference in Town and Gown. Thank you and have a great rest of the day. I would also invite you all to join us on April 3rd for our annual Climate Forward Conference in Town and Gown. Thank you and have a great rest of the day. Thank you for joining us on Let's Find Common Ground.

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