 The conviviality of this symposium where lots of friends and then people like me, fellow travelers, are here on behalf of this, I do here at UCI Law School, I teach labor and employment law, among other things, as legal profession, but have written on low-each work and in particular some on organizing among immigrant workers in Southern California and so it's an enormous pleasure for me to have this conference here. I don't have to go to immigration conferences because there's just not enough time in the world, but I try and read everything that I can and so it's just such a treat to have all of you here and I am also a faculty advisor to the French-Lake UC Irvine Law Review and let me say on behalf of the students involved in the law review, some of whom are in the room, how grateful we are to those of you who are writing papers for inclusion in this volume, if you do us a great honor by sharing your ideas in print with us and I'm hopeful that our students will do your work in honor by doing a great job with it and if not, let me know and I'll correct the whip. I'm not worried about that. This is a panel on immigration and work and just by way of introduction, all three of today's panelists focus on the core tension, a puzzle to go with Steven's theme, underlying immigration or the intersection of immigration and labor law. As we all know, as Inventionally said, most people migrate to the United States to work, always have, probably always will. The work is, as everyone says, the magnet, but as we know, immigration law makes work illegal for many and that, as Kathleen will talk about and as many have, enables employers to exploit work, sorry, exploit immigrant workers, which of course creates an incentive to hire them and gives them a competitive advantage in theory, gives employers who want to engage in that kind of exploitation a competitive advantage, but that competitive advantage is thought to subvert both the law and policy of immigration law and the law and policy of labor and employment law. And so this panel, three of the wonderful papers on this panel, address that core tension or puzzle and try to come to grips with the concepts about the illegality of work and the illegality of exploitation. We're going to go in alphabetical order, beginning with Jennifer Gordon, a professor at Fordham Law School, where she has been on the faculty teaching immigration and labor, among other courses for a number of years. And as probably you all know, prior to entering law teaching, she wrote a really terrific book that I have read and assigned called Suburban's Bet Shops and was the founding executive director of the workplace project, a really path-breaking worker center on Long Island that has been a model for many other worker centers and by itself has generated all sorts of interesting scholarly inquiry. Her paper will offer some critical insight into the arguments that immigrant workers' rights advocates make about why, other than basic human decency, it is important to protect the labor rights of all workers, including unauthorized migrants. And so she's going to take on the challenge of coming up with an answer to the conventional question. Do you think that undocumented workers actually have a right to work in the United States that should be protected? How should we address that? Next in alphabetical order, Kathleen Kim, an associate professor at my old employer Loyola Law School of Los Angeles, where she teaches sports and immigration law, really a pioneer in both activism and legal scholarship on human trafficking, where she did civil litigation on behalf of human trafficking survivors for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. And actually as a gubernatorial appointed to the California Alliance for Combat, Trafficking, and Slavery, coordinated by the California Attorney General's Office of that wonderful intersection between theory and practice. Her paper is going to focus on how the unauthorized status of migrant workers makes them uniquely susceptible to coercion. It's going to take on some of the 13th Amendment conceptual work focusing on the question of coerced labor. And then last but not least, Juliet Stumpf, a professor at Lewis and Clark Law School, where she teaches immigration law, employment discrimination, and civil procedure. Previously served as a trial attorney, a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she litigated employment discrimination claims and claims on behalf of immigrants and U.S. citizens of color. She's going to examine the contemporary debate over whether universalize the E-Verify system in the context of law-standing arguments about the role of government in regulating eligibility for employment and formation of the employment relationship. The Immigration and Reform and Control Act, as we all know, like lots of laws, some that we consider morally acceptable, some that we consider morally extremely objectionable, defines who is eligible and who is not to work by drawing a circle around some workers, which leaves some in and excludes others. And that creates a whole lot of conceptual and practical problems that she would talk about. The theme of this symposium, as an invitation to look more closely at what I felt were sort of tensions and puzzles in my own work and in the things that I've been saying for some 25 years now about the intersection of immigration and work. And this sort of, the particular knockup of puzzles I want to talk about today, started to feel thorny to me as I sensed increasing dissonance between two things that appear in almost every article, book, paper that I write. And in fact, originally I would have said the challenge was just saying the same thing differently. And those two things are that if you look at what economists say, in fact, immigrants and even low wage and undocumented immigrants do not have any significant impact on native low wage workers in the United States, if you look at the United States overall. Another version of this often used in a public debate is immigrants take jobs that Americans won't do. So that's one way that I and other advocates and scholars respond to the fear, a common fear, also a trumped up fear, that if we let any more immigrants, it's going to hurt native workers. And the other common way that we respond is saying that even if you don't have any, you the public don't have any connection to or concern for undocumented workers, you should support the enforcement of their labor rights because only when everybody's labor rights are enforced are anybody's labor rights real and that we have to make sure that undocumented workers have all the rights that native workers do or they're going to be more desirable to unscrupulous employers. Those are the two things. I've said them a lot. Many people in this room have said them a lot. I want to start off by exploring what I think is just a really obvious tension between those two. Obvious but also I think resolvable. And then go on to what I think are some more thorny questions that are under the surface. And I should say in starting, it's not that I think that all the tensions and contradictions are on my side, right? If you look at what many people who argue that immigrants are a competition or immigrants are going to hurt our workers, and there's inconsistencies all over the place, including that many of the people who profess most concern for our workers in that context, voting against minimum wage increases, health and safety increases, an increase in any kind of workplace protection. So not a free pass there, but this for me is an exercise to mean my own house. So let me first lay out the core arguments on the economic and workers rights ground, right? Seeing overall, if you look nationally, most economists now agree, the vast majority of economists now agree that immigration as a whole has either a neutral or small net positive impact on the national economy and on the workforce overall. And I have to say that when you say that, that strikes most casual and not so casual observers as preposterous, right? Most people have an image of the labor market as a fixed pool of jobs. You have more people coming in and that increases competition. So it must drive wages down and must put people out of work. And the economists general response to that is first, that immigrants are not what they call perfect substitutes for natives. That is, immigrants have different assets and they don't have the language skills or cultural community of natives. So they're going to get the jobs that require limited literacy and limited interaction with the public or other workers outside their language and native workers are going to get the jobs that require reading and writing and job training in the United States and so on. It's not economists say that immigrants compete with nobody for jobs. They do compete, but who they compete with are other recent immigrants. That's where you can see an impact not on native workers. The second thing economists say is in fact, despite the common intuition, the pool of jobs is not fixed. And immigrants are also consumers so they increase the demand for goods and services therefore creating more jobs and employers change how they structure their work in the face of a large supply of immigrant workers. They choose more labor intensive methods rather than capital intensive methods. And that also increases the number of jobs and increases the opportunities for native workers to move into supervisory or other positions. So that's the economic argument. The workers' rights argument basically what we say as workers' rights advocates is first, immigrants are already covered by the majority of workplace laws. They're covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act for minimum wages over time. They're covered under the Occupational Safety and Health Act for a safety and healthy workplace. In most, excuse me, in most circuits they're covered under anti-discrimination law. In most states they're covered under workers' comp law. And even the worst and most prominent decision in this field, the Hopham Plastics decision that says there are effectively no remedies for a set of undocumented workers under labor law, that is labor and organizing law, still affirms that they are employees within the definition of the Act. And what we say is what we really need to focus on is enforcement and making these rights truly available to the workers as opposed to just available on paper. As with the economic argument, this is met with some mixture of concern and disbelief by most casual observers of the situation. People say if undocumented workers are illegal, how do they have rights? If they're not supposed to be hired by employers, how can they work at all? How can they make a claim? And people also express a sense of inequity. Isn't offering rights to be undocumented some kind of incentive to break the law? Isn't it a reward for wrongdoing and so on? That argument was most powerfully expressed and most publicly directed to me when I was testifying before Congress arguing that employer sanctions should be revealed and Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California, said to me, let me tell you where you must examine your argument. You must examine the argument that says somebody who's here illegally in the first place has a right to go and challenge anybody about the conditions of the workplace. That argument won't fly in this public policymaking we have to do. At which point my heart, which is already pretty much as low as my physical body, just went completely through the floor because if this is what Maxine Waters was saying, then they will really and truly suck. Now, from the perspective of most immigrant worker advocates, the primary reason to enforce workplace rights for undocumented workers is that they are human beings. They make contributions to this country and to workplaces all over the country and that the US government covertly and sometimes overtly invites them to come in and therefore the government is responsible for the result. But that's not the principle rhetorical argument we offer to the public. Instead, we say if you don't protect the undocumented, they will be cheaper than other workers and they'll be less likely to complain and so the bad employers will hire them over other native workers. And the core assumption, and here we come to the tension, the core assumption underlying this is that the undocumented and legally authorized workers are competing with each other for jobs. And this is much rarer than explicitly stated, but I do believe it underlies a lot of public statements that immigrants will return home when they can't find work anymore. That is that this sort of labor law enforcement is in a way a more humane or an alternative to a direct deportation strategy. So just to deal upfront with what is the most obvious tension, if immigrants don't have a negative impact on native's wages and working conditions and if immigrants take jobs that native workers won't do, then they're not competing with native workers for jobs. And so other than dignity, human decency, human kindness, why should native workers care if those workers' rights are enforced? They're not actually in the same labor market. It's not going to matter. And I think that that tension is actually resolvable to a large degree by a more nuanced look at what economists really are saying. Everybody agrees, I think without exception in the world of economists, that high wage workers, high skilled workers are an asset to the country that receives them. That's a good deal for the country they're coming into. There is more debate at the low wage, low skill end. Nonetheless, most conclude that it's foreign born, other foreign born, other recent immigrant workers most likely to be hurt. But there are some who argue that the impact does fall in a meaningful way on native high school dropouts and those with minimal job experience and training. That's a small shrinking group of people. It's down, for example, by 3 million people over the past decade. But African Americans and other workers of color are over-represented in that pool. And even those who argue most vociferously for the harm to native workers, George Warholster comes to mind, still report a fairly small effect. He says the increase in immigration over 11 years of very high immigration resulted in a 3.6% decrease in the wages of high school dropouts in the United States. Now, that's a small but also real decrease in wages for somebody earning, say, $20,000 a year, that's $720 a year less. And I think that that effect, the real effect, gets magnified by the media's obsession with this idea of conflict between African Americans and immigrants, an obsession that persists even in the face of consistently showing that African Americans are more favorable toward immigration than white Americans. So in one sense, the surface tension, we could resolve the surface tension by doing a better job of, or a clearer job of saying what we're saying. We could say immigrants are largely beneficial to the economy and to U.S. workers overall, but to the extent they have an impact, it's on other low-wage workers, both born-born and high school dropout. And in that sense, the weight falls on the most vulnerable native workers, and African Americans in particular, who are over-represented in that pool and historically disenfranchised, and that merits extra concern from us as advocates. And so, at the very low-wage end, I think it's consistent to argue that focusing on protecting workplace rights for everybody, decent work for all, as our mantra, is not logically inconsistent. I'm also aware, though, that that is sort of an easy, perhaps a too easy place to rest and masks a lot of other things going on underneath the surface that I just want to run through by four biggest keeping up at my concerns, and then I look forward to discussing with you. So, these are concerns really about that position that I just stated, as the tension-resolving position. The first thing I would say is I worry that that position overstates the impact of immigrants on what's happened to African Americans in work, and thus falsely reinforces the story of conflict. African Americans have the highest rate of unemployment of any racial or ethnic group in the United States, and immigration into low-skilled jobs may account for a small part of that rate. And yet other causes work the competition with newcomers. Among those other causes, the sharp decline in unionized industrial jobs that gave opportunities for decent work for many black workers in the United States, and with many into the middle class, and for which they fought over a long time. The increase in privatization of government jobs, public service previously having been another unionized stalwart opportunity for African American workers who often denied access to decent public employment. On-going discrimination by employers against African Americans in favor of white and other favorite racial groups, and the criminalization of young black men in large rates of high school dropout among African American students are two other key factors. And if we're going to acknowledge an impact of immigrants on African Americans, we have to also give equal play to these other much more important factors. So that's one and that's my thought about it. The second issue is that I worry about the jobs Americans won't do narrative. This is a trope that gets pulled out all over the place, and I do believe there are indeed some jobs Americans may never want to do again. Americans, that is people who have a choice in our labor market defining Americans that way. Agriculture, right? Farm work is hot, it's hard, it's complicated, it has the meaning associations in many people's minds, and domestic work may be in a similar category. Although there are still plenty of native farm workers and domestic workers. But the resistance to those things is not inherent in the job. There's no natural work Americans won't do. It's shaped by the wages on offer. It's shaped by the cultural perceptions about the work that can change over time. It can raise wages for workers in residential construction, for hotel staff, for janitors, for health aids, home health aids, native workers may well be willing to apply for them. And with immigrants flooding those labor markets, demanding higher wages is much harder to do. And the question is how we talk about this honestly as opposed to just bringing out immigrants. Now I want to get to what I think is really the heart of my concern. Which is, is a focus on labor rights, the one that I've advocated and many of us have as well, really likely to shift employer preferences in the absence of meaningful penalties for employer's immigration violations. To the extent that we offer this, we often a nice week for myself have sort of pushed it to the side as a realistic possibility. With this really result in large turnover of jobs to immigrants and given how other things are enforced not likely, and I don't think taken the question seriously enough, I don't know what the evidence is to support it. I'm not saying it's not out there, I'm saying I don't know what it is. I have stories to tell that are disturbing to me, but I have them to tell about how fuller sanctions crackdowns have changed hiring in labor markets. I don't have those stories and I welcome them about how labor law workplace rights enforcement has actually changed hiring patterns, and I think that's because wages minimum wages and minimum workplace conditions are set very low in the United States. The majority of employers are ready to comply with them and there are other reasons that employers prefer undocumented workers control, subservience and all lack of ability to argue back in English, being high among them. And I think you also need to acknowledge that immigrant workers, new immigrants, do face a different picture than native workers. They come with crushing debt, workers they're only opportunity to pay back that they see their work here at least in the beginning as short term. The money they earn goes further back home and so to the extent that they have a, that willing is understood to be not fully willing in the sense that we wish it was they may be willing to do more work for less money and labor law enforcement is not going to change that. So the last concern is the question if labor law alone is not actually going to create any change, is there any such thing as a good employer sanctions policy? Now many in this room including Bill Hain and my wish me and myself have been arguing that the answer is no. And we've been arguing this for the 25 years since employer sanctions is passed. We've been saying employer sanctions gives union or employers a tool to undercut union organizing and workers who demand their rights and this should be the appeal. And this was particularly evident, I think self evident when combined with the Bush government's brutal policy of workplace rights. And the rights frankly continue under Obama although we're calling them silent rights because they result in workers being fired rather than deported. Our continued opposition to silent rights and to the firing of undocumented workers puts us in the position of having to answer do you believe that the undocumented have a right to work in the United States that should be protected. Now obviously part of the issue that is legalization. All those arguments can play out in other panels and there's more to say. But I think what we have the hardest time answering what we need to spend more time thinking about is what are we calling for by way of future flow policy. Policy for those who are going to keep coming into the United States whether we have a law that it makes them or not. Now maybe we should call for open borders. Kevin Johnson has made strong arguments for that. I have others in this room and elsewhere and maybe the reasons are as Bill Hing said earlier they can recently argue that institutionalized racism that U.S. immigration law has never been able to escape the role of the United States in creating the conditions that lead people to migrate and so on. But if we're going to argue and say our future policy should be open borders I worry deeply about the impact of that on the most disadvantaged workers in the United States. But I don't think we can just walk away from that question. And if we don't want to call for open borders but we do believe that given global inequality significant ongoing low wage migration is going to keep happening and we're concerned about the impact and we don't believe that labor law enforcement is seriously going to change that dynamic and we don't think sanctions is the right approach. What is our position about how to manage low wage immigrants still to come in the United States? And I ask the question having already spent a fair amount of time working on one possible answer or a proposal for transnational labor citizenship that would try and shift the incentives in immigration law to create more solidarity and more reasons for immigrants and possibility for immigrants to be able to enforce their rights while they're here. But that is in some measure a fantasy picture as opposed to something that's immediately implementable. And we need more proposals and I think we need more honest conversation about these questions. And so I welcome that. Thanks. Thanks so much to everyone at the DCI as we'll see if you're inviting me to be here organizing such an amazing conference. I'm humbled actually to be here. Not only by my co-panelists but everyone else participating in the events for today. And thank you Catherine for the massive introduction and I think it's particularly soothing that Jennifer did start us off because she very succinctly outlined the tensions that do exist within the debate around undocumented workers as well as legalization that tie into legalization at the end of your comments. And so I hope to make some comments about legalization of the other mind talk as well and how my particular work which focuses on human trafficking might provide a lens to make steps towards that goal of legalization though a little bit differently. So as Catherine already mentioned my practical experience and my scholarship center on the issue of human trafficking and as such is a part of a field of scholarship at the intersection of immigration and workplace rights. 90% of human trafficking victims are immigrant workers and I take a distinctly immigrant workplace rights approach to the issue of human trafficking which I believe is grounded in the 13th amendment protection of free labor. There are other approaches to human trafficking including women's rights, international human rights but mine is one of immigrant workplace rights. So naturally it makes sense that the particular project that I'm going to be discussing today which is tentatively titled Encorsable as suggested by Jennifer and Stephen late last spring when I presented a work on the coercion of work so I thank them for that. It's only tentatively titled Encorsable although I've gotten some pushback on that and it might change to beyond coercion but that particular project is part of a larger project that began several years ago when I participated in the 13th amendment symposium among labor theorists such as James Grace Hope, Leo Vanderbilt, Maria Antivarros and Rebecca Zietlow who view the 13th amendment as an anti-subordination principle and as a free labor principle and in that symposium piece that I contributed to that 13th amendment symposium I did discuss human trafficking as yet another form modern form of unfree labor whose characteristics remain at the time at least largely misunderstood and I also identified a conflicted question within 13th amendment jurisprudence and at the time still insufficiently answered in human trafficking law namely what kind of coercion could amount to a violation of involuntary servitude so that kind of question necessarily raised more profound questions of the nature of free will requiring a very in-depth theoretical and philosophical analysis into the normative structure of coercion and at the time I was way too green and extremely daunted by the prospect of pursuing such a challenge so it took me several years but recently I did answer those questions in an article called The Coercion of Trafficked Workers and so that just came out and that is really the springboard for the project that I'm working on today so just by way of background however this particular article utilized the basic framework of the first piece but significantly developed the doctrinal analysis undertaken in that first project and also drew from modern philosophy to define the prevailing ontological normative framework for coercion previous to the passage of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act which passed in 2000 to address protections and criminal provisions against human trafficking and then also identified a new ontological and normative framework for coercion only recently developed as a result of new advancements under the Trafficking Victim Protection Act so what are those frameworks pre-TDPA and post-TDPA well pre-TDPA I believe there was a dominant theory of coercion what I call the known reasonable alternative theory and what modern philosophers have called the moral baseline approach to coercion and as applied in the contemporary involuntary labor context in order to establish a violation of involuntary servitude that theory of the no reasonable alternative theory would require an employer to leave a worker with no reasonable alternative but to perform the labor so that requirement involves a specific threat a specific and identifiable threat by an employer which must be determined to be morally objectionable and therefore that threat would have to be so severe that a worker is in fact left with no choice but to comply within employer's demands in other words the threatened alternative by any moral objective standard must be so egregious that it would be unreasonable for a worker to choose it over remaining in forced labor until Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000 the Judicially Recognized Threatened Alternatives that could amount to involuntary servitude comprised of only threats of physical violence or threats of legal penalty for failure to work that follows from a well-recognized Supreme Court case called U.S. Peace Kisminsky in 1988 so that structure I believe makes intuitive sense because it can be widely agreed upon that such threats are morally objectionable while non-physical and nonviolent threats such as a threat to not send money home to a worker's family members in that immigrant worker's country of origin might not clearly be morally objectionable and therefore courts in the U.S. Supreme Court in that case refuse to recognize those kinds of non-physical threats as a violation of involuntary servitude yet the persistence of cases involving immigrant labor and what appeared to be forced labor conditions without threats of physical or legal constraints encouraged the Department of Justice to make an appeal to Congress to expand laws against involuntary servitude at the same time feminist labor rights advocates and immigrants rights groups were also lobbying for new legislation to specifically combat human trafficking. Then in 2000 the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed explicitly overturning the previous more restrictive laws regarding involuntary servitude and officially broadened the coercive means sufficient to find for forced labor violation specifically allowing psychological coercion in addition to physical and legal coercion to effectuate a violation of forced labor. And with that, importantly the Trafficking Victims Protection Act also provide immigration relief for individuals that were found to be trafficked and therefore coercion the legal sufficiency of coercion became a fundamental inquiry in obtaining immigration relief for a broad category exploited immigrant workers. However the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as initially promulgated failed to define psychological coercion stating nearly that it was non-physical and non-violent and due to the ambiguity of coercion under the first promulgation of the Act I've proposed in this previous article that it lack clarity and therefore allowed for the persistence of the dominant no reasonable alternative framework for determining cases of involuntary servitude. This overall resulted in the under-enforcement of non-physically coerced human trafficking violations and my survey of Trafficking Prosecutions since the enactment of Trafficking Victims Production Act shows 75% evidencing overt or threatened physical force while at the same time anecdotal testimony advocates appealed the test to the Department of Homeland Security and Law Enforcement's General Reluctance to recognize certain cases of trafficking in the absence of physical harm. In 2008 the Trafficking Victims Protection Act brought greater specificity to the definition of coercion direct and indirect threats of financial reputational and psychological harm for failure that could actually amount to forced labor and several court opinions also holistically applied this definition of trafficking bringing further clarity to coercion. From that analysis I extrapolated what I believe to be a new framework for coercion which I call situational and this is derived from the statutory language as well as these court opinions and the structure of situational coercion what it is is that it requires the evaluator to evaluate all those surrounding circumstances of the alleged forced labor scenario paying close attention to power inequalities and the worker's individual characteristics that may render them vulnerable to exploitation and ask whether the employer deliberately took advantage of the worker's vulnerability to obtain labor at an exploited price and this in my opinion better matches the sociological realities of trafficking which frequently involved no non over pressures to work marked by these severe unpowering balances between the worker and the employer so the operationalization of this framework requires that the evaluator again takes a look at all the surrounding circumstances with close attention to worker's vulnerabilities to determine if that employer indeed took advantage of the worker to keep them in exploitive working conditions so under this framework workers immigrant workers who are threatened with eviction from their employer provided housing when they complain about their working conditions to actually make a claim for forced labor and therefore attain immigration elite under the TVPA whereas under the no reasonable alternative framework that thread is not clearly morally objectionable because it still needs the worker with a choice a choice to simply leave fine housing and find another job elsewhere and in fact it seems legitimate that employer who provides housing to the worker can take back the housing if the worker complains and wants to leave the work situation however if all the circumstances of the case are evaluated under a situational framework including close attention to the workers vulnerabilities then the evaluator can see that the workers were undocumented they were also homeless before coming into the employ of the employer and so that demonstrates that the employer was clearly taking advantage of these worker vulnerabilities to keep the worker in exploitive labor conditions so under this situational framework then it expands the category of cases that might give rise to forced labor forced labor case and a power inequality is then the hallmark of forced labor in the modern arena where overt and objectively egregious those are often times the absence and this begs another question which brings me to my current project given the vulnerability of undocumented immigrants in the workplace due to the undocumented status and the constant implicit threat of deportation doesn't this point to an inherent power inequality between the workers and those that employ them and those then that not make the undocumented workplace inherently coercive so in other words beyond trafficking how pervasive is coercion in the undocumented workplace so just by way of analogy traditional Marxist for example considered capitalist employment relationships as inherently coercive and the workers in a capitalist economy are not directly forced to work as employers Marxist contends that the general background condition of economic relations the dull compulsion of economic relations coerces workers to submit to exploitative employment relationships so in this way coercion can be thought of as structural and indirect giving the appearance of volunteering this but in fact undermining the workers freedom and so as applied to then the immigrant workplace or the undocumented workplace a theory of structural coercion would place great emphasis on the general coerciveness of immigration restrictions a structural coercion analysis would eliminate consideration of the employer's conduct and focus instead on whether the structure of immigration laws coerces immigrant workers into accepting exploitative work relationships for example unlawful presence we know can be perceived as coercing undocumented immigrants into declines with substandard working conditions it's a ground of vulnerability unlawful presence sustains a climate of fear ignorance and keeping them from speaking out against exploitative labor conditions similarly as Jennifer spoke about ERCA illuminates some of these problems under a structural coercion framework even if employers do not explicitly threaten workers with deportation there's this implicit threat that if workers do not comply with exploitative working conditions then they could expose themselves to deportation so so then if that's the case if immigration restrictions do cultivate a coercive undocumented workplace then we as advocates have to think of a way to remedy it however that kind of coercion structural coercion is not direct specific or identifiable and therefore there is no immediate legal remedy furthermore by virtue of the laws that reinforce the illegality of undocumented immigrants there is in place an impossibly vulnerable position without bargaining power there's no opportunity to change workplace conditions and even if the labor rights in theory are available to these workers they can't exercise them so the only solution then is system-wide reform legalization is the only solution to remedy the inherently coercive workplace and to move toward this goal this particular project begins with a premise that the 13th amendment and related commerce enacted workplace rights statutes are intended to protect workers from coercion and this idea of freedom from coercion is an essential principle of free labor rights and just as a side note that idea comes from a contested labor history after the 13th amendment's enactment the idea that animated free labor was actually a freedom of contract idea so it was called free labor ideology but it really stood for freedom of contracts that individuals and employer and employee engage in a free labor contract even if those working conditions were unconscionable that was later influenced or impacted by a freedom from coercion type of analysis of labor advocates who saw freedom of contract as moving into a form of wage slavery and so labor advocates informs labor history by adopting the freedom from coercion idea of the workplace rather than freedom of contract so I'd like to argue that the undocumented workplace is also a highly contested area of labor rights and that this tension between freedom of contract and freedom of labor or freedom from coercion still persists in the undocumented workplace and that is largely driven by this idea that undocumented workers, I'm sorry because of their illegality they're perceived to be an inclusive relationship with their employers this idea that they freely comply with substandard working conditions and are voluntary present in violation of the law because these illegal workers willingly accept their exploitation use the laws, continue preference of immigration enforcement over labor rights and so as I report in this project I have to answer several crucial questions to get to that latter point that I just made firstly, what is the scope of coercion in the undocumented workplace what are then the implications for a free labor theory and in utilizing this lens of coercion in the undocumented workplace does it indeed demand the law's intervention and possibly a movement towards legalization like everybody else thank you to Irvine and Steven Lee when I first walked into this classroom I don't know if the urban people still realize this but this classroom has that new car smell right? and just while I got the feeling when I walked into this somebody was letting me test drive in the porch yeah that's what I was saying it's a pleasure to be part of pressing the pedal for the metal and I hope I can steer myself through this on this big occasion I was trying to talk about the labor crisis and going after it gives me the opportunity to say maybe the only one I'll ever have to say that bad traffic because it's not the only barrier to getting to work this is really this is still an area that I'm coming back to after a long time of writing about neutralization of immigration laws but I was at the desk with the president and I worked with immigration laws and with the residents and so it's where it relates I think it's my interest in seeing a way that immigration law enforcement affected other areas of the law right here that would be work so what I want to lay out is two ways I think that this country has framed thinking about work and regulating access to work and those are the immigration law framework and the employment law framework and for apologies to people who actually know about employment law I'll leave this to you in a somewhat simplistic way so the immigration law approach to work and to access to work but that would be to work I think it's twofold so immigration law tends to require work and then it also denies access to work so if you think about it this way it requires people to work with the legal structure and all the ways that have been this point in that today and then for other work but it's left in the forced migration of slaves into the country the indentured servitude for European immigrants in another way that hopefully does come in a second and in the denial of access to work of course is that we started out with the Indian contract legal laws for the APA the Asian exclusion law of the 19th century which basically said that you couldn't come into the country if you had a contract to work today right unlawfully present means that you are unlawful people unlawful people to work in a condition entry on an offer of employment and continued satisfaction performance of that job so for example the H1B these are the term years but it also terminates if the employer can make sure employment so the role of government in immigration law is very visible but in the national interest the government can basically trump an employer's decision about who to hire if that choice implicates entry in immigration basically so also if you look at which non-citizens the government grants authorization to work unlimited authorization to work we are looking basically at that asylum employment residence work authorization is what we call the justice department inherent at that status so let me talk about the other way of framing access to the workplace there is a world outside the picture that John of ultimate government control over who they work and who they not and that's what I'm calling the employment offering so when I teach employment discrimination when I spend about 15 seconds explaining that talking about how the at-will employment doctrine allows employers to fire employees for no reason or for no reason at all but in the courts a purgerized employment discrimination is basically an exception to this at-will doctrine so in that picture it's an employer that's forefronted there I'm getting a little bit simplistic but employment law means dedicated to how the law structures that employer-employee relationship so the government in that picture is pretty much absent of the formation of that relationship and in fact sometimes the way I teach is the employment discrimination law the government is often the good guy from the employee's perspective it's the Department of Justice and the EUC writing to the rescue and tearing down barriers to discrimination the problem is when they either don't do it or they do it wrong so I'm very proud of this barrier to talking about discrimination in employment so the question of whether this is the employee well that kind of gets relegated in my course to my coverage of national origin and alienation discrimination and that's been troubling me long enough so I had to come back and do this project so outside of immigration law the baseline expectation is that it's the employer who controls taxes to employment to the workplace, to the status of being an employee and we accept for the most part some level of coercion by the employer about what we'll work at where, when but people tend to see the government have a very little say about that so what happens when this comparatively coercive government centered framework of immigration law meets up with comparatively employer centered vision of work is relatively free from the government say over employee access to work see that's where I could be employer of the nation's laws and the e-verify system let me just give a great introduction to that I just want to lay out a few more details about both the immigration reform control act was passed in 1986 and it prohibited employers from knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants and people who were not authorized to work and it also required employers to check eligibility and identity e-verify is basically a way of it's sort of alternative to the I-9 form it's a way of checking the work authorization of new hires so the employer basically inputs information from the documents that you present into this database and that computer database then goes and checks that information against the security administration's database and against DHS's departmental administrative database so there's been a number of critiques of the e-verify system a lot of them and I think they can basically be summarized in two ways one is a question of whether or not the system works as it's intended to and the other one has to do with misuse so in terms of the question of whether or not it works as intended there's really two categories of complaints there both were inclusive it's confirming as work authorized to many people who don't have work authorization and there are estimates that confirms as work authorized about 54% of the undocumented population as the immigration policy institute's latest figure the other one is that it's under-inclusive that there are database errors or user errors that are failing to confirm as work authorized people who actually do have work authorization citizens and work authorized on citizens the other one has to do with discrimination there's a disparate impact on and either form employees or people who have what the user database enturer I think perceives as foreign seaming names that they find hard to spell name, order, errors, marriage related changes and such as that's around then right the second one has to do with misuse of the system and one way of thinking about this is there's two possible categories of two three but I'll start with two possible categories of actors who could misuse the system that we're kind of seeing coming up right now Laws and Employers of course and Jennifer has done a much better job than I've ever could talking about how the employer sanctions laws and allow employers to to misuse employer sanctions to harm later organizing and and under my notice of employment protections for workers and Steven Lee's article private integration screening in the workplace which he should all go home and read at his conference so he explains it's a problem of of mission conflict that immigration agencies and employers have inherently have different missions and that when you task employers with an immigration enforcement mission they may use their immigration powers basically to support their own mission so he verifies this picture by basically giving the employer more information about the employees immigration status and then tells them to fulfill that immigration enforcement mission by firing non-confirmed employees but it doesn't force them to that's not what computers really can do so in other words the the employer a more accurately to make that choice it's either follow the immigration mission or use the information to ensure more compliance less cost the workforce so there's employers I just want to talk about states because what we're seeing is I think rapidly growing trends in state laws that require employer use of the your time so the first issue is the issue that I think people talk about most is preemption the simple idea that this is really about the relationship between the state and the federal government and who gets to enforce immigration law and I think that's the the issue that's pretty important in why I'm not sure but I'll leave that for a moment what's also happening though is that what the states are really doing is claiming a greater role in the creation of the employment relationship in access to work and in decisions about who the employer hires or routines so it's using states are using employment as a means of enforcing other enforcement other enforcement goals so one question is whether that's a problem in the first place because after all the states are using this to increase the enforcement of immigration laws so unless you're an immigrant why is that a big deal one problem I think what they might actually be doing is trying to change the demographics of the state population but others have talked about that if you have a part so there's another problem that I want to raise and this is the part of my project where I start to feel like shagging is what we do where he says oh I have a bad feeling about this movie it's going to be a response with rough roll but they don't know why they add that bad feeling until they get problems so let me try to discern two of the goals so what I have to do with employment and law enforcement is to find this way e-verified together with the employer sanctions acts as a portal for governments like federal and state to have a presence in the inception of the employment relationship so let's put that together with the greater powers that it gives to employers to choose whether to use e-verified results only for immigration enforcement but also for their own purposes and so the upshot is if you put those together e-verified gives employers the federal government and the states a greater role, more power to operate in the realm of access to employment and the problem is I think a net loss of freedom for employees, for all employees not just immigrants but citizens as well now at its face you could say that's really the only way to affect a small percentage of employees now is about 2.6% of everyone who gets checked through the EDR system you get even a tentative non-confirmation that's sort of the first that sort of says check with the government to make sure the documents are okay before we issue a file on law confirmation so that you can't work but what's important is that it normalizes the role of government in using access to the workplace is a legitimate location for law enforcement and I think outside of immigration law we see one of our freedoms as citizens and permanent residents and other residents of the United States that's one of our whether and where we work is something that's central to our social structure for a democratic society and we need to ask the employer for permission to work at any particular workplace or to create our own work but not the government that's the way people tend to perceive that the government for example doesn't issue employment authorization to the citizen but I think that actually changed in 1986 I think the immigration reform control act transformed relatively private decision making about access to the workplace into a regime in which the government is authorized to work including citizens so the immigration reform control act and E-Verify makes the access to work of every person contingent on the permission of the U.S. government to be employed and E-Verify makes the decision of every employer to hire any employee contingent on the permission of the U.S. government to employ that individual and the information is very fiftiful now, very few employees think about it that way I think E-Verify is the Checheya health law E-Verify is going to make URPA's transformation visible to every employee to some extent but it goes beyond URPA in making that that government role visible So as the computer is checking the information E-Verify is going to And it makes the Department of Tourism and Security an active participant in the decision of how well the employee keeps her job. So why should we care? I'm going to give you a pragmatic and philosophical reason. David Holmes often talked about how immigration law is often the winch for government procurement of mainstream liberties. Watch immigration law to see what's going to happen to citizens next. And DHS's law enforcement role here would be verified without immigration law. Immigration law enforcement. But the Department of Homeland Security's mission is broader than that. It's about national security. And what he verified views of the Department of Homeland Security is information about every US worker who passes through the e-verify system. And I wonder whether at some point it's going to be tempting to use that information for other purposes. And here's a philosophical one. Work is central in our society. We use it to generate the theme that our income is to sustain ourselves and our families. Just a forecast time to sustain groups. Work has social and personal meaning. CNDS has talked about work as one of the most racially integrated aspects of many of our lives. And it can be a central place, she says, where democratic integration occurs. So I'd like to see us be very careful about how we let the government use that delicate moment where work begins. Well, thank you, three fabulous panelists for terrific papers. In the interest of time, I'm simply just going to pose one question to each panelist. I have a speaking suspicion that you might want to turn it around for a conversation of the group since we have all these great minds in the room. And I'll let you decide what you want to do with that. First, for Jennifer, I wanted to maybe think about focusing on the very last question you asked about managing the future flow of immigration policy. I know this is an issue as to which Mike Wishing has given a lot of thought, because it really is core, I think, as both labor policy in the United States going forward. And to maybe get you to hazard some ideas on the hard questions and trade-offs that you think advocates and scholars ought to be thinking about as we look forward. For Kathleen, I was thinking both with your hat as an advocate and activist and as a scholar. The push to define coercion more broadly has lots of appeal. If you think of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, this is a rights-protective statute in an area where there has been so little rights protective legislative or case law development over the last couple of decades. And so I can see the temptation to want to define coercion more broadly so that the TVPA and, for example, the visas that you can get under it are more broadly available. But I'm wondering whether there is a risk in defining it sufficiently broadly that everybody in theory becomes coerced. And thus, there is no protection for workers more generally, at least if we exist in a world in which coercion and exploitation of low-wage workers is maybe a feature of our legal culture and our economy going forward. Is there a possible unintended consequence? I don't know. I'm not arguing. I'm kind of raising questions. And finally, for Juliet, I'm wondering whether strategically there would be ways to mobilize the general anti-regulatory stance of employers and the business community against this form of intrusive regulation. In theory, employer sanctions could have done that. It could have gotten employers to kind of rise up and say, look, I don't like OSHA. I don't like employer sanctions. I don't like the EEOC. I don't like any of this regulation about telling me about guardrails or ladders or recordkeeping about which racial minorities are representing my workforce and which percentages. And I don't like, either, whether strategically there would be a way to think about strong libertarian streets in Arizona, what it would take to get employers to say, you can't take my business license away just because I wanted to hire this group of workers. Are there possible sort of conceptual coalitions that could be formed in academic work and then on the ground, political coalitions that could be formed in this area if we reconceptualize, e-verify as being the absolute worst version of the IRS and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration all rolled into one? Now it's on. So to respond to that question, I think as soon as I sat down, I realized, as I had thought this whole thing out, what I didn't put in at the end as one of the things that we don't believe is a good idea is, of course, guesswork. Guesswork programs was the answer in comprehensive immigration reform to the, what do we do about the future flow question? But for many of the same reasons that many of us oppose employer sanctions, we also think that guesswork programs are gold lines for exploitation on the workers, well, employers point of view, but harmful to the worker. So, and then there's this whole debate but also about, as I was saying, is a good guesswork program and I think to the extent, some people won't land into any guesswork program and some people feel like if you have a guesswork program that has complete mobility for the worker, completely equal rights and a path to citizenship, that's a possibility, right? But I think the hardest questions on this one, I think there's two kinds of ways to go about the answers. One is large and conceptual. How could we reconfigure immigration laws so that it's consistent with decent work for all? And the other, and I think harder, is really hardcore and numerical, right? You can come up with, and I face this particularly in having proposed a system that I think works better for decent work for all. And the question is how many? You create the ideal program and how many people are you gonna let in under that program? And so I think for those of us who prefer to work with the beauty of models, that's really the challenge, is to figure out what size. Once you figure out what looks fair, how many people get to come in under that and we're very, very reluctant to do that and our reluctance to do that means that our beautiful models aren't entering into the national debate. So really good question. Oh, I'm sorry, that's okay. I'm gonna sit still over here. Really good question, Catherine. And I've been challenged with that question previously and certainly there could be unintended consequences with expanding a definition of coercion so broadly, like you said, that all workplaces that are susceptible to violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act because all workplaces, to some extent are coercive and power, there's inherent power. Like as I mentioned, the Marxist theory, there's inherent power differential between one employee and one employee. So this particular project is informed by a coercion analysis as developed under the TVPA but moves beyond the TVPA. So under the TVPA, there has to be a specific dyadic relationship between the employer and employee. There does have to be some evidence as to employer's intentional taking advantage of the worker and but that's evaluated according to all the facts of surrounding circumstances of the case. And what the TVPA does accomplish with respect to a coercion definition is on this situational analysis where the vulnerable conditions of the worker, the background to conditions of the worker are actually prioritized in the evaluation. So what I hope to do is take that piece of it to inform a structural coercion analysis in the enough bit of workplace because if we look at Trafficking Victims and we see that for the most part they are a vendor vulnerable because of a precarious or undocumented status, then that better informs how immigration restrictions more generally might structurally coerce the workers in the undocumented workplace. And so that can't be fixed by the TVPA and I don't think it should. What I do think is that because of potentially this inherent coercivity of the undocumented workplace that it should be, I know that calls to legislative reform this area have not worked and they probably aren't ever gonna work, but I hope that on the salings and significance of a free labor lens as derived from the 13th Amendment might be another call to the legislature to promote legalization efforts. So Catherine, your questions, can you hear me? So your question's a really interesting one and to some extent I think the question of whether there's some strategic aspects to this and I think with the Chamber of Commerce versus Whiting that's to some extent, that's what the employers are doing right there if they're kind of standing up and saying, hey, this is great, we can't take this kind of role in our workplace. And as I was sort of writing this article, I was thinking about that but also thinking about whether there are other groups to bring in and thinking in particular about whether the Ferocious Remora is sort of laying out the citizen proxy, whether they're arguments to make to protect immigrants that draw on citizens as proxies for those rights. And so I'm gonna be the, so Ferocious and Leti are the optimists and the pessimists in this trope. I'm gonna try to channel both of them. So here goes, I think the citizen proxy argument would be one that tries to channel the little libertarian in all of us, right? But the one that says, well, I don't want the government to be messing around with my right to work. We don't necessarily have one, that's part of the problem but maybe that's the way that we kind of think about it. And so that concern might activate citizens and others who have authorization to work, right? Enough to mobilize some feeling and arguments that pertain to either of those arguments that are being paid by now. Okay, so here's the pessimist in me. I have the feeling that when the employer sends, puts a U.S. citizen, for example, information into the E-verify system and the computer comes back and gives a little feed of whatever it does and says, you're work authorized. I welcome to the remaining employees. I think there's some proportion of the citizens who are gonna say, my membership has just been confirmed. I'm in and the system has just confirmed my membership. And that makes me feel good and so I think the system is great. So it's not really gonna activate the little libertarian that's inside of us all. So I think that's one problem with the citizen proxy argument is that the citizens might actually not see, right, that there actually is a proxy argument. People might not be making this argument. What that gets us back to is the panel before, right? The idea that we can repudiate the other in order to confirm our membership. And I think that's what E-verify might allow us to do. There is an argument that I've been looking at and it comes from some of the national security literature about how we conceive of sort of government infusions that aren't necessarily infusions that say you can't do something. But they're more like communities. They curtail our freedom or our way of understanding how we should be treated in the workplace. And I need to do a lot more work by looking at that but that might be more productive. So I have a clarification and a question. The clarification is that I can't think of any media in Jennifer with the title incorrisible but I should also add that my colleague, Mario Barnes, was involved in the conversation. Like most of my contributions from the school I was just writing in on the co-tails of Jennifer and Mario's expertise and wisdom. So I just didn't want him to do that. But the question is this. So I'm really interested in not just the enforcement of laws but whether it's like the identity of the enforcer that can affect outcomes and public's understanding of what may or may not be an appropriate or an effective outcome. And a few of us have been really looking at whether to what extent empowering or tinkering with the responsibility of the labor department, the EOC, state labor agencies, whether that can affect how we think about labor rights specifically how the public does. Here I'm going to deal with the use of Salsaedo, Shannon Gleason who's been doing some of this work and my most recent work is focused on that. And the question I have for you all is how would you feel if you tweaked it a little bit so that the department labor would take a more proactive role? Is there a place other words for? The public enforcement of the labor laws. Jennifer, your work, we talked about organizing and the role that labor organizations could play but that's really a channel of private enforcement. So I just would like to hear about that. And Julia, I know that you verify currently regulated by DHS but how would you feel labor is playing a regular role in this and I guess the same goes to Kathy as well. Get stuck in this order, we're going to just keep going. If I understand you right here, talking about a piece I just published with a political science colleague arguing that the Department of Labor in its enforcement of minimum wage would do well to create a formal role for workers organizations including unions and worker centers and pointing out a couple of situations where this is already happening on a state level that it's not as legally infeasible as some have argued and that in fact it works quite well which is just as Steven said one idea for bringing more power and more effective strategies to workplace enforcement for all workers but particularly for immigrant heavy workplaces. I think as a theoretical matter Department of Labor is really feeling because their charge is to enforce Fair Labor Standards Act and their investigators, their due diligence involves interviewing both sides and they don't necessarily side with one of the sides but they look for workplace violations and seek to rectify them. I think that there's a field of scholarship that deals with public versus private enforcement and public enforcement has, I mean the reality of it is that public enforcement has been challenged with scarce resources and I think that that is a problem and because the public enforcement agency even the Department of Labor while they're enforcing really good law then from an activist sort of individual rights perspective the enforcement of the law might supersede the representation of workers' interests and so I mean just from my own experience in terms of representing the worker individually versus getting the Department of Labor involved there was sometimes a tension between the individual interests of the worker and pursuing their legal case versus the interests of the Department of Labor to overtake the investigation of the workplace violations. Oh, thanks for giving me a minute to talk to think about the Steve Stevens question. So let me do the pros and cons and maybe a pro. So talking about the Department of Labor one of the nice things about putting the Department of Labor in charge of the e-verify system might be that the labor would have a greater tendency to focus on employer misuse. All right, so situations where the employers are supposed to be confined by a memorandum of agreement with the government that says I'm only gonna use this system to verify new hires not established employees and not to pre-screen employees. But there's no way that the, there's a monitoring and compliance division that's been in place since 2007 but I don't think it's doing a lot of work in figuring out how much employer misuse of the system is, there's a little bit of it and they're trying to work on some sort of automatic ways of looking into some of that. But I think what they are supposed to be doing is then sending that information to ICE and I don't think that that's how many of the kind of ICE is appropriate in this issue. So I think the Department of Labor would be a good do better job of that. The problem is I don't you end up at that point however, the Department of Labor is the agency with commission conflict within the agency because they're supposed to be protecting the rights of employees and at the same time by having an immigration enforcement mission and I don't know how they would resolve that and drawing on your work, right? I think they would end up having to make a choice between the two and maybe that would be the right choice. But maybe here's another pro of giving it to the Department of Labor. They might do a better job of actually taking into account all of the costs to employees into the labor force of the E-Verify and E-Clerc Sanction System and might be more capable perhaps of coming back to Congress in Senba. This is, I just don't have problems here. I'm an immigration lawyer of about 30 years and my experience, I had a comment on your earlier point about the libertarian element but before we leave that, the Department of Labor in my experience should first be evaluated for its performance under immigration administration and if that were done, they would be found as would all the other agencies to be globally inadequate in their performance. I mean, we concern ourselves with the rights of labor, American workers in particular, the Department of Labor in order to allow for a test of the labor market requires an American worker, American employers to create an artificial test that is a hoax on applicants for employment who are U.S. citizens and so they have the resources to determine from their own statistics shortage occupations and declined ability because they won't face the political heat. And so I would say that we tend to accept too much of the status quo when we want to throw more and more agencies into the immigration function with conflicting measures. If you wanted to fix the E-verify system, I would suggest that the Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel would be better equipped to do that. They do have a memorandum of agreement with DHS on violations that are brought to their attention. They've been very vigorous in enforcement and you might also want to have a private right of action that would avoid the conflict that exists in the Department of Labor's espousal of its own interests over those of workers. If there were a private right of action given all the hungry labor, I mean, hungry plaintiff's employment lawyers out there, I think that would be a vigorous enforcement tool. But my point is, I'm hopeful that there will be a libertarian streak in the American people but I didn't hear a peep when U.S. passport information was fed into the E-verify which was never intended for that purpose and there was no forewarning to a U.S. citizen passport applicant that their personal data is going to go into a government database for employment verification purposes. I also am surprised that there has only been pushback on real ID from the states for the costs but not from a libertarian perspective that this is another encroachment on citizen rights. So I would love to see American workers recognize that to truly have an enforceable immigration system, they have to accept some burdens and then maybe they would be more reasonable than what they expect. But I don't know if you want to comment on any of that but I'm not sure there are reasons for optimism I'd like to be but I'm not sure. So I'm not sure either but I'm trying to find them. And so I'm thinking about, just to kind of raise two really interesting points, who's the best protector of employee interests? So I used to work here as a special counsel and that's been something that they had thought about. It was what kind of role they should be playing in either of them. The problem is that their expertise is in discrimination and I think what I'm talking about has something to do with discrimination and there are aspects of discrimination that are implicated like this but there are also other sort of non-discrimination related aspects of employer and disputes that go well outside of their expertise. So and so without expanding the role of the office of special counsel, tremendously as well as the number of staff. Because I think we were 12 attorneys for the whole nation at some point in time. Then I think that's a partial resolution but not one that really that isn't a larger issue. So document abuse has nothing to do with discrimination necessarily. It's an expertise that they developed and they can certainly develop e-verifying issues as another expertise. Yeah, I think that's possible. And then the other question of a private right of action, that's another possibility and I think it's a really good place to start. The office is looking at the, the interdiscrimination issues of work that have a private right of action and it's been tremendously underutilized. And I think that's probably because the statutes too and just the forms of discrimination that the session actually covers are almost useless. I shouldn't say that, it's not true because I don't mean to disparage my whole office that way because they've done a tremendous amount of work but I think the kind of work that they've done that's really helped in this sort of issue is more policy related and then more so working with other governments to make sure that other agencies to make sure that some of the civil rights issues get addressed. And I will stop there before the conversation doesn't allow her. I see, Mike had a question and you had a question. Why don't we go with you and then Mike? Okay. As if they don't have any response. For the first thing I'd say as a monitor, I appreciate your, I think you know a little bit more cynical about the, you were to say if you were to read about data, it actually poses additional questions especially if you compare the impact of the state at a better level and where exactly it's going. But that aside, I wonder kind of going off of this logic of the economic incentive of undocumented labor but also even high skilled labor whether it poses an additional problem not only for us through the screen but also the advocates that you and some of us work with which is are we boxing ourselves and to kind of focusing on an economic incentive on the one hand and then how do we manage that with this other work that we do in terms of encouraging past mobility. So once these workers achieve our other goal, no longer pose that economic incentive in this framework. We just shot ourselves in the foot in terms of arguing on the other hand. So it's kind of another mentor that I deal with in terms of how to harmonize social justice or economic justice work with the other claims. So I'm trying to look at that and some of the other stuff. Thank you. No, I just get a second comment. Okay, Mike. This is so great and for me in particular because I feel like I've been saying the same thing for a while. So like fresh ideas are so excellent. So thank you guys for all the contributions. So I kind of have a quick question down the line. So Catherine, I love the suggestion of being undocumented 13th amendment which I take is somewhat implicit in what you're just saying. But I wonder more narrowly with your recent guest worker program which has come up, those penis cases you mentioned say at the bottom that you can't go to jail for quitting your job. But guest workers can go to jail for quitting their job. They can go to immigration jail because their status is immediately forfeit upon the way forward for being fined. So I wonder whether there's not 13th amendment problems you can see through labor with our existing guest workers or others. Julie, I'm wondering, there's no small business exemption to urban but you verify it has more status to operate. It's the only workplace law I'm aware of that does not have a small business exemption. And I was struck by your final beautiful note about the delicate moment of entering work. And we're thinking, I'm not sure if someone who starts a Walmart would put it quite that way. I think you had a conception more of a mom-and-pop shop which in every other workplace law, environmental law, many of the regulatory schemes of other exemptions, but not whether there shouldn't be an exemption and you verify it's even larger. Maybe there should be an urgent number of fire statutes or a change of amount of your kind of curious from an intro perspective you're thought of as small business exemptions to be verified. And then to Jennifer, sort of the heart of this, so I so appreciate the product of trying to figure out how to get past the rhetorical conflict to summarize the vaccine waters, that exchange, which I can see still resonates 10 years later, so. Five, but it'll resonate for nine, 15. But I'm kind of, there's the politics of it and how to get it done and there's the kind of analytic conception of what kind of a system might be sketched out of an ideal world, but I wonder if there is a little space in between for a public policy discussion. It's not just the politics. You propose a reduction in employer sanctions and someone says, well, where's the new enforcement gonna come from? It's a political matter, if you reduce some enforcement, you gotta spike it somehow. But this is a pure public policy matter. So 25 years ago, Congress said we have two goals for a deterrent illegal immigration that will protect U.S. workers. And for 100 years, we didn't have sanctions as means to achieve those goals, but our federal immigration laws had those goals too, I think. And it's to ask for the accepted sanctions must further those goals. But I think many of us could embrace those goals and say, well, as a deterrent public policy matter, we're not sure this is getting us towards either of those. And whether there is in space between the politics and the pure analysis, say, this is just one more thing we've tried towards longstanding goals and it hasn't worked out. It's had counterproductive effects in many ways, but it hasn't achieved a goal. So can we not just say, we actually agree. You started by saying sometimes you doubt the other side's commitment to protecting U.S. work, but we're in our commitment to deterring illegal immigration to sometimes get out of it. But isn't there a way to actually genuinely and sincerely embrace both of those goals as important goals? And then say, well, let's just figure out better ways than this to try to go up there. Is that to create any more space in your discussion? Okay, so I'll quickly respond. Thanks Mike for the good question. And I absolutely agree that guest worker programs that you can create a more direct relationship with the 13th Amendment violation and Marie Antiveros has done quite a bit of work around that. And so I totally agree and maybe I'm taking, I don't know, I'm not good with cliches, but a bigger bite than I can chew or something. But yeah, so I mean, it's possible that guest workers will be part of this larger project, but ultimately, my goal is to at least propose a new way of looking at legalization on the number of undocumented workers more generally, and which is why I got the pictures of undocumented workers more generally. So I'm all for small business exemptions. Did you verify? And here's some support for that. But the E-Verify has been a quote unquote voluntary project, so that employers get to volunteer to be involved, to sign up for the E-Verify. It's not voluntary for employees, but what the employer is saying is we're gonna sign up for E-Verify and we're gonna run all of our new hires, whether they like it or not, right, through the E-Verify system. So, and what's happened is most of the E-Verify employees, employers have been large corporations, which, because of consolidation, it's easier to train new resources and they tend to have more expertise in the employment laws. So one of the problems with expanding E-Verify nationwide is we start to get to smaller employers, ones that don't have human resources departments. And so we're gonna end up with more errors, possibly more different forms of discrimination. And as well, once you move beyond the volunteers, about the sort of the published and voluntary employers, what we've seen in Arizona is that employers get less happy with the E-Verify system than they've reported so far. And it looks like they're also getting less compliant with the limitations that E-Verify places on and how to use them. So, and now the only thing is that I think by exempting small businesses, spending a house small you get, we end up exempting a pretty large population of employees. And some people might have a problem with that. But that's, you know, but I think it's worth it. I think E-Verify will have enough, but there's too many costs to expand it. So, I think there's one possibility that I fully understand the question so we can talk later. But if I think that what you're suggesting is what we've been trying to do, right? To say, you know, the protecting worker, we have the protecting worker mission to deter an illegality mission. And we've got lots of ideas on protecting workers and let's look more closely at them. They're also going to deter illegality, right? I mean, I think that's been our default position and then when other possibilities are brought up to deter illegality employer sanctions, rates, silent rates, you know, whatever, we don't like any of them. I mean, I don't mean that as a critique. I mean, it is true. I don't like any of them. And so, but I think that because our only answer is really focus on workplace standards, well, not because. Our only answer is really focus on workplace standards. And therefore, we don't want to look too closely at that because I can't bring to mind right now any other answers in terms of what we're offering for the deter illegality side. And yet I have some doubts about whether we really think enforcing workplace standards is going to deter illegality. I think we think it's going to protect workers and that's what I care the most about. But it has started to feel disingenuous to me to offer that as our only, I think it's part of the package, but our only deter illegality proposal. So we have lapsed our time, unfortunately, because I could go on for hours more, but there's also a bunch of sandwiches outside from Lee's Sandwiches. What time do you want to reconvene, Stephen? There's just one dish.