 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. That's John Egan. He's an immigration lawyer. Immigration lawyers are different now. Because immigration is different now. And he runs the immigration, what is it, the clinic, is it? We've started an immigration law clinic at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law. And they've asked me to set that up. So I'm doing that. And we love having him on the show because we are in the same place. At the same time. So we can have a conversation that way. So I mean it's really sad what's happened in the Trump administration. Although most Americans I think are open and welcoming to immigrants, the Trump administration is not. And as you mentioned, Steve Bannon at the early time said we're going to do shock. We, his administration is going to do shock and awe on immigrants. And we have turned around. We have turned around in this country and we have had a negative effect on other countries. And we have isolated ourselves and distinguished ourselves as people without the same morality as you thought we had. This is very troubling. Yeah. Right. Exactly. We have a history, I mean we consider ourselves to be a nation of immigrants. And of course we are. Everybody here came from some place else. Even the indigenous people in America walked across from Siberia. So this place is all immigrants. And yet now we've decided we don't want them here. We, I shouldn't say we, there are some people in the country who have decided that they don't want immigrants here. And they have stepped up policies to make that so. We're here today I think to talk about migrant children being a detention. But this has been an ongoing thing since the beginning of this administration. They have just taken one step after another. The Muslim ban. They've attacked the immigration court system, accused the immigration judges of slowing things down intentionally. They've attacked the immigration lawyer, said that we're all cheating to get people in. Right on down the line they've slowed down the process for people to get green cards. They've stepped up the process of background checks trying to find any excuse to deny people their applications. Something that I find absolutely scary is down at the southern border they're now taking people's U.S. citizenship away from them because they were not born in a hospital and therefore their birth certificates are questionable. Oh wow. Taking. It's like a birther thing isn't it? Well it's worse than that because there's no reason why these people should, I mean they're not Kenyan. They were born in Texas for heaven's sakes. And so this is pretty scary when people, when they start Ashley and again another program that they started was they're going back and looking at people who have been granted citizenship with the possibility of taking that away from them. Well there are some small number of cases where people cheated to get their citizenship. Those people take it away from them. I don't care. That was wrong. They shouldn't have done it. That's not a problem. But that's how they opened the door to taking citizenship away from a lot more people. Give me your tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That's right. It says right on the base of the Statue of Liberty. It says that we're going to take people in. And when you think about the people that they're talking about in that particular poem. I think that fits pretty closely with the people coming across our southern border right now. Now there's too many of them. I mean obviously we can't take in all of Central America. That's not going to work. But some of these people have legitimate reasons for needing to leave their homes. And we have to deal with that as a real problem. That's not a problem you solve by stripping their children away from them and putting them into, you know, caged rooms. That's not how you solve that problem. Just as a footnote, the next show today is about the movie made by Ai Weiwei called Human Flow. It's about the 60 million people in this world right now who are in refugee camps against their will. For one reason or another. And some of them have been there for decades. We have a big problem with Human Flow and Trump is creating more of a problem with Human Flow. That's right. They call that problem in refugee circles refugee warehousing. Where instead of actually solving the problem or resettling these people you simply put them in a refugee camp and let them sit. And we have some of that here in the Pacific. Nauru. There are people in Nauru who have been there for 10 years. 10 years they haven't figured out what to do with them. That's not solving the problem. That's just warehousing people. And many of these places are really awful conditions. You know you're not even talking about a nice pleasant prison like that. You know I occasionally visit the Federal Detention Center out near the airport. That's a hotel compared to these places. And what are we going to do? Just leave them there forever? That's not a solution. Well actually I want to ask you that. So we have we we reverse ourselves into something you know I don't know. Actually it's a wrong thing to say we've reversed ourselves because it was never like this. There was always a certain amount of openness in the United States. Maybe sometimes more sometimes less. The McCarron Walters Act was less. But the fact is that we've always been a nation of immigrants and now we reject that. We make it difficult and it's all very cute but it is morally offensive. And the question I put to you is can we get back to where we were? Can we change you know our morality? Well that's kind of a big question Jay. Can we change our morality? I think we have to. I think we can't persist in the approach that we're seeing right now. That's not viable in the long run. It's not viable politically. It's not viable for international relations. You know we're offending so many people in the world that you know we have to get along with people in Asia. We have to get along with people south of our border. We have to get along with people in Europe. That's not something that we can just say we don't need those people anymore because we got everything we need right here. No we don't and we rely on those markets for our products too. So no we can't just persist in offending the whole world. I think the big picture of migration is that this is some kind of the outfall from the globalization process. It's a really big picture. There are 60 million. There's a whole lot more than that if you include all of the migrants on the planet right now. We've never seen migration on the planet quite to this extent and we have to deal with it as a large global problem. Taking you know this this mindset of well we'll just throw them all out and that'll solve the problem will not solve the problem. There are implications and consequences. This morning driving in I heard on NPR that Jack Ma who runs Ali Baba in China. You know a multi multi billion trillion dollar company like Amazon who had promised to create a million jobs in this country you know as a statement of comedy between us a year ago or two has withdrawn the promise and you ask why of course you can try to figure out why. He said the tariffs and other things the United States has done in the Trump administration don't create the kind of environment where he wants to create a million jobs and part of that is immigration. Part of that is dealing with the Chinese immigration question. So we have we have a political secondary consequence here that may get worse in terms of our relationship in general with the number two economy and with what might be the number one economy in the near term with a military competitor. It's not good business to have an argument with your military competitor in the world today. Well there's more than that involved in this. You know some people are not cognizant. We spend a lot of time looking at the people coming across the southern border. We think that our American immigration problem has something to do with the people coming from Latin America and that's a problem. But people don't realize that the single largest group of immigrants coming into the United States right now are coming from Asia and China is the largest single sender of immigrants into the United States. So when you impose these sort of restrictions they're feeling it personally. Their families are being restricted. Their family members are being sent out of the country for no apparent good reason. We had a situation again this whole shock and awe notion they just don't stop. They invited about eight years ago foreign nationals with specific skills into the military program called MAVNI military accessions in the vital national interest. The woman who figured out how to do this I think she was given a Fulbright genius grant just really an amazing program for diversifying the language skills and technical skills in the military. A lot of Chinese went into that. They are now being thrown out of the military and having their immigration status canceled. Well they can't go home. They just joined a foreign military. Right. So they they can't eat. We throw them out. We make up reasons to throw them out of the military. They're ready and willing to become productive members of the US military. We throw them out and they can't go home. Well this is not a way of making friends and influencing people. This is bad news and it's all bad attitude stuff coming from this administration. Now and it has all kinds of effect. Maybe I make a jump when I tell you about Carlos Juarez. Carlos Juarez is an HPU faculty. Carlos Juarez has been a host on our shows for years. Carlos Juarez moved to Mexico in a in a suburb city near Mexico City with a university there at Puebla PUE BLA. He has he established a department in international relations internationally and you know foreign relations in general. Diplomacy and he he has students from all over the world who come and I say to myself what's happening here. It's very popular. It was a great move for him to do that and he appears every week on our show to introduce his students and the things they're teaching in Mexico City. But I'm saying wow. Is this is that. He can't do this in the US. He can't bring in the foreign students. He has immigration problems and getting them into his program at school. Incidentally I know Carlos. He's a great guy and you're right. He's brilliant. He's a very productive guy but he's an immigrant and that gives you another kind of clue. You know we benefit from getting immigrants into the country. They're doing productive things. They're contributing. You talk about international students. We have seen a continuous upswing in the number of international students enrolled in universities and colleges in the United States. It's gone up continuously until this past year and now it's dropping. Why because those people don't feel welcome here. They're getting through the immigration process and saying why do I need to subject myself to this kind of treatment or for that matter science. You know if you see you know the coverage on science and you see some remarkable discovery made in this and medicine and science of all kinds. You know a lot of Chinese names there. Well right. You know this is sort of an ongoing joke amongst immigration lawyers. They say well just open up the door at the National Laboratory and look and see who's inside that room making us safe. Right. Who are contributing to the security of the United States and the technicians in those rooms are Chinese. They're Europeans and they're Indians. Hello. Throw them all out. Bad idea. A few years ago Bill Gates this is right after his retirement which you know dates my story but went around the country from campus to campus recruiting young students to take technology and information technology and computer science because not enough we're applying not enough we're available to apply to Microsoft. Come to find that he didn't he didn't have enough of a supply from local I mean American college kids. So he wound up hiring and he might be affected by the way Microsoft and all the tech companies by these immigration constraints we have now. He hired people from all over the world who had come here on some kind of immigration status who were students from other countries but not American students is really strange. So what we're not producing our greatest talent or at least a fair portion of it is coming from outside. We're shooting ourselves in the foot in technology and science and medicine. Well absolutely right around that same time you have to remember that Microsoft set up a satellite campus of their Seattle operation across the border in Canada simply for the reason of bringing those people someplace where they could get them visas. Now what are we doing when we're inviting companies to hire people in Canada rather than hire them in the United States that doesn't make any sense at all. The Trump administration would like to hire them here but it rejects well right. I mean even here locally take a look at our own engineering department. I want to call them out for unwanted attention but look at our engineering department at University of Hawaii. It's an excellent department but over half of the students in the Ph.D. program are international students. Why because they're brighter than American kids. No that's not it. It's that American kids are not going into those fields at the same levels that other people are. In fact look at the frankly look at the faculty there. Over half of those people were born outside the United States. Why are they here because this is a good place to go to school. It's a good place to learn and it's also a very good place to make your contribution. Why aren't we letting that happen. Perfect expression of the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. There you go. John Egan is an immigration lawyer and the leader of the new brand new immigration clinic. That's right. William S. Richardson School of Law. When we come back we're going to talk about the kids. You remember the kids. I hope you didn't forget the kids. All those kids who were in jail those young five six seven year old kids separated from their parents. We didn't talk about what happened to them. We'll be right back. This is Think Hawaii raising public awareness. There was a new woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn't know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread and kissed them all soundly and put them to bed. Hunger is a story we can end. End it at feeding america.org. Hello. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomai Weigert and we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on Thursdays at 4pm and we hope we'll see you next time. We're back with John Egan. We're talking about immigration but let's take a digression point. This is what's happening immigration under the hood that we don't hear about which is you know undermining the conscience of the country. You know in economics like the tariffs, trade, environment for sure, and work safety for sure, social programs for sure, all these things while we sit are being undermined and they don't make the front page. The press doesn't have the time and opportunity to cover all the things the Trump administration is doing to pull the wings out of this country. Immigration is only one of them. This is really shattering that. Yeah and I think immigration is actually an exemplar because they really did set out right from the beginning to push and push and push. It just has been an unending once a week. There's a terrible new announcement of some awful policy that they're doing and it just continues. They're wearing people down. They're just overwhelming people. I think you know Steve Bannon and Steve Miller said they were going to do this shock and awe strategy on immigration and it has worked. People are how can you forget about children? It's hard to fathom. Can't you know we just wean the press I suppose and the people that you know the ones who follow the news cannot they don't have the time to cover all the bad things that are happening and so a lot of them as you say we we get fatigued. That's right and we don't cover it and that means they have license to go further and further and further and when you look back down the road say at the end of the year at some demarcation point you find out that we've really been hurt in so many ways. But let's talk about the children John. That was that was an outrage beyond outrage. What happened? Well it hasn't stopped. The news this week says that there's another 1700 children that they don't know where they are. They're not accounted for. That's not the ones that were missing before. That's a new 1700 children unaccounted for. It just they have not stopped and they have not fixed this problem. It's astounding to me that anyone could come up with a policy that they knew was going to take children away from their families and not have a plan for how to track them. You know one of the judges in this whole scenario was outraged. He said you know you take their cell phone away and you give them a receipt. You take their children away and you don't give them anything. What how can that be? And yet that's what they did. You know it's really amazing. People continue to think that this administration has some sort of a great master plan that they're going to figure out how this all works and it's just a matter of time until they get it all sorted out in the pieces all fit together. But there's no master plan. They're throwing this stuff together like you know a jigsaw puzzle and they don't have all the pieces yet. They put that policy in place without having a plan for how to take care of the children. That's appalling. You know from my point of view, our point of view here at Think Tech, what is truly amazing is that they don't have a computer program. They don't. Right. To identify a parent with a child. This has got to be you know high school computing 101 to create a program that will do that. Well those programs exist already. The refugee agencies use them. So when you go as a refugee you come across the border and you encounter the tent that has the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees flag flying over it. They're sitting there and the computer program is that we're talking about Bill Gates really. That was donated by Microsoft. They put together a program. Okay now we'll track these people and we'll figure out how to keep track of them. They and the International Committee of the Red Cross who has been doing family reunification for years. If these people hadn't wanted to think about how to do this, the experience was there, the knowledge is there, the technology is there, they didn't, they weren't interested in that. No and that leaves the question of why they take a parent in one location and put them in the lockup or whatever they've done and take the child with lots of unknown children essentially and move them to a city thousands of miles away in a location unknown and thousands of miles away where they nobody can ever find them not the parent or anyone can find them it almost sounds John like it's punitive. Well bingo you got that right on the nose and this now they've sort of backed away from it nobody's saying it anymore but when they first started the zero tolerance policy everybody from the president down to John Kelly, his chief of staff through to Kirsten Nielsen the head of DHS, through to Jeff Sessions the head of they all said this is a deterrent we do this and then those people will know don't come here because we're going to take your children away from you. What? They won't admit that this is what they said but they're on tape this is what they were saying we're doing this in order to tell those people don't come here. So we're going to give them the hardest time we can give them okay in a way of punishing them in order to show you people never to do this again. But it hasn't stopped anymore because you have to really go back and see what's going on in Central America there are some terrible things going on down there's an utter failure of governance gangs are running whole communities it's terrible brutality it's it's awful brutality and and I'm not naive I don't think asylum is the solution to the failure of governance in Central America that's that's not going to work we can't fix Central America by giving kids asylum but we can't fix asylum by just throwing people back to the wolves. And that's to be more thoughtful than that but you know you're an immigration lawyer you've dealt with you know immigration agents you've dealt with immigration judges administrative law judges and you've probably dealt with the guys in the field of the border patrol type guys who pick these people up and handle them and you know I'm I kind of been waiting for somebody in the immigration service to say wait a minute this isn't moral I don't want to do this I don't want to be part of this it's like a war crime I'm out of here is that happening are they complaining are they telling you on the side Sean I hate doing what I'm doing I'm not getting that personally because we're not seeing that much of this here in Hawaii on the mainland yes people are bailing out not in great numbers but they are bailing out here in Hawaii because we're pretty far from that border we're not seeing this sort of thing our local immigration bar the American Immigration Lawyers Association local chapter have regular liaison meetings with these people just last week I was talking with the head of our deportation office here and his supervisor from San Francisco their chief attorney here and they were asked directly do we have any of these children here in Hawaii good question and they said no and they were very relieved they said no we haven't had a child in detention in over eight years we don't want to have children in detention we're not we don't have the facilities for it and you can just tell they were relieved not to be part of that picture so that's a relief to know but it also answers why we're not seeing you know great tumult over this here so even my moral reaction to what's going on is really reaction to what's going on in the southern border now you say talk about people being shifted around we have actually had some of these families arrive here in Hawaii when they're released from detention and this is prior to the zero tolerance program family members could sponsor them and invite them to American American citizens or permanent residents anybody who's here frankly and some of them are not with good papers but but if they could say I have a place these people can come and wait for their hearings they were allowing that to happen and we have received some here in Hawaii yeah well I you know I just I wonder you know like where it's all going you know Kirsten Nielsen you mentioned her name is a homeland security and that's the overarching agency you know per Bush W. Bush back when after you know after 9 11 I suppose she's and she was here like two weeks ago I don't know if you got to see her I did not I I didn't want to see her you know actually they set around a little notice if you want to see her and be part of her 20 minute appearance and 20 people would be there you had to get press credentials from homeland security and I said to myself press credentials homeland security by the way other guys Kirsten Nielsen is the guys who keep a list of all journalists in the country and they identified the journalists statements and positions on issues on this big database they got the database for that not for the kids but for that and you know I really don't want to be part of that I don't want to be on that list and I certainly don't want to spend time with her but she's the one whatever she is who's running immigration service immigration service is the one who's taking these policies so here we are with a major problem the the judge who who said put the put the children back with the parents is that finished or is there more to come on that no that that has not finished in fact one of the judges that you may recall this thing called the florida's agreement made about 20 years ago they've been blaming Obama for this terrible law it was it happened 20 years ago but Obama was not president 20 years ago but that agreement says you cannot keep children for more than 20 days the news is that the administration is now trying to upset that agreement by an administrative rule change smart money says no you can't do that that that's going to be challenged by yet another judge but instead of actually solving the problem they want to remove the rule that doesn't allow them to incarcerate children so so no I don't think we have a solution here at all yet they're not finished abusing these kids that's mean it's mean it's premeditated and mean yes so let me let me go to to your clinic now okay I want your clinic to address these things head on I want your clinic to file lawsuits and make the point are you doing that we're taking it more individual level in fact our clinic is working with one of these families that has come here to Hawaii and we're taking her case through the immigration court process Jay if you want to help you certainly can you know the law school they'll take donations and they have actually set up an account for our clinic so if you want to help yes you're welcome to do that and we can help by having you come back over and over again Jay I'm happy to be here it's been wonderful to talk with you as always and I do want to have you back and I want to keep track of this and I want the public to keep track of this we can't let this slide under the wedge we really should not yeah thank you Johnny my pleasure all the best thank you here Aloha