 Good afternoon everyone, especially if you're on the East Coast I guess and welcome all wherever you're tuning in from. My name is Tammy Kim and I'm a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and a former lawyer for immigrant workers. It's my great pleasure to moderate today's event on immigration matters hosted by New America and the new press. The occasion for this conversation is the paperback release of a new book here. Immigration matters, movements, visions and strategies for a progressive future. But we also happen to be meeting at a critical time in the world of immigration policy and immigrants rights. We are of course nearly a year out of the Trump administration, so bald faced in a xenophobia and racism and deliberate mismanagement of the pandemic. The past four years unveiled for many of us the architecture of state control and catalyze the black lives matter solidarity movements of last summer. All of us who care about civil and human rights had high hopes for the Biden administration, which has to its credit enacted some great reforms. But in the last few weeks we have also seen images circulate of customs and border patrol agents brutalizing Haitian people seeking asylum in Texas. And we continue to read about the separation of families and the lockdown of the border, ostensibly based on the public health threat of coven 19. Where does the immigrant rights movement with its many priorities and politics go from here. I'm grateful to this new book immigration matters for giving a much needed overview of immigration past and present. It's a wide ranging edited volume that collects chapters from historians and sociologists, political scientists, activists, organizers and policymakers. This is just Smith's about migration and the stories we tell ourselves about America. It challenges us to be more sensible and perhaps more imaginative in how we go about what we call immigration reform. Please do buy a copy of the book, which you can see linked at the bottom right of your screen. We will hear from three contributors to immigration matters. New America Senior Advisors, it's only amunios George Mason Professor Justin guest and City University of New York Professor Ruth milkman, who is also one of the editors of the book. In terms of structure for today, each panelist will speak for a few minutes, and then we'll have plenty of time for question and answer. As we go please feel free to type your questions into Slido, the box located to the right of the video on your screen. The captioning is available by hovering over the video and clicking CC at bottom. Our first speaker will be Cecilia Munoz, a senior advisor at New America, and a member of the Biden Harris transition team, who previously worked as President Obama's director of intergovernmental affairs and director of the Domestic Policy Council. Before that she spent two decades at the National Council La Raza, now known as unidos us. She will give us an overview of her chapter of the book, which lays out strategies for change, the border and beyond. Welcome Cecilia. Thank you so much Tammy and thank you to everybody who is participating. We're so glad to have you here. You know I was reflecting on what it felt like to be writing about the border this with the writing of the book happened of course, long before you know what the outcome would be and I thought it would be it was a timely issue at the time. I suspected it would be a timely issue shortly after the inauguration, which turned out to be true. And of course, in this moment where we're having this conversation it remains very very timely, you know, frustratingly so. So the chapter in the book really outlines a little bit about why we are in the situation that we are, but it also has some specific recommendations I'm going to spend like minute focusing on those. The first really is that it is essential that we recognize and think of what's happening at the border as not just a border situation it's really the result of what an unacknowledged refugee crisis in our hemisphere. We can't fix a refugee crisis at the border that you will the government will never have the tools to address a refugee crisis at the border. And so we, it's tremendously important that we recognize as a society the reasons that people are leaving and that we engage in a muscular way in our own hemisphere. This is a border to address the reasons people migrate in the first place, which sounds like a possibly a crazily tall order it is not it is just been the subject of, of at least neglect, as well as, you know, arguably some really quite negative behavior by the United States over many years. This is something we can address and we have to what we expect to have a manageable situation at the border so that's recommendation number one. And is that our border, the all of the infrastructure at the US Mexico border from the, the laws and the policies and the regulatory policy to the actual physical infrastructure border patrol facilities and facilities that near them and around and around them to the personnel that that people encounter when they cross the border, all of that was designed for a border that we no longer have was designed for a situation from decades ago, when the primary challenge was single adults coming from Mexico. That's not what we're seeing at the US Mexico border any longer we're seeing families from Central America and you know famously and importantly in the last few weeks from Haiti and other places. Our infrastructure, the laws, nothing is suited for the migration of families from a non continuous country which is very much what we're seeing. Importantly, the Biden administration is moving towards something that that the book recommends which is to create a situation where we are much more expeditiously able to process people's asylum claims. And all the way it works is people who are arriving if they are allowed to present the possibility of an asylum claim. They end up waiting years for hearing within the United States which is a system which doesn't deliver them an answer expeditiously, and doesn't deliver the kind of orderliness that I think Americans have come to expect at the border. The Biden administration is moving by promulgating regulations to address this to essentially move the system out of the courts and into the asylum core well trained asylum core, which hopefully will be able to address asylum claims more expeditiously. This is really essential, because the pressure on the border is not going to abate the situation, even if we invest in the short term the situation in the driving migration isn't going to change. It is really imperative that we have an asylum system that properly houses people addresses their humanitarian needs their needs as fellow human beings, and answers the question which is the government's job to answer which is do they qualify for asylum or not under the legal regime. The third recommendation and I'll stop with this has to do with the legal regime itself. Our asylum system was built largely for the Cold War was also not built for what we're seeing now, we are really seeing only the beginning of climate migration, both in the migration patients but also in the migration of Central States. That is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, obviously the planet will seem much more climate migration in the future and we're not ready for it in the United States and we're not ready for it across the globe. Among many other things that will require in the United States are reckoning with our own policies and attitudes about whom we choose to protect. We have a pretty antiquated asylum system we have not had a reckoning or conversation about really the conditions of the bulk of the people who are presenting themselves at the US Mexico border. And while there are many Americans who feel extraordinary compassion and rightly so and extraordinary outrage at the treatment for example the Haitian migrants from a week or two ago. That is as it should be, but we're not having a conversation about about who we should welcome. And I say this as the co founder of something called welcome dot US which came together to mobilize people around people from Afghanistan who were who helped the United States in our troops over the last 20 years. The whole idea is to get civil society involved, both in the actual resettlement of people and in the conversation about who should be settled in the United States and how we might connect with them. And let me stop with that and hand it back to you. Thank you so much Cecilia appreciate that. This speaker will be Justin guest and associate professor of policy and government at the char school of George Mason University. Justin is the author of several books, including crossroads comparative immigration regimes in a world of demographic change is chapter and immigration matters explores future policy directions and is entitled when Democrats are not the party of ideas. Thank you for being here Justin. Thank you so much for having me and for inviting me and it was a pleasure to be a part of this book, which reflects Ruth and Deepak Bargavas and pennies vision. You know I think for for a different future for American immigration so it's wonderful to be beside you all and also Cecilia as well. So what I want to do is, you know, my chapter ranges because it's truly a sort of critique of immigration politics in the United States. But I want to reflect on the current situation we're in and where my ideas might be helpful. I think it's fair to say right now that no matter what side of the aisle, someone is on. Things are not going well with American immigration politics. It's a tough moment in history right now, after a tough four years. We have obviously the crisis at our southern border that Cecilia has just depicted really astutely. We have the lingering issue of undocumented immigrants United States, which appears the Democrats in Congress are not going to be able to legislate on via budget reconciliation. It's in itself already an act of desperation, and we have the usual on stalemate as relates to the need for labor in the country, the desire to reunify with family enormous backlogs for both admission and visas, and also citizenship applications. It's a really really just a mess right now. And that's not necessarily attributable to the Biden administration which is still relatively new. It's a product of decades of what I call policy formaldehyde, simple inaction on because of the sort of stalemate on that immigration has been subject to. And what we're really conscious of I think is that the refugee crisis that Cecilia mentions is in some ways a refugee crisis except that if only it were it would be a lot easier. The problem is that so many people that are trying to enter the United States that are southern border right now, do not qualify as refugees, which makes the situation so much harder because they are forced migrants, but they don't necessarily qualify according to international standards, let alone our own national standards. And so, you know, this is complicated our efforts. But what I want to emphasize is that what's also complicating our efforts is that this is a challenge of governance, not just of external forces, but actually our internal ability to govern the country. And what we're stuck with right now is this enduring equilibrium between the two major political parties. On the one hand you have Republicans which have lots of ideas. There's lots of ideas on the right right now about what to do about immigration, and all of them are driven by restrictionism intolerance outright nationalism, and are really unhealthy for the country more broadly particularly given our demographic aging, our voracious appetite for labor and innovation and entrepreneurship, and and our human humanitarian interest and maintain the sort of mission of the United States since our founding. On the other side on the left, Democrats have very few ideas right now. I think the Democrats are a few ideas precisely because they can't actually rally around any major ideas. It's a party that's fractured. You have three basic factions on the left right now you have the sort of pro business organizations that are sort of, in some ways commoditizing immigration as a human resource that they need. The immigrant rights movement which is mostly mobilizing around the undocumented and to a certain extent family reunification. And then you also have this sort of cosmopolitan foreign policy elites that are pushing hard for broadening refugee migration to the country, and some of our international obligations. The result has been a party that is largely retrenched that their decision has basically been just keep the system as it is, and just focus on sort of key things that we can all agree upon. And the one thing that everyone on the left can agree upon right now is improving the plight of the undocumented a really noble mission and certainly one that has incredible urgency to it at this point in our history. And that has also become the fulcrum I think of partisanship in the United States, it is precisely what motivates Republicans against the Democratic Party it is it is inflammatory, and it's basically become the sort of red line for so many Republican legislators legislators in Congress. And so that really poses an enormous challenge when we are so retrenched. And yet, the one thing that everyone can agree upon is actually a no go zone. And so this is also I think really deep end and compounded by the intensity gap across left and right. So, while most Democrats can agree that immigration is good for the country that we are a nation of immigrants, and that we want to continue this legacy going forward. The problem is that the belief the passion for that issue is really subordinate to Democrats passion for other issues right now, climate change, health care provision, public health, inequality and poverty, racial justice are all way higher on the sort of list of hierarchy of the hierarchy of American policy problems right now. On the right, on the other hand, immigration is frequently number one, at least a quarter and possibly a third of Republicans, immigration is the number one issue this country is facing. And so this intensity gap has led to a strange kind of contortion of politics, where Democrats are just happy to leave the current system as it is, despite it's obviously blaring inadequacies. And what I want to conclude with is to touch on what we can learn, I think, from the Afghan airlift, from which Cecilia also mentioned in her remarks. So what I think we can take away from this was it really was a remarkable I think moment, just sort of a new cycle in American history, but it was remarkable because you saw people left and right. And deeply religious evangelicals and churches, you know, big business and corporations, average Americans middle class folks in the suburbs, actually really with an outpouring of care and consideration about refugees a group that has been, you know, subject to vilification, and real doubt about their belonging in the United States historically, at least recently. What you saw was a rallying around that these, this is a group of people who we must protect this is an imperative that we must deal with. And a shaming of the Biden administration at one point for not doing enough to prepare for their arrival in the United States. And this of course story will continue to go on. But what I think we can take away from this is that there are two components of the Afghan airlift that really should be a lesson to all of us in the immigration policy and politics world. One, we were able to get a sense of consensus over among people who are normally quite restrictionist and restrictive about their immigration views is that there are two components. One, there's a sense that the United States was in control of the operation. They were vetting people closely. We knew the people who were coming in. There was a sense of familiarity with the potential new Americans who are going to arrive. And that doing so was in the national interest. These are folks who had nearly given their lives and some people in some cases did give their lives off and were subject to bodily harm and family harm for the country that they had never actually stepped foot in for a country that they never fully knew it was for an idea that is America. And that national interest and that sense of control was what opened the gates, I think of Americans and open the way to their hearts and actually creating a sort of consensus immigration issue. So I think that the challenge has to be to identify ways to actually put things in the American interest, but also demonstrate a sense of control without necessarily using the draconian policies of the Trump administration, but demonstrating that the American government is actually a good manager of this system, which right now in the, in the times that we are looking at right now, it just doesn't look that way. And I think that is our challenge for the future to demonstrate good governance, good management, and then ask the American people to reconsider more restrictionist restrictionist views. Thank you for that political overview Justin. The final speaker will be Ruth milkman, distinguished professor at the city University of New York's Graduate Center and the School of Labor and Urban Studies. Ruth has written widely on many aspects of labor and labor movements, including women workers, immigrant workers and the gig economy. In addition to editing immigration matters she recently published a volume called immigrant labor and the new precariat. Today she will discuss her chapter history shows that the immigrant threat narrative is wrong. I'll turn it over to you, Ruth. Thank you for being here. So, in contrast to what Justin just described in regard to the public consensus across the aisle about the Afghan refugee situation. What I'm going to talk about is the opposite. It's a, it's probably the third rail of the immigration conversation and the one that animates the Republican passion that Justin mentioned a minute ago. Namely, the view that immigrants, and especially low wage immigrants are a threat to the American economy to American culture to taxpayers and you know because they are burdened with costs that they wouldn't otherwise have as folks like that weren't in the country. So, I call that and others due to the immigrant threat narrative the idea that immigration is a threat rather than an opportunity or a benefit to the United States. And I try to focusing on the labor side of that I try to look at the problem from with a historical lens looking at what is the process through which low age immigrants become part of our labor force and you know, is it damaging to us born workers and what I try to show is two threads to it. First, in industries like construction short haul trucking meatpacking. There is a dynamic through which the sequence of events is this employers take steps to attack unions degrade jobs cut costs especially labor costs. That leads to deterioration and working conditions. Benefits evaporate things like pensions that used to be standard in those kinds of industries. And then us born workers in these industries mostly that means us born men white men actually though not in meatpacking but in construction and trucking that is who used to be in the labor force. And then what's going on in the industry and they say, I'm not doing this anymore not under not under this regime, you know, I'm happy to do it if I have a pension plan and I get paid by the hour and I make a decent living but not anymore, and they move to other kinds of jobs that are still viewed as desirable. I should mention there's a lot of turnover in the labor market anyway so people are moving around all the time but this is one of the drivers of it in those industries. Employers are faced with vacancies labor shortages by the way, we do have a lot of labor shortages right now, not necessarily in all these industries but it's not irrelevant to what I'm talking about. And then employers turn to immigrants, often recruiting them from across the US Mexico border. Historically that there's been a lot of that not right now. So, so immigrants essentially do replace the US born workers but the but it's that it's it's due to the actions of employers to degrade jobs. So that's one thread. And the other is a little different and it involves mostly female workers in the care work sector. And my starting point there is just to point out that those jobs weren't degraded particularly in the neoliberal era they were already horrible jobs, they never paid well they never had unions they never had benefits etc. And they were dominated historically these this work was done by African American women. And then something changed in the 1970s the same time by the way that employers went on the warpath in those other sectors I was just talking about, just alongside that in the 1970s, thanks to the civil rights movement and especially the title seven of the Civil Rights Act. African American women suddenly have access to a much bigger variety of jobs and they historically had, and they rapidly abandoned domestic work and things like home care, and move into clerical jobs service jobs sales jobs that had always been female dominated but previously all white, or almost all white. And now, as any quality grows in this period since the 1970s, and as the population ages, and as more mothers enter the labor force and need more domestic services, or think they need them. The demand for pay domestic labor skyrockets, and for home care. And so there's so that's when people start hiring immigrants for those jobs we think of them now as kind of prototypical immigrant jobs but it was not always so. It's not a story of degradation but the process is similar exodus of us born workers and immigrant workers, filling the, the resulting vacancies. So, my view is that my conclusion from all this is two things really and we can discuss the details more people are interested. Immigration policy is an immigration dynamics are inextricably entwined with labor policy and labor market dynamics I think you can see that from just these two sketches I just offered. Also, the US born workers have every reason to be enraged about the situation they face especially non college educated workers in today's labor market, but they should be targeting that rage, not an immigrants but that at employers who have degraded jobs and at policymakers who have increased inequality. So I'll just stop there. And thank you all to the attendees who are here with us. Just a reminder, please do insert your questions in the Slido box which should be towards the right bottom of the video. I've prepared some questions for our wonderful panelists and I'll just go in reverse chronological order and then ask some general questions and we eagerly await a massive attendee questions so. On this labor question. I'm curious if you could say a little bit about the role that large unions and union confederations have played in shaping immigration policy. I think some of our audience will know that the relationship was not always a rosy one. So that's, that's a great question. Actually, inside the US labor movement that what I started with the immigrant threat narrative was pervasive in the 70s and 80s that's how most unionists saw immigrants as a threat to their own livelihoods. By the end of the 20th century that had changed. And the AFL CIO began to do they did a basically 180 degree term in the year 2000, putting out a statement saying that they were eager to contribute to policies that would help legalize undocumented immigrants who are already in the United States and promoting immigrant rights and all kinds of other arenas. So that was a big reversal. I wouldn't. Well, and, and they did become in that. Well, okay, so that's 2000. That reflects a lot of immigrant worker organizing that unions engaged in in the 1990s to everyone's surprise, I think, including some of the organizers themselves. This was not as difficult as they anticipated immigrants eagerly embraced opportunities to unionize, which if you think about it makes sense. Most low age immigrants this is come to this country because they want to advance themselves economically. So there's not that much union organizing these days and there wasn't even in the 90s. So there was more than than now. When someone offers a helping hand and said hey you want to get together and, you know, it's a very welcome thing, perhaps more so than famously individualistic us born workers in many cases so. So that was quite successful in the 1990s and that's what helped lead to the policy reversal. So the labor movement began to see immigrants as kind of a prime target in terms of new organizing instead of as a threat to their existing membership. And then certain unions, especially the ones that had done that. I'm thinking of, especially the service employees union. SEI you and the hre now called the night here the hotel and restaurant workers union. And they really became very central to the immigration policy discussions and and mobilizations of the first decade of this century. And then in 2008, everything sort of falls apart with the Great Recession where immigrants basically stopped coming and the nation is preoccupied with other things so we haven't heard so much from labor on this topic since then but that's the that's a potted history. Thank you that's really helpful. Justin on the political question I'm curious, you in your chapter incorporate some research you've done comparatively across countries on regulation of national immigrants and you find that the US has some some unusual features. What are those features, and you, why do you advocate for something you call immigration moneyball, maybe you could explain that briefly. And what I'll do is I'll post a link to the article that that idea comes from, which was a piece in Politico from a couple years back on immigration moneyball. So, you know, this is a hop to give a very short version of all this, but the US is a rogue immigration country, you know, after, after almost a century of sort of being the standard bear. In 1882, when we first federalized immigration. The US is now exceptional, and not always for the best reasons. And that's mostly because of the stalemate that I mentioned my opening remarks. Our immigration policy is largely unchanged since 1986, and fundamentally unchanged since the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965. We haven't had any major overhauls in the system. And so we are, you know, outdated in many ways compared to what other countries now do on immigration in order to advance their national interests for commercial reasons and also economic reasons and also for to address demographic aging. The fundamental reasons why we look different is that unlike any other country in the world, we emphasize family migration in our permanent visas. And that's not necessarily a bad thing it's actually a very humane way of running immigration, but it's also not a very good way of targeting skills, whether low or high skilled individuals that help fill the labor gaps and labor shortages. It's also not a very good way of helping to fuel economic rebirths and development and some of more rural parts of the country, which could use the extra help because of demographic aging and also because of departures to to more urban areas. It's just a very untargeted way of welcoming immigrants. 65% of all permanent migration to the United States is on family visas. And that is almost double the next nearest country in the world. I mean that's just remarkable if you think about it. In case you're wondering it's it's it's France and Ireland that are in the mid 30s. So 65 is a big number. The other thing that makes this unique is our structural reliance on the undocumented. So what you do see around the world right now is an interest in short term labor migration contract labor temporary labor visas. They make up about 50% of all visas in the top 30 destination states worldwide. We don't really have a lot of temporary labor migration to the United States we have some programs, but it's not as nearly as wide as some of our peer countries like Canada or the UK or Australia, which really emphasize this. And so we have actually relied on de facto temporary labor migration in the form of undocumented people who of course who statuses in the shadows and can be exploited and are highly vulnerable. That's the way to run and manage a migration system. And so those are the two principle ways that we look strange. While the rest of the world is actually developing very sophisticated ways to both open their borders to more immigrants, and also be more selective about them. And of course my other work details a variety of ways we can do that, including moneyball migration, and the moneyball idea in very brief is basically the way to apply the logic of data analytics that you see in the sports world to the migration. So instead of picking, you know, a defenseman or or a first baseman or point guard, you know, we're picking engineers and we're picking entrepreneurs and we're picking software programmers and we're picking math teachers. These are who we need to be picking and how can we leverage analytics to do that there are key ways if we were to collect the right data and then leverage it in our immigration selection. And that will allow us to welcome more immigrants because it gives that same sense of control that I emphasize so much in my opening remarks. Great, thank you for that. And maybe we can circle back to the low wage worker part of that moneyball equation as well. Cecilia. I've recently read some articles observing that at the start of the Biden administration immigration detention was actually at quite a low but has since risen. I'm curious what you make of this and what some acceptable alternatives to incarceration might be for immigrants. Yeah, it's a great question that that's in some ways that relates to the earlier point I made about the tools that are available at the border, just now being the right tools and one of those right that's been used for for a long time. Facilities in which the federal government has invested our detention facilities and there are some circumstances where the law actually requires detention on the assumption that it will act as a deterrent. And of course there's really no evidence that that's true and there's increasingly evidence that is not true. In fact, in some ways if the, if the four years of the Trump administration doing all of the harshest things they could imagine to migrants including taking their and the fact that none of that actually served as a deterrent suggests that the notion that like the whole house of cards needs to fall that this notion that that whatever the decisions the United States makes at the border at can actually act as a deterrent to migration because it's pretty definitively proved not to be true. So, I would love to see an environment this would require, you know action by Congress which is something that you know isn't forthcoming in these days but I would love to see an environment particularly as it relates to the folks who are coming forward and asking for asylum, in which we provide sort of a community based approach to housing them while they are waiting for their answers to their asylum claims which under the regulatory regime that I described could happen relatively expeditiously that is a completely different approach. It's used in some parts of Europe. But the idea is that, you know, the government's job is to sort among the people who present themselves at the border, who is eligible for entry and protection the United States and who is not. I mean I think we should change the rules around who is and who isn't, but with whatever set of rules we're talking about. It makes sense to allow folks to enter, provide them with access to a community and housing and humane conditions that acknowledge their circumstances and including acknowledging the fact that many of them will have endured trauma. Get them an answer to their asylum petition expeditiously and then if the answer is yes they go on their way in the United States and then if the answer is no we need the infrastructure to return people humanely which is something that we don't do well at all in the United States. Again, most recently and horrifyingly by sending people back to Haiti and quite literally throwing their belongings on the tarmac. But so there's a lot that needs to change there is a different vision for how we might use facilities at the border but that suggests a different kind of facility, and really from beginning to end a different kind of approach. One that is, I would hope a little bit more worthy of who we are as the United States. Thank you for that. I'm going to bring in a couple of audience questions here. I'm just and I might turn this one to you. One of the audience members wants to know how industries that profit from migrant labor relate to the historically pro business Republican Party is nativist turn. I might just inject here I mean maybe you could speak to, you know, poultry the poultry plants or, you know, the farms where immigrant workers have have supplied that labor for many decades now and the fact that the owners of those, those businesses often are very much in the Republican Party. Yeah, I'm happy to. It's actually really something that's good for Ruth to talk about actually as well, because this is a little bit more up her alley. Maybe what I'll do is I'll just contextualize Ruth's response by saying that the realignment of American partisan politics that we have is basically since the 1990s into the into the 20 teens is in many ways encapsulated by immigration, because rather than seeing a sort of left right spectrum, I think the parties are now increasingly on an open closed spectrum. One is obviously more nationalistic, nostalgic, and retrenched, whereas Democrats are obviously more liberal, more cosmopolitan, and more open. So, immigration is the perfect expression of this and a lot of those pro business organizations the Chamber of Commerce, lots of business owners and people who employ a lot of laborers previously affiliated very closely with the Republican Party. With this issue the Republicans are no longer with them, no matter well how strong the business interests are, it was very clear from Donald Trump's 2018 attempt to float a new immigration bill via Jared Kushner's team that anything that that kept the status quo in terms of the number of immigrants coming into the country was dead on arrival with Republicans. And of course that bill was also dead and arrival with Democrats for a variety of reasons as well. So, the party realignment has completely adjusted these coalitions. Now that's not to say that you don't have a lot of business owners who are still Republican and many of them even be nativistic and in their views and nationalistic in their views. But it basically means that they're not as aligned on immigration as they once were before. And it's mostly because immigration has become that central fulcrum, where everything else is sort of, you know, revolving around I mean it is really a way of predicting Donald Trump's views on a variety of other national matters if you can know how they feel about immigration. In terms of you know the actual management of labor I'm actually turn that over to Ruth though. Okay, sure. Well I just want to add one thing to what you just said which is that it wasn't that long ago that there were lots of pro immigration Republicans. I remember in the George Bush administration there was a, it failed but a serious attempt at immigration comprehensive immigration reform that he support that the regime, the administration supported. And for that matter in the last big immigration reform of 1986 occurred under Ronald Reagan. I remember being shocked by, I used to teach at UCLA where I had an a student whose parents had come to the United States undocumented actually I had many such students but this one told me that her parents thought the best president the US had ever had was Ronald Reagan why because that's how they got legal status. So this is not this is a recent development which Justin just described and you know sadly the business interests that do support expansive immigration policies are very quiet about it. They will complain on the one side about in agriculture for example, that they can't find workers and at the same time, they might support Trump and the other, the so called America First Agenda so it is a huge contradiction. Yeah. Well I'll just add I've worked with some of these businesses, and some of the associations that they participate in, which have been in the past, more vocally pro immigrant the immigration reform that passed in 1991 he had a strong business coalition. And even as recently as 2013 when a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform passed the United States Senate with 68 votes like remember when that was a thing that could happen. It also had strong business community support what's really happening is that the folks who are who acknowledge that they frankly need immigrants in the workforce and they want a more generous immigration policy are scared to death of the current political climate and fear lifting up their heads and saying what they believe because of the backlash that will inevitably ensue and that is a huge part of the reason that despite the fact that the majority of the country supports the kind of immigration reform that's been on the table now, you know three or four times in the last 20 years. I can't get it over the finish line and that that's that it's not a policy problem it's not a substance problem it's not even a coalition problem. It's a problem of Republican intransigence from beginning to end it's a political problem. I want to offer a short rejoinder. I also think that consistent with what Cecilia just said, we know what policies are out there, you know there's been tons of research out there. This is an issue that is no longer dictated by policy or substance, it's really driven by emotion. And in many ways, you know this this recent switch and realignment. This is just, you know, Ruth and I disagree about how fast it's been. I think it's actually been decades in the making because there's been so much baiting of either racist or nationalist or nativist rhetoric on the right, that eventually Republicans were expected to actually deliver on some of these things rather than just use it to sort of stir people up which is what people under the Bush administration and during Clinton Republicans did then. Race to who could sound more nativistic and nationalistic, even though none of those actual policies were actually pursued until the Trump administration. And so when you wet the appetite of folks for this kind of, for these kinds of ideas, eventually they're going to say okay well are you going to deliver now I want it. And that's what's happened and I think it's so much of it is about fear threat, you know, or sympathy and an outrage, you know, that's what's driving immigration policy right now it's not about, you know, oh what can we do to advance the mission of this country to advance our purpose to strengthen us. That's not what people are talking about. That's why it's so important to change the conversation, although it's very difficult in the face of those, you know, passions that that you just described I just want to mention something that appears in something Justin wrote a few years called the new minority which studies. I think your term for them as post traumatic industrial cities like Youngstown Ohio is the US example he talks about. And there, there's a tremendous amount of immigrant scapegoating and blaming immigrants for the plight of workers who once had, you know, so called middle class jobs and factories and those jobs have evaporated. And it's astonishing that in that situation, where there's no logical way in which you could possibly attribute the closing of those factories to immigrants, there aren't hardly any immigrants in Youngstown or at least not at the time that that book was written. So, and yet they, they, they are completely convinced that this is what's the problem. And it really does defy logic and, you know, I think you're right that there's a huge emotional, you know, component and it's very easy to fall into, you know, to buy into a scapegoating kind of perspective, especially if you're hearing it every night on Fox News, which, you know, we still are. Cecilia might turn this question to you this is from Hassan who wants to know what can or should be done to counter the anti immigrant movement. So the sort of apparatus attached to Republicans but not only Republicans really who have been responsible for creating narratives of immigration and invasion specifically groups like fair center for immigration studies numbers USA. Yeah. So what's so interesting. I mean this has been a conundrum for, I've been doing this more than 30 years it's been a conundrum the whole time. There's sort of information about fair and the founder affair of Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who's who's racist white supremacist views sort of led to his founding of both fair and then the center for immigration studies starts as a project of fair you have this kind of cascading set of organizations which all have the same origins all have ties to white supremacy and they have dominated they've been the voice of the sort of anti immigrant side of the equation. Really, for, for, for at least 30 years longer 40. And the information about the racist connection has been visible in the public I since 19 about 1991. Right, so we've known and been able to demonstrate who these folks are and where their views come from for a really long time. And the upshot of all of that is that really is that the media who cite them don't care, right it's not as if there weren't a lot of folks pointing that out and suggesting that it is not legitimate to paint an organization with a racist history with that was with racist origins as a neutral think tank that is merely anti immigrant that that is inaccurate has largely fallen on deaf ears. You saw kind of a blip of recognition as the Trump administration emerged onto the scene and you started to see, right, you really started to recognize white supremacy for what it is. And in some cases got uncomfortable citing these sources, but mostly not mostly if there's there's still dominating the conversation. So, you know, while I spent and many people have spent many years sort of elevating that this is illegitimate we have not yet succeeded. And, you know, for many years we were able to simply out work them, and build broader coalitions and succeed in moving things forward that they opposed. And obviously, the, you know, we are not in such a moment now. And the part, a big piece of the reason for the political paralysis on immigration issues has to do with the fact that as much as it pains me to say at the sort of white supremacist view the anti immigrant view is a summit that has been for a while, and has created the fear that you just heard us describe with respect to businesses with respect to Republicans including Republicans who used to be part of the coalition who were in some cases the primary authors of things like the Dream Act, who no can bring themselves to support it or vote for it on the floor because the backlash is so strong. So, you know, I, I, it's more of an explanation than an answer because collectively as a field, we have not figured out how to disempower organizations with explicit racist origins, who continue to be cited as if they were merely good thinkers on the anti immigrant side. Thank you. I have a couple questions here addressing social cohesion as a concern in the crafting of immigration policy and I might start with Justin but everyone should feel free to jump in. So one person, citing, I think observations by Eduardo Porter and other researchers notes that immigrants comprise less than 14% of the US population which compared to other countries, many other countries is actually quite low. So what acceptable percentage, and are there real concerns to be addressed regarding social cohesion what it kind of means to be part of this polity. Justin. Yeah, it's a fantastic question. Um, no, there is no such thing as an acceptable share. There's no evidence that when you pass a magical threshold, nativism abounds or anything like that. What there is evidence of is that there is an acceptable pace of migration so there's an acceptable pace of change. What we see people reacting to is acute influxes, which again render the sense of the loss of control, and, and that sense of control is really I have found in my own research as well to be pivotal to reactions that are more anti immigrant and more restrictionist. I think we have to recognize that human beings broadly left and right, don't like lots of change all at once, which is, you know, pretty normal. And, and, and so managing the situation, preparing the sort of soil the ground for the arrival of immigrants is just as important as ensuring their own success. We have to think about both we have to treat the arrivals but also the natives who are already present and making sure that everyone is comfortable I think that's really key going forward. In terms of social cohesion. I think that the challenge that our country faces is a kind of is a challenge that faces almost any country subject to intense demographic change, which is what we're witnessing now. We have enormous amounts of immigrants here it's that we have had persistent immigration over the last half century, and that that has altered quite literally the complexion of the country. And so the demographic change feels faster because of differential fertility rates, rather than because of an influx of immigrants all of a sudden because that's, you know, the, the questioner points out right correctly. We are not actually like Australia which is at 30% double the stock. We have to actually what we're the challenge that we're facing is that these are countries all of us are countries that were founded on a sense of identity that is related in some specific way to an ethnicity, a race, a religion, and some kind of sense of origin and heritage. The United States has a number of civic ideals from its founding, the practical de facto history of the country is if a white Protestant country, and that is primarily been a white Protestant country, and in our implicit understandings of American identity that background is there just the same way that, you know, a white and Catholic countries at the core of Spain and the settler states like Australia or Canada. And it's not that they're inherently racist necessarily it's just who live there initially separating ourselves from that those ethno racial ethno religious backdrops is really hard work, because we have to identify the civic ideals that actually bring people together as a country. So we can do that that there has to be a sense of appetite for for doing so for rethinking what it means to be an American. And there are a number of organizations and thinkers who are who are actively thinking about this right now and I have a book on the subject. That's going to be coming out in spring next year called majority minority. And it's going to be a challenge really I think of the next several decades of our country about how to rethink who we are. It can't be about any kind of sense of origin, but rather in the sense of mission. What is our purpose. And we already have the fundamental materials for that sense of mission. I think that everyone agrees that that there is still something it's flickering but it's there about the American dream. And I think that there was also a sense of struggle that unites everyone as well. So if we can leverage that shared sense of struggle that shared sense of dream of working towards something that America is a project, then I think we'll be on our way to doing so. Can I challenge that a little bit. I think you're very much with the thrust of what you're saying, although I would say that sort of the white Protestant thing which is the story that we lean on and that we tell ourselves was was never the the whole truth. We look at, you know, the folks with names like mine were here in what is now the United States earlier. And of course the whole Southwestern United States has a very, very different history we just don't know it we don't acknowledge it as a history of the United States, and it's people. Our history is more complex and contains more diversity than we acknowledge, and in some ways that that that's where the seeds are of the answer here because we have in fact, sort of come together around around a set of ideals which is what makes us the United States with a lot of diversity for a very long time successfully and that has been, I think it's a mistake to assume that our demographic change is a challenge to that because we have almost never had times when we didn't have demographic change. And there was a time when, you know, Benjamin Franklin was worried that we were all going to be speaking German for example, concerns about social cohesion are as old as the United States is. But our ability to be one thing with our diversity is also as old as the United States is and there's certainly times when we haven't been so good at it. You know, we are we are in potentially such a time, but we also take great pride in the notion that that we are unique on the planet. Having this kind of diversity and still being one place and one people we have always had to work at it. That will continue to be true, but we have the capacity to be successful at it and I think it's a mistake to suggest that because demographics are changing in a, you know, in a different way that is getting noticed or the numbers of people with names like mine are starting to exceed numbers of other kinds of people that that is somehow a threat it's not a threat it's a continuation of the process that we've been undergoing now for I just add a couple comments I really agree with what Cecilia just said and and also with Justin's point about the early history of the country, but let's not forget the the first great wave of migration of southern and East European immigrants. They were greeted in exactly the same way as Latinos and Asians are now with great suspicion, racialization, etc. And, and now they consider themselves white and American in a fundamental way that they view people of color as not being. I remember as a kid coming home from school and reporting to my mother who was the kid of Russian immigrants Russian Jewish immigrants that we were taught to say in school our forefathers came from England and she laughed and she said oh yeah Beth McMillan the one African American kid in my class her her forefathers came from England, and later I realized how it was equally ridiculous to say it about me. But somehow that was the trope then it was all black and white, as opposed to the multicultural whatever people of color kind of categories that we have now, but we ourselves were. As you know, most people who are alive today their their grandparents or great grandparents were immigrants from somewhere else so that's the other thing that could be leveraged and has been actually by the immigrant rights movement historically but I think that you know this is in some ways case in point of my argument, you know it is precisely that each of those diverse waves of immigrants that have entered the country. So historically in the 19th century in the early 20th century, eventually assimilated into a sense of whiteness, the idea of what it means to be white in the United States has changed over time it's no longer Anglo and Protestant necessarily. And that is problematic because we still assign privilege that whiteness, and that whiteness still defines what the American mainstream is. And so, despite the diversity that you know Cecilia and Ruth, you know, properly point out that has been a defining component of the United States, demographically, it has been hidden by this sort of innate and sort of I should say inherent to move gravitationally towards the sense of whiteness that has defined who we are and I think that's a really a principal challenge of our times, as we try to actually bring ourselves to create a sense of cohesion with people who are ostensibly not white and may not want to be white. And that's going to be very challenging and that's hence the need for these civic ideals. And if anyone's interested in this idea I published a piece about a month ago in the New York Times is an op it, and hopefully we can link it and share it I think it's already actually in the chat. So everyone can double click on that and actually see what I have to say and a little bit longer for. I would just add that this shows that not only I said before and my presentation that immigration policy is entangled with labor market policy. Let's also, it's obvious but I think it's a good note to wind things up on immigration and race are deeply interconnected and white supremacy is the target that we need to focus on as we try to move this agenda forward. Yeah, I would agree as someone who is not white and has no desire to be white does not necessarily feel a whitening pressure but that certainly the the sort of mythology of the US is as you've described. I would also maybe suggest that I think Native American thinking around kind of what immigration is and sort of which social cohesion is it's been quite useful to me and trying to understand what what imaginative possibilities at least for migration policy might be. We are actually at the end of our hour we have so many wonderful questions that we didn't get to and I think the listeners for those and I'll pass them on to the panelists. But thank you so much to Cecilia and Justin and Ruth for your generous comments and your expertise and for putting together this wonderful guidebook for us all to to engage with this much, much further. And thank you to New America and the new press, please do purchase the book at the link on your screen. Thank you all so much. Thank you.