 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Hi, everyone. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. This is Community Matters. John Egan is next to me. He's an immigration lawyer. That's right. With the American Association of Immigration Lawyers. That's right. That's our group. Okay. And he's practicing here in Honolulu. And he's following very closely what happens, because every immigration lawyer has to do that these days. Well, it's part of being an immigration lawyer. You have to stay on this stuff. Things are changing three times a day. Literally. Literally. Like yesterday. Give us a report. What happened yesterday and this morning? Well, top Democrat leadership, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer from the Senate, Nancy Pelosi from the House of Representatives, had dinner at the White House with President Trump. They came out of the dinner and reported that they had cut a deal on the deferred action for childhood arrivals, the DACA program. Well, that would be earth shattering. And there were some walking it back shortly after. However, today it seems that, yes, in fact, they have got the broad outlines, at least, of an agreement. So boy, that's head snapping back and forth. Yeah, back and forth. Yeah. Right. Watching a tennis game at high speed. That's it. Yeah. Well, without necessarily getting into that, there was a liability feature for this White House. What does that deal look like? Well, we don't know yet, still yet to come. There is, right now, a version of the DREAM Act. That's the legislation that's been in front of the Congress seven or eight times already. But it was reintroduced during this session. In the Senate, it was Lindsey Graham. And on the Democratic side, there was, again, Chuck Schumer on the Republicans, Jeff Flake from Arizona was in on it, and Dick Durbin from Illinois. So they're putting it out there as a bipartisan proposal. And it really incorporates almost everything that was in the original DREAM Act. People who got here under 17, meaning that it was their parents who brought them here tend to have not been involved in any of these criminal sort of other activities that would make them unwelcome. That if they file their paperwork right and they stay in school, that they can get a green card. That's what the shape of this is right now. That's a high-stakes game. Well, for these young people, it's absolutely high-stakes. It's the idea that they would have to crawl back into the shadows, go to a country they don't know anything about. Right. And this is, these people have come here as infants, grew up here. They don't speak the language back there. In many cases. That's true. So, yes, it is absolutely high-stakes for these people. And the ones that, you know, under the program that exists right now, the statistics are really good. These young people are in school, they're in the military, they've got jobs, they're doing the right things. So the idea that we should rescind all that and take it all back, not that many people were really in favor of that. But let me ask you a question. Wouldn't it have been just as easy to leave DACA undisturbed? Well, yes. If I was running that show, I think I would have left it in place. He made a, he being Donald Trump, our president, made a campaign promise that he was going to take it out. Whether that was a wise thing for him to commit to, I don't want to speak to that. But he did make that commitment. And he has people that are pushing him to keep up on the promises he's made. On the other hand, you know, speaking as an immigration attorney, I have an opinion about this. I think that we should do this. We should give these people the way to go. But I have to say, executive orders are no way to make big decisions in our government. It would be better to have a statute. Way, way better. That's how we're supposed to run this place. You want to make a big change in the way we do business as a country? Pass it out as a law. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, but all this tumble to, you know, and also with the reduction he's now talking about reducing the number of immigrants to allow in the country. You know, at the ban litigation and all this stuff, this has probably changed your whole operation as an immigration lawyer in the past 10 months, no? Well, it's made it a lot more stressful. I can say that, you know, I don't want to complain, but it's a little fatiguing to have the ground rules changing every day you show up to work. And many of my clients are in pretty severe stress, you know. They don't know what to do. They don't know what the rules are today. Can you help them? We try. You know. Sometimes it sounds like it's really insoluble, no? Well, right. I mean, and that's been going on for a while. For example, here in Hawaii, we have big numbers of people from the Philippines in particular in China, some other Asian countries, where they're waiting for 15, 20 years in line. They've done all their paperwork. They've got all their approvals so far, 15, 20 years to bring a family member over. So yeah, insoluble is what that begins to look like. Yeah. So this creates, I mean, aside from the psychological aspect to you as a lawyer, you know, you have a mission. You have a desire. You have a commitment. Your life is dedicated to do this, but your toolkit is empty. That's the problem. Well, I don't want to say empty. There's usually some way that we can get people clear. The worst thing is not knowing, you know, for a lot of these people, just knowing where they really stand is, you know, an increment of help. So being able to do that is a good thing. We are really troubled right now. You know, this whole, we shouldn't let an issue like immigration rip the country apart. And the craziest thing about this is that we actually have a pretty strong consensus on this. The polling is consistent. Right now, 70 to 75 percent of Americans think, even on this issue of the DACA youngsters, 75 percent of the people say, give them papers. And of those, about 30 percent say, just give them citizenship right now. Get it over with. Do it. They deserve it. 70 percent saying, well, maybe not citizenship, but give them a green card. Put those together. 70 percent of the people say, give these people papers. On the other side, there are people who have a very strong opinion that this is just wrong, just wrong. But remember, they're a minority. And in that whole number, there's another 10 or 15 percent who don't know, don't care, undecided. So the number of people who are really dead set opposed to this is that's a minority position. Why isn't it a majority position in Congress? Well, that's another question. That's ideological. Well, and I heard your interview, you've had more than one with Bethanne Koslovich on Hawaii Public Radio. I've been on that station. Yes. Yeah. And there's some remarkable points. And one of the points that I wanted to follow through with is the point about what is happening in the country, and all of a sudden this issue should surface in this way. I mean, and it's in the same vein as what happened in Charlottesville. It's in the same vein as this new found bigotry we are finding in the last year or so. And maybe we can say with some level of discernment that we have a racial divide going on and it's surfacing in this area of the law. Well, boy, that's going a little deep. Yes. Yes, actually, I think that you are putting your finger on one of the issues that's behind all of this. Because let's just take those numbers we're talking about, 70 percent, maybe more, give these people papers and get it done with. Another few percent don't know, don't care. Who's left behind? That hardcore of people who are really adamant that these people don't belong in our country. Well, what does that mean? These people don't belong in our country. What do you define? In our country. Well, what is an American? I mean, does it have to people who look like you and me, old white guys with gray hair? No, I don't think that's how we define America. I think there's a whole lot more of us here. But there are people who are really uncomfortable with that, really uncomfortable. And they seem to have a license now to make some trouble about it. I think of Canada, the Trudeau legacy, if you will. Pierre Trudeau and his son. And they both ascribe, through their credit, to the notion of inclusivity. And Canada has been made strong by it. So there is a good laboratory in Canada to say that if you let everybody in, it actually works pretty well. It gives you a good economy. It gives you a good social balance, all that. I like the Canadian example. But I don't think we have to look there. I think we can look right here at home. I think that diversity has helped America in a lot of ways. And if we want to look very specifically here at home, take a look at Hawaii. Hawaii is a pretty darn good example for what happens when you bring different kinds of people together, give them some opportunities, give them a little bit of freedom. You know, great things happen. I don't think we should be worried about that. I think that small number of people, I mean, if you think about it on the political scale, this is probably the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives who has that very exclusionary point of view. I think it's kind of interesting that Donald Trump, by making this announcement, has challenged them. He said, OK, we should do this. Everybody knows we should do this. Some people don't want it. Put your cards on the table. Tell us why you don't want it. Not bad. I mean, he's unreliable. But gee whiz. You know, even unreliable guys are like clocks. They write twice a day. Yes, that's true. I mean, honestly, you know, I can say I'm not a fan of Donald Trump's. I didn't vote for him. And I worry about what he's up to. But in this particular case, I think he's putting the challenge where it belongs. This really shouldn't be something that lives or dies by an executive order. It should be part of our law. Let's talk about the ban. OK. The ban, now the Supreme Court said the ban sticks for a few months. And they'll look at it again, I suppose, next term. But you know, where is that all going? And we've got a new Supreme Court, in a way. Are you comfortable with that? Well, I think that you're right. They are going to keep working on this. You know, they did extend it. But Hawaii won a little bit in there, too, you know. Our attorney general did get in and assert that, no, you cannot call these people not family members. That's not what we understand to be a family. Family member can bring in people. They've got a connection. They've got arrangements made. You can't just interrupt that sort of thing. That came through. That's a win. And is that being respected by the Supreme Court now? That was, yes. Good. The flip side of that is that the Supreme Court allowed the Trump ban on refugees resettling and didn't essentially said that that's not the same kind of relationship, a resettlement offer from a non-governmental organization or a community group, a church, whoever's sponsoring these refugees to come in. That's not the same as a family commitment. Now, we can argue about that, but that's what they've said. It's not the end of the discussion, I don't think. No, no. Well, you know, I'd like to, you know, we'll take a short break, John, but when we come back, I'd like to talk about, I want to make you Congress, I want to make you into Congress. Oh, boy. I want to ask you what you think they should do. You know, reform, not reform. What's a reform? It's been discussed for at least 20 years, maybe 30, and I'd like to hear your thoughts. When we come back from this break, you'll see this is going to be really interesting. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii. Not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. My friend, mother, what big eyes you have. She's fine. All the better to see you with my dear. That's so full. What are you doing? Okay. Cool. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Posh. This is over. Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. Okay. We're back. I'm glad you stayed around. It was worth staying around. This is John Egan. He's an immigration lawyer. And he's practicing right here, and he sees closely what's going on. So I'd like to just take a moment and take a walk into the future with him and talk about immigration reform in general, which has been an issue. In fact, Peter Levinson, who comes from Hawaii, was the counsel for the immigration committee in Congress for many years, working on reform, but reform never happened. So I make you now the Congress. You get that feeling around you being a Congress. What would you do, John, about reform and immigration, finally? Well, Jay, I'm feeling really empowered by that. Thank you. Good. That's kind of too big to just get it all out in one piece. But the high points are, first, you have to do something about the dreamers, the young people who came here. That's just a fairness issue. There's no way around that. I think actually, in my opinion, personal opinion, I think that it's not a bad idea for the country to think about how many immigrants do we really want. Do we want to set that on autopilot and let it just run? Or do we want to think about those numbers? It's a fair question. He wants to cut it in half, and I think that's too much. I think that's not a good idea. But there might be limits that are appropriate, unended, bring them all in, no borders idea. That doesn't really work. You've seen that in Europe. It's really difficult to make that work in the long run. It's difficult to make the public believe that that's in their interests, because it's not in a lot of ways. There's another issue that's really important that kind of gets left out here, because we're talking about these sympathetic cases of young people and very sometimes dramatic family being ripped apart. But what about the business side? There's a whole other side of immigration that we don't hear about that much, that people coming in to start businesses, people the ability of businesses to bring people in and out in order to do their business. The world is becoming very globalized. Whether you like that idea or not, it's happening. So when you have a company that needs to bring someone in to do a particular job, do we allow that or do we make it tough? One of the executive orders that Trump has put through right now, this buy American, executive order, what he was criticizing his predecessor for, does exactly that. It addresses letting people come in for employment opportunities and wants to really, really cut that down. Why is it that no business leaders think this is a good idea? Including Microsoft and Apple and like. And right on down the line. All business leaders that I have heard of have expressed that that's really a bad idea that that's not going to help them whatsoever. So somehow coming to grips with the economic immigration would have to be on the reform list somewhere. You know, there's another little piece that's kind of going under the radar right now is that this administration is making it much, much tougher for international students to come to America and study. Well, that's a disaster. Now, again, there is a reasonable question. How many international students do we want in the country? Last time I heard, the last statistics that I saw said that there's now about a million international students in the United States studying in one form or another. Is that enough? Too much? Not enough? Well, we could talk about that. But the idea that they're doing is we're not going to talk about it. We're just going to cut down the access in very arbitrary ways. We're not going to give them interviews at the embassies and consulates because we've reduced the number of people who are working in those consulates. We're going to ask them questions about their long-term plans. Well, you're asking a 17, 18-year-old kid about their long-term plans. My long-term plans were not that firm at 17, 18. So they're using all these things to sort of cut down on access to international education. Again, in a globalized world, cutting down on international education is just nonsensical. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And the second part of that, of course, is the part that we see at APCSS, the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, which educates middle management people from Asia mostly, and it teaches them to like each other. It teaches them to like the United States. They become citizen diplomats. So even if these kids leave, well, when they do, a lot of them do leave anyway, all right. When they leave, we want them to like us. We want them to be part of the glue that holds the global society together and is friends with us. And so if you make it hard for them, you're making it hard for citizen diplomacy. Well, that's right. And it just flies in the face of everything that we know about how the new world works. You know, just taking another example out of blue skies, sort of. One thing that we're seeing in the immigration field is a lot more intermarriages, a lot more marriages where a U.S. citizen gets into a long-term lifetime commitment relationship with someone from another country. Same kind of thing. I mean, in some sense, that's really citizen diplomacy because they're taking it right into the family. A lot more of that happening now. And that's not something that anybody ever made a plan for. It's just a byproduct of better communication, better transportation, easier access to different countries traveling. Our kids are going off to Europe for the summer, going off to Asia. They're coming here. They're all going to school in different places. The kids meet up. They meet up, right? So a lot of this is going on. It's tectonic. The whole thing is tectonic. We're talking about globalism, Thomas Friedman's globalism. We're talking about globalization of the world, which is, to me, that's almost like Nirvana if we can pull that off without problems. Well, that's exactly the problem, though. There are people who are very uncomfortable. What you call Nirvana, they look like, oh, my gosh, what happened to my country that I used to know? I used to live here. I thought I knew what America was, and now what is it? So those people need to either get on board or we need to tell them you're a minority, act like it. Yeah. What about the wall? I mean, the problem there, and maybe he has some point, is that we've had a porous wall for many, many years, and the people come in and they're unlawful and undocumented and so forth, and you can forgive them all. You can forgive every single one of them, but then the wall was still porous. I mean, the border is still porous. You keep on doing that. What do you do in order to make a law and enforce it, whatever the law is, but enforce it so that the same problem that led to the current contention over it doesn't recur? Well, the simple answer to that, of course, is walls don't work. The Berlin Wall didn't work, and it became sort of a symbol of what was wrong with that whole Eastern European mentality. The Maginot Line didn't work. The Germans came through anyway. The Chinese Wall didn't work. Walls don't work. Give me a break. That's, you know, Janet Napolitano, when she was the governor of Arizona, said, flat out, she says, show me a 24-foot wall, and the guy on the other side is going to show you a 25-foot ladder. So walls aren't going to do it. I have a radical suggestion. Why don't we give everybody who wants to come into the country a chance to come in with papers and then let's track them? And if they overstay, we punish them. Then you're going to give them motivation to go back out when it's time to go, or else they're never coming back. But giving them that original paper is not something most people are really happy with. I don't think that's going to be our solution. And when they come here, welcome them. I'm reminded of the immigration from mainland China, PRC China, to Singapore. It's not that hard. You can fall within a quota. You arrive, they give you a job, and a house that you won't, from payments from the job the same day. In other words, it's a welcoming man. It's the way to do it. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I don't know that we have the social structure to accomplish giving them a house and a mortgage, but I look at this whole issue of immigration in the lens of my own personal family's experience. In 1848, they had a potato famine in Ireland, everybody was starving. What do you do? Do you stay and starve or do you get out? Well, smart people, people who were still able to, got out. There's now more Irish people in America than in Ireland. What was wrong there? One, there was no food, no opportunity. Two, the government was corrupt. Governments was a complete failure. Well, that's what's going on in Central America right now. You have corruption, failures of government, crises on the ground. Those people are doing the same thing that my great grandparents did. They're leaving in order to find some place that they can survive. We need to take that into account. A wall isn't going to stop those people. It's just going to up the stakes. So where do you think this is going to go? John, we talked briefly during the break about this whole thing, about that it's unstable right now. It's unpredictable. It'll keep you busy. It won't make you happy, but it'll keep you busy. It won't make your clients happy either, I think. But at least during this administration, we can see more tumult and more commotion and more hysteria and controversy than we have in a long time in the immigration field. Where does it go? I'd like to think that at some point people realize that doing nonsensical things consistently over time is not going to bring good results. You cannot, like what's going on right now, they're stripping staff out from our embassies and council that's across the world. How can that possibly be a good idea? We're taking good qualified entrepreneurs and telling them, hit the road, go on home. That's not a good idea. You can just stack up these bad ideas. We can tell people you can't come here because you're religion, we don't like. Bad idea. You can only take so many bad ideas and then people say, hey, wait, stop with the bad ideas. We've got to get serious about fixing these problems, not making them worse. So when does that point come? I wish I had a crystal ball for you. What's so funny is that as these issues bubble up like DACA did just a week ago, I saw the, I don't know if you were there, but I saw the protest at the federal building. It was very interesting. I wasn't there myself, but many of my friends were. Yeah. And so as the level of public interest grows one way or the other on immigration issues and all these migrant, not only here but elsewhere, all these issues, then so does the level of interest in immigration law grow. And I'm wondering what you would say to say a college graduate or somebody about to go to law school or somebody in law school about whether to commit himself or herself to a life in the practice of immigration, because we know that there will be issues. We know there'll be work for you. There definitely will be work. You know what, and I do, because I teach a course at the law school on refugee law. And so I do talk to young people about that. I give them a warning. I want them to know that this is a hard way to make a living. You know, lawyers generally speaking make pretty decent money, but frankly, and not to tell stories, I hope my banker isn't listening, but immigration lawyers on the low end of the scale of money making in law. So if money making in law is your goal, don't go near immigration law. You're not going to be happy. On the other hand, if you like being really involved with people from other countries or you want to know about other cultures, you want to do that face-to-face every day and do things that actually help people put their life forward in America and be part of the globalization process. That's right. That's right. And to have that positive impact on people's lives, that's actually a really good place to practice. And the bottom line for me is that those 70 percent, and it might even be more than 70 percent, no pressure on you, John, but those 70 percent are counting on you and the immigration bar to keep things sane and rational and constructive. Well, thank you for putting that on my shoulders. I'll take that home and think about it. John Egan, immigration lawyer here at Honolulu. Thank you so much. You're talking with you.