 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Lawrence, Joshua Zeitz, Madeline Hsu, and Peniel Joseph. Well, greetings again, everyone. We're off to a great start. And I'm really looking forward to this second panel, which gives us an opportunity to dive a little deeper into some components of the great society. These three great scholars up here with me wrote in the book, respectively, about the war on poverty, about race relations, and about immigration. And I think those are three pretty big pillars of the great society that deserve to be looked into in some greater depth. But before we get to those individual components, let me ask you each an important question, I think. We have this tendency, I think, in thinking about Lyndon Johnson's domestic record about the great society to carve it up. There's civil rights, there's poverty, there's environment, there's education, there's consumer protection, and on and on. But what was it in each of your opinions that knits the whole thing together? What were the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of the great society writ large? Madeline, can I start with you? So LBJ takes up immigration reform, and he has to be persuaded. It had really been a major issue for John F. Kennedy. LBJ knew personally, professionally, how hard it is to enact immigration legislation. And immigration is just an area that affects so many aspects of life in the United States. People have very strongly held views on what priority should be enacted in our immigration laws, because the immigration laws determine who will be future Americans. It goes to the heart of national values, and we have a range of opinions. And so LBJ knew this was very difficult, but he was persuaded ultimately to take it up because he came to understand that it was in alignment with his goals for civil rights legislation. And when he campaigned for those reforms, he constantly used this mantra. And as Mark from the previous panel referred to, the system that had been in place, the chief criteria for your chances to immigrate into the United States legally rested on your national origins. And the national origins heavily privileged people from Western and Northern European countries. And LBJ's slogan that he used was that your rights to immigrate into the United States should be based on your individual merit, not on your country of origin. It should speak about you as a person. And this was persuasive along with many other promises that he made with the version of laws. Anil. No, I'd say in terms of one word, it would be freedom. When we think about Lyndon Johnson, and I love the previous panel, I would say that what's so important about the Johnson presidency, and I think you even see it as vice president, especially in 63, he's got the great chat with Ted Sorensen in June, following the Gettysburg speech on May 30th, where he's talking, giving advice to Ted Sorensen to give to Jack Kennedy. And he's talking about using the presidency as a bully pulpit. But he also mentioned James Baldwin. He mentions Martin Luther King Jr. It's really an extraordinary, and we have it at the LBJ Library, 25 pages. He's at the June 22nd meeting with civil rights leaders and President Kennedy. And he's really, and then he becomes president. And so this idea of freedom, and freedom, sort of really freedom beyond emancipation, freedom beyond what has been conceived. And I think the interesting thing with LBJ, with freedom, is that he's in creative tension with these social movements, okay? And I think that's how democracies work. We were talking earlier about democracies being messy. So he doesn't agree with everything they say, but he agrees with a lot. And so for instance, the freedom comes from people like James Baldwin, the fire next time, who gives us a whole new language on how to talk about race in 1963. Truly extraordinary if you take a look at sort of 30, 35 national newspapers and look at every single issue for a year, which people like us up here do, and other magazines and stuff from 63 and archives, and you see the way our language changes. But Martin Luther King Jr. changes our language too. Letter from Birmingham Jail. By May, the American Friends Committee, the Quakers, print up 50,000 booklets by May of 1963. People are teaching that. And what is Letter from Birmingham Jail? It's a theory of justice, morally centered. Lyndon Johnson uses that language in 1963 and 64 and 65, transforms the whole ballgame. And when I say freedom, he means freedom for everyone, but he understands that not everyone's at the same place. And that's why you get immigration, you get water policy, you get voting rights, you get all these different policies, but truly extraordinary, and again, one word, freedom. Josh, underpinnings. I think when you take all of these disparate threads, what brings them together is an optimistic faith in the ability of the federal government to affirmatively help people, individuals achieve their fair share of a prosperous society. The safety net that Lyndon Johnson put in place persists to this day, and we've become a far less prosperous and growing economy. And so today it actually is a stopgap. But at the time, I think it was born of a fundamental liberal faith that we had cracked the code. We could figure out how to grow the economy in perpetuity. And if the federal government were able to furnish individuals who had been left behind with qualitative tools that they needed in order to capture their fair share of that pie, whether that was education or whether that was job training or access to good healthcare, that it could help lift everyone up. But then there's a flip side to that coin, which is that part of that great society legacy was a recognition that Jim Crow posed an artificial barrier to that scheme, and it made a mockery of qualitative liberalism. And so there was a conscious desire to dismantle as much of that edifice as possible in a five or eight year period of time. And what strikes me is how ambitious that two-sided coin was. You take, for instance, the launching of Medicare, which was an enormously ambitious project. It was one thing to get it through Congress. It was another thing to actually launch Medicare and Medicaid in the space of less than a year. It was just an enormous administrative lift. And as all of us have lived through the launch of the ACA, it's messy, it's difficult, it's ambitious enough. And yet the Johnson administration also decided to use Medicare in the same way it used federal aid to primary and secondary education in conjunction with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in order to dismantle Jim Crow in 12,000 of the nation's nursing homes and hospitals. And what that meant was that as they were launching this program, which was, again, difficult enough, they put in force really tough regulations that said, if you wanna be a participant in Medicare and Medicaid and hospitals and nursing homes did, by and large, then you have to dismantle segregation. You have to, you can no longer segregate on floors, in rooms, on boards, in communities where the population does not look like the professional population of the facility. You have to go out and affirmatively try to hire people who do represent the community. You have to advertise in newspapers throughout the broader county that the hospital or the nursing home is no longer segregated. They even mandated that professional staff in these facilities address everybody by courtesy titles like Mr. and Ms. and Mrs. This, to me, was the embodiment of the two-sided coin, the recognition that if you didn't dismantle Jim Crow, all of these qualitative liberal measures really are for naught. And interweaving of the different elements of the Great Society is something that's easy to miss if you sort of silo the different components and just examine one on its own terms. Madeline, you mentioned a minute ago, kind of in passing, that immigration had been a priority for John F. Kennedy. To some extent, a similar claim could be made with respect to poverty, with respect to civil rights. These had been around as priorities and were in fact priorities for John F. Kennedy and yet it's under Lyndon Johnson's administration that major strides are made, really transformative bills. Talk if you each would, given your focus in the book, about the leadership that Johnson brought that enabled him, working with Congress and others, to move these agendas forward. Kennedy had largely been frustrated, right? In each one of these areas, but under Johnson there was progress, there were real achievements. How do you explain that? What did Lyndon Johnson bring to the table that had been lacking perhaps in an earlier period? Should we go the other way, Josh? I think Julian covered some of this before. I think people who've worked in recent Democratic administrations probably bear a certain amount of frustration where you're told if only Barack Obama had played more golf with Mitch McConnell, if only he had glad handled a little more, surely he could have achieved more. You can't discount the enormous majorities that Lyndon Johnson had in 1964. And you also can't discount the temporary but significant rush of goodwill that he enjoyed in political capital that he gained from John Kennedy's assassination and so for a moment, anything that he could wrap up, however true or not true in the Kennedy legacy, had a modicum of momentum. But for me, and this is my bias because it's what I've written about, I think there's the passing of these initiatives and then there's the actual rollout of them and the ability administratively to actually create such an edifice that by 1968, 69 when he left office, it had already become really difficult to dismantle Medicare or Medicaid or federal aid to primary and secondary education or Head Start or you name this raft of initiatives. And so they built momentum over time because of his success in sort of mastering that administrative state. So to me, the master of the Senate is an interesting kind of construction for Johnson but the master of the administrative state to me is a sort of unspoken part of his legacy. Yeah, I think when we look at 1963 because the president takes over after John Kennedy's assassination November 22nd and if you look at that year and sort of how it unfolds, America is in real crisis. So in a lot of ways, 63 is the closest and sort of factually accurate year we had to 2020. A lot of people when that happened in 2020 kept comparing it to 68, but it's a wrong comparison. So 63 was when you saw really hundreds of protest in cities from coast to coast for civil rights, really for the first time in American history. And this is the first time we start to do Lewis Harris and different pollsters go out into black communities and interview thousands of people and they interview a hundred civil rights leaders. Johnson is very, very, Lyndon Johnson as vice president is very connected to a lot of this. He's getting awards from the African American press because he's cultivating different black journalists. By May in the spring of 63, we have whole articles in the New York Amsterdam news and the Los Angeles Sentinel and the Journal, the Cleveland Call and Post celebrating Lyndon Johnson as vice president and even people like Whitney Young of the Urban League and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, they are giving interviews on background to major press outlets saying we think the vice president is more proactive and passionate about civil rights. This is all of just facts. And so in a lot of ways the country he inherits by November is a country that remember has faced three tragedies. One is Medgar Evers who's the NAACP field secretary who shot hours after John F. Kennedy's finest moment as president June 11, 63 where he gives his civil rights address. The second tragedy is September 15th, 1963 and for African American really 11 to 13 years old girls are young women are killed in a terrorist bombing attack. That 16th Street Baptist Church is the same church that Condoleezza Rice's family went to in Birmingham. So they targeted this upper middle class elite church on purpose, right? And then the third tragedy obviously enormous is John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. So Lyndon Johnson inherits a country that is in a national roiling crisis. One of the first things he does is have conversations by phone and bringing to the White House people like Martin Luther King Jr., people like Roy Wilkins, the whole civil rights establishment. And he tells them that not only am I with you but I'm gonna be sort of the best ally and friend you ever had, right? To the point where as soon as Dr. King comes from that meeting, he's gushing to his own people saying, I think we may have struck gold here, you know? Even though he's mourning JFK. So what Lyndon Johnson provides in the immediate aftermath and we don't remember this is the kind of roiling demonstrations that we had for civil rights. The kind of protest and dissension that we had for civil rights and the kind of way in which both Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy certainly tried their best and they have some good moments but he really uses the presidency as a bully pulpit. So in a way throughout the end of 63 and throughout 64 and 65, it's very interesting. He's running into that problem. He's running towards it instead of leaning away from it, which is really extraordinary. And he connects that problem to these other conceptions of freedom. So the speech about the war on poverty in January of 1964, the different programs that are unleashed, he gets basically in agreement with civil rights groups to not have a bunch of demonstrations by the summer and fall of 1964 because people start to see, look Humphrey is gonna be the vice president. He's been true to his word. The Civil Rights Act is passed July 2nd, 1964. So he really provides a kind of leadership that's very passionate and pugnacious on this issue of civil rights. But what's interesting what Johnson does, and this is the New Deal liberal in him, he really connects his civil rights policy to employment policy, to the environment, to transportation policy, to education policy, to immigration policy. So in a way, I think the president realizes that look we had on the other panel, the New Deal, Nicky Hemmer said really quite brilliantly, whiffed on the politics of race, they did. Texas Rangers just won the World Series, it's thinking of these baseball right here. They whiffed on race because everything remains segregated because of the Dixiecrats, right? So I'm not saying FDR was not some racist, but they whiffed on transforming policy. Lyndon Johnson doesn't, he really confronts it. Obviously it's imperfect, it's flawed, but it's a massive vision. And in that sense, he's really connected to the vision of the New Deal, but also the Second World War. We're the only country in the history of the world that within four years from having basically no military get 16 million people to serve and build up the biggest arsenal for global democracy in the history of the world, right? And so Lyndon Johnson says if this country can do that, we can actually transform domestic race relations, right? So it's an aspirational, huge, it's a big, big swing, but it's really leadership and it's visionary, even though it's gonna be incredibly flawed, incredibly contested, but just the willingness to take on the fight is something we should applaud. Beautiful to put. Madeleine immigration, why does LBJ succeed where others have failed? So in the 1950s, in the 1950s as now, the United States had a very broken immigration system. In the 1920s, the United States had implemented the most severe immigration restrictions in national history. As mentioned, those restrictions were overtly racist and discriminatory, highly, highly favored immigration from Western and Northern European countries. And the real emphasis in that was this effort to conserve the demographic composition of the United States. And this was critically important, very much so to these evil Dixie crats that we're all talking about. By the 1950s, they were overtly racist. They posed severe barriers in terms of American international relations. The United States was trying to fortify its relationships with decolonizing newly established nations in places like Asia, Africa, the Caribbean. Also, the actual immigration that was happening, in fact, was happening outside of the immigration laws. And all these fronts, every president starting with Truman onward knew that the laws had to be changed. They needed to be changed. There was a lot of community pressure, different ethnic communities, organizations, all lobbying for there to be immigration reform. The holdup, the problem was that the Dixie crats controlled the committee and subcommittees in Congress and were able to effectively foil to block any efforts at major immigration reform. And even though John F. Kennedy takes this up when he's a senator, he knows that is constantly getting thwarted by some of the major figures such as Francis Walter. Now, when, so Johnson, he has his priorities, right? And when he becomes president on, after the tragic assassination of JFK, he has to be persuaded to actually tackle this problem because he knows very well how difficult it will actually be. However, one of the major figures passes away, Francis Walter, but the mantle of the head of sort of the immigration restrictionist movement is taken over by Michael Feegan, but there is this window of opportunity. And I think Johnson is persuaded that this is in alignment with his own kinds of values. And once he takes up that fight, he goes after it. And he has an array of partners in the struggle. So Ted Kennedy is there, Bobby Kennedy as well, Emmanuel Seller, Philip Hart in the Senate, all are out there with him campaigning. But he's also a pragmatist. And his, the significant majorities that he's holding in Congress also make the sort of the Dixie Crat leadership recognize that immigration reform is in fact going to happen. And they decide to be pragmatic in their term. So the immigration law that we have actually was chiefly crafted by Michael Feegan, right? So he decides, he sends in his version of what the immigration reform would be to Lyndon Johnson. It fulfills LBJ's primary goal that the racist national origin system should be set aside, that you can't have, each country should have equal terms in terms of the numbers of people that can legally immigrate to the United States. So there's this kind of surface equality, but what Feegan has also added is that to qualify for legal immigration, you only have three options. Family reunification, you have to be a fairly close family member, what is called skilled employment, and then also refugees. It's actually a very narrow door and the laws really emphasize family reunification. And this was Feegan's strategy for trying to ensure that immigration continued to be predominantly the same as the majority population in the United States. Of course, hasn't worked out, right? We know that the law has been transformative. And, you know, and LBJ took it. What has also been transformative in that law, and this criteria was added at the very last minute, was that it also then under the claim that well, to be fully equal, we also have to start restricting the numbers of people emigrating within the Americas, right? And so suddenly we have a 20,000 cap placed on one of our nearest, well, Canada and Mexico, which were the most severely impacted per year in the name of this kind of equality. And this has been also transformative because in the years leading up to 1965, there were several hundred thousand Mexicans coming to the United States every year. And suddenly this becomes illegalized. They don't have legal pathways to emigrate. And this is a problem that we are still struggling with. Thank you. I wanna ask each of you another question to take you a little bit deeper into your chapter. And Peniel, I think I might start with you. You had a big job in the book. Yours was the chapter that focused on what I think Lyndon Johnson might have said was his proudest achievement, civil rights legislation, the 64 and 65 bills in particular. But you made a very interesting choice in tackling that subject of telling the story via Lyndon Johnson's relationship with Martin Luther King, which has a fascinating trajectory. Take us through briefly, of course, that trajectory and how the relationship maps on to the larger story of civil rights in the Johnson period. Oh, absolutely. I think Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson have really the most, and we can talk about Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln who they meet up three times during the Civil War and after, but they have the most important relationship of any president and social movement leader in American history. And what I mean by that is that what's so interesting, a social movement leader is not a president. That's what, when Barack Obama got elected in 2008, I think a lot of people, young people especially, but some not so young mistook Obama and he at times spoke in the cadence of a social movement leader. I know, I get it. But the president is the president, is the commander in chief. And so with Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., they are both in ways, co-equal statesman. To show you how important King is, the same year that John F. Kennedy is assassinated, Time magazine's man of the year, person of the year is Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. This is the same year. And so you'd have to say, well, my goodness, how is that possible? But if you look at the year of 63, Martin Luther King Jr. becomes a kind of prime minister of the United States. Jeremy Suri, my colleague has a great book, The Impossible Presidency, and this idea of the president, it's too big of a job for one person. Martin Luther King Jr. is working in tandem with the president to an extent. He's challenging Kennedy, he's challenging Johnson, but what's so interesting in 64 and 65, these two men from the South, Atlanta and from Texas, right? Atlanta, Georgia, Texas Hill Country, really come to have a very important fundamental understanding of each other. They know they need each other. President Johnson's a pragmatist, so we know that at times, like when he signs the Civil Rights Act and he gives King the pen, there's a point where some of the Dixie Crats or he's talking to somebody and says, well, I wish that picture wasn't there because that's gonna sort of hurt us with the conservatives and the other panel was talking about that. The president Johnson, Lyndon Johnson is intensely aware of optics, right? So on some levels, even when Dr. King wins the Nobel Peace Prize, he asks one of his aides like, well, what should I do, right? And they say, well, we've gotta acknowledge this and he sends him a telegram saying that this is a great reflection of the entire country, of you and the entire country. So it's really of you and me. So Dr. King gets the Johnson treatment, just even in telegram, but when they meet in the White House, what's so interesting is that LBJ is telling Dr. King, I have your back, I'm a supporter, I'm for this, right? But he's also telling him, this is one of many issues that I have and that's the creative tension between a social movement leader and a president because King is saying and making an argument, this is the issue, this is the beating heart of American democracy, touches everything, your foreign policy, your domestic policy. The president is gonna say, this is important, but I've got a lot of important things to do, right? But in 64, 65, and I'll end with this, Watts. So in South Central Los Angeles, August 11th to August 18th blows up. Ideologically, we could say it's either a rebellion, a riot, or a civil disturbance, right? Those are the different perspectives. Those who think it's based on police brutality and misery say it's an urban rebellion. Conservatives are saying this is a riot and this is what you get from having anti-poverty programs. The government sort of goes in between and says these are civil disturbances, right? When we think about the McComb report and we think about the Kerner commission and other commissions. Well, Lyndon Johnson and MLK are on the phone with each other and it's just so interesting the phone conversation because LBJ is saying you can call me anytime. Martin Luther King Jr. is saying we have to have a crash anti-poverty program. They're both in unison and at the same time Lyndon Johnson's telling him don't let the public think there's any daylight between me and you on Vietnam. Aha. So you're getting rumblings, right? He's telling him, look, I'm your guy, you're my guy, but I need loyalty. I need loyalty, right? And Martin Luther King Jr. is not Roy Wilkins. He's not Whitney Young. He's not interested. I'm old enough to remember Monty Hall and let's make a deal. He doesn't want to make a deal. He's saying, no, no, no. So it's so interesting. So the high point of that, the positive relationship is 64, 65. And what we see in 66, 67, 68 is that King as a social movement leader, he never has a personal bad word to say about President Johnson. It's not personal. His whole thing is this moral revolution he wants. He calls it a revolution of values to build what he calls a beloved community. And guess what, folks? He believes it. He's imperfect too, but he believes it. He believes we can have a community that doesn't have violence, militarism, racism, and that has food and justice and good housing for all people. How do you like that? Right? And that we could do it non-violently everyone, you know? So that's what bumps up into the pragmatism of LBJ, right? And so they become, I won't say bitter enemies, but they do become political adversaries where King speaks out against the Vietnam War in April 4th, 1967. He comes to connect the Vietnam War with not the failure of the Great Society, but the shortcomings of the Great Society. The Great Society didn't fail as we see, but the shortcomings become huge in the context of the promises that were made. And the final thing I'll say, what Lyndon Johnson oversees between 63 and 68 is nothing short of the reordering of American democracy vis-a-vis race. It's not going to be the revolution that some people want, but it becomes so threatening because people's success had been predicated on the segregated caste system. And what we do through the Great Society is, and I'll use the word that we used earlier, we puncture that caste system. It doesn't mean we eradicate it, but we certainly puncture it. Josh, you spoke really eloquently about motives for the war on poverty. Let's talk about impact. Another big issue that you cover in your essay. You know, Ronald Reagan famously said, we fought a war on poverty in poverty one. There are a lot of claims that get made about the LBJ's war on poverty, but the whole notion of fighting poverty. Talk about impact. How do you assess something as complicated as the war on poverty in terms of what it actually accomplished? So George Reedy, who had served as a longtime aide to Johnson and was press secretary in the early years of the presidency, would later say that the worst thing Johnson ever did or that any of them did was to declare war on poverty because it was just too grandiose in its ambitions. But to be fair, as I said before, it reflected a genuine consensus among liberals in this period that in the post-war period, that they had unlocked the secret to growth in perpetuity. And so to solve the problem of poverty, most of them agreed, not all. There were some within the administration who just disagreed, but most agreed initially, at least, that you didn't need to undertake a broad-based program of economic redistribution. You didn't need to re-divide up a growing pie. You just needed to provide people with qualitative tools that they would need, if they had been left behind, to access their fair share of that prosperity, whether that was education, job training, health care, what have you. The bottom sort of fell out on this post-war economy after 1973. And we all know the broad contours of it. And obviously, there have been, it's waned and ebbed and flowed. But by and large, after 1973, the prosperous middle class stopped enjoying uniformly the benefits of, let's say, defined benefits pensions, or employer-provided health care. Wages stagnated. Families that had two wage earners tended to keep pace with inflation in the 1970s and the 1980s and other spirals. Families, a large number of families, a growing number of families that didn't have two wage earners fell behind. Men's wages stagnated profoundly as we saw a wave of deindustrialization in the 70s and 80s. And so that economy that formed the basis of liberal faith in growth liberalism, really, in the 1960s, puttered out. And so a lot of these programs that have been born, really, as measures just to help those who had been left behind, became the safety net for increasing numbers of people, particularly if they were means tested programs like Medicaid. You could, I guess, regard Medicare as equivalent to means tested, because obviously you can age into it. And so the knock against the great society by conservatives from Ronald Reagan up through Paul Ryan was that it failed, or even that it contributed to creating a dependency culture that perpetuated the cycle of poverty rather than alleviating it. But I think if we step back, there are two things that I would note. One is that these programs were meant for a fundamentally different economy. That said, they've actually created the stop gap that has kept many millions of people out of poverty, both from a quantitative and qualitative standpoint. So we talked about this last night. A few of us went up to Texas State to do a panel, which was really exciting. It's right where the Hill Country starts. I say this as though I knew that before last night. I didn't. From New Jersey, I had no idea. But you look out there, right? And this is where Johnson was born. This is the poverty he grew up in. It's the poverty that he understood. And so one of the things we talked about last evening was that when we measure poverty, at least from a pure-based economic standpoint, the government looks at cash income. So how much income do you have? That determines whether you are below that poverty line. But when economists add back non-cash-based benefits, whether that's the provision of health care, whether that's the provision of nutrition assistance, like SNAP, which was born under the Kennedy Johnson Administration, the school lunch program, which was also a Kennedy Johnson great society innovation, you can add back other things, other non-cash benefits. The estimates are that the great society programs today have taken a bite out of, like this is a few years ago, but I think it was 26% bite out of poverty. So they're in imperfect and increasingly frayed social safety net. But if you take them away, the American poverty grows exponentially. And it's not just by numbers. It's by the number of children who aren't getting school lunches. The number of children who aren't getting school breakfast. The number of kids who aren't getting free immunizations. The number of adults who don't have access to health care and to prescription drugs. So it was built for a different economy, but it has proved an incredibly important stop gap in an economy that has gotten a whole lot riskier for most families and an economy that has gotten a lot more unequal since 1973. Madeline, on immigration, it seems to me one of the fascinating, one of the curious things about the bill is that at the time it was passed, it was seen as a landmark occasion. But there were a lot of folks around who believed that it wouldn't have that big an impact. But as you've said, it has been monumentally transformative. What was it specifically about the bill that led to this remarkable transformation of basic American demography? So, well, Johnson and the various folks campaigning for the liberalization of the immigration laws actually promised that nothing much will change. We can remove, strip away the racism from the laws, but nothing much will change. And the changes that they proposed would happen. So family reunification is the emphasis that was one of the reasons why they could make that claim. Although I think there was some understanding, and they could look at earlier immigration patterns that there were pressures of certain kinds, from Asian countries, also of people who have highly educated graduate degrees. This is how my father came to the United States, that there was already ongoing pressures for brain drain. But there was also, I think, a general recognition that these are the kinds of immigrants we, in fact, would like to welcome. And provisions are built in to ensure that people who immigrate through the skilled worker preference will be scrutinized by the Department of Labor. They're not supposed to displace American workers. These kinds of reassurances meant that even the organized labor organizations were on board with these changes. So it projects, I think, very clearly certain kinds of national priorities, but that's not how immigration actually works, because people make the really difficult choice of leaving their homes, leaving their communities. Immigration requires tremendous aspiration and also sacrifice. And we have to recognize this, and that the people who generally are going to be motivated to migrate do so because they are in situations of extremely limited economic opportunity. They are in situations of insecurity, political instability, even violence. Their decision to try to move is really very powerful. And the law doesn't account for this. And so the people who wanted to take that opportunity of the changed law have come very much from Asia. They have come from poorer countries in the Americas, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. We get more and more immigration from Central America because of political instability in those areas. Since the 1990s, we've had more immigration from Africa. And so the laws have allowed for more people to come. I will say that the United States post World War II efforts to rebuild the economies of their European allies and also of Japan have been very successful, which means that people are not so motivated to come from these parts of the world. And so the law has been transformative. For my expertise as an Asian-American history, disproportionately Asian-Americans have immigrated through the skilled preference criteria. It means that the United States has been very successful in effect in terms of importing a middle class from other countries. And people come in with college graduate level educations. It is not an accident that statistically the average levels of education, household income, employment in STEM fields, and white collar and professional fields of Asian-Americans far exceeds that of the United States. But this is sort of the intention of the laws and the laws have been very successful. And then what happens is that people legally immigrate and they bring over their entire family chains. Another thing that does happen though is when you have restrictions, and now I'm moving to talking about migration within the Americas, one of the things that it then imposes, and we also saw this happening in the 1920s when the severe immigration restrictions were imposed on European immigrants, is that it forces people to make a choice, that if you're going to come to the United States, previously there had been relatively high levels of circular migration, but once your border crossings are restricted, that forces you to make a decision about actually staying. You have to pick a side. And this has also happened, this is another reason why we see these increases in migration from the Americas from the 1970s onward. And so it really has changed, and they're both sort of, from my perspective, significant improvements, also significant problems. We are at a juncture where we have long needed immigration reform, but we don't have LBJ around. I am mindful of the time and we will have to call it quits here very shortly, but before we get there, very quickly, one of the purposes of the book, as you can tell from the title, is to draw out the implications of the Johnson period for America today. What is, to each of you, a key lesson or implication of the Johnson period that we would do well to remember today? Josh? I think of it as one of the three or four transformative moments in American state building. It's on par with the, or it's comparable to the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and Great Society. And it speaks to the power of the federal government to play an affirmative role in not just in individuals' lives, but also in reshaping the idea of citizenship, which I think is a powerful dovetail to what we were just talking about on the question of immigration and what it means to be an American. And we don't get these bursts of creativity and proactive creativity. Very often, they come every couple decades. We're probably due for one in a big way. You can see that you can see of American democracy sort of on teetering on the edge because so much of the structure has fallen apart, but it stands out in that way for me. And I guess the lesson is that we do have these moments and when we have them, we should take the window. I would concur with that. And I'd say that when we think about LBJ's America, I'd say that I connect it with the New Frontier 61 to 69, because one of the things I've seen with my research is so many young people of all backgrounds globally were really impacted by the Peace Corps. They were really impacted by sort of Kennedy's call for this kind of idealism. And then in a lot of ways, the interesting part about the Kennedy-Johnson relationship is that Johnson, in certain ways, actualizes some of the vision that Kennedy had said in a way where the legislation's not going through 61, 62, 63, and then suddenly we see this burst, especially with I think it's the 89th Congress that Julian has written about as well. So I'd say this idea of citizenship, yes, but his biggest legacy, I think, is this idea, and he gets it in tandem with the Civil Rights Social Movement during the Second Reconstruction, is this idea of dignity and democracy. So yes, citizenship, but there becomes, for a time, there is an aperture where we're really rethinking what dignity means, where somebody like Fannie Lou Hamer, who Melody Barnes was talking about earlier today, a sharecropper from Ruleville, Mississippi, becomes by 68 a delegate at the National Democratic National Convention, right? And we start to think from the bottom up that people who are sharecroppers and people who are impoverished can be leaders and can be the shapers of democracy. And again, when you have a president who says, 65, March 15th, 1965, we shall overcome, right? And is speaking the moral language of the Civil Rights Movement, that's very, very powerful. We haven't seen that since, you know? So in a lot of ways, LBJ embraces aspects of the Civil Rights Movement and institutionalizes it, right? It's sometimes to the chagrin of activists, right? And that's what happens when things become mainstream. But again, Voting Rights Act for 48 years, Civil Rights Act for 60 years, these things are transformative in ways that even went beyond what I think President Johnson, the only reason why we have women's athletics and when we see what's going on, that's all the Civil Rights Act, right? And his legacy is democracy and dignity and really that we can tackle big ideas and big challenges. And he wasn't afraid to tackle the biggest challenges. And I think subsequently a lot of times we're afraid, right? We're in fear, we're paralyzed by fear, not just the president, but the nation, right? And I think this is one of the last times that we weren't paralyzed by fear. And wow, the things that we did, everything from the moonshot to headstart, to immigration, to civil rights, voting rights. So if we believe we can make it happen, I think that's LBJ's legacy. Thank you, Madeline, last word. Oh, that's a big responsibility. So I will say I am very narrowly an immigration historian and being given the opportunity to do this chapter really underscored for me just how powerful laws are, immigration laws in terms of transforming the possibilities for certain categories of people. And so after 1965, we have far more Asians being able to immigrate. And I won't say that Asian immigration is gone, but what people have found is that the Asians came, they made their lives here, they pursued livelihoods, they had families, they have established multitudes of new communities in far sort of across the United States. And I'd say to a large extent have been sort of allowed successfully to claim becoming Americans. But on the flip side of that is that we have a lot of people who then became illegal immigrants and there have been accompanying burdens of racialization, of inequality, of legal marginalization that comes from their immigration status. And it really underscores the necessity of paying attention to our laws, our policies and how powerfully they operate, which really echoes everything that's been said here. Well, thank you. Thank you to these three wonderful scholars, to Mark and Nicky and Julian and Melody from the earlier panel. And I would also like to acknowledge a few other scholars who contributed to the book, who took part in other events over the last two days, Sheda Jahanbani, Laura Kalman, Fred Logovall and Frank Gavin, and also Jerry Kedava, who contributed wonderful chapters to this 12th chapter book. Thank you all for being here so much. Thanks again to the scholars. This was really a terrific conversation. Can't thank you enough.