 Also, this is our last conversation of the day, of the week. So we've saved, I think, the timeliest for last. And there's been a lot of referencing to immigration throughout the two days. And we started off yesterday in our politics panel with a lot of optimism. I think immigration was the one glimmer of hope that people pointed to as a subject that Congress has taken on in a constructive way. And I think that that panel sort of already chocked it up on the scoreboard. It's something that's been accomplished. Today it's a little cloudier, so maybe tomorrow we'll give us a bit of a reality check in terms of where things stand on the Hill. But let me introduce, we have 40 minutes for immigration reform. And that's a lot to cover, but because this is New America and we add value even beyond that, we're going to pivot and talk about how this immigration debate fits in with the larger demographic trend of the US becoming majority minority nation. So to my immediate right, we have Tamar Jacoby, who is one of the people who is most informed on all things immigration in town. She's a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. She also runs Immigration Works, which is a group trying to bring businesses together to make immigration reform happen. We have Alexandra Starr, an Emerson fellow here at New America, who's a prolific writer for many outlets on immigration. And in a similar vein to Jason's has really brought the issue to life by focusing on individual families and what immigration means to them. And also to what the nexus between immigration and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. And then to the far right, we have Gregor Rodriguez, who is one of the founding fathers of New America. I could say he was one of the early fellows, yeah. And he's also the founding publisher of Zocalo Public Square, our venture out in LA. And he runs the Center for Social Cohesion at our partner institution, Arizona State University. So thanks all for being here. Tamar, so start us off. I mentioned that it seemed, I was very optimistic last night after hearing the politics conversation. But you know that I'm a bit wary because I'm still a little traumatized from what happened in 2006 and 2007. When it seemed like comprehensive immigration reform was going to happen. The entire establishment, corporate, Republican, you had big labor had come around and we were gonna pass immigration reform. And then something happened. Which was members of Congress heard from some of their constituents who fell very strongly about this and it all got derailed. And here we are again. You've been very much involved in the negotiations, working with the gang of eight in the Senate. Again, the sort of model group that we were praising yesterday as a constructive example of bipartisanship. And they certainly have made tremendous advance. I mean, given where we might have expected them, this issue to be a year ago, which was just in think tank land because nobody in Congress wanted to touch it, we had an election. People looked at the results and some of the trends in terms of who was voting for whom, and suddenly there's been a lot of progress. But we have a lot long ways to go. We haven't brought the house into the process in the same way. So just sketch out for us, what are the remaining hurdles? How optimistic are you? And what are the things that we should keep our eyes on as we track the progress of this legislation? Because I feel like there's still a lot that hasn't been resolved beyond sort of the headlines of people wanting to make it happen. So great question, Andreas, and thank you for the opportunity. In some ways, I'm the worst person to ask because I am right on the front lines. And it's kind of the famous war and peace description of the battle of Waterloo, you know the least about what's going on when you're kind of there in the middle of the battle. But there's eight members of the Senate who are working on this and eight members in the House and one of the eight House members who I won't name. But he has a kind of a great riff that's worth quoting where he says, the chances of this passing and us getting it done have never been this good. The President sees it as his legacy and the Republicans see it as their political future and business and labor is with us and Intel and Microsoft are with us. Then he pauses for comic effect. Chances have never been so good. He pauses for comic effect. I'll give it about a 5% chance. I'm not that pessimistic. I think I'm kind of at the 50-50 point. But this is 536 different people with thousands of people behind them trying to make a Swiss watch. And there's a lot of momentum, but getting that Swiss watch workable is not easy. So the Senate bill in brief I think is a good bipartisan compromise. I think they did really look for sweet spots and by and large, I think they found them, kind of the three big ones. It is a kind of humane, practical answer to the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. But it combines that with a pretty tough-minded determination to enforce the rule of law on the border and in the workplace, big sweet spot. It does take our traditional family-oriented approach to immigration and rebalance it to make it more employment-based who we let in. And that's a huge shift. It will be a big, important shift going forward, important balance. And on the 11 million, it's a path to citizenship, but it's not a direct or special path. So in many ways, on these big, grand bargain things, they've done a good job. But that still doesn't mean it's necessarily gonna work and get through Congress because those are the big things and there are lots of little things. Obviously, kind of the big, everybody who reads the newspaper knows I'm gonna have a harder time in the House than the Senate. And House Republicans are, in a way, the biggest question mark. It's a little bit of a stereotype and misleading. There is a lot of ferment in the House. I mean, every Republican office you go in the House, they tell you we have to do something. And there definitely is a sea change. People understand that Republicans are never gonna see the inside of the White House again if we don't get on the right side of this. That doesn't necessarily tell you what the something is and whether people can come around to before, certainly, I don't think the Senate bill is gonna wash in the House or play in the House. So the question is, can the House come up with something that's close enough? What is most objectionable to House members about what the senators told us? I mean, there's lots of different things, but so the new amnesty. Last time, amnesty was the amnesty. This time, what's gonna be the biggest question in my mind, I predict, is gonna be cost. It's gonna be cost, Obamacare, welfare. When I ride airplanes now, the person next to me doesn't say what part of illegal don't you understand. They say, what's it gonna cost when we bring all these people into the system? I think there's an answer to that, but I think that's what a lot of Republicans need to be able to go home and talk about. I also think every office you go in, the first thing they say is I have to do something, and the second thing they say is, but I can't be back here in 10 or 15 years dealing with another big bunch of unauthorized immigrants. And so they naturally gravitate to the border as the answer for that. The border isn't actually the best answer to that. The best answer to that is a legal way for the workers we need to come to the country. But that's a step further in reasoning than you can necessarily get in a TV sound bite. So and the public hasn't really spoken. That's the other big obstacle. Up to now, the public hasn't been paying attention. My new idea is that maybe the best way to get to comprehensive immigration reform is if we could keep adding on the scandals. But so the public will be paying attention to other things. But the truth is, we just don't know, polls show that the public is for it. We don't know if when this gets to be on the top item in the news, the reaction is gonna be a shrug, which is what a lot of people think the reaction is gonna be, or, as in 06 and 07, another roar of saying don't do it. That's a, have the polls changed significantly from what they were in 2006, 2007, because back then, majorities were backing what Congress was advancing with the president back. It just had to do with the ferocity of the opposition of a minority of people. But have the headline polls changed? The polls show that many fewer people think this is a threat to the country now, which is good. So there's less fodder for, I mean, the polls always were a mix, right? The polls were, people saying them for comprehensive reform includes a lot of enforcement, but there was also a lot of ambivalence about immigration. And I don't know that that ambivalence has changed, how salient the threat it seems to be has changed somewhat. It also seems like a few months ago, the big divide, even when we, once we got to the point where everybody, there was a consensus that we had to do something, we, you know, being members of Congress at reading election results, it seemed like the big divide was between those that were going to favor a pathway to citizenship for the legalized undocumented population versus those who felt, well, let's go ahead, okay, fine, let's legalize them, give them legal residence. But it's going to be a cul-de-sac. There is going to be no pathway to citizenship. That seems, we seem to, we have seemed to move beyond that. At least my understanding, is that going to, is that going to stick in the house? I think that's going to come up again in the house. I don't know if it's going to be the obstacle. We see, we haven't, it's so far it's been a very elite conversation. So far it's been, you know, you and eight senators. Well, but it's, you know, it hasn't yet gotten the rank and file House Republicans really, really into it. And they are, again, they want to come along. Leadership wants to bring them along. But how far they can come is not yet at all clear. So would you wager that the president will be signing immigration reform, something that looks to us like comprehensive reform that takes care of the undocumented population, creates a sustainable pathway, you know, a legalized flow of workers in the future. And that we can just kind of check the south of us. I hate to say this, but it really depends on what time of day you ask me. Well, I'm asking you at 106. It was, yeah, you know, I would not bet my house or my car or my glasses on it. So Alexander, would you wager that it's going to pass? And also, you know, when you step back from, you know, the, the question of what may or may not be in the legislation, at least the contours of what we're talking about, what strikes you as, is this continuity with, you know, each generation, there seems to be a major reform of immigration. Does this represent continuity with the recent approach or what strikes you as a, as a big departure perhaps? So I would say the biggest change in this bill is how we would accept immigrants going forward. So currently, we have a system that you could say is mostly family reunification based, but also employer based. And that's where employers petition for visas on behalf of foreigners whom they want to hire under this bill. And it's a pretty big departure. They would create a point system. They would eliminate some of the family visas, like for, say, adult married children. And they would, those visas, you know, whatever, was it 40,000 or so? Like, and it increases over time, would be allocated based on a point system. And the best known point systems in the world are Australia and Canada. And the ideas that we would allocate points based on attributes like level of education, your English proficiency, your job experience. So that is potentially huge. I mean, it's a really big change. But it's not the only track, right? They're not replacing all employment based on family. Just adding that as part one track. But do we know how this will play out in practice? I mean, one of the things that's striking when you look back, say, at the 65 landmark legislation, immigration reform, and we were talking about this the other day, when President Lyndon Johnson signed this piece of legislation in it in the year when they were passing all sorts of other hugely important pieces of legislation, he actually said, and most of the members of Congress involved said, this isn't going to really change anything. I mean, his statement, usually when a president signs, you know, a bill into law, the tendency is to hype the significance of it. But the statement was pupuda to such an extent. He practically said, I don't know why I'm bothering, you know, wasting my time signing this thing. And it was a huge sea change in terms of immigration, in terms of diversifying the population that we talk about when we talk about immigrants. But it wasn't clear at the time that they were doing that. I think experts might have had a better sense of what was about to happen because of the new emphasis on family and revisiting some of the old quotas. But do we know how this would actually, this shift would play out in practice over time? Well, there was a quote, I think some Senate staffers said that they thought eventually visas, about 50% of visas would be allocated based on skills, which is a pretty big change from what we have now. Is it about 85% or allocated based on family reunification? Now, two-thirds family and 7% employment based. So, now, the thing, you've actually made a comment before, I thought your comments were terrific and so on the point. You made a comment about how we would be moving more to an employment-based visa system. I would actually argue it's sort of more skills-based, right? That's the way a point system oftentimes works. So, a question is, like, how will it work? It'll be intriguing to see. And it really depends on how you decide to allocate points. You can give a lot of points for having an existing job offer in the United States. So then, maybe things don't change so much. You can also give a lot of points for having a U.S. degree. Again, we can guess that those people are oftentimes going to have an easier time finding work just because when they go to employers, they're going to have a better sense of how to rank them or how to evaluate them. I will say I spoke with people in both the Canadian and Australian government. They have tweaked their point system so often, so many times over the years, and they have people who they let in who can't find jobs. You know, it's the way someone presents on a piece of paper or resume is not the way they might, how they might interact with employers. So, that's something to think about. I mean, I wrote a piece about this. Australia and Canada also have parliamentary systems where they can be very agile in their response to events on the ground. So, when they saw a lot in Canada, you know, a lot of people with PhDs in engineering degrees who were driving cabs, they tweaked their system. And actually, ironically, they made it more like ours. So, I would argue that since we may be going towards a point system, we really have to be careful that we too can be agile in responding to events on the ground, because we have not obviously evinced that quality over the past 25 years. And a point system cannot run on autopilot the way arguably you could say family reunification and employer-based visa allocation can, because you have family members sort of making the choice and employers making the choice. Here, government is the one screening these applications, and that means that we have to be very responsive to whether the people we're letting in are actually doing well once they arrive. And you dodged the wagering part of the question. Are you in? You know, I guess for me, I mean, it's just so... The change is just striking. You know what, I've been covering this for a while and it's just stunning to me like how far people have moved towards being receptive to reform. So, in a way, I am optimistic. I would say this, though, even if nothing else passes, they're going to pass a version of the DREAM Act. They're going to do... Now, that's obviously not going to solve the whole problem, but there'll be something. Let me ask you, temporary worker visas. I know, Tamar, you've been very involved and actually influential in making this round of immigration reform so that we don't revisit this question 10, 20 years ago. Another need to legalize undocumented workers because we didn't have a mechanism for people to come here legally. But are you worried at all that when we talk about temporary workers, there's always the comparison made to the European experience. You both... Actually, all three of you have written quite a bit about that, about the differences between our approach to immigration historically and the European experience. But do you see any downsides to having this be part of the... Well, the temporary worker program, the low-skill temporary worker program in the bill is actually... It's almost a misnomer to call it a temporary worker program. Better way to call it would be provisional worker visa program because people come, it's very break the mold. It's not like any temporary worker program you've ever heard of before. The worker doesn't actually have to stay with or work for the employer who brought him in. He can go work for any other employer who's proved that he's tried to find Americans and can't. So very different in that regard. And also kind of does try to solve the problem of there's nothing more permanent than a temporary foreign worker by allowing people who... Encouraging people who want to go home to go home and work here for a while, make some money, take money home to build a house. But then allowing the people who succeed here and want to stay to get into the points track. And that's where sort of transition from being a temporary worker to being a permanent resident. And that's where the point system will be most into play. I mean there's still gonna be, half of the visas are still gonna be based on family connections. 40% of the visas are still gonna be based on employment base that has nothing to do with the point system. And the point system is one other piece. So I'm sure anything new is always an experiment. And the problem is we don't revisit immigration very often. So you start an experiment, you don't come back to it for 25 years. But I think it's gonna be a very interesting experiment. So Gregory, I haven't forgotten about you. Gregory, I should mention, is the author of Mongrel's Basterd's Orphans in Vagabonds. It's his memoir of his first 10 years at New America. It's a book I've actually read twice and I still need to look at the title when I say it. The subtitle is Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America. The Economist, when Gregory's book came out, described it as an indispensable guide to America's future. And I think, in terms of looking at Mexican immigration, often the Mexico nexus here, the fact that when we talk about immigration, we're also talking about the economic integration of North America often gets lost in the debate here in town. We talk about immigrants and immigration as if they just drop out of the sky because we don't pay sufficient attention to North America, the hemisphere, the relationship with Mexico, which was another subject that I was very pleased to hear came up earlier today. So you've looked at sort of the narrative of how this history of Mexican immigration has altered how Americans think of their identity and how it has reinterpreted race, understanding of race in the United States. You also are in a state of California, which in some ways has moved beyond some of this debate around immigration that we're still having in Washington that we see in some places like Arizona. There was a moment in the 90s where it seemed that that debate was at its fever pitch in California. And I've often heard you describe California now as a post-immigration, post-immigrant state. What does that mean? I mean, what's striking is that the nation as a federal level is finally grappling with this issue of undocumented and comprehensive immigration reform. On some level in Los Angeles and California as a whole, we're starting to realize, oh my goodness, we are beyond immigration. A new study, Dal Meyers at University of Southern California has called this a homegrown state. We've been receiving people from the Midwest or from the East Coast and from all around the globe for 150 years, and suddenly a majority of Californians are native born. We are California born. So the issue then is not about immigration in a place like California, which has been the poster child for immigration. The issue is integration. The issue is not about legalizing the illegal. It's not about making the foreign become native. It's about making the native born go up the ladder, be part of the whole. This is a moment in which we can talk about social cohesion. We can talk about rootedness. We can talk about a group of Californians that have more of a shared sense, and Lenny, this is all for you, a shared sense of a common future. And maybe even solve its problems. But I think at some point we're a step beyond, even though this is all incredibly important, and this is not exactly irrelevant to what we're happening to us. This would help the cause of making us more rooted and integrating the whole. But I think what's fascinating is that we're beginning to look that that's just one part of it, the legalizing the undocumented immigration reform. Now we have the bigger issue of integration, the integrating people who have never lived in any other country, but this, allowing for a mobility to higher education, to better jobs, to the middle class. So I think we're on almost to another debate even before we've even finished this one. And the trend towards a majority minority nation, is that something that is particularly meaningful or do you feel that it's just we continue to redefine what it means to be white? Late last year, there was headlines from the latest census data showed that a majority of babies for the first time were minority and it was sort of one of these tailor made stories for cable news and there was a lot done, made of that. What's the significance of any of that? It's a little bit, the drum beats a little bit tiresome in a sense it overestimates the significance of the ethnic and racial background of the population of every given place. I mean we did this in Los Angeles before we had our first Mexican-American mayor since 1870 and everybody. I mean you'd think that Margaritas were gonna come out of the water faucets. I mean suddenly the mariachis would be behind every press conference, but guess what? He was an American politician who cheated on his wife. I mean my goodness, I got a call from CNN once. What does this tell us about Latino politics? I said I'm happy to go on as long as we talk about what Bill Clinton means for about whites in politics and Jesse Jackson is about blacks in activism. They said, oh can you recommend anyone else? I can't. So I mean in a sense with the drum beat about demographic change, it's a red herring. I mean what we have are class issues and ultimately integration issues that really are, whether the babies blue, black, green, or red, we have the same fundamental problem of making this country more equal and more whole and this is all just, I mean the newspapers love it, but again in Los Angeles we're actually gonna lose our first Mexican-American mayor in a hundred years and the next mayor will either be Anglo or a Italian-Mexican-Jewish kid who's with a Rhodes Scholar, with a Rhodes Scholarship. So I mean there's some. His family is from Chihuahua. No, his father's family is Italian-Mexican. From Chihuahua. They are not. Don't claim Chihuahua on any set of. We'll talk later. Eric Garcetti told me that. He wanted us to endorse it. Well just final question on this theme. You know Samuel Huntington and others argued that there is something distinctively different about this flow of Mexicans crossing the border, that they're not gonna integrate or assimilate to the same degree because they're just taking over communities and they're not having, the melting pot has been lost because immigration is so much Mexican-driven these days and you see the growth of Spanish language, media and Spanish. And you, I mean you buy that that there's something different about this wave of immigration as opposed to, you know, Irish coming in the 19th century or Italian-American. The numbers, the close proximity to the homeland, obviously the long history, the history of conquest and annexation, yes, there is a difference. However, Huntington clearly underestimated the incredibly powerful pull of American culture. I, once I was sick about all this, writing about all this stuff and I took a 14-hour flight to Cape Town and I took an eight-day ship to Tristan de Cuna, the most remote-inhabited island on earth. I get there and somebody asked me if I had any Garth Brooks CDs. And to think that- And he did. And I did. And somehow thinking that the children born within our borders are somehow immune to the charms of Bugs Bunny, I mean, it's overstated. And again, and I think we've seen that. This is not, there's precedent for this. There's been 150 years of Mexican immigration. And do we have any great uprisings or attempts to undermine the stability of the United States? No. So you have this larger demographic reality of the growth of Latinos in the United States as a segment of the population. That seems to be driving what's happening on Capitol Hill. There's just an equation of what that demographic wants and the need to deal with this problem. To Mark correct me if I'm wrong, is that the sole driver of why things look so differently today than they did a year ago in terms of the prospects? I think it's the main driver. And I think, I mean, I think it, Gregory's absolutely right, right? The deciding who we're gonna let in is sort of in a way the easy question, creating a community is the hard question. But the politics around immigration are in some sort of crude way part of creating that community. Because I mean, yes, integration has been going on in the cities like Los Angeles and campuses like ASU and kind of in media for decades. But finally, like Republican politicians are sort of recognizing that we have Latinos in the country. And it's like Latinos have been in the room for a long time, but now a whole different political class is kind of recognizing that they're in the room. And that's, you know, that should be in a way come first, but it's an important part of creating the big community that we're talking about. And it's not just Republican politicians thinking that I'm gonna do this one vote on immigration, which is really about people, very uneducated people coming from a different country and that's gonna win me all these voters. It is, it's a little more sophisticated than that. Most of these Republicans understand we have to get that issue off the table so that we can talk to Latinos about things that they really do care about. And I mean, and that- Immigration isn't even the top three. And isn't even close, but it is a threshold issue, right? You know, what I used to say about the way Romney played it wrong, he was like an encyclopedia salesman who came to your door and the first thing he said was, I don't really like people like you, but would you like to buy my encyclopedias? And Republicans need to stop saying, when they talk about immigration, people hear I don't really like people like you and they have to stop saying that and then they have to start to listen to what Latinos care about and try to speak to those issues. And that's, so you know, this, I mean, the big step here almost will not be in the history of things will not be just passing immigration reform. We'll be getting on to that broader conversation and the fact that the immigration debate is part of getting to that broader conversation is a really good- But we're gonna get to the broader conversation even with or without immigration reform. I mean, we have our native born children we have to deal with. I mean, I want this to pass not as much as you, but I want it to pass. But the Spanishization of Southwest started along before this legislation was even discussed. And it's driven as much by births as it is by. The growth of Latino population is driven significantly more by births than by migration. Okay, so we're gonna take a little, we're gonna take questions from the audience, but I must say, Alexander has a hard break. She needs to catch a train. So we're gonna excuse you. Oh, okay. Thank you. Thank you. And so questions, comments. Lenny, since you were. I'm curious about your comment about the debates gonna be in the House on cost or the economics. And I'm curious whether you think there's actually any basis to listen to the facts on that from those who are gonna vote or is it gonna be just based on pure ideology? Well, so I mean, obviously the heritage debate, good question. And you know, it's never as simple as the facts. I mean, let's not be naive, right? I mean, the way you can answer that right there. But I mean, going beyond that a little bit. I mean, heritage, this time as in 06 and 07, weighed in with this crazy report, billions of dollars, and they were immediately discredited because the methodology was wrong and one of their guys said it had to do with Latino IQ. So they got shot down immediately and a lot of conservative groups pushed back and that was really good. But I just don't, and a lot of people are saying, oh, that debate's over. I just don't think so. Again, when I sort of, at all kind of look beneath the surface out there, again, you know, people say next to me in the airplane, not a good focus group, but you know, one focus group where people are worried about everything now is what's it gonna cost? And you know, and so I just think politics is so much about people's fears and the facts are helpful, but I think that is gonna be a big part of the debate. Others? Thank you, Jeffrey. I'd like to ask you a little bit. There was an article recently, I forget where by the San Diego mayor talking about how border security is actually an impediment to economic growth as border traffic is becoming more and more intense. I'd also like to get your sense of the future of migration or immigration from Mexico illegal or illegal on the view that recent research suggests that net net it's flat and there may be as Mexico becomes a faster growing economy and outward migration of Mexicans back to Mexico because there's more economic opportunity there. Well, I'm not an expert on migration and all that's a tomorrow question really and we probably disagree on this, but my sense is that I mean, I'll just, tomorrow I think it's a behavior rooted pattern that you think will continue. I'm likely to think that actually we will see a decline as far, I mean, there are some projections that we will see decline of newcomers for as far as we can project, but. Well, we have seen it. Well, it's economic demand driven, right? So it's, I mean, the reason we have migration at the level we have in the last 30, 40 years is not, it's about Mexico, but even more, it's about our changing workforce. In 1960, half of the Americans in the workforce were high school dropouts. Today, less than 10% of the Americans in the workforce are high school dropouts. We need workers. Mexico is becoming, I used to joke, if Mexico became Switzerland overnight. Mexico is actually becoming Switzerland not too slowly. Not overnight, but it's getting there. Not overnight, but it's becoming. But I was in the fields in Fresno recently and the Mexicans were doing the supervisory work and the people doing the hard work were Hondurans. And so we're gonna need people to work in the fields and work in restaurants and work construction. And they're gonna come from further and further away. Isn't that the bigger question? Where will we get the migrants next time we need them? Yeah. Well, there's, I mean, there are a lot of reasons why the flow has pretty much gone to zero. And as you pointed out, it's compared to half a million or so a year, you know, before the recession. And it's the tougher border security, our recession, changing demographics in Mexico, which also has an aging population. I mean, the demographic change there is as dramatic as it has been in the industrialized world. It's just lagging by 20 years or so. But the numbers are picking up. As well as the economy. Right, well, partly it'll come back but maybe not to the same degree. I mean, a somewhat quirky leading economic indicator is there's an annual Gallup poll where people are asked in different countries if you could leave permanently Mexico or wherever the question's being asked, would you? The answer early this year in Mexico was 11% of the population indicated that they would want to leave. That's the same percentage of Americans who would want to leave the US permanently because that's a global survey that Gallup does. Not that long ago, the percentage is saying they wanted to leave Mexico was 25, 30%. So there is sort of a brightening of prospects in Mexico that is, we have to take into account. Whatever those numbers are though, I would like to say that the influence of Spanish-language media was likely to decline from now on. The influence of official Mexico and the lives of Latinos is likely to decline. And this is becoming more of a native-born ethnic rather than immigrant population. I disagree with that, but let's take another break. We'll forever fight because he's Mexican-born on US-born, so, you know. He's not a real Mexican. He wants California back. He wants California back. I think as the border comes down and there's more back and forth, Mexico will become a bigger presence here through that community. But Mexico has never done a good job of keeping the loyalty of its latter generation. Yeah, but it's not a government issue now. It's gonna be a community thing. Constantine, help us. Save us. Separate us. Hi. I think this needs to be... Over here? Oh. Okay. No? One question here and then Constantine will get the last. Okay. I'll save you at the end. I hate to reroute the conversation. I'm from Silicon Valley and I think that we're getting cocky about our ability to retweet to each other about immigration reform and a lot of my friends have kind of donated to this forward.us and that seemed to be missing from the conversation here. Are we like, what's the reaction here in Washington to, you know, newly minted tech entrepreneurs trying to... Yeah, yeah, I think that the tech people have always been regarded as, you know, they're gonna come out pretty well in the bill no matter what happens. The public, much more than they think we need, you know, legalizing is obviously problematic for a lot of people in America. Bringing in, you know, more poor Mexican workers is problematic to a lot of people in America. There's some debate about whether we need more PhD scientists, but not as much. And that, I mean, one of the big dynamics here in DC around this bill has been sort of, you know, labor union thinking versus business thinking and they have managed to push back a little bit on the high-skilled visas. They're making it harder to use the H-1B visa, but pretty much the tech community is gonna come out, you know, like bandits on this bill and the tech industry support is important and, you know, gonna be a big thing in getting it done. Constantine, final question. So yeah, I thought the fellow from Silicon Valley might steal my question, but he didn't. So, and it's more of a sort of broad question that you can both, all three, take in the direction that you will. Just to the extent that the conversations today tend to be siloed, that, you know, we talked about technology in the morning and then war and now immigration and the question of technology, and Gregory, your comments on sort of social cohesion and thinking about online education and how education serves as a cohesive force and perhaps less so if we're watching it on our computers. And I wanted to get your sort of reflections on if we're thinking about how immigration will affect this country on a 20 to 30 year time scale, the technologies that we have at our disposal both in this country and in the world will change during those decades. And I was wondering if you could sort of, just sort of give me your thoughts on how you think, you know, everything from, you know, how manufacturing gets done, you know, in terms of where the demand for labor is, in terms of what possibilities exist for border security. That, I mean, it seems to me that the border has been fundamentally porous because we've had a certain set of technologies for dealing with it and I'm not an advocate for militarizing the border. But it's a lot less porous than it used to be. Exactly and sort of, so I'll stop rambling on but sort of get your reflection on how changing technology affects this debate. How does technology and immigration interact? Well, that's like a really interesting, we could have a whole, not just a shelf of books, like a bookcase of books. I don't even know where to start. I mean, obviously, you know, immigrants have been key in driving sort of the innovation in the US, right? And this does go back to the Silicon Valley guy's question. I mean, I think it was a third of the scientists and a quarter of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in the boom were foreign born. And, you know, what the whole high tech piece of the bill is about, and in a way you're right, we did give it short shrift, is about, you know, in the 19th century, countries competed to get like the coal and the iron ore and the colonies. Now they compete to get the smart people and a lot, you know, innovation is what drives economic progress now and no country produces enough PhD scientists. Half of the PhD scientists in America are foreign born. And so, I mean, just, you know, our whole, the technology ultra progress we make wouldn't be possible without immigration. And part of the idea of the bill is to keep that going. You know, Ken, to move to sort of the other party question, can technology help in implementation? You know, sure. On the border, but even more important, one of the biggest change in this bill we haven't even talked about is every employer in America, when this bill passes, is gonna have to run new hires through an electronic online system and see if they're verified or not. That's gonna arguably be the biggest change. So, it's necessary, that is the place to control unauthorized immigration is in the workplace. If you, if there are enough people to take the jobs who are authorized and you can't get a job if you're unauthorized, there's no point in coming. It's a fundamentally new form of social food. Yeah. How the economy works. It's, it's, I guarantee you whether comprehensive immigration reform passes or they go to like just little things like the D-MAC mandatory, you verify it's gonna be a fact. The social control already exists. When you, when you get hired somewhere, you have to, you have to provide a social security number or some documentation that shows that you're, you're legally here. This is a new way of verifying that. So in a sense, it's, Well, I mean, it's an incremental. Yeah. Gregory, final thought? Otherwise, we'll fight later, no worries. All right. Thank you everybody and thanks to you guys. This was terrific. Thank you.