 In terms of logistics, if you need the restroom, please use the backdoor and just straight there on the right. And we'll just start in a few, okay? Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. I guess we'll get started. I am Daniel Costa from EPI. And we have a great discussion and panel for you that I'm really excited about. So thanks also to the panelists that made it here. I've been working on immigration for a few years now. And I've come to find out that there's never a quiet time or a down time. There's always just a lot of stuff happening. Right now, Congress is working on debating multiple pieces of legislation to amend low and high school temporary foreign worker programs on so-called sanctuary cities, on visas for rich investors, on refugees, and even governors are starting to weigh in on this. And even some of these efforts are being tied to appropriations legislation. And of course, presidential campaigns have really amplified some of these debates and put immigration front and center. So the relevant issue for today is deportations. What is a deportation? A deportation is the forcible removal of someone who doesn't have legal status to be in the United States can also be done through a voluntary departure. But the impact of deportations on families is something that is talked about a lot and can be devastating, especially in mixed status families. And something that we talk about a lot here at EPI is how deportations are used as a tool that facilitates the exploitation of workers. If you're a worker without legal status, an employer can threaten to deport you. And that makes you much less likely to complain about unpaid wages or unsafe working conditions. And this, of course, is bad not just for the migrant worker, but also for similarly situated US workers who have to work alongside people who are exploitable. So Congress has not been able to agree on a solution for this for a very long time. And a year ago this week, President Obama decided to announce an executive order that would have given deferred action, essentially a reprieve from deportation for about 4 million of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants. Now that is stuck in the courts, its legality has been questioned. And we're all hoping that the Supreme Court will have their say on it, but it still might not be for a little while. But in the meantime, millions of people are unprotected and vulnerable in the labor market. So that's why this book by Tanya Galashboza, who is a professor at the University of California, Merced, is so timely. It takes a deep and critical look at deportations and explains mass deportations in the context of a global economic crisis. So I don't wanna jump into too much about what the book says, because she's gonna do a better job of that. But I will, I guess, say a few words about the people who are going to respond to what's in the book and maybe talk about some policy implications. First is Dr. Mark Rosenblum, he's the deputy director of MPI, the Migration Policy Institute of their US Immigration Policy Program, where he works on US Immigration Policy, Immigration Enforcement and US Regional Migration Initiatives. He has been at MPI for a number of years with a quick stint in Congressional Research Service. And just in general, he is probably the person in the United States who has thought more about and written more about the deportation system and the deportation machinery than just about anyone. So his thoughts will be very useful. He understands the data and the metrics and the numbers that are out there. As good as anyone, and if you don't know the Migration Policy Institute, they're probably one of the best think tanks working on immigration, not just in the United States, but in the world. Got a lot of smart people and they're just almost unbelievably prolific. To his left is Jennifer Rosenblum, also known as JJ Rosenblum. She is currently a Rabina Foundation Visiting Human Rights Fellow at the Yale Law School, and she's a legal advisor to the National Guest Worker Alliance in the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, where she's been for a number of years as well. She has done a lot of impressive work. She was a legal strategist behind a number of national campaigns, including the Signal Workers case, which exposed labor traffic from India to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. The Justice at Hershey's campaign, which were hundreds of foreign students, won new regulations from the State Department for their cultural exchange visa, which is a de facto guest worker program. And also she worked on the CJ's Seafood Campaign, which highlighted forced labor and seafood processing in Walmart's US supply chain. I'll just add that she is a brilliant lawyer who is working on the cutting edge of the intersection of immigration, labor, and employment laws. And she also has a deep knowledge of the deportation system. Finally, Shannon Letter is the Director of Immigration in the Policy Department at AFL-CIO, and she was previously with the American Federation teachers for a long time, and she guides the labor movement's efforts on immigration. And she didn't give me a bio, so I'm not going to say anything else about her. But she's doing really great work and has been also at the forefront of pushing for protections in the immigration system for workers of all legal statuses. So with that, I'll just turn it over to Tanya, and please tell us about your book. All right, thank you very much, Daniel, for the invitation. And thanks so much to Mark, Jayja, and Shannon for agreeing to read the book. I'm sure that took no small amount of time. And then to write up comments. I've done that myself for other people many times, so I know it's a lot to ask. I really appreciate you taking on that task, especially with relatively short notice. So thanks to all of you, and thanks to everyone in the audience. I've never been in this building, but I've walked by it many times. I'm from Washington, D.C., and actually I think my first job, I couldn't remember if it was my first or second job, like McDonald's or Mrs. Fields Cookies. Anyway, I worked at Mrs. Fields Cookies on 14th and F, and I was underage, but they didn't use to check back then, pre-ERCA, so you could get away with a lot of things. Anyway, so I've never been in this building, but it's great to be here in D.C. and to share my work with you. So in the book, what I'm trying to do is to tell a story about mass deportation and global capitalism. So it's a pretty macro story, but I tell this big story about global capitalism and mass deportation based on interviews that I conducted with deportees. So between 2009 and 2013, I interviewed 147 people who had been deported from the United States to Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Brazil. And after listening to their stories, it became clear to me that in order to think about this current moment of mass deportation, you have to think about the trajectory of migration and how migrants fit into larger movements of global and of labor and of capital. So I'm not going to be able to share all 147 stories with you. I don't even share all 147 in the book. But I want to start off today with one story, a story of a deportee who I call Eric, because I think his story is emblematic of how deportation works and also of how it's related to movements of labor and capital. So in 2009, I had the opportunity to go to the Fuerza Aria, Guatamateca, which is where deportees arrive in Guatemala City. And every week in Guatemala City, four to six plane loads of deportees arrive. Last year, about 40,000 people were deported via air from the United States to Guatemala City. So I was standing there on the tarmac watching. And I saw a young man get off the plane. And some of the other people getting off the plane were coming. Looked like they had probably just crossed the desert. Another guy had on a fast food worker's uniform. But Eric looked like a young guy who'd probably grown up in the United States. Based on the way he walked, his young face. So I went up to him and I said, my name is Tanya. And I work at the time I was at the University of Kansas. I work at the University of Kansas. And I'm interested in talking to people, getting the stories of people who've been deported. Would you mind if I called you in about a month to see how things are going for you? He's like, I don't know about be here in a month. But you can, here's my aunt's number. And you can call me and see if I'm here. So he gave me his aunt's number. And we did meet up a month later in a shopping center. And he told me his story. So Eric, when he was eight years old, his mother was working in a garment factory in a maquiladora in Guatemala City. And she realized, I mean, she was working, but she wasn't really making enough money in order to be able to pay all the fees to send Eric to school. She wanted to provide her son with a better life. And she had some family in Los Angeles. So she moved to Inglewood, Los Angeles. After working in Los Angeles for three years, she saved up enough money to bring Eric to the United States. And he came to the United States on a tourist visa. We got to the United States. He enrolled in middle school. Things were going pretty well for Eric. He did fine in high school. But in his last year of high school, his mother injured her back at work. So she was unable to continue working. The kind of job she had didn't have any employment benefits or any sick leave. So basically, as soon as she was unable to work, her paycheck stopped. So Eric, but Eric was in his last year of school, so he decided that he would drop out of school and get a job in order to help his mother out. I don't know how many of you have been to Los Angeles, but in Los Angeles, if you have a job, you almost always need a car to get there. So Eric got a car and would drive back and forth to work during the week. And on the weekends, he's a teenager. He'd hang out with his friends. And he married a young woman who is a legal permanent resident from El Salvador. And she was pregnant at the time that actually, when I was talking to him, she was just about to give birth. And he wasn't going to be able to be there because he was in Guatemala. So he got a car. And one day, a friend of his asked him to give him a ride to the other side of town. So Eric dropped his friend off. And just after dropping his friend off, a police officer pulled him over. And they believed that Eric's friend had stolen a car or was going to steal a car after getting out of his car. So then Eric was arrested as an accomplice in the car theft. So they took Eric downtown, ran his fingerprints through a database, which revealed that Eric had overstayed his tourist visa. So they issued a detainer and called ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who came to pick Eric up. Now, while all this is happening, all this is going on, the police realized that it wasn't Eric's friend or Eric that were involved in the car theft, but it's another two young Latino men driving a similar car. But by that time, it didn't matter because the detainer had already been issued. And Eric was already on his way to the Corrections Corporation of America detention facility, where he stayed for a couple of months trying to appeal his case based on his marriage to a legal permanent resident, based on his unborn daughter. He wasn't able to get legal representation, and he was deported to Guatemala City. When he arrived in Guatemala City, he was able to get a job, he works in a call center. So he basically answers phone calls from the United States. And I believe at the time he was working for Sears. So you call Sears, my refrigerator's not here, I ordered it at nine o'clock and he says, sorry, the truck's delayed, it'll be there around noon. So he earns about $400 a month, which is obviously a lot less than he would make here in the United States. And in Guatemala, it's enough for him to get by, but it's not enough for him to bring his wife and daughter down and he's basically finds himself in a similar situation to that his mother left when she left him in the first place. So I tell you his story, because I think it sheds light on larger patterns. And also I call this a neoliberal cycle because what we can see is different neoliberal reforms implemented at different stages across history, but also that have affected Eric's life. So we'll start with global inequality and outsourcing. So remember when Eric's mother left Guatemala in the first place, she left because she was working in a transnational factory that didn't pay her enough to get by, but because of the linkages created through global capitalism, she had connections to the United States and she knew that she could make more money there, so she left to the United States. When she got to the United States, like many low skilled immigrants, she got a job in the low wage sector. Now interestingly, Eric's mother works in a garment factory in Los Angeles. I mean, if you know the United States has lost most of our manufacturing jobs over the course of the past 60 years, but the manufacturing jobs that do remain tend to be low paid, lack of benefits, sort of these sweatshops, a lot in Los Angeles. So she found a job in the low grade manufacturing sector was also related to outsourcing, de-unionization, larger trends in the United States. Now Eric's mother worked at this sweatshop for at least a decade, which you know, you would think it would give her some kind of benefits, but as an undocumented immigrant, she didn't have access to any benefits. When she injured her back, that was it, she was fired. And although California has cut back social services for undocumented immigrants over the past 30 or 40 years, during that same time period, California has built 23 major prisons between 1984 and 2005. And the Los Angeles Police Department has multiplied in size. So even though the state is not spending a lot of money on social services, the state is spending a lot of money on enforcement. And for that reason, Eric was picked up, even though he had not in fact committed a crime. There's just so many police in Los Angeles that many young men, especially young Latino men, working class Latino men tend to find themselves trapped in the enforcement arm of the state. Another major trend in neoliberal economic reforms in the United States and abroad is privatization. So when Eric was arrested, he was replaced in a private detention facility. So a lot of people talk about the privatization of prisons, but the fact is not many, a very small percentage of federal and state prisons are actually private prisons. But when it comes to immigration detention centers, it depends on how you count it, but two thirds of people in immigration detention are there in profit-based systems. So the percentage of immigrants behind bars who are there, where people are making a direct profit off of their detainment is much higher than in the prison system. And I call it a cycle because the cycle continues, Eric's back, we're now working for a different transnational company. Now we're outsourcing services in addition to manufacturing, it's also low wage work. It's also cutbacks in social services and as a deportee in Guatemala, he's subject to enhanced policing. Eric in particular is not as subjective, but those deportees who have tattoos, they're constantly harassed by the police. The police stop them, make them take off their t-shirts, take pictures of them. So very similar policing practices, actually they learn those policing practices from the United States. It's not surprising that they have very similar practices in Guatemala as they do here. So I tell you that story, but now I'm gonna go back out to the big numbers, which a lot of people are interested in. Just to show you, between 1927 and 1997, the United States deported a total of about 2 million people and by deportations I mean removals. Now since then, since 1997, another 5 million people have been removed from the United States. And there's two reasons for that, big increase. The first one's right here. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. And then in, and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death penalty act. So what those two's laws did is they expanded the grounds on which you could be deported and narrowed the grounds for appeal. So basically a lot of people were transformed from undocumented immigrants into deportable immigrants and then they were put on fast track to deportation. So deportations began to increase in 1997. The laws governing deportation have not changed substantively since 1997. The reason why we see a continued increase is that the federal government appropriates money, more and more money to deportations each year. And we see another rise in 2003 and that's the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. So currently, the budget of the Department of Homeland Security is about $60 billion and often compare that to the budget of the Department of Education which is responsible for all education in the country which is $79 billion. And about half of the money of DHS is dedicated to immigration law enforcement. It's $30 billion a year. It's more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. So the United States is spending a tremendous amount of money on immigration law enforcement. And the interesting thing about deportations is that they don't affect all groups equally. So when the laws change in 1996, the number of women deported increased. So we see here, prior to 1996, there were never more than 50,000 removals in any given year. By 1998, you had almost 50,000 women being removed. So the number of women removed every year increased. But it remained flat until 2003. I mean, the number of women remaining flat has remained flat basically since 1998. But the number of men removed since the creation of Department of Homeland Security has increased dramatically, right? So for some reason, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security has led to increased removals of men whereas the number of women has remained flat. There's another interesting trend, which is removals by country of origin. So when the 1996 laws were implemented, this green line is Mexicans. So the number of Mexicans has increased pretty steadily over the course of the past 20 years. This line is Central Americans. So we basically see an increase in the deportation or the removal of Central Americans beginning with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The numbers of removals of the other groups have increased, but they sort of pale in comparison when you put them on this chart alongside the Mexicans and the Central Americans. So basically 98% of all people who are removed from the United States are Latin American or Caribbean. In contrast, 60% of non-citizens are Mexican, Latin American, or Caribbean. And 90% of deportees are men, and about half of all non-citizens are men. So the way that immigration law is being enforced today targets Latin American and Caribbean men in ways that it doesn't target other groups. So a lot of time people think that's related to criminality, and this is the latest available data on the criminal charges that people were convicted of prior to being removed. So in 2013, about 400,000 people were deported. Now half of those people were deported without any criminal convictions. So they didn't have any criminal charges at all. They were apprehended through other ways and put into the deportation law enforcement machinery. But the other half of the people were deported based on, they had a previous criminal conviction. And President Obama likes to say that he focuses on deporting felons, not families, but I'm sure most of you can imagine felons have families too. But anyway, almost a third of the people who were deported on criminal grounds in 2013 were deported for immigration offenses. So you might imagine people driving lorries across the border filled with undocumented immigrants, and that is an immigration crime, and some people are deported for that, but a relatively small number. The single largest category, most of these people are deported for illegal entry or illegal re-entry. So if you're an undocumented immigrant and you come across the border without permission, that's a civil violation. But there is a law in the books that says that we can prosecute a person for illegal entry or for illegal re-entry. That law has been on the book since 1924, but with the Immigration Act of 1924, but it hasn't been enforced very dramatically or very much at all. But just in the past few years through Operation Streamline, basically the federal government has been transforming undocumented immigrants into criminals and then saying, look, we're deporting all these criminals. Last year we deported 60,000 criminal aliens. But basically the year before or in any other year they could easily be just called undocumented migrants or people without immigration status. Next biggest category is drugs. Within that category, the largest category is marijuana possession, which has been legalized in many states and I believe also in the District of Columbia. Yep, so traffic offenses, a lot of those are DUIs, but we don't usually tend to think of people with junk, with people who drive after having a glass of wine as criminals. But anyway, as you can see, the most people that are deported on criminal grounds are deported for offenses that sometimes lead to a criminal sentence, but oftentimes don't, right? So it's often, it's really a matter of prosecutorial discretion and of transforming people into criminals in order to say that we're deporting a lot of criminals. So when we deport a lot of criminals or people that we call criminals, we're gonna be deporting a lot of people who live in the United States. And in 2011, 100,000 deportations involve people with U.S. citizens. So the more the enforcement arm reaches into the United States, the more we're deporting people who are long-term residents of the United States. So I just wanna, people always ask, and I'm not sure how many of you study immigration statistics, but this is actually, I think Mark wrote this report, let's go over it briefly in case he doesn't cover it in detail in his comments. So there's a big question, are deportations really up? Who are they deporting? Is it interior removals or border removals? So I think this chart is really informative because what you see, and people always ask about Obama versus Bush. Okay, so this blue line is interior removals. This, in 2003, when the DHS was created, so I think people often talk about the 1996 laws, but I think the creation of the DHS is even more important when we think about immigration law enforcement. You see interior removals going up. This is the last year of the Bush administration. When Obama gets to office, he basically keeps the Bush machinery going with basically, because he selected Janet Napolitano as his chair, or the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, now she's my president, and then you got Jay Johnson. She's the president of the University of California. And then interior removals have gone down in the past couple of years, but they've gone down, but they're still way higher than they've ever been historically. And we don't have the data, well I don't have it, Mark might have it. We don't have the data for this year yet, but basically the data that we have so far shows that deportations have just been continuing to rise consistently since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. So a lot of people have looked at deportations, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion of why mass deportation is happening now, why nearly all deportees are Latin American and Caribbean men, and how deportation is related to movements of labor and capital. And that's what I address in my book. And I'll go over this argument again a little briefly before I turn it over to the panelists. All right, so in order to understand why deportation is happening now, we have to think about the involvement of the United States in Latin America. So I'm gonna tell you a little story about Guatemala, but I could easily have told you the same story about Jamaica, about Haiti, about the Dominican Republic, about Chile, about El Salvador, Indonesia, I'll stop there. So in 1954, the Guatemalans elected Jacoba Arbenz as their president. And then the United States didn't like him because he was left leaning. And we sent down the CIA to aid the dissidents. And that led to a civil war in Guatemala, which lasted between 1954 until the peace accords were signed in 1996. So during this whole time, there's a lot of turmoil, mass killings, especially of indigenous people in Latin America, I mean, in Guatemala. And a lot of people began to leave Guatemala for the United States. They came to the United States, they also went to Mexico and to Canada. But they came to the United States in part because there was U.S. Chiquita Bananas and coffee companies that already had owned plantations in Guatemala. So there already were connections with the United States. That migration continued in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s and continues to the present day. But in the 1980s, actually in the late 1970s, the United States began to enter. Right now, I know you've heard about an economic crisis. Well, the last big crisis was revolving around the 1979 oil crisis. So what happened in the United States is large manufacturers found themselves unable to compete on the global market, in part due to the increase in the skyrocketing price of oil, but in part due to rising competition from Japan, from Germany, maybe not from China, from other countries that were also producing automobiles, manufacturing goods, et cetera. So the United States was able to solve or the capitalist class in the United States was able to solve the last economic crisis by outsourcing. So the problem in the United States, the cost of labor was too high for the capitalist. So they shut down factories in Detroit, moved the factories to Mexico, moved them to China. And basically they were able to get through the last economic crisis. And what that did in the United States is it created a tremendous pattern of deindustrialization. So now we have a very small manufacturing sector in the United States compared to what we had in the 1950s. And also in the 1950s, there was what many people had, you just had one person in the household working and that person earned enough money to support the family. And those kind of jobs have basically gone away for working class people in the United States. Now the other side of it, if you wanna think about when Detroit sends jobs abroad, I mean they have to go somewhere. In order for the jobs to go somewhere, that means that leaders in the United States have to sit at the table with leaders in Guatemala, leaders in other countries and sign trade agreements, sign foreign direct investment agreements. They basically have to sit down and negotiate the terms of these agreements. And they did that in Guatemala in a lot of places and they built factories in Guatemala, they built factories in China, they built the Maquiladoras along the border of Mexico all throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. And what happens on the US side is we have deindustrialization. So a lot of the factory jobs go away, but the factory jobs go away but they create new kinds of jobs. So now we have the global financial consultant, the executive director of trade policy. Right, so you have these very high level, I'm sure you guys know people like this, right? Management consultants get paid a lot of money to negotiate these trade agreements. And those people work a lot of hours and they have a very luxurious lifestyle and that creates the need for an increased service sector. So nannies, gardeners, dog walkers, I'm sure you can know other things that people do, but jobs that immigrants tend to fill. So there's a connection, what I'm trying to do is trace, there's a connection between outsourcing of jobs to Latin America, the kinds of immigrants that come to the United States, but these things all kind of, the United States could not have made its transition to a deindustrialized economy without immigration from Latin America, without people coming in to fill the service sector jobs that were created through outsourcing. So in this era of globalization that we've seen over the past 40, 50 years, the movement of capital has been facilitated through lots of new laws and the movement of people has been restricted. So any laws that have been passed have basically restricted the movement of people. So just for example, in 1994 NAFTA was signed, 2006, CAFTA was signed, and right now they're negotiating the TPP that hasn't been signed yet. The Trade Trans-Pacific Partnership. But anyway, they're always negotiating some trade deal in Congress, but for immigration we have IRCA, Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. There hasn't been really any major federal legislation since 1986, so it's just interesting, and I was talking to my students, and I was like, if you went home and talked to your aunties about immigration, they'd have something to say. They'd say, yeah, I was like, what about if you went home? He said to your auntie, let's talk about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Then nobody talks about it, or you know, it's not part of common lexicon. It's not on the radar of the presidential candidates. They're not making slide, snide remarks about trade partnerships, but they are making lots of snide remarks. Even the mayor of Roanoke said that he wanted to put the Syrians into Japanese internment camps. Anyway, so the discourse about immigration is strong, but there's been almost no movement in Congress, right? It's just interesting to think about how all these agreements have been signed in trade, but not with immigration. And lastly, I want to draw a connection. I put this figure up here, because it should remind you of the figure I showed you at the beginning, which was about the increase in deportations over the past 30 years. The same time we've seen an increase, I'm not at the same time, a much longer standing trend is the increase in mass incarceration, but we went through a similar transformation right where incarcerating relatively few people for a very long time, and then all of a sudden a tremendous increase. Now a lot of people also tie mass incarceration to deindustrialization. A lot of people argue that the United States designed the war on drugs not to protect the poor, but to transform them into compliant workers. So as the good jobs went away, we have all these people who are unemployed, and a lot of those people got put into prisons, right? A lot of, particularly the African American men who were living in urban centers whose parents had worked in factories, and now there was no jobs for them, they're unemployed, a lot of those men were funneled into the criminal justice system. And just like deportation, the criminal law enforcement apparatus is also very gendered. 93% of all prisoners are men, 90% of all deportees are men. So there's a parallel here in terms of the coercive arm of the state, right? So just as the prison industrial complex has been created to repress a certain sector of the labor market, I argue that immigration law enforcement has been created to repress a different sector of the labor market. So we have a new crisis today, new economic crisis, but we're using very similar tactics in terms of raiding communities, separating people from their families, creating a lot of fear of law enforcement, and now this is being directed at immigration law, at immigrants, native-born African American and Latino men are still subjected to criminal law enforcement, but just as criminal law enforcement practices have sort of leveled off, we've seen an increase in mass deportation. And the last piece of it is that deportees are now working in these transnational labor markets. So there's really no room to outsource any more manual, I mean, we can continue to outsource manufacturing, but it's kind of reached a tipping point, right? The market is saturated, right? So anyone that wanted to export their manufacturing to China has already done so, right? And there really aren't any, I mean, there may be some more countries on the horizon, but the ones that we've been trying to get jobs to outsource to have been having a lot of internal conflict. So sort of that market is kind of saturated, but the market for services is still there, especially with Latin America. So in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and El Salvador, the call center sector has doubled in the past decade. So there have been 5 million deportations from the United States to that region in the past, since 1997. Now, all those deportees are definitely not qualified to work in call sectors, and it's call centers, because not all of them are bilingual and bicultural, but there is a substantial proportion of them that are, and the call center sectors in those countries wouldn't have been able to thrive in the way that they have without this flow of deportees. So in El Salvador, actually, interestingly, the call center sector has not only doubled, but the wages have also doubled as they've tried to, because they tried to attract deportees into the sector, and they wouldn't have, which just shows that basically there is a need for that sector of the labor market in El Salvador. So basically, just to sum up, what I've tried to argue today is that people have long argued, scholars often argue, there's a connection between deindustrialization and trade agreements, right? That the reason why people migrate to the United States or to other countries is related to international flows of capital. People that study mass incarceration have long argued that there's a link between deindustrialization and mass incarceration, but I'm arguing that when we look at international flows of labor through the lens of deportation, we're able to see how the coercive arm of the state operates in conjunction with global flows of capital. So that's the contribution I'm bringing is saying, we look at deportation, and we compare, we can look at the 1970s to today, and we can see very similar trends, and we can sort of understand mass incarceration, not just in terms of domestic politics, but in terms of international politics, and we can understand deportation, not just in terms of local politics, but in terms of global politics. So why should we care? I mean, there's all kinds of reasons. If just from an economic standpoint, the United States has spent billions and billions of dollars on immigration, law enforcement money that could have gone to schools, to nursing homes, to social security, to all kinds of places. The other part of it is the separation of families. The devastation is caused, currently there are about 5,000 children in foster care because their parents have been deported, and when those children are adopted into families in 20 years from now, learned that the state took their family away, took their parents away, you can just imagine that we're gonna be paying the repercussions of this, we're seeing the repercussions of this for many decades to come. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, and now Mark Rosenblum will come up. Thank you, and Daniel, thank you for that, well, for inviting me. Thank you all for attending, and Daniel, thank you for the overly kind introduction. So it's a hard introduction to live up to. So I do spend a lot of time working on immigration enforcement, I have spent a lot of time working on these issues, mostly at a pretty macro level, and my sort of number one observation is that as somebody who's pretty steeped in this stuff, I found this book really informative, really filled in a lot of nuance. I mean, I found the case studies, the micro level stories that you told, extremely helpful for somebody like me to get a better feel for who is being deported and the specific stories behind their travel to the United States, how they came into the enforcement system, how they were deported, their experiences in being deported. So I really recommend the book. I think also that there's a lot about the book, apart from enjoying learning those stories, a lot about the book that I think is really just totally right on. So clearly there's a powerful interaction. I mean, given that the immigration enforcement system focuses so heavily on criminal aliens and that there are now such tight connections between how we do immigration enforcement and the criminal justice system through secure communities and now priority enforcement program through criminal alien program, it's just undebatable that there's this tight nexus between the criminal justice system and the immigration enforcement system and thinking about what that means and how it reinforces, how the biases in those systems reinforce each other, I think is a really important line of analysis. I also think that there's some specific policy takeaways that sort of immediately follow. I mean, one of them that I was really struck by is how many of the stories that you tell are about people who had they had a good immigration lawyer, probably wouldn't have been deported and really shines light on the importance of access to counsel. And of course, I totally agree both with your narrative and with the point that in the post 1996 world, the lack of discretion for immigration judges and the mandatory deportation categories is the other huge policy piece that drives a lot of these stories. So those are all, I think, really important points. Having said that, I'm gonna play my role as sort of the right-winger on the EPI spectrum and push back on a couple of points. So I wanna, for the sake of argument and just sort of thinking theoretically, academically, I wanna push back a little bit on the theoretical framework of calling deportations a core element of global capitalism. I mean, it's certainly not something that labor unions for most of the modern era would have argued, right? I mean, for most of history, we have thought of immigration as a tool of global capitalism and deportations or immigration enforcement as a way to defend the American working class. And I mean, I know, I mean, Shannon will tell me, that's not what we're thinking about it now, but there's still a reason that we have half thought about it that way. And essentially it's that a free flow of labor clearly is good for the global South, but isn't unambiguously good for U.S. workers. And I mean, there's a few different ways to think about that. One is that, and this sort of comes directly out of Tanya's book, on one hand we can argue that immigration is a key safety valve, immigration outflows allow countries like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic to have, it follows from neo-liberalism. So immigration supports global capitalism, but then deportations also support global capitalism. So clearly there's something inconsistent there. So what I think we're really arguing is not that borders and deportation inherently are a tool of global capitalism, but rather that the way we do immigration enforcement represents the interests of the state or represents class interests, represents the ruling class. And when you think about it, so it's not that immigration enforcement has to be a tool of capitalism, but that immigration enforcement is deployed as a tool of capitalism. And then when you phrase it that way, I wonder if that's more true about immigration than it is about sort of every other policy issue or any other policy issue. I mean, is it more true about immigration than the tax code or then how we enforce environmental law? How we do criminal justice? And if it is more true about immigration, what's unique about immigration? And I think that some things that are unique about immigration are, I mean, immigration like the criminal justice system does have this nexus with race and class that environmental law doesn't necessarily have. Not coincidentally, the actors with the most direct interest in changing immigration enforcement are not traditionally powerful stakeholders in the American political system. So there are some things that are unique about immigration, but I still think it's important to draw a distinction between immigration enforcement per se and how immigration enforcement is done. And I would argue that certainly there are times and there are contexts in which immigration is deployed by business to discipline labor. And you can read people like Kitty Calavita and who tells the story that way. But empirically, it's clearly not true that deportations consistently respond to the business cycle, that there are other things driving it. And I mean, the most obvious reason we know this is true is that under the Obama administration during the period of the deepest recession we've had in 100 years, or almost 100 years, we've also increased enforcement exponentially. So that's not what a sort of a simple business cycle structuralist Marxist story about immigration enforcement would predict. So that's one point that I think there's more to immigration than just reinforcing the interests of capitalism. It's also about how we understand security and cultural issues and a whole bundle of things that aren't tied to economics. So then a second sort of set of reactions I have is to ask, well, what should immigration enforcement look like? And I would argue that I don't think that the answer is, well, we should, I mean, I think it's hard to defend the argument that we should not be deporting anybody and that we should live in a borderless world. I mean, you can make that argument. And I mean, certainly, again, from the global South perspective, that's right, and like in Rawlsian, I mean, you can certainly make that argument, but there are also some legitimate reasons that we have borders and that, at least in the world that we live in today, that we should have immigration enforcement. If we allowed in a lot more immigrants to the United States, if we had a borderless world, that would benefit the global South, but it wouldn't benefit most Americans and certainly it would exacerbate inequality, it would undermine whatever social welfare system that we have, so that's a hard line of analysis to go down. And I think that there's a real cost that we've experienced to not enforcing immigration rules. The fact is that the United States, for most of the last 50 years, since we've entered the era of mass unauthorized migration and around 1970, for most of that period, we haven't had mass immigration enforcement. I mean, as you observe, it's a recent thing, but the absence of that, along with a badly designed visa system and all the things that we'd like to change, have created the situation where there are 11 million unauthorized immigrants, which is, so that's not a good outcome. And even if we agree that the current rules can't be enforced, I think that there is, at this point, a well-justified skepticism by mainstream Americans that the US has the capacity and the political will to ever enforce immigration rules. And I think that's, among other things, a huge hurdle to Americans reacting generously to the Central American refugees, that if that refugee flow didn't come in a context of 50 years of not successfully enforcing immigration policy, particularly towards Central Americans, that we would have reacted very differently to those refugees. And so, I think you can't not be able to enforce immigration rules and be able to have generous refugee policies consistently or it makes it much more difficult. So that's a, you know, and then, you know, we certainly also, you know, once we put in place, once we do legalization and put in place a visa system that matches supply and demand and make all the reforms that all of us want to do, at that point, we will also have to enforce immigration rules and we have to credibly be able to say that we'll do that in order to put those other reforms in place. So we have to have a serious conversation about what immigration enforcement should look like. And I think that that's where a lot of recent activity, as you said, I mean, your figure, I like your figure, and I do have one more year of data for that figure and the trends have continued in that direction. Interior removals have continued to go down and border removals have continued to go up. And that's where, since 2011, as you said, the Obama administration, when it came in, continued Bush-era policies, doubled down on Bush-era policies, expanded secure communities, interior removals went up to record highs. But since 2011 has made a systematic effort to change the way we do immigration enforcement and essentially, a lot of that has meant focusing even more narrowly and specifically on people who have been convicted of crimes and recent illegal entrants. But in particular, in terms of interior enforcement, mostly focusing on people who've been convicted of crimes. And when you look at the data, the administration has been pretty successful in that. And that's why interior removals have been cut more than in half since 2011 is because rather than picking up people like Chris who wasn't ever convicted of a crime, theoretically, and I think probably empirically it's correct that the story that you told at the beginning of your talk wouldn't happen today, that the Obama administration has stopped that practice because he has not been convicted of a serious crime. He would not, through the Priority Enforcement Program, get picked up by ICE, at least on paper. He shouldn't. And what I understand is, from talking to people who were immigrant rights activists and certainly from talking to DHS, is that there aren't a lot of cases like Chris happening at this point. But certainly, other stories in your book, people who have been convicted of drug crimes, I mean, they are right in DHS's wheelhouse. I mean, they're going to continue to get deported. I think that it's worth having a debate about, well, are we going to continue to deport people from the interior? Do we do interior enforcement? And if we do, who falls into that category? And is something like the Priority Enforcement Program, which continues to get data through the criminal justice system and identify people who have been convicted of crimes who happen to be deportable, and if they've been convicted of serious crimes, we're going to put them first in line. Is that the right way to go or not? And I think you can make a good case that it is. And the reason is, is that if we are compelled to do interior enforcement, I would say that doing it in jails, for all of its problems, is better than doing it in schools or hospitals or churches or people's homes or street corners. So, you know, if not jails, then where? Unless you're going to argue that we shouldn't deport anybody from the interior. So we should have that debate. And not only is our jails the best places to do it out of the available options, I think, but if we have to define a group of unauthorized Democrats who should be targeted, probably people who've been convicted of crimes is better than any other category that we could say. I mean, if not them, then who? So, I mean, it's hard to come up with an alternative other than, well, just a lot less deportations. And clearly, we should, you know, there's a lot of people who should be legalized and we shouldn't have a large unauthorized population. But, I mean, what, I think the real argument that you probably want to make is that we should deport a lot less people, not that we should deport people differently. So, you know, that's a fair, but that's the debate to have, I think. Okay, so wrapping up, the other point is restoring relief and for people with families and to, because the one thing, so Obama, I think, has been very successful at focusing on bad guys, but not very successful at exercising discretion for people who have equities. And so that's, I think, another place to really push. And then also, you know, certainly, to restore discretion for judges and the three and 10-year bars and things like that. So, I'll wrap up there. All right, that was a lot to chew on. See, a lot of brains moving. Again, thanks to EPI and Daniel specifically for hosting this panel. I think it's really important this week on the anniversary of the November 20th Executive Action, which was supposed to give a lot of people protections and which is stalled in court at the same time that the deportation machinery has not been stalled and is aggressively moving forward. And I think, as we talk about why should we care, in addition to all of the reasons that Tanya raised, I think additionally I would add because it's very much impacting labor markets in a huge way, both the workers in those labor markets that are pulled out and deported, the workers who work alongside them, the workers who hear about them, and it's just having a huge impact. So I wanted to focus a little bit more in that area, while also dialoguing a little bit with some of the arguments Mark was making. Just before I start, I think I really would encourage folks to read the book. I thought it was really beautiful and starting with the focus and weaving through the stories really gives you texture, even I think for those of us on the panel who know the work pretty deeply, were moved. And if you know parts of it and not other parts, you'll be moved. I think the choice of focusing on deportees challenges the normative, good, bad immigrant very deeply and focusing on the deportees and then moving backwards and forwards in their life story, their foreign policy stories of their country, the economic stories of their families. It's just very rich and dense and important. So really, really appreciate that work from Tanya and really would encourage everyone to deepen their reading about it. I think the other thing is that in terms of looking at a worker question, so often whether we're in the comprehensive immigration reform policy debate or we're sort of in our own sectors thinking about work and immigration, we think about employment based immigration and how do we reform future flows and that's where the work conversation comes up. And I think what Tanya is really pushing us to do and what this panel is modeling is to say no, that immigration enforcement is also really a fundamental question and we have to look at the immigration enforcement questions in the context of work and sectors and workers' rights. And I think the one thing I would say is that I think there is a very parallel story that's going on with people who come on employment based visas, particularly guest worker visas, which maybe doesn't penetrate through quite as much in the stories in the book in part because the definition of deportation in the data doesn't always match the coercion and the way that people are removed from labor markets on guest worker visas. And so for instance, if you're arrested by the police, a detainer is put down on you and you are then put in the immigration system or record occurs of your deportation. If you're a worker and your employer thinks you're trying to organize on the job and they put you in a van and they drive you to the bus station and they cash your last check on the way and they put you on a bus back to Mexico, that doesn't get recorded as a deportation. If you're a seasonal worker that has to get recruited and hired again every year based on the temporary worker program and you try to organize or you complain about your health and safety rights and then you get blacklisted and you can't get that job back even though you've had it for 15 years, that's not gonna get recorded as a deportation. But I think the sort of your removal from the labor market based on your activity which is enabled because of the immigration law and the way it's practiced is very much there. And the intersection between the immigration law and immigration enforcement is very much there. So if you're a worker in Alabama when the Alabama anti-immigrant law is in place and every police officer can ask you for your papers then you're gonna have a different understanding of your rights or your ability to go talk to the Department of Labor or a union organizer or a church. Then you will if you're a worker in a place where those anti-immigrant laws aren't in place or where the police are less, are you're likely to have a different interaction with the police. So I think the intersection is very much there. I wanted to tell two pretty recent stories which I think really also highlight this intersection of immigration enforcement and labor markets and really help further the points that Tanya's making and maybe problematize a little bit some of Mark's assumptions on how the system is working. One is a case of two day laborers who are arrested in rural Louisiana this year in May. They're men who work in temporary construction jobs and they had reinterred the United States in the last five years. So they're determined to be priorities under the memo although they have no criminal history they've never been arrested before. They're standing in front of a Motel 6 in rural Louisiana waiting to be picked up for work and local police drive by and say show me your papers. They refuse to show their membership ID card in a community organization. They're nonetheless arrested by the local police and transported to the police station. The local police call Border Patrol. Border Patrol picks them up from there then turns them over to ICE. They end up in rural immigration detention. They're not released because they're priorities. They file civil rights complaints saying that in fact at least in their instance and maybe more broadly the intersection of the criminal justice system and the immigration system is becoming a force multiplier of Southern racism and they can't get anywhere with those complaints. And then as their case escalates and escalates under a memo that exists that says that if you're involved in a good face civil rights dispute you're supposed to be getting prosecutorial discretion and nonetheless it ends up as it rises to the level of the New York Times editorial page that one of the men is deported and one of the men is released in a six month stay of removal. When we interview them there's also very deep labor market implications that even though they're not in a labor dispute in that moment with their employer at the Motel six like picking them up for their construction job they say to us of course we know that Latinos don't get the same safety equipment on the construction site that white workers get. Yes we have been victims of wage theft and we've not come forward because we were afraid that that would lead to an interaction with law enforcement just like the one we just had. And so I think that it's important in some instances like the second story I'll tell you the labor market intersections are very transparent. In some instances the labor market implications are one degree below the surface of the enforcement story but nonetheless very much there. The second story I would mention is Shelly in Paris who's an H2B worker from Jamaica and who comes in into the subcontracted contingent economy. She's working for a subcontractor called Mr. Clean Cleaning Luxury Condos in Florida. The work is so bad and the illegal deductions are so high that workers are getting $0 paychecks. And they paid $3,000 to $5,000 in Jamaica to get these jobs on temporary work visas. They come from the same economy that the stories in Tanya's book relates. Some of them are the daughters and sons of H2B sugar cane workers in Florida some of the most abusive stories of the Caribbean US economy that you can find. And they tell their employer, like we're gonna do a sit down strike if you don't start giving us more hours and stop the deductions so that we can at least earn back the money that we paid. And the next pay period the employer staples to their $0 paychecks. A form that says if you do not show up for work as assigned every day the Okaloosa County Sheriff and Immigration and Customs Enforcement will drive you to the airport and send you back to Jamaica. So again you have an intersection where of the contingent work economy the guest worker program which ties supposedly legal workers to one employer even when they're in a very serious labor dispute and the enforcement where workers really do fear that the sheriff, immigration enforcement and their employer are all collaborating. Those workers were ultimately found to be victims of forced labor by the department of labor. And are in the process of applying for U-Vises. And so I think the other question I would ask is as we look at the trafficking and forced labor discussion how do we understand immigration related coercion in the economy and forced labor in the history of the 13th amendment in the United States. And there are 1940s cases coming out of Florida that say when the power below Pollock v. Williams is the U.S. Supreme Court case that says when the power below isn't enough to overcome the power above you don't have enough rights to organize. That's one way to understand involuntary servitude. And 13th amendment scholars that write if you don't have the ability to change jobs then you don't have the ability to effectuate your 13th amendment rights. So one of the questions that I have going forward for more research or more interesting discussions is how do we look at as we look at the definitions of extremely coercive economy or the aggregation of why can't you enforce your right to minimum wage and health and safety and non-discrimination looking at the way that immigration coercion is in fact not only restricting individual sets of workers as in the Shellyans case but more broadly labor sectors. If you have undocumented workers that are not able to be unemployed and you have whole sectors where that's actually what's driving the state of the economy then I think there are some really interesting questions there quickly wrapping up the other two areas where I thought would be really interesting to look at more research. Basically I'm saying more Tanya please. Are like looking both at sectors and at migration chains and the employment based legal migration and the undocumented migration and sort of the intersection. So if you looked at Jamaicans for instance in the low wage economy or you looked in Florida I think that would be interesting or we could probably identify particular sectors where those workers are competing and really looking at it as two poles of the coerced economy. On the one hand undocumented workers who can't get another job because they can't get a job in the first place they're not work authorized and the coercion that comes from that. And then also workers who are under the purportedly legal guest worker program but can't change employers that way are deeply in debt and are hugely repressed from reporting workplace violations and then how those two poles hold down the much broader economy which has many many US workers in it. And then finally I think what this made me wonder about and I think Shannon will talk a little bit more about this but is what does this mean for organizing? And there was a time when we said you couldn't organize contingent workers you couldn't organize day laborers in the United States because they were in one place and then they would travel somewhere else in three months. And I think good strong immigrants rights community and labor organizing has shown that you can come up with organizing models to build power. And although we're not where we wish that we were in having enough power to get some dignified immigration laws on the books we are we have moved in a good direction. And I think there are a lot of the dreamers that have been thinking about cross-border organizing from the student perspective and family perspective there are some labor folks thinking about like how do you organize in the call centers in here? And I think more and more of that story I would be interested to continue to see. And just on the policy front I think there are a lot of big policy questions in the room that we don't have time to get into all of but there are some basic protections which I think the polling data shows that Republicans and Democrats and people agree on. This is 2013 polling data but 90% of people polled thought that immigration reform should protect the rights of US born and immigrant workers because all workers need dignity and freedom from exploitation. Eight in 10 thought that immigrant workers who blow the whistle on abuse of employers are helping US workers defend workplace standards and they should be able to stay in the US and work towards citizenship. And three quarters thought that if employers are allowed to get away with mistreating immigrant workers it lowers wages and work conditions for all workers. So I think there is work that could be done administratively to make sure that workers who are in civil and labor rights disputes at that moment can be protected and can pursue the rights on the books. Some of that we really need to get rolling fast. That will I think help create more organizing and more power to win some of the bigger structural statutory changes that we need. Thanks. All right, thank you, I'm gonna echo the thanks both to Tanya and to EPI for putting this together. I think it's a really important conversation to be having at any time, but particularly at this time around this anniversary. And I'll go ahead and confess that as a reader I'm very sort of like emotionally driven in my responses. And in reading this book I traversed quite a dramatic range of emotions in terms of responding to the very compelling stories that were put forward. And I think I would just like to echo the thanks for building the analysis up from the lived experience of the people that are affected by the system and to underscore how important and underutilized of a methodology that is for us to really interpret the systems that affect the lives of people. And I would say that in overarching frame I vacillated between thinking whether the breadth of the issues that were covered here was completely daunting and overwhelming. And thinking that it was really exciting and motivational. And so I'm gonna sort of focus on the motivational and exciting part because I think we all need a little hope right now anyone that's been working on these issues. And I think that for me the intersectional analysis that Tanya has put forward really kind of points to a path for us that can broaden the coalitions that we know we're gonna need to effect real change. And it helps underscore the fact that we really do need to have better opportunities to build sort of a shared power analysis of the systems that are at play here and how they work together. And I think that it also acknowledges that in doing this work we're starting from a starting point where all working people and particularly people of color face acute vulnerabilities within a global economic system that has been structured to make them vulnerable. And so that really it exacerbates the challenges that we face but it really does sort of point to the need for us to be thinking big, really big about the fact that we need to restructure not only our immigration system but our economic system and certainly the enforcement system. And so I think that brings with it power. And just to make this a little bit more explicit, I think that when we think about how siloed we are in terms of the very hard work that's going on on wage justice or on mass incarceration or on immigration reform or on trade policy, worker rights, privatization, you name it, all the things that are touched on this book, finding some frames that help us stop narrowing our advocacy, preventing the sort of the dilemmas that purport to pit us against each other. And that work is really, really fundamentally important moving forward. And so giving us a shared analysis of how we fit into this structure in the way that Tanya has I think is really important to moving forward in a way that can increase our numbers. And as someone who works very specifically on immigration policy, I think that when you read, some of the components that are in this book about the reality that you can have a five year period in which one quarter of the construction workers in this country lose their jobs, it makes clear that we need an economic narrative to talk about this that helps people see their fate as being shared. And until we have that, we're always going to struggle with these dynamics of encampment that have really undermined our ability to move forward. And so I think that all those things are really important. And so the most visceral reaction that I have is that every time I see this sort of that analysis that the global economy depends on a compliant labor force, right, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. And so obviously the most immediate response that we need to that is to refuse to be compliant. And I think that what's clear and what JJ had hinted at is that immigrant workers are leading away and thinking through how to resist being compliant, right? The organizing is really exciting. That's going on. It's tremendously important. It goes across all different parts of the country, all different sectors of the economy. And it's really our job in the policy framework to figure out what we can do to reduce the risks for people who are taking all of those brave steps, to try to advance all of these various fronts that we're talking about and to really do the work to enforce labor standards in our country. There's been really nice assessment of some of the comparative enforcement budgets and numbers and things like that, but just to layer onto that with some numbers that both MPI and EPI have put out, we do a terrible job enforcing our labor laws in this country, right? And the budgets reflect that. We spend 10 times as much enforcing our immigration laws as we spend enforcing our labor laws. And there's almost 10 times as many enforcement agents, just in ICE and Customs and Border Patrol alone, as there are in the entire mechanisms to enforce our labor laws. And so the extreme asymmetries of that, particularly when you think about, so we have more than 7 million employers, right, work sites, individual employers, and 135 million workers in this country. And so when you think about how dependent we are for any kind of core enforcement standards on the courage of workers to be the agents for that enforcement, then I think it really lays clear how necessary it is for us to reduce the impediments that they have to enforce basic rights and justice. And it really is particularly frustrating within that space to think about how our criminal narrative focuses on individual actors who, for instance, have crossed the border and not on employers who routinely steal wages and discriminate and exploit, and that that's not the criminal narrative that we are focused on, is a continual source of frustration, but it's an example, I think, of the way that we need to redirect our analysis if we're going to be able to move forward. So I think that this is all very helpful and I will just acknowledge that this is a week in which we have been hopeful that we would make some baby steps forward in terms of seeing a little bit more of a clear commitment from our administration to prevent our immigration enforcement system from being used as a tool to repress workers' rights and to prevent us from enforcing our labor and employment laws. And there's been a lot of engagement with the administration in terms of thinking through concrete steps that would do that and would, as JJ had indicated, ensure that those who are doing the essential work of standing up and raising concerns would be protected so that we could all begin to see a little bit of positive progress towards the kinds of basic advancements that we know that we need to see in terms of wage protections and all of those sorts of things. And so it's an open question whether there will be any announcements this week. But I think that there was a process set in motion as part of the executive announcements last November that has gotten very little attention but is critically important, which is really about trying to create the dialogue between the agencies that enforce these laws to figure out how they can prevent them from working in active conflict with each other. And this is a message that we need the administration to hear from as many different directions as possible is that it's absolutely imperative that we figure out how to prevent our immigration system from continuing to be used as a tool to keep workers quiet and silent and to repress their most fundamental rights. So I think there's a lot more that I'm sure that we're gonna talk about. I don't wanna take too much time, but we're at the beginnings of what you can see and what Daniel indicated of starting to see isolated pieces of what had been the component parts of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill resurface within the Congress. And I think that the last point that I would like to make is just that the structure of how people move really matters and that if you look at the components of that neoliberal cycle that Tanya laid out and you just think about our guest worker programs, then you can see the way that they can be used to directly facilitate all of the aspects of that circle, the outsourcing and the privatization, the driving down of wages, the limiting of access to benefits and the enforcement by making it much, much easier to remove workers who decide to assert their rights. So we have a huge amount of work in front of us, but it's really obvious that the only way that we're gonna make that work successful is if we build it from the ground up and if we follow the lead as Tanya did and the way she structured her book of the people who are in the system who are on the front lines every day taking the risks and if we try to do whatever we can in Washington to ensure that we don't get in their way. Okay, so I hope the audience can start thinking up some questions and I'd like to give Tanya a couple of minutes if she wants to maybe respond to some of the top line things you thought about, but before that, I'll just add one small wrinkle to the comments that were given and it seems like a lot of what's discussed in the book is mostly workers who were in low wage occupations and did not have a lot of education, but I feel like I at least need to point out that this is also starting to happen on high school then and has been happening for a while. New York Times has reported on a number of cases recently in the H1BVDs, these are workers with college degrees, workers at Disneyland, at Toys R Us, at Southern California Edison have been replaced with the employer, I mean employers can use this business model through the H1B visa where they bring in a worker and tell that worker to train their H1B worker who is going to be their replacement, the H1B shadows them and then the employer can say if you don't train the worker, it won't give you your severance package and also if you refuse to train them then we'll fire you for cause so you don't get unemployment insurance and so they're coming after workers at the high school and then of course this is an attempt to pit immigrant and U.S. workers against each other and so it's employers and immigration laws are facilitating this of course. Oh wow, all right, well first of all thanks to all the commentators for reading the book and all of your provocative comments. I won't be able to respond to everything, I just wanna say, okay so what I argue in the book is that we're in a moment of global apartheid and that it's unsustainable, so it's true, right? If there were more justice in the world we here in the United States would be worse off. I mean I totally agree with that but I think that and I'm an academic and I don't have to go to Congress to argue that we need to be fair to the people of the world but I think there's benefit to having the position that I have in being able to create and to distribute these kinds of discourses. So I mean it's just we benefit tremendously from global exploitation and immigration is just one part of that, right? So the fact that we can get things for very cheap prices is because people are making very cheap stuff for us so I'm just not gonna defend that and if you're gonna say the United States would be worse off we, like people, workers in the United States would be worse off if we had more immigrants that I'm gonna say, well yeah, I mean it's crazy statistic I heard one day and I don't have a citation for it but something like 40% of working age people in the world are unemployed. I mean so that, I mean the global system is just doesn't make sense, right? So it's totally unjust. So along those lines, that would be my response to the argument that more immigration would affect American workers, I'm like well of course the other, the problem though is that the United States also uses 25% of the world's resources so everyone came here, the world will be over in like 50 years so we'd have to figure out the environmental aspect of it. But and to follow up with that, well to follow up with that I mean I definitely agree with what Shannon, I think Shannon in some ways answered some of the questions that JJ raised in terms of the coalitions. I mean I think one thing that I hope people would get from reading the book is that if you're fighting for immigrant justice you also, I mean it makes a lot of sense to work with people who are fighting for criminal justice reform, people are fighting for labor reform, people are fighting for environmental reform. I'm actually, I was just at this talk recently where they estimate right now there's a quarter of a billion international migrants they estimate there'll be another quarter of a billion climate refugees in the next 50 years. So environmental, I mean so there's a lot of coalitions that can be built around immigration justice. And the last thing I'll say is about criminal justice. I mean Mark I think a lot of people would agree with you you know if you're gonna look for, if we're gonna have interior enforcement we should look in the jails. I mean the issue, there's a lot of issues with that when we look at immigration. The first one is, I mean the criminal justice apparatus in the United States is just straight up racist, right? So I mean that's the problem, that's one big problem with it, right? If you're a marijuana smoker in a state where marijuana is illegal and you're white, you're 13, I mean you're black, you're 13 times more likely to be arrested than if you're white. So and the other part of it is there's two more things. One, this one people probably might find surprising that I would say this, but I was recently at a debate, I mean a discussion about the rights of deportees and there was a woman in the room and she said, well I mean obviously a pedophile shouldn't have any rights and I'm like, well you know, I mean I'd actually rather the pedophile be in the United States than like in Haiti where like there's not a lot of protections for the children that he or she may be predatory upon. So from a global justice standpoint, I'd rather have some criminals in the United States where they're kind of less likely to actually harm people than in countries where there's just no state apparatus that can protect citizens. The other argument I'd make about criminal, the criminals is, I mean a lot of these guys that I interviewed, I mean they were, either they were kids when they left Jamaica or the Dominican Republic or they were workers. When they got here is where they committed their crime. So everything about the criminal activity they got in was a product of US society. So basically we're, I mean there's one kid, you know he came, he was adopted, he comes over here as a baby, grows up in inner city, commits a crime, but then just to deport him to the country where he was adopted from, I mean I just, you know, it's almost like we're saying, it's like very essentialist saying like you were born in Guatemala, therefore you do anything wrong, you belong there. When really everything about everything wrong he did is related to his socialization in the United States. All right, questions from the audience? Thank you. Let's turn the question around and talk about the extent, and you talk about the employer's exploitation. How big is it? Shannon, you talk a little bit about it. I remember the ice raids on the armor, heat-packing clamps and the Iowa Interior Enforcement, Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming, et cetera. I'm not even going to mention Walmart, that's the other part of the globalized capitalistic company here, but can we put a number, can we put a, not just spaces, but say how big that exploitation is? I mean, go ahead. No, you go first. Well, I mean, we have shocking wage theft numbers and we know that the vast, you know, majority of that wage theft is happening in low-wage industries and we know that in those industries, immigrant workers are disproportionately represented. I mean, it's just the number of layers in which the exploitation happens, you know, we could go on and on about for a long time. We know that the highest rates of death and injury on the job happen for immigrant workers and particularly undocumented workers. So I think that we should count that very heavily in terms of the exploitation and quantifying the numbers. That would be the most perhaps important number to quantify in terms of the employer exploitation. And I think that one of the things that we've been alluding to certainly in terms of the misuse of the employment-based visa system is the very active efforts that go on routinely to misuse those systems to very explicitly and strategically drive down wages and to ensure within a legal structure that you're directly able to maintain a compliant workforce. So I'm sure that there are lots of different numbers that we could put to answer your question, but that's maybe a few fronts to think about. I would just say to answer in the absence of what's there, just to like remind ourselves, there aren't whistleblower programs. There aren't guarantees of protections. If you're an undocumented worker and you come forward, the fact that you're participating in protected activity doesn't offer you anything guaranteed on the immigration side. And the same thing if you're in most of the guest worker programs. So under-reporting is hugely rampant. We've done studies in our membership where 100% of the people have said I faced a basic workplace violation and I did not report it because I was afraid of immigration enforcement. Anyone else? I'm Ross Eisenbray from EPI and although I agree with your macroeconomic and historical analysis of the causes of a lot of migration and our foreign policy is now doing terrible things in Syria, I believe our support of overthrowing Assad is one of the causes of one of the biggest economic crises in the world since World War II. But if a million Syrians came to the United States unlawfully, Mark's right, that would not be, and you can say that it would be in some global sense just that they came and made it harder for people who are working here. But I don't think that there aren't very many Americans who would support an open border that said everybody in the world who wants to can come to the United States. So if we don't have that rule on it, we have a rule that says you come here under certain circumstances, then we have to have a way to enforce that. It's right, why don't you guys get to that? Do you think that we should have open borders completely and have no method of reporting or persuading people to leave who are here without authorization? Yeah, I believe we live in the golden fortress and it can't last forever, right? I mean, the United States and other developed countries have 16% of the world's population, we use 86% of the world's resources, and I don't think that I can, I can't just sit up here and say we deserve it because my ancestors work for it, I'm like, no, I mean, it's not fair, it's not right. So I think, yeah, I think, yeah, so I would definitely argue that the current state of global capitalism would not be possible without mass deportation, without the possibility of deportation, right? So borders are required in order to keep the fortress, the golden fortress of fortress. So yeah, I mean, I definitely would argue that. I do think, I mean, the question of how do we get to a point where we have open borders is a different question, but I think if you just think about it ethically, I don't think there's a moral justification for us hoarding the world's resources and destroying the climate while we're at it. Isn't there a justification in the sense that if you had open borders, it would just lead to another form of exploitation? It would mean that there would be a large influx of workers who were probably going to be low paid and be exploited, and does anyone else on the panel have a thought on that to have Tanya respond to? Anybody for open borders? I mean, no, I'm not. What? But I mean, without disagreeing with your sort of fundamental point that there's nothing fair about that the US, that per capita income of the US is four times higher than Mexico and per capita income in Mexico is four times higher than Honduras. I agree with you, not fair, but I think Daniel's point, I would agree that erasing the borders isn't the way to address that problem. I think what you're concerned about is more, the capitalist system, the borders are a pretty secondary center of that compared to just the concentration of wealth and resources that we live in a labor-rich, capital-concentrated world. I don't think the borders are the first priority for addressing that. I would just say I think it's a sequencing question. I mean, you can talk about what's normatively right at all the policy questions of how we get to a place where people have a choice, right? I mean, it's not that we should have to open the borders here, so everyone has to come here because it's the only choice. There should be a choice in every country. I'm reminded of a colleague of mine who came to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an H2B worker from Peru and he was a small business person in Peru and he'd been structurally adjusted out of his small business and so he thought that by coming as an H2B worker in construction after the storm, he'd be able to make about $5,000 on top of the $5,000 that he paid and come back and reinvest his business and run it. It turned out to be a really exploitative situation. He organized workers across a bunch of hotels and as he started to be successful, the owner of the hotel called him into the office and said, hey friend, we're all small business people here, let's, we can work this out trying to buy him off. And he said, well, we're not the same because you're from the United States and I'm from Peru, you know, fundamentally. And so I don't, I think there's a lot of steps by which you would get to a globally equitable world and open borders is a trigger that scares people but there's really like just a lot more questions in there. Yeah and maybe just to layer on, you know, one other component I think, you know, given the choice between being able to have decent work at home or be forced to leave everyone you love and everything you care about to go to a place where you're going to be discriminated against and exploited, most working people around the world would choose to have a decent standard of living in the, you know, the country that's their home and that there is a lot that we could be doing to encourage a decent work agenda around the world. That's certainly, you know, I think a critical component of the equation of pursuing a more just global economy. Please. On a serious week, right here. Migration there, that's around that in Mexico. Great immigration, migration here in Mexico. On a Guatemalan country, Chile, you know, basically our foreign policy sort of creates these turmoil in this situation where people say, let's go to America and we will do what we can. And I think if we change our outlook on the world, we invest into the visit, it was going on, maybe come here and go to school, you know, and you think about relationships, we have a much more, but capitalism, unfortunately, does not accept those notes, academics, I thought it was the time of the time. You've got to paint that. That's my dad. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Let's paint that vision of what's really possible and try to move in that direction. That's the role of African intellectuals in Africa. I think it's definitely something that's not set enough and during the current migrant crisis that almost every of the big refugee flows that are coming in from Afghanistan or Iraq, Syria, Africans through Libya has been a direct result of American bombing and intervention and they've all been a huge disaster. And if we hadn't done a lot of those things, there might still be tyrants there, but it would be stable, but people would probably still want to leave because there's tyrants that just wouldn't be as many coming right now. But I want to respond to your dad in any way. Ha ha ha. I mean, I do think it's a good question about, you know, what does open borders really solve? And I just, I mean, the thing of global justice is it doesn't have a one answer solution, but I just think that when you put open borders on the table, what it allows us to see is global injustice. And then we can sort of think about, okay, well, if we recognize that it's not really fair to live in the Golden Fortress, what do we do about that and how do we move forward? And I think, because if you don't, if we think, if we operate from the assumption that the United States has the right to hoard the world's resources, then we just can't have a conversation that allows us to move forward, I think. That's, yeah, I'm not going to really say, you know, exactly what comes first, because I think it's, I mean, it's super complex. Your book ended on a note that I, you know, I'm glad we're talking about this because it sort of ended on a note that made me think, you know, she must be saying open borders is the next logical step. I talk more explicitly about policy solutions, including open borders and the right to migrate and the right to not migrate. And my other book, immigration nation, which has more policy analysis, the sort of if we respected human rights, what would immigration policy look like? So that's another way you can approach it. But it still comes to, you still think about these things and you basically still come down to people should have the right to go wherever they want on the planet because people, the, you know, borders are a capitalist invention and they basically allow us to hoard resources in certain places. Let's be clear, borders were not a capitalist invention. Oh yeah. For borders, long before capitalism, we had kingdoms, we had various systems of various economies that were not capitalist. So borders may always be in the interest of a powerful local group that controls any economy, but not necessarily. They're created to have different sovereign regions under the Westphalian sort of notion of nation state. I mean, my real worry with your articulating is that in any sort of realistic political horizon, the result of what you're calling for is going would be to the benefit of people who want to exploit labor. I mean, a tight labor market is to the benefit of working with respect to their employers. So something that flooded a labor market with more workers competing for the jobs that were being offered would benefit some people and earn a lot of other people. Right, but a tight labor market is just an invention, because there's 40% of the working age people in the world that don't have jobs. So we have 40% of the people in the world that could be working sitting around, they're not doing anything, but they're reselling packets of pencils or, so yes, that's true, but what about those other, what is it, two billion people that are unemployed? Just to sort of pose one sort of additional layer to this, 70% of countries in the world report a nurse shortage. And right now, given the migration systems that we have in place, those resources too are going to the countries that have resources, they're going to the developed world, to the detriment of all the countries that had invested in training those workers and who desperately need skilled service providers. And so I do think that our vision for what comes next has to really have a lot of layers to ensure that these flows, which as folks have pointed out, range the whole wage and skill spectrum, do not have devastating consequences in the countries that are left behind. Sort of a good wrapping of thought. Does anyone else have a concluding thought they want to add? I mean, just very briefly, I thought that JJ and Shannon, I mean, I really appreciated the focus on the immigration and labor rights. You know, I mean, to me that I, you know, I'll plead guilty to putting that in a different silo than immigration enforcement, but I mean, to me, that's, it really highlights the need for, you know, labor law enforcement, which is connected to immigration. You know, I mean, I think, you know, the point that JJ was making, I guess it was Shannon that was making earlier about, you know, just the scope of employer expectation. You know, there was the, I think it was the National Immigration Justice Center a few years ago, the report about wage theft, you know, that showed that legal temporary workers, you know, were only marginally better protected than unauthorized workers, but that all US low-wage workers experienced rampant wage theft. I mean, so, you know, that to me is the other real takeaway that, so I'm curious to see how the conversation evolves on. Well, we published the papers a few months ago here at EPI that shows that actually low-skilled guest workers in H2&H2B are in the same wages as unauthorized immigrants and it shows that those structures are sort of keeping that in the same way and guest workers are coming in after having paid lots of money and they can't move jobs and so they get no wage gain, no wage benefit from actually being legal versus unauthorized, last word. I just wanted to have one last word because I didn't make this in my remarks, but I did want to push back a little bit on marks. That's really nice to you. I know, right at the end and then we can't respond. Just this notion that it is the best we have to use the criminal justice system in the way that it's being used to criminalize immigrants and I think even at the level of the Obama administration, there are now many interventions going on, questioning the sentencing guidelines, questioning criminalization and yet one of the big impacts of those is increasing numbers of deportations of people who should be getting out because they were over sentenced or they were sentenced on crack versus powder cocaine or all these racist parts of the criminal justice system. So I would say that when you have a system that is under review at the national level for being racist and certainly in the South where I've done a huge amount of work where police departments are under Department of Justice consent decree for racial profiling and use of force, tying a deportation system to that isn't the way to go and it has real fundamental problems that get maybe pushed beneath the surface when we just say like what is the best way forward. And so thanks, Mark, for being the right winger on the panel. De facto, de facto. And before we close, I just want to say that we will be selling Tonya's book at a discounted rate read out here and maybe she'll sign some books if anybody wants to sign and thanks to everyone on the panel and everyone who came, I really appreciate it. Thanks for this discussion. Thanks. Sorry. No, no, no.