 Hi, I'm Heather Herlbert, and I'm delighted to welcome you to New America this afternoon on behalf of our political reform program and our fellows program. New America, as you know, is all about renewing America for the digital age, and we also like to say that we're a national network, which means that we are a think tank in D.C., but not necessarily of D.C., and today is one of those days where we make good on that promise by pulling in folks who are working all over the country to start with the perspective of an issue, immigration, that we tend to think about primarily in its federal guise, but as you're going to learn, there is an amazing range of experimentation, activity, policy making going on at the state level. If the states are the laboratories of democracy, folks are working at midnight in the lab, as we're about to learn, I want to acknowledge and thank first our Arizona State University fellow, Jude Jaffe Block, at whose instigation this event is happening. Jude has, she's coming to the end, sadly, of her time with us, where she has been co-authoring a book about immigration enforcement in Arizona's Maricopa County, which will detail the famous sheriff Joe Arpaio's crackdown on illegal immigration and the class action racial profiling suit that was brought against him. You'll hear a little bit today about the broader universe of immigration related policy surrounding that and what implications that's had for other states. For the last five years, Jude has worked as a public radio reporter in Phoenix, covering immigration and border, among other issues for regional and national audiences. Joining us today to help us make broader sense of the immigration issues, we have Adam Hunter, who is an immigration policy and strategy consultant who has held leadership roles on national and homeland security issues and migration and immigration policy and research. He directed the Pew Charitable Trust's immigration and the state's project, looking at the intersection of national, state and local policies. Before joining Pew, Adam was acting chief of staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, which has the job of administering immigration benefits. He has been both a Truman National Security fellow and a Transatlantic Forum on Migration fellow, so we're very glad to welcome Adam. We're also happy to have Ali Nurani, who is the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization which promotes the value of immigrants and immigration. Before joining the National Immigration Forum, he was executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. He's also held leadership roles in public health and environmental organizations, so is able to think about how immigration reflects and connects to those issues. He's the author of There Goes the Neighborhood, How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. He's spent recent years traveling the U.S., having conversations and learning about how immigration, the issue, plays out in communities and in the everyday lives of Americans, so we're very happy to welcome Ali to talk about his book and what he learned in the process of writing it. And last but certainly not least, we are delighted to welcome Michael Frank, our neighbor in the Hoover Institution and where he directs its D.C. programs. Prior to joining Hoover, he served as policy director and counsel for House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy. Michael, I was teasing him that he's a serial offender on the Hill. He also served as communications director for former House Majority Leader, Dick Army, and in between his time on the Hill, he served as vice president for government relations at the Heritage Foundation and worked in the U.S. Department of Education and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. So you are in for a real treat this afternoon as we're going to get some initial thoughts from each of our panelists about how immigration has been playing out in their particular area of expertise. We'll then have some conversation among the panelists. I always say I like to provoke a little pleasant disagreement. We'll then have time for questions for all of you and then at the end we do urge you to stick around because there'll be some light refreshments and some time to get to know each other and your fellow panelists at the end of our session today. So with that, Adam, I want to invite you to kick it off and to talk a little bit about sort of the comprehensive overview you have of what's going on in the States on this supposedly most frozen of issues immigration. Thank you very much, Heather, and thank you all for being here on a beautiful, beautiful Monday evening in Washington and to all those at home I hope you're watching on a balcony because it is glorious weather outside. So thanks, Heather. I wanted to start with a couple of the broader trends that I've seen over the course of working at the federal level and then focusing on state and local issues over the past couple years that really animate this federalism dynamic that we have in the United States. So of course federalism issues go back to the founding right. Anyone who's seen Hamilton knows that there's been a lot of interplay and discussion around these issues but as it relates a little bit more closely to immigration there's a couple things I wanted to highlight. So we understand the federal government has exclusive control over who is legally admitted and who is removed from the country but does very little in terms of how people are integrated and what support mechanisms are provided that are really place-based and left to other levels of government, other sectors of society there frankly. We've also seen since 1990 more than doubling of the number of immigrants in our country. We have about 43 million immigrants or farm-born individuals now more than doubling since 1990 alone so a drastic increase in the number of newcomers who have come to the United States. We've also seen over recent years more than ever in our history in fact an increased disbursement of these new immigrants. Immigrants are not just settling in the big six gateway states of New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida, Texas and California but they're going to new gateway states they're going increasingly to suburbs and outside of city centers and in some research I did in my last role we looked at the counties as a unit of analysis between 1990 and 2012 and the share of immigrants grew in 87 percent of all U.S. counties nationwide but their impact was really outsized in some particular areas. There were 22 percent of American counties in which the native born U.S. born population declined over that period but in more than half of those it was the growth of immigrants that mitigated those losses and in fact in many of those counties actually overcame the loss of natives so that the counties grew solely because of immigrants and if you were to look at that graphically you see swaths from the Texas Panhandle on up to Minnesota really the middle of the country that are acutely affected by this population change over about the past 20 25 years. We've also had at the federal level and speaking of the federal government kind of executive and legislative branches here a lack of structural reforms and really systemic reforms of our immigration system in more than 20 years. We've set some programs and some increasing numbers of immigrants in 1990. We've rejiggered some enforcement regimes and instituted some bars to readmission and some other programs in 1996 but there's arguably not a big overhaul of our immigration system now in 21 years so it no longer meets the realities of our economy of our aspirations of our expectations of ourselves and of newcomers than when these laws were written. So with all of that is backdrop there's a couple things that I've seen with regard to how the federal government engages with states and to a degree localities as well and that is federal action of course influences state and local action but there's also evidence that state and local action may well determine whether the federal policy aims are fulfilled. We've seen this going way back through 1986 ERCA the Immigration Reform and Control Act where Congress provided money and authorities for states to administer programs on behalf of the federal government. More recently in 2012 the President Obama one of his executive actions the deferred action for childhood arrivals. There was no funding to states but we see through research that the places where local governments where state governments provided the outreach in bully pulpit provided public funding and engaged organizations had a higher uptick and successive participants in enrolling in the DACA program. We've seen the countervailing trend when President Obama in 2014 tried to enact the deferred action for parents of Americans program for the unauthorized immigrant parents of permanent residents and US citizens that it was states that sprung to action and litigated that and blocked implementation of that program and of course we see through enforcement similarly during the Obama years it was state and local activity challenging ICE that forced changes in what was then secure communities to institute the priority enforcement program a regime which has now been dismantled under the Trump administration but we see now a whole litany of discussion around what ought to be proper enforcement and dividing of duties between federal state and local authorities. So the second bucket is that interestingly states have also been using policy tools at their level of jurisdiction increasingly to affect their desired immigration outcomes and these not need be intentionally or inherently immigration related. Think of higher education and the issue of in-state tuition licensing and credentialing for foreign-born workers or even unauthorized immigrants were extending some kind of official identification ID NYC New York City has a municipal identification program drivers licenses in 12 states in the District of Columbia including California where they had more than 600,000 enrolled in the first year. So as a result of all of those trends we see now that there are states that are really pushing the boundaries of what the daily life can really be like for an immigrant and particularly an unauthorized immigrant in their jurisdiction and that the experience of an immigrant varies greatly depending on where one is. The extreme example here is California where for example as an unauthorized immigrant can get a driver's license be admitted to a California University at in-state tuition get financial support they're protected from what's called the trust act so statewide bar on honoring ICE detainers in California. They can graduate and get an occupational license using a taxpayer identification number to get a certified state credential for plumbing engineering interior design and there's actually now legislative proposals that would provide health care for all and would expressly cover unauthorized immigrants in a single payer health system that is under the legislature consideration in this term. So for a lot of you know different reasons we get into California's really leading and in terms of an example of trying to reduce the unauthorized status in this case to be as meaningless as possible for daily interactions for their jurisdiction. So one key example of how states are leading the way. Great thanks for for starting us off there and as we were going to sort of move directly from California to its opposite. Jude you have put five years of your life into learning and telling the story of the Arizona example and not just the Arizona example but what it meant in the past and means now in other states. I thought I'd just start by kind of trying to give you a little overview of what happened in Arizona. Probably many of you have heard of SB 1070 in 2010 which is Arizona's most famous immigration law but it certainly it wasn't actually the first one so the wave of immigration enforcement administration began well before that in the early mid 2000s and some people could argue it started even before that but for our purposes today what you end up with is our several laws passed by the state legislature as well as by voters through ballot initiatives aimed at this goal of assisting the federal government with immigration enforcement. A lot of these the Republican state lawmakers who advanced these bills believe that the state should have the right to also enforce immigration law along with the federal government as a partner and they very much would like to see that continue even today under the Trump administration which is taking you know a similar view on the immigration question. But I really like the list that Adam gave of California because all of the things Adam needs are things that are the opposite in Arizona so no driver's licenses for unauthorized immigrants there was a big fight over whether DACA recipients could get licenses that they ultimately won but at first they were banned. I think you mentioned something about workers being able to have some kind of credential to be able to work so Arizona passed a law that said that criminalized working with a fake ID which is the main way that unauthorized immigrants work so that became a state felony and something that state law enforcement could prosecute. I think you mentioned health some health care benefits. There was actually a state proposition that made sure that if any immigrant applying for state benefits that the government agency should check their status and report their status as they found out they were unauthorized. The California has the trust act to limit cooperation between the federal government and some local law enforcement or allow local law enforcement to not detain certain unauthorized immigrants who've been accused of certain crimes who are in jail and not hold them. Arizona SB 1070 included a provision that that said that banned sanctuary cities that says you can't be a sanctuary city so which is of course a super hot topic right now with the Trump administration and with Texas's SB 4. So I just think that's a really nice parallel right these next door neighbors having really different structures but I mean so I just give you a litany of laws and there are actually more and I could go on and on and I'm happy to answer that in a Q&A but in the interest of time I won't tell you all of the things Arizona passed but just to paint a picture with the state level laws that were passed and the ballot initiatives plus Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio who took it very seriously to be very strict on immigration and the federal 287G Task Force Program which was a partnership between the federal government and local law enforcement agencies that that deputized police on the street through the Task Force Program to enforce federal immigration laws all of these programs together which which you had in Maricopa County for a two-year period between 2007-2009 the combination of Arpaio state laws and the 287G program that gave his deputies federal power meant that in places like Maricopa County if you were an unauthorized immigrant your life could change very quickly one day to the next so you could get in your car and a broken tail light could lead to deportation because there were these very aggressive neighborhood sweeps with deputies who had immigration authority your stop for a traffic violation your question about immigration you end up in deportation proceeding or you go to work and your workplace is has been targeted by one of Arpaio's work site raids because you've worked with a fake ID that's a felony now you're in jail on on state charges another Arizona law says that you are ineligible for bond so now you're in jail until your trial you're probably going to plead guilty now you have a felony now you're a priority for deportation now you're in deportation proceeding so what we saw was sort of a very widening of the net of a lot of these programs the intent of 287G was to be a force multiplier to allow local local police to aid federal federal agents in immigration enforcement but also with all of these other state laws and local actors like Sheriff Arpaio you get this it becomes a lot easier to wind up in deportation proceedings and the net of people who who are getting into it is is broader and broader and so I think so there are a lot of law professors and others sort of looking at Arizona's the case of Arizona with what could could this be the same climate that could happen under the Trump administration and you know we know that that there are people who were very much at the center of Arizona's immigration enforcement policy who were instrumental in the Trump campaign you know our former governor Jan Brewer and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio were both very important surrogate Trump's immigration speech was in Phoenix Chris Coback who who authored FB 1070 is now in the Trump administration under the new election integrity commission so there are these linkages so I mean there and 287G the program that I mentioned is something that we've seen the Trump administration signal that they would like to continue so I think there's reason to believe that that's sort of the Arizona case could could be relevant to the national picture so I just want to take another second to talk about you know what what are the lessons learned from Arizona's sort of experiment with state-based immigration enforcement and I think it really depends who you ask and I just want to be very careful that there's a there's a wide array of views on this and so I did talk with the state senator who introduced the bell Russell Pierce recently about its legacy and he feels like SB 1070 was a huge success and it really reduced the unauthorized population in Arizona there was a big exodus of people who went to other states some of the people who were originally from Mexico returned to Mexico he believes that it is the reason why crime rates went down others think that there is not a cause-and-effect relationship then you talked to the law enforcement community and there's kind of a mixed bag certainly some sheriffs like our Pio and others were big fans of the bill and had wanted stricter immigration enforcement others felt like it complicated others in law enforcement felt like it complicated the job of their deputies again sorry in in that litany of rules that I gave you a you know SB 1070 had something that said that that local police should inquire about immigration status this is the sort of famous show me your papers part of the law so there's been you know contention about whether that degraded the trust with the immigrant community and local police and I think there was a really interesting instance that happened this past year there's a part of Phoenix that's heavily Latino where there was a serial shooter and the police were really asking for community involvement they were saying we need you to help us solve this crime we need to hear from the community and there were several victims in a row and some and not everyone not all of them were fatal shooting and so they said you know who had seen this guy we need help and there were a group of immigrant women who had formed a neighborhood watch in this heavily immigrant Latino area and they said they told the press we're really having trouble people are telling us that SB 1070 the things that our Pio used to do here are are really diminishing our trust we can't convince anyone to cooperate they're too afraid so we did see a very real example and this always gets highlighted as a concern from some police chiefs but there was a an actual case where we saw it play out in Arizona and the other fact is you know we saw the business community come out and say you know that there there had been some ramifications on the economy in the state there had been conventions and tourism dollars lost after there was a boycott because of SB 1070 I think we're starting to see you know is SB 4 in Texas going to replicate and you know that's a big question you know we saw that kind of boycott in North Carolina I have questions how often are you know other states going to boycott other states you know I don't know how sustainable it is to keep going you know I think there's real questions like whether this this tool will lose its effect at some point but in Arizona there are certainly some who felt like it made a difference and ultimately after 2010 after SB 1070 the legislature didn't pass any more extreme immigration laws there were a couple but they weren't they didn't kind of rise to that level and then finally I would say that the on the grass root side of things there was a kind of a group of activists who were galvanized because of because of the the enforcement threat who started organizing on the ground some of those activists have become recruited in other states to train people about how to block deportation how to teach the immigrant community know your rights so some of those that Arizona knowledge is now being exported and there were also lawsuits that were really successful for the most part so a lot of the apparatus that I described well some it's such a patchwork there are a lot of the things that got passed in the mid-2000s ended up getting scaled back or struck down by federal courts some things are still in effect but other things got struck down if you want to know more about that I'm happy in the Q&A to go over it if I don't bore everyone with the ins and outs but but there was quite a bit of litigation it took years and years but but but there were real changes because of federal court intervention which I think kind of gets lost it's not a very sexy story but but it is an important piece of what happened here and I think you know moving forward what pieces of this could could we see on a national scale and I think it's important to note that that we're seeing Attorney General Jeff Sessions talking about the criminal consequences how federal prosecutors he's encouraging federal prosecutors to prosecute immigration related offenses which it can often you know there could be if somebody's in the country unlawfully there's a question should they go through deportation proceedings or should they also be criminally prosecuted for certain offenses like illegal re-entry or human smuggling related crimes or ID theft and so you know I think that some of the the ways in which Arizona kind of demonstrated that there could be a kind of a state-level criminal apparatus on top of deportation we could start seeing more of that under the federal regime and so and I guess there's a very final point you know I just want to raise with the the opposites with California you know I think we could also see the Department of Justice of course during the Arizona's heyday had sued over SB 1070 you know are we going to see sort of a flip we're now California and other states that want to do more to protect or extend benefits to unauthorized immigrants are they going to is it going to reverse course we're now they're going to be kind of opposite with the Trump administration so I just think that's sort of an interesting trading places that Arizona and California are seeing thanks I'm Ali you spent a lot of time in recent years in states that aren't Arizona and aren't California and that maybe we could describe as not wanting to be either of those that you went out on the road with the idea that there was another way to get at these issues and tell us about your family so the National Immigration Forum in 2010 we decided that we wanted to do something completely different and the book that I wrote starts on this particular day December 18th 2010 where on December 18th two things happened in the United States one was that don't ask don't tell repealed and the second is a dream act was defeated and you know on that day I remember telling a colleague we're going to do things differently next time so looking backwards from December 18 2010 realized that the donor the community that was advocating for the repeal of don't ask don't tell they ran a policy campaign based on culture and values they said they engaged the military establishment they made the cases the case to the American public of what it means to be able to serve your country openly and freely those of us in the immigrant rights community we ran a campaign based on politics we focused on the idea of you know making sure the Latino voters were naturalizing that folks are registering to vote and in 2010 we focused on the swing states of Nevada and Colorado don't ask don't tell repealed the dream act was defeated and what we did is we looked at the map and we said okay if the least you know if the states in the southeast the Midwest the Mountain West have the least amount of support for what could be argued is the most compelling piece of immigration policy the dream act how do we move those votes they're not enough you know Latino Asian new American voters to run a political strategy you know some people say well demographics is destiny well no it may be in California maybe in Arizona maybe in some states but it's certainly not in the Midwest and certainly not in the southeast for the foreseeable future so we first looked at the faith community the highest number of adults who identify as evangelical Christian are in the southeast the Midwest the Northwest and we looked at law enforcement highest density of state local law enforcement are those same three regions and to get at your question are you the data point that you raised the fastest growth in the foreign born population is the same three regions so we embarked on a strategy that engage the faith law enforcement in the business community the conservative faith law enforcement business community in a conversation of what it means for these these sets of leadership to engage in the immigration debate and you know I'm happy to kind of go into the different angles but that that strategy we we you know started to move forward on 2011 with in 2011 and really have carried forward to this day last spring I you know kind of based on the this idea I spent a couple month two and a half three months going to you know talking to national leaders from these communities but also spending time in South Carolina suburban Houston Utah and Indiana to kind of do a deeper case case studies and what I found in each of these over the course of about three months I interviewed I think almost 60 faith law enforcement business leaders from these areas plus you know other other parts of the country I'm also spent some time in rural eastern Washington always forget about that one nobody here's from eastern Washington right okay and then over the summer and into the fall I wrote it so I wrote the book right when we were in the middle of the presidential campaign so a lot of people asked me well did you have to change anything after the election because that's when we were doing final edits and I'm not totally sure how to feel about about this answer yet but no we didn't have to I didn't have to change anything I don't change you a few things here and there but by and large I think the change the challenge remains the same in terms of how do you and this is the thesis that I try to advance in the book is that the immigration debate is not about politics and politics for the overwhelming majority of Americans in the country it is about culture and values when an immigrant moves into a community in South Carolina they're asking the question of you know native born South Carolinians are asking the question my culture gonna change my values gonna have to change my how much is my neighborhood gonna change so the book tells a story a series of stories of how from these different perspectives how people are managing and and engaging in this change in a really honest and authentic way doesn't it's not easy by any means so I guess the you know I can you know provide a ton of different examples but the one that I wanted to lift up kind of relevant to what Jude and Andrew saying were in South Carolina last year so one thing about South Carolina South Carolina the scene the fastest growth in the Hispanic population second only to North Carolina so the way I wrote it is that it felt like as the textile mills were moving to Mexico Mexico was moving to South Carolina one of the things that happened spring of last year was that they're just as the presidential campaigns were heating up the Syrian refugee debate was heating up World Relief one of the the nation's leading refugee resettlement organizations was looking to start an office open an office in Spartanburg upstate South Carolina and turned into this huge debate in the state in the community and the state legislature decided to move forward with legislation that would have required refugee resettling in South Carolina to register for the state with the state and second would have held liable the organization that resettled the individual for any crimes the individual may have made commit in the future so in essence it would have halted refugee resettlement to the state of South Carolina realizing that there was not a political strategy to change to move the needle our organizer in Alabama his his tear part of his territory South Carolina he's a Southern Baptist pastor he went to he's already knew people in South Carolina started spending more and more time there built out a coalition that included the Southern Baptist the Catholic community Lutheran community the Jewish community the ACLU and others and they made a case to the state legislators that to resettle refugees in the South and South Carolina is an issue of religious liberty and with just enough of an argument to give Republican lawmakers who were stuck in the middle on this they were stuck in like a really tough political debate with their base but they also realized that you know a large part of the conservative part of South Carolina also wanted to make sure that refugees were resettled in fact one of the the churches I interviewed for the book was leadership of first Baptist Church in Spartanburg one of the largest Southern Baptist churches and their leadership talked about the excitement of the congregation to resettle Syrian refugees regardless of religion so that that the case that the coalition made to state legislators managed to bottle up the legislation and died so my point here is that as we move into an era that is going to be more and more about how states are reacting whether it's a state like California or state like Texas I think the the strategies and the ways that we have to understand how these issues are playing out and the local level take a different level of kind of a new level of imagination it's not about changing demographics it's not even necessarily about the economic needs of of that particular locality it is really a deep-seated cultural question that so many communities across the country are struggling with and challenges for policymakers to understand that cultural change that cultural debate and be able to put forward a constructive policy so Michael at some level what we're hearing about is the state's right to dream right you know you have states doing what they want to do and and Ali has just you know really described the sort of that you can encompass in many ways the whole immigration debate within the contemporary Republican Party you've had the fun of watching this come and go at the federal level several times I wonder if you'd my many sins three different times going back yeah reflect for us on what the future holds at the federal level yeah well first of all head of thanks for the invitation it's great to be here and I really love your space it's a terrific place to hold events hopefully we'll be worthy of this wonderful space a lot of thoughts here let me try to disentangle them first of all one thing I will mention but Adam and Ali said this separately in different ways the way immigration now the foreign-born populations are spread out beyond the initial kind of six or so states too much more of America is something you notice when you've worked on these things on Capitol Hill and I'm a house of representatives person and one thing I can tell you that when I worked on this I think it was a 1990 bill for a member on the House Judiciary Committee there were very few members who fell immediately impacted sort of like a you know an urban member not being directly affected by a farm bill or something like that even though they do deal with food stands but but on the commodity programs and all that they check out they defer to somebody who's judgment they trust who has a lot of that going on in their state back then immigration was kind of like that and there was an outsized influence played by delegations from Chicago and New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Florida because of obvious concentrations of immigrant populations back then in those in those states in northern New Jersey also for example more recently as you've seen these debates unfold especially the one in 2013 almost every member will in meetings put their hand up and give you an anecdote about why this issue is important to them what happened in a recent town hall meeting the editorial pages in their home district newspapers and other kinds of magazines and so on in their districts and television stations it's an immediate issue now for the vast majority of House members and that makes a difference in how these issues move through the system especially in the House I think every senator probably feels directly impacted as well whereas 25 30 years ago I think the number would have been much much smaller so that hasn't has an impact another thing I'll just mention when we get to the logjam aspect of this I've had this naughty thought but it is naughty that there's two reasons I've noticed why you can read a law and it makes absolutely no sense to you like you just realize what was going on what was in the water was in the air when it was being drafted and I've concluded this two main explanations for absolute inanity in legislation one is the members who are drafting a trying to meet some CBO score the Congressional Budget Office has a you know scoring on what the revenue impact is or what the spending impact is and the people pushing the bill need to get the numbers in a line alignment somehow or other and I'm doing all kinds of legislative contortions to get the next score to actually comport with whatever the political mandate is the other reason more relevant here is jurisdiction and so a lot of times you find the committee chairman of one committee doesn't want any jot or tittle of their bill to spill over into some other committee's jurisdiction so you get all kinds of you know craftsmanship to double and triple check with Paul Amontarian so you make sure that the only one committee has jurisdiction so hence a logical maybe fix to some problem that would transfer to several committees jurisdiction gets overlooked or gets no knowingly abandoned because the committee chair wants to keep the bill within one jurisdiction so the naughty thought as we go forward as you think about areas where immigration does if you want to do a comprehensive bill the kind of areas that would be implicated a lot of them could very easily be thought of as being part of the committee jurisdictions elsewhere so for example wouldn't a farm worker type program whatever that would look like naturally reside with the ag committee or would the high-tech type area of dealing with h1bs and other kinds of high-tech or or high-skilled workers stem and all that reside maybe within labor maybe with even financial services or other other committees that I'm thinking of in the house so the naughty thought is maybe one of the ways out of this and the premise here is that if you think of the traditional then diagrams there's a lot of space in the immigration policy area where there's a lot of agreement but but there's a veto point that each party has erected that prevents the commonality areas from moving forward because it would have to be part of a broader bill that would also trigger some kind of provisions and solution that would make the Democratic side of the aisle happy on dealing with the 11 million issues and all the issues related to that on the Republican side it would be mostly issues relating to internal security enforcement of laws and that sort of thing that have been a roadblock the wall is a symbol of that but there's a lot of other secondary and tertiary elements of that whole whole debate or the whole aspect of what DHS would do to enforce a law so those end up becoming the blockages to any kind of broader solution and the naughty thought is maybe breaking this out into smaller component parts a hitch a ride on other must-pass bills is something to be given some some thought to because in that case you might be able to segregate out elements that that really are a problem that have not been addressed in decades that could be addressed seriously in other other big standalone bills the core of all this of course and the reason we're talking a lot about federalism is that it's a broken system I think one thing that every member of Congress can agree on is there's no one out there saying you know I've taken a look at this legislative or this statutory area and I love it this is really well done it makes a lot of sense all the moving parts fit together perfectly it's serving the interest of our country very well no one says that so you and this has been the case for decades now so you have this ongoing tension building up and the system is trying to respond to it like a market test and the market test now is coming with states doing things and executive branch and courts getting involved the last president Obama really did have this sense of well if Congress is not going to act we're going to act and you had the different you know docket type regulatory you know executive not orders but executive memos coming out from DHS they were trying to address things that the president wanted Congress to address and that somehow they couldn't because they were log jam couldn't do so again when you go to Federalist route I get the final point I'll leave you with and it's not the most cheery assessment here is it except for that naughty thought I suppose is that you want the you want the resolution of this to try to to bring people to the table for a number of reasons and one quick thought on that you mentioned the licensing issue well that's a real current favorite issue among conservatives who who think that state and local level licensing requirements are a real burden to entry-level entrepreneurs getting in doing things everything you know the classic of the beautician requirements a lot of states you need like seven thousand hours of training to braid hair and you don't really need that you may need it if it's using chemicals and all that but you don't need that much for a lot of people to enter into a pain profession like that and so if maybe you could bring the conservatives to the table to reform and improve and deregulate the kind of licensing bars and maybe the Democrats see that and say okay we'll hit your right on that bill but we want to make the the non the undocumented or the non-citizen population eligible for this as well and you find a confluence of interests and things like that so if you go to federalism route be creative in thinking how you can bring together both sides maybe for entirely different reasons to solve one of these kind of problems make life better for the folks who are involved you know I'll stop there and look forward to your question so one of the things I hear each of you saying in a different way is actually something Ali that you said explicitly that the solution here isn't political and in nowhere in any of your remarks did I hear and then so and so lost in election and that you know because of course the one of the ways that our system is supposed to resolve log jams is that the public is supposed to get tired of the log jam and change who represents them and so Jude I wonder if we could start with you and then just anyone else who wants to jump in were there any electoral consequences you know you you alluded to how Arizona is always supposed to be right on the edge of turning into a blue state and yet never quite does well I think there were there are some key moments that do come to mind so state senator Russell Pierce who I mentioned is no longer a state senator so he's the one who who brought SB 1070 and who is responsible for a whole I pretty much most of Arizona's immigration legislation so he was he was actually recalled and and lost his seat so that that what there was a real kind of consequence and actually elite details that in his book and so I defer to him on more details but that was before I got to Arizona but and then you know sheriff Joe Arpaio did lose his election this last time after winning successively six times in a row so based and much of his popularity was because of immigration enforcement you could argue that this last time voters punished him for one of the main reasons seem to be that a racial profiling lawsuit against him had cost and his disobedience in that suit had cost taxpayers tens of millions dollars and so that seems to be one of the leading narratives of of why he lost but I mean it there you know and he was also 84 and it was his and there was a lot more money in that race on the opposition side than there had ever been before so there are many factors but but those were some two two big ones that come to mind and I guess even before that as though I mean there there definitely is a pattern of of I mean I think Jan Brewer who who wasn't kind of an immigration hawk you know she she passed she signed SB 1070 and then was was elected governor so she had been interim and there had been appointed and then she won her election after that so so I mean there there is definitely both sides examples on both sides I would say I mean first of all there the Arizona example I think is a linkage between the question of kind of politics and culture so Russell Pierce when he was running for during the recall race he was what I think and what he thought was an off the record or closed though conversation he was caught on tape and was reported in the news that where he said in essence the LDS church supports SB 1070 the LDS church was one of the primary players in Utah later in 2010 to sign to move forward with the Utah compact Utah compact was a effort by conservative faith law enforcement business leaders in Utah to craft five principles that more or less said there's a different way to have this dialogue in Utah and as a result they changed the politics in Utah and stopped SB 1070 from moving into the state but what really kind of got under their skin is when Pierce said the church supports you know the principles of SB 1070 so a couple days later if not in the same story I think the church released a statement that said you know to paraphrase don't quote me on this to pair you know that from the church's perspective we care about you know family security and prosperity and we believe in a comprehensive solution so they never explicitly said Russell Pierce is wrong but they said just enough to make clear to their community that he did not represent their beliefs and it's also important to note here that Mesa in the Senate or the district that he represented had some of the highest number one of the highest numbers of Mormon voters in the state of Arizona Mormon's who do the missions overseas are come back and they tend to be very very favorably disposed toward immigration and flows of people and they my friends and if they go to Lee who are very conservative on everything you can imagine their conservatism channels through a lot of immigration it's very obvious but then in terms of the other election piece I mean I think you know Donald Trump won the Republican primary tour large decreed because of his immigration position he tapped into an anxiety and fear among the American work American workers and their families that catapulted that got him through the nomination practically every other competitor every other Republican running for the that nomination was more much more moderate on the question so I think that the if you had asked that question a year ago I think I would have been challenged to find a candidate for officer or a policymaker who lost because of a pro-immigration position I think things are just different now there are some members who won came into prominence politically because of kind of an anti-immigrant position one it comes to mind is there was Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania believe he was a mayor in the figure which town in central Hamilton yeah and that was his jumping off the springboard to become a House member that staying that way for the foreseeable future you know what's the thing that causes the resurgence of the pro- immigration Republican at the federal level since you've just talked so eloquently about how they absolutely exist in the citizen well don't forget you do have the broader discussion where immigration may be an element of it but the much broader one of the sorting of the American population into like-minded communities and I see that in the way political campaigns play out especially my first love of course is the house I don't know why I just love studying it and trying to understand it and you you don't you see these these polarized caucuses both very heavily right of center very heavily left the center and very few in the middle in part coming through because of that sorting and it plays out what some places on maybe an energy cluster of issues or some social issues or some broader economic concerns and immigration is certainly one of those value systems that run through that that polarized electorate and come out and very that you come in very very different places as a result of that how you how you bridge that is kind of what I was trying to get out of my remarks I think you look for ways to pull people together maybe for entirely different sets of reasons around a shared policy and each side would have to swallow a little bit that they probably don't want almost by definition but absent that it's a hard thing to imagine in the near future of a way to they get the ball moving on a you know a solving a problem that's really endemic to the entire area of immigration statutory law some irony to underscore this discussion the majority of Americans tend to support the immigration reform these comprehensive reforms if asked individually and in fact the kind of favorability toward immigrants that Americans show few research centers ask this question every year for 20 years Gallup is that historic highs I mean in Gallup's last polling I think it was 2014 and 2015 it was fully 73% of Americans say immigrants are good as opposed to bad for our country numbers that haven't been seen since the early 90s so there's some disconnect between what the average person believes about immigration and how that translates politically and I think that some of these points of that we see in some electoral readouts is that those that are more concerned about immigration ranked that higher on their list of factors that sway their decision so where those that are supportive you know of course they're supportive but not voting on that issue those who are not supportive are definitely voting on that issue and I see that happening much more in explaining the divergence now yeah I was just gonna ask if you how you saw that play out I mean in some of the states where you were did a combination of these interesting welcoming measures and at some adopting some of the Arizona style measures so you saw kind of a both and one of the places I spent some time was Indiana I interviewed you know folks from the Chamber in Indianapolis got to know some of the folks in the Catholic community but then the person that I spent a good chunk of time with was Greg Zeller who is the former Republican Attorney General he just left office last year and he told me how again it's kind of this this connection between his political stance as a Republican good on immigration good on refugee issues but and how that you know conflicted a little bit or a lot sometimes with his position as you know a southern user who grew up on the banks of the Mississippi and he was in office when then Governor Pence made a sign the letter and made an effort to stop Syrian refugee resettlement to the state of Indiana and he told me of how he extended the legal case but then a day later was at the press conference to welcome Syrian refugees and there is a as a member of the Catholic Charity's Board of Directors and that plays out you know that played out in places like Lake County Illinois where again a Republican Catholic sheriff who came into office of the Joe Arpaio believer and then now is one of our biggest advocates on immigration reform or in Fresno County kind of same thing a very rural area high Republican high number of Republicans but there's just this cultural question of okay like you're saying it may not be a voting issue but it is an issue of kind of how people want to see their their communities grow so Adam I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit since it's it's not really fair to just ask Mike questions about the Republicans you know this this conversation does sort of assume that the Democratic Party stance on immigration is written in stone and doesn't change that's not what you hear people saying all the time what are we likely to see happen on the Democratic side of the aisle at the federal level as as this stuckness continues and as we we continue to have the perception that there's a certain chunk of American voters and frankly the states that you described are states that Democrats are going to be very interested in for the foreseeable future yeah it's a huge question I may not be the best person to answer that entirely but just from a couple observations I certainly think that the game has shifted to certainly now in the short term defense so trying to defend the wins that prior Democratic administration has gained and to try to make advances at the state and local level to both affect kind of immediate policy aims and protect individuals to protect rights to advance some rights but also to build I think as Ali has pointed out kind of the political groundswell and awareness that can translate back to federal activity in terms of federal legislative priorities right now I mean that's that's kind of anyone's guess I haven't followed that as closely recently but I think the landscape right now and and really animated by the executive branch certainly and the courts is still playing out there's not a lot of threads to pull on right now so speaking of the courts looking back at the Arizona example it certainly would seem that one of the lessons that you would take away from the Arizona example is that you have got to be willing to spend a lot of money on legal fees if you want to go the Arizona route is that in fact a lesson that other that other states and jurisdictions have taken I mean are we going to see an exact replica of the Arizona lawsuits in Texas and is there a reason to believe it won't it won't play out the same way I think I think I mean I was kind of it's not a lawyer just play one on TV so I don't know all this but the state of Texas filed the first lawsuit you know they sued Maldef and other others to more or less try to get a decision out of the courts right of the gates that the the law was was constitutional now a small town I want to say in the Rio Grande Valley has been I think the second lawsuit filed I'm sure there will be additional lawsuits but I don't think the states have I don't think Texas you know they didn't take Arizona lessons to heart I mean they're plunging into something that's going to cost a lot of money from the legal perspective. Well I would just add that some of the very same lawyers who were involved in the Arizona litigation are involved in challenging some of Trump's executive actions so some of them got kind of practiced at the state level for what we're seeing now. I'm going back to California so it's not only states that are funding litigation against other entities on policy ground but we have states that are funding legal supports for their residents right so in the LA Times just this week Governor Jerry Brown is proposing in this year's budget to add an additional 15 million dollars in legal services support for individuals who may face deportation in California right so there's a lot of money going behind kind of litigation at levels of institutions as well as to protect individuals right now. So this is going to be my last question and then we'll open it up to Q&A but how how long is this sort of multi-speed multivariate federalism sustainable you know Mike you you mentioned and Adam you also mentioned it's been 26 years no 21 years since we've had federal immigration reform I think many of us who worked in government over those years would would have said this wouldn't be sustainable for as long as it has been I don't know whether we have in the past seen another issue where the status of a human being differs so widely from from state to state and so one is tempted to say oh this isn't sustainable something will have to be done but you'd have lost a lot of bets on that over the last 20 years so I wonder if each of you would like to offer some thoughts on that. I'll start we can go down the line you know as a policy-minded person who's tended to kind of be federally focused I mean I I want resolve of the issue and the issue really is federal right and it's kind of in in lieu of fixing the federal challenges you see literal litigation and kind of figurative litigation of the immigration issue various issues through almost every other policy arena now so the result is you know if advanced properly could put pressure to federal resolve if not exactly that which you speak of this kind of multi-tiered citizenship multiple identity gets hardened I mean I was in government when the president announced the creation of DACA right now everyone's going to the mat to defend and and calculates as a win that Homeland Security Secretary Kelly is still preserving DACA DACA was never the fix DACA is a stopgap right until there's actual real lasting solutions but the the risk is we fall into this environment where I think writ large our identities are shifting the value of citizenship you know we think of ourselves less kind of you know we're less proudly American writ large I mean we're thinking ourselves maybe as a Washingtonian or New Yorker the identities are shifting in ways that make me concerned that this kind of multi-speed multi-tiered citizenship is actually more durable than I feel it should be I think that I think we're in a period of time where it is incredibly hard if not impossible to see what life looks like 612 18 months down the line I just think that I just started reading Ed Luce's book of the decline of Western liberalism and you know what it's interesting to me because so much of this debate is you know east versus west and that is certainly a big part of this and kind of how how other nations are seeing what we as the United States have put forward but and I think there's also an element where it's also north versus south where you have people whose incomes are rising south of the US or south of Europe but for any of a number of reasons they are moving north and that's churning the system in ways that are economic or cultural that are really really hard to unpack and say okay this is the this is the strategy one thing I'd mention I think is to the extent that the executive branch in the courts act to try to resolve different pressure points that are in the failed system right now that might enable status quo to continue in other words sometimes you may need the branches to pull back and live within their guardrails their boundaries in order to force the system to respond to the pressing need as opposed to being relatively aggressive and maybe outside the box and interpreting what's in the black-letter law or what's judicial precedent in order to get a solution that they want so that the results oriented approach by the other two branches articles two and three might have the unintended consequence of enabling the article one branch congress to just sit on his hinds and not act on this for even longer than it has been inactive thus far so sometimes you gotta be careful about that because I think there's a political marketplace that should respond to this at some point and and there's gonna have to you know but if you constantly put on solves here and there to try to you know keep it from hitting a boiling point then Congress has the innate ability to always look to some other issue well I once thinking exactly to this point but I just as a sort of a parting word on on lessons from Arizona I would say that that I I suspect that there we might be seeing some fatigue on the immigration issue in Arizona and I and I don't know if that might change if we see different levels of unauthorized immigration change the fact that that it's illegal border crossing is quite low might have something to do with it but I think some of the public opinion polling you saw around the election suggested that that the Arizona voter isn't sort of as concerned with immigration and illegal immigration as an issue and and that there's a bipartisan push to do to increase trade and tourism from Mexico and that kind of seems to be a lot of the focus on border issues isn't isn't all negative these days in that state so I think that I think you are seeing a shift I'm not quite sure yet sort of which direction it's going and how sustained it'll be or sort of what are the causes but it's been interesting to watch well with that unexpected note of optimism my colleague Susanna Rajig has a microphone so please put up your hand and she will come around start right there and then we'll go to the gentleman in back and then the woman in black and white please tell us who you are and then ask an actual question hello I'm Andreas Martinez with ASU and and New America future tense thank you for a great discussion on an issue that I have followed avidly and cared deeply about one thing we didn't get to it's interesting because you all posit you portrayed California and Arizona almost as being different planets and yet one thing that we didn't get to is the fact that in many ways California committed the original sin I will define original sin as scapegoating immigrants and immigration for short-term political gain when we go back to the 90s and prop 187 and Governor Davis so and I think that's an important antecedent to a lot of what you talked about and I'm curious to hear from you Jude and from others whether you see California as a cautionary tale for what Trump is trying to do nationally for what Joe Arpaio and others have done in Arizona that it's gonna catch up in a sense politically and there will be a backlash or was the California case for a number of different reasons not something that is a leading indicator for what might happen on both sides of this debate for the rest of the country so yeah I think that's a really interesting question and I'm from California originally and so as soon as I got to Arizona I was interested in this question I mean you know prop 187 has been credited with turning Arizona blue and being and galvanizing the Latino vote and really shaping a lot of the political dynamic in California today and as an observer in Arizona there was sort of the all of this there's sort of every election cycle questions about will this be the election that the Latino vote turns out in big numbers and there is a big Latino population though the eligible to vote Latino population keeps growing each year and yet the voter turnout rates still don't equal the turnout rates of white voters and so you know I heading into this election you know I heard a lot of people speculating you know with Trump and our pile on the ballot this November and of course our pile lost and Trump won you know what there was this question like would that be is this the prop 187 moment if SB 1070 era and earlier eras you know didn't drive a big Latino turnout would this you know this election and I think the numbers suggest that that you know while there were gains made in the in the in Latino turnout that it still has not kind of risen to its potential and certainly hasn't had there's no evidence of a backlash that has had I would argue but I think so I you know I'm I'm curious like what it takes so I wonder if that model of voting against a threat as seen in California as this really kind of crystal clear galvanizing moment it doesn't seem to me that it's played out in Arizona and I don't know if it will and I'm not sure why but I'll let someone else take a stab to the point so the temporal aspect is important right so in California though you didn't see really material changes I think for eight ten twelve years after which so we're right now entering the 10th year after SB 1070 you have you know a senior senator recalled you have to our pyre so maybe this is the leading edge of a shift but you know I think Texas is now the big case to watch because Texas I mean their legislature meets only every two years so you get a good handle of a burst of activity right now and then there's a year to digest but in Texas has been a you know relatively conservative state but also against the marker in terms of immigrant and even unauthorized friendliness in ways that made them an outlier even to Arizona for a while so in that bigger state much more diverse economy much more diversity among the immigrant population this particular SB 4 was so targeted such a loud discourse all of law enforcement against you had the governor for the first time ever signing the bill Facebook live first time ever the governor you know did a live signing and did it to this right so it's a really galvanizing moment for supporters and detractors alike so I think the real you know is that temporal element shrunk now in Texas or not that'll be the big thing to watch in my view I completely agree on the temporal piece and I mean in California you had the 1986 Reagan amnesty legislation and 93 was 187 right 94 so some people told me that 187 was kind of a backlash to 1986 and then you know 10 years later if not more 20 years now you see a state of California that is where the Latino community drives politics but it took an incredible investment of public sector and private sector investment in infrastructure within the community to create that type of groundswell I think in Arizona we're still really early in the process and I think in Texas the challenge is going to be different because it's a it's a much larger state it's a it's a state that doesn't have anywhere that near the organizing capacity within the Latino community certainly of California not even of Arizona so I think in in Texas we could see you in a longer tail between SB4 and really the emergence of of Hispanic political juice I was going to ask a further cynical question there you know back to Mike your point about how much more we as a society have segregated ourselves then 25 years ago and the other thing that I wonder about is income inequality and how much more extreme that is in Texas today than it was in California in the 90s and if you put together sort of self-imposed segregation voting restrictions and income inequality does that make the tail longer and longer and thinner and thinner it's good to vary by state but I mean it is a remarkable coincidence of political success that the Democrats have when they have constituencies with a lot of really wealthy well educated and a lot of really poor constituents and not very many who would be in the middle of those distributions and Republicans have the exact opposite kind of political success and you saw that in the election right I think Trump got 69% of non-college educated white voters which is not that much different than where Democrats have been with the Hispanic vote so it's sort of like an identity politics dynamic but in an unexpected direction and that's I think kind of dangerous in a lot of levels as all of that is when people vote on those lines and that that's a if anything is a force for for not coming to a table and not kind of resolve these things because that dynamic seems like it's not getting it any better anytime soon the gentleman in the back hi thanks so much for this my name is Diego and I work for CFED and I have a question about the naughty thought so I thought it was very interesting how you talked about you know delinking all of these different policies and to me the 20-time attempt to pass the DREAM Act was an example of this you know let's not worry about a huge comprehensive bill let's worry about you know the most sympathetic group among the 11 million and it failed to get 60 votes you were to see something about the H1B visa you've had you you would have people say well you know there are so many problems with the H1B visa you'd have the whole you know this is just a way for businesses to not hire American workers and pay them less so I'm wondering how can we delink all of these different policy issues without having people say well you actually need all three legs of the three-legged stool for it to stand or for people to just go against the policy as it stands on its own well that's a good question I think my starting point is that a lot of times you do have a logic that says some issue area that not immigration but a lot of other ones that if you combine all the different disparate parts one you get kind of a benevolent dynamic or chemistry that results from that where we're having a multiple set of things in the final product legislatively speaking builds your vote rather than disperses and diminishes it I think what we've seen with immigration however is that when you try the more comprehensive approach you get a diminished level of support and you get too many veto points that just can cancel each other out and you get no action whatsoever so the reason is naughty is that I've always when I was working most recently for Kevin McCarthy I was really struck at the different people coming through who wanted to focus on just one or another element of the overall issue and they seemed a fuddle when you explain why the bigger dynamic was at loggerheads they didn't get that because they would literally say I have crops you know apples that are rotting on the trees because I can't find people to do this because of the dynamics of work in that particular part of the labor market and so on just across the board and that hence I kept thinking well wouldn't it make sense to try to you know fit these different elements into a broader thing where where there's many more moving parts that become must pass and if it's must pass then this is just a smaller element of the whole and maybe that tension that that intensity gets lost in the broader project of passing a farm bill or a highway bill or a high-tech you know reform bill whatever that that's the thought and again I think you you may be right that the reason why that may not work in other areas may not work here but in which case you know I'm you know hit the nearest bar and just think about this longer it's just because it's really a conundrum there's also of course the House Senate dynamic here I can't forget in 2013 for comprehensive we have 68 votes so a vast bipartisan majority in favor of a comprehensive bill I would also just say sometimes like the legislative debate is pitted against you know enforcement on one side and what to do with regards to the undocumented side and there's a there's an assumption that if you for the undocumented you say people get legal status and no citizenship all of a sudden you know we're all good that may or may not have been the case I don't I certainly don't think it's the case right now I think that the debate has gotten so the issues of trade and immigration have become so conflated where the assumption you know I think the biggest sticking point at this point and I would even argue in the last even 2013-14 is future flow what's the future of legal immigration to the US and that's you know realize whether it's through a farm worker you know farm worker bills high-tech or any other thing else I just think that that's the tension that has been our undoing and you know it's it's it's a question harder to answer right now given the economic anxiety that the very real economic anxiety people are feeling the woman in black and white one idea that we've been really interested in and sort of squares with these state federal ideas you've been talking about and also a sort of a smaller component of the larger issue is senator Johnson's recent bill to let states sort of adjudicate quotas on temporary workers I just haven't heard that many people talk about it so I'm curious if you guys have any perspective on the potential for a bill like that or any potential stumbling blocks and then maybe other innovative ideas you've heard to move forward in this climate thanks I'm so glad you brought that up because there's actually an interesting paper out today from the Niskanen Center reviewing all of the state level efforts to do to do employment related immigration which really is a fascinating moment of you know sort of as a federalist you think to yourself wait there's no way a state can do that but there have been really interesting experiments which I'm hoping you all can talk about Adam I'll start with that I mean the fact that our federal government exclusively decides is not consistent across our peers Canada has elements of provincial selection has employer selection as does Australia for example and there's been states and so not even just from the federal level I mean I think of Republican Governor Snyder in Michigan who has advocated for resettling and devoting more refugees and other classes of immigrants to be resettled to Michigan because they want the redevelopment they want the talent I mean for it in Detroit particularly so I think there's a lot of merit to kind of question you know does this type of system work as we see in not just immigration but so many policy areas a kind of trend of experimentation across the states maybe this could be one I don't see why not talk about the Massachusetts higher education example which is and maybe at least since you've come out of Massachusetts you can both talk about that one a little bit the H1B so this is an effort and actually not sure where it stands I was familiar with it a couple years ago where there was some impetus from the state from the then governor Deval Patrick I believe to create kind of an incubator model to attract and sponsor through Massachusetts state universities using state funds H1B's and some of the beauty of working through some of these higher education institutions that you're not subject to caps right so allowing individuals to be kind of embedded to a public institution but then also to start or grow a business and have connections in the private sector with incentives to stay in Massachusetts was kind of this hybrid model I'm curious if it's still around or what's still around I know Governor Baker when he first came in he paused it but I think he put it back online I don't know where it is in terms of implementation I mean according to this this gain in paper that I was reading in prep for this it is still around but you know so but on the one hand this is a fascinating really innovative model but Mike and Jude I wonder if to some extent actually those kinds of innovative fixes on the legal side in some ways add to the anxiety that Ali was talking about earlier about what the future flow looks like and so that this in a way it gets back to your get back to the wickedness of the problem on the flow issue as it exists today one thing we did at my office at Hoover a couple months ago we have an economist who focused on immigration so he invited the head of the statistical part of DHS that follows all the immigration stuff really exciting event but one thing I took away from it was I had not appreciated the extent to which the chain migration side was about two-thirds of the flow the flow was a million and fifty thousand in 2015 and 650 some a thousand of that were chain migration so I think you know what one of the my premises is that you'd like to see the system work for the economic and humanitarian traditions of a country and not it's almost like having a two-thirds of your flow haven't you have no control over it's almost like you know the parents given the keys to the teenagers for a weekend and they invite two kids over for a party and Olson 300 are showing up right because of one of wonders of the internet and tweeting and everything if you can't you have to have some control over it and one way to do it are ideas to substitute for some of the Mike chain migration ideas like what you described the Johnson and I think it's a buck have in the house but also be reminded that no one really ever talks about this when Mike Pence was a house member he got himself into quite a bit of a hot hot water over some ideas he had about making that kind of approach with an employer base of sighted if an employer had a need for employees and they weren't recruiting and found employees they wanted to bring into America they could do that and had certain kind I think what he called it a red card or something like that a gold card where you could come in for a certain like a contractual period and it was it was binding and it could last and be renewed and so on with certain touching back issues or whatever but he really got in trouble for China but you can do an employer base you can do it state-based that the caveat I would offer though is that if you do it state-based and a person loses their job what happens to them I think it has to it has to be some ability to have a more fluid labor market once the person comes in here because of the nature of job flow going coming and going I don't think you want the person's time here to be simply you know they can only be in Indiana or Michigan you want them to be able if the job doesn't work out of a better opportunity comes across the transom to be able to switch to go to Nebraska or Florida or wherever I think what I can just add to that is just that a big part of the Arizona story that I didn't mention is that there were very active employer groups that formed sort of in light of all of the state enforcement policy and so and and then with the the various levels and of enforcement you know we're either worried that their work sites would be rated not that they would necessarily face penalties but just that having all of your employees be arrested one day is very damaging to your business so a lot of them were terrified of getting rated you know even though they're the laws wouldn't have really implicated them personally but it would have been bad for business and so you saw some of these even pretty conservative Republican businessmen get pretty enthusiastic about comprehensive immigration reform be willing to sort of sign on to and lobby for for a bigger piece of legislation that they didn't necessarily agree with most of what was in it but because they felt like they wanted to see something happen on the federal level because they didn't see what was happening in Arizona as sustainable for business so that was sort of a part of it I see the gentleman in the turquoise shirt had a question yep my name is Michelle and my question is there seems to be kind of just a juxtaposition between like the rise of nationalism and the polarization of politics especially the national level and identity politics yet there's so much it seems like there's so much success in efforts like locally with churches and local institutions to like welcome immigrants in so I mean is that prevalent is it pertinent to what's happening and could it be used somehow to advance the cause so the fastest growth and you know most of your faith communities is coming from you know Latinos you know the the evangelical community the Catholic community the Mormon community etc so with that growth you know I say this with all due respect and affection you know every pastor is a politician right they see a new family in their congregation and they're going to ask the question what can I what what can I do to help and now more than ever that Hispanic family is going to ask for help on immigration whether it's something as simple as learning English to helping somebody get legal status so pastors and really conservative parts of the country are grappling with those questions and they're answering those questions not just through their faith but also you know what's the role their institution in their broader community and I mean we're just finding that you know across the country that's happening and while it's easy for us to kind of be focused and it's important for us to be focused on the big political debate and the rise of nationalism I think not far underneath that are is a really active conversation and to kind of go back to the DACA program you know DACA was important in that it protected 750,000 young people from deportation I would argue that it was just as or even more important for millions and millions and millions of Americans to now realize that the family one few over a church is undocumented their kid's best friend is undocumented the family down the road street is undocumented so it's personalizing this issue in ways that we've never seen and what it means is that you know in Indiana people love the Jose they know but they're still afraid of the Jose they don't know or the Mohammed they don't know or you know whoever it is and we have to be able to you know bridge that gap yeah and this I mean we were actually talking about this before the event is something that we've seen across other issues where the actually the the don't ask don't tell comparison is really an interesting one and you know about this from past life as well that what it takes to change somebody's mind is knowing someone in that personal way that Ali just described that sort of vague awareness that oh so-and-so is a member of X group doesn't help the way it was once described to me is that you have to know someone in the group well enough to ask them a personal or embarrassing question which you know in many ways describes church membership one of the studies I cited one of the studies I cited it was a analysis of the Gallup survey last summer and you know the Gallup survey is what a sample of 90,000 so it's a massive sample and what they found is that your your Trump voter at that point in time lived in a culturally isolated community so that was certainly one factor but the other factor in fact a stronger factor and their vote was that they felt their child would not do better than that so yes the personal relationship is important but that personal relationship is not going to happen for everybody and it may actually be overshadowed by a deeper economic anxiety great for the last we have two more questions over here so maybe we could take you two together and if each of you ask your question then we'll give the panel sort of the last last word hi I'm Emma thine with the cybersecurity initiative here in New America I really appreciated all the context you guys injected into this conversation and I'd like to ask you to do it explicitly so what I'm recognizing that these debates happen and shifting context what is one specific bit of context or trend whether international technological political economic that you'd like to lift up and connect to this conversation Richard Fulton I'm with the American Jewish Committee this is we're talking about the role of state and local governments I want to come back to the federalism question it seems as if you know with contending state laws taking very different diametrically opposed views some trying to look at more strict and tough enforcement on immigrants and some trying to protect immigrants the question I have is whether we've got an irreconcilable contradiction in terms of what's the relationship between the states and the federal government in terms of immigration and does it matter so for instance you know and just recalling that for a long time the discussion about immigration vis-a-vis Arizona or vis-a-vis Indiana's efforts to keep keep out refugees the discussion was this is a federal role the federal government sets immigration policy states shouldn't be setting their own immigration policy but now when you have California or Massachusetts Massachusetts even trying to set aside what some would say is an explicit federal law about sharing information by local authorities with federal officials you know how do we reconcile all of this does it matter and where we're going to wind up in terms of you know the relationship of the federal government the states on immigration enforcement great context and federalism we'll give we'll give each of you a last Adam you want to sure I mean so taking taking the second question first I may think this goes back to some of the themes we've touched on in that you know the different branches because there hasn't been the federal legislative outlet we're seeing increased state activity we're seeing increased court activity and those branches are really trying to hash it out where that's going and how that's sustainable I don't like it I'm uncomfortable and unsettled with it kind of right now knowing that that's kind of a process of democracy that we should all cherish and share but I still contend that with certain comprehensive federal solutions most of the other problems go away I mean almost instantaneously it with perspective so I think that there's still hope for some big fixes that can resolve a lot of those underlying issues not not near term hope for sure and on the broader issue you know that the discussion and how we feel toward immigrants and towards others in this country is not necessarily unique to this country right now but at the same time that we're having these discussions there are others that are seeking to who immigrants and we have benefited despite our broken system by being still the most attractive destination for newcomers of all stripes for generations and I don't think that that's a guarantee given that that will stay so in the next 20 30 years and when a Canada and Australia a France a Germany not UK likely right now is actively wooing immigrants in ways that we have abdicated in that leadership role what does that say about us and what is our future economy look like so say the the federalism question I'm not sure it matters at this point I think we have to fight the fight at multiple levels and that fight is not always defensive sometimes it were on offense but like I said earlier I think we have to think about the innovative strategies to do that at multiple levels and how that shakes out I'm not I'm not entirely sure but I am optimistic in that you know I was in Idaho six weeks ago in front of a room of 75 dairymen at 4 p.m. there are grumpy people they'd been up since 4 a.m. you know at least half of that room had voted for Donald Trump but they were they were afraid of the direction of immigration enforcement because their Latino workforce had not just been with them for over a decade and was part of their operation but they saw them as an extension of their community and their family so those Idaho Republican conservative dairymen were fighting for refugee resettlement fighting against immigration enforcement efforts whether it was at the state or the federal level so that's that's why I'm optimistic and I think whether that's context or something else I think that it's up to us who care about these issues to the way we put it as our and we have to you know meet people where they are but just not leave them there on your question first I don't think it's an accident that the countries that have had a large outpouring of concern and controversy relating to immigration have also had fairly stagnant economic outcomes the last decade or more and I suppose I think you know that's at the root of a lot of the kind of concern and antagonism and all that on the one hand to find ways to help unbridle the growth I think would have a ripple effect positively with respect to how this issue plays out because that can be immigrants can become an easy target for people whose communities are suffering whose jobs are going away or as incomes are stagnant or going down whose kids don't have that same prospect of a future as they may have had when they were their kids age so I think getting to the root of a lot of that and getting economy back up to three to four percent range of growth rather than one to two could go a very very long way of creating a political ecosystem in which you could actually get a legislative solution on immigration and federalism if federalism is from a political ethics sense is a very situational issue so federalism recently was considered and rejected on the health care issue when it was put forth to that you know to the Senate they're looking at that oh we don't want that and the Democrats in the House didn't want that but it was purely giving the states a lot more ability to weigh various parts of the status quo in the formal care act and do things more important with what different state governors and legislatures wanted to do here federalism might have a different might be a different take but don't forget that we're in an environment now or I think it's 68 or so of the 98 legislative chambers are run by Republicans and some of them by very large supermajorities of them and 30 with three governors are Republican you know that's the exact upside down of what it was 40 years ago so and so depending on where the center of gravity is ideologically in those chambers and in those state houses you may you federalism in the immigration realm might lead to it like you kind of suggested a whole bunch of results that some people left the center wouldn't like at all so you can be careful what you ask for I think I'm gonna take the journalist cop out I tend to not prescribe or over analyze outside of my expertise well then I will close by reminding everybody that if you enjoyed this panel you can number one look up Ali's book there goes the neighborhood and you can keep an eye out for a Jude's forthcoming book which doesn't have a title yet but you can tweet suggested titles at her and or you can follow her reporting in Arizona and watch for the book and join me in thanking this terrific panel and join the panel for refreshments outside