 Good morning and welcome. I am Celeste Watkins Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Wildean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I'm also founding director of the Center for Racial Justice here at Ford. I'm delighted to welcome all of you here this morning for today's kickoff of the Ford School, School Inaugural's Dean Symposium. More on that word inaugural in a moment. When I became your Dean last summer, I hope to find an exciting and inspirational way to bring my networks of scholars and friends from my time as a student at Spellman and Harvard to my years on the faculty at Northwestern together with my new Ford School community all around how to shape public policy for the good. So this is the inaugural Dean Symposium, which I hope my successors will emulate to bring their networks together with this extraordinary Ford School community. We have what I hope will be an enlightening two days of conversation ahead looking at issues like the future of social policy, new policies in support of families and kids, the AI Bill of Rights in the future of technology policy, communicating climate change, racial justice and public policy and the state of democracy here in the US and around the world. We are lucky to have so many scholars and policymakers joining us here in Ann Arbor that you will meet over the next couple of days. And I wanna acknowledge a very special guest here, Robert and Sandra White, who are Regent White's parents who come to so many of our events who are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. Thank you for all the ways that you support me and all the ways that you support the Ford School. It just means the world to us. So it's exciting to see our Ford School community gathered here and welcome to the many of you from across campus and beyond tuning in virtually. Thank you all for coming. I hope you can take part in many of these conversations. Many of my colleagues have worked hard to put this together. I'm grateful to Luke Schaefer, Shobhata Parthasarathi, Caitlyn Raimi, Paula Lance, Jenna Bednar, Susan Page and other faculty members as well who have put these panels together and the staffs at Poverty Solutions, the Science and Technology and Public Policy Program, the Center for Racial Justice, the Wiser Diplomacy Center and many up more for their support. I also want to acknowledge our media partner, Detroit Public Television. Our first speaker is a good friend of the University of Michigan and of the Ford School. In fact, the first policymaker that I interfaced with when I started at the Ford School, I think within a month of my starting I was asked to interview you. So I'm so honored to welcome back Cecilia Munoz, a national leader in public policy and public interest technology with nearly three decades of experience in the nonprofit sector in eight years of service on President Obama's senior team, first as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs followed by five years as Director of Obama's Domestic Policy Council. She also led the Domestic and Economic Policy Team for the Biden-Harris Transition. Before working in government, she spent 20 years at the National Council of La Raza, now Unidos US, the nation's largest Hispanic Policy and Advocacy Organization. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000 for her work on immigration and civil rights and as a trustee of the Kresge, MacArthur and Joyce foundations. And importantly, she received her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, go blue. I am looking forward to speaking with her about the challenges of addressing social issues and policies in the current environment. Once Cecilia and I have spoken for a while, we'll open it up to the audience for questions. If you're watching online, please click the link on the webpage. If you're here in Wild Hall, please use the QR code on the cards that were distributed and my colleagues, Kellen Epstein and Ford School PhD candidate, Jamari Jackson will moderate. Thank you both. And if you are posting to social media, please use at Ford School and hashtag Dean's Symposium. With that, please join me in welcoming this morning's special guest, Cecilia Munoz. Thank you so much. Oh my gosh, thank you for being with me. I'm gonna move this way so that we can have a clear line of sight. I just wanna thank you for being here. And part of why I think so many of us are in this room and tuning in is because we understand the importance of public policy at this moment. And there's so many ways in which robust policy discussions that are evidence-based are taking a hit and public service is taking a hit. So I wonder if you can just kick off this two-day conversation with talking about the importance of policy in this very moment and the importance of policy work. What a great way to start. But I really have to start by thanking you so much for the opportunity to be here with all of you and to be part of really what looks like an amazing couple of days. And it's a real testament to your leadership as Dean and I'm excited to be celebrating that too. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I love coming back here. This is home for me. So thanks for the opportunity. It's pretty easy to be cynical about policymaking in this day and age. I mean, we have a lot that's broken in our democracy and I know we're gonna be spending some time during this symposium thinking about that. I honestly see that as a call to kind of double down. So we live in a democracy that means we make decisions together on extremely consequential things and our ability to do that breaks down. There's a lot that breaks down along with it. And there are, obviously we are bombarded every day with reasons for despair. But every day there are also real reasons for hope, extraordinary reasons for hope that there are many signs that public engagement in the process is actually on the increase at least in some communities. The process isn't just about what happens in Washington. Thank God, because what happens in Washington is a little bit of a mess. Or certainly what happens in Congress is a little bit of a mess. But even despite the mess, we have made progress in the sense that there, I mean, right now there are literally billions of dollars flowing towards energy conservation, renewable energy projects. We just had a nationwide, essentially public experiment with a child tax credit that reduced child poverty in half. Which is, think about that, that's extraordinary. And we are in a live conversation about extending that and that is a live bipartisan conversation. So even in this moment where it's pretty easy to lose hope, there are all kinds of signs of hope and we own this thing and we cannot afford to let it break. And public policy is a major tool, it's not the only tool, but it is a major tool through which we collectively address big problems and we have big problems to address. And we, it's not that, I mean, I think I have this conversation with my daughters a lot, my daughters are 28 and 31. They worry that we lack the capacity to solve our problems together. And I don't believe that we do. I think there are ways in which that capacity is atrophy. I think there are things to be concerned and alarmed about. But we have that capacity and our biggest enemy, honestly, is cynicism. And so in some ways a policy school is a great place to make the case. This is an endeavor worth undertaking. More so now, maybe, than ever. How do we combat the cynicism? If that is our biggest enemy or our biggest challenge, how do we begin to address that? I would say two things. I just had a conversation with a wonderful group of students this morning that was really lovely and heartening. And one of the things we talked about was joy. And I'm a big believer in joy as kind of part of this nerdy thing that we do, which is making public policy. There are, honestly, I know this is, I mean, I guess I can say it in this audience. It is an inherently nerdy enterprise. I label myself as a policy nerd with great pride. I also think there's inherent joy in this process because to do it well means to connect with community, right? To do it well means if we're having a conversation about picking issue, expanding access to childcare, the tools to get it done include connecting at a community level, include amassing the data, the evidence base for why it's important what the return on investment is. But it also means spending time in schools, with kids, in communities, with parents. And it means making connections between those things and the people who are making decisions in legislatures, in the executive branch. And through all kinds of stages of that process, there are ample opportunities for joy. There really are. And of course, when you're able to accomplish something for people, there's nothing more satisfying than that. So I think joy is a big part of the answer to combating cynicism. But the other is to remind ourselves of the progress that we're able to make, to step away from the yelling and the despair that we are spoon fed every day because I really don't believe that's an accurate picture of where we are. I think it's like a magnifying glass and if you live with that magnified image, it's pretty easy to just retreat. But at every level in our cities, in many states, maybe not all states of the union, and even at the federal level, there are important indications of progress if you're looking for them. And they're there to be found. There are good people rolling up their sleeves, doing extraordinary things in the United States every day. And it is really hard to be cynical if you put yourself in the presence of that. But sometimes you have to try to put yourself in the presence of that, but it's not that hard. So much of what I hear you saying is part of what motivates you, and I believe many people in this room, towards policy engagement, and that is the joy, that is the desire to connect, that is the desire to move things forward. It seems in our climate right now, we have so many folks who seem to be motivated by other kind of core principles, whether it's power, whether it's money, whether it's kind of the consolidation of what's mine, if you will. How do we respond to that? So it's a different kind of joy, I guess we could say. Motivated around very different things and very different values and priorities. How do we respond to that? So what I think of is the community-focused joy, which is about connection and about, quite literally, my ability to participate in a thing which lifts us all up, and our ability collectively to participate in a thing which lifts us all up, I want that to be bigger than whatever joy people are getting around power or money. And I think it's possible for it to be bigger and more powerful, but you have to believe that and you have to show up. So I think that's one answer to your question. I also think it is harder in this environment to call out the kind of brazen, this is about power, because we no longer have one place where we're receiving information. So instead of having a national conversation, we're having gazillions of national conversations down very narrow avenues. That makes it harder to lift up things which are brazen, things which are unproductive, things which are negative, things which undercut us. So I think we are, and we are learning how to manage the environment that we're in. But we're beginning to see, I mean, I feel like in the, I don't know, 15 years since I went into government, yeah, I guess President Obama won the election 15 years ago. So that's, I'm old enough to think that's not a lot of time. Maybe it is a lot of time. But we have gone from seeing technology as the great democratizer, that was gonna help answer a lot of things to the thing which undercuts democracy profoundly. And now, and I know you're gonna have Alondra Nelson here to lead this conversation. Now that conversation is morphing towards we are both skeptical, there is tremendous possibility tremendous danger, technology, AI in particular is like this giant amplifier of human potential for good and for evil, right? So we've, just in 15 years, we've been in like multiple different places as technology develops. So we're learning how to live in a democracy in this environment with these tools that are reshaping so much. And we have to be deliberate about learning how to have one conversation, lift up what it is we wanna be and what it is we don't wanna be. But I, through all of that, I continue to believe that the power of collective action is among the things that will save multiracial democracy both in this country and on the planet. But we have to believe that that's possible in order to show up. And among the things you mentioned, you mentioned power, you mentioned money, I would add, you mentioned losing what's mine, I would add hate to that, which is becoming really quite a powerful force in our politics. That's not new in America. I think we have to be deliberate about countering that. Again, seeing it for what it is. And I had this conversation with students this morning and not, we need to kind of out love it, honestly. And I've mentioned, I have a hard time talking about that, but I actually think it's essential. Again, because a democracy requires us to be a collective and hate isn't great for a collective. I wonder, as we're absorbing your really thoughtful remarks, if you could take us through your trajectory as we hear from you and as we listen to you, starting at the University of Michigan, you're actually from the state of Michigan. Ethnic studies was a part of your field of study. I was in a black studies department for many, many years at Northwestern. Some of my colleagues are here today. And I wonder if you can take us through from your time at Michigan and what you studied, your time at La Raza and your kind of movement towards Washington, D.C. I wonder if you could just take us on that journey so that we understand more of your process and your journey. So the journey actually to Michigan actually starts with my grandfather who's a Bolivian man who got his master's in engineering at the University of Michigan in the 20s, sent his sons, including my dad. My dad was here in the 40s at Michigan. So I'm the first generation of my family to be born in the United States. I'm the third generation to graduate from Michigan. And one of my daughters went here. So we're a four generation family. I came here as a, I studied Latin American studies and English literature actually. I'm a literature person. Did graduate work at UC Berkeley also in Latin American studies, also focusing on literature. And came out of that experience really, I volunteered at a legal services clinic while I lived in California. And left with a conviction, came back to the Midwest, I came to Chicago, came back to the Midwest with a conviction that what I wanted to do was direct services. And I worked for the Archdiocese of Chicago in a program providing services to immigrants. As I mentioned to the students this morning, discovered that I was not meant for that work. And that's really important. Sometimes you find your path by finding what is not your path. But I found my voice as an advocate doing that work. And that took me to the National Council of Arrasa to DC in 1988. I started there as their immigration policy person. I was there for 20 years and I learned the craft. I'm embarrassed to say this in a policy school, especially when it's distinguished as this one because I am not the graduate of a policy school. I learned the craft of policy making on the job. At NCLR, taught by really wonderful self-taught people. And this was at a time when, this is 1988, the first US census with any degree of accuracy and counting Hispanic Americans was in 1980. So we were working with the first data set that even allowed us to quantify what was our educational status, what was our economic status. And so our job, a big piece of the job was what I think of as Latinos 101, like literally explaining to policy makers, this is who we are, here we are. This is how many of us there are, this is where we live. And we knew, because it was a community organization, we knew we had challenges with respect to education, with respect to poverty, with respect to civil rights. But we were able to quantify them for the very first time in the 80s. And so we were literally educating ourselves and educating the media and policy makers. And then on the basis of what the data showed, crafting a policy agenda and trying to enact it. And at the time, one of the great revelations that the data taught us was that poverty in the Latino community was not explained by being out of work, it was explained by the kind of work that we had. We had both the highest labor force participation in the country and among the highest poverty rates. And that was because of the kind of work, right? And so that's an important insight. That's a prime example of what data can show you that then helps you craft an agenda. So I learned how to do all of that there. I helped build coalitions that passed really important immigration policies and other things. And because I ended up overseeing the public policy division, I learned education policy and healthcare policy and a bunch of other things. And so I was leading the public policy division there after 20 years when I was approached by the president-elect, President Obama, to my astonishment to go work in the White House, which I resisted because I had teenage girls at home and my mother had recently passed away. But I got my arm twisted and I ended up in the White House to my utter astonishment. And I was there for eight years, those are dog years. Let me just tell you it's really intense work. It was an amazing experience. Also a really super challenging experience. I don't regret it for a second, but it took a lot out of me. So I was for three years responsible for the president's relationships with state, local, and tribal governments. But he asked me to come also because of what I knew about immigration and because he wanted immigration reform to pass. So I was responsible for immigration policy for all eight years. I did five years at domestic policy. I'm so far the country's longest serving domestic policy advisor to president. That's crazy. First Hispanic person in that role had to overcome a lot of self-doubt and other people's doubts. But again, learned a tremendous amount and had a hand in a lot of what I think of as really quite important policy making. And since then, when I left government, I moved to a think tank called New America and did a bunch of work on public interest technology, which I understand is the intersection between the skills of technologists. It's not actually about technology itself. It's about this skillset that people in the Silicon Valley and other places have applied to the art of delivering public policy, which was really, happened because the healthcare website failed. Remember healthcare.gov? And for three really horrifying weeks, it wasn't working. And then we fixed it and then 20 million people got healthcare, like don't forget that part of the story. But what we learned from that is that government is not good at stuff which people in the Silicon Valley do before breakfast. And it's not an engineering problem, it's a management problem. And we went about then creating something called the US Digital Service and recruiting people with this skillset to come work in government. And I got a huge education in the piece that policymakers frequently don't think about, which is delivery. Like if you pass a tax credit that's supposed to benefit poor people, the earned income tax credit as an example, hugely important piece of policy has lifted tens of millions of families out of poverty and regularly 20% of the people who are eligible don't access it. We've been treating it as an outreach problem for years and years and years and clearly there's an outreach element to the problem. But it's also a delivery problem. And we're only more recently applying those skills to reaching people. And there are lots of solutions available here that we haven't tried, that we could. And so I kind of signed up in that field and I did that for about six years. I'm still helping with a project there called the New Practice Lab, which is using that skillset over the next five years to help three million families with kids under six. And then I work with an incubator for new nonprofits now. So I've described this as, I mean, I had a friend of mine calls this the Yoda phase of my career. Yeah, in the full circle, which we're returning back to those organizations where you started. So I sit on some boards of philanthropies and I'm helping incubate nonprofits that are tackling big problems. And it's kind of putting all of the things I've learned over all of those years to work together. You talked about your extensive history working on immigration. It's something that you said President Obama wanted immigration reform and that's part of why he was interested in having you in the White House. And it's a deja vu moment obviously where we are in a seemingly intractable situation as it relates to our immigration policy and trying to get something passed. Can you talk a little bit about that being someone who has worked to try to pass immigration reform. What are the struggles around it? What advice would you offer us? Yeah. Unpack that situation with that first, please. The last major immigration reform that was passed by the Congress of the United States was in the 1990s. I worked on that bill. We haven't meaningfully reformed immigration since then. So like Google was not a thing the last time we reformed immigration. Right, that gives you a sense of, like we weren't emailing each other last time we passed a major immigration reform. That's how old and rickety our system is. We have on multiple occasions since then attempted to pass bipartisan immigration reforms. We've come very close twice in 2006, 2007 and again in 2013. And the reason, the single reason that we haven't passed a reform, again, these are bipartisan reforms. They tended to pull at like 85% public support. It is political. We don't have a substantive problem. It's a political problem. And it's a problem on the Republican side. Which is, that's not a partisan statement although I obviously work for a Democratic president. It's just true. The bill that passed the Senate in 2013 with 68 votes didn't go through the House. Not because it didn't have the votes. It had 218, we know that it did. The speaker of the House at the time, John Boehner, never brought it to the floor. And the reason that he didn't was because the coalition that at least then was available to pass an immigration bill was most of the Democrats and some of the Republicans. And that's where the 218 votes come from. And the speaker felt and he was probably right that if he did that, the next vote in his caucus would be to oust him as speaker because a majority of his caucus doesn't support it. And that is the reason we don't have an immigration and updated immigration system. And the way the politics works now, so there was a recent bipartisan agreement which is that rarest of things, right? Members of both parties agreeing to a package on a really difficult topic. Again, had votes. The reason that it didn't come up for a vote in both chambers was political. I have trouble saying his name, but I'll say it, former President Trump blew up the bill because he did not want something that felt like a victory for the current president. And so his party bailed, and so we don't have a bill. And the challenge at the moment is that Republicans would rather have an issue than have a solution. And that is why that bill broke up. And that's what, at the moment, it's what's preventing us from legislative progress on immigration. So that's kind of reform of the legal immigration system and the answer for undocumented immigrants living in the US. We also obviously have a tremendous challenge at our border. And the solutions for that also run straight through the Congress of the United States. There are solutions available, but you need Congress and we're not gonna have Congress, which means that this awful dynamic that we're experiencing is gonna continue. And what I, among the many things I'm frustrated by in this space is that we have a hard time having a rational conversation about it. It's a lot of emotion and not a lot of facts or solutions oriented thinking. And the pressure that we're experiencing at the border gets talked about and kind of thought about from a policy perspective as like it's an emergency crisis. And of course it is, but that means that we also don't apply kind of long-term thinking and we need to apply long-term thinking. One, because the long, there's the solution set is a long-term solution set. It's there aren't like immediate levers that you can pull. And we need the capacity to make policy decisions for a long time horizon. But also it's gonna get worse. This is not a one-time emergency. In some ways this is, you can think of it as like the beginning of climate migration. So that's not gonna get better. And so we need to grow up and develop some capacity to deal with it. And the growing up needs to happen frankly at every point of the policy process, including the advocacy community and the policy makers. But there are solutions here. We just have to be grown-ups, which is hard. And meanwhile, just the trauma that people are experiencing as they navigate this, having families on both sides of the border, what we see happening on the border, all of that, how do we also, and this is a part that I don't know that we talk as much about, which is the ripple effects for families, for communities, for communities on the border. Talk a little bit about those. And this kind of goes back to some of the early work you did when you were working directly with communities that were being affected. Yeah, I mean it's, there's obviously a whole host of things we can talk about with respect to what migrants themselves go through. I mean, the hardest thing I worked on when I was in government was we had a crisis and a rise in the number of unaccompanied migrant children, which that was the one time in government where I needed to cry for 10 minutes at the end of every day just to work it out of my system and be able to continue my work. But think about that for a minute. The average age at the time was 13 or 14, which right means that some kids were younger, some kids were older than that. Think about that, that there's the children traveling alone or with smugglers. So there's a whole human dimension to this, which is profound. And important. And of course, there are policy dimensions to this issue, which actually gets me to the one, a big, big source of hope that I have in this issue. One of the organizations that I helped found with this incubator for new organizations is called welcome.us. And it was founded on this notion that because of climate migration, the world is gonna need to get better at welcoming people. And the world ain't gonna get better at welcoming people if we can't get better at welcoming people in the United States. So we were trying to create new avenues for regular folks to sponsor refugees and migrants. This is a couple years ago. Just before actually we were playing around with community sponsorship of refugees right before the US withdrew from Afghanistan. And suddenly there were 85,000 Afghan evacuees who needed to be resettled all at once. So we and many others engaged a big chunk of civil society in supporting those 85,000 people. So it's like veterans groups and like the Rotary Club of America, like all kinds of really interesting folks who had not been, they weren't like immigration and refugee people stood up to help these folks. So that was amazing. And on the basis of the success of that, when Russia invaded Ukraine, some people from Ukraine started coming to the US-Mexico border, because it's the only way in. And the administration quietly asked us if we were to use humanitarian visas for Ukrainians, if we could say you could get a humanitarian visa to come if there is a sponsor in the US to receive you. They were like, do you think that could work? They said, we're thinking of maybe 10,000 visas. And we said, don't cap it because we think we can do 10 times that. To date, 300,000 Americans have stepped forward to sponsor Ukrainians and about 200,000 have arrived with sponsors. On the basis of the success of that, because there were Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans also coming to the border, the administration said, what if we ran the same play for people from those countries? For a variety of reasons, those are places we don't deport people to. And they did. So they now have a program. There's 30,000 humanitarian visas available to people from those four countries if they have a sponsor in the US. And to date, two million Americans have stepped forward. The people who've signed up to be sponsors come from every state in the union and 11,000 zip codes. And they're not immigration people. They're not thinking about the politics of this issue. They're coming at this from, these are people in a moment of need. And I can be a welcomeer. And what they are taking on is enormous. But what's interesting, so about a half a million people have come this way in the last couple of years, which is a big number. And there are no mayors complaining about it. There is no crisis associated with it. And the reason for that is that there's someone who greets you at the airport and has figured out your housing and is helping enroll your kids in school and helping you find a job because this visa comes with work authorization. So this is what this tells me is there is a solution set available. And turns out the solution set is us. It's not a government program. It's the generosity and ingenuity of the American people. And it turns out we still have that even now. So that gives me a tremendous amount of hope. And that it speaks to what we are capable of even now on this issue. And I was sort of humbled. I'm an immigration person. I've been doing this for a long time. The messaging that resonates the most here is not about people in their moment of need, although that's important. The messaging that resonates the most is about us as welcomeers and who we want to be. And I find that very powerful. And so there's all kinds of good people and their politics are probably different than mine. And I am great with that because they're willing to welcome a family and that's what we need. And it turns out we are capable of that. We're doing it right now. Right, right. And I bet that's a policy that many people did not know about. Well, that's right. And it's not in the news very much because it doesn't fit the narrative. What the reporters are covering is the yelling. And it's not that that's not important. But this is one heck of a good news, we can fix it story. And nobody knows it. That tells you something too. So we've talked about everyday citizens who are engaging. We've talked about policy makers. Let's talk a little bit about civil servants or what I kind of began my career studying, quote unquote bureaucrats, government bureaucrats. And regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, and we'll start to talk a little bit more about that, there are two very different visions for the role of public servants. And plans like the Heritage Foundation's 2025 plan, you know, on the left, people are thinking about the government service workforce in very, very different ways and pipeline. Can you lay out that debate? Because now there's all of this attention on public servants. Yep. This is so important. It's absolutely fundamental to our ability to survive as a democracy. And I sit on the board of an organization called Protect Democracy, which focuses on this. It was founded by a couple of colleagues that I worked with in the Obama years. They worked in the White House Counsel's office. And when President Trump was elected, they did an analysis of like, what are the signs that autocracy is taking hold and plotted them against, are there people working on that thing? Like one of the signs has to do with the judiciary. There are groups who work on the judiciary. One of the signs is what happens to the civil service. And there weren't organizations working on that. So that's one of the things that this organization does. And the reason that civil service is so essential to democracy is that they are, these are career folks, whose job is to follow the law. And they are not political appointees. They don't come in with a specific agenda. So I served as a political appointee under President Obama. I was limited in what I could tell the career folks to do because the reason I was there had to do with the election and its results. And the reason they are there has to do with the functioning of government. And adherence to the law no matter what. Not that political appointees. I mean, we also swear to uphold the law, by the way, and that's kind of important. But the civil service is, the job is to be there no matter what and to implement the stuff no matter what. And their job changes if you change the law. Their job doesn't change if you change the president. And that is essential if a democracy is gonna survive. And so the plan to try to fire a bunch of huge numbers of civil servants. That's the Heritage Foundation's plan. That's the assumption is that this is what a next Trump presidency would do. The reason to do that is to infuse politics into the inner workings of government. And we know from experience that could be in defiance of the law, right? So a civil service is how you stay true to the rule of law as a central principle of government. And it turns out that the reason that's important, I mean, it's a thing that we, I think maybe didn't think we had to think about. Is that if you don't have the rule of law and structures that are faithful to the rule of law, then you're down to the whims of a guy. And we have a sense now of what that looks like. And I wouldn't wanna be subject to the whims of my guy any more than I would wanna be subject to the whims of another. Like the rule of law turns out to be tremendously important. That's how we survive as a democracy. And civil servants are essential to that. So the conversation about what happens if we get to a place where the whole infrastructure of government turns over when we change parties, think of the institutional memory you lose. Think of the capacity to run fundamental things like nutrition programs or student aid to name something that's very much in the news. Like if you are losing that capacity with each four years, you almost can't function. And when I started in government, one of the things I was responsible for for a variety of reasons had to do with the territories of the United States, Puerto Rico, which is a territory of the United States. And we can have a whole conversation about what that means, but its entire government changes over every time the governorship changes hands. And it makes it really hard to do anything, to administer housing policy, to administer education policy, because they lose all their institutional memory every time that the party changes hands, that the governorship changes hands. And that's, I was able to witness how much that bollocks up just the ability to get basic things done. That's not what we want for our country. Can't be. Yeah. I wonder if you can comment on the next panel after this is on social policy, and I see some of our panelists in the audience, where we'll be talking about policies for families and kids as well. Some focus on families in general, some focus on kids, some focus on a variety of different things within that, health, education, et cetera. I wonder, it's interesting because social policy is so much bread and butter of people's lived experiences, but it's an issue that I think we could do a lot more to educate people about. So that during an election season, they understand the implications down to social policy. Yes, it's about the economy. Yes, it's about the stuff that you see in the headlines, but it's also about some of those kind of everyday issues of how easy it is to live your life. I wonder if you can kind of tee us up for this conversation on social policy. It couldn't be more important. And I actually think we have, I don't know that we collectively are responsible for this, but we have fallen into this notion that kind of hardcore economic issues, whatever those are, come first, and then maybe we can get to social policy. Like that's a little bit the order of things, at least at the way it shows up in Washington. I think of it, this is a shorthand that I'm not entirely comfortable using, but you will understand what I mean when I say it, it's like the hard economic issues are like the stuff that the guys work on in social policy is the girly stuff, right? They're for less important, they're for a little softer, just maybe not as hardcore as like the stuff which drives our economy. But come on, childcare and caregiving, of course drives our economy. It is a hardcore economic issue. And so that, I think we are seeing movements begin to assert a different philosophy around social policy, which is like, oh, and by the way, like we can't function unless we take care of this stuff. And part of the way we have been functioning is because some of the humans involved here are just taking it on their shoulders, but they are breaking, right? Caregiving, people who act as caregivers either to children or to parents, people who work in our early childhood education, who don't earn enough to support their own families. Like we are surviving through systems which are cracking, breaking, broken. And that stuff, if it works, is actually what makes the economy go. Like it's actually how you get the workers you need in the workforce. So we've kind of allowed this distinction to govern our policymaking and our conversations and we can't re-end do that anymore. And I'm very excited by kind of what's happening in the debate around caregiving and care, right? So we had this whole, it was in President Biden's Build Back Better philosophy. It was in the initial legislation. That was a breakthrough. And then Congress got its hands on it and it had to do some cutting and guess what got cut, right? The whole caregiving piece got excised. But that community is not giving up. We've just had a month-long focus on it in Washington. President just showed up at an event earlier this week. And it is getting harder to back away from the inescapable fact that this is essential to our economy. And so that's how you get there. And that gives me, again, that gives me a lot of hope. And I love that framing of that is the engine that drives the economy. The ability for people to support themselves and their families and find caregivers and all of that. Yeah. Or to be caregivers. And to be caregivers. Yeah, well, wonderful. I wonder if we can turn it over to Kellen and to Jamari for some questions from the audience. Checking if my mic is on. So thank you Cecilia Munoz and Dean Watkins Hayes for this wonderful and generative discussion. So we have some great questions asked from the audience. And to get us started, Ms. Munoz, would you be willing to talk about how being a woman and being Latina has impacted and made a difference in your career? And if you're comfortable, would you be willing to share some specific examples of these differences and impacts? Yeah, how being a Latina has shaped my career. So, like I, where do I even begin? It's obviously fundamental to who I am. It's like also asking how being a woman has shaped my career. It's fundamental to who I am. And to what I do, like I started out and still am an advocate for my own community, that the Latinos 101 thing that I described is not a thing you ever have to stop doing. I had a conversation with a student just today that like we're the largest minority in the country but most of the country doesn't know that. And we're kind of still absent from a, except for the immigration conversation. We're kind of absent from the other conversations that we should be part of and that needs to change. So in some respects, it has opened a lot of doors for me in the sense that I worked in an institution in my community. And so I've had this amazing opportunity to have like who I am and what I do be like completely aligned. And then I walk into the White House. Unfortunately, I was working for President Obama, who I didn't have to explain to him my community was important. And so that wasn't really nice. But I also encountered, and I have encountered throughout my career, people who believe that I was where I was as the shorthand for it is as affirmative action hire. And I told the story to students this morning. I wrote a book where I also tell this story where one of the five chiefs of staff, White House chief of staff that I worked under was not excited that I was promoted from intergovernmental affairs to domestic policy. He told a couple of reporters who wrote books and in their books he basically said, the reason he left, my promotion was a last straw. And he implied that I got the domestic policy job as an affirmative action hire. And so it was sort of a bummer that I read those books. And it cost me some confidence, honestly, because I really had to ask myself, I'm sitting around the chief of staff's table every morning under the next, there were two chief of staffs that I served under after him. And I thought, man, that's what the last one thought. How do I know that's not what everybody around this table thinks? And what do I do with that? I'm in this job. It helped a lot that I knew that's not what the president thought. So that comes in handy. But I did have to develop strategies to, I think of it as like the scaffolding that I could lean back on when I did not feel confident. And that scaffolding consisted of relentless preparation. I tried never to walk into a meeting without being prepared from A to Z backwards and forwards. Like the pressure to not make a mistake for someone in that position is really great because if you make a mistake it's not just that, you don't get to have a bad day. Because if you have a bad day, then all of Latinohood is having a bad day. And you can't do that. So ultra preparation. And then I built a cadre of people from whom I could ask for feedback. So Valerie Jarrett was one of those people, senior advisor to the president. She was my boss for the first three years, a woman of color herself, so she knows the drill. I could go in her office and close the door and say, oh my God, that meeting just now. Like, where did I go off the rails? What did you see that I didn't see? And I knew she would tell me, right? So I didn't need her as a cheerleader, although she was a cheerleader. I mean, I needed her to be honest with me. And I knew she would be. And I've learned that it is not a sign of weakness to ask for feedback, although I would not have asked for feedback, say from the chief of staff who didn't believe in me, for example. But I did identify people that I knew I could ask for feedback from, and I would. And I decided it's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. What I'm communicating is, turns out I am aware that I am human and that there's stuff I can do to up my game. And I need you to tell me what I need to do to up my game. So those two strategies served me really well when I knew I could rely on those things when I was not sure of myself, which was a lot. And in your book, More Than Ready, you talk about also when the critique was coming from within the community. So as head of the Domestic Policy Council, there are ways in which there's an expectation from within the community of why can't you do this? You're not moving fast enough on that. You're not doing enough. And how did you navigate that? Because the reality is, you are in a role that is not boundless. There are constraints, there are policies, there are procedures. There's things in which there's needles you can move and there's needles you can only move so much and there's new needles you can't move. How did you grapple with that piece of it? I got a lot of it. I mean, if you Google me now, please don't do it now. You'll find many people from my own community who believe that I was responsible for immigration enforcement in the Obama years. And I was responsible for policymaking, but that who will never forgive me for what they see as a very destructive role. And I knew that that was gonna happen when I went in and I, so I accepted that. And it happens, I think, to anybody who is closely associated with the community in a position like that. There are people who will always ask how come President Obama didn't do more for African Americans? And I think the answer is that he did a lot and that he was also being president of the whole country. But for me, what I found most useful was to have real clarity on my North Star and to have my North Star be about what I was working on and not be about whether I was loved. I had a good friend gave me excellent advice and what he said was, get your love at home, right? In other words, if you're looking for it at work, you're gonna make decisions that are attuned to being popular, being loved, having, getting, adulation, whatever it is. But if you're getting it at home, sure of who you are and whoever your people are or sure of who you are, and I'm blessed to have that in my life, then you don't need to get it at work and you can stay focused on the mission. And that was essential to my being able to look at myself in the mirror every day. And I definitely worked around people who were looking for that kind of reinforcement at work. And there is always a point at which you make a decision which is not on task. And that ultimately doesn't serve the country well because you wanna be loved. And I tried very hard not to do that and I paid a price for it, but I, that's all right. Cause I was getting my love at home, I'm okay. Yeah. Next question. Cecilia, thank you again for being here. So you've already spoken today about what we might anticipate moving forward in terms, in the immigration space, in terms of climate migration, kind of putting the onus into the American citizens hands who it sounds like are willing and able to step up. Is there anything else that you can add about where you see immigration reform going in the future and what you think needs to happen? Yeah. So I, aside from the remarkable progress that I already outlined, I don't expect a lot of policy progress in the immediate term like Congress is what it is and it's kind of a catastrophe. But the thing that we need to work on and it needs to happen in movement, in the advocacy community as well in order for it to even have a shot in Congress, honestly has to do with what happens with our asylum system, which is broken. Like that is unfortunately contributing to what happens at the border in a really profound way. So people are putting themselves in the hands of smugglers. Who are saying to them, we'll pay us the money, we'll take you on this dangerous trip and then you look for someone in the border patrol and you tell them that you're scared to go back and once you do that, you're in. And it's true. And the reason that it's true is because you won't get an asylum hearing for five years, seven years and by that time, you've spent a long time in the U.S. It's pretty hard to remove you. And that's true for a good reason. It's really important that we give people the ability to make an asylum case, like that is important to the safety and security of people who are truly in danger. But it is not intended to be a pathway for people who are fleeing a country that has fallen apart who are coming for economic opportunity, who are fleeing because the coffee crop in Guatemala failed, like these are profound reasons and to have so many people on the move is a profound thing. But our asylum system was built for the Cold War, it's not built for that. And we, you can think of it as, and the advocacy community is thinking of it as for understandable good and noble reasons. We are preserving a principle that if you were fleeing, you should be able to ask for protection. And I believe in that principle, it's really important. I also think it is on the verge of crumbling into dust unless we create a more rational system that I don't think it can survive our politics. Because, so one way to think about it is we're preserving a principle. Another way to think about it is much of the world is going in the direction of like the conversation in the UK, which is people wanna come here for protection, we would like to send them to Rwanda and let them rot there so that we don't have to deal with them. That's the conversation in the UK. Policy makers and the public are really quite comfortable with that conversation. Maybe the courts, which saves us from that, maybe. But that is actually, I believe where we are heading in the United States. And so the other way to think about it is if we are gonna forestall that, we gotta get on the case and fix what's broken. And that means making terrible judgment calls and terrible trade-offs. And for understandable reasons, the advocacy community doesn't wanna do that. And it is easier to fight for the principle. But I think we're gonna lose unless we get more strategic. So that is, I think, the conversation that we vitally need to have because what we're seeing is not gonna slow down. Could you discuss how federal policy levers be leveraged to advance state investment in action on social policy issues, including P through 16 education policy? Right, so these are, this is the areas of policy where we really, where states have disinvested over a long period of time and sort of P through 16, the educational system is the classic example, which used to be supported here in Michigan by a much greater proportion of state funds than currently. It's the reason that to wish they had a place like this gets expensive, right? It's because the state has disinvested and that's true, repeated all over the country. And in the K-12 system, we have the same problem. The corollary and one of the ways that the federal government and federal policy creates incentives is by dangling matching funds. But the, you know, a recent, relatively recent example of that is the Affordable Care Act, right? Well, one of the ways where we attempted to expand eligibility for healthcare was to expand Medicaid and to say to the states who administer their Medicaid programs, the federal government has this big bolus of money and you can come take some, like we will match, which you, in fact, it was a two to one match initially, expand Medicaid eligibility and the feds will give you a bunch of money to do it. And because Obamacare was politicized, to this day, a bunch of states have, you know, rather than take federal money to expand their Medicaid systems and cover more people, they just won't do it, though they'd rather let people not have healthcare. And there's about a million people now who would have coverage but don't because they live in states which have refused the federal money. So unfortunately what that means is that, at least in some cases, where there is a federal match, even that won't induce states to take on a thing if it's become politicized. And it's hard to predict what's gonna become politicized because we're a little crazy. I don't, however, going back to what I said before, I believe that social movements can have an impact on this. That ultimately people who are paying taxes and have priorities can have a say on where their states are investing money. And whether or not education is a priority should be self-evident. And it's not just social movements. It's also employers who kind of know, like the business community knows, that if you don't have a great educational system in a state, it's gonna be pretty hard to recruit the workers that you need. And so there are sectors that are aligned, but it does mean that we need those voices to be willing to say out loud that that requires tax policy, that requires raising money and spending money. And we've gotten uncomfortable with those conversations in the United States. And I think we need to get more comfortable, especially when it comes to education. At pre-K, all the way through K-12, all the way through higher ed. There's no reason we can't do that except we're a little timid. So you've already spoken to part of the second half of the question, but I'm gonna ask the whole thing just to make sure I'm not missing anything. Obama has been called the deporter-in-chief by immigrant rights advocacy organizations. What do you make of this criticism and what immigration policies would you propose today? So he wasn't just called the deporter-in-chief by immigrant advocacy organizations, he was called the deporter-in-chief by my former boss, a woman named Janet Marguia who runs Unido CUS who is like my sister. So that was a little painful. So it is accurate that the numbers of people who moved from the United States went up in the Obama years, especially the early Obama years, that is true. It is also true that the vast majority of those people were recent arrivals to the United States. So the enforcement priorities that President Obama put forward were, the old way of doing immigration enforcement was immigration authorities go after anybody they could find. And so they would go about finding people by raiding workplaces and literally hanging in the Walmart parking lot waiting for the shifts to change. Like that was the enforcement approach. The Obama administration shifted that and did workplace raids and basically said we're gonna focus on people who are, undocumented people who are convicted of serious crimes and recent arrivals on the theory that it's more humane to remove somebody who's been here two weeks than it is to remove somebody who's been here 20 years and is otherwise contributing in the community. So that's who those people were that got removed. But the number was a big number and folks focused on that. And we're less focused on the sort of the quantitative if you will, the like what was contained within that number. But nevertheless the media being what it is and in some ways the advocacy energy being what it is that moniker's gonna stick. It's probably gonna be somewhere in what gets written about him long after the fact. And that is what it is. I don't, the policy decisions we made about how to conduct immigration enforcement were important. I think whether we conduct immigration enforcement is not on offer as a policy, right? In other words, it's like that's not a binary. Yes, we're gonna do it or no, we're not. It's all about how and I feel pretty good about the policy choices we made about how, including DACA by the way, which is an exercise in immigration enforcement authority. What DACA is is to say, some people are gonna be our priorities for enforcement, people convicted of crimes and recent arrivals. And some people are not, including people who were brought as children and have grown up and no other country except the United States. It's not a benefit program, it's an exercise in enforcement authority and I'm pretty proud of those judgments. So the Latinx community is becoming increasingly heterogeneous from liberal and conservative attitudes on social and economic issues to differing geographic trends to even divergent attitudes on immigration policy. Is there a way of addressing that population as a block and how can policy makers work within that diversity? Yeah, what a great question. So it turns out, so my community is really diverse and that's always been true. And it's really diverse in the sense that we have, Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, Dominicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, I'm a Bolivian. So we have a lot of diversity in terms of what our origins are. We have the native born, which is the majority and foreign born from lots of different places. But we have never not had ideological diversity. That's always been true. When I first got to DC now, well more than 30 years ago, which might as well be a million years ago, the people who it was hardest to get on board with policies to legalize the undocumented were the Mexican-American Congressional representatives from Texas who were Democrats. It turns out that the people who felt the most threatened by the people who were coming were their co-ethnics who were living in the same state. So that hasn't. There's been some ebbs and flows, but the larger trend has always been thus and will continue to be thus. The thing which is perplexing people now is that Latino males in particular are kind of gravitating towards President Trump. And so there have been key moments where folks espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric have lost the support of Latino community wholesale. Classic example of that was Governor Pete Wilson in California put forward a ballot initiative that was extremely harsh and that the response and engagement as a result of that ballot initiative actually turned California blue. It wasn't a blue state before that, if you can remember. If you're old enough to remember when there were Republican governors of California and Republican legislature. So we have had moments like that where we collectively got angry and you would think this could be some such moment and it's not. And it turns out we're kind of not unlike the rest of America that way. And the thing which plagues us in political circles is that we are really only understood through the lens of immigration policy. Like you only really think about us when you're talking about immigration. And it turns out we're a little more well rounded than that. And we care about the state of the economy and we care about education, we care about healthcare and we care about where we are more likely to be entrepreneurs than other communities like we have complexity and the political, the media doesn't really focus on our complexity and neither does the political world. And there is a really great organization run by someone who I greatly admire named Stephanie Valencia the organization is called ECHIS. And it does a bunch of things. And one of the things that it does is really, really good demographic data gathering with respect to what's actually really going on in our community. And I highly recommend them if you're interested in this topic. So another question we received is don't we need to rebrand immigration? It's not just border chaos. The country needs immigrants always has. We need talent acquisition as well as a better border process. How can we get people to look at the wider picture? Oh my goodness. If there were an easy answer to this, I'm sure we would have found it already. So what the questioner asks is completely true. The business community knows we need immigrants. Economists know we need immigrants. People who are thinking in terms of who we need to be in the future know that like the, and who we've been in the past understand that this is a thing which has provided us energy and vitality and economic growth and like all of the things that we want. And has not provided all the things that we're afraid of. Crime or dependence on benefits or threats to the English, the dominance of English as our common language. Like none of that is materialized. So all that is true but the emotion around immigration makes it kind of a fact free zone which is very frustrating. But I've also learned that there's a former colleague of mine who worked in the White House who ran President Obama's first campaign, a guy named David Pluff used to refer to that there's like a permission structure that you gotta get to before you can have the conversation you wanna have. And in this case the permission structure is the border. Like people really, and I think the American people may not be so unreasonable in this respect. Like they're regular folks, good folks, have the right to expect that the government will manage this in a way that's orderly and fair and hopefully humane. Like hopefully we want that too. And that's why it's so vitally important to some people in Congress to prevent congressional action from making sure that that happens. Cause if people are kind of satisfied that it's orderly and fair and that is totally within our reach, then we can have the conversation about like how to expand immigration in the way that suits our interests. But as long as this thing feels like it's in crisis, we don't have the permission structure to have the broader immigration conversation. And that's why we have an action. So you mentioned Puerto Rico during your talk. What do you think is the solution to the government instability in Puerto Rico and the lack of representation that US citizens living in Puerto Rico have in the federal government? Oh, I wish this one had an easy answer too. So I just, it is really a travesty of justice in so many ways that Puerto Ricans are American citizens who don't have the same rights as other American citizens and who don't have the same access to benefits as other American citizens. We quite literally give them less Medicaid and less food stamps and less other stuff. And the minute you raise the conversation about let's assume that Puerto Rico were to become a state and treated like other states in the union, it turns out it's expensive. And that's a big reason that conversation hasn't progressed. And it's from a justice standpoint, it's pretty hard to defend. I would add the District of Columbia, by the way, to that justice perspective, also just like don't even get me started about these American citizens who just are treated as less than, period. I mean, there have been times when we felt we could make progress by like pairing places to see if like, because if the issue is or you make a place a state, then they get like senators and that might throw the political balance off, right? We got Hawaii and Alaska on the assumption that they would kind of balance each other out. So there have been attempts to sort of do that in the past. But again, this is, it's highly politicized and I'm sorry, it's highly racialized. Puerto Ricans are understood to be brown and black. The District of Columbia is understood to be, it's chocolate city, right? And that unfortunately creates political obstacle, which is unconscionable but true. And I don't know what the solution to that is except the fight and not being cynical about it. It turns out the movements to address injustices have taken a really long time. And I think a lot about this, I think a lot about what it was like to be an abolitionist in the 18th, late 18th century. Right, so those are folks who fought for a thing who did not live to see the thing. But they fought and they kept the faith and they contributed to what we actually got to. And sometimes we are called upon to be those people who fight for a thing that we may not get to see, but we fight the fight and so help me, there can be joy in that. And wow, is it important. So you've already spoken about some of the perceived differences between social policy and some of the other kind of harder policies and this question is along those same lines. Why does social policy have to be tied to the economy to matter? Can it matter without being associated with the economy? What a great question. So I would hope that to people in this room it certainly does, right? That when I refer to it as the girly stuff, like part of the reason that I call it that is because a lot of the social policy issues that we fight for are connected to women and women's lives and that to some policy makers that feels less important and boy is that messed up. So yes, it is important in its own right and women's lives and the lives of children and the well-being of children. How could you think anything other than it's important in its own right, especially what happens to children in the first five years, for example, which is when like 95% of brain development happens. Like we're shooting ourselves in the foot every day by not paying more attention to this. So yes, absolutely important in its own right and no, not yet how politics works. And let's change that, definitely. But as we are changing it, let's make sure that we are positioning ourselves to have impact on these issues by reminding the country of what is also true, which is that we cannot hope to succeed economically and in other indicators of our well-being if we're not educating our children properly, if we're not making it possible for people to be the caregivers they need to be in their lives. If people who work a 40-hour weep don't earn what they need to earn in order to sustain a family, that all things would shoot us in the foot more broadly. So I guess I'm arguing for both end, recognizing that these things are important in their own right, but also setting ourselves up to succeed in an environment where if we are struggling economically, policymakers are only gonna pay attention to that and what seems connected to that. I think we have time for one more question. You mentioned goals in today's Democratic Party from immigration reform to health care expansion. There's an election coming up in a poll, in poll after poll in recent months, a majority of Americans, including in some poll, even a majority of Republicans wanna cease fire in Israel's assault on Gaza. At the same time, the Biden administration continues to export weapons to support Israel militarily from your understanding of internal democratic politics. What is happening here? Is there a pathway for Biden to push agendas on immigration and health care if he continues to support Israel's militarily, threatening his chances at reelection? Wow, that is a whopper of a last question. So my daughters are part of the movement on Gaza, I will just say out loud, and actually I take some pride in that, but they are doing it in a way which also respects the pain of their Jewish cousins, my nieces. I'm proud of all of that. I think what we are seeing is a sea change. You're already seeing the effects of it in the sense that the norms, the things which have been true about how we approach the Middle East, what we think about, what we take into account in the United States are shifting, and they're shifting because of a lot of activism, and the activism is coming from multiple communities, including the Jewish community, and I think that's actually really important. And you begin to see it have an impact on the president, and I think that's really important. And it does speak to how social activism can move things. And God willing, it moves us in a direction of respecting the humanity of everybody concerned here. This is such a hard subject to talk about. The emotions are real and very deep. The pain is real and very deep, and you can see me struggling to indicate my respect for all of it. But the way forward has to include the dignity of the human beings involved, the human beings who live in the region. And as hard as it is, that cannot be impossible. We refuse to accept that it's impossible, but it does require lots of things to shift. And the way those things shift, what we can see is that they shift when people stand up. And hopefully, we can stand up in a way that allows us to talk about it and still respect each other and love each other and love humanity. And it's really hard to do on this topic for a lot of important reasons, but there is a shift happening. And it's happening because people are standing up. And I guess that means there's no reason it can't happen on other things, but what that means is we have to have that kind of energy. Please join me in thanking Cecilia Munoz. This was phenomenal. There are so many things that we are thinking about in this nation and in this world, and you did such a beautiful job helping us to understand, to process, to ask our own questions internally and to prepare for what we know is gonna be a very complicated couple of months as we look at what's happening in the world, but also as we prepare for our next election cycle. So thank you so much for just setting the table for a wonder, what I know is gonna be a really impactful couple of days of conversations. Thank you so much. Thank you. What you're doing here is just couldn't be more important. I couldn't be more excited about it. It's really a shot in the arm to be around people who are doing the thinking and training the people who are gonna lead us out of the wilderness. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So we have some logistical things to share. First of all, thank you all for being here. Daniel, I'm gonna turn it over to you who has been phenomenal. The events team, please give them a hand. Cindy Harris too, I don't know if you hear. There's a whole team of people. Laura Lee, who you're gonna meet with. I see Chris and Cindy Bank and our amazing communications and outreach team who you'll be seeing throughout this event. Thank you so much. And we are going to be heading into the Great Hall. There are some refreshments and then we will see you back for our next panel. Is that correct? 130. 130. 130. Okay, we'll see you back at 130. Thank you everybody.