 Hello, I'm Andres Martinez, Vice President here at New America. I'm with my good friend Tamar Jacobi, a Schwartz Fellow at New America, as well as the President of Immigration Works. We are sitting here in early 2006. There's excitement about immigration reform. Oh, no, no, wait, it's actually 2013, but it feels very much like 2006. I can remember being in Los Angeles at the LA Times, big marches on the streets of LA. We were going to do comprehensive reform. We had a Republican president who was backing this. A lot of the same senators that I saw go to that microphone this week were the gang pushing immigration reform back then. I feel like I've seen this movie. Is it going to end differently, Tamar? You have seen this movie, but the movie has changed somewhat. You're right. In 2006 and 2007, there was bipartisan support. You're right that similar characters, you're right similar outline of proposal. What's different is there's been six years of drought in between, and that's really important to notice, right? And a few elections. Well, I'm going to get to the few elections, but yes, six years of drought and a few elections. The six years of drought, you couldn't even mention immigration on Capitol Hill. When I walked through the hall and people associated me with immigration, literally people would go the other way or people would not return my phone calls. I should say you were very involved with that. I was very involved in the 2006 and 2007 effort. Then the 2012 election happened and the Latino vote made its muscle apparent, played a key role in electing President Obama. This was not a sudden thing. This is a power that's been growing for many years, many decades even, and is only in the middle of its growth. It will grow significantly going forward, but for some reason this was the moment in that kind of steady crescendo when people noticed and people got it and the penny dropped and Democrats and Republicans realized this is the future. And that has just changed the climate unrecognizably from as little as six months ago. And I would argue it's changed the climate from five or six years ago also because more Republicans get it now and I think there's an urgency on both sides. I've been quite astonished in recent weeks how much momentum I think there is and it's not to say momentum to get it right. It's a long road ahead to get the details right and the details really matter, the substance. Let's not call them the details. But I think there is a lot of momentum and I think it's quite unusual. Let's talk a little bit about the substance and the urgency. Let me just say one thing before we get to that because the Latino vote is what's driving this. I hope we don't just do this as a way to keep a Latino unhappy segment of the population happy. This really has to be done in a way that's good for America. And I'm not saying what's good for America is not necessarily different than what's good for the Latino vote. But I hope members don't approach it as let's check that box, keep those people happy, move on to the next thing. This is really about all of America. This is about who we're going to be for decades going future. This is going to be how every business in America hires people. This cannot be done as a check the box for that protest group. And we certainly don't want to be here again in 20 years, which is what happened the last time. And I think this is a little bit where you're getting at. For all of the political urgency around the question of immigration reform, a very important component of it is not getting much attention as you wrote about this week on CNN. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so when most people hear about comprehensive immigration reform, they think about the 11 million unauthorized people already here. That's who Latinos were voting about. That's the controversy. That's the path to citizenship, the quote-unquote amnesty, the what is it about illegal you don't understand. When you hear all those phrases, that's what they're arguing about. Those people are really here because of a failing in the past. They're here because people wanted to come to work. We needed people to come to work here. We had job openings that weren't being filled. But there was no legal way for people to get here. So there's a legal way, it's a little more complicated than that because we need workers, we need very skilled workers, and we need very unskilled workers. We don't graduate enough science PhDs, and we graduate so many high school diploma holders that there are not enough people left to do the farm work and the kitchen work. And there aren't enough legal venues for unskilled workers. Exactly. There aren't enough legal avenues or paths in. There's really no legal avenue or path in. Okay, they skipped a line. There is no line. As you pointed out, there is no line. There is no line. And yet there's a need for these workers. And if we don't fix that, if we don't create a line, we're going to find ourselves in exactly the same place 10 or 20 years down the road. But why is it so difficult to talk about this? I mean, even President Obama's pep rally yesterday in Las Vegas, and one of my personal pet peeves is that we always have to advance policy and campaign style pep rallies. I wish we could get over that. But anyways, even in his talk in Las Vegas, he spent an awful lot of time talking about the founders of Google, God bless them, and the venture capitalists. And that's a very important part. If we don't want to stifle innovation by not being a beacon to all kind of STEM graduates and engineers around the world. But even in that context, when the core of the problem is unskilled labor, he feels like he needs to lean on the founders of Intel and Google. Why is that? This is a holy alliance of labor-friendly Democrats and anti-immigrant Republicans that don't like the idea of more visas for workers. And Americans generally don't understand, are skeptical of having more immigrants. What they don't necessarily understand is that what we're proposing is not more unskilled immigrants. It's that the ones who've been coming illegally could now come legally. We're switching them from the back door, so to speak, to a front door. But people hear more visas and they say it's 8% unemployment. And even the employers who rely on immigrant workers, they've never had a program in the past. So they don't necessarily see, oh, I'm going to need a program in the future. They don't realize that the old way of doing things, and most of them didn't deliberately hire unauthorized workers, right? They looked at those papers and they ran them through the system. But you know, many of them were worried. They couldn't ask any more questions. They think that somehow that's going to go on. They don't realize that they're going to need a program. They don't like the idea of a bureaucratic government program. They kind of hope they'll figure out a way to get by and they're not really thinking to the future. So there's a big constituency for legalization. All the Latino voters for that. There's a big constituency for the Google and Intel and high-skilled piece. There's a big constituency for enforcement of every kind. But the thing that's the most important heart of the fix, there's not a real strong constituency for. And that's a challenge. I was very struck by how the Republicans, I first noticed this in Senator Rubio's op-ed last weekend in the Las Vegas Review Journal where he talked about the status quo amounts to de facto amnesty. And that seems to be this great talking point that all the Republicans now are relying on to justify their 180, that not doing something is the soft position because essentially these people are here, and so reform now is tough. It seems like something Frank Luntz might have come up for them or maybe you did, I don't know. Rubio's smart enough to come up with it himself. I've heard a couple of Republicans now saying that but it's an astonishing turnaround. It is an astonishing turnaround. It's a very clever turn of phrase. And to be honest, McCain has been saying it for years, to be honest, to be honest, to give credit words to him. Well, he wasn't saying it in 2010 when he... But anyways, I'm also struck by the fact that there seems to have been tremendous movement just in the last month on the question of citizenship. And that big difference seems to have been taken off the table as I understand it. Well, I think we haven't heard from the majority of Republicans yet. I mean, I don't know. Within the gang. Within the gang it's taken off the table. We still have the House to go and we still have a bunch of other senators. And I mean, you're right, there's so much momentum and people who weren't talking about citizenship even weeks ago are now talking about citizenship. I would be the last person to predict it's going to stop. You know, the momentum is rolling and people are waking up different people than they went to bed. And just so we're clear when I say citizenship, I mean that the people who've been here without authorization, not only would they be entitled to get legal residency, but they will be eligible for citizenship and that's always been a bit of a... Exactly. And now we're arguing, if you look at the argument between the senators who were behind the bipartisan proposal and the president, the dispute between them now is do we have... How long will they have to wait? How many hoops do you have to jump through? How many hoops do you have to jump through? And will we have to secure the border first? That's a pretty... That's all we have to argue about but we're in a pretty good place. And secure the flu and fix the debt. You're right. But so... But it isn't that. It's really just... All it really is is how long do they have to wait and they're pretty similar in that and arguably, Obama's, they'd have to wait longer. And do we have to secure the border first? I mean... Haven't we already secured the border? Well, you know, it's all in your definition. I mean... And I don't live on the border. You know, Jeff Flake, who somebody really trusts, who represents Arizona... Senator from Arizona, yeah. Senator from Arizona, who has been pro-immigration reform through his career in Congress and is very close to the ranchers on the border. You know, he thinks not that it's not secure. I mean, the flow is way down. It's net zero now. But, you know, there's a dangerous situation in Mexico and those people are on the front line. You know, when Jeff says, when Senator Flake says, there's still work to be done on the border, I trust him. There's probably still some work to be done on the border. I don't think we want to move the goalpost and move the goalpost and move the goalpost. That means we never do anything else. Right. The Washington Post, I think, had a good article pointing out this week that a lot of the metrics that were set forth in 2006, 2007 have been accomplished. Right. And I think there were... Yeah, and that's important to... 11 murders in El Paso last year, which is amazing. It's just stunning. Yeah, yeah. Considering the same city divided by one wall from five is... It's certainly... We're certainly close. And the flow has... Right. Has basically... Although the flow will pick up. The flow will pick up as the economy picks up. Whether it's a question of the demographics in Mexico, because Mexico has an aging population, or whether it's nearly a question of the slowdown in our economy, or the security measures. I mean, we could spend hours... We are just parsing. But the flow will pick up again as the economy improves. And it already has. I mean, the immigrants only come to work if there is work. And if you're going to be unemployed, it's much better to be unemployed in Mexico. It's warmer. It's cheaper. Food's better. Family and friends, exactly. So when the downturn started, the migrants knew about the downturn before we did. The flow started to ebb in late 0607. And the migrants are now picking up again. So I think the migrants are seeing the upturn, maybe ahead of some Americans. So there will be an economy's flow. And also, to be fair, when they see the politics and everything a bit, you know, if you're in a... To be fair, if you're in a pueblo in Zacatecas and you hear that Obama gave this big announcement, you might think it's... There's a green light. It's more about the work. It's about the work. And it's been coming up since the beginning of the year. Let me ask you, just turning a little bit to the politics. Is it more productive in your estimation in terms of passing reform to have the president work closely with the senators and try to get on the same page early on? Or is it better for him to stake out a position that's far to the left so that enough Republicans can oppose his proposal and still vote for... If I was looking at this, let's say if I was president, I would say, you know, I haven't seen kindness work together on anything, you know, really serious since I've been here. We've got some people working seriously. We've got a lot of momentum. Just let it go for a while. Let it run. See where it goes. I mean, I don't... He feels he needs to step in and add some urgency. Perhaps that could help us by that becomes the left goal post and the bipartisan bill becomes the center. But, you know, I think something's moving. Let's let it breathe for a bit. Great. Tomorrow this is going to be really interesting to follow in the next months, weeks and months and years. Hopefully not years. Not years. We're going to get this done. We'll be looking to you for wisdom on this. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity.