 Thank you all for coming. My name is Scarlett Althabott-Green. I'm a senior policy analyst at New America Foundation, well, now New America. And I really appreciate those of you that were able to make it with the snow cancellations last week and our guests who were able to fly despite reschedules and all of that. So we're very excited to have our guests here today. I'm going to introduce them first and then do a little bit of an introduction on the topic generally. And then Andrew's going to talk about the report that you all hopefully had the opportunity to pick up outside. If not, feel free to take a copy on your way out. So our first panelist will be Andrew Wainer. He is a senior immigration policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute. Andrew has more than 15 years of experience working on immigration issues in the US and in Latin America. Andrew's research and writing on immigration has appeared in a wide range of publications, including peer-reviewed journals like International Migration and on other media, such as the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times. Betty Garcia has lived in Iowa for over 20 years. She is a native of Mexico who has spent most of her life in the United States. Betty assists her parents, the owners of Tortilleria Sonora, operate their small business. Tortilleria Sonora began 20 years ago in the family's home and is now a fully staffed production facility in Des Moines. They have clients ranging from local restaurants to grocery chains and to food service distributors. Rod Castillo is the executive director of the Suazo Center for Business Development and Entrepreneurship. He is a passionate advocate for the Latino community and believes that education is the key to the economic success. And then lastly, Amelia Lobo is passionate about helping Iowans create wealth for themselves, their families and their communities through small business ownership. She is the director of small business programs at ICID Ventures. It's a 26-year-old Iowa nonprofit that is the Iowa leader in working with women, minorities, and low-income clients as they launch small businesses. So generally, I was very excited when Andrew contacted me about this topic. I think that right now in the US we're really at a critical sort of social and economic juncture where we have had a lot of economic duress, particularly in minority communities and immigrant communities. And the recovery has really, it's been slow and it has very much, can be measured along ethnic and racial lines. So minority communities, generally including immigrant communities, have not recovered wealth or access to wealth as quickly as white communities. So this event really kind of seeks to explore how immigrant entrepreneurship and small businesses can improve the situation and the economic situation for their local communities in terms of poverty reduction and in terms of just broader economic growth. And so I was really interested in looking at immigration from sort of a different lens than it is typically looked at. So not necessarily as a problem, but actually as a solution. Andrew will quote far more stats from the report that he has been writing in collaboration with these folks and others. But essentially there's just a wealth of small business owners who are non-native born people in the US. As probably most of you know, the vast majority of immigrant families are of mixed status. And so there are a lot of sort of social and economic dynamics at play. There are significant barriers that affect the ability of small business owners who are immigrants. And especially those who are foreign language speakers to access wealth and to access economic opportunity. And so Andrew will talk about that. And our idea is essentially that if you remove some of those barriers, then you can actually see families and local communities reap the benefits of sort of an infrastructure that is already there and a group of people that are already sort of working to grow businesses or to start businesses in a potential that has been there for a very long time. And in many ways, this is sort of the history of America. And so we're sort of looking at what that looks like in the next 20 to 25 years. So without further ado, Andrew. Good afternoon everyone. I just wanna say, first of all, thanks to all of you for being out here. I know the weather's been pretty bad today. It's a little better and so appreciate you coming out and being here to participate in this. Also wanna say thanks to New America and particularly to Scarlett. Scarlett, in addition to helping organize the panel and the space, she actually provided a lot of sort of analytical and research guidance into the report and definitely helped improve the quality of the report. I hope you all were able to pick up a copy of that. So I just wanna talk briefly at the beginning to sort of frame going a little bit more in depth about what Scarlett talked about. Sort of frame why we did this research, what the goals were and how it fits in to sort of a broader context. So there's a lot of ways to look at this issue. It involves immigration policy, asset building, financial education, economics, entrepreneurship. It doesn't involve just one policy or one issue. It's interdisciplinary and cross cutting. But I think working at Bread for the World Institute, our focus is on poverty reduction and I'm an immigration analyst. So that's sort of the angle that we took. We look at it in particular of the recent US recession that's been very long and very deep and slow to, it's been very slow for the economy to emerge from the recession. So we're looking at ways that immigration policy could help help provide dynamism to the economy to help reduce poverty and help inject economic activity and economic growth to help reduce lessen the impact of the recession or to leave it quicker, which I think just now the economy started to grow at a faster pace after many years. So one way to do that is to look at entrepreneurship. And I'm just gonna cite a couple other reports that sort of fed into this. In May 2014, the Brookings Institution had a report called Declining Business Dynamism in the United States. And that focused on how entrepreneurs, this is just one example, entrepreneurs are key. Entrepreneurship is key to business dynamism and the creation, growth and expansion of businesses is important to sustained economic growth and job creation. This is sort of the creative destruction of capitalism that's been a big part of the US economy and that drives economic growth for a long time in the United States. Historically, in the United States, one business is born every minute while another business fails every 80 seconds. So that gives a sense of the churn of small businesses and how that feeds into, that creates a dynamic economic environment. People are trying ideas, getting out there, growing their businesses, testing it in the market, hiring employees, selling goods, and that's a way that entrepreneurship contributes to the economy broadly. But the report I mentioned earlier, it's sort of main finding and there's a lot of other research out there talking about this is that over time, over the past few decades, US business formation has been on the decline. So, and that's affecting the pace of job creation. Job creation goes up and down and obviously there's a lot of variables, a lot of factors that feed into job creation. But over the long term, entrepreneurship in America which is really part of American culture and even part of American sort of national myth, the entrepreneur is on the decline. And so I don't wanna talk too much about the report but one of their key findings, recommendations and key findings in the report and I'll quote here, they said that perhaps the best and most immediately effective way for the federal government to ensure a more dynamic economy is to significantly expand the number of immigrant entrepreneurs granted work visas to enter and remain in the country. So this report and among many others in the context of what was a stagnant economy and declining entrepreneurship broadly in the United States, one of the major recommendations is to support immigrant entrepreneurs. And there's been some attention to, there's growing attention to immigrant entrepreneurship. Typically this is among STEM entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs Silicon Valley focusing on science, technology, engineering and math. We hear a lot about Google, we hear a lot about Yahoo which have I think immigrant entrepreneurs either as co-founders or founders. So those get a lot of attention, politicians talk about them, policy makers talk about them and in supporting them there's a general sort of consensus I think in supporting those type of entrepreneurs. But in our report we wanted to focus more on small business owners. The corner store owner, the restaurateur, the person who owns a landscaping business or a translation company, they also make a contribution to the economy. They also help, they also hire people, they also contribute to local economic dynamism. So we wanted to focus on them because they're often left out. People want to focus on the billionaires and millionaires in Silicon Valley a lot of times and that's important but there's also the small immigrant entrepreneurs that make an impact. So this is, you know, this report's part of a growing body of research on small immigrant entrepreneurship. Recent findings won report by the Fiscal Policy Institute, found that small immigrant entrepreneurs owned businesses generated $776 billion in business activity and sustained 4.7 million employees. 14% of all people employed by US small business owners and it's also been proven that immigrants have a higher propensity for entrepreneurship. About immigrants that are foreign born are about 13% of the total US population. They're about 16% of the labor force and they're about 18% of all small business owners. So they're over represented as immigrant entrepreneurs. So given all this data and these statistics, we take the potential based on the other research out there, the potential of small immigrant entrepreneurs to contribute to the economy to help reduce poverty and to contribute economic dynamism. We sort of take that as a given. What this project did, what we did with our report and what, you know, I'm hoping we can explore a little in the panel in the discussion today and as Scarlett mentioned, is what are the barriers to small immigrant entrepreneurs? And we did that focused on three diverse field research sites, two of which are represented here today on the panel and which folks will talk about. We focused on Miami, Florida, Des Moines, Iowa and Salt Lake City, Utah. And so the goal was to ascertain the challenges that small immigrant entrepreneurs face in these three communities and find the sort of overlap in the commonalities in each of the three sites to identify the barriers but also to identify some of the promising practices in the people who are supporting small immigrant entrepreneurs to help immigrant entrepreneurs contribute better to their local economy. So government, we talked to people in government, nonprofit, academia and the private sector on what they see as the barriers and what they're doing to address the barriers to small immigrant entrepreneurs. So this study is, this report's very much locally focused. It was done over, pretty much over 2014, we talked to interviewed 78 people in each of the three sites. So again, I'm not to go into too much detail of the report but just to sort of talk about some of the findings here up front, some of the major barriers we found. There were four major barriers we found across sites identified by people in all sites. That was lack of access to finance, lack of opportunities for business education and skills, language and culture and immigration status. Now I should say, being an entrepreneur in general is difficult. I think most businesses actually fail whether they're foreign-born or US-born business owners. And so some of the barriers are also true for US business owners. They're maybe not unique to foreign-born but they're maybe more intense for some of the barriers. Access to finance is a problem for everybody but for immigrants it's even a more intense barrier. And some of the barriers are unique to immigrant entrepreneurs, for example. Immigration status is something that a US-born entrepreneur, for example, just would not have to deal with. So to wrap up sort of the opening remarks, immigrant entrepreneurs do face unique barriers in spite of being a big part of the local economy and having the potential to help revitalize local economies, they face unique barriers but they don't receive a lot of unique support, at least from the federal government. One example of this, if you think about federal agencies that might help small immigrant entrepreneurs, the small business administration may come to mind. And so if you look, you know, I took a look at the small business administration, that's one thing we looked at and they do a lot of research on immigrant entrepreneurs and they definitely tout the potential of immigrant entrepreneurs. And it's very pro-immigrant entrepreneurs in terms of rhetoric, but in terms of their budget and programming, you'd be very hard-pressed to find any sort of SBA programming for immigrant entrepreneurs. That was, you know, I found out across sites there's very little programming or funding available. One example, and you can find this online, if you look at their budget request, the SBA budget request, the Congressional Budget Justification and Performance Review for 2015, again, this is easily, you can easily find this online, they requested from Congress, this is where different agencies put out, you know, what they've done in programming, what they've achieved, what they want to achieve in the coming year, sort of justifying the funding for their agency. In 2015, they requested $710 million for SBA funding. And their request was 132 pages long. And so if you go in the report, you know, they're dealing with a lot of different issues in groups. So if you go in the report, the word women is mentioned 79 times. So, you know, a big thing the SBA does is work with like, you know, female-owned businesses. That's a big important thing they do. If you look at minority, it's mentioned 14 times. That's another one. Rural, they have a special program dealing with rural businesses, and that's mentioned 11 times. If you look for the word immigrant in the 132-page document, you'll find it's zero times. So immigrants totally not mentioned, even though they're, they employ 14% of all people in the small business sector. Immigrants in the SBA is sort of real request to Congress when it talks about money and programming. That's a good sort of example of what it finds important. It's really nowhere to be found. And I know it's easy to criticize, and I know the SBA faces lots of political pressures and budgetary pressures, but, you know, when there's a group that's employing 14% of all people in the small business sector and they're getting no mention from the SBA, you know, part of this report and part of the recommendations we have is that it's, you know, things may be a little bit out of balance in terms of federal government attention to this group. So finally, you know, to kind of bring it up to the present moment, why I think this is, you know, a good moment to talk about this, is the DAPA program announced by President Obama in 2014, the Deferred Action for Parental Arrivals, which, you know, I know that's in the courts and that's in Congress and whatnot. But, you know, I think eventually that's going to be implemented. And you'll have four or five million people who are going to be able to get work permits and be able to get sort of a quasi legalization eventually at some point. And thousands of them are entrepreneurs. Maybe some of them are entrepreneurs now, but they're not able to expand because they're working under the table. Many others may be aspiring entrepreneurs, but they may be having to, you know, taking it up because of fear because of their undocumented status. So this is a great time for this program, which also includes a White House Task Force for New Americans, which brings together different agencies to sort of integrate these people who are getting this deferred status and getting work permits to have a piece of that, specifically dedicated to immigrant entrepreneurs to engage the specific unique needs of immigrant entrepreneurs so that they can be more successful and contribute more successfully to their communities. And this is still something in progress, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about this issue. So I think I'll stop there. That's a quick summary, but look forward to the questions and discussion. Okay, so Betty will tell us a little bit about sort of her perspective from as an immigrant entrepreneur herself. First of all, I'd like to thank Scarlett and Andrew for having us here. It's a great opportunity to be able to voice our opinion and our thoughts. Well, we came into this country in 1984 and my mom came to visit her sister to Des Moines, Iowa. She absolutely loved the place and said, I'm not going back. So we followed. My mom was working as a housekeeper. My father was working at a meatpacking plant. During 1993, the floods came in Des Moines, Iowa and it caused my dad's company to close. So we moved to Texas where we have family. There wasn't a good tortilla there. So we started working out of our home in our living room, actually. While people had couches and TV sets, we had little industrial machines. We had no idea what we were doing. So we all pitched in. There's four of us. There's four kids. And we helped everything from flipping. It was very manual work. We packaged them with a little twisty tie put on a sticker and my dad would take them in milk crates to the local Pigley Wiggly. So that's kind of how we started there. Then we moved back to Des Moines, Iowa and they managed to get a little storefront. We got a little bit more updated machinery and start supply to some of the local grocery stores there. Some of the issues that we came across was a grocery store would say, where's your barcode? And we were like, what's a barcode? And my dad, Betty, figured it out. I'm like, okay. What about the nutritional facts? Oh, well, you need that in order to sell it at a retail. It's no longer the little Pigley Wiggly town store anymore. So my father has an eighth grade education and my mother has a third grade education. So language was a huge obstacle. I'm the oldest of four, so they depended on me quite a bit to do the translating from trying to get a loan or how do we get a rental space or shipping equipment? Where do we get bags from? Little things like that. So it was definitely a struggle. The other thing is fear of growth. Once you start getting really busy, are you doing things well? The city comes and inspects it, but do you really understand what they want from you? I was always in the middle, always had my hand in the business, even though I had another regular job. And things like my mom would call me and say, Betty, the phone line is not working. Oh, okay, let me get on that, mom. My dad would say, we don't have internet, why? Well, I don't know, dad. Let me go over there and check it out. So when I first came into the business full-time, my mom was keeping a calendar. She had a little calendar, kept track of the invoices, who bought how much and what grocery store Oda's. But it was all written down in this calendar. So it was very not updated for better lack of words. But they tried, they showed us hard work pays off. Today we have a fully functional manufacturing tortilla plant that we have nine employees. We just obtained a private label contract. And so there's more growth there. That's exactly what we needed, to employ more people, to update our equipment. So we're very, very excited about that. The bank has been one of our biggest fans. Building relationships with people is definitely a must. And it's me, because my parents, even though they do know how to speak, some English, my dad says, well, when business is doing well, I'm the owner. But if it's not doing well, you're the owner. Meaning me. So we do have just the cultural differences. I'll give you an example. We, one of our distributors for food service, required or wanted some wraps from us, which to us is kind of foreign, because who has flavors in their tortillas? And my dad's like, God, no one's gonna like that. No one's gonna like that. I'm like, all the people like it. We just don't like it. And it's one of our biggest sellers today. So little things like that. Just the difference of the culture, the background, and trying to obtain financing. We are at this point that we're going to have this growth spur is going to be growing pains. And I'm excited. My dad's a little bit freaked out about it. But it's exciting. And how do you obtain just your financing? What's the next step? Today I know a little bit more than my parents did and I'm a huge help. But for somebody that doesn't speak the language, we didn't know anything from barcodes to the nutritional facts, to how do you get your materials? And you have to make a product that's going to be long-lasting on the shelves. If you don't put preservatives in it, it's going to expire within a week. So there's a lot of little factors to go into it, so. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, we're up, so maybe from a macro level. What are some of the issues that you encounter? Well, listen to Betty's story. It's very common to see that with entrepreneurs that just come to this country and they have lots of questions. And one of the things that we believe, and we're very strong, is about the education. Why she has experienced it can be accelerated by having classes, having mentors, and giving the heads up to entrepreneurs to say, this is what you're going to need. Not only in the part of business, like creating a business plan, which most lending institution will ask, but also what are the legal implications of certain kind of food, or what are the city requirements? What are the state requirements? There's a lot to learn. And when you look into that, and then you also understand that there is a barrier of communication, of language. It makes it almost impossible. So one of the things that we do in Salt Lake City, we started with a non-profit organization that's called the Pete Swassel Business Center, and we help about 350 to one year, we even have up to 600 businesses that we help. In all sort of aspects, whether it is marketing, whether it is lending, whether it is human resources, there's a lot of challenges for entrepreneur. And it's interesting that now the city, I mean the colleges and universities are making a difference between teaching business and teaching entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship demands a lot. You have to be a little bit of a lawyer, a little bit of a salesman, an administrator, et cetera. And we are aware of that. And so the Pete Swassel Business Center, we teach classes in the evenings from six to nine, because we are conscious that most of the immigrants are working very hard, whether they have one or two jobs, sometimes up to three jobs, to support their families. And yes, we are asking them to come to classes in the evenings when they're tired and learning all this theory. But as you know, you can go to school, learn the theory, and then how do you apply it? And that's the key to it, is that we have mentoring. And so we have experts that we help them through the day to the entrepreneur to apply those concepts of theory that they learned in the evenings. And it has worked quite well. We have one of the most important factors that I would like a legislature to consider is that when you're looking at an entrepreneur, whether it's local or foreign, born, start a business in this country. And if he has the education, entrepreneurship education, he can create a job, and I am gonna quote one that is a lady from Mexico, it started seven years ago, struggle to get a loan, and was turned down from many, many banks. We help her develop the business plan. She got a loan today, actually two years ago when I talked to her and I got her numbers. She has revenues of over 50 million dollars. She has over 350 employees. And if you consider 350 employees that they have families, that's 350 households being supported by one little lady that started five years ago, seven years ago now. So if you multiply by all the entrepreneurs, and a lot of the people that come to this country they come with this dream of having a better life and their willing to learn, they are able to learn all what they need is a place, a way to have that education. And we do it in a very layman terms, very easy, less than three months you can see that they start changing from asking us how to do it to conversing and talking with us and dialoguing about what do you think about this? This is one of my solution. And they really start becoming entrepreneurs and being responsible for their own businesses. So my plea, my passion really is it is about education. Education meaning not as a formal education university which is very important and everybody should strive to get that. But what happened to the ones that can't? What happened to the ones that don't have the time or the money? We need more organizations that are nonprofit dedicated to help them, particularly a mentor one-on-one to able them to be entrepreneurs and to, at the end, we're all gonna benefit. The economic impact that we have done just as in Salt Lake City. Imagine that, I mean 300 businesses services every year, 150 to 160 new LLCs of corporate created every year. The quantization of that impact, the economic impact to our local economy, it is substantial and I think we can do more. We can do more in other states, we can do more even in Salt Lake. And that's my message. I could be talking more and more but I guess we'll have the opportunity to answer some questions. And last but not least, I do want to thank you for inviting us and Andrea Forrest for having this investigation and this study. I think there's a lot that we can do. And thanks for your time. Come here. Well, thank you. And thank you, Andrew, first for your visit in Des Moines and also to Scarlet for having us here. So I run the small business programs in an organization that actually is transitioning in terms of its name right now from ISED Ventures to the Iowa Center for Economic Success. We have a number of small business programs. Our agency is actually statewide with I guess I would say boots on the ground in Des Moines and in rural Southeast Iowa. So one of our big challenges in Iowa is that Iowa is largely though not as rural as most people might think. And so it's hard to get services into those rural areas. And I'm very excited to meet both of you and especially to hear your story, buddy, because her story is very typical of what a lot of our clients experience with the caveat that her family, you've been in business for a very long time and obviously the level of success is much higher than what our clients have experienced so far. But just in terms of Iowa, although we think of Iowa as being a very white state, in fact Iowa basically owes all of its population growth to immigration. By 2040 it will be about 12% Latino. It also has other substantial immigrant populations, Middle Eastern, East African and such. Now particularly when we think about the Latino population, but all of our immigrant populations, they are younger, poorer folks. And so entrepreneurship is really, really important avenue for those families to grow assets. And we're an asset building organization, which basically means that we are striving to help people exit poverty by growing assets. You know a really interesting thing I think is not only do entrepreneurs have higher income, than their counterpart, but also when we look at past that first generation, studies indicate that entrepreneurs are more likely to invest in their own children's actually formal education. So it's a very typical story. You have an entrepreneur or an immigrant who comes to the state and has a third grade and eighth grade education. And they, but their kids are more likely to finish high school and go to college, et cetera. And so by making investments in entrepreneurs, in essence we're also making investments in their kids and their kids ability to earn exponentially more income than even they have as business owners. Our programs, we, like I said, we're in Des Moines until very recently, all of our programs were completely in English. And that's something that we've really tried to change and add more services in Spanish. And so we do, we also do night classes in English and in Spanish, six p.m. to eight 30 p.m. twice a week. In fact, we have a session going on right now. And then we do specialty classes. So we have general business management classes and then specialty classes. And right now we're working on rolling out a program specifically geared towards our rural entrepreneurs, which is called Dream Builder. We run a women's business center and so a lot of our education is actually geared towards women. And Dream Builder is a completely woman-focused online business education platform which has support from our staff. So I'm happy to talk more about that as well. And then we also provide mentorship and kind of the connection between the business owner and the state institution or the lending agency or what have you. I think one of the big challenges that may be touched on a little bit is actually digital literacy. I truly think that being an entrepreneur probably 50 years ago or 100 years ago perhaps was not so different for a native born resident as a foreign born resident or somebody with more or less education in the sense that they didn't face these additional hurdles. So for example, our regulatory environment is so much more complicated now than it used to be and certainly than it is in Mexico or Costa Rica where I grew up. And also in order to succeed you essentially have to be able to take orders online and use email and do all these things that are very difficult for somebody with a low level of education. Never mind somebody who's not a native English speaker. At least in Iowa, and I don't know if this is the case in Utah as well, our state doesn't provide any sort of resources, business resources that are not in English and that's a conscious choice on the part of state legislature. So it's very, very difficult for a non-native individual to access those services and so we really try to bridge that gap and I would go even further and say that there's definitely an issue of cultural competency or a cultural barrier and it's hard for our entrepreneurs to reach the state but I would like to put that on the other side and say there's a lack of cultural competency on the part of our state agencies towards the entrepreneur and I would say and I am paid for by the SVA in part but I would say also on the part of the SVA when I think of my organization as being client driven I have to think of my organization as being able to respond to my client's needs and in order to respond to my client's needs I, it's on me to have that competency, right? And I don't see that our state agencies are doing that and that's where I think organizations like ours have to come in and provide that bridge between the entrepreneur, between the individual and the state. So that's one of the things that we really try to do through our educational programs. In addition to our educational programs we're currently launching a micro loan fund which will be funding of up to $50,000 for businesses that are owned by women, individuals with minority status and individuals with disabilities. And so we're really excited about doing that and a company like Tortilleria Sonora maybe a couple of years ago might have been a good candidate for that. You probably have bigger capital needs now but there are a lot of challenges in that too. We can't lend in the way that a bank lends and unfortunately because of our funding and I think this is a really important point that Andrew alluded to, our funding prohibits us from lending this money out to people who are not authorized residents and a lot of particularly Latino population in Iowa falls into that group. So that's a hole that we're not addressing and so I think we need to really think about what that means and how we can develop the assets to address those issues. So I think I'm gonna ask a couple of questions and then I'll open it up for all of you. One of the questions that I had just reading through the report and talking to all you in preparation for this event is the underlying sort of and somewhat unspoken issue or maybe like we've spoken a little bit about it is obviously the barrier of immigration or legalization and as you've mentioned, the federal government Andrew for example has a lot of imperatives and a lot of pressures and federal agencies have a lot of imperatives and pressures in order to get their full budgets funded in what they can or can't fund and how they can discuss a particular issue or how they can't and funders also have a lot of those barriers. But I was very interested in kind of exploring a little bit more this idea that because folks are in the country without legal status that we will create a structure and a discourse and a funding pathway that explicitly disables them from sort of becoming or being able to achieve economic success and in a way that we basically as for anyone that's been following immigration news we can't possibly deport everyone that is in the United States without documentation, right? And that's just like a fact. And so what do we lose by literally forcing people to remain in a secondary economic status? Not just the individual, but then also as you were saying, their children. And so I wanted to hear a little bit from you all in terms of numbers and the research and in your specific locality, sort of your take on what is the potential economic loss and sort of like long-term loss of creating this system even if we're not explicitly doing it by failing to kind of recognize the realities of the facts in terms of the composition of the United States right now. I don't know who wants to take that like super easy question. Yeah, let me give it a try. One of the things that, you know, there is a challenge especially with undocumented is that they are not going to be qualifying for any sort of traditional lending institution, right? And even some nonprofits, they're going to be out. And the real problem is that, you know, any person that wants a loan, whether it is personal for business, any lending institution are in for the business. So their main drive is to mitigate risk. How do you measure risk? Well, we have a system here that measure risk by having Social Security where you have a report. And in that report, it tell you the character, it tell you a lot of the history of the person in terms of finances and that would exclude almost anyone. And all organizations are looking for where is that good borrower, where is that A plus borrower in order for us to mitigate our risk, right? Meaning the lending institution. Yeah, now you're seeing what the issue is. So the other side of the coin is we got an entrepreneur that has a good business plan, he has the opportunity to have success. And how do you connect that bridge? How do you connect that bridge if someone doesn't have a history of financial history that says, yeah, this person could or will repay? There is something that at the center we are doing that is new, it's a new concept. There are some organizations are getting very interested in it. We are starting, we already started with a pilot of micro lending program. And the idea is rather than to look for the A plus borrower is to create a plus borrower, meaning people in poverty, they have less education the most, but given the education and given a program where they can come to, in this case, to our center, learn about business, learn about human resources, learn about personal finances, they become a, we have seen this as the month progresses and they are achieving their education and they're developing their business, they understand and we can measure now character, which used to be in the traditional sense, a credit score, now you can measure the character by looking what they achieve in the education term. I don't know if I'm explaining myself, but to us it's very exciting, because now we can literally help someone get out of poverty into applying their own creation, their own business through education. So go back again into education, so important. We can pass laws, we can do all sort of things, try to enforce something, but it's the difference between feeding a man a fish or teaching him how to fish. And in all the principles I think that that's one of the most important ones. The economic loss that we are seeing today by segregating, by separating, by putting blocks, stumbling blocks to people, I mean, someone was talking about, and I read in the news that ICE right now has the power to deport 400,000 people a year. There are over 11.6 million non-documented. So they are to stay. And what are we to do? Education is the solution to help. That, otherwise, it will create more poverty, it will create more issues in terms of needs for food, health, et cetera. And what we can do is help them help themselves. And this goes for not just immigrants, but for everyone that is in the situation of low poverty. And that's my try to the answer. I'm just thinking at you and not at me. I mean, I guess from a national policy standpoint, I would just go back to this program. The DARPA program would offer an opportunity for people to legalize, including entrepreneurs, or at least to get a work permit. So I mean, they're here, and they want to contribute to their communities. I mean, I understand the debate about the executive action. I think my own opinion is I supported it, but I understand that people not liking immigration enforcement to be done through the presidency. I think that's a legitimate point of view, but it's already enacted, the people are here. I'm not sure why you would want to, if they want to contribute to their communities economically, not make it easier for them to do so. So I'm hoping as this works its way through the courts and when it's implemented, that people who are now running their, running a business is difficult enough as we've heard from here. I think running your business while you're under the table basically is really challenging. So I'm hoping through this program, these people can come above board and do more in the places where they live with their businesses. I would also add, I think it's so interesting, there's such a big difference between the ways that undocumented immigrants are treated in specific areas versus other areas. So for example, I used to underwrite micro loans in New York City, and so in New York City, I had very little fear of my clients being deported. And going to your point of risk management, if I consider that my clients can easily be deported, I'm probably not gonna give them a big loan, right? Because I also have to protect my portfolio and my ability to continue lending. In Iowa, police are deputized. So it becomes much more likely that if you have something very minor, a much traffic infraction or a car accident, that you can be deported. So the risk calculation is very different in Iowa from where it would be somewhere like New York City. But the other issue is the rhetoric within our own state legislatures, right? And because I have funding that comes from the state, and there's a lot of rhetoric around immigration within the state, it's much harder for me to be able to use that funding to support the businesses owned by undocumented immigrants. However, I think here the big heroes that are, at least I hope, the big heroes that are gonna emerge are those that are in cities and towns. Cities like Salt Lake City, which I know has been doing a lot of work with immigrants lately, but also much smaller towns. We have a program, a rural program based in Southeast Iowa, which is the poorest part of our state. And one of the towns that we work in is a town called Muscatine. One of our clients there wants to start a business, and it will hopefully employ quite a few people. And that town itself has a small microloan fund, and they have signaled that they would be willing to lend him funds to start his business, even though they know him to be undocumented. And so I think that the cities are the ones that are gonna emerge as the heroes here in saying that we know that these individuals are significant contributors to our community, and that we want to support them even though we know that there's a risk there. So that I think is really exciting, and I think as we're able to do a better job with our programs, and part of doing our better job with our programs is not only providing the services and the education and the microloans to our clients, but also advocating for them in terms of policy, right? There's going to that local newspaper and saying, this business just hired 10 people, and this business is owned by this immigrant. And as we do that, towns like Muscatine, Iowa, like Des Moines, can start thinking more about the opportunities that are provided by immigrants rather than the drawback. Well, that's exciting. Yeah, I think that in my reading and also in a prior life elsewhere, when you get into the nuances of a locality, people are very clear on what the economic imperative is there, particularly in depressed areas. And so anyone that can really bring in jobs, it's a great person to have. And so I think that you're right that a lot of the dialogue is a lot more nuanced at the city level and at the locality level because of that. And I'm just gonna ask one more question and then open it up. And maybe Betty also, you can kind of talk to this. This idea of poverty reduction through entrepreneurship, I think obviously one of the barriers that we have identified is the language barrier and another one, the immigration barrier in addition to finance. And so in a context where a person may not be able to get a job over the table in many ways, the only way for their family to kind of stay afloat is through entrepreneurship. And that may account for some of the overrepresentation in small business ownership. And so I wanted to maybe ask if you all had some concrete examples of where small business entrepreneurship really helped both like a family and then maybe broader in a locality in terms of poverty reduction. Yes, of course. Yeah, no, go ahead. Well, I, that's kind of it. If I may. So, you know, we keep a lot of statistics in our center and half of the entrepreneurs in the past have been women and we started doing a little research of why was so or was motivating women to go into business. And in the low and moderate income levels, a lot of mothers, they have two, three, four children. And when you consider a low-paying job with a cost of child support, it makes it impossible for them to sustain, almost makes it worth it not to go to work, cheaper. And so, but having a small business at home where they can take care of the child, children and develop, you know, some kind of income, it's a, you know, great, great answer to their financial problems. So, I think that's one of them impact the family tremendously, you know, and now having the opportunity, we even have thought on doing it in the day as they take their children to school and then they have maybe one, two, three hours to come and participate and have a special program for women, but we need the, you know, some, at least for younger child to have a child care for the mother, but it definitely would impact, I mean, it will break that poverty cycle of not being able to get the education or not being able to start the business. And from a personal experience, we, what I've noticed is the majority of my employees are women and we're not quite there as a full-time job for everybody, but because of our business, our hours of operations, it does help those women that may not be able to have a full-time job because they have, you know, two, three, you know, four children, but can contribute to the household. So it's not just the husband or they may be by themselves, but, you know, it's not just the husband with that whole burden to try to get them ahead or provide. So, you know, my employees, even though, like I said, we're not at full-time just yet, they benefit from it, you know, it's a contribution, they feel better, they have their own little money for whatever, you know, they use it for, but they're not just solely depending on their spouse for that support, so. Okay, so I'm gonna open it up for folks that have questions. Patricia, I'll walk around with the mic. Thanks, hi. Is that on? Yep. Okay, it's so awesome. I'm Peggy Orchowski, I'm the Congressional Correspondent for the Hispanic Outlook on higher ed, which is a very diverse magazine. I cover immigration, I've written two books on it, and I cover everybody in Congress, I have to. So I'm equally, good relations with Luis Gutierrez as I am with Stephen King, and everybody has a good point. Is that my Stephen King? That's your Stephen King. Don't throw up, I mean, you know. No, no. He needs to be worked with. And, you know, I've gotten, I'm from California, and I came to Washington, and I got a really different view. I've spent a lot of time in South America, and got a really different view on Latino immigrants here. Well, Puerto Ricans for one thing. But also, the fact that people here, they love Latinos, they love hiring them. I've had extremely liberal Democrats tell me they'll hire a Latino any day over a black. That their work ethic, their friendliness, and all that. We all love the immigrant worker. They're so willing and hardworking and going to sacrifice. And, but the problem is we, not everybody can be a first generation immigrant. Not, you know, immigration law also has to protect American workers. And the big problem nowadays is African Americans. And here in Washington, the unemployment rate of African Americans is 9%. The Latino unemployment rate, 2.9%. Three times lower. You start getting places like Ferguson. I mean, I'm amazed at Ferguson. All the shops, most of the shops that were burned, they were immigrants who owned them, not blacks. So my question to you is, when you're talking about giving jobs, like you're nine employees, how many of them are legally in the country? How many of them are Americans? When we give intrapreneur visas and, I mean, investment visas, part of the requirement is that they have to hire Americans or legal immigrants. The idea is jobs for Americans, you know. If you are funding businesses that only hire family members or people who are here illegally, yes, you're going to get some resistance. So how open are your companies to show this education business to Americans, to African Americans particularly? We have a real problem with that. And it's a rising problem. I don't know. LA, there's a big problem between blacks and Latinos in the construction business. Here in Washington, 10 years ago, all the construction business was blacks. Let me jump in. Yeah, no, thank you. That was a very packed question. That would help this resistance to DAPA and everything else. If at least you talk about American unemployment and especially African Americans. So let me take that for a minute. So there are a few issues there to unpack. The first one is sort of the tokenization of Latino immigrants as kind of like an ideal race over African Americans. I think it's exceedingly problematic and I won't ask you for any names of who in Congress is involved in that type of discourse, but obviously that is beyond problematic. I think the other issue here to kind of unpack a little bit is kind of this idea of who really is an American and historically what the roots and the history of immigration are in the country. And certainly I think that if we engage in discourse on immigration issues and who it is that we are employing specifically and how the economy is growing and then how the people that are being employed are spending money and how that money is funneling back into the economy and then in turn employing other people, there is a ripple effect. And so I'm gonna let you wanna answer that, Rob, but I definitely wanna just kind of clarify kind of both of those issues that were sort of in there a little bit. Right, so I'm saying I'm gonna go ahead and let the panel. Yes, please go ahead. Let me take that question just with examples. I have one immigrant that has started a phone call card that at the end rather than buying and reselling it, hired, as far as I know right now, over 10 engineers. All, let's be not political correct, all white males, engineers, graduated from here or say from here, provide citizens of the United States. They're white people, so they're likely American citizens. White born males from the United States and you know, however you wanna call it. But yeah, I mean the idea and that's the idea is there is an entrepreneur to create a business that can create jobs for everyone. Now most likely a small little business, yeah sure, they're gonna hire the family. Even when we tell them, in our organization, say if you're gonna hire a family, they better have the skills or they, you better invest in your family to have the skills in order to have a successful business. But that's another topic. But yes, yes, the answer it is yes and that's why we are so excited about to help immigrants start businesses. Because if they are good entrepreneurs, if they are good administrators, they are gonna provide jobs for everyone collectively in their community. And so from my background, by the way, as an electronic engineer, they're very well paid. So yes, there is an economic impact that the community is doing. And the larger the business, the more opportunities will be for jobs for everyone. The other story that I told you about, 350 employees, yeah, you got accountants, you got marketing, you got all sorts of educated. And yeah, there is not, you know, anti-discrimination of saying we're gonna hire only immigrants. You have to hire people with the skills. Most likely, those are probably better you. Right, and anyone that comes to me for a job and I have an opening, you know, can you perform the job? But where have you worked before? You know, are you able to meet the requirements of our business hours? You know, it doesn't matter if you're black, white, orange, blue, green, but. But you checked their immigration status. So we, oh, go ahead, sorry. We are required for them to fill out their debut night or their paperwork. They have to present a photo ID. And whatever the sheet says, whether it's a social security number card and a local photo ID or, you know, that's what I'm required to do. So, yeah, if I may, my organization is not exclusively Latino serving. So actually about 40% of our clients are African-American and that's down from about 70%, not because we choose to serve fewer African-Americans, but because we're serving many more Latinas now. I think the history of race and economic inequality in this country is a very complex topic, which is not necessarily a topic that we're tackling today. It definitely intersects. And so I think that, you know, sort of who acts as a services and what those services are and how we target the services to the particular communities is incredibly important in terms of giving those communities sort of these opportunities. Today we're choosing to talk about immigrants in that context. Our program often talks about other racial groups in that context and I don't think it's necessarily productive to kind of pit them against one another. So Patricia, I think someone in the back has a question. So yesterday I was at a National League of Cities panel on immigration. 80% of the audience by a show of hands was from towns or cities smaller than 100,000. Could you talk a little bit, if somebody's in a city of fewer than 100,000 people and if they have a desire to support immigrant entrepreneurs in their city, what institutions, should they look at community colleges, should they look at the city's commerce department or what institution should they look to to help them serve immigrant entrepreneurs better? That is such a great question and such a difficult question to answer and I would say that we're right there because the cities that, particularly the cities we serve in Eastern Iowa are cities of 50,000 and less. I think, you know, when I talk to a lot of economic development professionals, they really want to provide services to Latinos in particular because they have a big influx of Latinos but you have to actually have the resources to provide those services so it's not good enough to say I want to have a Spanish workshop once a year or four times a year, et cetera and so I think the answer to that is really a combination of all of those things. So for example, in Iowa, we have Iowa State University which is a land grant university and they have an extension program that has an entrepreneurial development kind of group that is really working with Latino entrepreneurs, among others. Non-profits like ours that are really committed to providing services in at least Spanish. I mean, we would love to provide services in other languages as well. We have an important Burmese population in Iowa. Also, we need to have the state agencies really care and understand what they're doing wrong and but generally I think it's up, it's really kind of been up to non-profits. Unfortunately, a lot of the funding that a lot of these non-profits use to receive through programs like Prime through SBA have gone away. So that's a really complex question. I would say one of the big challenges for us in Iowa at least is hiring staff that both has the interest and the knowledge to work with entrepreneurs in general but with Latino entrepreneurs in particular to provide services in Spanish. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that maybe Andrew, you can talk a little bit about this, it's in the report. And even extremely immigrant sort of conscious localities like in Florida and Miami specifically where there's a vast number of Latino immigrants, services are not necessarily targeted to other immigrant groups. So actually in Florida the report focuses on Haitian immigration and Haitian immigrants and entrepreneurs and so maybe you can talk about what is or isn't there in that context. Yeah, I mean I guess just very briefly, it's a great question and I think it varies so much. Some of the main organizations that could help could be a community college, it could be sort of an ethnic chamber of commerce, you see that but in a small town they may not have one. So it really varies. Yeah, and so I think in Miami we focused on actually Haitian immigrants and the role of Haitian immigrants where you have a very vibrant immigrant entrepreneurial culture in Miami but it's very dominated by Spanish speakers. So there's always, it's a complex issue where you have a lot of support for Spanish speaking. Latin American immigrant entrepreneurs, the city politically is dominated by people from Latin American descendants but Haitian entrepreneurs they feel like they're kind of shut out from the English speaking business community and the Spanish speaking community. So there's lots of different barriers. Maybe one more or two more Patricia? Hi, Chris Alper I'm from Bloomberg BNA. This question is for Andrew. Curious if you could explain some of the specific policy solutions that you'd like to see the White House undertake to address some of these issues and I'm also curious if you've heard whether or not they're actually considering any of those policies or other policies in rolling out top of whenever that happens? Yeah, so I mean I guess there's three basic ones. One would be, you know which I spoke of would be sort of like within an organization like the SBA or a new organization by like in the, that's like the SBA that targets immigrant entrepreneurs. You know again you can, there's very reasonable to debate how much attention, you know should go to immigrant entrepreneurs versus female business owners and others and none, you know more important than the other they're all important but right now I think through what I've seen my research there's almost a complete lack of targeting of immigrant entrepreneurs. So either within the SBA or some other relevant organization is created to help immigrant entrepreneurs succeed. The other one would be, you know I think I touched upon it a little bit earlier would be within DAPA. DAPA brings together this White House task force for new Americans, tons of different agencies, you know to help integrate people who are gonna be getting this deportation deferral and work permits. Again, you know entrepreneurs isn't the only thing or necessarily even the most important thing within that but it should be part of it. A big chunk of these people who are gonna be getting work permits, wanna be entrepreneurs. So and specific services for entrepreneurs which are discussed in the report, you know and been discussed here on the panel, cultural competency, language, things like that that are targeted specifically to immigrant entrepreneurs. What that looks like, you know that's that could be created in a variety of different ways but at least there's something specific uniquely targeted to immigrant entrepreneurs who are going through DAPA. And the last one is you know the most controversial one I guess would be legalization, some sort of broader legalization of immigrants. I mean, you hear some amazing stories I was talking with Betty last night. You know it is possible to have a business and be undocumented it's definitely possible but it's a big drag and a big hassle and dangerous. So just providing some method of legalization for immigrant entrepreneurs broadly beyond DACA is really gonna help them be more successful. You know obviously not only employees and laborers but also people who own businesses it's just gonna facilitate their ability to help the communities they live in. So I mean I think those would probably be like, I don't know if that's as specific as you wanted but those are three sort of recommendations that are in the report. I think you know too in addition to the SBA actually a lot of the funding for these programs comes from the USDA through their rural business enterprise grant programs and that's the agency that has been our champion in our rural program. But I would also say things like CDBG funding. I mean we and Andrew doesn't directly go to this but like you can't provide these services and not pay for them. So you know we have to decide are these priorities and if so are we willing to invest in and it's not just about immigrant communities. Are we willing to invest in low income communities and in the community development and personally I don't see that right now. So bring back CDBG funding is the other one. Anyone else? Okay so do you all want an opportunity to give a few closing remarks? Here okay? I'm gonna talk afterwards if folks wanna talk. Yeah that's great. Okay well thank you all for coming. We look forward to continuing the conversation online. This it was a live stream today but it will be posted online as well if you wanna forward it along and thank you.