ALAN PRICE: Good evening. I'm Alan Price, director of the
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of all my library
and foundation colleagues, I'm delighted to welcome
all of you who are watching tonight's program online. Thank you for joining
us this evening. Special welcome to the
immigration politics class at Skidmore College
led by Bob Turner. Welcome. I'd like to acknowledge
the generous support of our underwriters of the
Kennedy Library Forums, lead sponsors Bank of America,
the Lowell Institute, and AT&T. And our media sponsors,
The Boston Globe and WBUR. We look forward to a
robust question and answer period this evening. You'll see full
instructions on screen for submitting your questions
via email or comments on our YouTube page
during the program. Immigration was always
of special interest to President John F. Kennedy
and the Kennedy family, and we are so grateful to
have this timely opportunity to explore these critical issues
with our distinguished guests this evening. I'm now delighted to
introduce tonight's speakers. I would like to extend a warm
virtual welcome to Theresa Cardinal Brown,
director of immigration and cross-border policy at
the Bipartisan Policy Center. She came to BPC in 2014 from her
own consulting firm, Cardinal North Strategies, and has more
than 20 years of experience in immigration law and policy. She has served as director of
immigration and border policy at the US Chamber of Commerce
and associate director of business immigration advocacy
at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, has worked
in the immigration practices of large law firms, and served
in several government positions during the administrations
of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I'm delighted to welcome
Roberto Gonzales virtually. He is professor of education
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and
director of the immigration initiative at Harvard,
a university-wide effort aimed at advancing and promoting
interdisciplinary scholarship and intellectual exchange around
issues of immigration policy and immigrant communities. His research centers on
contemporary processes of immigration and
social inequality and stems from
theoretical interests at the intersection of race
and ethnicity, immigration, and policy. His work has been cited across
a broad range of disciplines and has garnered awards from
sociology, anthropology, psychology, education,
law, and social work. It's a pleasure to welcome
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, chancellor of the University
of Massachusetts Boston. Prior to UMass
Boston, his arrival there last year, he served as
the inaugural UCLA Wasserman Dean, leading two
academic departments, 16 nationally renowned
research institutes, and two innovative
demonstration schools at UCLA's Graduate School
of Education and Information Studies. His research focuses
on cultural psychology and psychological anthropology
with an emphasis on education, globalization, and migration. His award-winning books
and edited volumes have been published by
leading university presses, and his scholarly
papers in a range of disciplines and languages
appear in leading journals. He regularly contributes to
national and international media outlets. I'm so pleased to welcome Daniel
Tichenor the Philip H. Knight chair of social science and
director of the Wayne Morse Center's Program for
Democratic Engagement at the University of Oregon. He has published seven books,
received numerous research awards, served as
a research fellow at the Brookings Institution
and Princeton's School of Policy and International
Affairs and was named to the inaugural
class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows in 2015. He has testified and
provided expert briefings to Congress on
immigration law and policy and provided
commentary and essays for many national publications. And I know he has
conducted a lot of research within the JFK
Presidential Library. I'm also delighted to welcome
Jia Lynn Yang, national editor at The New York Times. She previously served as deputy
national editor at The Times, as well as deputy
national security editor at The
Washington Post, where she was part of a team
that won a Pulitzer Prize. Before becoming
editor, she wrote about business and
economics at The Post and at Fortune magazine
for over a decade. She is the author of One
Mighty and Irresistible Tide, The Epic Struggle over American
Immigration 1924 to 1965. Finally, I'm so
pleased to welcome Julia Preston, our moderator
for this evening's discussion, to the library
virtually this evening. She is a contributing writer
for the Marshall Project, a non-partisan, non-profit
news organization covering criminal justice. She previously covered
immigration for The New York Times for 10 years, and she
was a member of The Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer
Prize for reporting on international affairs. She has worked as an editor
and foreign correspondent for The Times and before
that The Washington Post, and her work has
won numerous awards. Please join me in welcoming
our special guests. JULIA PRESTON: Thank you. Thank you to the Kennedy Library
and to Alan Price and Liz Murphy and the staff for
organizing this extraordinarily timely panel and for gathering
such a distinguished group of scholars and
researchers to discuss this issue of immigration. Today, in the opening months
of the Biden administration, a cycle of American history
and policy on immigration is repeating itself. President Trump, in his
four years in office, amplified the
xenophobic hostility towards immigrants that
has always been inherent in American society. He broadcasted it
from the White House, and his policies were permeated
with restrictionist views. Now President Biden evokes
a nearly opposite spirit on immigration, a spirit
that has also been present in American society and
one that welcomes refugees and immigrants and celebrates
their ingenuity and their grit. But photographs we are seeing
this week of small children in rows packed into grim tents,
holding centers at the border, are a reminder of an
immigration system that is dysfunctional, chaotic,
and failing in many respects. And President Biden
has said that the time is right for broad reform. And advocates and activists
who cheered President Biden's election have cued up a
series of very ambitious bills before Congress to
achieve that reform. But many who have worked for
years to analyze and repair the immigration system,
including, I think, some of our panelists,
worry that the problems in the immigration system
have become too big to fix. So this is what we're going
to talk about tonight. And I'll start off by asking our
panelists a round of questions designed to sort of fill in
the historical background and the social background
of this debate. So I'll start with you,
Chancellor Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo. Give us a little-- give us a big picture. Briefly paint the big picture
here of the current dynamics of migration as it is coming
into the United States. How have the forces that are
propelling migration changed? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO:
Thank you, Julia. I'm so delighted. I am so very happy to be a
part of this important library forum. I'm happy as a member of
the board of the Library Foundation. I am happy as an
American by choice. That's what we immigrants are. And I am happy as
chancellor of UMass Boston to join in this
important conversation. In one of the passages
that we always come back to in A
Nation of Immigrants, President Kennedy wrote,
quote, "Another way of indicating the importance
of immigration to America is to point out that every
American who ever lived, with the exception of one group,
was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants." End of quote. Indeed, in our
country, immigration is at once history and destiny. It is the story of
how our country came to be in its present form,
and it is the future, as the fastest growing
sector of the US child and emerging adult
population now are the children of immigrants. That's the first of my
three points in two minutes. Second point, in
the current era, migrations are
extraordinarily complex, multi-determined, and escape
vulgar, mechanistic models of causality. After holding for
3/4 of a century, the map tracing the
major migration corridors of the post-World War II
era with labor migration begetting family
reunification, begetting the rise of the second
generation, that map has become increasingly blurred and a
new map of mass migration is emerging. Third point, there are
three disparate formations that lay the foundations for
an emerging new US migration cartography. First, the end of the
Cold War significantly accelerated human
migrations to our country. Second, the worldwide
economic crisis of 2008 and the anti-government
uprisings in north Africa and the Middle East
beginning in 2010 signal another significant turn. Third, President Trump's moves
to make good on the campaign promises that elected
him, rapidly stepping up deportations of unauthorized
immigrants in the US, building a 2,000-mile concrete
wall along the Mexican border marked a brusk, brusk turning
point in the migration landscape to our country. Migration now, as
we are witnessing at the southern
border, is increasingly defined by uncontrolled
criminality, war on terror, and unchecked climate change. Central America's
so-called Northern Triangle is exhibit A. Symbiotically,
these forces, the forces of war on terror, unchecked
criminality, and unchecked climate
change, are the three forces that synergistically
are driving what I call in our most recent volume
the catastrophic migrations of the 21st century. A new map is unfolding
before our very eyes. JULIA PRESTON: Jia I'm going
to take my next question to you in honor of the forum where
we find ourselves today and to ask you to reflect and
share a bit of history, which is the political evolution that
John Kennedy underwent that you write about in your
book as he was running for senator the
first time and then going forward as he launched his
campaign and ran for president. And so I'm sure people
would be interested to hear about that moment in
Kennedy's political evolution. And maybe you can just
reflect a little bit about what that might
mean, what you see that might mean for reform now. JIA LYNN YANG: Yes,
it's such an honor to be here because I had
the honor of doing research at the JFK Presidential
Library and really enjoyed digging into the part
of the archives that deal with the history of A
Nation of Immigrants, this now famous book. It has a fascinating history. So it actually began as
just a 40-page pamphlet that President Kennedy,
then a senator, wrote. And basically the
Anti-Defamation League had invited him to
just write this. The heir to the Welch
grape juice fortune was trying to fund different
pamphlets for students to read about sort of
different civics issues. And so they invited Kennedy,
then a young senator, to write this pamphlet. The pamphlet, then, in 1963 gets
turned into a full-blown book. One of his aides really
begins to expand on it. It's not something that Kennedy
was, frankly, very involved in. I think Myer Feldman, his aide,
was much more deeply engaged in expanding it. Arthur Schlesinger
was brought in to sort of get
the history right. Tragically, they
were in the middle of doing this right when
he was assassinated. And so after he was
killed, the book project took on this greater
significance. The rest of them finished it
with Teddy Kennedy helping, and then the book
became part of kind of this moral argument
for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act,
which my book is about and really just totally
changed our entire perception of who would be
allowed in the country. The thing I'd say about
Kennedy that I think is applicable to now that's so
interesting, this is a family-- his father, Joe
Sr., I don't think of having read a lot about
him as someone who wanted the family to seem very Irish. This was a time when ascending
the ladder in American society meant you wanted to seem less
Irish and more like a WASP. You wanted to seem like you
were just a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It was only when
Kennedy, JFK, his son, began to have political
ambitions that getting involved in immigration
as an issue, owning himself as an identity of
being Irish-American, I'd argue was a bit of an act of
political opportunism. This is a family
that had spent years trying to convince everyone
that they were the WASPiest family ever. They're sailing. They're in Hyannis Port. There at these bastions of
really elite white culture. And yet for JFK
to ascend, he has to really embrace what it
means to be Irish-American. And it's also a moment when
there's a new nationalism, I'd argue, being born around
a nation of immigrants. So before this, you would-- and
we kind of take it for granted. I think before, you think of
immigrants as a thing that is less American. It's like immigrants are kind
of oppositional to the idea of nationalism. But in the '50s,
as JFK is rising, as his career is
rising, it's a moment when there's a new
nationalism coming into being from historians
like Oscar Handlin that say, actually, what
makes America so American are the immigrants. The immigrants don't take
away from Americanness. They make America what it is. And so Kennedy's
career really rises with this new mythology,
this new conception of American identity. He embraces being
Irish-American. And I think for right
now, it's so relevant because I think
for people who want to change the system, this
idea of tying immigrants to Americanness, sort of
the opposite of what Trump was doing, that's one
formula for making change. And it's sort of what
a lot of reformers rode through the '60s
to get to the 1965 act. And the last thing I'd say with
Kennedy that's so interesting is that he's also
embracing in this moment when he's taking off this
kind of hyphenated identity. He's saying, I am Irish. I'm also American. And that kind of thinking,
I think, is only now-- it's only grown because we're
an even more multicultural country. We have a lot of
people who identify as a hyphenated something. And someone like Kennedy rose
and was beloved for that. It used to be that you
would hide such a thing. But I feel like
his career is a bit of a template for what
kind of an earlier version of a
multicultural America would look like arguing for more
generous immigration policies. So anyway, it's a
pleasure to be here because the history of
Kennedy himself I think is so important to understand
for our current immigration debate. JULIA PRESTON: Yes, indeed. And so Dan, now we'll go to you. And bring us up to right
before the present. So I guess my question
to you is when you look at President Trump,
his nativism, his approach to immigration politics,
was this an aberration or an expression
of something that has been a factor in American
politics for a long time? And how do you see that
nativism affecting-- how has it affected the
possibilities for immigration reform in recent times? DANIEL TICHENOR: Yes. So I guess my short
answer is it's both an aberration
and something that's been with us for a long time. An aberration in the
sense that we have not had such an overtly nativist
president who actually gained office by making anti-immigrant
appeals so central really since the 1920s. But as you, I think, underscored
in your question, Julia, these kind of
xenophobic tempers have been kind of persistent
features of American life really since the founding. And so we were just talking
about the Nation of Immigrants. We've been a very restive,
contentious nation of immigrants, one that
has always celebrated its immigrant past but
dreaded the immigrant present, felt very uneasy about
the latest newcomers. And so I promised to
bring you up to present, but think about
Chinese exclusion, racist national origins
quotas, eugenics, and so forth. It has always kind of been part
of the American experience, as well as the Statue of
Liberty and our celebrating this tradition of immigration. So immigration reform is always
incredibly tough to achieve. That has just been one of the
constants in American politics. And think about you've had
business interests, labor, ethnic groups, immigrant
rights, civil rights groups, immigration restrictionists. So to get your
question about where is restrictionism
today on this, I think that I would
say, Julia, that one of the real dilemmas,
the last time that we had comprehensive immigration
reform that addressed the fact that we had millions
of undocumented immigrants in the country and questions
about porous borders and so on was the Immigration Reform
and Control Act of 1986. So we literally have been
stuck in neutral for decades. And we've had significant
efforts that took place in 2001 during the Bush administration. And that was derailed with 9/11. We had efforts again during
the Bush administration, 2006 and 2007, but
something had changed. Between 2001 and 2006-7, in the
base of the Republican Party, you had the growth of a very
strong immigration restriction movement that was
quite powerful. You had members of
Congress who were not as centrist as George W. Bush
on this issue who fought hard against producing
comprehensive reform. And so really it was that
shift within the party that kind of undid-- in the past, to get
comprehensive immigration reform, you needed
to get a compromise. And usually the bargain
entailed some element of legalization, some
enhanced enforcement, employer sanctions, and some
kind of guest worker program. But 2001, 2006, 2007, fast
forward to Obama and 2013, you couldn't put together
those kind of deals because in Congress, both those
who were on the right and those on the left were
at loggerheads and unwilling to engage in those kind of
bargains as they had in past. So very quickly,
what we were left, then, with is this profound,
intense polarization of both parties, both at
the base, at the grassroots, and in Washington,
which made it kind of mission impossible for
even the most ambitious administrations and
lawmakers to get through comprehensive
reform as in the past. So what that has meant is
that most policymaking has been done through unilateral
executive action, which obviously lacks the continuity
of significant legislative reform. So with that, I'll-- JULIA PRESTON: Which
is a great intro for me to go to Roberto, who,
Roberto, your research is about immigrant youth, and
particularly young immigrants who are contending with
undocumented immigration status and all of the
issues surrounding that. And President Obama gave us, or
gave them a form of protection. He used his
executive authorities to give them a
form of protection that is known as DACA. And so I'm wondering if you
could just tell us a little bit about DACA, about this
generation of young immigrants, and what the advantages
and what the limitations have been of that
kind of protection to kind of set the stage for
the next round of questions, where we'll talk about the
proposals that are taking place now. ROBERTO GONZALES:
Yeah, that sounds good. Thank you for the
question, Julia. It's a real honor to be here. So I want to draw-- maybe zoom out a little
bit from your question and talk about this policy
trend towards these semi-legal statuses, like DACA, that are
not fully unauthorized status but aren't fully
legal statuses either. So there's a general
consensus, I think, regarding these kind
of bright boundaries of these dichotomous categories. But there are growing numbers
of migrants in the United States and around the
globe more generally who possess these
statuses that are much more fuzzy beyond these
dichotomous categories. So increasing numbers
of migrants today occupy these statuses that
are temporary, uncertain, and non-linear. We could think about statuses
like temporary protected status, like DACA, also like
deferred enforcement departure, which is a presidential
discretion. Those waiting for green
cards under the Violence of Women Act or
the U visa program, the very long backlog
of young people who are under a special
immigration immigrant juvenile status. So you've got growing
numbers and a growing trend towards these semi-legal
statuses that many of them don't ever lead to any kind
of formal legal status. And so for those possessing
these liminal statuses, they often live in
a state of limbo that can persist
indefinitely, sometimes, as I said, never
leading to citizenship or any other form of
formal integration. And certainly, like
DACA beneficiaries-- and we're certainly
aware of them-- they enjoy certain
rights and privileges. But their precarious
status places limits on a range of
activities, such as receipt of social services, for example. In addition, while
they're sometimes able to renew these statuses
and the benefits that come with them, for
DACA beneficiaries, for example, for TPS holders,
that means work authorization, stays of deportation. But for many of them, having
to continually reapply in their renewal periods, a
period of non-renewal for them can push them out of
status, even if temporarily. And that has resulted in job
loss, bureaucratic hurdles, stress, you name it. So ultimately the
durability of these statuses is really called into
question precisely because the tension between
access and exclusion, between belonging
and vulnerability that characterizes their daily
experiences remains unresolved. And you think about
having these statuses in the context of
heavy enforcement, and we've ratcheted up
enforcement over the last two decades increasingly. And so while they may enjoy
certain access to the polity, there's always this
kind of a looming threat of enforcement for them and
for their family members. JULIA PRESTON: So it's a
kind of a half in and half out situation. ROBERTO GONZALES: Yeah, that's
right, Julia, and never really either way. And there may be certain
times, certain places, where they are kind of more
legal or even less legal. But these kinds of
administrative policies really create this
limbo that sows the seeds of vulnerability,
continued vulnerability. JULIA PRESTON: All right,
we'll talk more about DACA, but we have this
image of the DREAMers and of being the sort
of triumphant class of young immigrants. And your research really
is a cautionary tale about that, that
this is really a very difficult and potentially
psychologically damaging situation for many of
these young people. ROBERTO GONZALES: Yeah,
these are young people who many of them move to the
US with their parents at six months old, at two
years old, at five years old, grow up alongside of
American-born friends and peers, are in the
same neighborhoods. They're educated in
the same schools. But at a really critical time
when their friends are moving forward, obtaining
driver's licenses, taking after-school
jobs, obtaining financial aid for
college, starting careers, you think about those kind
of normative trajectories, is that they're hitting walls. And this blocked access,
particularly over time, has a real debilitating effect
for many of these young people. This is really the embodiment
of Langston Hughes's Dream Deferred, what happens to
these young people who grow up being promised that if you work
hard enough, that if you dream boldly enough there will
be something there for you. But ultimately, we've
been waiting for 20 years. And them and their
families have been waiting for 20 years for
some sort of legislation like the DREAM Act to pass. JULIA PRESTON: All right,
well, we'll come back to that. Theresa, the border. So yeah, to these
images that we've seen-- finally, the photographers
got in, I guess yesterday, to one of these
holding facilities where, between the
Customs and Border Protection and the Department
of Health and Human Services, they've had to sort
of park these kids because the facilities on either
side are completely swamped. So give us the
background to this. Under President
Obama and especially under President Trump,
what was the evolution of border enforcement? And what are the flows, how
are the flows of migrants in the hemisphere, how
have they been changing coming up to this moment now? THERESA CARDINAL BROWN:
Well, thanks so much to you, and thanks to the
John F. Kennedy Library for inviting me. So I'm going to take
the benefits of one of my colleagues as well to just
go back a little bit further in time. When we think about migration
at the US-Mexico border, first of all, for a lot
of Americans, that is the image of immigration. It's either Ellis Island
and the Statue of Liberty or people running across
the border from Mexico. There's not a lot of in between. And that perception
that migration across the US-Mexico border
is illegal, it's dangerous, it's a symptom of that
we're not able to control our borders really belies
the history of that border. For much of the
United States history, that border between the
United States and Mexico was wide open, and people
could cross there regularly. As a matter of fact,
until the 1965 act, there was not any
limitation on migration from the Western Hemisphere. And so one of the
outcomes of the 1965 act, of those limitations,
was the need for security along the US-Mexico border. We had had programs like
the Bracero Program, which generated circular migration
from Mexico from World War II until the early 1960s. There were lots of
problems with that program, but it created that sort of
interdependence of the United States and Mexico in labor
markets and the joint border region that we
kind of know today. But since 1965, there have
been progressive efforts at securing that border
from unlawful migration. I think in particularly,
starting, believe it or not, in the Clinton years. From 1996, when there was
a law passed on immigration enforcement, primarily, the
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
signed under President Clinton, they started building fences
along the US-Mexico border starting in San Diego
and continuously reinforcing and policing and
militarizing that border. But for most of that
time, for up until, frankly, the
mid-2010s, the majority of people trying to come
into the United States across the border were
Mexicans, mostly single adults, mostly male, and
mostly seeking work. So they were labor migrants
who did not have access to visas who were coming
into the United States to work in the United States. They were trying
to evade detection. And most of them,
when apprehended, if they were apprehended,
would be returned pretty much summarily and fairly
quickly to Mexico. So our border infrastructure,
the systems that process migrants along that
border were built for very short-term holding. The border patrol stations
that exist along the border look like your local
police precinct. They have short-term holding
jail cells and computer terminals for agents to get
identifications from people and enter them into the systems. And that was the way the border
has worked for several decades, for half a century. But we have seen increasingly
over time other nationalities coming to that border. And what started happening,
particularly in the mid-2010s, around 2011, 2012,
is that we started seeing a significant increase
in Central American migration from those Northern
Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Honduras, and unaccompanied children. Now, laws that
have been in place since 2002 with the
Homeland Security Act and 2008 with the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act had rules for how we
treated unaccompanied minors at the border. First of all, they
were required to be interviewed to see if they
were victims of trafficking. That was the main
important thing. Were they being trafficked
across the border? Were they in danger? Secondly, they were given
access to the immigration system if that was the case. For those who were Mexicans--
and there were unaccompanied Mexican children arriving
during this time-- for the most part, if they
were not trafficking victims, they would be returned
back to Mexico to the Mexican authorities
to help reunite them with family in Mexico. But if they were
not from Mexico, they were to be turned over
to the Department of Health and Human Services, provided
with health care, education, case management until
they could be placed with a sponsor in
the United States, who usually was a
relative of individual. And their cases would be
pursued in the United States. That system was fine
when the average number of these children was no more
than a couple of thousand a month. The system was enough
to handle that. But in 2011, 2012, 2013,
and particularly in 2014, we saw a precipitous increase
in the arrival of these children such that the systems
that were in place could no longer handle them. The capacity was not there. So they were getting backed
up at border patrol stations. They didn't have transport to
get them to Health and Human Services facilities. The facilities the Health and
Human Services were running were also getting full. And so the Obama
administration helped build these excess capacity
places, like down in Texas. And those were the
first time we saw the pictures of the
warehouse with the chain link fences in them and the children
behind the chain link fences, and people called
it kids in cages. These were overflow
facilities that were meant to handle the
rapid increase in children coming to the border. The Obama administration
did invest in trying to expand Health
and Human Services capacities and other things. But very quickly, the
unaccompanied children turned into families. And these families
were seeking asylum. So unlike Mexican adults, who
were usually summarily turned back to Mexico, families
who had an asylum claim had to be admitted
to the United States to have that asylum claim
interviewed, at least to find credible
fear, and sometimes more, to have that case go to
the immigration court system. So families that may
have sent their children unaccompanied first, then
started arriving as families, and then the families
overtook the systems. So what we have seen
for the last eight years in ebbs and flows over
time is a persistent shift in the arrival of migrants
at that border from Mexicans seeking work to Central
Americans, particularly families and children,
seeking asylum. And we have not invested in
our asylum process or system or infrastructure to
recognize that change. Successive administrations,
including the Obama administration, invested
in detention facilities for families,
invested in programs that would allow them to rapidly
turn people away or process cases without really
hearing asylum cases. And that quadrupled under
the Trump administration. In 2019, we saw
the highest number of families arriving at the
border from Central America. And since 2014, there
have been seven times when each year,
Central Americans have been more than Mexicans
arriving at the border. And so that that
persistent issue continues to have ramifications
for the Biden administration, an administration that that
ran on trying to turn back Trump's policies that shut down
the asylum system for almost everybody but is still now
having to grapple with, well, if I open that back up,
do I have the capacity to process the people coming? And that's one of the issues
why we're seeing this again. That the United States, over
several administrations now, has not decided to rethink the
processes and infrastructure that were developed for a very
different type of migration. JULIA PRESTON: OK. Marcelo, I'm going
to go back to you and ask a broader question
along the same lines that Theresa just
framed, which is, we have an immigration
system that's built on family reunification
and certain kinds of pretty restricted labor migration. And when you look at the
American Immigration concept and framework, how in
sync or out of sync is it now for the
kinds of migration flows that you would expect
to see soon and in the future? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO:
Thank you, Julia. With the new reality of
unchecked climate change and, more broadly speaking,
ecological disasters that are pushing greater
and greater numbers of human beings, including
children and families, we see this-- Central America is exhibit A.
You take the Northern Triangle, and you see from the ecological
origins of the so-called Soccer War between El
Salvador and Honduras-- this goes back historically
to Hurricane Mitch that really began the momentum, the kinetic
momentum of the first wave of Hondurans coming
into the United States, to the current dynamics in
terms of the environment in Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Honduras. You see just a
wicked, wicked synergy that is pushing increasingly
very large numbers of people into what Roberto called
this limbo, this limbo world. Very important to keep
in mind the following. Only one in 10 forcibly
displaced persons today will make it out
of the Americas, out of Latin America,
will make it out of Asia, will make it out of Africa. The vast majority will remain
in neighboring countries, really creating what is the
largest crisis of confinement in human history. Only one in 10 will
make it to the US border or will make it to any of
the European countries. The structures
and the strictures that have been in place
since World War II are predicated on some
fundamental principles that are somewhat anachronistic
to the realities of the 21st century. The conceptual center of gravity
for the Geneva Conventions is the idea of [FRENCH],, the
French notion that until safety can be guaranteed in
the country of origin, you will be protected. You will be protected, and
you will not be returned. What we have now is a very, very
different dynamic, which is we are seeing larger, larger
zones of confinement that are acting really
as buffer zones, where what the great
Hannah Arendt once called the right to have rights
becomes completely elusive. You can't access these
fundamental rights because you're not going to be
able to access the opportunity to make those claims. This is the
fundamental catastrophe we're seeing the world over. We see this in the Middle East. We see this in Africa. We see this elsewhere in Asia. And this is the dynamic
in Central America today. We have a dynamic that is
no longer ready to accept or metabolize the fact that
entire regions of the world are not so easily-- you can't so easily return
to, until and unless we create the fundamental structures, the
institutions that give folks the opportunity
of not migrating. The right to not
migrate should also be considered a
fundamental right. What we see today
is increasingly a catastrophic flight into
greater forms of confinement. And the elusive quest to
access fundamental rights is disappearing. And what we see in the camp,
in the warehouses that Theresa so eloquently outlined
for us, is a manifestation of this broader
global phenomenon. This is what's going on
off the coast of Australia. This is what's
going on in Turkey. This is what's going on in
the Turkey-Syria border. This is what's going on in
so many regions of the world, zones of confinement, zones
where the right to access rights is disappearing. So we are not prepared. The structures in
place in our country that flow mostly from the idea
of labor migration, as Theresa mentioned. I mean, the Bracero Program,
who would have thought? World War II, we went
to Mexico knocking at the door asking Mexicans
to come to work for the war, during the war effort. The Europeans, they put
in place similar programs. You saw that in Germany,
this idea of the guest, the immigrant as a guest. There is nothing more
permanent than guest programs. There's nothing more permanent
than guest migration. The permanent
populations now that we see not only in our country, but
in Germany, in the Netherlands, and in the United
Kingdom all flow from these kinds
of programs that weren't fully articulated for
the end of incorporating really fully the longing that we
hear in Roberto's voice to be fully incorporated into
the family of the nation. That is becoming more
and more elusive. JULIA PRESTON: All right, so
that gives us an opportunity for Dan and Roberto. Dan, I'll go to you first. Let's talk about
immigration reform. Are we going to-- we have President
Biden has made a plan. His plan has been introduced
as these very sweeping bills in both the House
and the Senate. You have Senator Alex Padilla,
who has a plan for a pathway to citizenship for
essential workers. And Roberto will talk about
the Dream and Promise Act. But Dan, how do you see it? How do you see these
political forces that you've been talking about? How are they going to impact the
debate in the first two years of the Biden administration
on immigration reform? DANIEL TICHENOR: Yeah, I mean,
it's a mammoth package, right? I mean, so most of the folks who
have been following immigration politics for some time looked
at what was rolled out and said, wow, it's incredibly ambitious. It's addressing everything. And in some ways, you
could look at this and say it seems that the Biden
team learned from the Obama experience. The early Obama years,
the approach was, let's try to build up our bona
fides, showing conservatives and border hawks that we can
be really good at enforcement. That then won Obama the
moniker of deporter in chief from DREAMers. And in any case,
by the time Obama was able to really lean
into immigration reform, he had lost his
majorities in Congress and put other priorities first. And so one of the things that
was sort of a game changer this time was that
President Biden put this really broad reform--
legal immigration reform, a path to citizenship,
a whole host of changes on the table on day one. And it was a big package. And that his
congressional sponsors said we want to go big and go
after our biggest principles. But those same
lawmakers also said that we think that we're very
open to piecemeal approaches, which was basically just
being realistic and saying, look, we're throwing a
Hail Mary pass on this, but we know that
with a 50-50 Senate, with a reconciliation process
that probably can't be used for this and so
forth, that it's going to be very hard to achieve. So as such, and those
who have been following the infrastructure bills,
it looks like Speaker Pelosi said that she's
hoping by July 4th that they'll have this
massive infrastructure package together. Others are saying [AUDIO OUT] And so as a result,
in all likelihood-- JULIA PRESTON:
Are we losing Dan? Dan, we can't hear you. DANIEL TICHENOR: Now. JULIA PRESTON: Sorry. DANIEL TICHENOR: Can
you hear me OK now? JULIA PRESTON: Yeah. DANIEL TICHENOR:
Sorry about that. Such is Zoom land
sometimes, right? So in essence, all I
was trying to underscore is that even though the Biden
administration put forward this massive package
from day one, like the Obama administration,
it put other priorities first, priorities that we
thought were key to get. So you had the relief package,
then you had infrastructure, and probably immigration
voting rights may come before
immigration and so forth. So some of these more
nettlesome, contentious efforts are probably going to
have to wait a bit. And when they do come,
the most likely scenarios that have been
suggested is that you're going to get a DREAM Act of some
kind pushed forward initially, some kind of effort to
focus on farm workers as the most likely first two
things, the first two bites, and then try to see if you can
build incrementally from there. JULIA PRESTON: Roberto, what
do you think about that? Tell us a little bit
about what is in-- we have the Dream
and Promise Act. We have the DREAM Act,
which Senator Durbin-- now this is 20 years that he
has reintroduced that time and again. Again, I believe that
Senator Lindsey Graham is his co-sponsor. So there is a kind of a little
flash of bipartisanship there. But how do you see that? Is this good legislation? And do you think it can pass? What are the DREAMers-- how can they influence this? ROBERTO GONZALES: Yeah,
it's a really good question. I think that, as opposed to Dan
mentioning this kind of really massive, really
massive bill, this is quite a bit more modest. Nevertheless, Migration
Policy Institute estimates that about 4.4 million
people could be eligible. So we're talking about
these categories, DREAMers, those who are eligible for TPS. I mentioned earlier the
deferred enforcement departure, those who hold that
status, and then what are being called
legal DREAMers. And these are children of
parents who came to the US with certain types
of temporary visas. And many of these young
people may have aged out. But thinking about
this, as you mentioned and I mentioned before,
this has been 20 years. And our elected
officials like to tell us that change takes time. And certainly, if we
look historically, any progressive
change in this country has taken years, if not
decades to accomplish. But these ideas don't square
with the everyday lives of kids and their families. So we're several years into
DACA, and what we don't need, and I think that nobody from
the immigrant rights community is pushing for over
legalization is kind of a preservation of DACA. I think that the long
and the short of DACA is that it's arguably the
most successful policy of immigrant integration in the
last 20 to 30 years, clearly. We saw in DACA young
people taking giant leaps, being catapulted towards the
American mainstream, new jobs, increasing their
earnings, building up credit, driver's licenses,
career trajectories that were on a
very positive step. But DACA doesn't address,
doesn't provide a pathway to legalization. It doesn't address exclusions
from federal financial aid. And these young people are part
of families and communities that are in dire need of relief. So what does it
mean to be a member of a family or a community
that also needs help? So legalization certainly is
the tide that raises most boats. And in this case, we're talking
about a segment, maybe a third of the population. And so while Democrats
hold very thin majorities in both chambers,
Republicans, it seems like, are less likely to
support a broad path to citizenship for all
undocumented immigrants. And so something like
this might have a chance. But then again, many argue that
it might have gone too far. So unlike other versions
of the DREAM Act, this one also covers TPS holders
and those holding this DED status that I talked about. And so there will be
that fight on that side. And I think that many people,
many people within the DREAMer community, the broader
immigrants rights movement, will really want more. And what will be back
to this argument of kind of pitting piecemeal policy
versus kind of the big more comprehensive piece. It's not clear. But I think that
certainly this bill has-- it certainly has the support
of the American public, but does it have the
kind of political capital to move forward, I think,
is a major question. JULIA PRESTON: Theresa, I want
to ask you just to bring us up to date on the border. Just quickly, what
has Biden changed? What has not changed? And to what extent, in
order to fix the border, do we need some massive
piece of legislation as well? THERESA CARDINAL BROWN:
That's a really good question. So to start with what the
president has changed, the biggest thing that
President Biden has changed is the rhetoric around
immigration, frankly. The way he talked about migrants
and immigration, the way he made clear during his
election that he wanted to undo what Trump
had done, was just such a significant change in
how he spoke about immigrants that one of the things we
know because we have heard from immigrants say
is that they thought that he would open the border. The reality is he hasn't
actually opened the border. In spite of a lot of executive
orders signed early on, the biggest thing he did was
stop border wall construction, but he hasn't taken
down any of the border wall that was already there. He kept in place the
Title 42 restrictions, the COVID-era restrictions that
President Trump put in place in April of 2020 that
allows the United States to expel most immigrants
who come to the border. So most of the single
adults that are coming are being expelled
right back from that, and an awful lot of families
are still being expelled. And the way this Title 42
order is being interpreted is that it supersedes
all immigration law. So people are being expelled
without any immigration process whatsoever, no ability to
even try to claim asylum if that is their intent. The only exception he has been
for the unaccompanied children. And that is one
of the reasons why we have seen an increase
in unaccompanied children. The fact that the Title
42 order is also in place is one of the reasons why we
see a lot of single adults right now. The majority of
immigrants are still single adults right
now, many of whom have tried several times,
so-called recidivists. Because they're not suffering
any immigration consequences from the attempt or
being expelled, sometimes in a matter of hours,
back to Mexico, the opportunity cost
of trying again is low, and so we're seeing repetitive
attempts at crossing. Other programs, the migrant
protection protocols that Trump had in place
early in 2018 and 2019 that required immigrants
who were allowed to apply for asylum
in the United States to wait in Mexico while
their cases were heard. He ended new entrants
into that program, although since President Trump
had put Title 42 in place, pretty much nobody
was put in MPP. But then he opened up
pathways for many of them who had pending cases to come
back into the United States. So they are registering in
Mexico, taking COVID tests, and then subsequently
being allowed in to continue their cases
in the United States. But those are the only
fundamental changes at the border. And that's the fact that many
migrants are finding out, after making the long
trek to the border, only to be told that they're
not going to be allowed in to make an asylum claim. And I think that's one of the
reasons why many immigration advocates are very frustrated
with the Biden administration because they expected a much
more rapid undoing, if you will, of many of
Trump's policies. But the reality is, as I said,
the Trump administration also left the Biden administration
with a highly depleted infrastructure for
processing migrants, were they to take away
these restrictions. So I believe very strongly
that one of the reasons the Biden administration has
kept most of the Title 42 restrictions in place,
it is because it's the one policy that allows
them essentially to regulate the number of
families and adults they have to manage
at the border, and they can continue
to expel them. Now, how much longer that policy
is going to remain in place is an open question. The Biden administration
has made no articulation that it might move to
end it, although many are urging him to do so. There is a lawsuit that is
out there about whether or not the use of Title 42 to supersede
immigration law is even legal. So the Biden administration
is taking the Trump position in that lawsuit right
now, although they have asked the court
to wait because they might intend to take it down. But I think the bigger question
is whether Mexico will continue to allow the United States
to turn migrants who aren't Mexican back into Mexico. JULIA PRESTON: Yeah. THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: That
is something that the Trump administration essentially
foisted on to Mexico, and they took it, if you will--
it was a unilateral action by the United States,
but they acceded to it-- that I think the current
Mexican government is eager to sort
of rid itself of. JULIA PRESTON: So I'm
going to just give Jia a chance, before we go to
questions, to maybe comment on another very
dramatic situation that we've experienced
in recent days, which was the shootings in
Atlanta and the focus on Asian immigration that very
sadly came from that violence. And in so much of our discussion
about reform and the system, we don't really talk that
much about Asian immigrants. And I'm wondering, just looking
at the events in Atlanta, what kind of impact did
that have, do you think, on the Asian community
and on the discussion in the United States
about Asian immigrants? JIA LYNN YANG: I mean, I
think it just accentuated all the fears that people
have been carrying around for the last year
during the pandemic. I think it also has become a
moment for many Asian-Americans to figure out, what is our
political identity here? I think we talk a
lot about policy. I do think there's
something here where there are just
millions of Asian-Americans in this country. That has never been the case
before that we've had so many. And yet what does it mean
to be Asian-American? What is this category? I'd be curious if you polled
actual Asian immigrants how many would even
identify as Asian-American. But certainly when you have
these anti-Asian hate crimes, the bigotry of other people
has a way of uniting you. Because the bigot
doesn't care if you're Korean or Chinese or Filipino. It's all the same to them. And so in that way, there is a
new, I think potentially more unified, identity
emerging from all of this. But it's also just-- it's just very sad. I don't know what else to say. It's like being Asian for
so long, Asian-American, has meant just sort of this
provisional Americanness. You see this in the
immigration laws. I would argue, and
I argue in my book, that the 1965 law, which allowed
so many Asian families to be here, including
my own, was really never intended to allow this
many Asian-Americans to be here. There's testimony in Congress
where people are saying, no, no, don't worry. There won't be Asians here. So I think there's this fear
among some Asian-Americans that this country doesn't
really want us to begin with. And if you look
at the history, I don't think there was ever a
moment where the country said intentionally, we want millions
of Asian-Americans here. And so when there are
these hate crimes, it just reinforces this
basic kind of insecurity and this tenuous sense of, are
we even supposed to be here? What do people
want to do with us? And so there's also
this sort of toggling between Asian-Americans have
been described as almost like white-adjacent. They're not really
people of color. They're not this. They're not that. And so I think this is a really,
as sad as this moment is, it's also a moment that demands
some kind of political identity to emerge from a group
that I think has struggled to articulate one. And even if you can
trace back the history to things like Daniel was
talking about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. That law and those
Chinese immigrants have very little to do with
the people who are here now. I think as much
as I love learning Asian-American history, it's a
whole different world of people here. And to try to draw a
straight line I think is sort of difficult. What
I try to do with my book, honestly, is to say the
political lineage of Asian America is largely the 1965
Immigration and Nationality Act. And if you can begin to
understand that heritage, that legacy, then you can begin
with some grounded idea of what it means to be Asian-American. And what I would say is
we've run out of time, but that law is so important
because it states emphatically that Americanness should not
be tied to race or ethnicity. And so even if the
law, when it's passed, does not intend to have all
these Asian-Americans come through family reunification
and other priorities, the spirit of it
is very much alive with us today in this country. It's what the entire fight
over the Trump administration was about. It's about, does your
race or ethnicity matter for whether you can be American? And so I think for
Asian-Americans trying to understand the heartbreak of
this year, the pain and anguish of it, I think, for people to
look at the immigration history and to see how far we've
come, even if some moments feel frankly accidental,
that's something to work with. And it's a way to
tie Asian-Americans to the broader legacy of the
fight for racial equality in this country,
one that I think can feel hard to attach
yourself to when your family is a relatively recent arrival. But I think through
immigration, there is the possibility for
all kinds of unitedness across different groups. And I think that's
why tying immigration to the people who are here,
it's like for me, a lot of this has been learning-- I think I used to think of
immigration as very abstract. It's a thing that
Congress fights over. It's a thing that
presidents fight over. But the fact of
the matter is what happens in Congress is why
my family is even here. It's quite personal. And so I think as
we think about how to talk about
immigration, finding a way to connect to people who are
the descendants of immigrants, to say, your life was
changed by these laws. If we're talking about a
way forward with policy, I think it's important to try
to bring it into people's lives and to say, but for
these laws, your family would have had a
very different life. You wouldn't have the
papers that you have. And that's what's
happening here. It's not a thing that
happens to other people. Who has papers and who
does not affects us all because the laws
can also change. That's the thing I also
learned from my research. You can decide tomorrow that
these people don't count and these people do,
and the paper itself doesn't have some kind
of inherent significance. So again, I think that's where
tying a moment like right now for Asian-Americans to
immigration explicitly to say, this is not about
the border alone. This is about what it
means to be American, and what it means that
your family is here, and how your family is
actually being bound very tightly with the families that
are also at the border trying to come in here. JULIA PRESTON: OK. Well, that's a
tremendously great place to leave the discussion
and go to the questions. And so here's a question
that maybe Dan or Roberto. Do you consider it fair to
allow illegal immigrants in before legal immigrants? So Dan, maybe you want
to answer that question. Because this
question articulates the underlying dynamic
of immigration reform. Do you consider it fair to
allow illegal immigrants in before legal immigrants? DANIEL TICHENOR: So I think,
Theresa, someone else kind of invoked Bill Clinton, a
moment in the the Clinton administration. And one of the big metaphors
that Clinton talked about was rewarding those who play by
the rules and those who don't. And so one of the things that
was carted out in the 1990s and has been with
us for a long time is the idea that
legal immigrants are waiting patiently. There actually is no really-- in truth, there is no line. But we think of the
metaphor of the line, and they're waiting patiently,
and others are cutting in line. And so if you take
that approach, you can say ethically,
it is unfair. However, if you think
about, actually, the trajectory of
America's insatiable appetite for cheap labor,
whether that labor is authorized, documented,
or undocumented, you have a very
different picture of what's ethically
right on this. So the fact that we can
talk about almost any decade of American history
in which we've had a big wink on certain
policies in law but in fact have had very kind of
unending dependence and desire for cheap undocumented labor. And so there was
conversation earlier-- I think Theresa raised
the Bracero Program, which starts in the 1940s and is
meant to be addressed kind of, as they put it, the
war manpower problem, and yet exists until
1963, long after the war. Because that contract
labor was basically so desired by American employers. And in tandem with
that legal contract labor, which was very
exploited, by the way, but that's a whole
other conversation, we had similar streams of
undocumented immigrants coming into the country. And the INS at the time-- basically here's where
the big wink comes in-- was not really
enforcing, at least not during harvest season,
in a consistent fashion. And so we can fast
forward to recent decades again where we had a system that
basically relied very strongly on undocumented labor because
it was cheap, tractable, and useful in doing a lot of
jobs that a lot of Americans don't want. And when you think
about it in those terms, you might have a very
different perspective on what is fair and unfair. ROBERTO GONZALES:
Hey, if I can pick up on Dan's important
points, I think at the height of
the Bracero Program, the United States was recruiting
upwards of 500,000 labor migrants per year. And in fact, beyond
that number, growers couldn't get enough workers. And so we're actually
recruiting workers through, quote unquote,
"illegal" channels. And so you've got this
massive number of migrants who are making
these return trips, and this becomes a very regular
part of labor migration. The Bracero Program
ends 1963, 1964. In 1965-- we've talked about
that the Hartzler Act of 1965-- is that we put numerical
restrictions on the Western Hemisphere, 120,000. And Mexico by 1976 is subject
to country of origin quotas of 20,000 per year. So we've got this
huge bottleneck. So we've got this penchant for
cheap, flexible, pliant labor, and more than 500,000 annually. And suddenly, because
we've got Mexico subject to these country of
origin quotas and the Western Hemisphere quota, and we've
got what happens is that the-- so labor migration
doesn't change. It doesn't slow down
until 2007, 2008. But what we have is the auspices
under which migrants arrived have changed. And so they've
become undocumented. Undocumented immigrants
today, the vast majority of adult undocumented
immigrants have been here-- they're long-term stayers. So the average-- I
think the median stay is more than 13 years. So more than 75% of this
undocumented population has been here for
more than 15 years. And so we have to ask these
really tough questions that I can understand that
during a time of pandemic, during a time of
economic downturn, these are some very
difficult questions. But these are people who are
part of our communities, who are part of our communities
of faith, who have ties to their neighbors, again,
to communities of faith, to employers, to
their kids' teachers. And so how do we address a
population that has been here, that has grown roots
here is a really-- I think, is a really
important question. JULIA PRESTON: Theresa, did
you want to respond also? THERESA CARDINAL
BROWN: Yeah, I just want to point out
something that Dan said and maybe elaborate on it. This question
comes from a belief that the legal immigration
system actually works, that it's easy to get
in line and get a visa, and these are people that
just choose not to do that. And the fact of the matter
is that the legal immigration system, particularly if
you're coming for work, is extraordinarily
difficult and restrictive. For some countries
and some nationalities and some categories,
you can stay and wait in that line for
50 years or longer. So is that really a line? And I think going
back to the idea that when did we last fix
our immigration system? IRCA in 1986
married legalization of what was then about 3.3
million undocumented immigrants with increased border security
and employment verification and enforcement
mechanisms but didn't address the legal
immigration system at all. The next time we did that was in
1990, where we sort of tweaked the existing system that
we inherited from 1965, but we didn't really expand it. Here we are, some
almost 40 years later, with a system that
is very outdated that allows these long
backlogs to fill, which really is not a
system that is workable, which is roundly criticized
for being more complicated than the tax system for
people to try to navigate. And yet we have this
idea that somehow, well, you should just do
it the legal way. I would say that that
doesn't work anymore because the legal system itself
is broken in so many ways. And so we need to
address the undocumented for all of the reasons that
Dan and Roberto mentioned. But we also need to fix our
legal immigration system. And frankly, if we want
to secure the border and have people
come in a legal way, rather than coming to the
border without authorization or papers, then we need to fix
the legal immigration system and give them
avenues that actually work to try to do that. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: Julia,
may I make a comment as to-- JULIA PRESTON: You may. We're still on the
first question. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: Sorry. JULIA PRESTON: Yeah, go ahead. No, no. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: As a
member of the board of the JFK Library Foundation, it took
two Irish-American politicians, Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill,
to make the deal to regularize the act that-- JULIA PRESTON: 1986. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO:
--Theresa just mentioned, two Irish-American politicians. JULIA PRESTON: So Marcelo, I
think there's a question here that you might be answering. It says, "Wouldn't it
be more efficacious if the US spent all
the money they are now spending on enforcement
in a Marshall Plan for Central America? I think most people would like
to stay in their own country if they felt safe and
could earn a decent living, rather than enter into
the dangerous chaos that now exists." You want to take a
shot at that, Marcelo? And maybe Theresa, you have some
thoughts about that as well. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO:
Thank you so much. 75 years of data, 75
years of basic research makes one point
and one point only. At any given moment in
human history, less than 3% of the world's
population is on the move beyond the country
of birth, meaning Homo sapiens sapiens,
all things equal, would rather not migrate. So the right not to migrate
is a fundamental right, especially in the context of
the catastrophic migrations of the 21st century. So smart, long-term investments
in the regions of the world that today are sending
the largest numbers of forced migrants,
forced migrants would be both
humanitarian, ethical, and a very good investment
in the long term. Having said that, I believe
that the right to migrate is a fundamental human right. Immigration is a shared
condition of our humanity. Immigration is
written on our DNA. It's in our stereoscopic vision. It's in our bipedalism. It's in our central
nervous system. Immigration makes us human. Immigration is the shared
experience of humanity. Two things are true. People should have
the right to migrate. People should also have
the right not to migrate. So investing differently
in initiatives that would enable people to
offer the fundamental dignity, the fundamental capacities to
stay and not have to migrate should be a smart
and wise investment. JULIA PRESTON: Theresa,
the Biden administration has embraced this concept to
the extent that one wonders-- he's speaking so much
about root causes. He's named Vice President
Harris to go down and negotiate with the countries
in Central America to develop programs to address
the root causes of migration. So on one hand, this does seem
to be the policy of the Biden administration. But on the other hand, is this
going to happen soon enough? THERESA CARDINAL BROWN:
Well, I agree with Marcelo that addressing the reasons
that people are migrating in the first place is ultimately
how you reduce migration that is forced, that uncontrolled
and irregular migration is one way to look at it. You reduce that when you don't
force people to have to leave. That is a long and complicated
investment process. And I would say that President
Biden knows that because when he was vice president
under Obama, President Obama sent
him to Central America to do just that. He was charged with creating
what was then the prosperity plan for Americas. And so he understands
that, and I think that's one of the reasons
why he's leaning into this root cause argument. I think it's
absolutely necessary, and it's something that we need
to invest in for the future. But it is also a very
long-term proposition. And we cannot ignore the fact
that American intervention in many of these countries in
Central America over several decades is one of the reasons
why they are tough places for people to stay right now. The criminal gangs
that are rampant down there started,
many of them, in the prisons in
the United States, when earlier migrants
from those countries came and learned gangs
from gangs in prison and took them back home. We have issues of corruption
in the governments there, impunity that is rampant. So we have to be very
careful and cautious how we get on our white
horse and trot down there and say we're going to fix it. We have to learn from the past. And to figure out
how we do it, I think that what the Biden
administration is proposing and what is absolutely
necessary is a regional plan. But it has to absolutely
involve Mexico. It has to involve the
countries in the region. It has to involve Costa Rica
and Panama and Nicaragua and any other country that
is able and willing to help with what is essentially
a hemispheric issue. We should invite our northern
neighbors from Canada as well. It can't just be
the United States. But it's a necessary
investment, absolutely. Is it going to solve our
problem at the border in the next two to four years? No. No. I don't think so. So we have to also invest
in our own processes. We have to invest
in a system that can manage the migration,
that can give people a way to make their claim, decide
if they're able to stay, and if not, then
return them in safety and manage that from that end. DANIEL TICHENOR: Julia-- JULIA PRESTON: Yeah. DANIEL TICHENOR: Could I
make a 15-second point? JULIA PRESTON: Yes. DANIEL TICHENOR: To me, in
thinking about a Marshall Plan, as the questioner put it, one
of the critical ingredients is, is it capacious enough
to include something that addresses climate change? Because I think climate refugees
is such a huge challenge going forward. And so one has to ask, no matter
how much money and addressing human rights and so forth, as
climate crises loom for us, already is having a dramatic
impact on people's movement. And I wonder, Marcelo,
noting that roughly 3%, and that's been for a long time
of people who want to move. But again, as we
face these stresses surrounding our
changing environment, one wonders where we
are 10 years from now if that number goes up as a
result of just that stress. JULIA PRESTON: We
have a question, which is, how has the
pandemic affected immigration to the United States? So who wants to grab that one? We could talk all
night about that. Yeah, go ahead, Marcelo. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: The
pandemic brought immigration to a real halt, globally,
if you look at the data, for two reasons. One, borders were shut. And internally, by the way,
the largest movements of people worldwide today are in Asia. And they're not in the Americas. And you have internal controls
that prevented the movements of people, both internationally
as well as internally within nation-states. So the pandemic has
just dramatically changed the flows,
albeit temporarily, over the last year. The data on this are
very, very clear-- not the forced migrations. Not forced migrations. THERESA CARDINAL BROWN: I
would add that migration to the United States, because
of the sequence of orders that President
Trump put in place, first the green card ban and
then the temporary visa ban, have reduced legal immigration
to the United States, both for temporary and
permanent, by close to 80% in the last year. And even though President Trump
has now let those bans-- well, took them away and then
let one lapse today, the consulates overseas
that process legal visas are still operating at
significantly reduced capacity. And there are backlogs
of hundreds of thousands of applications waiting to
be processed, some of which will expire, and people
will lose their chance to come to the
United States legally if that isn't caught up. So even though
Marcelo is correct, it's a temporary
pause due to COVID. The recovery from
this temporary pause could take quite a
long time to see. JULIA PRESTON: Yeah. Jia, did you want to
reflect on that as well? You started to talk
about it before, but obviously the pandemic has
made the United States acutely aware that it's on the
same planet with China. And I don't know. Do you want to reflect on that? JIA LYNN YANG: I guess
the only thing I would say is that I feel like this
event and sort of what's become of our passports is
again a reminder of how man made all of these rules around
where we can go are, that they can
change at any time. Suddenly we have
these passports that are supposed to allow
us to go everywhere, but because we've so
mismanaged the pandemic, our ability to move
around the world has been severely restricted. And so one thing
I'm curious about is, as we come out
of this pandemic, what does that mean
for any kind of-- even any movement around the
world, beyond just people having visas and being able to
officially migrate somewhere. What is the movement of
human people around the globe going to look like if
wealthy countries do not help pay for and
provide vaccines to developing countries
that can't afford it now? So just as a broad thought,
it reminds me, again, of how contingent our ability
to move around the world is. And I think that's something
that some Americans maybe take for granted because we have-- if you're born here
and you're sort of used to this
freedom of movement, I think the pandemic is a bit
of a wake-up call, potentially, that it's not so easy to decide
that you're going to show up in other countries, just
as other people struggle to come here as well. It's just that sort
of the arrow is kind of pointing in
the other direction now in a way that maybe
is uncomfortable for us. JULIA PRESTON: OK, we
have time for one-- ROBERTO GONZALES: Julia,
I just wanted to-- JULIA PRESTON: Yeah, go ahead. ROBERTO GONZALES: I think that
the related question to this is, what has this pandemic
done to immigrants residing in the United States? And we've certainly seen
it exacerbate inequalities. With immigrant families, with
immigrant and mixed status households, you've got adults
who are essential workers. You've got households
that have not been eligible for the
relief, the COVID relief. You've got a massive crisis
in the public education system with immigrant families
really struggling to keep up. We see older children
who are taking care of their younger siblings. We see Wi-Fi
connectivity problems. You see the digital divide
and education gaps growing. So it's had untold
effects, I think, that we'll be studying
this for years to come. JULIA PRESTON: Indeed. I think we have time
for one more question. The US population is slowing. Do we not need an increase
in our labor force to have a growing economy? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO:
So three things. In the long term,
demographically, immigrants behave fertility-wise like the
encompassing populations where they settle, meaning that
the rates of live births tend to migrate with migration
towards the national norms. Meaning in the long
term, immigration is not a real solution. Second, the average number
of live births in Mexico has collapsed. Mexico entered the demographic
transition with a vengeance. The average Mexican
woman today has in the order of 2.4,
2.5 live births. A generation ago-- a
generation is 20 years-- she had something like
close to seven live births. So the claim of the
number of immigrants that are required as a
function of the labor force is a claim that has been
studied very, very carefully. And there are
fundamental limits. In the context of
automation, robotics, artificial intelligence,
computer-assisted design, the nature of work is
fundamentally changing. And what's important
to keep in mind is that both at the very, very high end
of the opportunity structure and at the low end of the
opportunity structure, immigrants tend to
complement the skills of the native-born force. Very few of us are going to
either win the Nobel Prize or are high school dropouts. Immigrants tend to
be overrepresented in the category of
winners of the Nobel Prize and folk with very low levels
of education and skill. So a claim of labor functions
is that the complementarity of immigrant labor has worked
very, very well, especially in this look the other
way culture that Dan talked about earlier. But fundamentally, it has
been a conceptual error, in my estimation,
to reduce migration to labor and to units of work. In my world, immigration
is an ethical act of and for the family. Immigration is for the family. The family begins immigration. It's at the level
of the household. And the momentum that
immigration sustains is all driven by kinship
and social organization. So in my estimation,
it is better to think through
the need for labor in the context of a
clear, open-eyed view that when we want immigrants,
we want the whole human being. We don't want the Braceros. The Braceros, their
very name tells you everything you need to know. Arms for labor-- no. Immigration is an ethical
act of and for the family. The family unit begins it. Immigration changes the family. One family begins it. A very different family
culturally, structurally completes the immigration
cycle down the road. So-- JULIA PRESTON: OK. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO:
--thank you. JULIA PRESTON: We have to
unfortunately leave it there, but it's a wonderful thought. And so I just want
to thank everybody. This was an incredibly
rich and broad discussion. And thank you again
to the Kennedy Library for bringing us all together
for a remarkably wide-ranging conversation on this very
dynamic and difficult and hopefully productive issue. Thank you. DANIEL TICHENOR:
Thank you, Julia. ROBERTO GONZALES:
Yeah, thank you, Julia. [MUSIC PLAYING]
