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POLICY ORIENTATION FOR THE TEXAS LEGISLATURE 2014
“Immigration Reform: A Solution for Texas is a Solution for the Nation”
POLICY PANEL SESSION IV (January 9, 2014)
Immigration is a persistent and confounding issue in the national debate. But is a solution really so far out of reach? Our panelists will discuss new ways forward on an enduring issue of contention.
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Fund:
Our ambitious title today for the panel is immigration reform, a solution for Texas, a solution for the nation. Once again, there’s a great deal of humility focused around this topic and Texas’ role in it, but actually on this, I certainly can attest that there’s some validity to this. I’m a Californian. No boos, no boos. And I have long noticed that the people of Texas have had a more cooperative, a more responsible, and a less adversarial relationship when it comes to immigration issues than we in California. The level of rhetoric and the level of animosity and the level of misunderstanding, frankly, has been lower here than in California and perhaps some of those reasons will be brought out by our panelists. The way this panel is going to be run is we’re going to have about, presentations of about ten minutes from each of our participants. I’m going to have a few concluding remarks, based on the prerogative of the moderator and then we’re going to allot as much time as possible for questions and other commentary from you. My only advice to you would be, as much as possible when you stand up, and when the person with the microphone approaches you, there will be, I’m going to envision a thought bubble rising above you and in that thought bubble there will be words that you say, but, hopefully, at the end of the thought bubble will be a question mark and not a series of dots signifying continuing commentary on your thoughts. So we want you to express your views very, very persistently, but we want them to be directed towards enhancing the conversation rather than just going on and on. So, with that, it’s my privilege to introduce, Barrett Duke who is the vice president for public policy and research, as well as the Director of the Research Institute of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He directs their advocacy efforts in Washington, D.C., and communicates with Southern Baptist offices all over the country and has a unique perspective to bring to this issue. Dr. Duke.
Duke:
Glad to be with you today, and, John, as I understand it, you’re not the first Californian to be coming to Texas lately. And I’m glad to be in Texas. I lived in Dallas for five years, and I really enjoyed my time here, and always glad to come back to this state. As you know, there are a lot of Southern Baptists in Texas. In fact over 10 percent of your population is Southern Baptists. I know it feels like more than that and I’m glad it feels like more than that. They’re about 25 percent of all the folks in Texas, or Evangelicals and about half of those are Southern Baptists so, there are plenty of us around and, speaking, not with a single voice but with a growing voice on immigration reform in favor of finding a way to address the plight of the 11 million or so folks who are just basically trapped in this country, with very little solution.
Southern Baptists come to this question in a number of different ways and I just want to kind of lay those out. I think the first is personal. I mean Southern Baptists will pretty much talk to anybody about Jesus Christ if they’ll just stand still long enough to let us have a conversation. We don’t we don’t ask where they’re from. We don’t ask whether or not they’re legal. We believe that Jesus Christ died for every single human being on the face of the Earth and that everyone must trust Christ the Savior to have peace with God and, therefore, it would be a violation of our duty to God to refuse to share that important message with everybody that we possibly can and we’ve done that and as my guess is everyone in this room could attest, we do that pretty persistently and we’ve done that as well in the Hispanic community. As a result, a lot of our churches have Hispanic ministries attached to them and those in many cases are some of their more rapidly growing aspects of their ministry. We’re reaching them for Lord. We’re baptizing them, and they’re becoming part of our church fellowships. We’re hiring pastors to minister to them and so basically they’re s-, they are spiritual family with us. It’s inconceivable for us to think that we would introduce them to the Lord, baptize them, and then simply say, “Okay now you’re on your own. In fact, in reality, we’d just as soon see you deported as sticking around.”
That is becoming simply not the case for more and more of our Southern Baptist churches. They are developing relationships with Hispanics many of them undocumented, and they’re looking for real solutions for how to make it possible for these people these folks that they’ve begun to know, that they’ve become friends with, that they recognize are good, hardworking, moral, family-oriented people for them to be able to come out of the shadows and begin themselves to fulfill all of the potential that God has put within them. So, first of all, I think it’s largely personal for us, but it’s also biblical. You can’t read your Bible without understanding God’s concern for how a people treats the most vulnerable in their midst. You have very clear teachings in the Old Testament that God told his people to love the stranger in their midst. This was a person who was not Israel, part of Israel, it was a person who was not Jewish. It was a person who wasn’t even necessarily an adherent to the Jewish faith but they were within the borders of Israel and Israel was expected to treat them in the same way.
In fact, God said, “Love them like yourselves.” That was the expectation that God had for Israel to treat the stranger in their midst and then, of course, we know the teachings of Jesus about how Jesus expected his disciples to treat the stranger in their midst as well, and we have plenty of biblical teaching on how we deal in hospitality toward strangers as well. So when you just look at it from a biblical perspective, we understand as well that it’s appropriate for us to find a way to make it possible for these 11 million or so folks to live peacefully in our midst and to be able to move forward with their lives in our midst as well.
It’s also a moral question for us. We just can’t imagine that you could actually even, deport 11 million people. I mean just look at the Elian Gonzalez situation in Florida a number of years back and then multiply that by 11 million and you can imagine what would happen if this country actually decided to forcefully deport 11 million people and, quite frankly, that’s the only way we’re going to get them out of the country if we were trying to deport them. We just don’t see that that’s feasible, nor is it humanitarian. It certainly isn’t moral. These are, for the most part now we know there are, there is a criminal element. We’re not asking for the criminal element to be treated the same way as these other hardworking folks. We recognize that our own government and business has been complicit in the circumstance that we’re in. If this government, if our government had the will not to have 11 million people here in an undocumented status, they would not be here. We were certainly happy to have them here when there were plenty of jobs and the economy was booming and now all of a sudden because things have slowed down some folks want them out. That’s just, in our opinion, is inappropriate behavior on the part of a nation toward a vulnerable people. But there are also questions simply about how these folks are being treated here in this country right now as well. I have a pastor friend in New Orleans, at First Baptist Church of New Orleans. He said they have a ministry to undocumented folks at their church and he said there are folks there who simply treat them as walking ATM machines. They know they have nowhere to put their money. They walk around with it in their pockets and they’re regularly victimized.
He knows of a gunshot victim who refused to go to the hospital with a gunshot wound because he was afraid he’d be deported and he would be separated from his family as a result. So those are, those are just, for us, unacceptable circumstances and a nation, like this nation, should not allow those kinds of things to be happening to over 11 million people living within our borders. Southern Baptists have already addressed this on a couple of occasions. In 2011, in Phoenix of all places, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for immigration reform which included a means toward legal status for the undocumented here. The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention here in Texas just back in October passed a resolution as well calling for the same thing. In fact, um they actually adopted the principles that we’re a part of. They were part of a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table, and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention here actually adopted the principles as part of their resolution and this is what it calls for: Respects for the God-given dignity of every person, protects the unity of the immediate family, respects the rule of law, guarantees secure national borders, ensures fairness to taxpayers, and as another component of legislation, establishes a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and do wish to become permanent residents. So, we’re addressing this at the denominational level as well as at the church level and we believe that our country is close to finally resolving this question in a way that treats these folks in our midst in an appropriate and in a Christian and humane manner and I’ll be happy to attempt to answer your questions afterward. Thanks very much.
Fund:
Next, we have Ike Brannon, who’s a senior fellow of the George W. Bush Institute, and is also currently President of the consulting firm, Capital Policy Analytics.
Brannon:
All right. Thanks, John, and thanks to the Texas Public Policy Foundation for inviting me down here. About 20 years ago, I was a brand new professor in the University of Wisconsin system, and a company that had just opened in Madison asked me for some advice. Asking a newly admitted Ph.D. economist to help with something is a terrible, terrible idea, but I offered to help just the same. The problem was that they had opened this new, the managers had opened this new factory on the outskirts of Madison and they needed a thousand workers and at the time, this is the beginning of 1995 they couldn’t find a thousand skilled workers. They didn’t know what to do. So we came. We thought about a solution and I observed that something like 300 miles away in Superior, Wisconsin in the northwest part of the state a factory that did a similar thing was closing down. It also happened to have a thousand employees, so I suggested to the managers, “Why don’t you go up there and make these people a carte blanche offer to come work for you guys?” and they did it. All thousand people, no questions asked, were offered a job at wages 5 to 10 percent above what they were making at, at their old spot. None of these people had jobs lined up. So what happened? Of the thousand people approximately 90 of them decided to move down to Madison. We, we were shocked. We couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I contacted the old company. I did a little survey of what was going on.
800 of the people who were laid off at the factory that closed in Superior, a year later did not have a job. They were collecting unemployment insurance and they were still living in Superior, and of the 80 people that that we hired that my, this company hired in Madison half of them left and moved back to Superior without a job after 18 months. Superior and Madison are 300 miles away but they’re quite, quite similar, I think in culture. In fact, at the time, Madison was voted the nicest city in America and I’m not sure anyone would say that about Superior. So what was going on? Well, we like, Americans like living where our friends and family live. Our migration rates within the United States have fallen a lot. We may be a nation of immigrants who almost every one of whom left and traveled here, usually in perilous situations, but that’s not how Americans do it anymore.
In 1960, 12 percent of all Americans moved to another state in search of a new job. In 2012, that figure was something around 4 percent, an all‑time low. We’re not nearly as mobile as we used to be, and this is causing problems and it’s going to cause problems for a state like Texas. Texas, unlike Illinois where I’m from, or other places in the Northeast, I now live in Washington, D.C. Texas has had a booming economy. I don’t need to tell you guys that. It’s averaged, it’s added one million new jobs in the last two years. The unemployment rate for Texas is 6.1 percent. That’s pretty close to what economists think of as the natural rate. That is, there’s not a ton more people left to take new jobs. The unemployment that we have is because people don’t have the requisite skills for the jobs that are open. In other words, despite the fact that our national economy still has a ways to grow, Texas is about to hit a labor constraint in the near future. So, if Texas wants to keep up this boom pace in the next few years, it can’t simply look across the border and across the state border and assume that people from Illinois or Wisconsin or Iowa are going to stream down here. It’s not the way the United States works anymore.
As Mr. Duke pointed out, Texas has been a magnet for immigration for the last 30 or 40 years. Part of that is because of its proximity to Mexico and Central America, but it’s much, more than that, right? But if you look at Texas in 1970 it’s the number of immigrants it had as a proportion of its population was below the nationwide average. There weren’t a whole lot of immigrants hanging out in Texas. What’s changed is that there are jobs here. This has become a dynamic economy. I grew up with a guy who was an immigrant. His name was Robert Noguy. I wrote about him for the Bush Institute, a piece we just published yesterday. Robert came to Peoria, Illinois, my hometown in 1980 when his family escaped Poland walking across the border at cover of night. They located into Peoria because of a Catholic charity that relocated Polish immigrants in Central Illinois today Robert is the CEO of a major manufacturing concern that employs 2,500 people which is 2,000 more people than were employed when he took over as CEO.
This is the type of entrepreneurship and innovation and the type of jobs that every single state in the country is lusting after, and Peoria somehow got this simply because the Catholic charity that found him put him in there and Robert happens to, even though he’s an immigrant, he lived in two other countries before he came to the United States. Robert has no intention of moving anywhere else. Peoria got this guy who created all these jobs out of sheer luck. Nobody in their right mind would relocate a new business in Peoria. It has a very high, or Illinois at large, right? It has a relatively high state corporate income tax. It has a high personal income tax and that personal income tax is going higher. Its workmen’s’ comp situation is amongst the worst in the country and it has all kinds of unfriendly regulations. Okay?
We lucked into having a Robert Noguy create jobs. Texas attracts all these jobs. Texas attracts people like that. I think sometimes that the people in Peoria and elsewhere that don’t have an experience with a lot of immigrants, and there aren’t many, there aren’t many immigrants in, in Central Illinois, their assumption is that immigrants go and take people’s jobs and that they make things especially bad in places where there aren’t a whole lot of jobs. Immigrants, in general, don’t go to places where there aren’t a whole lot of jobs. There aren’t many illegal immigrants in Peoria because they know, they have much better place to find jobs elsewhere, and the other thing that economists have figured out a long time ago is that in general immigrants are quite good at creating jobs. They’re three times more likely than the typical American, even controlling for education and income to start their own business, and they’re three or four times more likely to create a business that actually employs new people. Because there’s kind of a barrier to get into the United States for everybody we don’t get just everybody into the United States. We tend to get relatively talented people from other countries and this is a great benefit to us.
In the last five to ten years there have been a number of studies trying to look at the net cost to the United States government and to various state governments as to the cost of immigrants both legal and illegal and sometimes people get a net plus. Sometimes people get a net minus. The one thing that people need to keep in mind, the one, I think, hard and true datum that’s out there is that the United States Social Security system actually benefits greatly from illegal immigrants. The way illegal immigrants, the way the Social Security system works, you have to pay in for ten years before you can qualify for any benefits. There’s no other pension in America by law that requires you to participate for so long before you get any benefits. So there’s two different things that go on. So immigrants who have legal right will come here for five or six or eight years, right? There’s the H1B visas limit you to that, and then they go back home just short of being able to qualify for those ten years. Or if they’re an illegal immigrant, what do they do? They borrow somebody else’s Social Security number and they take that person’s identity and they work as if they’re that person, somebody who’s back in their hometown for instance, and that person might collect 30 or 40 or 50 or in a couple of cases a few hundred years of Social Security benefits but that person knows better than to try to collect on those benefits because he fears that he would be caught if he tried to do that and arrested to some degree.
Steve Goss, the Chief Actuary for Social Security, estimates that the net cost is the net benefit to the Social Security system in present value terms, not stretched out over 50 years, is something like $2 trillion. So I think some of that represents exploitation. I think if somebody works for five or seven or eight or nine or ten years and pays into the Social Security system maybe they ought to receive something, but the fact of the matter, the overwhelming data that figures into the net cost or benefits of immigrants in the United States has to do with the gigantic contributions they make to Social Security. And the last point I’ll make if you kind of think about the data that just, that just came out yesterday, the United States’ birth rate is at an all-time low. Right? Social Security and Medicare are going to collapse unless we have people coming up and replacing the people at the bottom and happily for us, immigrants who come in tend to have higher birth rates. They tend to stay in the labor force longer. We really will see a different composition of the labor force if we didn’t have immigrants and this is something that Europe’s going to have to face fairly soon. Europe’s much older, they have, much older than us. They have much lower birth rates. At some point Europe’s going to have to adopt almost full-scale immigration or they’re going to have to dramatically increase their taxes, and at some point we’re going to have to make the same decision.
Fund:
And our last speaker is Derrick Morgan who is the Heritage Foundation’s Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy.
Morgan:
Thank you John, and thank you to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It’s really great to be back here in my home state of Texas. I’ve been sojourning in an unholy land in Washington D.C. for quite some time but it’s good to be back here. And I’m excited to talk to you about immigration as well. It’s a critical issue facing our country. Now we have to admit there’s definitely points of disagreement, and I have a feeling I’m on the panel to provide some fair and balance, to quote the Fox Network there. But there are some areas of common ground available as well and that’s what I’d like to talk about in part. We all agree that immigration can make our country stronger. It has for hundreds of years, and it can do that in the future and it is doing it today. Did you know that today the United States admits more immigrants on a clear path to citizenship than the rest of the world combined? That’s if we don’t reform immigration at all today, we welcome more people to our country to become full American citizens than the rest of the world combined.
Even with our generous immigration laws, the immigration system does need repair. I think we probably all agree on that as well. We agree the system needs to be more rational and more humane, and more workable as well. We agree that the enforcement of the law must be predictable, effective, and fair. We agree that there are economic costs and benefits that have to be weighed into our decisions. We all agree that we must have secure borders; that our national security really requires that. We know there are drug cartels and other criminal activities that pose a threat to this state and to the nation. We’re mindful of the importance of immigration to the history and strength of the country, and we all should condemn bigoted and racist actions, and here in Texas we know it’s not just a national debate, but it’s a local issue and it always has been, and I think many of the things that Texas is doing make sense in this area, and can be a model for the rest of the nation. So, the question really becomes how should we reform the immigration system? We know we should. The central overriding question is how do we do that? What we really need to do, is to do a step-by-step approach, to focus where there’s widespread agreement. We can reform our legal immigration system to make it work better, and we need to restore the integrity of U.S. law by enforcing current immigration laws. We can move these pieces of reform first. We can take a few steps now, and save for another day the most controversial issues, like the legal status of those in the country illegally. The President and others who are insisting on a legalization or an amnesty will make it much more difficult to reform our convoluted, unfair, and illogical legal immigration system.
Well, why is amnesty such a problem? Well, for three reasons. It’s unfair, it’s costly, and it won’t work. It’s unfair. It’s unfair to those who came to our country through that difficult, sometimes convoluted immigration system. We all know people like this. Other people, like that Ike was just talking about, they respected the rules. They played by the rules. Amnesty really sends the wrong message and says, “Don’t even bother.” It really is a slap in the face. We need a legal immigration system that makes it easier to play by the rules. America’s most recent legal residents did things the right way, and it’s unfair to reward those who did not do so. It’s also unfair to those who did not come to the United States because they respect our laws, and there are lots of people that fit in this category. A recent PEW poll revealed that Mexicans who said they wanted to move to the United States, only a bit over half said they would do so without authorization. So we’re talking about tens of thousands, potentially even millions of people who did not come to our country from that one country, not to mention the rest of the world, because it’s against our laws to do so. What kind of a message would we be sending to them if we pass yet another amnesty bill?
Well, the bottom line is that granting legal status to undocumented immigrants rewards illegal behavior, but amnesty isn’t just about fairness. It’s also about money, too. Much of the economic work that’s been done on immigration reform tends to neglect one important question. What would be the effect of a legalization, or an amnesty, on the American taxpayer? We wondered about that at Heritage, so we looked very carefully at all levels of government, local, state, and federal; we calculated all the taxes paid, and undocumented workers do pay taxes. They pay a lot in sales taxes and property taxes and so forth. We calculated all those taxes, and all the benefits and services likely to be received, and adding millions of people into our already overburdened welfare and retirement and entitlement programs will cost trillions of dollars over the lifetime of those 11 million people. Yes, we’re talking about trillions of dollars. Social Security, for example, really is helped in the short run, because you have a lot more people paying in, but Social Security, if you look at the work that’s been done, particularly for low wage workers, of which a majority of undocumented workers are lower wage workers, you end up getting way more back in benefits than you pay in to Social Security. So that’s why that math doesn’t work out in the long run. The fact is that all of those trillions of dollars have to be paid by someone, and that someone is you. Look, if the United States were Texas, with more reasonable welfare and entitlement programs and policies, then this objection could be greatly ameliorated. The work that Chuck Devore and the TPPF have done, comparing California and Texas for example, is really quite constructive. TPPF’s November report has all kinds of great data. California has the highest percentage of welfare recipients in the country. Texas has the fourth lowest.
Now, admittedly there are all kinds of other differences at work but this points out what I think is a real key to finding a common path forward on immigration in the long run, and that’s welfare reform. Milton Friedman taught us that, who’s a Libertarian, who is principally okay with the idea of open borders. He told us that you can’t have open borders and a welfare state. That’s true not only economically that it’s costly, but it’s also costly in human terms as well. From a moral point of view, we’re putting millions more people into our strained and broken safety net system. Our welfare system discourages work and marriage, because benefits are cut if you make more money as a family. We must make it pay to work and not penalize work and family. The overwhelming majority of immigrants, including undocumented immigrants come to the United States with a strong work ethic and a sense of family. We should not put them into a system that discourages those good values, and if we do not fix our safety net now, our system will be strained to the point of collapse financially, and millions will be drawn down into a dependent class. That’s not good for anybody. Not only is it unfair and costly, it also won’t even solve the problem.
Congress’ non‑partisan budget analysis office looked at the comprehensive senate bill that, according to its proponents, had the toughest border and visa and employment provisions ever, but the CBO found that even that bill would not stop unlawful immigration. In fact, millions more unlawful immigrants would come here over the next few decades, they projected. That means that even if we passed another painful and divisive amnesty, we would find ourselves back in the same situation within a generation. The minute that we pass amnesty, the problem starts all over again. We have to realize that what we do today sends signals and creates incentives, and like the pull of gravity, passing an amnesty again will encourage more unlawful immigration. If you don’t believe me or the CBO, then let’s look at our own recent experience. In 1986, we had many of these same arguments, and Congress passed, and the President signed an amnesty for some three million people, saying we were only going to do it this one time, to fix this problem, but here we are, yet again, and now we’re talking about an amnesty for more than 11 million people. If we pass another amnesty, it will be even worse, because people will see it as a signal that serial amnesties are on the way. If we passed amnesty, I am quite certain that we’ll be having this same debate again when today’s high school freshman enters college. We cannot pretend that this bill will solve our nation’s unlawful immigration program, because it won’t.
Well, amnesty isn’t the answer, but a good step-by-step approach can work, and it would start with some reforms that have wider appeal. We should make it easier for those who are willing to play by the rules and contribute to the economy to come here legally. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed John Deery and Courtney Getalig point out that the immigrants with advanced degrees from U.S. universities working in science and technology bring innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation to the United States with them. The authors argue sensibly for fixing our broken legal immigration system to allow America to attract and retain the world’s best talent. Like the rest of the many other countries in the world are doing right now. This is the business communities, and especially the tech sector’s top reason for reform, and it makes a lot of sense. Reforming our legal immigration system in this way has the potential for political agreement, because making it easier for entrepreneurs and high skilled immigrants to come here does not present those same problems as amnesty. This type of reform is neither unfair, after all, this is a new system that would be done orderly and would not reward those who break the law, and it’s also not costly, because high-skilled immigrants are more likely to contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits and services, actually lightening the taxpayers’ load. So, now is the time, I think, to push a realistic path forward for immigration reform, reforming our legal immigration system and restoring the integrity of our immigration laws. Insisting on an amnesty will wreck chances for reform this year. We do not need to wait for amnesty to give these common-sense solutions a try, even this year. We must all be invested in reform, and we can work together for partnership and community, not division and acrimony. Thank you very much.
Fund:
I’m going to take the moderator’s prerogative and make a few comments before we get to your questions. Because I only have a little bit of time, I’m going to speak very bluntly, and somewhat simplistically, so some details will be left out, but I think there’s a lot of discussion on the immigration issue, which isn’t clear and directed on, so here goes. A lot of my friends are legitimately angry that we’re not allowed to use the term illegal aliens anymore. This is preposterous political correctness. They are illegal aliens. We should be able to say that. I would simply caution you that if you use the term, you automatically close the ears of a lot of people that you’re trying to address on the issue if you want to have a solution. So, it’s perfectly appropriate to say people are illegal aliens. That’s what they are. But it’s also a conversation stopper rather than a starter.
Secondly, it outrages me from personal experience, because I know people that were victims of crime, how little we do to deport people who commit crimes in this country, and in fact, the whole issue has become politicized. The Clinton Administration let in several hundred thousand, or allowed to stay several hundred thousand people without doing proper criminal background checks, and we let in an awful lot of people and on the path of citizenship in the 1990s, people who had committed serious crimes, ranging from rape to check forging, with almost no enforcement of the laws that require them to be deported for committing such crimes, and the explanation, because we have the emails and we have the notes taken by the Clinton Administration officials who did this, that it was an advance of the 1996 election. They wanted more people on the roles in order to vote, and that’s deplorable, but unfortunately it’s all too often an incentive and the motivation for people who want a comprehensive immigration bill. And speaking of the Senate Comprehensive Immigration Bill, I am someone who very much wants immigration reform, but the Senate bill resembles very much the Obamacare bill. It’s a 1,800‑page monstrosity that you have to pass in order to find out what’s in it, and I just had a conversation last week with Mario Diaz-Balart, who is a Republican Hispanic Congressman from Florida, who said, “The days of omnibus legislation of several hundred or a thousand pages must end on every subject for all time.”
And frankly, the reason why the Senate insisted on an omnibus, all-encompassing, comprehensive bill, was political. It wasn’t policy. The House of Representatives is perfectly prepared to pass individual, discreet pieces of legislation to address the gaping failures of our immigration law, and I agree with all of the panel at some of those failures, but the reason the Senate won’t do that is very simple. They insist on a path to citizenship to be included for even the smallest reform to pass. I don’t think you have to have a giant, global solution in order to solve even the smallest problems, and we all see what happened when we did that with healthcare. A couple of other quick points.
Those who believe in only an enforcement strategy on immigration are frankly fooling themselves. I was born in Tucson, Arizona. I’ve spent a lifetime reporting and doing work on the border, and let me give you some relevant facts; 40 percent or more of the people who are here illegally, or undocumented, whatever you want to call it, overstayed legitimate visas. They didn’t cross any border. So, unless you want to prevent the flow of commerce and the flow of skilled people and the flow of tourists back and forth across the country, you’re going to have to address that issue. Almost half the people here illegally never crossed a border illegally. They simply overstayed a visa. Enforcement only has an entirely different cast if you’re trying to prevent anyone from entering the country illegally, or illegally in fear of overstaying their visa.
Assimilation; we used to do a much better job of assimilation people into this country. Something called Americanization was considered a good thing. Now it’s considered the mark of the Conquistador, the Yankee, who is trying to impose their culture or their values on people coming from other countries. So long as we were not able to give people, I think, the benefits of an understanding of what the American Constitutional system is, the English language and various other things, it makes solving the immigration problem much more difficult. But as for the enforcement, in 1969, not more than a couple of hundred miles from here, Richard Nixon arrived at the border with Mexico to declare a war on drugs, and he launched, in 1969, Operation Intercept, and Operation Intercept meant that we had 3,000 additional border customs and immigration agents deplored along the border subjecting every vehicle and cargo to a thorough search to stop the flow of drugs from Mexico. It created a nightmare, and believe me, the level of commerce and trade and flow of people in 1969 was far less than it was today. It lasted six weeks before it was abandoned, and ever since then, we have done such a wonderful job controlling the flow of drugs from Mexico. There have been no problems. If we can’t control the flow of drugs over the last 45 years from Mexico, does anyone really think we’re going to control the flow of people? And I’ll tell you why.
My brother stayed in Tucson, Arizona went to college there. He became Deputy Chief of Police in Tucson. He was head of the border liaison taskforce for several years in Tucson under Chief Ronstadt, who is Linda Ronstadt’s brother. He knows the border issue, and here’s what I’ve learned from him. You can’t do enforcement alone for one simple reason, if for no other reason – Bribery. We try very, very hard to get the best possible people for our border patrol. We only accept 1 out of 30 applicants, and the force is rife with bribery, because there’s no possible way we can legitimately pay salaries to these people that are in excess of the bribes that are often offered to them. It doesn’t mean everyone is dishonest. Most people are honest, but if enough people are dishonest, the system cannot function the way we envision, and just to give you one anecdote, my brother had two people on his police force, and one day they raided one of the top Coyotes in Tucson, and he had files of thousands of illegal aliens that he had brought across the border, and they got him, and just as they were about to take him away, he said, “I’m an asthmatic. I need to get my medicine. Can you open that desk drawer there and bring the asthma medicine, with me?” So, they opened the desk drawer and there was $200,000.00 in cash in the desk drawer, and the guy said, “You know, you had a very successful raid. You got all my records. You broke up my operation. The only thing that went wrong is I managed to get out the back door at the last minute.” And he looked at the cash, and he pointed to the, to the, at the cash, and he pointed to them, and they looked at him and said, “Sorry, buster. We’re taking you in. You’re finished,” and this, you’re trying to bribe us, too. So, I said to my brother, “This is exactly how law enforcement’s supposed to work,” and he said, “Absolutely, and I’m proud of them, but they had been partners together for six weeks. If they’d been partners for six months, I wouldn’t be telling you this story.”
So, one of the things that conservatives, who have an understanding of the limitation of government, should understand is, yes, we want national security. Yes, we want to remain a sovereign, independent nation with control of our borders, but there are limits. What border agents tell me is, we want to have the ability to go after the bad guys, because we can’t control every guy who wants to be a waiter or a construction worker in this country. We can try to focus on the bad guys, and just in conclusion, we’ve had this problem before. In 1953, we had less than half the population we have today, but we had over one million arrests at the border. We had a crisis at the border. Today we have one million arrests at the border. On a per capita basis, our crisis was bigger in 1953. But, back then, we solved it. How did we solve it? Dwight Eisenhower came in and he was a general, and he was result oriented, and he was not clouded by ideology or preconceived notions, and he said, “I’m going to do two things. I’m going to hire a bunch of generals that used to serve with me under, me at D Day, and I’m going to put them in charge of this operation, and they’re going to do two things. One is going to be real enforcement that matters to people. It’s not going to be fines. It’s going to be shaming.” So, he sent federal agents out to all of the employers who were hiring illegal aliens, and he basically busted them and he put their names and photos on the front page of newspapers, and he shamed them, and then he sent a bunch of other people back through the same employers who were lawyers, and they said, “You want this to happen again? It will happen again. You can either get your employees legally through an upgraded and updated Bracero program, or you can get raided again and be shamed in your community,” and then they expanded the Bracero program from agriculture to a whole range of occupations, and the Bracero program worked.
Now, you’re not going to believe these numbers, but they’re actually real. In 1953, we had 1.1 million arrests at the border. Then we allowed the Bracero s to bring in about 4 or 500,000 people legally for short-term visas. The results were dramatic. By 1959, arrests of illegal aliens had fallen to 45,000 a year, from 1.1 million to 45,000 in six years. They remained under 100,000 until 1964, and let me tell you briefly, before I finish, what happened in ’64. Lyndon Johnson became President. Lyndon Johnson had opposed the Bracero program at the behest of Texas ranchers who wanted to exploit illegal labor, and he had opposed the Bracero program while he was Majority Leader, and then while he was President, and as the price of union support in 1964 in that presidential election, he agreed to end the Bracero program by Executive Order on December 31, 1964, and he did it, and as soon as the Bracero program ended, the number of illegal arrest started to climb. It climbed so that by 1976, apprehensions were up to 800,000. The next year they reached 1,000,000, and they have never gone below a million since then.
We had a solution that wasn’t perfect. The Bracero program its faults, but we had a solution, and we have let it go, and both the Right and the Left have repudiated that potential solution for, I think, reasons of emotion and reasons of ideology, and I believe we can get back to something that’s rational, that’s principled, that takes care of the problems of people who live in our shadows in fear, and who takes care of the legitimate concerns of people about our national security and sovereignty. If we don’t do that, if we continue to be clouded by, I think, the extremes of the Right and the extremes of the Left, we’re not going to have a solution, and our children and grandchildren are going to inherit a disaster. And with that, we’ll go to your questions. What I’m going to do, so that almost no one is short changed, I’m going to try to work my way back this way and then up this way. So, be patient. So, I’m going to go this way in a, sort of like a U. Yes?
Next Speaker:
I appreciate John and all of you. I didn’t understand –
Next Speaker:
Okay, wait ’til for the microphone if you could.
Next Speaker:
I appreciated all of you. I didn’t understand from your comments, Mr. Fund, what were you doing about the 11 million now?
Fund:
I am the moderator, and I’ll make my, no, I will make my comment very brief. You’re going to have to find some way to allow them to, with fines and with, I think, perhaps returning to their home country in some cases; in other cases going through a process of assimilation, you’re going to have to find a way for them to establish a green card or legal residency basis, or at least have a path to that. Right now it takes about 11 years to become a citizen. I think the process for the green card should be significantly shorter than that. Many of them, by the way, have left. One thing we have to understand about this issue, there has been no net migration from Mexico since 2007 when the recession began. It stopped in 2007, net migration for Mexico. So, we’re dealing probably not with 11 million people now. We’re probably dealing with a significantly lower number, but, of course, we don’t know because we’re dealing with illegal activity. So, the answer is, we have to have a process by which people demonstrate that they know English, that they have no criminal record, that they will pay fines, and through that, they can start a green card process, but others may have another different idea. Any, is there, is, does any-, does anyone want to comment?
Next Speaker:
Yeah, I’ll be happy to add a comment. As you’ve heard me say, I think we need to find a just way to address the plight of these 11 million folks. We’re not calling for amnesty, and it’s actually disingenuous to say that anything that enables these folks to get legal in this country is amnesty. If you ask them or require that they admit their guilt and pay some kind of a fine, that’s not amnesty. That’s simply a penalty. I kind of think of it like this. There was a time in this country when we executed young teenagers for certain crimes; not only this country, other countries, and at some point, people said, “You know what? It’s probably not a good idea that we execute young teenagers for these particular activities, and so therefore we’re going to find a different set of penalties for those teenagers, rather than executing them. I don’t think anybody in this room or in this country would say because we’re not executing teenagers the way we used to, that therefore they’re all getting amnesty, because we’ve created a different set of penalties for them, and that’s just simply what we’re asking for here. Let’s find a different set of penalties that enable these folks to come forward, admit their guilt, and give some kind of restitution, and let’s get them to the place where they’re actually able to fulfill their own God-given potential and contribute more to the wellbeing and the livelihood of this nation. So I think we do need to address it. I don’t think it, that that’s called amnesty. However, I think there is an alternative solution.
Next Speaker:
Next person down this row who’s got their hand up.
Fund:
Yep, could you stand to make sure everyone hears it?
Next Speaker:
Sure. This is for any one of the panelists that wanted to, that wants to answer it. There’s only two, the moderator and Mr. Morgan, that seem to be trying to address the problem that we have with legal immigration status, and I think there does need to be a separation, and we have to solve our legal immigration problem before we have a chance at solving the illegal immigration problem. I’m one of the few non-Hispanic people that have –
Fund:
Are you pointing towards a question?
Next Speaker:
Yes. That have –
Fund:
Quickly.
Next Speaker:
– that have been involved in trying to have some legal immigration –
Fund:
Not quick enough. Pointing towards a question.
Next Speaker:
How do we get the conversation to be about also fixing the legal immigration status?
Fund:
Any panelist wants to address that?
Next Speaker:
It’s part of the conversation now. You already have as we pointed out, in the Senate bill there is a significant component in there that addresses changing the legal immigration system that moves it away from for example, a family-based system or to a skill-based system as well. The House, as well, has a, has a component in one of the bills that they’ve passed also that reforms that. They have the E‑verify system in it. They have the component that tries to deal with the problem with overstays on visas as well. So, everybody, who is having this conversation includes in that a component that deals with reforming the system as well so that we get a handle on the problem.
Next Speaker:
It just strikes me that it would be better to go forward where there’s area of some agreement first, rather than trying to hold everything up for an amnesty, which seems to be what the President and his allies are doing at this point, unfortunately. The House, I think, is taking, hopefully, a different approach, and they’ll, they’ll look at these issues where we don’t have to answer the hardest questions first.
Next Speaker:
One good thing as that might make this a little bit easier, is Teddy Kennedy when he was alive insisted that there be gigantic quotas for Ireland I think more people, at one point, more people could emigrate from Ireland per year than from all of Africa. I think what, with the demise of Teddy Kennedy, I think we might be able to have a more equitable solution as to who comes in, and I have a number of friends who have gotten a green card lotteries, and they’re all successful, wonderful people, but it seems to, it strikes me as kind of ludicrous that we award green cards that way.
Fund:
Next question.
Next Speaker:
John, there’s one in the back.
Fund:
Oh, I’m sorry.
Next Speaker:
Yeah, I’ve just got a quick, two-part question –
Fund:
No.
Next Speaker:
One –
Fund:
We, no. Sorry. Nice –
Next Speaker:
Okay.
Fund:
– nice try.
Next Speaker:
Okay.
Fund:
But, but, but –
Next Speaker:
What makes you think –?
Fund:
– you can make a point, but quickly move to a question.
Next Speaker:
It’s sort of, part of the cliché of the debate to say now is the time to reform immigration, but what makes anybody think that with Obama President, that he will enforce any part of, that he will enforce any part of the bill which we’re for?
Next Speaker:
I understand.
Fund:
It seems to me and I’d like the panelists to respond, that the smart thing for us to do is to get busy, win the 2014 election, and the 2016 election, and then reform immigration, rather than entering to an agreement with the one President that has consistently failed to execute the laws of the country in violation of the Constitution.
Next Speaker:
I, uh –
Next Speaker:
Yeah.
Next Speaker:
Senator Gramm and I know each other very well. I was giving him a hard time. Actually he makes a very good point, and I would simply, I would make a stipulation that any bill the House of Representatives passes on this issue should not take effect until January 20th, 2017.
Next Speaker:
Yeah, I definitely believe –
Next Speaker:
Because that’s when the next President is sworn in.
Next Speaker:
I think the Senator is –
Next Speaker:
It’s not just taking effect. Why should we write it with Obama? I mean, if it’s not going to take effect, why don’t we wait and write it ourselves the way we want to do it.
Next Speaker:
For purely, for you, for purely cosmetic and political reasons.
Next Speaker:
I would associate myself with my former boss’ remarks. I think he’s exactly right, and I would just take one iss-, a small issue with one you thing you said, John, which is the border patrol, these people are given a very, very difficult job, and they don’t have a lot of support from this President, and I think that’s putting it very generously. In fact, they say over and over again, “We’re not allowed to enforce the law,” so I think, I have a lot of respect for people that are willing to go out there and do that job, and we need to let them enforce the law.
Next Speaker:
I agree, and surveys show that 60 percent of the border patrol says their morale is low, very low, or non-existent. It is a thankless job, which is one of the reasons why, if you don’t have serious direction from the top you become prey to temptation.
Next Speaker:
Senator, thank you very much for being here and for participating in the conversation. We agree that there are some difficult components in this, and that a bipartisan solution is going to be difficult to arrive at. We also agree that there needs to be some kind of way to make sure that border security comes first and that we have a believable certification system, that makes sure that the borders have been secured before permanent legal status is granted. Provisional legal status is one thing. Permanent legal status is something else and there needs to be something better than what the Senate has come up with that certifies that the border is secure and we’re asking the house to make sure they do come up with something that’s better than what the what the Senate has done.
In terms of trying to win future elections in order to have a fully Republican solution on this politics isn’t my business, but I certainly spend a lot of time talking to politicians, and I think that if Republicans continue to alienate the growing portion of the America’s populace which is immigrants that they’re going to have a harder and harder time winning national elections and one way you do alienate the immigrant population is continue to communicate that you really don’t want them to be involved in part of the solution to addressing their particular dilemmas. So I think we need to think about this in a little different terms than that.
Next Speaker:
Can I just add –?
Next Speaker:
Well, could I just make one point.
Next Speaker:
Sure.
Next Speaker:
I voted against amnesty in 1986. I’m the only Republican who ever got a majority of the Hispanic vote in a statewide election. I mean, this idea that you got to be for amnesty, for illegal aliens, to get Hispanics to vote against you is just baloney.
Next Speaker:
Yes, it is.
Next Speaker:
I don’t see any evidence to suggest –
Next Speaker:
I would –
Next Speaker:
– I don’t see any evidence that would suggest –
Next Speaker:
I would say –
Next Speaker:
– That it’s true, and people assert it and the Hispanic activists talk about it, but I don’t see any evidence that it’s about voter behavior. I think we got killed with Hispanics because we didn’t communicate with them about things they cared about, and that is values and jobs.
Next Speaker:
A- amen. I would –
Next Speaker:
I would, I – go ahead.
Next Speaker:
– I just have one quick thing. I think you’re exactly right and there was a recent PEW poll actually done of Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans, and they both agreed that an amnesty, or actually they just called it a path to legalization, would reward illegal behavior and would lead to more illegal immigration. It’s a common-sense thing shared by all Americans of, of all backgrounds. Also, in terms of a better system, I think the Senator makes a good point about why do we need to do this right now under these circumstances. If you did want to do something, what you could do is start where we agree again. Reform legal immigration, and a better way to determine if the enforcement is working is to look at the census. They have to collect data on who’s here, including undocumented workers. You could easily track the numbers in the census and make sure that enforcement provisions, such as reinstituting no-match letters, which the President’s done away with putting E-verify enhancing that. If you do these kinds of things, you get to the overstate program you were talking about, John, and we make sure that our border, that the President’s actually enforcing the border. You do those things, and you see it in the numbers in the census, then you can conclude that, okay, we’ve got this under control, and then you can proceed to the more difficult questions at that point.
Next Speaker:
I agree with Senator Gramm. I think that there is a problem, though, with minority voters, and it has to do not with the seven-letter word amnesty. It has to do with the seven-letter word respect. Proud people take umbrage very easily, sometimes too easily, but it’s often the case that minority populations believe that they’re not fully inclusive within the American community by the kind of statements or the kind of behavior that they hear from elected officials. So, I don’t think it’s opposition to a specific or support for a specific proposal, but I do think the word respect is something that has to be discussed, and Republican congressmen who, I think, have good relations with their Hispanic populations and go out and do outreach and talk with them and actually listen rather than just shout I think they do very well. Next question.