Thursday, Jan. 12, 2006
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
National Press Club
Washington , D.C.
 
Fortress America: Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Part one of a four-part series
Presented by the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities
 
 
Welcoming Remarks:
Paul Igasaki , Chair, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, American Bar Association

Moderator:
Christina DeConcini , Policy Director, National Immigration Forum

Speakers:
Angelo Amador, Director of Immigration Policy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
J. Kevin Appleby, Director of the Office of Immigration and Refugee Policy, United States Conference on Catholic Bishops
Ana Avendano , Associate General Counsel and Director of Immigrant Worker Programs, AFL-CIO
Eliseo Medina, International Executive Vice President, SEIU
Cecilia Munoz, Vice President of the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation, National Council of La Raza
Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform
Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union

Paul Igasaski :
Good morning. On behalf of the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities of the American Bar Association, it’s a pleasure to welcome you here today for the first in a very important series of discussions, Fortress America: The State and Future of U.S. Immigration Law and Policy. I’m Paul Igasaki, chair of the section. My day job, I’m executive director of the Rights Working Group, a coalition that addresses many of the issues following 9/11, that our panels will be discussing. The Individual Rights section of the ABA is dedicated to civil and human rights issues on behalf of America’s lawyers and was created in response to President Kennedy’s call to the legal profession to volunteer to fight for justice, in a time when our nation was not living up to its promises of unalienable rights for all people. Abraham Lincoln once wrote about the xenophobic agenda, the Know-Nothing party in the 1850’s. “As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it all men are created equal except Negro. If the Know-Nothings get control, it will read all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics. When it comes to this, I should prefer immigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, where despotism could be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” The words are as resonate today as it were in the 1850’s. The Individual Rights section has been addressing immigration issues for many of its years. When I first came to this town in the 1980’s, I testified alongside the ABA on behalf of fair and family based immigration policy, an elusive goal that we are still searching to resolve. This nation of immigrants has often been conflicted on the flow of new Americans that has defined our country. What we face in this New Year is something far more radical than what we have seen before. The House passed a bill before the holidays that will criminalize immigration. It will criminalize those of us who interact with those of who may be undocumented. It will push employers to engage in witch hunts in their workforces; and ultimately, it says that due process, fundamental civil and human rights are only available to some human beings in this country. Following 9/11, we’ve already seen lengthy detentions or implications from minor immigration infractions. We’ve seen our precious rights to representation, to trial, to be able to confront the charges and evidence against us compromised so long as immigrants are involved. This is unprecedented and in our section of the ABA, our Committee on the Rights of Immigrants believes it is essential that we understand what the new America will look like. The Senate will debate this issue in the coming months and while the House debate lasted only a week, we need a more thoughtful consideration of where we are headed. Following this, we will have panels that will address the issues of detention, asylum, and the admission of immigrants. This panel will be moderated by Christina DeConcini, Vice Chair of the Committee on Immigrants of our Committee on Immigrants, Policy Director of the National Immigration Forum, and like me, a former ABA staff person. She is joined by many of America’s opinion leaders who have a variety of ideological and professional perspectives. This will be a rare opportunity and I hope you are looking forward to it as much as I. Thanks for joining us here today.

Christina DeConcini :
Okay, good morning and thank you for coming. Just to repeat, I’m Christina Deconcini, I’m the Director of Policy at the National Immigration Forum. I’m going to moderate this very distinguished panel. Because we have so many speakers and we want to leave time for questions and answers especially for members of press and others, I’ve asked each speaker to keep their sharings very brief and I really do regret that. Before we get started and I introduce the panelists, I want to just say a couple words about this issue and the broad group of people from across the political spectrum as evidenced today on this panel that support comprehensive immigration reform. There really are few issues like this that bring conservatives and liberals, business and labor, ethnic and religious leaders together and while we very much hope to have a very lively discussion of different points of view on comprehensive immigration reform, there is also a lot of threads of similarities on how to fix the problem. There seems to be unanimous agreement across the political spectrum that are immigration system is broken, that we need to regain control of our borders, and restore the rule of law. In comprehensive immigration reform, while certainly not fixing all of the immigration related problems in the United States, would be a step toward doing that and has a great deal of political saliency today on Capitol Hill. Currently, our immigration laws do not match the reality. That’s really the underscore of what we’re talking about here today. Instead, they invite illegality and undermine the rule of law. We have an economy that is dependent on foreign born workers to fill many jobs and yet there is no way for this people to come to the United States and work legally so they come illegally. We have an immigration system that says yes to a U.S. citizen or legal current resident, you can legally bring your spouse or your child to the United States yet the wait of up to 14 years in some cases are unreasonably long and people choose to not wait to be with their loved ones. Basically, until those laws are reformed to match the reality, there’s no way that we’ll get control of our immigration system and the illegality will continue. Not just that of those people crossing the border unauthorized, but of the smuggling rings and the large market for fraudulent documents that this mismatch of laws and reality continue to fuel. Many people say that enforcement is the answer and Paul just referenced large support for that in the House of Representatives with the passage of the Sensenbrenner Bill. Clearly, we do need to enforce laws, but it is also clear that trying to enforce unworkable laws doesn’t work and won’t work. We’ve tried that and it has failed and I hope some of the speakers today will address that as I don’t have time to do so. But basically, it really is disingenuous to claim that repeating more of the same failed policy we’ve tried for 20 years of just enforcement without reforming the broken laws will solve this problem. And finally, the last thing I want to say is that for any fix to a broken immigration system to work, it has to address the 11 million unauthorized workers in the United States. For our nation’s security we need to know who’s here, and it’s neither realistic nor desirable to deport 11 million people living and working in our communities. The idea that immigrants will come forward for a Report to Deport program is ridiculous and it’s not grounded in reality. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently, “Those who wave the no amnesty flag are actually encouraging a larger underground population. The only reform that has the chance to succeed is one that recognizes the reality, that 10 or so million illegal aliens already working in the US and are vital to the economy and communities.” I will leave it to our panelists now to discuss the numerous legislative proposals on the table that addresses this issue and their strengths and their weaknesses from their various institutional perspectives. In short, we must remain a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws, and we can do both if we have the courage to be honest about what the problem is and also honest about the workability of solutions proposed. With that, I’ll introduce the panelists. Each has an incredibly distinguished resume that deserves a minimum of 5 minute introduction but due to the interest of time, I am going only to introduce them by name and their present title and I hope I will be forgiven for this. And I’ll tell you ahead of time that it truly is an enormous oversight to do that but that’s what I’m going to do. So, in order, we’re going to start over here and I’m just going go right down and explain who everyone is and then we’ll start. So Cecilia Munoz is going to be the first speaker. She’s the Vice-President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation at the National Counsel of La Raza. Then we have Angela Amador and he is the Director of Immigration Policy for the US Chamber of Commerce. Following the business perspective, we’re going to hear from the union perspective on this. We’ll first hear from Eliseo Medina, who is the International Executive Vice President for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and we’ll hear from Ana Avendano. She is the Associate General Counsel and Director of Immigrant Worker Programs at the AFL-CIO. Following that, we’re going to hear from Mr. Grover Norquist, who is the President of Americans for Tax Reform. Then from Anthony Romero, who is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union and finally, from Kevin Appleby who is the Director of Migration and Refugee Policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. With that, Cecilia, go ahead.

Cecilia Munoz :
Thank you very much Christina, and thank you to the ABA for putting together this panel on this series on what couldn’t be a more timely topic. So I have the unenviable task of trying to frame the issues in seven minutes or less and this is something that probably any one of us could do and it’d take us at least a half an hour, but I think as Christina started, she’s absolutely correct. That while this is a very difficult issue, its an issue of very high emotion, its also an issue on which at least on one question there is a consensus and that is that we have a system which doesn’t work, and which needs to be reformed and that is sort of the fundamental premise driving forward this debate. For my own constituency in the Latino community, exhibit A of defining why we have a problem is the number of deaths at the border. We lose an average of more than one person a day in the years in the Arizona desert or crossing trying to enter into the United States. In the year 2005, more than 400 people died crossing the border. That is an unacceptable situation and that’s part of, for us, the urgency around reforming our system. But the others, maybe Exhibit B, the thing which may be more visible for the rest of the community is the presence of undocumented immigrants in the workforce. There is somewhere between 10 and 11 million people living and working in the United States without authorization. They’re increasingly visible in the workplace and in our communities and there’s an increasing sense that businesses in particular sectors of the economy especially very heavily reliant on that labor and you can certainly make the argument that as a nation economically, we depend very much on that workforce. It’s neither in our interest nor in their interest for folks to continue to be living in hiding from civic authorities and from the government. Tensions around this issue should be very clear and escalating. There are debates over all kinds of sides issues related to this. New Hampshire is considering whether to be using its trespassing laws for example as a way of dealing with the phenomenon of undocumented migration. That’s one of many, many examples of state and local governments trying to grapple with the presence of immigrants in their communities. The reality is, even if New Hampshire were to go all out, it wouldn’t come close to dealing with the problem in a reasonable way. Ultimately, immigration reform can only be tackled by the United States Congress. So that’s both the source of frustration at the state and local level but hopefully also part of the source of urgency around really getting to reform and hopefully putting a reform on the table that actually has some hope of being effective and getting us out of this situation in which we continue to depend on a workforce that we acknowledge is not here under the law. So the way this debate has taken shape, there are two big approaches that are being framed. The first approach as you’ve heard, is enforcement only approach which was adopted by the House of Representatives last month and that is this philosophy that if we could just get tougher on undocumented immigrants then we’ll be getting a handle on the problem. What that really does is expand a philosophy and a strategy that we’ve been building policy around for more than 15 years. In fact, the reform of the mid 1980’s was focused on a get tough approach. We have been getting tough ever since. We have quintupled the resources that we devote to enforcement of the borders since 1985 and that increase in resources and energy around enforcement has coincided with a very large increase in undocumented migration. It’s a steady pace of about 300,000 to 400,000 migrants a year but it has remained steady in all of that time despite the fact that we have quintupled the resources that we’ve been aiming at enforcement. The elements of the get tough strategy are either this notion that maybe by deputizing local police which the House just voted to do and encouraging them to get into the business of immigration enforcement, that we can somehow increase the number of people we are able to round up and remove. When you think of the scale of what we’re talking about, there are 11 million people here without their papers. The likelihood of rounding up and deporting people are, I think is remote and that doesn’t even address the question of what that would do to this country economically. The other part of that philosophy is if we toughen up our laws and make life as miserable as possible for the people that are here, maybe they will go away. So that’s sort of the really the crux. If you follow the enforcement arguments to its conclusion, that’s about as far as you get. So that’s sort of the first approach. It has a lot of political cache. It makes for good campaign arguments and we are in election year. At the end of the day, I’m not sure there’s a lot of confidence that that’s going to solve our immigration problems. It is a continuation of the strategies that we’ve been attempting for a long time. The second approach is this notion of comprehensive reform which is what this panel is going to be talking about. In contrast to the House approach which was entirely based on enforcement, there are multiple Senate proposals coming from Senators on both sides of the aisle which in various ways tackle different elements of what ultimately we’re all calling comprehensive reform. I’m going to outline the broader philosophy and some of the basics of those elements. The notion of comprehensive reform is based on the premise that we need to recognize the realities that are driving migration and rather than focus entirely on clamping down, attempt to regulate what is an economic phenomenon and a workplace phenomenon so that we have control in a sense that immigration is happening in a regulated way, that we know who’s coming and are able to inspect the people who come before they come and allocate them a legal mechanism to come and do the work that they’re coming to do. So, it’s the alternative to risking your life crossing the desert is creating a program that allows people to come and work in the United States legally, thereby, regulating the migration which is right now happening at the risk of people’s lives and also without the benefit of happening under the law. So the notion is let’s take this phenomenon, we know more or less how many people we’re talking about, let’s acknowledge that there are people in the workforce who aren’t going anywhere and craft a policy which recognizes those realities and regulates them so that we maximize the extent to which migration happens legally, that we have control over it, and that we are enforcing laws which are actually enforceable. So that we are dedicating our enforcement resources to places where we all share concerns about the problem. Employers who may be really taking advantage of people and seeking to pay them lower wages and expose them to working conditions that are unacceptable. Dedicating enforcement resources more focused on the issues of security which is something that Americans across the border are concerned about. I think there’s an argument to be made that spending resources chasing after folks who are otherwise law-abiding but here in the workforce without their papers is probably not the best use of enforcement resources. So the notion of comprehensive reform is to regulate what right now is happening in an unregulated way and the elements which are on the table in one form or another in these various proposals are all of them contain enforcement. They also focus on border enforcement and on enforcement on the interior, including in the workplace and one of the elements of that is seeking to create a more reliable mechanism for employers to be able to check the documents of the people that they hire. A second element is reduction of the family backlogs, Christina mentioned this. Some legal residents of this country wait four, five, six years to reunite with their spouses and children. That ends up fostering undocumented migration because family ties tend to be stronger than the constraints of our laws. And so reduction of the family backlogs is one essential element of a comprehensive reform. Dealing with the 11 million is also an essential element of comprehensive reform and various bills do this in various ways. But the notion is to accept that folks are here and to give those people who are law-abiding, in the workforce, making a contribution, the opportunity to get on a path which ultimately leads to citizenship. That goes by multiple names, earned legalization, earned adjustment, but the notion of earning your way to permanent status by virtue of your hard work. It is going to be a prominent part of the Senate debate. The last piece is the future flow. Once we deal with the 11 million and we address enforcement, there’s the question so what happens to the 300,000-400,000 people who we fully expect to come in this year, and next year, and the following year. The idea is to create, and there’s a lot of raggling over the details that you’ll hear about, some kind of worker program that allows people to come in on visas, with rights, the ability to change employers once they get here so that we’re regulating that process rather than continuing to wink and nod at a significant undocumented flow across the border. So the debate is either going to be about who can be tougher on illegal immigration and there are folks who believe it is in their political interest to frame the debate in that way. Or the debate can focus on what is actually going to work. It’s obviously a heavier lift to have a more comprehensive debate, to have all of these elements on the table. But I think the diversity of this panel is one piece of evidence suggesting that there’s a really broad coalition which is interested in rolling up its sleeves and conducting this debate in a way that maybe will get us solutions which isn’t necessarily going to make everybody happy or sustain every constituency at this table. But at the end of the day, we all have a stake in fixing this and we believe that it’s in the national interest to fix this and to have the kind of debate which gets us closer towards resolving this issue rather than continuing to inflame them and blow them up out of proportion. And as a representative from a Latin civil rights organization, we can talk a lot about the cost of blowing these issues out of proportion. Scape-goating people and entire communities and constituencies because of our concerns about immigration. That’s part of what drives us in this debate. But the overriding motivation is to get to a place where our system is regulated, where it’s under control, where migration happens legally and where we don’t have to have this heated debates in the future.

Angelo Amador:
First of all, I have a copy of a presentation I was going to give until I was told I had 300 seconds to give my presentation so if you want more details they made copies and they’re outside. Instead of giving you my overall view, I’m just going to build up on what Cecilia had said and she said it’s a broad coalition and most people here are members of those coalitions and we’re working very, very closely and actually next week, I believe Tom Donahue and Andy Stern are going to be having a press conference together to talk about this issue as well. So I’ll mention a couple of things and go into the details and use my 300 seconds that way. First of all, I want to mention the House bill briefly because in our view, especially when it deals with the 11 million in the United States is not about enforcement, it’s really just about punishment. Enforcement would mean mass deportation. Enforcement would be trying to round up a population similar to that of the state of Ohio and sending them back and even Tancredo is saying that’s not what they want to do. So the whole approach they’re taking is let’s make their lives very, very bad and miserable and allow them to continue in this legal system until they get tired and go home. That is basically supporting an illegal system and that is not what we want. The business community, what we’re pushing and what the coalition is pushing for is a legal system. Nobody likes illegal immigration. Nobody likes the system that we have now so what we’re looking is for a solution to this problem that has been building up for the last 20 years and the solution will be comprehensive immigration reform that takes into consideration the 11 million that are currently in the United States and the need for having a legal path, one of the things that you hear most in these programs and radio talk shows is the whole issue, “well we don’t have a problem with them coming over, we just want them to come over in a legal fashion. Let’s just ship them all back and have them do their paperwork.” Like if they could just go to the post office, fill out some forms and come in. The reality is and what I tell people, and even when I go to Congress and I meet a staff person, I say “Look, there are only 5,000 green cards or permanent visas for workers at the most unskilled level and there’s a need, in addition to all the other visas, there’s a need for about 400,000. Well, you do the math, you know 5,000 visas, and you know, they go, there cannot be only 5,000. Yeah, one hotel can take care of those 5,000 visas. So when they say, let them come legally, yes that’s what we want, but we need the system there to allow for these people to come here legally and we don’t have that right now. So what we’re looking for is three things. One is for the undocumented, finding a way for them to earn legal status. Most of them are working on the books. What that means is that they’re paying taxes, they’re paying social security taxes, they’re paying a lot of other taxes and they’re being treated for those purposes like anybody else. I heard a Congresswoman from the Immigration Reform Caucus that ask about the Social Security Fund. They have about 500 billion dollars that nobody knows who it belongs too. Well, it belongs to those people that are working with those fraudulent documents. Well what about that? “See I don’t have a problem with them padding our system. What I have a problem with is with them getting anything back.” And the business community doesn’t believe in that. They want to be able to treat all of their workers the same. They want to be able to make sure they’re putting in what they get back and they want to make sure they have a system that works. People talk about cheap labor. People say businesses are only interested for cheap labor. If that was the case, why would we be working so hard to legalize these workers? We are the ones pushing for legal status to make sure that they have the rights in the books, not just that we think that they have the rights. So when we match our immigration system to reality, the reality is they are here, they are working, we need them, 5percent of our workforce, 25percent in certain occupations are special in the area of service and construction. We need a system that matches the economic needs of this country. The problem with the ‘86 Amnesty Bill and that was an amnesty bill this is not. The one that we’re supporting have penalties and have a number of books and even when you talk to a certain number of people in the business community, well maybe it’s too harsh to have a $2,000 penalty on people that are low skilled workers and not making a tough salary spot. The reality is there’s going to have some penalties while we’re supporting certain number of penalties. But the problem with the ‘86 Bill, going back to that, didn’t create anything for the future flow so the second part of any comprehensive bill from the business perspective is that there has to be a legal system, not just 5,000 visas for people to be able to come to this country and work legally within our system. On the first point, the one where I mentioned about the undocumented here, we believe that they have to have a path to earn permanent residency. It’s just the nature of this country. We cannot just have a permanent underclass and again, employers don’t want to treat their employees differently and that would honestly mean just that we’re going to start separating ones from another. It would mean just more regulation and it’s just going to be unworkable. And the third one is we need to ensure national security. A lot of people don’t think we care about that and we do. The bottom line is that, if we go where we are proposing, if Congress passes what we’re proposing, a lot of national security issues – a lot of them are going to be easier to handle. For example, they ask us what is your position on the wall. The wall in the House bill, the one they want to build in Mexico. They want to build a wall in Canada, on the Canadian border as well but they don’t mention that. And our point is if you create a system that works, you won’t need to spend all this money on building a wall. If you create this system, you wouldn’t need to build a wall, you wouldn’t need to spend that much money enforcement because a lot of these issues will go away. If people had a way to come here legally, they’re going to come here legally, it’s just common sense. So, what we’re proposing is going to help national security. So again, the bill that we are currently endorsing is the McCain-Kennedy Bill. One of the main reasons for that and going into the details, this is only details I mentioned before and I’ll stop after that is the whole issue of return. People are talking about let’s just make them go back and do their paperwork there and maybe stay there a month or two while everything processes. Well, that doesn’t make any sense. You know, people for many reasons are not going to trust the system and not going to come forward just to be deported at the end of 5-6 years, whatever. They went through all this work to get over here, so why are they going to do it? We have already admitted that we don’t have the resources to send them back or remove them all, so basically what we will be doing is postponing this conversation five or six years and we think that’s ridiculous. We already postponed it long enough. It’s been 20 years and it’s been six years since the last time we sat down and started working on the first draft and we think no, let’s take care of it now. We think the whole idea of requiring that 11 million to sign up so that they can then return at the end of 6 years for whichever period is not going to work. It doesn’t work administratively, it won’t work economically, and again, our perspective which is the business perspective, and economically it just doesn’t make any sense. We have these workers and people talk about, well let’s do it by industry because if not we will have to do it in five years because the consulate cannot already handle what they have. So let’s say that everybody that works in hotels would have leave in year one or two, everybody in agriculture in year three, etc., etc. Well that doesn’t make any sense, you’re going to take all the restaurant employees for two or three months and just shut them down while they do their paperwork and then they com back. Then we’ll shut down agriculture for a couple of months. These are some of the ideas. There was another idea that has floated around and I won’t mention where it came from. We pointed out, you know only 40percent of the people here are from Mexico and you guys keep talking about Mexico and they’re undocumented. Well what about the other 60percent? Well, couldn’t we talk to Mexico and ask them to take the other 60percent and they’ll do their paperwork there. You know, this was an idea and I met with the ambassador and the idea was brought to the ambassador and he said well, no I don’t think so. What we’re talking about is, let’s sit down, let’s talk realistically, let’s look at solutions, let’s look at earned legalization, you know how many years for them to prove their worth for staying in this country. We think that some of them have already done that. We’re not saying that some people will not have to be deported. There are people here that are undocumented and we don’t want them to be in this country. You come forward and you go through a background check and it comes out that you’re really a drug dealer and don’t have any job and don’t have any reason to stay here, you know, we believe that person should be deported. Now if you’re here and you’ve held a steady job and you don’t have any horrible convictions and you’re willing to sign up for a program and pay fines and you do community service, whatever they can come up with that is reasonable then we think that person would have earned his right to become a permanent resident here and we should welcome them. Which is the way we have historically done it and it has worked so far and I think we should go back to the roots and see what kind of country we want to be.

Eliseo Medina:
Thank you very much, Christina. The Service Employees Union is the largest union of immigrants in this country. Our members clean office buildings; they work in nursing homes taking care of our elderly; they work in home care, going to people’s homes cooking their meals, taking them shopping and sometimes just keeping company for these people. They care very much about their work and about their communities. They have U.S. born children. They go to work everyday like we all do. They pay their taxes. They contribute to our society, and in return all they ask us is that they be given an opportunity, a chance at the American dream. I believe that we need to face reality. We need these workers, they are vital to our society. They are our neighbors; many of them are our family members. They clean our office buildings; they make our rooms in the hotels. They cook our food; they cut our grass; they are small business owners; they are community leaders and yes, many of them are helping to raise our children. And I believe that we need to do better than continue a system of illegality that serves no one. A system where hundreds of people are dying in the desert every year; a system where people go to work everyday not knowing if they will come home because they could be arrested and deported; a system that makes criminals of people who only want an opportunity and who also look at the people who hire them, who need them as law breakers as well. So our union is squarely on the side of immigrants. We’re squarely on the side of fixing this problem because we think that it doesn’t do any one any good if we continue what we are doing now. Previous speakers have spoken about comprehensive reform and I endorse all of those issues that they have raised dealing with the 11 million undocumented workers, having a way of channeling future flows rather than what we are doing now. Building a new Berlin Wall on our southern borders is not a solution, it is a waste of money and it is not in keeping our best traditions of our American society. We believe that what we need is courage by our Congress members and Senators to resist society’s call of politics and instead to give the American people what they want which is a solution. Good public policy, not politics. We need to fix this problem in a way that will actually solve the problem. Not just patch and not just postpone it for another day because in that one more day, more people will die, more money will be spent and resources squandered in our current unworkable system. So we’re proud at the SEIU to work with this coalition. This is probably the first time you’re going to see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and SEIU on the same side but I think that sends a strong message about why this issue is so important. We can agree and it’s not just because business wants cheap workers. Our employers who hire are members paid living wages. They want a system that works for everyone so thank you.

Ana Avendano:
Thank you, Christina. Thank you to the ABA. On behalf of President Sweeney and the nine millions members of the AFL-CIO, I’d like to thank you for this very interesting discussion here this morning. The AFL-CIO represents nine millions workers in all sectors of the economy and we believe that as the previous speakers do, that America deserves a system, an immigration system that protects all workers within our borders, both native born and foreign. And at the same time guarantees the safety of our nation without compromising our civil liberties or our civil rights. As we heard, what we have right now is a system of illegality; it’s a system of illegality that has resulting in deaths on the border everyday. It is also a system of illegality that’s really a system of exploitation. That while there is a person dying in the desert everyday, there’s also a Mexican worker dying on the job in the United States everyday and that is a shameful statistic. Now everyone on this panel, or I think most people on the panel are going to talk about the support for legalization, for earned legalization, or some version of that construct as a comprehensive piece of what they believe should be part of the reform of our immigration system and we certainly agree with that. Now where we disagree is in some portions of the rest of the package and I think that to understand what these differences are. I view it as that we each have a different vision of what a just society is. For us, a just society is one where all workers are protected, where work is valued, where workers can work with dignity and where every worker in the United States, whether that worker is foreign born or U.S. born has the chance to improve her law in life. That’s just a fundamental notion. And I think that where the different views of what a just society is, really come out in what Cecilia called the future flow issue which is the way to address once we solve the crisis of the 12 million people, 10 million people who are working here unauthorized, what do we do about future immigration. The current proposals before the Senate now have adopted this view as if it were a part of reality, as if it had to be this way, as if it had to be based on this notion of guest-worker program. The guest-worker programs have been a failure not just in the United States but in the entire world. There has never been a single guest worker program that has worked to the benefit of workers at all. The first American guest worker program was the post WWII Vesaro program. Workers in Mexico are still trying to get their money that was owed to them today. The modern version of guest-worker program we seen are in the high-tech industry, which is called the H1B program and in the unskilled, in what they called the unskilled jobs where seasonal jobs in poultry and hotels, service jobs, those kinds of jobs. Those programs have been very limited in scope and limited in number for good reasons because they have completely failed to do what they were set out to do which is to address short-term spot labor shortages for very short period of time. The high-tech guest worker program was adopted more than 15 years ago and it is now 15 years later, the long-term labor shortage is still there, we haven’t addressed that as a round of public policy, we should be looking at that. Instead we are filling that need for long-term workers with short-term workers. Now the massive expansion of these guest worker programs is at the heart of what the current Senate proposals, that’s how they view future flow. So now we’re going to be seeing a radical, radical massive expansion of these programs and they’re going to go well beyond these seasonal industries that they are under current law but all unskilled jobs. What the immigration law calls unskilled jobs and I dare anyone in this room to call construction worker, for example, unskilled. There are very skilled jobs that are going to be covered by this massive temporary worker program. Again, in history these programs don’t work. Why? Because workers don’t have the freedom to improve their lot in life. They’re tied to an employer. The economic relationship is set by the employer at the beginning of their relationship and it is static. The best that that can do is improve in favor of the employer. The current Senate proposals, the McCain-Kennedy bill, more than quadruples the number of visas that would be available every year, for employers to import workers into certain sectors of the economy. Now there’s another component to the whole guest worker issue is that there is really a dark and radical departure of what we see and what we see a democratic society is. We have to think about the impact of having 400,000 to start and increasing 20percent guests within our communities and in our workplaces. Guests, who by their very nature, don’t have a long-term interest in their community or again to improve their lot in life or fundamental benefits like pensions. Guests don’t have the long-term view of what we should be thinking about and what we in the labor movement are all about is encouraging roots, encouraging communities, encouraging the improvements of our society. We’re not a nation of guests, we’re a nation of citizens and I think that we need to think about that as we develop the public policies on how to address long-term labor shortages. We’re not denying that as baby boomers retire, there’s going to be labor shortages in some sectors of the economy but the answer to that is very clear to us, that both long-term jobs, permanent jobs, should be filled with workers with more rights. In any kind of immigration reform proposal needs to increase the number of what Amador was talking about, those 5,000 visas. We need to increase the available numbers of visas so that we can give workers full rights. So that a foreign worker will have the exact same bargaining powers, same exact rights as a U.S. citizen. There’s simply no valid notion that we have to turn full-time permanent jobs that have benefits into temporary jobs through guest worker program. And on that, I will say thank you.

Grover Norquist:
Thank you. Grover Norquist with the Americans for Tax Reform. Three points, as a patriot, immigration is a key issue for the United States. It’s our greatest competitive advantage; it’s what we do better than the entire rest of the world. We got naturally a low level of legal immigration, we’ve got a bunch of silly rules which hamstring it. It’s a real problem because we are damaging ourselves on our greatest advantage against the rest of the world. Every once in a while people write whole books about some other country or society that is going to get ahead of us and take us up. I remember Japan was supposed to be number one. Well, they forgot to have kids and they don’t do immigrants and so Japan is both shrinking as an economic power, as a political power, as a world power. There’s a new kick that the Europeans are going to overtake us and they’re forgetting to have kids and they don’t do immigration very well at all. And even if Japan or Europe decided to get into the business, people would always rather come here than go there. China, the zero population growth, the people over here talked China into that wonderful one-child policy. They now have an aging population, in 30-50 years they’re older than we are and are declining and again, they don’t do immigration very well either. Our ability to be the dominant power on the planet stems an awful lot from the fact that we take in more immigrants than everybody else and we do it better than everybody else because we do treat them as Americans and bring them in to be Americans, not just guests, the way the Germans or the Austrians do. As an economist, you look at it and say we got a 5percent unemployment and its falling. There are 11 million people over here working. What’s Tom Tancredo thinking? How is this going to work again? Now the only thing I can figure is he’s planning on abolishing high school because if he abolished high school and then all the people who are here that didn’t fill out the paperwork like the little Germans before they got in here, if they all left then we can take all their jobs and empty the high schools. But if we’re not willing to do that how is Tom Tancredo expected to have the American economy function? Everyone grows in the future and we need to grow. Now, as a Republican I am very concerned that some people, Tom Tancredo and company, are repeating the error of the Republican minister who referred to rum Romanism and rebellion, speaking of the Democratic party in the late 1800’s and he did this at the Religious Bureau of Republican National Committee, you may not have been aware, I wasn’t aware that they had a religious bureau but I imagine there weren’t very many Catholics in the room if the minister giving the speech referred to the Democratic party as rum being against prohibition, Romanism, Roman Catholicism and rebellion meaning the recent unpleasantness of the civil war. And this cost the Republican Party the Roman Catholic vote for about 100 years. People who speak ill of you do not love you. We didn’t carry the Roman Catholic vote for the U.S .House of Representatives, Republican Party until 1994. A lot of this nonsense, people going for short term political gain. The politics of this is not what some people think it is. We had Governor Kilgore in Virginia who ran against the idea that some people wake up at six in the morning to stand by the side of the road looking for work and that this is a threat to Virginia. The anti-immigrant campaign of Mr. Kilgore did not get him elected governor in an otherwise Republican state and at a time when other Republicans in other states were winning. Immigration bashing was not a good success. He should’ve perhaps gone to talk to President Pat Buchanan about whether this is a strategy that wins votes. I do understand that you can have a lot of fun on talk radio on the set but that is not the same thing as in making economic sense or any other kind of sense. It’s not the same thing as winning votes. Tom Tancredo is a Congressman from Colorado. He is not a senator from Colorado. Why is Tom Tancredo not a Senator from Colorado? There was Senate seat opened up, it was just waiting for a confident Republican to run. His polling numbers statewide were so poor he couldn’t consider running. The only thing people of Colorado know about him, apart from his district where he’s run a bunch of times is his position on immigration so the idea that this is a vote winning issue is just counterfactual. It’s very, very important for people to understand this. There was a discussion about what the House did on the vote to build a Berlin Wall. Well the House didn’t do anything. The House did this big gesture. Everybody who voted for that knew, knows that there’s not going to be a wall only put people in prison, only fix here and later we’re going to deal with the underlying problem. I mean I talked to some people who were dead set against what passed but they voted for it because everybody was told, look the Senate is going to save us and the president and the Senate are not going to sign this bill so vote for it and go home and too many people did that. The challenge is and sometimes our friends will say, well I’m against illegal immigration. Well in the 1970’s we had a 55 mile an hour speed limit and this was a stupid law. And we didn’t have people running around going well I’m in favor of the rule of law you know, we must have those people in prison and fine them for driving 55 mph. People drove 65 and 75 mph and the problem was not illegal driving in the United States, the problem was a stupid 55 mph speed limit. The amount of legal immigration in this country is so low, that much immigration is going to be illegal; much necessary immigration is going to be illegal immigration. It is not the fault of the people coming here, it is not the fault of the people hiring them, it is the fault of a stupid law. So step one is to get the amount of immigration, this country needs to grow to become and to maintain itself as a preeminent power on the globe and that is to have more immigration into the country. Let’s get those legal numbers up and then we can get away from this silliness. I get a kick out of these guys, well I’m against illegal immigration. Well, how about we increase the number of people who can come here then they’ll be legal. Well, oddly enough they’re not for that either so you have to go back and figure out what their real motivation is and we can guess. This is a really important issue and it really defines what the United States is about and to just go back to the very beginning, this is our number one competitive advantage against the rest of the world. It is why Japan isn’t running the world, it’s why China isn’t running the world, it’s why Europe isn’t running the world, it’s why we’re going to become increasingly the leader of the world and the rest of the world until they can absorb and take immigrants and have a society in which immigrants want to go too. They’re not going to challenge us for being the preeminent power in the world.

Anthony Romero:
Good morning, I am Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU and I’m delighted to be here with this group of panelists. Many of them are dear and old friends from the Counsel of La Raza and SIEU and I’m always delighted to be to the right of Grover Norquist who is also a very dear friend. One of the things that I think have been instructed from our recent work on the Patriot Act and the filibuster that the Patriot Act encountered was the power of working across the political spectrum and with a broad cross section of groups. In fact, that we have been able to work so closely with Grover’s organization, with Bob Barr, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which has raised very important questions about how that act works in a detriment of the private sector. I think gives us a page from which to look at for the purposes on the oncoming debate around immigration reform. I want to place a little about context around immigration in the broader context of the war on terror and questions around national security because I do think that we need to locate this debate precisely in the unique context in which this country is now coming too. And obviously the events after September 11 unleashed a series of policy reforms and changes in public opinions that we have to be very mindful of as we talk about comprehensive immigration reform. I will argue that much of the initial focus on the war on terror quickly morphed into a war on immigrants. That you see a wholesale repeal of civil liberties and civil rights that at first blush focused on immigrants and non-citizens in the U.S. It was as you recall, one of the first actions of the Justice Department to arrest and detain thousands of immigrants mostly from Asia, mostly from the Middle East, mostly Muslim. But the wholesale repeal of basic rights, individuals who were detained from months at end and prior to 9/11 would not have been detained for the immigration violations they were held under. They were denied access to their family members, denied access to counsel, deported in secret and I think one of the problems we have as advocates of immigration reform is that this context in which the global war on terror is still very much alive and well in these discussions is particularly difficult for us who are trying to advocate for a much more thoughtful visionary and embracing immigration policy. I think we have to be able to locate that, answer those questions on national security and remind ourselves that the war on terror should not become a war on immigrants. I think you even look at some of the bills that have been passed whether you go back to the Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Reform Control Act of 2005 or the Real ID Act that was attached to the military spending bill. You see in both those bills efforts to substantially diminish the rights of non-citizens to have to their day in court. That’s where I really want to focus my three points in the short period of time that we have. That right now as we debate comprehensive immigration reform, as we debate numbers and remaining the global force that Grover Norquist tells us, that we also to make sure as we debate those arguments that we not do so in a way that creates a Faustian bargain around the rights of immigrants and access to the judicial system. Clearly, this is a context in which access to the judicial system and judicial review is even more important than ever and I would even underscore the most recent events that we have seen with this recent domestic spying program that national security agency without Congressional approval, without any judge signing off on it. The importance of a system of checks and balances becomes much more significant when you have an administration that has been this aggressive in circumscribing the role of the courts and we can certainly expect that same aggression in terms of trying to circumscribe the role of the courts visa these immigrants. And there I will just point to three issues that we have to be mindful of and be very strong in our efforts. There’s an effort by Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter that would create an entirely new and separate federal court that would hear only immigration issues and we have to reject this proposal as a form of judicial gerrymandering where you create one court that will only hear immigration issues does not grapple with the broader civil liberties concerns. That we risk this separate article three court becoming much too insular, much too ghettoized, much too removed from the larger principles that are expressed in our Constitutions. That our Constitutions is really quite clear on rights of persons and the Constitution did not set up this dual class of separate and unequal between immigrants and U.S. citizens. To carve out a separate federal court that would only hear the cases related to immigration we think would set a very dangerous precedent for a system that will be inherently separate and unequal. I think a second question that we have to be mindful of in some of the debates around comprehensive immigration reform is this question around indefinite detention of non-citizens. We heard already the Supreme Court in a case that was argued almost two years ago by the ACLU rejected this practice that non-citizens who are being detained by the U.S. government but cannot be deported to countries that won’t take them still have basic rights and that being held for an unreasonable period of time is contrary to the protection of the Constitution and due process. There is an effort in the legislation to undo that important Supreme Court precedent and I think once again to allow Congress in the context of immigration reform to strip away the rights of immigrants and to deny the ability of the courts to review such cases we think at the ACLU will be ill considered. A third area, and then I’ll close, that we are quite concerned about in the debate around comprehensive immigration reform and we may end up being on different sides of this debate even among the colleagues at this table is the question around an employment verification system. That many of the bills talk about the necessary quid pro quo, that in order to have a larger number of individuals coming into the country that there should be a much more vigorous and electronic employment verification system. We have to remind ourselves that 54 million people are hired every year and that government accounting office report showed that the system would have to be enormous to do the type of employment verification that some of the pieces of legislation proposed and there would still be an enormous error rate even for non-citizens. There are very significant questions about how much it will cost. I think this will be an issue certainly the private sector is concerned about. 11.7 billion dollars a year is our estimate around employment verification program. And then quickly get to questions of core principles, of whether or not we are literally backing into a system of national identification and whether or not that system of national identification is ever going to be sufficiently vigorous. To be fool-proof, to be free from fraud and even if you were able to assure the questions around the utility of the system is a question of how it’s utilized. On whom are these work verification documents being demanded? Will it just further promote a system of racial profiling where if you look a certain way or have a certain accent you’ll have to show the work verification system but if you look quite differently and don’t have that accent that perhaps it won’t be utilized or implemented in precisely the same way? All of this we believe will back into a system that will very much get us to a system of national ID without having a full robust discussion, if that is precisely what we want. We think it will be ill considered. At the very end of it, I will just say as we think about the context of how the immigration reform debate is going to play into the larger debate around the role of rights and the role of the Judiciary that we been mindful of some of these changes that the administration has put in place are very aggressively anti-rights and anti-judicial review and in cases as far flung around issues on detention in Guantanamo or the designation of enemy combatants or a domestic spying program on American citizens without judicial approval that one of the consistent themes in this administration has been to erode the system of checks and balances and to diminish rights. And knowing that that has been a theme in many of their domestic and even foreign policies that we can certainly expect those same issues to be live ones in the comprehensive immigration debate as well. Thank you very much.

Kevin Appleby:
Thank you, Christina, and I’d like to thank the American Bar Association for having us in such a distinguished panel today. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is the national headquarters for the Catholic bishops in the nation and represents the interest of the Catholic Church before the government here in Washington. Why is the Catholic Church involved in this issue in the first place? Why are any of the faith-based groups involved in this issue? Well, the immigration issue is a multi-faceted issue is which we have heard today is talked about in different terms. It’s talked about in economic terms, in legal terms, in social terms, in labor terms, but surprise, surprise, it’s a humanitarian issue as well. It’s a moral issue because it impacts the human rights and human dignities of people. The basic premise of the bishop’s advocacy is that we have a broken system, a system that is an immoral system which accepts the labor of undocumented persons without extending them the protection of the law and as a result, they are exploited, they are abused by traffickers, by smugglers, they die in the deserts and their human rights and their human dignities are violated. Thus, the system has to be changed because it is a moral issue and it’s an immoral system which needs to be changed. We’re also involved because Catholics are involved in every aspect of the migratory phenomenon. We have Catholics that are border control agents, we have Catholics who are migrants, who are elected officials, who are immigration judges and hopefully we can bring these actors together listening to the voice of the church to find a common solution. We are also a very diverse Church, we reflect what the national trends are in terms of our diversity as a nation of immigrants. We’re sort of a nation of immigrants; we’re a church of immigrants. Our Latino population is growing just as the Latino population in the United States is growing. And finally we see the human consequences of this immoral system everyday, everyday in our programs, in our social service programs, in our hospitals, in our parishes. We see undocumented workers. We see their family suffering. We have priests who come to us and say, I just heard from a family who needs our help. What can we do about this and there’s not much we can do for them because the laws the way it is. So the bishops decided we really need to change the system and they have several principles that I’d like to articulate for you. First of all, we believe that we need to look at the root causes of migration and this is an issue that hasn’t been really talked about in this debate. We are a universal church so we see the root causes, we see the poverty that drives people to make this decision which isn’t an easy decision to get up and leave your home community and go over thousands of miles of desert. To put your trust into an unscrupulous smuggler, to come and find a job which pays you some wages. We have to look at the root causes. It hasn’t been in the debate but we’re hopeful that over time as we look at our trade agreements, as we look at our economic gain, that we’ll look at how this impacts migration, how it drives people, and how it drives people and sort of look at these policies and try to tear at them towards those trends. Second, we’d like to see an earned legalization. We think this is a vital, vital piece of the program. Let me talk a little about that because it’s going to be important plus they earn the right to stay. Plus it’s good policy. I mean God help us if we pass a good policy in this city, but it does several things. First of all, it stabilizes the workforce. It stabilizes the immigrant workforce and raises wages for everyone. Secondly, it preserves family, as we heard there are a number of mixed families, mixed-status families in the immigrant community where we have undocumented parents and documented children and they’re being separated. This is a growing social issue. If we have an earned legalization we will wipe that away. Thirdly, that allows long term residents who’ve been here for five years and the Pew Hispanic Center has said that 70 percent of the undocumented populations been here five years or more. Allows them to stay and contribute to the community without fear and then contribute to our country. Finally, it’s pro-security, it’s a pro-security policy that allows people to come out of the shadows, to be identified to the government so the government knows who they are and then the government can focus their resources on those who aren’t coming forward and identify those who are here to harm us and not to help us. The common response, well they broke the law, they broke the law and we’re not going to extend them anything because they broke the law. Well, let me say this. The law itself is broken and sometimes when the law is broken we need leadership to change that law so the law is appropriate and reflects the best interest of the nation and this is a moment where we need to step up to the plate and realize that. Thirdly, we’d like to see improvements in our family reunification program. Cecilia mentioned that briefly but as you’ve heard it takes years for a legal permanent residence to petition for their immediate family to come. Eight to ten years for a Mexican permanent resident to petition for their children and their spouse to come under the current system. That needs to be changed. We not only have migration driven by economic forces but we have migration driven by family forces as well and we have to recognize that. Fourthly, a temporary worker program that has protections for workers both native-born workers and for foreign-born workers. Fifth, restoration of due process protections for immigrants and six, another issue that hasn’t been discussed much is implementation of this program. We need to figure out a way in which we can implement this. We need to give the resources to the government to do this. We have backlogs in our current categories that go for years because we don’t put enough money into the system and now we’re going to have another program. We need to make sure that they have enough resources for it. The House has just passed HR 4437 and the bishops came out strongly in opposition to this bill. We think it’s the wrong approach. We think it’s an approach history has shown will not work and we’re very concerned with many of the provisions in the bill and we hope that this Senate will abandon that bill. I’d like to point out one provision in particular which we’re very concerned about which would criminalize assisting an undocumented immigrant. What we think that would do will put church workers, priests, nuns, and others in our social service programs in jeopardy of being subject to a five year imprisonment by assisting an undocumented worker. Current law does not require that our social service programs or church workers ask someone for their documentation before providing assistance. This new law, this new proposal would wipe that out and say if you assisted an undocumented immigrant knowingly or with reckless disregard to whether they’re an undocumented immigrant then you could be subject to five years in prison. We’re concerned that that could place priests who help someone who comes to the parish doors, a good Samaritan who provides water and food to an undocumented immigrant, that they will be criminals subject to five years in prison and we think this is outrageous. There are several other provisions in that bill that we also think are outrageous as well. Hopefully the Senate will see the wisdom and give us a more comprehensive bill. We supported the McCain-Kennedy Bill because we think it’s the best bill out there that balances all of the elements which the bishops are pursuing and we believe that that should be an enacted. There are other groups that are working with us in the faith-based community to advance these principles, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Jewish community among others. We have a statement on immigration reform which several groups have signed which could be found on our website. Finally, I’d just like to mention that the church has also launched its own campaign, the Justice for Immigrants campaign in which the bishops decided to launch in May when they found that many who are opposed to immigration are indeed Catholic, including a lot of our elected officials who are Catholic. So we have started this campaign, its called Justice for Immigrants and you can go on our website to learn more about it, www.justiceforimmigrants.org. Our campaign is to educate Catholics throughout the country on immigration. It’s not necessarily to switch the Roman Catholic vote to Democrat but it’s just to educate on this issue so our Catholics can advocate in it. Thank you.

Question and Answer Portion

Question:
Good morning, Mauricio Robbero, Executive Director of IUDA here in D.C. and I have a question for Ana. I found your arguments about the expanded guest worker program to be very persuasive and I was curious whether currently you find it as a necessary compromise or are you opposed to the McCain-Kennedy Bill?

Ana Avendano:
The AFL-CIO is not supporting the McCain-Kennedy Bill because of the guest worker program. It is not a compromise that was ever actually full debated. Many of the problems that Tony raised with the issues of how quickly we address sort of the national security issue without a full and robust debate, the same thing about guest worker programs. Somebody made the compromise along the way not without any public discourse, not with any input from workers, leaders, nobody. There was no hearing on this. It just became, like I said, oh yeah we have to do a guest worker program. One of the things that we’d like to see is a much more extensive discussion on what it means to transform our society into a nation of guests.

Angelo Amador:
I just want to add because they’re talking a lot about the McCain Kennedy guest worker program and how much debate was there. Actually during the negotiations that I was at there was a representative from the AFL-CIO and the ACLU was certainly involved. But I just want to encourage anybody that wants to know what’s actually in there to go back and read it. One of the proposals that we actually oppose is the fact that they’re not tied to an employer even for one day. On the McCain-Kennedy Bill the guest worker on day one after arriving in the United States and going to the place that he is supposed to be employed, he can immediately change out. So they’re not tied to their employer. Even if they lose their jobs, there is, I believe 60 days in which they have to find another job before they are in full removal. That’s unable to improve a lot. This is the first immigration bill that I see that allows an employee to petition, to self petition for a green card as opposed to being tied to an employer. It’s a new thing that is there, not that we don’t have opposition on but first portability, we think at least three months to get all things to bring this person over. He has a private right of action within the Department of Labor, something that we fought and we actually ended up compromising with the representative from the union to be able to get something that is workable. And also if the individual is successful they get attorneys fees, which is something that if you ask any business they wouldn’t like to have to pay. It’s something that all of those provisions and others, and I encourage you to go back and read it, are things that we’re still explaining to our own membership and explaining why the Chamber is supporting a bill that has those provisions there. It is a compromise, they were debated before the bill was introduced and you know we wish that this will move forward and we’ll have more comparable hearings and we would have more of a debate. Right now, that’s not the case but anybody wants amendments to support McCain-Kennedy, you know which seven of the eight people here on the table have done already and my sister is a dentist and she always says, there’s always a tenth dentist that doesn’t use Crest. So if you look at the people that are supporting this bill, you know it goes from left to right. And the HR 4437, there’s a newspaper that prints for Congress and one of the things that we asked them to do that they do was list the people who are opposed and the people who were not supporting it and they didn’t print the list. And we called them and they said well nobody was supporting it so we couldn’t print the two list. So in the McCain-Kennedy, if you look at the list you will see at the same time as it was with 4437 that the groups of people supporting it including those probations is quite broad. And its not that we’re happy with some of the provisions, some of which are listed is just because from what’s out there and Hagel which I know they have supported returned probation which we do not support and that’s why we couldn’t jump on board with that one. But you know go back, read it and see what the facts and what the end captions say.

Eliseo Medina:
If I may just add to this question. My father was a Vessaro. He came in under this guest worker program in the 1940’s. I know firsthand about the failures of this system and I certainly do not want to see them repeated again. I think that will be bad for the workers, bad for employers, and that would be bad for this country. But I do believe that we do need a way for people to come in a legal way to this country without risking their lives like the way they’re doing now. And I believe that any program like that, and we support a guest worker program that has job portability as Angelo has mentioned so workers do not find themselves tied to an employer and that there’s also full labor rights and a way to enforce them so they don’t have to be dependent on the Department of Labor who has a terrible record of enforcing worker’s rights. That way they can have a union, they can have anybody to help them make sure their rights are being observed. And one of the advantages is that right now our current system anybody who comes to the U.S. is forced to stay because it’s too difficult to go back. In the future we have a program that allows for people to come in a legal way. They want to come for a year, two years and then go home, that’s fine, they ought to be able to do that. But for those who want to make America their home, they also ought to have a pathway to citizenship. I think that’s a far preferable system to just simply saying no and allow the current system to continue. I would love to say that they’ll give enough visas so that everybody can come as a permanent resident but not everybody wants to do that. Some only one to come for only a season or two whatever, that’s their choice. They ought to be able to come because they want too, not because they have too.

Ana Avendano:
Let me respond to a couple of things. I just want to make clear that the audience understands that when I was talking about robust public debate I did not mean discussion amongst lobbyists. I don’t consider that robust public debate. I mean real input from the public. There was none about that in relation to the McCain Kennedy guest worker program. We completely agree that there have to be legal channels for people to come to the United States. We just believe that people need to do that under a permanent system. Nobody says that if you come here with a green card you have to stay here and you can’t leave the country. My family came here on a green card. We left the country for awhile, we came back. When I’m talking about the problems with guest worker programs, they are not these sort of structural, even the protection angle, it is the fundamental transformation of our society and our communities from citizens to guests and that is the fundamental problem that we see with guest worker programs and also with the expansion of them. Now again, the answer to all of the problems that we were talking about here needs to be sort of debated and people need to explain, public policy makers need to explain why it is politically infeasible to increase the number of permanent visas. That is where the xenophobia is, that is where the racism is and I think we need to talk about that more.

Question:
I was interested in what Mr. Appleby was saying about provisions to the bill which deals with people who are aiding or assisting illegal immigrants and saying that those people could be in jeopardy of being thrown into jail for up to five years. Or if they’re doing it for money, in exchange for their services is up to 20. I was hoping that Mr. Appleby or anyone who is moved to speak could respond as to what groups would be affected by that kind of legislation, anyone aiding or assisting this sort of very broad ambiguous language. It could apply to priests giving better water, good Samaritans giving somebody a ride or someone helping their neighbor out with sort of small things like tiling the bathroom floor or something. How expansive is that language do you think and who are the groups, besides the priests, bishops, Catholic Church that are affected. Who else is affected?

Eliseo Medina:
Well if I may answer that, I too am concerned with that provision for along of reasons but in addition to the priests going to jail I would be right in there with them because under the provisions of this law if I negotiate a contract that will cover undocumented workers to improve their wages, their working conditions. If I then process a grievance against their employer for mistreating them, for not paying them what they were supposed to. I would be considered to be aiding and abetting them and because they are members of our union and they pay their union dues just like any other worker to participate in the union they could say that I’m doing it for money and I could spend the rest of my life as I get older in jail. I think that is absolutely abhorring to who we are as Americans. And when that Statue of Liberty that said “give me your poor, your tired huddled masses.” If that law would’ve been in effect all those huddled masses and everybody helping them would’ve been in jail. I can’t think of a worse thing to do to our country, in terms of our values but also in terms of resources. What do you want to do? Start building more prisons to hold all these people for doing such a simple humanitarian thing? It’s absolutely the worse thing that anybody could do.

Angelo Amador:
And I just want to add that for businesses we’re also very concerned because it has ramifications, for example in the Rico statute they’re already arguing that, there has been a couple of times when it’s already been successful you know when the individual actually is in the premises. Let’s say it’s a hotel or something. The person working gets a room or something like that. They’ve already said that’s aiding and abetting or assisting an undocumented so this makes it even further. So lets say you hire somebody and discover later on the person is undocumented and you start helping them with the paperwork or I know some businesses provide loans to pay for the attorney in advance to be able to legalize the worker and you know in this period of time where they’re doing all this that would also be assisting so we’re very concerned about that as well.

Anthony Romero:
The one thing that I would just add is that if that provision is also read as broadly as also prohibit the ability of lawyers to provide assistance to immigrants. It’s another way, once again to shut the courthouse doors to the immigrant community and clearly that would raise very serious constitutional questions for us. I think were to go forward we would be very anxious to make that question before relevant courts. The Constitution is very clear in some parts. In some parts, the rights are reserved for citizens. The right to vote for instance is reserved for citizens. In other parts of the Constitution the wording is very clear; no person shall be denied life, liberty or property without due process of law. That the right to free speech is entitled to all persons and the idea then that lawyers who help assure the rights of immigrants of these persons whether they’re documented or undocumented could be seen as aiding and abetting will raise very serious Constitutional questions and is ill advised. It’s just not mean spirited to the lovely nuns and priests who are trying to help folks, but it’s also mean-spirited to the very communities who are trying to serve those immigrants in different ways.

Grover Norquist:
This is what happens when people vote for laws that they know are gestures not laws. Any Congressman that you go to and say “did you really mean this,” most of them will say, “well no of course we didn’t mean it, we were just saying message we care about illegal immigration and we see on T.V. that this is important.” And so they didn’t read this. There were a handful of them who were most insistent, Tom Tancredo and some others on having nothing on them to prove it and not taking out some of the more egregious things. Frankly it is fair to go to these people who voted for this and hold them responsible and say you didn’t read it, you thought you were just saying message I care but you actually voted for a real piece of legislation and there will be bad people, radicals on the anti-immigrant side who will look at that say and say, well this is no negotiating starting point because the House agreed to all of this and what we need to remind people is the House did not agree to all this, they did not read this, they did not focus on this, they just today we’re going to do a gesture and they did one and some very icky people stuck some very icky stuff in here and I hope we excommunicate them.

Question:
Speaking of egregious provision in the Sensenbrenner Bill, I want to get a comment on something else. A provision in that criminalizes unlawful presence in the United States and a concern of a lot of people is that aside from the actual substance of this provision is that it’s going to both this provision and the one the panel was just talking about in terms of criminalizing people who assist undocumented it’s going to spur or perhaps mandate local enforcement of the immigration laws. I want people to speak to the potential ramifications of that.

Cecilia Munoz:
The bill does in fact mandate local police in that it allows local police to engage in immigration enforcement. It authorizes them to do that, it deputizes local police and it also will withhold justice departments funds to any jurisdictions who decide that it’s not in the interest of preserving the public safety to be collaborating with the immigration authorities which many, many police chiefs across the country they agree with us that it is a mistake for local police to be any immigration business. Why? Because there’s immigrants in their communities that they’ve been working hard to build relationships with and if people are fearful that the police are now the immigration authorities they won’t report crimes when they experience them, they won’t be comfortable coming forward as witnesses to crimes, when people are victims of domestic violence they won’t feel comfortable calling the police for assistance. It undermines the public safety in a very profound way. It undercuts law enforcement’s abilities to do its job and again it doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful towards the broader goal which is really stemming which is just getting our system under control and so now we have a 11 million people whom we classified as criminals and we have the potential to unleash local enforcement to go after them as well as the immigration authorities. So what exactly does that produce in terms of a result? We undercut public safety, public health, we push these communities further underground. We have the due process implications of this are severe for people who do end up in deportation proceedings and we end with more people in detention, more people going through proceedings but this is the sort of gosh we can round up all 11 million and ship them out strategy. At least if you believe a considerable amount of polling that’s been done and all across the American community, across party lines, across gender lines, across racial and ethnic lines even people who don’t like immigrants seem to get it that we’re not going to be rounding up 11 million people and shipping them out. I would also put this in the same category as Grover Norquist was just describing, as it’s a message but its not a policy and as a policy it makes no sense and one does wonder what the Republican leadership was thinking in allowing this to go forth. We have precious few days to educate legislators about what was in this bill because they got it on a Tuesday, the markup was on a Thursday and the bill was done by the following week. Nevertheless, the information about what this bill does is out there, the community had enough time to get really angry about the way the immigration debate was going forward and for a party that professes to be interested in the Latino vote, this is a very interesting way about going and trying to get it. This is highly offensive stuff. People get it that it doesn’t work, people get it that it’s about demagoguery, but it is the opening negotiating posture if there is a better Senate bill and ultimately a negotiation between the two and its outrageous that we even have to have some elements of this debate.

Grover Norquist:
When you give the government power to do something to go after immigrants, you also give them that power for other stuff. For those people who are concerned with the Second Amendment, the idea of having the federal government nationalize the local police force and so the guys in Idaho who thought there Second Amendment rights were fine because the Idaho local police and the Idaho state would never go after them will find themselves contending with Tancredo’s understanding of Second Amendment and gun rights. When we revisit this issue I think a lot of people concerned with many issues beyond immigration will say that we do not want to nationalize the local police. J. Edgar Hoover warned against this sort of behavior. It is very dangerous on many issues starting with guns and moving up.

Kevin Appleby:
Let me just add on the provision for criminalizing. We called it the anti-legalization provision because anyone who’s a criminal becomes a criminal in this provision will not be allowed to have any benefits, any legal benefits in the future. So basically at this rate if there is going to be guest worker program for these people or a legalization program for these people which is contrary to what some of the leadership analysis said, that we’ll deal with the guest worker program in Conference Committee. We’re not going to deal with it on the floor. Well how can you deal with the guest worker program in Conference Committee if you have this provision in there unless you just go against what the House has voted for. It really doesn’t make sense in that regard as well.

Question:
I would like to hear your comments on the proposal wall to be built between the United States and Mexico. This doesn’t seem to be only an idea from Sensenbrenner and friends but also from Michael Chertoff who also all wound up talking now about an intelligent wall. Do you think that is possible? Is it something that is going to happen? Is the United States ready to build a 900 billion dollar wall between the two countries?

Cecilia Munoz:
I’ll start. Governor Napolitano from Arizona, she made my favorite comment about the wall which was show me a ten foot wall and I’ll show you an 11 foot ladder and that kind of sums it up, in that the resilience of the folks that are coming across. Right now these are people walking across the Arizona desert. Much as we’d like to create a system where they don’t have to do that and make those kinds of choices, I don’t think, well history suggests that this is going to be effective in stopping the problem. It’s more messages as opposed to real policy and so it may make the people who want to get tough feel good. They can talk tough about building walls but at the end of the day I’m not sure there’s a lot of confidence that it will have any real impact on migration and it does send a very interesting message about the kind of society that we may be interested in becoming. Coming out of this debate I was on one of those crazy television debates a week or so ago about this issue and the commentator was talking about East Berlin and you know maybe some people want to move in that direction for this country but I think we can do a lot better than East Berlin.

Kevin Appleby:
There was a report yesterday in one of the papers that the border patrol found a tunnel between the US and Mexico recently. Well they ain’t seen nothing yet if this wall goes up. The forces that drive people to migrate will overwhelm any wall that we build on the southern border.

Angelo Amador:
I just want to say that and I admit, I do read the newspaper where I saw the best comment. It’s a good way; this was their view on it for those of you who read their newspaper. The commentary section asking individuals says it’s a good way of keeping out of shape illegal immigrants out of the country. Having said that, kidding aside the Chamber again hasn’t taken a position because are constantly solving the problem and we’re convinced that if you solve the problem, address it, the whole issue of the wall goes away. Now having said that, we’ll also say you know with the shortage we have of workers we always throw the question back out there, who’s going to build this wall and if you only use legalized citizens you’re just going to exacerbate the point that we already have of the shortage in construction and all these other industries we’ve been talking about for the last hour and a half.

Eliseo Medina:
And I would just say that I’m disappointed in the Congress for not dealing with real issues. We’ve got 45 million people without health insurance in this country. We have 9 billion dollars. There’s a whole lot more useful, productive things we could be doing with it than empty gestures.