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« Back to Fixing Immigration and More, Part One main page   Transcript for: Fixing Immigration and More, Part OneTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1410 Fixing Immigration, Part One. FEED DATE: May 4, 2006 Tamar Jacoby Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. America is divided on immigration. Some say that immigration hurts American workers. Others maintain that immigrants are a vital part of our economic engine. President George W. Bush supports a temporary guest-worker program, but proposals in Congress range from building a wall at the Mexican border to putting millions of illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship. Most everyone agrees that current immigration policy doesn’t work. What should we do about it? To Find Out, Think Tank is joined this week by Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a leading neo-conservative, author of, 'Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What it Means to be American.' The Topic Before the House: Fixing Immigration and More, Part One, this week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Tamar Jacoby, welcome back to Think Tank. JACOBY: Glad to be here. WATTENBERG: Well, great. Tell us about you. JACOBY: I’m a journalist by training. I worked for the New York Times for many years and for Newsweek... Late ‘90’s, I decided that if I was going to be a writer, I’d like to be writing about what I really cared about rather than the week’s assignment or Topic A, I really wanted to dig my teeth into something and know something about something and -- and have some extra... WATTENBERG: And that took you to immigration? JACOBY: Well, that first took me to race. I spent about ten years thinking about race in America and thinking about what had happened since the Civil Rights Movement. And I spent a lot of time writing and talking about race but I started to think, you know, the question that had really driven me to think about that, which was what kind of country are we and can we be with as much difference as we have in the country, with as much diversity, you know, what’s no longer... WATTENBERG: ...and assimilation, and... JACOBY: ...and that took me to immigration and assimilation and then I eventually... WATTENBERG: ...as Franklin Roosevelt said, we are all immigrants, right. JACOBY: We are all immigrants. WATTENBERG: ...That happens to be a true fact, but okay. JACOBY: And then -- and then I’d been bitten by the bug of immigration and I’ve been doing that, it must be seven, eight years now. And you go from the assimilation questions to the how many do we let in and who and why because that’s a key part of it. WATTENBERG: You’ve actually moved down from the New York area to the Washington Metroplex area to follow this thing. JACOBY: Well, that’s the other transition. I’ve gone from being what you might call a disinterested writer to somebody who is really trying to make something happen. WATTENBERG: Okay, so. Let’s have it in a nutshell first. What’s going on with immigration policy? JACOBY: The issue has ripened in an incredible way just in the last couple of months really; it’s been ripening for a year, but... WATTENBERG: A couple of months meaning spring 2006. JACOBY: I would say yes. WATTENBERG: Right. JACOBY: The public finally has realized that it isn’t working, that the system is dysfunctional, and different parts of the public think about it in different ways. Law and order conservatives feel that the rule of law is being eroded. Latinos feel that they -- immigrants and other Latinos feel here’s a whole class of people that are left out of the country. Politicians are realizing that the public is frustrated and upset about it. It’s -- somehow we’ve reached a tipping point of concern about it, and that’s translated into congressional attention and we are about to see whether that translates into -- into real action on a bill. WATTENBERG: I mean, the irony of this thing, at least as I see it, is that not withstanding all of the craziness within the system, which is truly bizarre, it has worked better than anywhere else in the world and I think -- and I’ll explain to you why -- it is our basic comparative advantage over anyone and everyone in the world. That’s the irony. Everyone says it’s terrible, but it isn’t really terrible. JACOBY: I agree with that, but there are two components here, right? One is how good we are at absorbing them and that’s about assimilation and allow -- and helping them find a way to become Americans. And there’s no question that we do that better than anyone in the world, but -- but I would argue that the -- that the system that has twelve million people here -- living here illegally is not a good -- is not a functioning system. WATTENBERG: Well, you know, let’s just quantify that for a minute. You got “twelve million”, quotes, illegals and you have three hundred million Americans. But some of them have been here for thirty years. They have children who... JACOBY: Yeah. Yeah. WATTENBERG: Okay, so it is a minuscule part of the population. They are not all from Mexico; they are from -- I did a book, as you know, called The First Universal Nation, but we weren’t until the 1980’s or so. We were from almost everywhere; now we are from Asia and Latin America and Mexico is a huge part of it... JACOBY: I disagree that it’s okay the way it is. I don’t think that we want to be the kind of country where the rule of law gets eroded that way. When you have whole parts of cities and whole industries, and besides, twelve million people, that’s Ohio; that’s almost Pennsylvania, saying that the rules don’t matter. I think that’s bad for us. I think it’s bad for -- it’s really bad for people who have to live in the shadows, but it’s bad for us as a country and it’s not a very good idea in an age of international terrorism to have that many people - - millions of people who we don’t know their real names, we don’t know where they live, they live in the shadows and I think we could fix it without very much cost. WATTENBERG: Well, I believe in that in theory, but this is such an open country, we can’t keep out illegal drugs and we can’t keep out illegal immigrants and no matter what you do, because it’s such a good game in town, in America. You’re Godspeed, good luck; you’re not going to be able to do it. JACOBY: I don’t think it’ll ever be totally, totally, totally, but you could have said in prohibition, we’re doing fine, everybody is getting the drink they need and it’s not that bad, but isn’t what we have now a little better? More realistic laws that you can enforce. WATTENBERG: You still have dry counties. You still have dry counties. JACOBY: You do. And you have illicit behavior, but when you get a realistic law that you can enforce much more easily, I think it’s going to work better for everyone including American workers because when illegal workers aren’t -- I think they do mostly work above the table, but when they -- but it’s got to be somewhat harder for them to bargain for wages and working conditions and that makes it harder for American workers. WATTENBERG: Yeah, but, as you know, as in every other aspect of our modern society there are these dueling studies. I mean, George Moorehouse says one thing and the other guy says another thing and they’ve all got data and it’s pretty hard to sort it out, as you know. JACOBY: But I don’t have any doubt that they are good for the economy, that they help grow the economy. You can’t grow a business without workers. That our workforce is getting older and more educated and then I would say that there is one set of numbers you need to know to understand the current immigration. In 1960, half of all American men dropped out of high school and went into unskilled work. Today, less than 10% do, but we still need all kinds of unskilled work and we need somebody to do it. WATTENBERG: Of course, you’ve got the high-end brain drain type... JACOBY: That too. WATTENBERG: ...but that’s another story. But one of the great ironies is some of the people who are complaining about this low end immigration, who are the people who are cleaning women and people who do your lawns use them because that’s the only people you can get. JACOBY: It’s not that Americans are lazy, it’s not that they don’t want to work, it’s that we are increasingly educated, people don’t want... WATTENBERG: True. JACOBY: ...I don’t know anyone raising their kids to be busboys or farmhands or even really construction much anymore. People want -- it turns out when you ask -- when you know something about the construction world, people want to work construction when their dads worked outside. Not too many dads work outside anymore, people want to work inside, but we still need that all done. WATTENBERG: Okay, so, what does the phrase “guest worker” mean? That’s one -- one end of this thing. JACOBY: Yeah, now there you are on to something and I -- we’ve all been saying what we want as a guest worker program and I do have some trouble with that. I think we want a guest worker program but that one that encourages many of the people and the people who want to, to go home and have a good life in Mexico when they are done with their stint here. WATTENBERG: Which they are going to do... JACOBY: Which they are going to do if they want to, but also allows the ones who put down roots here, who want to become citizens, who invest in their community, who get what it means to be American and prosper here, it allows them to get onto another track eventually. WATTENBERG: To get onto a track towards becoming citizens. JACOBY: Toward becoming -- as we always have. WATTENBERG: And these demonstrations that we‘ve seen, I mean, they got the message, they’re all waiving American Flags and there had been that incident some years ago that drove Pat Buchanan crazy with that... JACOBY: Soccer. WATTENBERG: ...U.S. Mexican Soccer game up in L.A. or San Diego where they were all waiving Mexican Flags. JACOBY: Well, come on; a soccer game. When I go to a soccer -- you know, when I go to a baseball game I wear my Yankee’s hat, I mean, that’s what they were doing at the game. WATTENBERG: Well, I think people -- Jews, Italians, whoever, I mean, if a soccer team from Israel came to America and played here -- look, I’m a very patriotic American, I would have a Zionist -- if an Italian team came here and I were the son of an Italian immigrant, I would feel a little something. It’s... JACOBY: It’s human nature. WATTENBERG: You can be both. JACOBY: Exactly, exactly, exactly. I agree with you, but -- and the overwhelming evidence shows that today’s immigrants are assimilating, if anything, faster and more successfully than the Ellis Island way. WATTENBERG: And learning English more rapidly. JACOBY: The kids learn English. Sure it’s hard for adults to learn English and a lot of the adults are speaking Spanish in the supermarkets or the street or whatever, and that bother’s people. And I -- you know, you can sort of see -- if I thought that the kids weren’t going to learn I’d be worried, too. 98% of the kids -- I mean there is no study that finds the kids not learning English. WATTENBERG: My experience in following this issue, which I have done, is whenever you have doubt just press the pause button and say wait a generation or two and that’s really... JACOBY: Right. The sociologists say that America is a graveyard for languages, and it’s no less true today than it was in the past. They’re also -- they’re also... WATTENBERG: Engendering often a lot of tragedy within families, as does intermarriage, but that’s... JACOBY: That’s the process. WATTENBERG: That’s it. JACOBY: Of course assimilation isn’t a total 100% success story, but they are hard-working people with family values, they are patriotic, they are fighting and dying in the armed forces in if not -- if not totally proportionate numbers then very close. WATTENBERG: You know, I have a number which I -- the Defense Department is an interesting place; they have numbers on everything except who’s going to win a war, but... JACOBY: How many troops we need. WATTENBERG: Mexican-Americans have the highest rate of Congressional Medal of Honors... JACOBY: Yeah, yeah. WATTENBERG: ...which is the highest rate, which -- than any other group... JACOBY: That’s great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. WATTENBERG: ...in the American Armed Forces. JACOBY: And there are a lot of people who argue that -- who are alarmed at the Hispanic education gap, and who say, “Look, the second -- the third generation isn’t graduating from high school at any better rate then the second generation.” But, I would argue they ought -- Michael Brown has a great argument where he says it’s an alternative path into the mainstream; not necessarily straight through higher education and that kind of achievement, but home ownership and entrepreneurship. And you -- this is what you see in the Mexican-American community is the guy who first gets here is the busboy; by the time he’s been here twenty-five years, he’s buying the coffee shop. WATTENBERG: I mean, the whole thing, I mean, here’s a guy I saw that in the paper the other day in The Washington Post, Robert Samuelson who’s really one of the smart guys in America who really knows how to use data. If I’m not misquoting him, he came out in favor of this monster wall. Now, that’s a little screwy. I mean, you know, it would so easily -- so easy to avoid it, such a terrible symbol. The thing is getting a little screwy. JACOBY: Well, there are two answers to Samuelson. I mean, one is that a wall isn’t going to work. The way to get control -- we do need better enforcement; what we mostly need enforcement in the workplace. A wall is just not going to get -- a fifty foot wall will soon have fifty-one foot ladders. We won’t be done building the wall and there’ll be... WATTENBERG: More tunnels... JACOBY: Tunnels and boats. WATTENBERG: More people coming in on a visitor’s visa and disappearing. You know, I had another favorite number: during the 1980’s a million Poles came to America and disappeared. They came on a visitor’s visa... JACOBY: And disappeared. WATTENBERG: ...and we lost track of them. They got married, had children. I mean, it -- the Irish, the same thing. JACOBY: But we do -- and the way to get control is enforcement in the workplace, which we need. But Samuelson’s even bigger point that I -- where I think he’s wrong is he said, well, we’re importing poverty. The truth is we are importing a working class because we don’t really have a working class anymore. WATTENBERG: Well, and I don’t know if we are importing poverty but we are importing people who will work at lower wages, but the alternative, the follow-on to that is they are subsidizing us, the goods cost less, and... JACOBY: And the economy is growing, the economy is growing; it’s not just the few pennies on the head of lettuce, it’s that they come out of the meat packing plant and go into town and buy groceries and shoes for their kids and washing machines and hire plumbers and the whole economy grows. WATTENBERG: Now, many immigrants have their own strong religious and cultural traditions. I think in Spanish, if I’m not mistaken, it’s called the Padrones. Is that right? JACOBY: I’m not sure. WATTENBERG: It’s in the back of my head. Particularly Mexicans who are predominantly Roman Catholic are -- and yet you have people like Pat Buchanan who is sort of a professional Catholic among other things coming out with a vicious book and yet they are his kind of folks. Traditional values family, people who are religious. JACOBY: If I thought that in twenty-five years Spanish would be an equal language with English, and we would be importing Latino fatalism and Mexican authoritarian values, I would worry too. But, I have -- I mean, it’s not an illegitimate question to say what kind of country are we going to be. But when you look at the evidence, none of those bad things are happening. These people want to be Americans and Pat Buchanan -- the problem with Pat Buchanan, he doesn’t have enough faith in the allure of our ideals and our way of life. Immigrants come and the ones who stay are the ones who love that and understand it. WATTENBERG: Alright, let me give you my sort of radical notion here, which is never mentioned. First of all, as you know, birth rates and fertility rates are sinking all around the world, including in Mexico. JACOBY: Yes. Yes. WATTENBERG: Leading demographers already say it’s already below replacement. Now, just think if you have a society that over time is going to go down anyway, and a huge immigration, you end up with a country without any people. JACOBY: Yeah. WATTENBERG: Zero except for the few Americans and Germans who own condos... JACOBY: Who want to move there. Yeah. WATTENBERG: ...on the gulf side. Now, let me just go through this whole thing because it’s very important to me. I think this is the thing that isn’t mentioned. Every major country in the world is slated to lose population by gobs. You don’t even understand how much it’s going down, except America. Roughly speaking population yields power. Now, it doesn’t always happen but when you look out into the future and people don’t want to talk about macro America. I’ve testified on the Hill about this; nobody wants to -- you don’t write about it. What it -- what it’s saying in my judgment is immigration and consequent assimilation is our number one comparative advantage and it’s going to yield a destiny -- I mean, this is U.N. data we’re at three hundred million; we’re going to four hundred million; we’re going to five hundred million. We -- if you believe that America should be an influential country, which I believe, very much so, that’s the key to it. JACOBY: Yeah, I will buy this. I buy this. WATTENBERG: And, you know, no one ever talks about it. JACOBY: Yeah. It’s a -- I don’t know, you’re right; it’s a little bit abstract to people because it’s so far down the road, and people -- a lot of people have a bugaboo about you know, we’re going to use up all the resources or something. They’re scared of the, you know, but obviously you’re right and the only reason I think people don’t talk about it more is it’s just a little bit, most people don’t see the -- that big a picture. Population yields power, that’s the phrase? I might steal it. WATTENBERG: You got it. Okay, you can... JACOBY: Socialism of ideas. WATTENBERG: You can do it without attribution. JACOBY: That’s very generous. I’ll call you the first few times. WATTENBERG: Is what you’re talking about amnesty and doesn’t amnesty yield the lure of continued illegality, the idea being that, “okay, come on across and it will be tough for a while, but sooner or later”... I mean, that’s what happened with IRCA, is that what it’s called? The Immigration Reform... JACOBY: The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. WATTENBERG: Yeah. They said everybody here is fine, but no more. That’s the argument against amnesty. JACOBY: Two part answer. First, what was wrong with IRCA? It didn’t create a pipeline for the workers that we were going to need on a continuing basis to come legally, so it said we’ll clean up all of the illegal ones who came in the past because our pipeline isn’t big enough, because our pipeline isn’t commensurate with our economic needs, but we won’t enlarge our pipeline. So, we cleaned up the old pool so to speak, but we didn’t make the pipeline any bigger, so over the next twenty years we got another big pool of illegal people. It wasn’t that the amnesty wasn’t successful, it was that the other two legs of the stool - which is a worker program and enforcement to make sure that people use the worker program - were not put in place. We just did really one leg of the stool. WATTENBERG: And it had very mild consequences for the employer. JACOBY: Not just mild consequences; no tools for them to use to really know whether the workers they were hiring were illegal or not. WATTENBERG: And now, you all are proposing, and I’m not sure I’m in favor of this, legal consequences for employers where they can go to the slammer if they do the wrong thing. JACOBY: It’s not just consequences, it’s the tool. What we have now is -- the analogy is if you wanted to buy a shirt and you went into the store and you gave the guy a MasterCard and he had to eyeball the MasterCard and if it was wrong, he had to swallow the price of the shirt. All they ask us to do now is show the employer a card; he has no way of knowing whether your social security number or your -- or your Tennessee birth certificate or your report card or whatever you show... WATTENBERG: Or your Mexican certificate of identification. Right. JACOBY: ...is valid. He can’t ask too many questions, and if he’s wrong he’s legally liable. We need to give him something like a credit card verification where he swipes the card and it comes back, authorized or not, so he has a way to actually do what we are asking them to do and then we have to prosecute the bad guys. A few high profile cases of big companies doing it wrong, believe you me, we can change the climate. Right now the climate is everybody does it wrong in a lot of industries, let’s give them the tools, go after a few and change the climate. The deal on the table now. First of all, it divides the illegal population... WATTENBERG: This is the second part of your answer on amnesty, right? JACOBY: No. Well the first one was what’s wrong with IRCA. WATTENBERG: Right. JACOBY: So now we are talking about why this... WATTENBERG: Okay. JACOBY: ...why the deal on the table isn’t amnesty. The main answer is for most of the undocumented, what they are being asked to do is go around to the law enforcement, admit they committed a crime, be fingerprinted, pay a stiff penalty and then wait in legal limbo for six years until they’re cleared and authorized residents in this country, and then they have to wait another five years to be citizens. If I had to do that, if I had to go to the police and say I committed a crime and wait in legal limbo, I would not consider that an amnesty. JACOBY: The deal on the table is even a little tougher than that. The deal on the table asks about forty percent of them to actually leave the country and come back the legal way and then go through the normal process of applying for a green card. So even tougher requirements under -- in the compromise under the table now. And, I mean, it’s -- I don’t see how you call this amnesty. WATTENBERG: And the Senators that I am most familiar with who have been pushing this sort of a solution, it’s a pretty interesting spectrum, is John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Ted Kennedy. JACOBY: Well, they’re the one -- they have been putting out -- it’s -- it’s so complicated, you need a scorecard... WATTENBERG: I know. JACOBY: ...to keep track of it, but there was a bill on the table that was the Kennedy/McCain answer, and it had -- it was this wait six years and pay a fine and all that. And now enter Senators Mel Martinez and Chuck Hagel, also Republicans, and they have said, toughen it up a little bit, to meet the concerns of law and order conservatives who want people to really do it the same -- not get any special dispensation. WATTENBERG: Allegedly, big word in Washington, the opposition to this sort of thing is coming from sort of mid-continent Americans who don’t want to see our culture diluted, blah, blah, blah, is that... JACOBY: The opposition is a very complicated mixed stew. There are people who are worried about the culture, there are people who are just worried about the illegality who feel that they did something wrong and we don’t want to reward people who did something wrong, and that’s legitimate. It’s mixed with security concerns and it’s a kind of heady mix. WATTENBERG: It’s a very interesting thing, just for the record. To my knowledge, no terrorists have come in through Mexico. Terrorists have come down through Canada. JACOBY: Canada. WATTENBERG: Nobody said -- is talking about Canada being a problem. JACOBY: Well, the main point is if we take the busboys and the gardeners off the table, it will be a lot easier for the border guards to focus on the actual criminals and would be terrorists. If the bus boys and gardeners can come in a legitimate program and the border guards can focus on people who really are dangerous, that would make a lot more sense. JACOBY: But he basic point is that a large group of the undocumented population has to go out of the country, come back the legal way and then go through the normal channels that everybody has to go through at home in Mexico and they won’t get to the ticket window before anybody waiting at home in Mexico. Now, there is a part of the population, the people who’ve been here longer, who have a slightly easier path with the argument being that they’ve put down some roots here, they’ve invested in the community, they’ve contributed to America, they have a slightly easier path and I think that’s a legitimate argument to make. People who’ve been here and invested and have families and own business should have a little bit of an easier time, but even the option being offered to them, I don’t think it’s amnesty. If I had to go down to the police station and register with law enforcement and be fingerprinted and pay a penalty and wait six years in legal limbo before I was considered on the right side of the law, I would not consider that a blanket pardon. WATTENBERG: Tamar Jacoby, thank you very much for joining us in Part I of a very fascinating discussion which we are going to continue in part two. And thank you for joining us on Think Tank. Please remember to join us for a future episode with Tamar Jacoby where we will continue our discussion about Immigration and more. Remember to send us your comments via e-mail, we think it helps make our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Announcer: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4455 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite C-100, Washington, DC 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. 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