PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Saving Immigration Reform "

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Saving Immigration Reform

WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Immigration reform is perhaps the most dominant domestic issue on the political scene today. Few other topics demand such passion from all along the political spectrum.
President Bush’s plan for a guest worker program was crushed by an unusual coalition of political interests but everyone agrees that something must be done. Is compromise possible? Where do we go from here? To find out, THINK TANK is joined by Mark Krikorian, the executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies and a frequent contributor to National Review Magazine; and, by Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of 'Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants And What It Means To Be American.' The topic before the house, saving immigration reform, this week on THINK TANK.
[MUSIC]
WATTENBERG: Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian, welcome to THINK TANK. You’ve been on at least once before.
KRIKORIAN: And so have I.
WATTENBERG: And so have you, Mark. So, welcome back.
We just had in the spring and summer of 2007 a monumental and titanic legislative battle about President Bush’s immigration bill. Could each of you try to explain in relatively neutral terms, relatively briefly, what was in that bill that went down.
JACOBY: A guest temporary worker program, much tougher enforcement on the border and in the work place. A path to citizenship for the -- I believe there are 12 million of them -- illegal immigrants are already here. And --
WATTENBERG: [Inaudible] This is the so-called amnesty provision.
JACOBY: I don’t call it amnesty. I don’t think it was amnesty. [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
WATTENBERG: I said so-called.
JACOBY: Plus an overhaul of the way we give out permanent visas, so that it had less to do with families, still had to do with family, but less to do with family and more to do with your skills and your education and whether you’d be useful in the economy.
KRIKORIAN: And Tamar described that correctly. The only thing I would take issue obviously with is whether the enforcement measures really would have been tougher. They were nominally tougher.
JACOBY: They were much tougher.
KRIKORIAN: But those were the four elements of the bill. The important question and I think Tamar actually probably would agree with me here is why did it fall apart.
JACOBY: Part of the problem was that it was a compromise. In order to pass -- in order to build the kind of coalition we needed to pass, we needed to bring people as diverse as conservative Senator John Kyl of Arizona and liberal Senator -- Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts.
In order to get a bill supported by that wide a range of people it had to have a lot of compromises in it. It had to have a little something for everyone, but also something that everyone really hated.
And what that meant was that the support for it was kind of lukewarm. It’s hard to generate a lot of enthusiasm for a compromise. Meanwhile, people like Mark, people who really hated it were very intense and very strong.
So, we were kind of saying we sort of liked it, we sort of don’t like it, we’re not sure. And meanwhile people like Mark were saying it’s really bad for the country, defeat it.
But the most important thing to understand about what it was was that we need a certain flow of workers to keep our economy growing. But right now we give out many fewer visas than that need -- what we need to keep the economy growing.
WATTENBERG: Yeah, but how do you determine what the need is.
JACOBY: Well, I believe you determine it by looking at how the economy in the past 15 years -- about half of the new jobs created in this country were created because there were immigrants here to fill them, legal and illegal.
So, I look at the last 20 years and I say well, gee, supply and demand is generating about a million and a half --
WATTENBERG: Well, I mean --
JACOBY: Coming every year.
WATTENBERG: Suppose instead of a million and a half immigrants coming in, there were two and a half or half a million --
JACOBY: The point is --
WATTENBERG: People -- people create jobs. I mean they need shoemakers, they need carpet makers, they need picture hangers. They need automobiles, so, I mean you know -- India has more jobs than the United States. The United States has more jobs than Honduras. They are not absolute numbers, so --
JACOBY: But our economy has been humming at I think at a pretty good rate. We’ve had a lot of growth, we’ve [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER] had low employment --
WATTENBERG: And you think they -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: But the immigrant quotas were so low that they meant that about a third of the immigrants who came to fill those jobs came illegally. It was -- it’s as if we were making cars here and we needed to import the steel. But our quotas were too low, so a third of the steel was bootlegged. That’s the problem that comprehensive immigration reform was designed to fix.
WATTENBERG: Okay
KRIKORIAN: I got to say your question was right on target, because the fact is the economy can adjust to an immigration level that was half what we had over the past ten years or double what we had over the past ten years.
The question is what are the consequences for low skilled workers. What are the consequences for the long term competitiveness of the economy, what are the consequences for taxpayers.
So, see Tamar describes the economy as sort of a fixed system that needs to have a certain number of jobs. Say this number of jobs legally through the various mechanisms only this number of people can come so illegal immigration makes up the difference. In reality illegal immigration is something that’s generated by legal immigration.
And if we have a million and a half immigrants a years, legal and illegal, as we do roughly today, net increase -- net immigration of a million and a half -- those people will be incorporated into the economy. We have a very flexible economy [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER] The question is what are the consequences for taxpayers, for poor American workers, et cetera.
WATTENBERG: I want to ask you a question. You don’t want to call it amnesty, but you’re taking people who are illegal and making them legal. Call it a banana. Okay. We’ll call it the banana situation.
People like Mark make the case -- and I think with some merit, although I think I have a little curlicue on the -- that once you say you can come here illegally, through the banana provision and then become legal, it encourages the next group of immigrants to come here and seek their own banana.
JACOBY: The claim is that the legalization provisions of this bill were very tough. You had to wait 13 years. You had to pay probably up to eight thousand dollars in fines. You had to go home at some point to your home country and apply to come back in.
So, you didn’t just get a wave of the wand, it’s fine. There were fairly tough conditions. And the point is you combine that with tougher enforcement that would work in the future.
And the reason that I believe tougher enforcement would work is again we’d be -- we’d have realistic laws. It’s very hard to enforce unrealistic laws. Imagine sticking to a zero calorie diet, very hard to do. That’s what -- one of the reasons we’ve had problems enforcing immigration law.
Once you get your calorie, once you get your diet up there at a reasonable level, you can stick to it. We could have enforcement if we had reasonable quotas for immigrants coming in the future.
KRIKORIAN: A couple of points. First of all, the amnesty -- all of the provisions and hoops that Tamar was talking about were all for subsequent stages of the amnesty. The amnesty actually happened immediately. When you applied, you had to be given legal status, including a card, a right to work, Social Security number, by the end of the next business day, period.
So, the amnesty was immediate. Those people -- those -- that it was provisional legal status nominally. It was never going to be withdrawn. We have a whole history of temporary statuses that continue forever.
So, one of the things that alienated people even who would support some kind of legalization was that this was immediate legalization pretty much for everybody without any real standards. [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: How are you going to get people? You had to pay a big fine to [unintelligible] but, yes, people had to come forward and register with the government and get fingerprinted and then they were on the right side of the law as opposed to the wrong side of the law.
To get to be a citizen, you had to jump through all those hoops. To be here legally, you had to come forward, be fingerprinted and pay a thousand dollar fine. We’ve got to get them out of the shadows somehow. The point is it’s for our sake. This isn’t for them.
We have a problem in this country when you have a population the size of Pennsylvania living in the shadows. We don’t know their names. They’ve never been through a security check. We’ve got to get them out of the shadows some how. You can’t make them go through stages and get out of the shadows eventually. You’ve got to bring them out of the shadows. And then they can jump through hoops if they want to become citizens.
KRIKORIAN: And part of the thing is that the reason -- even people who disagree with me on the broader issue -- rejected this bill -- is because we wouldn’t know who they were. The security clearance would have been nominal, would have been cursory and they would have gotten the legal status by the end of the next business day.
This is why -- for instance, people like Charles Krauthammer even opposed this bill and he’s actually a supporter -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: Charles Krauthammer opposed it because --
KRIKORIAN: -- of generous legalization and high levels of immigration, so --
WATTENBERG: [unintelligible]
JACOBY: Again, you -- for --
WATTENBERG: Did Charles Krauthammer -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER] did Charles Krauthammer the bill. [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: Yeah, I believe Charles Krauthammer because the tide -- I mean there are a lot of people who used to be for comprehensive reform who opposed it this time around. But I think it was -- it was a political -- I’m sorry a political calculation.
KRIKORIAN: No, no. I mean that’s -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: I think they felt that this was a tougher legalization provision than last year. And --
WATTENBERG: May I make a point. We are all immigrants to use an old line. We have the most prosperous wealthy economy the world has ever seen. Every stick of evidence we have is that immigrants do assimilate.
If the Latino immigrants don’t speak English in the first generation, they do in the second generation. If they don’t in the second generation, they do in the third generation. So, what’s your problem?
KRIKORIAN: The problem overall -- and this isn’t -- this is getting away from specifically -- bill -- but the broader problem --
WATTENBERG: That’s what I want to talk about.
KRIKORIAN: -- with high levels of immigration is that mass immigration is incompatible with a modern society. It’s a 19th Century policy that worked then, because our society was different, not because the immigrants --
WATTENBERG: Excuse me --
KRIKORIAN: -- were all that different --
WATTENBERG: Mark, what is the evidence of that? Look, we took in a million immigrants a year at a time when we had 70 - 80 million people. Now, we’re taking in a million and a half -- we have 300 million people. What is the problem?
KRIKORIAN: The problem is that we have changed fundamentally, our society has changed in ways that make it qualitatively different from the past. The immigrants aren’t that different from 100 years ago. We are.
We now have an economy that’s a knowledge based, capital intensive service economy, not a manufacturing economy. We have a welfare state and a large government sector other than welfare in a way that didn’t exist 100 years ago.
We have rapid communications and transportation technology plus multiculturalism, ideology of multiculturalism that’s rooted in every institution, every day care center of our society, every church -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
WATTENBERG: Let’s give Tamar --
KRIKORIAN: -- my point is all of those things make immigration -- the context different -- not the immigrants themselves.
JACOBY: Yeah, I would argue that the way America has changed in the past 50 years makes immigration even more necessary. In 1960, half of all American men dropped out of high school and looked for unskilled work. Today, less than ten percent do.
But we still need people to do unskilled work along with the knowledge economy and more productive, more educated American workers that Mark’s describing -- we need people, we need a service sector to make it possible to do that.
The brain surgeon can go out to do brain surgery, because someone else is at home mowing his lawn or taking care of his house. So, we still need unskilled workers. We need skilled immigrants too. Immigrants grow the economy in a way that more than makes up for any public services they use. They do assimilate. So, you know, I think it’s good for the economy and brings a lot of other things too without many dire costs.
WATTENBERG: I couldn’t have said that better myself.
I mean I --
KRIKORIAN: The fact is -- economically immigration is not some kind of boon for the economy as a whole. The fact is the National Research Council has looked at it and even the President’s Council of Economic Advisers updated in a kind of half assed way their research from ten years ago and came to the same conclusion.
The economic effect, the economic benefit from immigration is relatively small and it comes from holding down the wages of low skilled workers.
JACOBY: That’s just not true.
KRIKORIAN: It’s a [Inaudible] benefit, number --
WATTENBERG: Give me a break.
KRIKORIAN: Number two, that is completely offset by the additional government expenses that immigrants incur --
JACOBY: [Inaudible]
KRIKORIAN: -- because immigrants are poor --
WATTENBERG: Mark --
KRIKORIAN: -- they have low levels of education. They can’t [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: That’s so not true.
KRIKORIAN: -- modern society.
JACOBY: Half of all the jobs -- half of all the jobs filled in the past decade and a half were made possible because there were immigrant bodies here to fill them. That’s -- economic growth is good for America --
KRIKORIAN: Economic growth --
JACOBY: Let me finish -- and let me finish -- and on the fiscal side the best -- it’s very hard to measure. The reason the National Academy of Sciences and the Council of Economic Advisers has trouble measuring it is how do you measure -- if you open a new restaurant -- because you have the best place to open the restaurant -- and that’s a new job for a chef and a new job for a lot of waiters and a new job for a construction company that builds it. A lot of new jobs.
How do you measure that economic growth and the affect of that economic growth -- how do you measure in the negative if you don’t have -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
KRIKORIAN: What Tamar is saying is that we have a desperate shortage -- is that -- it’s a vital resource to have dropouts -- high school dropouts --
JACOBY: It is actually.
KRIKORIAN: -- like oil -- and that we need more high school dropouts [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: That’s exactly right.
KRIKORIAN: -- than we generate. And my point is the whole history of economic progress is reducing the number of poor and uneducated people increasing the productivity of labor.
WATTENBERG: May I say something?
KRIKORIAN: Sure, sure.
WATTENBERG: This argument has been going on for -- since 1790 at least. All right. I mean Benjamin Franklin cursed the Germans who wouldn’t assimilate or the terrible thing and they didn’t want the Jews and they didn’t want the Irish and they didn’t want the Armenians in. They called them all kinds of terrible names.
If we had followed the counsel of people like yourself 150 years ago, we would be Australia or Canada. Okay. You would have a vast underpopulated country. You would not be a world power. You would not have the reserve currency. You would not have the universal language. You would not have scientific supremacy. You are of Armenian extraction?
KRIKORIAN: Hm-hm.
WATTENBERG: You think it was a mistake to take in Armenians?
KRIKORIAN: It was up to Americans at the time and when they changed the rules, it was up to them to change the rules. I’m glad my grandparents got in, but that doesn’t mean --
WATTENBERG: But you’re on the gang plank. You don’t want other people --
KRIKORIAN: That doesn’t mean that just because my grandparents got here -- doesn’t mean that I and you and Tamar are therefore prohibited from having any future opinions about what’s [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER] good for the United States.
JACOBY: [Inaudible] the economy now.
KRIKORIAN: Every country is a country of immigration. [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
WATTENBERG: Mark --
KRIKORIAN: What’s good for our children, not what was good for our grandparents.
WATTENBERG: Look, if I thought that you were not entitled to have an opinion you wouldn’t be on this program. Trust me. Okay. Can we establish that?
KRIKORIAN: Sure.
WATTENBERG: You are entitled to have an opinion. That’s why you’re here. And you are entitled to have an opinion -- and even your neutral moderator is entitled to have an opinion.
What I’m saying is Americans -- it’s always been a bugaboo to say oh my god the immigrants are coming, the immigrants are coming. You have this situation -- someone like Pat Buchanan and he is mindlessly angry at Mexicans and yet they are Roman Catholics, they have traditional values, they have family values, they are upwardly mobile.
Every poll that I have seen shows that the immigrant generation is more patriotic than America as a whole. The Defense Department has very good data on a lot of things including the number of Congressional Medal of Honors awarded to American military personnel categorized by ethnicity.
And the group that is number one by far are Mexican Americans. Okay. They have won more Congressional Medals of Honor per capita -- proportion wise than any other group in America. Is that bad?
KRIKORIAN: What does that tell us about tomorrow’s immigration. The fact is -- you want to look at research -- the research that sociologists have done -- looks at kids today, children of immigrant mothers -- either they came in as immigrants or were brought up here or were born overseas -- and the fact is that as they go through high school they identify less and less with America because of the multiculturalism --
JACOBY: That’s not true --
KRIKORIAN: -- that pervades our schools. Not because the immigrants are a problem -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: It’s not true. It’s not true.
KRIKORIAN: Because our schools are a problem, along with [Inaudible]
JACOBY: First generation identifies strongly with America. Second generation does go through a multicultural phase. People eventually get over it. Third generation feels strongly American. They are very patriotic. They do learn English, they are rising up. The evidence just doesn’t support [Inaudible] --
WATTENBERG: Mark --
JACOBY: -- assimilation.
WATTENBERG: -- there is a saying that I have heard that --
JACOBY: You call yourself an Armenian too. People say are you an Armenian American and you say yes [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER] and they say, yes, to Mexican American, but they also feel that they’re Americans. You’re right that you know --
KRIKORIAN: When my mom went to school --
WATTENBERG: Listen --
KRIKORIAN: -- my mom was the daughter of immigrants. She went to school, memorized the Gettysburg address, was socialized into a strong Americanization paradigm. What are kids learning in our schools --
WATTENBERG: I -- I --
KRIKORIAN: I have to go to a museum to get my kid a book about Paul Revere -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
JACOBY: That’s not a reason to tank the economy -- [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
WATTENBERG: Give Tamar a chance.
JACOBY: I say assimilation is happening. It’s not happening exactly the way it happened in the past. Yes, the institutions are missing. But people are nevertheless becoming Americans. And it’s -- the basic point is that we need them for a healthy vital economy. We live in a global marketplace that makes sense for us and they’re not having the cost that you’re describing of a Balkanized society. On the contrary, they are becoming American --
KRIKORIAN: So, the question -- you’re saying that we need them economically and it’s working okay in our society, it’s not Balkanizing.
JACOBY: Exactly.
KRIKORIAN: My point is if our society were Balkanizing would the economy trump that or not. And you’re saying --
JACOBY: No, no, no.
KRIKORIAN: -- yes, it would trump it.
JACOBY: If I thought that my nephew’s and niece’s future -- we were going to have -- Spanish is going to be the first language and our politics are going to look more like Mexico’s than they do America’s, I would also say forfeit the economic growth. But I don’t see us having to make that choice.
KRIKORIAN: And that’s a Pollyanna view, quite frankly.
JACOBY: I don’t think so. [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
KRIKORIAN: This is where we disagree.
WATTENBERG: What is a Pollyanna view?
KRIKORIAN: That assimilation is going to work out not just assimilation, but immigration overall is compatible with the way our society functions [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
The fact is there’s two kinds of assimilation, one is you learn English, learn to drive on the right side of the road.
JACOBY: The other is [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
WATTENBERG: Let’s make believe I’m the moderator. [Laughter] We’re going to talk one at a time, mostly me. [Laughter]
KRIKORIAN: It is your show.
WATTENBERG: Mark, the citizenship exam that you have to take for citizenship would not be passed by most Americans.
KRIKORIAN: So what, they inherited America. They don’t need to prove anything. We don’t. I mean now that’s a problem with our schools. I’m not saying that that’s not --
WATTENBERG: But we are saying -- now, just hold on a minute, listen to yourself talking would you for a moment.
KRIKORIAN: Okay.
WATTENBERG: We are establishing that newly naturalized immigrants know more about America and American history than do natives.
KRIKORIAN: Maybe, maybe not. I mean I -- I can stipulate that for the sake of argument. I’m happy to concede. I don’t know if that’s actually true.
WATTENBERG: And the other thing -- let me just give you one anecdotal piece of evidence. I know Latina mothers who tell their children -- and these are people who love Spanish the way most immigrant groups love their own language -- and they say to them, Spanish is the language of bus boys.
Now, what do they mean. They want their -- they understand in the marrow of their bones that if you want to succeed in this country where there are a 140 languages being -- in play -- you have to learn the common language.
KRIKORIAN: But there’s a question -- the difference here is what is the message our society is sending to those kids and what are their elites -- wait wait -- there’s two issues, two ways to look at the language. Is it a -- practically necessary to learn English. Is it a benefit in getting a job. There’s no question about that, everybody agrees. That’s a different issue from do you have a moral obligation to learn English because you’re a newcomer who needs to adapt your ways to the ways of the society [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
And that’s the message that we’re not sending and our elites -- [unintelligible] elites [SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER]
WATTENBERG: All right, all right.
JACOBY: There’s a moral obligation to learn the language.
KRIKORIAN: Sure, of course, absolutely.
JACOBY: The country has a moral obligation to be loyal to the --
WATTENBERG: Stop, stop for a moment. I mean if immigrants by every standard we know are more patriotic than Americans, isn’t that a moral commitment?
KRIKORIAN: I don’t buy that. I mean I’m not sure -- and I’m not saying that -- that immigrants are somehow bad because of that. But my point is you’re sort of stealing a base here. I don’t -- I’m not sure immigrants, number one, are more patriotic. Number one.
WATTENBERG: There’s pretty good data about that. KRIKORIAN: Number two, I’m not sure that we’re doing an effective job of Americanizing anybody, our own kids or immigrant kids. So, the question is is it healthy to take in new people from aboard who need Americanizing.
JACOBY: I would agree that we’re not enough -- job of it. I would agree kids don’t learn enough history. People don’t understand what it means to be an American. We could be doing a much better job of doing that, but I also think you’re right that immigrants are bringing new vitality to those questions.
Immigrant parents fall in love with America. They come to work and they stay because they love it here. And the kids grow up understanding what’s great about in a way that our kids take for granted.
KRIKORIAN: In other words, they fix us.
JACOBY: No, no, no. But I think they’re going to add an infusion of -- and help the rest of us come around to understanding what it means to be an American.
WATTENBERG: May I close out this very placid session by -- Mark I will give you 30 seconds, Tamar I will give you 30 seconds and then I will have four hours [Laughter]
KRIKORIAN: What we need to do from now on -- the question is now what? Now that the bill has failed. And what we need to see is a commitment from the executive branch -- from the President -- to enforce the laws that he has within his power to enforce now.
For instance, prohibiting or requiring federal contractors to use the verification system that now exists, to check whether hires are legal or not. That kind of thing -- the President has in his power to do -- he needs to do that. If he had been doing it for the past six years he actually would have gotten his amnesty, however much I wouldn’t have liked it.
He needs to start enforcing the law now so that at some point down the road, maybe in the Hillary Clinton administration, there will be enough public trust and confidence that the elite is committed to enforcing rules -- that maybe something like Tamar supports could pass -- much to my chagrin, but at least we would have had enforcement in the interim.
WATTENBERG: That’s 29 seconds.
JACOBY: The problem -- yes, of course we should have better enforcement of the law. Who disagrees with that. And the place to get control of immigration is with enforcement in the work place. That’s the most important to put the enforcement muscle.
The problem is going to be we’re again enforcing something like a zero calorie diet. We need immigrants and we need a continuing flow of immigrants, not just the illegal immigrants who are here now. We need about a half a million extra immigrants above what we have now to keep growing the economy.
I mean I work with employers in states -- that man who runs the Carls Juniors in Arizona was going to open 60 new restaurants next year. He’s not going to open them now, because he’s not going to get the workers.
People are moving -- agriculture is moving to Mexico. Contractors who can move their production to other countries are moving them because they’re not going to that life blood of workers that you need -- you can’t grow a business without new workers.
So, yes, we should have enforcement, but as we enforce, [a] it’s going to be hard to enforce, because it’s hard to enforce unrealistic law -- it’s like enforcing prohibition or a zero calorie diet. And as we -- to the degree we do have success, we’re literally going to be choking the economy.
So, you know, I think comprehensive immigration reform is urgent and I’m very -- I’m very disappointed by the failure, because I think it is going to be many years before we get around to doing it.
WATTENBERG: Okay. Tamar Jacoby, thank you very much. Mark Krikorian, thank you very much.
My final word is to apply the American as apple pie test. And the question is is it as American as apple pie to favor or immigration or to oppose immigration. And the answer is by my lights to favor it.
[Music]
Thank you both very much and thank you. Please send us your comments via email. We think it makes our program better. For THINK TANK I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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