- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of Think Tank with Steve Adubato has been provided by The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

Rowan University.

Proudly serving New Jersey for 100 years.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Wells Fargo.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Here when you need us most.

Johnson & Johnson.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Newark Board of Education.

And by New Jersey Children’s Foundation.

Giving all Newark students the opportunity to achieve.

Promotional support provided by BestofNJ.com.

All New Jersey in one place.

And by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

[MOTIVATIONAL MUSIC] - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with an important conversation about immigration and related matters with our good friend Amy Torres, Executive Director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

Amy, great to see you again.

- Thank you so much, Steve, for having me.

- Website's up.

Tell everyone what the organization is all about.

- So, New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice is the state's largest immigration coalition.

We bring together over 55 different organizations from every corner of the state to fight for policies that empower and protect New Jersey's immigrants.

- Okay, here we go.

I read a whole, I'm one of the few people who still reads different newspapers every day.

Yes, I go online, I read as well.

One of the newspapers is the New York Post, virtually every day.

Okay, let's start with it.

Crime, New York City, the Migrant Crisis, another assault, a murder, it's out of control, Mayor Adams in New York, and Mayor Adams is, if you will, a proxy for every other urban mayor across the country even though they don't all see it the same way.

It's a crisis at the border.

Crime, hyperbole?

- Absolutely, you know, I think what we're seeing and what we've seen in cities like New York and all across the country are a few different things.

One is asylum and immigration policy is absolutely a federal issue, and we must squarely place blame with the Biden administration for not doing enough to solve long-term problems.

But what we're also seeing in cities is this manifestation of things that we know have been an issue for a long time.

A chronic lack of housing and transitional shelter, deep cuts to human and community services and higher thresholds for screening people for eligibility for basic services that allow them to integrate into society.

So are an influx of newcomers putting strains on city resources?

Maybe, but also we know that those resources have been chronically underfunded over time, and we're just seeing a new scapegoat that's easy to sort of beat up, right, because they're the newest to arrive and those with the least political voice.

- Along those lines, we're taping this program on the 16th of June, the graphic, excuse me, July, I apologize.

The graphic will come up.

It's a few days after the assassination attempt against President Trump.

Policy issues still matter.

President Trump, former President Trump may be in a position to become president again.

We don't know.

He has made it clear that his immigration policy will be dramatically different from what it is right now in the federal government.

Close the border, shut it off, turn off the spigot.

No more immigration until we figure out, I'm not sure what.

You say?

- So Steve, the border is effectively closed right now.

The executive order that the Biden administration put in place in June said that once crossings reach a certain threshold, the border is effectively closed.

So we do see right now, the very same policies that we were hearing in 2018, in 2019, proposals from the Trump administration are actually being implemented by the Biden administration right now.

The future proposals that former President Trump has been talking about on the campaign trail are really scary, right?

There's some really awful things that are being proposed, being proposed by right wing think tanks.

But the reality is is that right now detention numbers are higher than they've ever been.

Deportations and expulsions are continuing to grow, and the border is effectively closed.

And that has real repercussions for when we talk about all of the things that immigration hawks claim to care about, right?

They claim to care about trafficking and gang violence.

They claim to care about, you know, labor issues and having people smuggled in and out, right?

Shutting down the border only incentivizes those bad actors to prey upon the vulnerable families that are just trying to seek safety and refuge.

- But Amy, there are millions and millions of Americans, many folks in New Jersey who argue, and many of them come from immigrant families.

My family came from Italy back in the, actually my grandfather came here in 1919 from a small little province in Italy, Southern Italy, poor, had nothing, and that's why they came here.

But there are many of those same, the descendants of those immigrants and others who argue that was a different kind of immigration.

This is totally different.

This is outta control.

The crime is outta control.

Now you said it's hyperbole, it's, okay.

But the perception right now, Amy, and you know it better than I do 'cause you work in the field every day is that it's out of control, and we need to do something drastic.

Talk to those folks, please.

- Yes, so Steve, I love that you shared the year that your family came here, 1919.

Let's take a look, and.

- My grandfather, Luigi Cavello from Avellino in Italy, please.

- Yeah.

I mean, you know, when we're talking about that golden era of immigration that a lot of us in the popular consciousness imagine, you're absolutely correct.

It was a totally different type of immigration, not because of the reasons that people were fleeing, the same things, right?

Famine, political violence, you know, discrimination at home, war, all of these pressures that force people to leave, right?

Those things largely remain the same.

What is very different is our domestic immigration system.

You did not need to demonstrate high skilled eligibility just to be able to come to the United States.

You did not need to have a family member already here.

You did not need to demonstrate credible fear.

You did not need to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars just to start the application and screening process.

I fully agree that we should return to an era that people remember from the past, right?

That, well, my family came here the right way.

You know, even though they didn't speak English, they integrated and found a job right away.

When we're talking about the headlines that we're seeing coming out of major cities, those asylum seekers are forbidden from working.

They are not authorized to work.

That's very different than how things were.

- Hold on, Amy, are you arguing there are not the quote unquote open borders that many people, because you just described all the things you have to have in place to get here.

And then we're seeing video of people, children, often unaccompanied by parents who's coming across a body of water, who's climbing through whatever.

Open borders, not true?

- That's actually the situation that was the case in 1919, is that you only needed to pass a health screening.

You did not need to do anything except for pay for your passage, a ticket on a boat.

- And now you believe it's much harder.

- It's absolutely much more restrictive and much, much harder to be able to come to the United States legally.

And the reason that we're seeing a rise in unaccompanied minors is that a lot of these restrictions still don't apply to children.

And we see families making an impossible choice in these border communities in Mexico and other parts of Central America, making the impossible choice that at least my child will be able to go the right way.

Let me send them so they can try to have a chance, and I'll try to go another way, either by waiting or going through some other irregular means.

When we talk about concerns for children, and we talk about concerns about trafficking and crime, it's a result of the policies that we have today.

We are forcing people to make impossible choices about their safety, about criminality, about who they trust, who they pay, who preys upon them because of the restrictive policies that we have in place.

In 1919, the only barriers that we had at the southern border were to prevent cattle from crossing from one ranch to another.

And even at Ellis Island, once you passed a health screening, there was no other documentation needed.

And you often hear people repeat that, this too in their own oral histories about their families.

Oh, someone changed my name.

- That's exactly right.

- If you needed documentation, right, there's no reason that that should happen.

We're living in a very, very different era than even my parents' generation and my grandparents' generation.

Immigration has radically changed, and in many ways not for the better.

- Amy, let's make a commitment to each other.

We'll continue this very complex and important conversation.

Amy Torres, Executive Director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

We in agreement on this, ongoing conversation, Amy?

- Absolutely, and it has not gone away presidential cycle after presidential cycle.

Until we have comprehensive immigration reform, we can continue revisiting this conversation, Steve.

- See how Amy got the last word?

We'll continue the conversation.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

To watch more Think Tank with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- I'm now joined by my colleague, Jacqui Tricarico, our special correspondent, Jacqui, you we're out at the the 5K, the New Jersey Sharing Network, the organization committed to organ and tissue donation, their annual 5K.

You did a whole range of great interviews.

This is with Nancy Nusbaum, who is a double-eye coronary recipient.

Talk about Nancy and that interview.

- Yeah, we're often talking to the folks at the New Jersey Sharing Network 5K.

A lot of them received organs, but when we're talking about tissue donation, that impacts so many lives as well.

And Nancy was going blind, had a really horrible disease in both of her eyes and was going blind.

And she received one eye, new tissue, and then another eye, new tissue at two different times within the span of a year and a half to regain her eyesight.

And she gives us an in-depth look into that whole process for her and really great story that you're gonna hear next.

Let's check it out.

- Hi, I'm Jacqui Tricarico, on location at the New Jersey Sharing Networks 5K event here in New Providence, New Jersey, and I am so pleased to be joined by Nancy Nusbaum, who is a double-eye cornea recipient.

Both of your eyes, new corneas in both of them, that happened two different times.

We're gonna get into that a little bit.

But I wanna first go back to when you're 35-years-old, and you are diagnosed with congenital corneal disease.

Describe what that was, and what was happening in your life at that time that you knew something wasn't right?

- I actually didn't know something was right, it was congenital so I had it my whole life as a child.

And you don't know what you're not seeing if you don't know it's there.

(laughs) So, I started at The Seeing Eye, and was surrounded by the awareness of what vision was.

And I started working part-time, and I worked for an ophthalmologist.

- [Jacqui] Oh.

- And when he did my eye exam, he said, "You know you have corneal disease, don't you?"

And I said, "No, I don't."

(chuckles) Both eyes were involved, and I asked him what that meant.

And there was no treatment for it, you know, so we monitored it for years.

But he said, "Eventually you're going to need a transplant," which just seemed shocking to me, I didn't know about this.

- So you fast forward to 2016, 2017, that timeframe, and you know that it's time, that you need this transplant.

- Yes.

You know, the cells in the cornea were dying off.

- Were you losing sight at that time then?

- Yes, I was.

At times, if we were very glaring, if today were very bright, for instance, a lot of things would look like a white screen to me.

So, I was getting to the point where I wouldn't be able to drive, I had to be careful when I did go out, if it were very glaring.

If it were raining, it would be looking through a Coke bottle with rain on it.

- And so this would keep happening, and it would get worse and worse if you didn't receive this transplant?

- Yes, I mean, I would lose my vision.

- Completely.

So you then are put on the transplant list.

So, you get those, so, one eye was done in 2016, and the other in 2017.

So two different donors that were giving you the gift to be able to see again.

Talk about that process, at both times, of going through this transplant, and knowing that you were able to receive this gift from another person.

- It was really, truly a sacred journey for me.

You know, I've had other surgeries before, but this one was different.

You know, these two individuals left the world.

And in their darkest time, in their darkest moment, and a time of sorrow for the family, they were thinking about giving a gift, giving a sacred gift, a kind gift, doing something for someone else.

So, there's something about that that is very sacred, and I feel as if I'm looking through their lenses when I see the world, I feel these two individuals created this miracle for me, and for probably many other people who were recipients of other organs or tissue donation.

And as I look at the world, you know, with these two individuals, I'm like, maybe they never saw New York City, maybe they never saw this or that.

And when I look at the moon, when I look at the color blue, which I couldn't see with the particular corneal disease I had, I didn't understand blue.

(laughs) - Yeah.

- I didn't get it.

But to see a beautiful blue color, is just, it's breathtaking, you know?

- Were you able to learn about your donors, or any of that information given to you at this point?

- It was all anonymous.

I did write to the donors' families, because I wanted them to know about my awareness of, you know, I think every sense speaks its own language, and vision certainly has a huge vocabulary, and I wanted them to know that I really, really understood what this gift was, and I honored it.

And, you know, it was a reverent, sacred gift.

And, you know, I just feel like so many people here who've received gifts, who have given sacred gifts like that, it reminds like all of us of the awe and- - The humanity, just the humanity, and people that we're thinking about- - That we're all connected, yes.

- And we're all connected.

And you're honoring your donors today by being here at the 5K.

Talk about how important that is for you to be here, to celebrate them, and be with all the other people here that have gone through similar, but different journeys.

- Yes, it's just an honor and a privilege.

And, you know, I think about my donors every day.

I mean, every single day, when I wake up and look in the mirror, brush my teeth, and, you know, say hello to them.

And I'm sure everybody here has that same feeling, so to have us all come together, and feel that energetically, and feel that reverence for life, and for all life, it's just very powerful.

- The New Jersey Sharing Network, how important of a role has that played in your journey?

- Oh, wonderful.

I was always hoping that there was an organization like New Jersey Sharing Network, and I sort of came across them by chance at an outreach we were doing for The Seeing Eye, another nonprofit.

- Are you still working with The Seeing Eye too?

- I retired.

I retired.

- Okay.

(chuckles) - But we're still doing it, we have- - 35 years here now?

- 35 years, yes.

- Wow, that's amazing.

- Went by in a flash.

(chuckles) - Yeah.

(chuckles) That's great.

- But we still do outreach programs for them, and came across, it was an outreach program for the Sharing Network group, and it was just like a match made in heaven, it was just wonderful.

- Well, working at The Seeing Eye, before you learned of this disease that you had, and then things coming full-circle for you, it seems like you're really doing so much to honor your donors, and thank you for taking the time today to talk to us about them.

- Oh, thank you, Jacqui, it was an honor.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

To watch more Think Tank with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We're now joined by Amy Mansue, President and Chief Executive Officer of Inspira Health.

Good to see you, my friend.

- Same to you, Steve.

It's great to be back together.

- Absolutely.

We'll put up the website for Inspira Health.

For hospitals and more, describe it as the website goes up.

- Steve, I'm thrilled to tell you that I have the privilege and honor of working at Inspira Health, which is, I'm the CEO.

We are a billion-dollar health system located in the bottom of South Jersey.

And I will tell you that I really had thought I'd been to every part of New Jersey and really understood, but the nature of the challenges that are faced in rural New Jersey specifically because the density everywhere else is so great, they are really hard to imagine unless you're here.

So our service area contains, our primary service area is Gloucester, Salem, Cumberland, and parts of Atlantic and Camden County.

But the primary service area within Cumberland, and Salem, and Gloucester counties, that Cumberland, Salem Counties, those are two of the poorest counties in the state of New Jersey with the worst health outcomes.

And there are so much distance between them because there's so few people.

So in Salem County, you have roughly 60,000 people and census going down, and in Cumberland County, you have about 150,000 people.

And so when you think about the density that exists in Essex County as an example, where you sit, it really pales in comparison.

So the challenges that people in poverty face are much different.

And so I really have had, this is now almost my fourth year at Inspira Health.

We have doctors, the same things that you would have in most health systems, doctors, outpatient settings, our four hospitals you mentioned, as well as two satellite emergency departments.

And really trying to think about how we engage with the community to really address some of those fundamental challenges that are come from, you know, all the natural things you would think of a poverty, but that added the transportation issues and the tremendous gap in reference to being able to get to people and get them to care.

- I don't even like Amy calling it the post-COVID world.

We're taping this in the middle of July 2024.

It'll be seen a little bit later.

Biggest lessons, dare I ask, that you have learned as a healthcare leader in South Jersey at Inspira Health that inform and influence how you lead today from this pandemic, please.

- Yeah, Steve, I would say a couple of things.

First, the conversations I'm having with team members now about how we support their mental health, when I first started out in this business, would've been 12 people in an HR, in a human resources conference room.

But now it is so important to identify that there are so many nuanced challenges.

You're really, you know, talking to people that were have served in war, in essence.

It was a war that, you know, related to healthcare, but they went in every day not knowing whether or not they would expose themselves or their families.

And just the stress of that still remains.

I would also say the challenges of the people coming for service today are significantly greater.

They're still coming in sicker, and they're delaying care more.

And I, you know, part of that is just the post-pandemic people still trying to get in for service.

Part of that is just the challenges of having access to care in rural areas.

But another real part of that is that I think there is a distrust of the healthcare system, and so that is making people wanna wait longer to get care.

And so by the time they come in, they're much sicker than before.

And then I would add one last nuance.

People have no patience anymore.

The level of anger, and hostility, and violence that we see each day that our healthcare workers are experience is much greater than anything I could have imagined pre-COVID, to the point that we actually have an entire team of people, as do many of the health systems that focus on workplace violence prevention and really trying to identify just literally SWAT teams that come in to try and support our staff when we find ourselves in violent situations.

This is different than security.

This is actually preventive in trying to make sure that we are doing everything we can to create those safe environments for our staff.

And that, you know, ranges from de-escalation training to making sure we expanded our behavioral health services for all of the people in need.

I mean, those are the things that we're still struggling with even post-pandemic is just the tremendous needs of our own patients but also our own staff.

- Fascinating how healthcare workers went in the spring of 2020 from heroes to what Amy Mansue just described.

It's shocking, it's pathetic, it's sad, and it's a commentary in itself.

You and I had an offline conversation about nursing, the nursing shortage, the nursing challenges.

There's an initiative that you're engaged in at Inspira with one of our higher ed partners, Rowan University.

Describe what it is and what it has to do with expanding, if you will, the pipeline of nurses coming into the profession at an incredibly challenging time.

Please, Amy.

- You know, I would say a couple things.

First of all, I think every healthcare leader has an opportunity for us to help people fell in love with healthcare again.

The next generation of those people who are called to care, you know, I've talked about this before, it is a calling, you know, whether you're caring for children or the elderly, you come in every day trying to do good for other people.

And so I think part of it is really making sure that we are creating accessibility for that.

I mentioned the poverty that exists in the county, Cumberland County, where our large hospital is in Vineland.

The dropout rate from high school is one in five people, right?

So when we set up the things that you would think normally an employer would do, like you need a high school diploma, that's a barrier to entry.

And so when, as we're going through COVID, as we're looking for ways to try and get more people in, we had some conversations with stakeholders who said, "Look, you know, just take away the high school diploma, commit that you'll help them get their diploma, but then let's move forward."

Indeed, we partnered with the Rowan College of South Jersey, which is the community college in Cumberland County as well as in Gloucester County.

They share those two counties.

And we set up an investment that our board of trustees made and the county college structure to say, "Look, if our employees commit to enroll in the programs with you, we will give them tuition free."

And so that creates the opportunity, A, for us to get a population of people in to help them get their high school diploma and then give them a direct link into the county college system, which is linked already to the Rowan University.

And so through that process, we've had over 400 people participate in that program.

And there is a desire to learn, but they need help.

They need help financially, and they also need help from the support of having a group of learners around them, and in healthcare you certainly have that.

And I'm so proud every single day when I meet people who say, "You know, I started out as a medical assistant, and now I'm going on to get my nursing degree."

Or last week I got to spend some time with somebody who I had met when I was volunteering within the organization at our thrift store.

And she was the person that worked at the thrift store to help people navigate, okay, well, I need a bassinet, I need this, I need that.

Could you keep eyes for them?

And again, I'm talking about a rural part of the area in New Jersey.

So it's very personal.

Like, we make sure that we get those items for people and then set them aside so they can then buy them.

But she's now moved into her first job as a medical assistant in one of our primary care offices.

And she now has a vision about, you know, going to school and doing all these things that she couldn't have imagined.

And that's the exciting part.

Not only providing healthcare services, but giving people that launchpad, that entry to careers, to be able to really create that foundation to then be able to build on.

- Amy Mansue, a leader in the world of healthcare.

She's the President and Chief Executive Officer of Inspira Health down in South Jersey.

Cannot thank you enough, my friend.

We'll talk very soon again about a whole range of challenging and important healthcare issues.

That's Amy Mansue, I'm Steve Adubato.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

Funding has been provided by The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

Rowan University.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Wells Fargo.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Johnson & Johnson.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Newark Board of Education.

And by New Jersey Children’s Foundation.

Promotional support provided by BestofNJ.com.

And by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

- I'm Tim Sullivan, CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Since joining the NJEDA, I've been struck by the incredible assets and resources that New Jersey has to offer.

The NJEDA is working every day to grow New Jersey's economy in a way that maximizes the values of those assets to benefit every single New Jersey resident.

This includes more support for small businesses and a focus on reclaiming New Jersey's position as a leader in the innovation economy.

Visit njeda.com to learn more about how NJEDA is building a stronger and fairer New Jersey economy.