Episode 94- Rich and Laura Collins- Immigration
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur and the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.
Rich Helppie:
Welcome to the Common Bridge. This is of course, the fiercely nonpartisan podcast and YouTube TV channel, where we discuss the issues of the day, the opportunities of the moment, and very specifically, what kind of policy responses might be appropriate. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that is very much in the news and that’s about immigration and immigration policy, and there’s a lot more to immigration policy than just the brewing situation at the southern border. We have a very special guest with us today, Laura Collins. And why don’t we just introduce Laura. Laura, welcome to the Common Bridge.
Laura Collins:
Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Rich Helppie:
Our audience likes to know a little bit about the background of the folks that come on to our show. And if you don’t mind, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Where were some of your early days and where did you get your education and a little bit about your work history and maybe what you’re up to today?
Laura Collins:
So I’ll start with my title. I’m Director of the Economic Growth Initiative, The Bush Institute, SMU Economic
Growth Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute here in Dallas, Texas. I’m originally from rural Oklahoma. I got a business degree from the University of Oklahoma. I went to law school at the University of Texas at Austin, and then sort of fell into doing immigration policy. I practiced law for a few years, did some other work in politics and policy, worked at the Republican National Committee in the 2012 cycle and really sort of found my way to immigration policy. It’s the topic that I love the most. And it’s one that I’m very excited to work on. And at the Bush Institute, we really think that immigration is good for America. Americans benefit from it economically, benefit from it culturally. And so it’s through that lens that the work that I do really comes from and how do we take that and make it possible to have an immigration policy that really continues to benefit us in the future.
Rich Helppie:
That is the topic of keen interest. I know me, and I’m sure to our listeners and viewers, because despite decades of attempts and spirited rhetoric, we still have no clear immigration policy. So I’m sure today we’re going to have some education, perhaps some policy ideas, or frameworks. But let’s set a little context that ultimately absent a direct ancestral line from some of the native inhabitants of North America over 400 years ago, we’re all either immigrants or we’re descendants of immigrants. Either we came here for a purpose or our ancestors did. The United States is unique in that it’s about ideas and a set of values that brought people together versus an ancestral identity. And now it seems that we need to decide as a nation, based on our history and those values, what do we do about immigration policy going forward? They’ve changed over the centuries and the decades. So Laura, when was the last time the United States did a full review or a significant upgrade of immigration policies?
Laura Collins:
We really haven’t had an immigration policy change in a really big way since the mid 1960s. We’ve had some big reforms along the way that were just slices of the pie, if you will. So a lot of people probably remember the 1986 Reagan Amnesty Bill, where there was a lot of legalization for undocumented immigrants, there was a lot of enforcement done in the 1990s. We’ve been nibble around the edges here and there on different categories, but in general, really 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act passed under President Johnson, was really the last time that we took a wholesale look and changed entirely how we think about immigration. And that was a response to what had happened in the 1920s, where we had imposed these quotas. We previously had a reasonably open border situation, very few qualifications to get in. And we, in the 1920s, there was this movement to impose these quotas. And so then if you weren’t from Western European nations, it was very difficult to migrate here, and we imposed these quotas and it took about 40 years to roll those back. And Congress worked on that constantly in that interim period. And what we really ended up with in 1965 was a new system that didn’t have quotas, but it did have these per country caps that said no more than 7% of the green cards issued in any one year can go to any particular country. And it shifted our system to one based on families. And so if you had a relative in the United States of a certain degree, we don’t let just any relative in, if you had a relative in the United States, you could be sponsored by that person to come to the United States and migrate. So that’s really the situation we still have today, one that’s overwhelmingly weighted towards family relationships. We do still have some green cards that are set aside for people based on the jobs that they have and the opportunities they have in the United States and the skills and education they bring. But unlike a lot of our similarly situated allies, other nations that have similar economies to ours, we really still bring in most people based on those family relationships.
Rich Helppie:
And the definition of family, of course, has changed dramatically during that time period, as well as the changes in the country. And I know recent presidents have offered immigration frameworks and to my non-expert eyes, they all seem to be basically the same, want to attract and retain those high value scientists and engineers and the like, all of them talk about a guest worker program so that if people come here to work seasonally, they can do so legally without having to put themselves at risk, and then return generally to Mexico or to Central America. There’s always some talk about border security, which I know is a highly inflammatory topic these days. And of course the controversial pathways to citizenship for those that are here but perhaps are here illegally, either overstaying a visa, or did they enter it on an H-1 visa and changed employers or perhaps they came into the country illegally in the first place. When you think back about the approaches of past presidents from Clinton, George W. Bush, President Obama, President Trump, and now President Biden, and even that gang of eight that came out of the Senate at one time, what are the main differences and what are the places people are in agreement that we need to think about in terms of immigration policy?
Laura Collins:
First I want to say that you can look at all of these different-some presidents proposed legislation and some didn’t, some just had frameworks. And you can look at all of these and you can, if you were to lay them side by side, you would find some pretty interesting differences in sort of the finer pieces of the policy. But in general, what we’ve seen a lot is that we have seen this push to increase immigration under most presidents. The Trump plan really didn’t have that. There wasn’t a push to increase legal immigration. There is a push for legalization, obviously there’s always a border security component. And what you find, I think, most of the public debate seems to be centered around this, how do you legalize the undocumented versus how much do you pay in border security? That’s really not where Congress ends up getting hung up. If you look at the Bush administration and what was put forth then, that really got hung up on worker visas. If you look at what happened with the gang of eight under the Obama administration, that really got hung up on future flows. And so that’s really a different question. It’s, how many people are we going to bring in every year? Where are they going to come from? Are we going to bring them based on their jobs or their family relationships? Are they going to be here on temporary worker visas, or are they going to get green cards with the idea that they’ll stay permanently? Because the rest of that sort of gets worked out in the details. There does seem to be this agreement about how much border security we need in exchange for these votes on legalization. It’s just that that vote on future flows is really, really tough for Congress to make. And I think that’s really because you’re picking winners and losers. You’re deciding what the future of the country looks like. I think that’s a great opportunity. I think that’s something Congress needs to embrace. But it’s a really tough vote for a lot of people because I don’t think it’s a very comfortable vote to take when you make a decision that’s going to have impact for generations. And we can even see what that looks like based on what the INA looked like in 1965, that really did kick off this wave of Asian immigration. I don’t think that was ever the intent, but when you had a situation before where Asian immigration, particularly from places like Japan, was basically zero, we hardly let anybody in-when the rules of that changed and then people could come legally and then they could start bringing family members, that really just changed the dynamics so much. And that’s when you started to see this wave of Asian immigration that we just didn’t have before. So they are fully cognizant that if they make a vote on future flows, if they make a decision to change how we structure our green card system, how we structure our temporary worker visa system, that they’re really going to make a fundamental difference in what the future of America looks like. And that is a scary proposition.
Rich Helppie:
And I do recall under President George W. Bush, his proposal for granting citizenship, there were requirements, learn English, pay a fee, etcetera. The right wing of the Republican party attacked that as amnesty during the midterms, they found that was a hot button issue. And the labor unions supporting the Democrats joined forces with that right wing to try to keep this less expensive labor out of the country. And so the issue has just continued to fester. I’ve looked into it a little bit into places like Canada and New Zealand, and you just can’t go to New Zealand. You have to prove that you’re not going to be a burden on the country and that you are going to be able to contribute.
Laura Collins:
If you’re going to come here on a green card and you’re being sponsored, someone has to certify that they’re going to make sure that you’re not going to be a burden. And if you are here on a green card, you don’t qualify for any federal entitlement benefits for a full five years. If you’re undocumented, if you came here and either overstayed a visa or you crossed our border, you don’t qualify for basically anything. States can vary, there are certain state-based programs that a state may may issue to you. You might qualify for emergency Medicaid because an emergency room’s not going to turn you away, but you can’t sign up for Medicaid, you can’t sign up for snap food benefits, you can’t sign up for Medicare, you don’t get social security. And this is when they estimate about 50-75% of the undocumented actually do pay income taxes in addition to the other taxes that they pay. If you’re renting an apartment you’re going to pay property taxes, you’re going to pay sales taxes, et cetera. But for those income taxes they’re paying into the system, they don’t get any of those benefits [inaudible] is just gone completely. So those are people who are supporting themselves in the best way that they can, and without the benefits the rest of us have. So that sort of test is built into our system for the people who are here legally, and then for the people who aren’t, it’s there because there’s no other choice.
Rich Helppie:
We didn’t talk about this beforehand, but it occurred to me as I was getting ready to chat with you this morning, that the H-1 visas that, particularly, technology companies are in favor of, that that is capped, is my understanding. And that there is some pressure now to increase that cap, to allow highly skilled computer technicians and scientists, engineers and the like, into the country to work here. Is that right? Am I getting that right?
Laura Collins:
H-1B visas, which are the temporary worker visas for highly skilled people, so think anything from a computer programmer to university professor or a doctor, just people with what we consider high skills and high education levels, those are capped. And that’s a fixed cap. And so many applications come in every year that there a lottery system that comes around April 1st of every year, employers submit these applications. They hope that they get in, and then if they don’t, that’s it, they have to reapply next year if they can’t find the labor they need here. And those are visas that, it’s interesting, it’s one of the few visas that we have where you can actually use that to transition to a green card. If your employer wants to keep you on and sponsor you for an employment based green card, they can, and still we’ll keep renewing that visa every year. And so you come up in the green card line. What we’ve found is there are so few green cards available in those categories that the people who are getting those H-1B visas and that are then getting in line for green cards sometimes have wait times so long that they will die before they come up in line for a green card. So we’ve got a system that, in one sense, works, in that we know who’s coming in, we generally can meet some of the needs of our economy. We’ve got some shortages, particularly in some categories, but it’s just gummed up in such a way that, it dis-incentivizes people to even want to be here. We know that if you’re a highly skilled worker, highly educated and you want to come here, it’s just extraordinarily difficult. There just aren’t enough green cards available. And there aren’t enough H-1B slots available as well.
Rich Helppie:
As a person that wrote a fair bit of computer code I know that I worked alongside many people that were in on H-1B visa’s, quite talented and they were able to come into the country and the employer was able to pay them less than they were paying Americans. A lot of people from the UK and some from India and such, and it always occurred to me, why couldn’t we be doing more about education and training citizens for those jobs to have those skills, but that’s probably a broader topic.
Laura Collins:
I think we can talk about that. And I think one of the things that’s interesting about this is you do hear from people who have personal anecdotes about wages being lower, but there’s-in the system built in-these wage floors because you do have to-if you’re an employer, who’s trying to get an H-1B worker, you have to certify with the Department of Labor what the wages are going to be, and they have to be comparable. So it’s an interesting kind of push and pull, what the law has built in and then also what a lot of people’s lived experiences on that. And when you get into this idea of like, why can’t we just train more computer programmers in the US versus bringing them in, it’s twofold, one is sort of the long-term prospect of what we do with our labor force. And you can train more computer programmers and hope that in 20 years when they graduate with those degrees, these jobs are going to be there for them. Or you can import that labor to fill the need temporarily and fill the need in the immediate future, or you can outsource that job overseas, or automate it. And so there’s those four pillars really of how this works and how you fill the needs in your labor force. And so you have to sort of run all of them. The education one is toughest because it’s not just that it’s the long-term. You also have to predict what the jobs of the future are going to look like. How do you make sure you’re educating people in such a way that when they graduate with degrees, they’re going to have some useful set of skills for the jobs that they’re going to have when they graduate. And that’s where immigration really fits that bill is that we can take people who already have those degrees and skills and insert them right now. And then we focus on educating people to have flexibility for the jobs of the future.
Rich Helppie:
Well that’s why we need to have more base level education. Because, when I tell my children, and now my grandchildren, is that the industries that you work in probably haven’t been invented yet, and the jobs therefore haven’t been invented. So you have to have a really sound base education with mathematics and physics and hard sciences as well as the ability to read and write, and you need a secondary language and such. But before I get off too far into the weeds, President Biden introduced some legislation last week in both the House and the Senate. My understanding is that they are smaller and more targeted, kind of a piece by piece approach versus a comprehensive bill. Are they much different than what other presidents have put forward, and in how so?
Laura Collins:
I think there’s two things here. There’s a couple of bills that are moving in what some people call piecemeal or incremental reform. And they’re things that passed in the last Congress, in the House. So it’s a bill about Dreamers and TPS holders and how to legalize them. There’s a bill about farm workforce modernization. So what do you do about the undocumented farm workers and how do you ensure that there is an agricultural labor force of the future? And then you’ve got this US Citizenship Act, which is the framework of what the Biden administration thinks is ideal immigration policy, and that’s their marker for what they think immigration should look like. And I will say the US Citizenship Act is probably a little bit narrower than what-as a comprehensive bill-than past presidents have put forward. You’ve seen probably a lot of Republicans already come out and say, it’s too thin on border security, because what it does is instead of focusing resources on physical barriers, it says, what do we need in terms of smart border? What do we need to do in terms of working with our neighbors cooperatively in law enforcement and security, so that we can work in country in Central America to process people who need asylum, or work with Mexico to stop any of the potential public safety threats that are coming through. And so it does a few things that are a little different in terms of future flows. It touches them a little bit differently than some of the past proposals do. It doesn’t really talk about temporary workers as much. It doesn’t really take on a lot of reforms in that respect. And the path to citizenship that’s in it is shorter than in some of the past bills. But in general, you see similar frameworks and that they’re still thinking about what do you do in the immediate, for the people who are already here? What do you do about Dreamers? The people who were brought here as children who are undocumented. We typically don’t hold children accountable for the crimes of their parents, so how do you address them? And then it does have these other security components. It doesn’t have the exact same look as past administrations, but that’s for Congress to work out. If this bill goes to committee markup, even floor amendments, that’s where you really going to see the negotiations take place and what this bill is now isn’t necessarily what it’s going to end up being if it happens to get to final passage.
Rich Helppie:
I hope that we can get more definitive discussion about the differences in the bills. And you mentioned agriculture and temporary agricultural workers. We just had a tragedy, not far from where I am. Some 28 people jammed into a single vehicle designed for like eight people, with 13 people killed instantly. We need those agricultural workers to come in. They shouldn’t have to put their lives in danger to do that. They should be processed through a regular border crossing with a temporary work visa that’s good for them to come in and do their work, and then return home. To me, it’s just an abject dereliction of duty that our elected officials can’t figure something that basic out, period.
Laura Collins:
I think the thing that’s hard about this as is, and you mentioned, these people who unfortunately lost their lives crossing the border, and some of them may have ended up working in agriculture. That is a place where we know a lot of people who are undocumented end up. The H2A program for temporary agricultural workers works pretty well. Where it doesn’t really work is that it’s just inadequate to meet the needs of these employers. And so what you end up having are-that visa ties to the employer, not to the worker. So you can’t, for example, if you are a Mexican or Central American agricultural worker, just to obtain that visa on your own, and then come in and try to find work, picking vegetables or fruits, you can’t do that. The farm has to go seek you out and recruit you. So that creates a disconnect, because if you know you have that skill and that’s the work that you want to do, unless you have the ability to get to the place where there’s the recruitment, you’re not going to really have that ability. We know that a lot of our agricultural visas don’t go to places like Central America, where there are people who desperately need work, who would love to come in legally on a temporary visa and do that sort of work. And so in some ways it works. We know that people do come in legally on it. We know that they leave on time. In some ways it doesn’t, because it doesn’t really necessarily match up the people who need the visas to the work. What you’re seeing with that accident, the border-it’s what happens when you don’t have enough legal channels for people to migrate, whether that’s temporary visas, whether that’s processing asylum seekers at ports of entry, whether that’s green cards, at all skill levels we know most of our green cards on employment basis are for people with high education levels, instead of people with less than a bachelor’s degree. How do you fix that system to make sure that people who want to come here and work can do so legally? You need to incentivize people to do the right thing, and you need to incentivize people to use the legal channels. But if those legal channels don’t exist, you’re just kind of constantly having this push and pull, where people really, really need to leave where they are, because there’s not enough work or they’re in danger. And people here need workers or their family members are here and they want people who they left back home to join them. And how do you make sure to match up those things with the legal system that actually works? Because if you had one, you wouldn’t be cramming that many people in the vehicle trying to evade law enforcement.
Rich Helppie:
We’ve heard about the cartels that they’ll move anything across the border, whether it be a …
Laura Collins:
Masters of supply chain, yeah.
Rich Helppie:
I’ve been told, I don’t know that it’s true, but that there are tunnels that go under the border from a warehouse on the Mexican side of the border that comes up in a warehouse on the US side. Is that true, first of all, do those kinds of things really exist?
Laura Collins:
I don’t know about the warehouses. They definitely find tunnels that go under walls and fencing. The wall doesn’t exist across the entire border so there are routes that people will take on foot. Those are extremely dangerous. One of the things we know is that where we’ve put up the border fencing and the walls is that there are places where it’s just really difficult to do. And so it pushes people into these more and more remote, more dangerous routes. And we’ve all seen the videos, I think, on cable news, of people getting in a raft and floating across the Rio Grande. And I think that if you had a system where people didn’t feel like they had to try to evade it, you wouldn’t even see that happening. You might still see cartels trying to run drugs through various means because that’s the line of business for them, but they wouldn’t need to smuggle people to make any money because there wouldn’t be any business there. People wouldn’t feel the need to pay them. And on the drugs, it’s interesting because we do know that there are those tunnels, but cartels, with the harder drugs, the fentanyls and the heroins, those are drugs that are small enough that they can try to run them under a pallet of vegetables. So we know those are things that come through ports of entry, most likely. And so our screening process really catches a lot of that, but if they even get one shipment in, they consider that victory. So that’s one of those elements of border security that’s a little bit overlooked because we know we catch drugs at ports of entry, how do we make sure our technology is up to date enough that we’re everything that goes through instead of letting a few things through every once in a while.
Rich Helppie:
While we’re talking about border security, we have a number of federal agencies: Department of Homeland Security, we have Customs and Border Patrol, CBP, we have Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. There’s probably others in there. What’s the role of these various agencies? You’ll hear somebody portraying them as heroic defenders and then you’ve got other parts on the political spectrum saying, well, we need to do away with this, for whatever reason. Is there a primer on what is the role of those agencies? And if I’m leaving anyone important out, maybe educate us on that.
Laura Collins:
It’s acronym soup, government acronym soup. So, Department of Homeland Security should be viewed as the parent agency of these, right there on top of everything. And then what you have is Customs and Border Protection are the people who process people and goods at ports of entry. So if you travel internationally, you encounter these people when you come back in, they’re examining your passport. They examine the visas of any foreign travelers and they examine all the goods that come through. Border Patrol, those are the law enforcement officers on foot, along the border. And they are the ones who-they intercept anyone crossing illegally. They should be viewed as the people who are really protecting between ports of entry, to a large extent that’s their job. And then ICE, that’s interior enforcement. So that is, I think, harder to define. ICE are the people who, if they catch someone as undocumented in the interior of the United States-so away from the border, maybe there was a workplace raid and they found undocumented workers-ICE is the law enforcement agency that handles anything related to immigration in the interior. It’s not always people who are undocumented, there are people here who are here legally who violate the terms of their visas or their green cards. They will handle that as well.
Rich Helppie:
So ICE is the group that these sanctuary cities and sanctuary states want to ban and ban their police departments from cooperating with and so forth, is that right?
Laura Collins:
That’s really a complicated topic. So the way this works is that if you are a local law enforcement agency and you pick up somebody who has violated their immigration status, or is here undocumented or illegally, then ICE can issue a detainer and can ask you to hold that individual based on their immigration status past the time that you would ordinarily hold them in local city jail or county jail, or state jail. ICE can ask you to hold them.
Rich Helppie:
They wouldn’t be detained just for the immigration violation, it’s they did something. They were being apprehended.
Laura Collins:
It would be something as small as, we pulled you over for speeding and we checked and we ran, we’ve noticed that you don’t have legal status here, and we can jail you for that. And ICE can do that. So that’s where that comes in. ICE is saying, well, you need to hold these people. And some local municipalities say, we’re not going to honor those ICE detainers for a certain group of people. It’s not for everybody. If you had someone who committed a murder, inevitably they would be held because they’re are huge threat to public safety. So there’s this debate some cities have where they say, well, what about people who just were jaywalking and got a ticket? Are they really threats to public safety? And what do we do to make sure that we have a relationship with that community so that if they know something untoward is going on with a member of their community, they feel comfortable coming to police and telling that you need to pick up this person. And so that’s just a really nuanced debate that I think gets lost in the political rhetoric, because individual law enforcement agencies, particularly at the state and county level, have to make that determination. How do we best serve our population? And they’re the ones who are having to go into those neighborhoods and talk to people. And if they don’t feel like they’re getting the right cooperation because of the role that Immigration Enforcement plays, that’s going to create a tension there. In addition, there a cost involved. If you are a county jail and you’re holding someone and ICE is not going to come and get them for three weeks, you’re paying for that person to be in jail there. And so there is this question of like, does ICE reimburse you? How does that process work? Is there something that you’re paying out that your taxpayers are paying for? And so it’s just a lot more complicated issue than just, oh, we don’t like ICE. There’s a lot more factors at play there. A lot of them that feel kind of bureaucratic and boring, but they’re there.
Rich Helppie:
That is a comprehensive piece of education that I frankly didn’t have and hopefully that our listeners and viewers are going to appreciate it as much as I am. As you’re talking through those scenarios, I’m thinking, well, gosh, if we have a path to citizenship for the, I think it’s 11 million people that are here, seems to make sense, then they’re documented. And if we have a guest worker program, that’s great. And then we’ve got the various visa programs that we start targeting. This is a solvable problem if we have the political will to do it. It’s always this talk about illegal versus legal immigration. And you have some people in some parts of the political spectrum saying, well, there’s no such thing as illegal immigration, like there should be no borders. So if you go by our laws and you say, if you’re not here legally, therefore you are here illegally, how many of them are people that overstayed their visa, versus cross the border illegally and stayed, versus they were brought in as a minor? Do we have a good handle on that some way?
Laura Collins:
That’s difficult obviously, because if you’re not here legally, you probably don’t want to be counted. And so there are some good estimates out there. Pew Research really does probably the best work on counting this population. Migration Policy Institute also does some really good work. We know that it’s around 11 million. We know that’s down from the peak it was in, I think, 2007 where there were probably about 12 million. We know that about a third of those are Dreamers- people who were brought here as children. And then about 60% are people who overstayed a visa and have just been here. They came in on a tourist visa or on a work visa, something happened and maybe they couldn’t afford to renew the visa. Maybe they violated the terms of the visa. Something happened that that forced them to stay because going home for them seemed like not the right option. They had a job here, they put down roots here. Some of them have American citizen children. There’s just a variety of reasons why you might have overstayed a visa. And this idea of open borders is always so funny to me because we really very much regulate who comes into this country. We have really good security protocols in place, lots of public safety checks. We make sure that we vet everyone who comes in. It’s not an open migration system like you might see in the European Union where you basically have free migration. There are very few countries even that can travel here without visa of any sort, so we really do have this system in place that’s very much controlled migration instead of open migration. And I also find the debate on open borders to be so funny because I saw a politician last week talking about that being like a socialist agenda for Democrats. And I laughed because open borders is actually quite radically free markets because it goes to the idea of the free flow of labor and the free market economy and people being able to move to whatever jobs are available, and ebb and flow. And that’s not really what I consider-and I’m not an expert in this-but it’s not really what I consider to be a socialist agenda. And so it gets caught up in this political rhetoric in a way that I think mis-defines it and makes it be something that it just is not, we have very controlled migration in this country.
Rich Helppie:
You mentioned American children of people that might be here illegally. We heard a lot about anchor babies and birth tourism, particularly from China. I haven’t heard much about that lately. Is that a factor or is that more anecdotal on the fringes?
Laura Collins:
I think there’s something like less than 4 million babies born in the US for every year. It’s around 4 million for everyone who gives birth in the US, and birth tourism is somewhere around 10,000 or fewer. So it’s just a small percentage of the number of babies that are born in the US each year. And one of the things that I think is this debate always ends up being this wonky debate that turns on whether people really, really like birthright citizenship and think that you should preserve it, or you really, really despise it because it encourages some people to come here and give birth when they wouldn’t do that otherwise. And I think that it’s just such a small number of people and it’s not great, I don’t obviously want people to be incentivized to come here and do that, but we’re not getting flooded with these babies. And I think that it’s a small price to pay, to preserve birthright citizenship, because birthright citizenship, to me, it’s one of those things in immigration that’s just so important-sets us apart, really, from a lot of similarly situated nations. And that if you’re born here with few exceptions, you’re going to be an American citizen. And so you’re already going to be fully integrated in that way that you already belong. You don’t have to prove you belong. And that’s not true of other countries. I wouldn’t want at all to have to prove that I was an American, just like in other places in Europe, you have to prove how German you are. And that’s just not, to me, the American ethos. We have these ideals and it is up to us to make sure that we all are educated in them and understand them well. But to be able to point to someone who was born here and say, you are just like me, we’re equals, we are Americans and that is who we are, I think is so important.
Rich Helppie:
And again, you make a reference there to assimilation, and if I moved to Germany or France or any place and you’ve mentioned the European Union, I’d expect that I’d have to learn their language, their rules, their customs, and so forth versus no, no, no, you have to adjust to me because I’m now coming into your country and treat me like the place that I came from.
Let’s talk a little bit more about the southern border, because that’s really where the controversy is right now. And I’d like to put it right out in the open today. We have something called Enhanced Detention Centers for immigrant minors that are said to be overflowing. This seems remarkably like kids in cages that we had over the past four years. And then prior to that, the people that built it, those were just compassionate prisons or something. Do we have a border crisis today? Because I read people saying, yes we do. And I’ve read that people say, no, no, no, we don’t. How many are coming? Where are they coming from? Why are they coming? And what should we be doing about it? Because just seems like a really bad idea to grab people at the border and your choice-a detention center, or however you want to phrase it, where are we on the southern border?
Laura Collins:
It’s a complicated soup. So let’s take a few of these piece by piece. So first, kids in cages. It’s really very much political rhetoric. What it comes from is there was a point in time in the Obama administration, where it was about 2014, we had this surge of unaccompanied minors coming across from Central America to request asylum. And the way that detention works is that our immigration system, on the enforcement side, is built to apprehend, detain and remove single adult males because that, for so long, is who we always saw coming across. They were seeking work. They tried to evade law enforcement. And so we’d apprehend them, put them in what was frankly, very much jail-like, for 24 hours or so until we could process them and then turn around and remove them. When you have children coming across obviously a prison cell is not really the best place to hold a child. And I don’t think anyone would agree that a prison cell is the best place to hold a child. Same issue if you have families coming across, it’s just not ideal so we have a different process for them. But this kids in cages thing came because there were too many coming across to process them in a timely manner. So there were these influx facilities that the Obama administration built and they put up chain-link fencing to divide various places, to keep certain ages of kids away from other ages of kids, et cetera. And so it very much looks like kids in cages. Then you fast forward to the Trump administration, and the Trump administration also had this crisis of families and children coming across the border in large numbers. The difference being that when you look at what the Trump administration was doing in terms of detention, they were trying to use the detention as a deterrent. The Obama administration was using detention as just a piece of the process. And the Trump administration said, this is zero tolerance, every parent that comes across, every adult that comes across, is going to be criminally prosecuted. And so since they were transferred to Department of Justice custody, which is separate from DHS custody, then they had to put the kids somewhere. And so they separated those parents and children. Those children then went into the normal process for custody. So they were put in CBP custody for a time period before they’re transferred to what’s called Office of Refugee Resettlement. That is where-the Office of Refugee Resettlement then takes those children, tries to identify a sponsor in the country to find them. You’ll hear in this debate, a lot of talk about whether children were put in one form of detention or another for too long. Some of that is just out of the control of the agencies. They’re working as quickly as they can. You also have seen probably in the news where they talk about some of these children that were separated during the Trump administration and they still haven’t found a parent or sponsor. Some of that has to do with policy choices that were made and the agencies not being ready to take in these children and to trace who their parents are and to make sure they kept track of them. But on the whole, what you see with child detention and what you’re seeing today is that you have a couple of different things. You have to detain a child who comes across unaccompanied because they can’t fend for themselves and they can’t be expected to find the person in the United States that they were coming to find, so they’re put temporarily in the CBP facilities, they’re transferred to ORR, and that’s where you see the enhanced conversation, because these are licensed facilities that are supposed to be better for children. Obviously no one really wants children detained, but it’s the reality of the situation. You have to do that. So as it pertains to today and what’s happening at the border today, and I realize this is a very long answer, you have pushed factors and pull factors. Push factors are the things that force people to leave their homes or that compel them to leave. Pull factors are the things that compel them to come to the United States. The greatest pull factor in the United States is our economy. We have a lot of job opportunities every year, and we have a lot of economic freedom. We have a lot of other freedoms and those are very attractive things. That’s why we’re the number one destination of migrants worldwide almost every year. What we see right now though, is a lot of people from Central America and increasingly some more from Mexico as well, who are facing lots of poverty. They’re facing a pandemic induced recession, just like we are here. Very little economic opportunity. And then particularly for Central America, you also have this violence aspect where the street gangs really make people’s lives miserable. You can’t go out at night and walk around your neighborhood for fear that something bad is going to happen to you. And also they had to big hurricanes in the fall that really just wiped out a lot of livelihoods for people. So there’s not a lot of hope there. And so they’re trying to get here to request asylum, and asylum is where we bring people in to protect them from the persecution they face. Unfortunately, the people that we see there are a mix. They’re not just people who are fleeing persecution. Some of them really are just looking for a job. But as we talked about earlier, the temporary worker visa system doesn’t accommodate them. There are no green cards available for them. And if they have a family member in the US who can sponsor them, sometimes those wait times are 10 to 15 years because there are so many people trying to come in on those visas. So what you see at the border today is all those factors, plus pandemic, because last March, there was a public health guidance put out that closed the border completely. We weren’t taking any asylum seekers. We weren’t taking any legal immigrants also. So no one was allowed to come in. And frankly, those people weren’t really traveling because, just like us, they were locked down too. They were trying to make sure that they were staying away from everybody else and staying at home and protecting themselves and their families from this virus. Now that’s not happening anymore. People are starting to feel comfortable traveling. In November a court said, you can’t just turn these people back around if they’re minors. So the Trump administration and the Biden administration, both, even though that public health guidance is still in place, now you have to take minors. So some of those people are now just sending their children, knowing that the children can get in, some are still attempting to cross with their children. And if you have children of a certain age, Mexico has decided not to take those younger children.
Rich Helppie:
So they’re coming from Central America through Mexico, or like Guatemala, El Salvador?
Laura Collins:
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. And typically they walk. Sometimes they hitch a ride on a train. They might pay someone to drive them and to smuggle them across. And then like, I think, we’ve all seen the caravans and people think the caravans are really scary. The caravans are people’s answer to coyotes. They don’t want to pay a smuggler. So they band together, hundreds of people together to be safety in numbers. So you see this is like this horrific soup of factors, combined with pent up demand. People have been trying to come and we’ve been turning them around and saying, you can’t request asylum right now because of COVID. But now there’s this tiny opening where we can take minors. So they are very slowly putting those people through.
Rich Helppie:
This reminds me when we had such a problem with the drug cartels in Columbia, and that we went and addressed the issue in Colombia. This seems to me, like as a world leader, United States ought to think about what can we do to make Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras better.
Laura Collins:
This is really the role of foreign assistance. How do you use the foreign assistance [inaudible] in the United States and target them to have those countries help themselves? It’s not really what do we do to go in and fix their problems, it’s how do we guide them through the problems that they face and how do we help them enhance their own security? And some of that is not even just about the street things, it’s about basic government corruption. If you don’t feel like your government is going to be accountable to you, if you feel like they’re just going to go to the highest bidder, then you have no real trust. And we really see this in the lens of gender based violence in the Northern Triangle. We know lots of women and girls face gender based violence. We know that there are illegal systems.
Rich Helppie:
The Northern Triangle-that’s the Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala?
Laura Collins:
Yes. And those are our main sending countries right now to people from the border to the border. We know that women and girls in these countries face high levels of gender based violence. They’re targeted solely for being female. We know that there are illegal systems in place that ostensibly punish domestic abusers or people who are sexually violent, but that means that the legal system actually is working on behalf of those women. And what we know is that even though there are laws on the books to protect them, it doesn’t mean that those crimes are being prosecuted. And so that’s just one example, it’s not just gender based violence, it’s a range of things. If you don’t feel like your government is working on your behalf and you can’t trust institutions to protect you, what choice do you have? And that’s really what we see a lot of happening in those three countries. And that’s why a lot of people are leaving.
Rich Helppie:
Really appreciate the depth of that.
Laura Collins:
I’m sorry. I know that was long.
Rich Helppie:
No, Laura, this is fascinating. And this is what we’re trying to accomplish on the Common Bridge is that these kinds of discussions are not part of our news industry. I refuse to call it journalism because they want to boil everything down to sound bytes, villains, heroes, red team, blue teams, and so forth. And I don’t think we’re that divided as a country, but as long as we keep telling the Democrats, as long as you attack Republicans, you’ve got our support and the opposite-Republicans attacking Democrats. And then people picking their news media based on that, those sides, we’re never going to get out of this and get to good policy. And that’s what we’re trying to talk about here. And good policy is nuanced and it’s multifaceted.
Laura Collins:
I don’t expect your listeners to know all of those details. They don’t work in this every day, and then it’s not something they’re going to encounter if they don’t go seek it out and they have to know where to look. And those are things that are limiting. And so it’s just really important, I think, for people like me, who I eat, sleep and breathe this, to talk about this and to have an open mind as you talk about it, because people have serious legitimate questions. It’s scary when you see some of those images, but at the same time, if you don’t know who those people are and why they’re coming, and you don’t know why they’re crossing the border in the way they are, we’re not processing asylum seekers at ports of entry.
Rich Helppie:
This is why they need to turn off CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, et cetera, and put on the Common Bridge on YouTube TV and get some real reporting and get some news about policies, or they go out for a walk or drive into work and they can listen to the podcast. Because I think most people want that. Our numbers certainly reflect that. We’re a little tiny operation with a micro budget, yet we’ve reached hundreds of thousands of downloads. So I think there’s an appetite and we’re just not being served.
Laura, right before we go into the wrap up. One thing that we don’t talk a lot about is assimilation. I think people should be proud of their heritage and their cultures that they bring. I know I certainly am. We’re recording this on March 15th, tomorrow, March 16th is St. Urho’s Day. And I’m going to clearly be wearing my purple shirt and making sure people know about that, but are we still advocating assimilation? And that there was some talk, well, we don’t want to call it a melting pot anymore. Well, I kind of think we do. I think we’re more together in our humanity and our ideals. I’ve traveled this country extensively throughout my life. And I think we have compassionate, generous people from all ancestral backgrounds that you can imagine. And from all social strata that you can think of. And are we assimilating or are we being pushed away from the idea of e pluribus unum?
Laura Collins:
So a couple of facts and then I’ll give you a fun anecdote someone else told me, because I think it’s a really good descriptor. This word-assimilation-some people say integration, I use them interchangeably. They have slightly different meanings, but I think really where we are is somewhere in between, which is that most people who come to this country do adopt American ideals. They do adopt their language and they assimilate to our culture. But at the same time, they’re also integrating in that they’re influencing our culture as well. And we know that, we know this, we can see this with our own eyes, in terms of the food that we eat and the music that we listened to and the styles that we have. And we also know this because the data shows that immigrants today are assimilating just as fast as their predecessors. I often hear this as a criticism, well, my German ancestors, my Italian ancestors, my Irish ancestors came here and they learned the language and they worked hard and they did what they needed to do. And actually we see that here too today with people from all around the globe. Even if the first-generation immigrant, the person who came here, never fully masters English, their children overwhelmingly do. We know those parents think that it’s extremely important for their children to learn English. And those children end up being the sort of people who, they go to college at higher rates than native born Americans. They tend to be employed at higher rates than native born Americans. They’re really coming in and living the American dream. And we know by the time you get to the grandchild of that immigrant, you have basically full integration, full assimilation, that the data on those children is indistinguishable from data on any other native born American. They are as American as the rest of us. Both with all of the good things and all of our flaws as well. And the anecdote is, there’s a man named Hector Barreto, who was the Small Business Administration head under the Bush administration. And he is the child of immigrants. And he has a story he tells where he talks about how his dad described assimilation. And he said, you know, the carrots flavor the stew, but they don’t stop being carrots.
Rich Helppie:
I like that. That’s outstanding. Laura, this has been very educational and I do so much appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. What didn’t we cover that perhaps we should?
Laura Collins:
Oh my goodness. Well, there’s so much to cover. We always could obviously go more in depth on Dreamers. I think that one of the important things to remember on Dreamers is that they do have this temporary status called DACA. DACA is not good enough because any administration can come in and reverse it. So they need a permanent legislative solution. That’s something Congress really should prioritize.
Rich Helppie:
And the DACA stands for?
Laura Collins:
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. We didn’t probably talk enough about the role that different sorts of green cards play in our system and how we can really supercharge our economic growth by talking about how we bring in more people based on their skills and education. There’s always a lot of rich things to talk about with that.
Rich Helppie:
Is that like some countries use a point system, for example?
Laura Collins:
The point system, yeah.
Rich Helppie:
And how do those work? How do those points systems work?
Laura Collins:
I think it depends on which country is using it, but basically they assign you points based on things like your education, the type of job you could work that fills a need in that country. Your family relationships even can come into play there. And then based on that scale, whether you can come in or not. So Canada uses the point system.
And we didn’t talk about naturalization, which I think is so important. We have a lot of immigrants that come here legally every year and for them to be full participants in American society and to be fully assimilated and integrated with us, naturalization is just such an important step that I think they really ought to take. And that we, as members of the community and people in corporate America, we all have a role to play in how we support their journey to naturalization because it’s not cheap and it’s not short and it’s intentionally not easy. We want it to be difficult to become an American. We’ve certainly made it that way. And the rewards are so great to all of us. And so we should do our part to help encourage naturalization.
Rich Helppie:
I agree with you, I’d like to see everyone graduating from high school in America be required to pass the citizenship test because my perception is that there’s a better understanding of civics and the structure of our government with the naturalization process than there is in high schools these days.
Laura Collins:
Well, your listeners can go test themselves, the questions that are asked are online, you can go find them and see if you get the right answers. So it’s always out there as a way for you to see just how much you remember.
Rich Helppie:
We’ll put that link on RichardHelppie.com.
Laura Collins:
You should!
Rich Helppie:
And encourage our listeners and viewers to see how well you do, particularly if you’re under the age of 25, I want to know how you’re doing with that.
Laura Collins:
You’re calling out Gen Z.
Rich Helppie:
Yeah, I guess I am. Okay. I think I’ve reached the point life I can do that so.
Laura Collins:
Well, they’ll call you out for something else. So, I mean, it’s all fair game, right?
Rich Helppie:
Right. My brand promise is that there’s something for everyone to not like every episode, under the theory that if you want to go and get affirmation report and what media channels to tune to, so this is going to challenge people a little bit or rile them up, who knows. Any final thoughts on some of the best or worst policies we might want to be thinking about?
Laura Collins:
I feel like I could talk for another hour. So I’ll just say this, we have a lot of policies at the Bush Institute that we think are the direction that our immigration policy should go, particularly on border policy. You should check us out: BushCenter.org is our website. You can follow us on social media, we’re at the Bush Center. And we have a white paper series that we think is pretty accessible. So you don’t have to be an expert in this to understand the things we’re talking about. And if you haven’t heard, President Bush is now a painter and he has a book coming out in April, that is a collection of 43 portraits of America’s immigrants, including their stories. I’ve had the privilege of reading those stories, so far it really makes you appreciate what it means to be an American. And it boosts your patriotism and pride in your country. So encourage everyone to take a look at that too. And just I’ve had a great time today and I hope that your listeners enjoyed what I had to say and I’ll come back anytime.
Rich Helppie:
Laura, we would be delighted to have you come back and we were going to take you up on that. For today I just want to, again, thank you for being so generous with your time, your expertise. This has been highly educational for me. I’m sure our listeners and viewers are going to enjoy this as well. So thank you very much for being on the Common Bridge. I think you’ve reflected this fiercely nonpartisan approach to issues of the day and opportunities of the moment to talk about policy and those policy don’t have a party affiliation or a political agenda, but it’s about what makes this country great. It’s doing the right thing at the right time for the benefit of future generations. So we’ve been with Laura Collins this morning. This is Rich Helppie signing off on the Common Bridge.
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