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>> he had a lot of goals in life but those were then enhanced when he met and married mary todd. she also was very ambitious. she said she wanted to marry a man of good mind and hopes for a bright future and to marry a man who would be president. there was something about abraham lincoln that she saw the potential and encouraged it. mary helped to basically showcase what her husband had done and how far he had calm and kind of hinted at where they were headed stating to the world that abraham lincoln had made it and he was ready to move on. >> he next, alvaro vargas llosa discusses his look "global crossings" which looks at some of the reasons people migrate to foreign lands even in situations where they might risk their own lives. hosted by the cato institute in washington d.c., this is an hour and a half. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome everybody to the cato institute. i am the director here at cato. since the beginning of this year immigration has become a burning public policy issue in washington. for the first time in decades the united states is considering a major reform in the way that it deals with immigrants. the ensuing debate and the possibility of reform is welcome but the fact is politicians are arriving very late to this issue. and that is because in this country there has long been a wide gap between restrictive laws and the reality of immigration. there is a gap that reflects the economic and social fact that there are millions of americans and millions of immigrants from mexico and elsewhere who wish to work together in this country and engage in peaceful voluntary exchange but are not legally allowed to do so. and that inconsistency has produced a lot of the problems associated with illegal immigration. many serious problems and some imagined. the prospects of reform have also stimulated the debate about economic and cultural issues surrounding immigration and its impact and it's a debate that cuts across party lines and it's one that has generated a lot of of -- how would a possible legalization of millions of unauthorized immigrants and the creation of a guestworker program affect wages and jobs? what does the evidence say about the extent to which immigrants are assimilating into american culture in recent decades? are immigrants and net drain or contributors to the welfare state and did they mainly come here to work or to get state and if it's? for that matter the political impact of immigration is something that has been debated. what should we expect from increased legal immigration in that regard first is the status quo? these are legitimate questions that go to the heart of one's worldviews on such issues as in equality and fairness the proper role of the state in regulating business and labor, cultural and national identity issues, and fiscal policy just to name a few issues so it's no wonder the sudden interest on the part of republicans and democrats to address this issue has caused heated exchanges exaggerated claims come to and some amount of nastiness. that is why i am pleased today to be able to host a forum for a book that takes a balanced look at a wide range of issues that are being discussed today. the book comcast "global crossings" immigration, civilization and america by alvaro vargas llosa comes at a perfect moment and it puts immigration in historical context showing how so much of the debate today is not actually new in american politics and that we can be guided by a lot of american experience, long american experience. it's better to let the author talk to us about that. my good friend alvaro vargas llosa is the senior fellow at the center for global prosperity at the independent institute who publishes -- who has published this book. he has been a nationally syndicated columnist for the "washington post" writers group. he has been the author of numerous books including the che guevara risk and the guide to perfect latin american idiot which was a bestseller in the spanish edition in latin america. he is a big what has in his columns that appear throughout latin america every week and has contributed to leading newspapers in the united states. he has been a board member of the "miami herald" publishing company and an op-ed page editor and columnist for the "miami herald." i could go on and on that i would say one more thing. he has also been one of the great champions of liberty in latin america, very present in all of the most important places on the right side of the issue i believe in with this book i could say in the americas. please help me welcome alvaro vargas llosa. [applause] >> thank you very much ian for that wonderful and generous presentation and thank you to the cato institute for hosting this and alex for being so kind and helping put it together. we have been asked why did i write this book? why was i interested in this topic? and welcome to there are several reasons. perhaps one of them has to do with diet i guess identity problem. i have been called a spaniard in peru. i have then called a pejorative term for south american. i've been called a pakistani in london where i was based for a while and now i m. called spanish, liberian which means spaniard so i don't really know where i belong and who i am but i guess it's probably a good enough reason to explore this important issue today. so let me tell you a little bit about what i do in this book. what i do is i take on all the different myths that i have seen over the years that are really driving this discussion and this debate, including the current discussion in the senate and soon in the house as well. about immigration reform. i won't cover all of that but i will share with you a few and give you my perspective on them and i hope that this will help at least clarify some of the misinformation that is out there it's really quite striking. one first myths and all i am going to say i have heard many people say, people with all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of places. i didn't make any of this up. one argument basically says we are getting the wrong kinds of immigrants and we used to get the right kind of immigrants. i'm not anti-immigration. i'm just against this current type of them a grant that getting today. the answer to that is the united states always got the wrong kind of immigrants. that has always been the case. the variety of immigrants sources and types of immigration that this country has received in the last two centuries, two and half centuries is simply astounding. of course between 1830 in 1880 yes it was mostly northern europeans but between 1880 and 1920 it was all about southern europeans and eastern europeans in central europeans had nothing to do with northern europeans. they look different in the different cultures. they were the mexicans of yesteryear and of course after that you had an and even before that you had people from asia. you have the chinese with with the gold rush and the chinese in the early 20th century and yes you had spent -- hispanics and you had indians after 1965 because of the changes that evolved that triggered an unintended consequence so there has always been the wrong kind of immigrant in united dates. it's simply not true. another important myth says that the u.s. is getting a disproportionate number of immigrants. just this morning on a radio show i heard we are getting more than any other country in the world. they are all wanting to come here and they don't want to go to other countries. again, but this is very silly. about 3% of the world population is made up of first-generation immigrants and illegal immigrants constitute about one sixth of the immigrants that travel from one place to another every year. so the total number of immigrants every year is about 215 and the total number of illegal immigrants about lion. the u.s. gets in terms of just illegal immigrants one sixth of 1% of its population so clearly a much smaller proportion than any other country is getting. so again it's not sure that the u.s. is getting a disproportionate number of immigrants. this is a worldwide phenomenon and other countries are relatively getting more immigrants than the united states, undocumented immigrants into the united states. another myth says that the only motive behind immigration is poverty. why should we in the united states solve world poverty? we have enough poor of our own. let us take care of our own and let's not solve world poverty. that is not true. that's not the only motive behind migration and in fact the poorest of the poor almost never migrate from one country to another. they migrate within the borders of their own country. let's take europe. until the 1980s, early 1980s europe was a source of migration of outmigration i mean, people leaving europe and that was a wealthy and prosperous continent before they got into this mess which is a different story. germany, the richest among the rich and europe was exporting half a million people every year until the 1980s. so clearly the motivation for that was not poverty. south korea has a significant number of immigrants or immigrants to come to the united states. that is a rich country. bangladeshi women who are very poor, the poorest among the poor , by great even in asia which is the continent that has the greatest number of migrants every year. so i could go on and on and on. what are the motives? do they very? yes of course great economic conditions are part of the story but you have everything including depressed conditions at home politically institutionally and economically. family ties occupational preference adventure, all sorts of different reasons for migrating. historical ties have a lot to do with it as well. the u.s. has historically been entangled around the world in conflicts and all sorts of exchanges, sometimes friendly and sometimes not so friendly and that is created conditions for permanent migration. there has been a significant bit of immigration to the united states as we all know and that has to do with the involvement in the war at the end of the 19th century and also with the encouragement that the united states gave to filipinos to come to the united states to start including a special program set up after the second world war for filipino notices. all those were signals that the u.s. sent saying it's okay to come. we recognize we are bound together succumb to the united states. mexican migration, the origin of mexican migration it to the united states is not poor mexicans wanting a better life in the united states. it was u.s. business, needing to replace eastern europeans. first japanese japanese workers in an eastern european workers in the early 20th century so they went to mexico and asked for mexican workers and mexican worker started coming to the united states to work particularly in railroad construction. all these historical ties have a lot to do with it as well. another important myth is the fact that there has never been any hostility to immigration in the united states. we have always been a country of immigrants and we have always welcome -- welcomed immigrants. we have always valued people coming from oversees to contribute to the society and again that is not true. there has always been hostility towards immigration and of course it hasn't always taken place exactly in the same way. it's not been as intense but historically it has always been the case that there was significant hostility to immigrants. if you look at what happened in the gold rush, the chinese were the object of vilification at the time. they were frowned upon by all those who were taken native born americans who are taking part in the gold rush. the japanese at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century would office and and -- often undergo tremendous illegal restrictions. they have had to find all sorts of ways to get around the law. in the middle of the 19th century, the whole nativist movement was born with the famous know nothing party were very much hostile towards immigration and they had an impact on the government and generally the outlook of society towards immigration. so it has been the case and that is why we have seen throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century and evolving situation from the point of view of how the law address immigration. that has always been i guess an evolution towards more or a change towards more and more restriction. that reflected the mindset, the mindset that was relatively hostile. not everybody of course partook in this. not everybody was reflected in these attitudes. there has always been a force for pro-immigration opinion in the united states but what i'm trying to get at is this is not something necessarily new or very different. one thing that i think we need to understand and this is also part of the myth is that whenever there is a big disconnect between the law and reality you are going to get -- it happens with goods, it happens with services, it happens with things but it also happens with evil. you constantly hear this argument and of course i can see where they are coming from. we cannot as a country governed by the rule of law except people who violate the law. we are just not that the country. this is not something that is morally or legally accepted and yes on paper of course that's an extremely powerful argument. who can argue with that? however the problem is the law is simply not realistic, when the law does not take reality into account then you create conditions for a systematic violation of the law on a grand scale. when that happens usually something is wrong with the law. not necessarily with the nature of the people who are violating that law. it's simply the way it works. it works with all sorts of other contacts, social contacts that stem from the criminalization of things that should not be held as being criminal by the law. so the same sort of thing happens with immigrants which is why when people say there is a disproportionate number of criminals who are immigrants of course if you penalize immigrants you have just made the condition of an immigrant a conditional one. if you adjust for age there are no more criminals who are immigrant then who are native-born. it's about the same rate. there are all sorts of studies but yes you had a significant number of people in jail sometimes on the way to deportation particularly in the last few years who could have been considered criminal simply because it was criminal to be an immigrant. so, it's important to get this myth out-of-the-way if we are going to find a legal way to deal with what is a social problem having almost 12 million people operating in the shadows outside of of the law is a social problem. we just need to make sure that is addressed from the starting point of believing these people are somehow biologically criminal. these people are simply the result of the disconnect between the law and reality. another important myth has to do with culture. i heard this time and time again and i'm sure many of you have heard this. these people are culturally different. unlike the previous waves of immigrants who are culturally in tune with our values. these people are different and yet if you look at this in so many different ways you find exactly the same pattern. immigrants today are culturally in tune with us-born people, with u.s. society almost any way you look at it. if you look at religion for instance, in the last 20 years but talk about hispanics for a moment and immigrants in that period of time. 70% of them are catholic and about 23% are partisan. of the ones who call themselves catholic one fifth of them call themselves born-again which is by the way something you never hear in latin america. latin american people never describe themselves as born-again. they are describing themselves as protestants in the united states of this is clearly an effort to tell the united states that we are like you. we believe just like you. we pray just like you. if you look at family values which is something i don't think conservatives who are critical of immigration clearly understand, you will find that there is probably more inclination towards family values today among immigrants than among any other part of society. for instance, half of all households are made up of couples with children and only 13% of households are headed by a single parent against one third in the case of native-born americans. so again if we stand for values values -- family values and we want a society based on family values then this is surely a source of great comfort among immigrants. they are all about family values. if we can convince them of this which is a tough thing to do that they will say out of there having many -- too many children. i don't i that argument with a problem that the well for state is a problem with immigration. that has not been the case. the birthrate is going down and down just as it's going down and down across latin america. it's still a little bit higher among hispanic women in the united states but only 60%. just half a child more than native warren women and the trend is going down. in latin america there is this new discussion and until a few years ago of course there was a high birthrate. today it's going down in an incredible way and so those societies are beginning to face some of the issues that developed countries have been facing in terms of the rate of course contributors to the system of transfer to beneficiaries. so they are facing the same issues. no matter how you look at it, for they are culturally compatible. if you look at all those neighborhoods that they have helped regenerate and i mention a few in the book in south florida, in new york. a process called gender fixation. communities that were in a complete disaster and they have become very nice communities thanks to the efforts of hispanics particularly but that general democrats have put into this. that is a cultural side of perfect compatibility with the host nation. i will grant you this though. it is true that most culturalism has distorted things a bit and i think we would -- it would not be fair if we did not recognize that. in the early part of the 20th century there was something that used to be called americanization. friedrich hayek for instance one of our heroes of course praised americanization very much. he attributed to americanization the virtue of having values and ideas relating to the free society. and yes i think there is something to be said for americanization. there were some aspects they were that were kind of chauvinistic and i guess there were abuses but by and large it was a healthy thing. it was not so much government policy. it was just a general cultural attitudes across society that somehow created incentives for people who came to become familiar with the values of society and all of these things. it was a positive thing. that began to change in the 1960s of course when this whole new paradigm what we call multiculturalism today emerged. i don't go into a lot of detail because there's a whole chapter in the book and it's a fascinating discussion but i don't want to be sidetracked. just quickly i would say that essentially what happened was europe's decolonization after the second world war we began to look at values in a different way through relativism. we began to see values as an exchange and all values were equal. all place of looking at society and institutions were pretty much equal. that gave rise of course to a whole new way of analyzing and studying societies from the past and then from that we went on to think of minorities as collectivist entities that were somehow in need of special protection, special rights to correct an imbalance that was historicahistorica l in nature that was the legacy of past abuses. this in turn translated of course into all sorts of i guess social engineering based on ethnicity and we saw things like gerrymandering along ethnic lines and unequal and employment opportunities and positive discrimination in all sorts of things that gradually i think went beyond what was really compatible with a truly free society governed by the principle of the quality before the law. that was bound to generate a backlash at some point and of course it did but my argument is this. people who are to blame for multiculturalism are not immigrants. they are u.s. academics mostly and it was mostly something that emerged out of academia not just in in the united states but to be fair also in europe. so yeah there has been a distortion there and yes there things i myself was an immigrant here do not feel it all comfortable with but if we are going to fight multiculturalism the way to do it is not defied immigration. it's to fight the ideology behind multiculturalism. so from that and this is one way to prove that it's not immigrants that are to blame for this. i am constantly told i drove past such community and reading spanish newspapers. it used to be that way of course. it always was that way. german communities in the west what did they do? a printed german papers and they spoke german among themselves. that is what first-generation italians did and that is what nations did and sometimes they do that still. it's human nature. people want to feel they belong to something and they want to protect themselves for a little while but that doesn't stop her and sarah the process of assimilation. it's a three generation process. the first-generation make some progress in the second generation is bilingual but they speak english better than any other language we are talking about and by the third generation they don't even speak the native tongue as we say anymore. i see that among hispanics and it's really a fascinating process. that was case. that was the way it was for their times in the polls and the germans and it's always been that kind of dynamic. again just as in the past the second generation does better financially than the first-generation and until the assimilation is completed if you look at marriage beyond the community which is one way to look at this, we see the same pattern today as we saw in the past. i compared second-generation italians in the early part of the 20 century with mexican state. the rate of marriage was 17% today it's a little higher, almost 20%. by the third generation of marriage is very strong. so again very similar patterns of assimilating, assimilation. of course since you have a constant permanent inflow of first-generation hispanics it's only natural that you are going to see some pockets of i guess spanish speaking communities almost on a constant basis but that is not because they are not assimilating. it simply because -- so there is nothing to fear. they are assimilating and i think that is something that we need to embrace. so let's just go into the economy. again it's another important source of myth. i am always hearing this. we would like to have high-skilled immigrants but these low-skilled immigrants, why do we need these low-skilled immigrants? because the modern economy needs low-skilled immigrants. since the second world war we had all these imbalances that needed to be corrected through basically migration. that is why the germans signed treaties with the turks. they needed turkish workers and the spanish with the moroccans the french with the algerians and the united states with the mexicans. that's the way it works. even in a high-tech economy you certain repetitious mechanical jobs that will be part of it. somebody will have to fill those , take up those jobs and that's something that migration helps to do. do they hurt the economy? they do exactly the opposite. immigrants help enlarge the pie again help make the pie bigger. i went to one of the most prominent academic critics and even he recognizes illegal immigrants contribute $22 billion to the economy every year so we updated that data. it's a very conservative statistics and i think it's more than that but let's accept that for a moment. which we just updated his calculation and that would translate into about $36 billion today. you make that legal it probably would be increased by 2.5 times, three times almost 100 lean dollars a year and a per decade over a trillion dollars. that's a contribution to the economy by immigrants. how does the process works quite fair producers and they are consumers. when they come in at the low-end of the scale they help others move up the scale. yes they have a very tiny temporary effect on wages at the lower end. our calculaticalculati on 1.45% in others very little bit but it's a very small impact but that is offset by people who are moving up the scale and earning higher wages and also offset by the fact that immigrants help these labor-intensive industries be more productive and they help keep prices down. so as consumers everybody in society is benefiting from that. the effect is of course a very potent one, positive potent not to speak of high-skilled immigration. again how could that not be a huge contribution to the economy? one third of doctors in engineering technology sciences involve immigrants. immigrants. one fourth of nobel prize winners throughout the 20th century in the u.s. have been immigrants. immigrants made silicon valley. the silicon valley miracle between 95 and 2005 immigrants founded many companies and created half a billion jobs. there is -- it was always absurd that the rules, i hope they're going to change now but were such that the quota for h. one bbs as high-skilled visas with the exhausted on day one. as soon as it was open for applications they would be taken up because 65,000 until a few years ago because it was of greater demand. that was economic suicide on the part of united states. let's finish but touching very quickly on the issue of cost versus benefit. that's another huge myth the idea that immigrants cost a lot more than they contribute fiscally i mean. that is simply not true. there is one great study a couple of decades ago by the natural research counsel. they calculated not only the fiscal impact of legalizing immigrants now, they calculated what would happen for the next 50 years because of course as you know they are young so we would expect they would be working for the next 50 years and they calculated them at present value of those 50 years in terms of what they will put into the system or take out of the system. that concluded of course -- included children better in public school today that will come out and work for the next 50 years or you have to bring all of that into the equation. their calculation was a net cost a one-off cost present-day value of $5000 which is nothing if you weigh that against the contribution i just talked about to the economy. other studies beyond that even the net contribution without taking into account the contribution to the economy, just the fiscal impact is going to be positive in terms of generating more revenue than they are taken taken out in outlooks has written about this very forcefully. my message is basically this. we are in an age of globalization. we have one case for free trade. we can say this point that we have ideal free trade conditions across the world but we have won the intellectual case for free trade. no one speaks against free trade on an intellectual level. no one says i'm against free trade. they say i'm for free trade but and then they talk about the level playing field and all that. the intellects really won the case for free trade trade we have made the case for free immigration and it's simply not reasonable to expect that a world moving grassley towards free trade can continue to contemplate immigration and the way it is. trade in goods constitutes the equivalent of 45% of wealth gdp. about 20% of world savings are invested outside of the country where they originate and 3% of the population is first-generation immigrant. this imbalance will have to be corrected. the dynamics are pushing the world in that direction so you can either accept and embrace and channel that energy through legal channels or you can try and put barriers against it and you will be overwhelmed either because the negative effect of actually being able and managing to control this will be huge or because you will not be able to control it. by the time you accept that you realize you will have spent a lot of money and with all the side effects that come with it and trying to -- immigration is not a danger to the united states to its values to its economy to its standing in the world. it is exactly the opposite. it is i think one of the best ways to keep the united states a free country keep it up rospars country and to keep it as a model for the rest of the world. thank you very much. [applause] see thank you. our next speaker is alex. he worked at the competitive and enterprise institute on immigration issues. he has degrees in economics and economic history from george mason university. he has been an exemplary policy analyst at the cato is two and has been quite involved and very influential in the current debate on immigration. please help me welcome alex nowrasteh. [applause] >> thank you ian for that very nice introduction and thank you i'll there'll for coming talking about your fantastic book. i want to save part of the reason why free trade is accepted intellectually by so many people around the world today as opposed to 50 or 60 years ago is because of the hard work of alberto and other classical liberals around the world the united states in central and south america and everywhere around the world. that hard work i think is really paid off. we are able to do so much at the cato institute in part because people like myself are able to stand on the shoulders of intellects like alvaro and others who have forcefully argued the point for generations of thank you very much. now i want to go into some other details about this fantastic book "global crossings" some details that we weren't able to touch on in a limited amount of time that we have but one of the main issues that a lot of people raise when it comes to in the gration is they think national security. today is a different environment if you have global terrorism and we have al qaeda and issues like these and because of this we can't be as open to immigration as we were in the past because of all these issues. just like the other points made in this book that is no different from what it was 100 years ago. there was an intense terrorist campaign in the united states in the early 20th century carried out mainly by italian anarchists and communists who had different points blew up dozens and up to 100 bombs across united states targeting people like the attorney general of the united states a mitchell palmer and numerous public officials across the country at the time. people had a reaction at that point. they said we can't have this type of thing. this is a new experience. this was at a time when communists were marching across the world and having success in europe and eastern europe and the chaos in the soviet union. these people were seen as an extension of that and we needed to close their borders to block the sale. that is not different than what we hear today about islamic terrorism and other issues like that. but what is even more astonishing is how a lot of our immigration policy makes it easier for national security threats to exist, makes it easier for these problems to grow in a lot of cases increase the ability of the national security threats in these opponents of liberty across the world to more exploit their advantages by taking advantage of american immigration law. one modern example of this is in 2010 there were about a dozen some always arrested in mexico. there were rumors that they were aimed members of the al-shabaab militia which is an islamist terrorist militia based in somali. the mexican authorities in their incompetence release them early without any kind of records. there was a big for of a better word freak out in the american media. these guys are deftly coming here and coming to the united states. they're going to wreak havoc and as a result border patrol and these people were eventually apprehended or they faded away and nothing happened but the point is because american immigration enforcement because our immigration laws are so focused on keeping people out for economic reasons or for any other types of reasons a small amount of what they are pulled to do focus on legitimate threats. instead they are more concerned with asking how will an additional worker affect the wages for american tomato pickers? they're more concerned with how one additional worker will affect the labor market conditions or computer programmers in silicon valley. they are more concerned with where a high-skilled immigrants will take a conference call with her is at his home or whether that home is listed as a place of residence or as a place of work than they are about these legitimate threats that are out there. we are really concerned about this. if we think that we live in an age that is so dangerous internationally that immigration needs to be restricted and regulated okay if you believe that's true than you should argue for a total refocusing immigration away from keeping out willing workers and separating them and focus entirely on the small but real national security threats that exist. throughout history these threats have also been used to our disadvantage. think about the numerous hoops and hurdles american immigration enforcement but in the 1930s and early 1940s on scientist trying to flee europe and come to the united states to work and eventually were employed to work in a manhattan project to help win the war. there is enormous bureaucratic fear and keeping these people out because of national security. a lot of these people had ties ties to common is our alleged ties to communist. because of the fear of national security -- one of my favorite examples is there was a chinese rocket scientist. he died in 2009. he was involved with rocket research in united states in the 50s. because of the national security law that said that communist could not be employed or emigrates united states he was investigated by the fbi and they said there was enough circumstantial evidence that he had attended a communist rally 20 years before the end he was kicked out of united states and deported to communist china where he was the founder of international rocket and missile program. the entire rocket program in china is based on the internetting expertise of this immigrant to the united states who wanted to stay here and live and work but was forced back to china as a result of that. i am a libertarian and i don't leave china is an accidental threat to the united states anything like that but if you are worried about this about national security issues coming from other countries the last thing you want to do is to send talented foreigners who have come here to learn these issues back to their home countries. that's pretty much the last thing you want to do. now i think switching gears to culture and how really americans have taken a look at immigrants and treated them to the much the same throughout history. we have always been skeptical of them and compare them negatively to previous immigrants. it's a quote i thomas sowell and a recent article written on june 4 titled abstract immigrants where he writes the immigrants of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived here 100 years ago. i think he massively exaggerates the differences between immigrants today and back then. we heard a lot about these differences but what is also different or americans today. it's true multiculturalism has impacted american society to an extent and i think that's a bad ideology that we are also in a lot of ways more welcoming. americans today may say nasty things about immigrants today but let's not forget the largest mass lynching in american history's was in the 1890s in new orleans of italian immigrants by a mob of white americans that thought they had committed a crime and had gotten away with it. in in the 30s ahead matzo protestant americans going out and burning down churches catholic churches occupy by the irish burning down and destroying confidence raping the nuns inside and horrible things like this. the rhetoric today about immigration of americans who are opposed is nasty and it is gross but we don't have this level of cultural aversion violence to the extent that people are going out and doing this. americans are behaving much better in the face of immigration than they did back in the day. and i think that comes across as well. these worries about immigrants being different or totally exaggerated. the catholic example is a great one. immigrants today are majority catholic just like they weren't 100 years ago. they come from different countries in the world in different parts of the world. what is most remarkable about assimilation especially for mexican-americans and the descendents of mexican-americans is that so many of them came in illegally. they came to this country illegally and they lived for years oftentimes in the black market. the extent to which they and their children have assimilated truly in a lot of ways outpaces the tying immigrants who came legally 100 years ago who were able to live entirely within the legal market. what is truly remarkable and i think if immigration was allowed to be dashed to the extent that all had come legally they would see a better pace of assimilation. looking at it that way in realizing immigrants to come today are more un-american when they calm and they become americans faster despite having to live in the black market i think is a testament not just to the entrepreneurial and energetic spirit of immigrants today and how they want to become american but also a testament to how much american culture has influenced so many people throughout the world and how we we are still a beacon for millions of people who want to come here and want to become americans. i think this book really goes into fantastic detail about that process about the cultural process by which people become americans. it differentiated from a lot of other books out there that sociologists write about assimilation. it really describe the process. it creates a model for how it happens and it was the first time i'd read that third generation. your parents are born here and you look longingly back on that ethnic or religious identifier where your parents came from or your grandparegrandpare nts came from and that is a feature of success. that is a market success of becoming an american because because as merrick is we don't have an ethnic or racial identifier. the largest ethnic group in the united states is german. that's going to change in the near future. that is the largest group. we don't have any blood borders culture conception of being american. it's a value conception, it's a civic notion of being american and that is something that is virtually unique throughout the world and unique throughout history and what this book does is describe that in some of the best detail i have ever read anywhere in the literature and both sociology and economic academics and even in popular books made for a popular audience. for that notion i think it made me -- a steady immigration policy and sometimes i become skeptical of the way my government does things and i've become skeptical of the united states and its immigration policy but this really filled me with more enthusiasm and more hope for the future of this country and the ability to assimilate immigrants and to be a beacon than virtually any book i've read in my years of working on this topic so i highly recommend it to all of you. i couldn't recommend it more. it's a beautiful book and thank you very much for coming today. [applause] >> thank you alex. we have time for questions and if you have a question please raise your hand and wait for the microphone. identify yourself and your affiliation. so we will take the first question up here in the front, please. wait for the microphone please. >> hi. my name is stephen. i have no affiliation. i was kind of interested in this notion of low unskilled workers versus high-skilled workers as whether we want immigrants are high-skilled or low-skilled. it always seemed to me that human beings are a resource and therefore if lots of low-skilled employees is a resource because -- it doesn't mean that we don't need the high-skilled but this idea that there is only a set number of jobs for low-skilled -- look at all the people that came to new york city that were low-skilled at the turn-of-the-century area jobs were created. in other words i think there is a misconception that you look at an economy and you say well we only have this amount of need right now for low-skilled but i think the answer is if you bring more resources that is more low-skilled workers, businesses will take advantage of that low-skilled. we will produce goods that will take advantage of these low-skilled workers. even if that production doesn't constitute this it will come to exist because the incentive. what i am saying to you my question is isn't that another big misconception that you guys seemed to overlook and you always hear so many people say we only want high-skilled labor with immigration. >> thank you very much. i couldn't agree with you more. i look at it in a different way. one way to look at it is just look at it domestic league. much of this discussion would be better understood by people if they thought these issues in the domestic context. since the second world war the u.s. has added about 100 million people to the workforce if you count baby boomers in general and women in particular. if the argument is made against immigrants were true on the economic level that those 100 million people would have destroyed the u.s. economy it would have generated so much unemployment and that would be the number one issue in the united states on a permanent basis and that is not the case. in the 60 years there has never been long-term unemployment of any kind. there has been unemployment of course in times of recession but that have different causes. look at arizona for instance which is such a sensitive place for this debate. just before the bursting of the bubble i looked at unemployment rates in arizona. among the lowest in the country, 4% and is sometimes less than 4% and get 10% of the workforce was and ice and continues to be immigrant. so clearly it's not generating unemployment. it is generating growth because arizona is a wealthy state and it is helping make as i said the pie larger. that includes both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants. .. yet at the same time we had an constant inflow of immigrant. it wouldn't have been possible if immigrants were hurting that productive process. >> if i could -- yeah, if i could add one small thing to do that. i have been doing a series of debates for the last couple of times this week. i have another one on sunday. the issue is always brought up, and the analogy i like to use is if we have 100 high-skilled people in a room. 100 college grads and bring in 50 more. the economy gets bigger production increases. the rejoinder critics say you lower the average education level in the room by doing that. that really shows, i think, the danger of knowing a little bit of math and knowing not very much economics. an average of the terrible way to describe that. it's a example of the danny devito fallacy. the average height in the room will i did crease. -- decrease. nobody is actually any shorter. that's something that is pervasive. talking about public policy and the impact of immigration on the economy by using broad averages like this, really is probably one of the worst ways to do it and betray a total of lack of understanding how economics works. >> question right there. >> my name is steven. a wonderful, wholly convincing presentation. one aspect i'm wondering about the effect on the nation that immigrants leave from. are those nations any worse off? for example, it was said that when the 1848 revolution failed failed in germany. a lot of german liberals here and germany became more autocratic. today as much as we complaib in the building about economic regulation. a lot of immigrants see the united as a more fertile place for -- applying entrepreneurial skills. are countries that immigrants leave from worse off, say, in term of entrepreneurial skills? >> that's a great question. well, what -- if we look at -- forget about nation-states and borders for a moment. what are we talking about? we are talking about how people are able to create the most value. in other words, they choose their location according where they can create the most value and exchange the friewft our labor according to what we need and what we can offer. if you look at that way you'll realize people moving in or out is not going have a long-term effect of a negative kind in any way. europe was exporting people, again, until the 1980. the country were becoming more and more prosperous. they are a mess today for different reason. we had the same in latin america. people my grated to vens with a lay from countries such as peru on a consistent basis for half a century. it's a wealthier country than venezuela. look at it this way as well. chinese immigration in the united states has played a key role in the growing economic prosperity of china, they have not only of course been able to export stuff and import stuff to them. they invested in china response i think that borders and barriers are really art initial term of the impact on the economy. we all benefit from the constant circulation as people. the same is happening in europe. some of the eastern -- or central european countries have been -- in the last few years. it became legal to do so. and yet they have been becoming more and more prosperous. poland is more prosperous. it export the an incredible amount of people to spain. >> i have some small things to add. he's 100% right. about the german 1848ers. they left behind complained about the liberals leaving. americans who experienced and met them complained about the autocratic germans who are bringing their socialist notion of collectism. 1848 formed a core of what became the republican party in the antislavery wing. that's a little about dote about the feeling of immigrants destroying the core of america no matter where they're from. the issue you talk about, you know, does immigration an e leave the sending country worse off? that usually takes the frame of the brain drain. that's what people call it. they say the best and the brightest and the most energetic leave and what is left behind everybody else suffers. that's assumes a person in a country is a property of everybody else in that country. which is a terrible notion that no person who has any concept of individual freedom or liberal in the classic call sense interpretation could actually deal. what we actually see is when the opportunities to e mate, -- e grate. they go to school more. they acquire more skills in order to do better in the source -- and in a country where they want to go to. at love them end up staying. we see this in south africa, in nursing scoop. a lot of lot of people go there to try to emigrate to the utah. a lot stay behind. we see it in the philippines. the filipino nursing program. they have some of the highest percentage of nurses of any country in the world because there's a possibility to leave when they have it. as a result the rest of the pill fee knows -- filipinos gain from that. you're right it's a weird argument used by most i are restrictionist to say immigration is bad for people in poor countries when it's not true. >> i guess i would add, i mean, -- so it does the opposite. >> yes. >> george washington university. i'm one of the academics you speak of. and i, you know, i love the presentation. thank you. i'm a little bit uncomfortable with your romantic vision of assimilation and acceptance. because we know that some groups are more asimilarble than others. perhaps you tell us a little bit about how you define assimilation; right. because, you know, how many times have the third or fourth generation immigrant been asked where are you from? all right. what language do you speak. maybe you can talk about how you think about assimilation. assimilation is not only based on the desire for individual but also on the desire for the larger society to allow that person to assimilate. >> well, about the first part is are they asimilar plaiting -- assimilating, you know, immigrants assimilating today the way they did in the past? and the an is definitely yes. the research is very extensive. i looked in to this in a lot of detail. there's many ways to measure it. whether it's, you know, the use of english. or mingling with the native born population. marriage, whether it's entrepreneurship. that's another way to measure this. the idea that the lot of entrepreneurship that is home grown but these hispanics are bringing in notions, you know, to entrepreneurship. that's not true. the rate of self-employment among hispanics almost equal the rate for native born americans. almost 12%. and the number of companies that are founding every year is just amazing and astounding. what does happen is this, which is something alex touched upon in his comment in the book, which is fascinating. the first generation of course, is first generation. they are trying to find their way around and try to fit in. at the same time they have attachments back home. incidentally you should look, people ask me mexicans are tied to their home country. it didn't used to be the case. read some of the letters italian were sending back home in the 120th century. full of italian passion. expressing profound follow stall georgia and sending money back home as well. that's totally natural. the second generation moveses in the opposite destruction. they are 0 conscious of being seen by u.s. society as not really fitting in, as being somehow different they escape from their root. they reject the roots to an extent. i wouldn't -- that's not fair, you know, for everybody, but certainly there's big percentage of that. yet, by the third generation they feel so secure they go back to those roots but the a different way. a purely sentimental way they begin to -- simply because they know they are so secure and accepted by u.s. society that there's no risk in that. that's really how cinco de mayo was born. it was never a big deal in mexico. it's a big deal here. because it's a big deal here mexicans back home start thinking it's uncomfortable because mexico immigrants are more patriotic than we are. we have to assume it's a national holiday. now in mexico they are celebrating it. that was the result not of first generation immigrants. certainly not of second generation immigrants. this was third generation immigrant they thought of it about time to celebrate that. who celebrates cinco de mayo it's not just mexicos. it's americans just like irish and italian holiday. as alex said, the country is not based on the nation-state here is not based on flood. it's based open credo. it's not a nation-state it's a nation of nations. a state based on credo. i think the reality speaks to that. >> i think the cinco de mayo example is great. i can't think a more american holiday than the defeat of the french army. that's what it is. and, you know, to go in to some, you know, more. this is what he writes a chapter here about the phenomena. it's about the immigrants moving toward the main stream society and in the main stream society moves toward them. whey learned in the book everything i like to do on sundays comes from the germans. i mean, i like to go bowling. i like to go to the shooting range nap is something that germans did on sunday that was really un-american in the 1870. people were afraid of that because, you know, the old puritanical version of sunday was you sit at home and, you know, go to church. you sit at home, you read the bible, and basically don't do anything that is fun. and the germans were like, no, we're not going do that. what to do we do on sunday? go out and have picnic and have a good time. that's app example of american society and changing partly to the immigrant and their culture. it's pretty clear that the immigrants do most of the changing. >> we'll take question in the back. >> hi. i'm emily colins from the atlas networking. my question for you, it seems like there a couple of institutional thing in the government that may need to change in relation to immigrant such as the minimum wage or welfare. at love immigrants work under the minimum wage and illegal immigrants may take welfare or became legal might take more welfare. people argue it would be associate drain on society. i was wondering for you would speak on whether or not that has been discussed in the house or in the senate or your opinion on that. >> sure. the congressional budget office just came up with a report calculating what the impact in fiscal terms would be legalizing 12 million people for the next decade and beyond. they did two different calculations. you know, a -- i don't want to get too technical something called dynamic scoring. you calculate the effect on the economy will be. and you calculate what the fiscal impact of that will be. the other way of doing that is calculate the fiscal impact assume there no huge change in the economy. chevre way you look at it, the impact is beneficial. what they to is simply calculate what intake is going to be on the deficit and it's going to be a very positive impact in term of reducing the deficit. but as i said, there are many studies that very respectable studies that indicate that contribution is very positive. just thinking of one of the point. i mention the national research council. there's another one that was very significant at the time. jeffrey did a study of what happened between the 1970 and the 1990s. that's two-decade period. he came up with a figure i think very significant. the net contribution was $25 billion. but again, when you look at it, you always think that the effect of immigration on the economy goes beyond what they themselves produce and consume and they themselves pay and what they themselves take out of the system. the impact the whole of u.s. society. they make all of society more productive. the entire economy more productive. ultimately it's almost impossible calculate what the impact will be. we know it will be positive because if the economy becomes more product iand producing more goods and services. by definition you're going bring more revenue to the government. ultimately, if that were not the case, though, that's a great argument to get rid of the welfare state. i mean, immigrant were not to blame are not to blame for the fact that government spending has gone up by a factor of 50 in the last seize pry until the second world war they weren't entitled relief programs. we had welfare reform in the 1990s that impacted immigrants as well. now they are able to use that system only in a very limited way. >> there's very few things more dangerous about the welfare state than it changes the perception of being asset and good for society to liabilities. to viewing people entirely of cost and to look at this, you know, one government agency to look at that and say people who take from there are a net cost are terrible. we did research here at the cato institute. we hired a couple of professors, recently at george washington to do a study about how much welfare for poor immigrants use compared to poor native-born americans. that's the relevant comparison. you want apples to apple. poor people to poor people. what we found is poor americans use medicaid at the same rate as poor immigrant and took the same amount of immigrants the program would be 42% smaller. it would be a huge savings. for some people when they look at the immigrant of taking a dollar of welfare. the damage is magnified beyond all comprehension compared to an american citizens taking the same amount. now, you know, i favor getting rid of the welfare state for everybody. but if we can't do that,let build wall around it, at least, and try to improve the perception and try remove the perception that immigrants are takers. they make far, far more an contribute far more to society than the paltry amount they take in welfare. >> okay. a question in the front row. >> thank you. my name is -- [inaudible] i'm an economist. thank you very much for the presentation. especially for the -- i couldn't agree more. in spite of the overwheking economic and cultural of the benefit -- everywhere across the world. how is it it the anti-immigration arguments find a for the fertile soil. you look at the experience of other countries, i'm sure you have done in the book, but can we draw any lessons from the way the country say europe or canada the way they have dealt with the myth in order have an immigration policy which makes culture sense. second question there's one myth where i couldn't agree with you. you said that the myth of the immigrants have a lot of children. i think that the myth that cannot be refuted because they a lot of more children. it's one of the economic benefits that immigrants bring younger population and generation or so. they have more children, and bring in influx of younger people to the nation and to the economy. that's a plus. >> great points you make. first, answer ting has to do with fear. any community that is faced faced faced with an influx of newcomers will be afraid. it will rationize that fear with arguments of the kind we tend hear because you proved to them those arguments are not true. you prove they are myth. you throw at them the statistics and historical experience. and yet that fear remains. i think it has to do with fear. that's how stereo type were born. you know, at the time of the irish immigration, the idea was irishmen were drunk. that was a stereo type. all italians were mobster. there may have been one or two but not all italians were mobsters. not all catholicses were repressive. we embrace them because they are about religion and values. catholic were hated a few centuries ago. they saw him as european repressers so today we have the stereotype that his pans -- hispanics are different and worse. we begin to embrace indians because of contribution to silicon valley. they were also the object of stereo type. about children, it's definitely coming down. even in europe. there's no question. it's slightly higher that night native rate in europe it's about two children. here it's 60% higher than the native rate. but the tendency is coming down. that's also the case in latin america. and incidentally one more point about the previous question connected to this. the average age for immigrants is 27. the average age for americans is 42. so again, that's a -- welfare state is what we really care about. clearly that's a plus. that's more years of con fry biewtion to the system. and in term of taking money out of the system, of the tran for system, only 1.2% of immigrant over 65 against 12% for the u.s. population. so, again, if those arguments were real, then, you know, those fears should be dispelled by the evidence. i think there's fear at the heart of this. it's very difficult to dispel. >> about why the rest of civilization and society doesn't take up the well known argument and fact and economics. i mean, i wish that immigration was the only instance of that. , i mean, there are so many economic notions that have been known for quite a long time that are not taken up in the main stream society. intellectually, i think we won the debate about free trade. when you ask the common person, you know, do you think we should be able to import goods and social securities from china without any kind of government. it's no, it takes american job. of course there should be barrier. i think the notion goes beyond this to the conception that there is a fixed pie. i think people have this ingrained notion there's a fixed pie of wealth. a fixed pie of jobs, a fixed pie of x, y, z. having more people come to the country will decrease the amount available us. i think it's a wrong headed notion. it's something we have been fighting against every sphere of public policy. for a long period of time when it has to go economics. and we have a lot of work do with immigration especially but numerous other issues. >> we have time for one more question if there is one. we'll take right there. >> hi. my name is mike. i'm a retired foreign service office with the agency for national development. i was previously the officer in charge of central america. we looked at the lot of issues in central america. and basically i looked in your book and i was going through the idea that most of the poor people do -- maybe within central america. i read in your prolowing mostly poor central americans and mexicans as, you know, in effect the drug war going on. this is a key issue. we have disease in central america right now for coffee plants called coffee rust. it's going impact about 3 million workers in central america that work in that sector. there is talking about 40 to 50% loss of the sector and loss of their employment. if they can move north, i think they may. i'm not sure it's on anybody's radar screen. it you are right you won't move north. they'll basically change their area of location within central america. that will also have impact. i would like to get your perspective on what could happen. it happened in the past. that's why we have different type of migration from central america before inspect is pending and coming up. >> well, i mean, it's not inconceivable that a small percentage of them will try to move north and eventually come to the united -- united states but they indicate they will mostly my grate within the area. if that what happened in central america. even in mexico. it's something people don't talk about all that much. i know, the experience of my home country of peru very well. it's a country in the last fifty years has seen a huge amount of migration internally. so much so everything has been impacted. the story incidentally is no different than the united states. domestic immigration is four times larger than international immigration for the united states. so it's just a pattern that seems to be repeating itself everywhere. so i don't know exangtly what will happen with the people. if we can go by historical precedent, it's very likely that that will not have a huge impact in term of international migration. of course, it would probably have an specific domestically in term of the economy. that will take us to the whole issue of the central american economy, institution, drug war, and all of that. it's a different issue. >> yeah. a few hispanics in the research, they looked from 2002, 2010, the increase in origin of different countries of my grants. central america was 16.5%. it was off the charts compared to any other origin. the next was 9% for south america. mexican country of origin was like 2% increase. something is happening. ethan, you map it out here incredibly difficult to come. but people still coming. and from central america, they're really coming. >> it's because central america is not doing that well and mexico has been doing better the last few years. which is why i predicted that a few years from now, the debate in the u.s. will be where are we going to get immigrants from? the mexicans don't want to come anymore. mexico is growing in 4% a year. i think it that will go to 6% and enough to ash absorb the new work force. they will be comingless and less and probably replaced by central americas for awhile until they take out the reform they need and get rid of the drug war which is devastating the whole area, by the way. in which case we need find them. i don't know where. it's going to be an issue. it will be, believe me, it will be an issue. there being recorded. twenty years from now mexicans won't want to don't united states anymore. >> and, you know, it's interesting, since 2008 of lawful immigrants coming to the united states, asians have outnumbered the hispanics. now we use hispanic broadly. i'm an american, so i use it central and south americans. asians have outnumbered them in term of the lawful migration system. and the gulf is getting wider every and every year. asia is the new source going forward of immigrants to the united states. it's going the new historical dynamic. so i predict my kid, when they are adults. they will look back and say, alex, why were so many people upset about his cantic or mexican immigrant. it's absurd. these indians or, you know, these southeast asians. they are different. they are taking our jobs this time. that's when i'm going to hear, i think, in the future not only from my kids if i have done a poor job educating them but also people in society. >> it's fascinating and encouraging discussion. i hope our friends on capitol hill pay attention to the points made today and read out of the book on sale here at the discount for all of you interested. thank you all for coming. please, join me in thanking our great speakers today. [applause] >> a luncheon following upstairs. [inaudible conversations] is there a non-fiction author or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. following yesterday's deadly standoff in egypt between military forces and supporters of ousted president mohammed morsi. president obama delivered a statement today in martha's vineyard on the situation in egypt. condemning yesterday's violence that left more than 500 people dead. here is a little of what the president had to say. >> that's why we are so concerned about recent events. we appreciate the complexity of the situation. mohammed morsi was elected president in a democratic election, his government was not clues -- inclusive and did not respect all the views of all the egyptians. we know many egyptians, millions of egyptians, operators a majority of gippings were calling for a change in course. while we do not believe that force is the way to resolve political differences, after the military's intervention there remain a chance for reconciliation and ab opportunity to pursue a democratic path. instead we have seen a more dangerous path taken through arbitrary arrests, broad crack down on mr. morsi's associations, and supporters and wounded thousand more. the united states strongly condemns the steps that have been taken by egypt's interriment government and security forces. we deplore violence against civilians. woe support universal rights to human dignity. including the right to peaceful protest. we propose the pursuit of marshall law which denies the right to citizens under the principle that security trumps individual freedom or fight makes right. today the united states extends its condolences to those who were killed and those who were wounded. given the depth of our partnership with egypt, our national security interest in this pivotal part of the world and our belief that engagement can support a transition back through a democratically elected civilian government. we companied our deployment egypt and its people. while we want to sustain our relationship with egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being called in the streets. rights are being rolled back. as a result, this morning we notified the egyptian government we are canceling our annual military exercise. going forward i asked the national security teem assess the the implication of the actions taken by the interim government and further steps we may take if necessary with respect to the u.s.-egyptian relationship. let my say the egyptian people deserve better than what we have seen over the last several days. and the egyptian people, let me say the cycle of violence and escalation needs to stop. here is a lit of what the foreign minister had to say in regard to his country's response to events in the region. [inaudible] yesterday in egypt. we have ongoing demonstrations and -- [inaudible] in months. and -- [inaudible] or even the demonstrations have a level of violence. once again we look forward to -- [inaudible] and -- [inaudible] you can see more of that event and the president's full remarks prior in our video library at c-span.org. tomorrow the center for strategic will host the iraqi foreign minister in a discussion expected to focus on u.s. iraq relations as well as the developing situations in egypt and syria. that gets underway live at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. the next deepak and sanjay chopra. discussing their book "brotherhood: dharma, destiny, and the american dream." this is an hour and fifteen minutes. [applause] [applause] >> thank you very much. before we get started, i want to tell everybody a quick story. as much you know, we have you can only come here as a guest. we have the golden rule one time. today depack depack is going break his own record. it's at fourth time. we make an exemption for him. the amount of people come out and how great he is. and we were delighted to learn of the incredible bock that was coming out, and to see his other half, or as some people would say, your better half. [laughter] anyway, redelighted to have both of them here. deepak and tonight also sanjay are going to impress us with an incredible fascinating story. we're going do a 45 minute conversation followed by about fifteen minute of audience questions. and for those people are standing. there's about ten seats in the first two rows. please feel free to come to the first duorows as there are seats in the first two rows. we don't want you to stand. so tell us, what was it like growing in india? how did that play in to your future but different careers? >> so growing up in india was an absolutely enchanting experience. we had the most loving parents, we had uncles and aunts, amazing grandparents. each one of them was an amazing story teller. growing up, we participated in the ancient ritual. every few weeks an uncle would arrive, an aunt would stay with us. our grandmother lived with us for many years. and hearing stories from them was absolutely intoxicating. it was a vibrant colorful experience. i can't ever forget it. deepak, what role did growing up in india play on your future career? >> sanjay say, we grew up with stories. our mother told us stories. mostly from spiritual literature from the mythological literature, and it was many, many years later i realized that everyone's life here is a story, you know. there's a story with us standing on the streets 2,500 years ago and lot of traffic on the street. and it was crowded even 2,500 years ago. and waiting for the camels to, you know, clear the traffic and -- [inaudible] explain life to me. that points to the char yacht passing by at the moment. and we have three divisions. life is like that. the will have karma, memory, and desire. and this is we experience our thoughts. we tell the story. we lived the story. we call it life. we were fortunate, as he said, to live in a household of stories. then we became doctors, and we realized that every person that comes to see us comes to see us because they have a story. you know, that have the tradition we grew up. we got stories from our families but also our parents. and also from my father about his experiences with his patients who were his best teachers and we learned later that was the same for us as well. >> and three -- [inaudible] i'm going pass along the mike phone. i know, some people are able to hear the microphone. there's three more streets up front and i think more in the back. >> all the stories had a lesson. what that instilled in us was the core values of growing up in india. the principles that we now -- hopefully passed on to our own kids. and now to our grandchildren. >> and your father was an incredible individual, one of the most famous doctors in india. what do you think he provided you for both of your future journeys? >> i have a dhapt in the book called blindfold a day. and i -- it's a true story. we were started in saint columbus high cool. e were -- hindi with an irish accent. after the a match on sunday, i was reading reader's digest. i fell asleep and woke up 45 minutes later and i'm blind. i cannot see. i nudged deepak and he's next to me and i said i can't see. he raised his hand in front of me. as if he's going poke my eye. i didn't believe. then he knew official that i was blind. he started crying. he said i have one brother and he's gone blind. [laughter] and then we were staying with our -- suddenly. suddenly. we were staying with our fathers younger brother, and he took us to the military hospital. they had no idea what was going on. they were using the term hysterical blindness. i was a 12-year-old kid who was a great athlete, a good student, and there was no reason for me to fake it. finally they got ahold of my father who was 300 miles away on a military jeep in a field trip. this is the art of medicine. he said tell me everything that happened to sanjay in the last two months. he's been fine. he's been perfectly. tell me everything. did he have any injuries? any new medicine. sure enough i had a laceration from a cricket. a week later, and i received stitches. so he put -- any antibiotic. did he get a tetanus shot the answer was yes. he ain't biotic and a shot. he said what kind of tetanus shot. this was 1961. antitetanus zero. and the app was antitetanus zero. our father was a cardiologist a specialist in heart disease but ably brilliant and said to the doctor he's having a rare id owe -- idiosyncretic give him masses doses of steroids. so they did that, and after that i could see gray and finally see deepak. it was an amazing experience. that's when i decided to become a doctor like our father. i told this story to professors of ophthalmologist. they are bedazzled. they said oh my god. such a rare reaction in 1961. >> here is another story. and this is when he was? england. my father and my mother. we were staying with our uncles. i was six he was maybe close to three and a half. my father was at eden eden burr roy and passed his exam he became a member of the royal college of physicians. in those days know e-mail. we got a telegram from england that he passed his exams. and so my grandfather, his father, took us both out that evening to see a movie. i still remember the movie, i don't know if you do. -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> then we went to a carnival they took us out for dinner. then in the middle of the night, we were woken up to the wailing of women crying. my grandfather had died. he skyed of a heart attack that -- died of a heart attack that evening. the next day they took him to the cree -- the same uncle he's talking about. he used interesting remarks and said what is a man, what is human being one day taking the children out to see a movie and a carnival, the next day he comes back as a bunch of ashes. for a 6-year-old to see someone and disappeared completely. he started losing his skin. his skin started peeling like a snake. he had sores everywhere. and they took him to see lot of doctors. and nobody could make the diagnoses. until my father was in england. remember, it take ace while to get the information. he made a diagnose is from opening land. he said he's feeling vulnerable. so he's losing his skin. he's feeling insecure about what happened. and then he actually he was going stay there longer, but he didn't. he took a boat and two week later he arrived in bomb dosh bombay. his skin came back. in hindsight, i'm thinking, you know, i wondered about this. if it was the mind body connection. a long time ago and my obsession with the meaning of death. >> bril -- brilliant. you have a fascinating funny story. i was hoping you could share it with us and also the qerks of how that really helps start this lifelong bond between both of you. >> right. so those of you who are sitting in the front, if you have met deepak before will realize and appreciate he has a dimple in the chin. i call it douglas chin. and with great pride, i want to tell you that i'm responsible for that. [laughter] so i was about nine years of age, and deepak was 11. i was a very good shot with bow and arrow, one our uncles gave him a gift of a bb gun as a birth certificate day present. bsh birthday present. i took a can of cherry blossom shoe polish and knocking it. and deepak comes and stands next to me and said shoot. he said what are you saying? i have a gun. he said you never -- remember the story of will -- [inaudible] i'm your older brother. i'm telling you to shoot. so i was -- i shot and missed the can and it hit him in the chin. so he said you know what? we have to go home, mom is there, and our grandmother is there. stay us with, and he said, i'm going to say i tripped and there was a piece of barbed wire on the ground and it anybodied me. i said, deepak, that's a lie. he said listen, mommy has been telling the story of ancient epic spiritual test. in it there's the guard, the guard, and younger brother, and i am -- i'm the older brother and you're the younger. you have to listen to everything i say. barbed wire. so we go home, he's bleeding weab my mother comes out. she cleans and said what happened? so i said tripped. there was a piece of barbed wire. [laughter] and that night our father return, he would come home often at 9:00 in night seeing patients in the hospital, teaching. we would wait for him for dinner. we were sitting for dinner. enhe said what happened to deepak. i said he tripped on a barbed wire. two days later there's a lump here. my grandmotherred a demon and people come from all over india to see you, and you have not met the diagnoses in your own son. there's probably a piece of rue barbed wire stuck in there. go get him an x-ray. it's the summer holiday. off he goes in the morning for an x-ray. i'm facing ther have ran data. and every two minutes i go, mom, did they call from the hospital? she said, you know, you're worried about this. just as she said that. the phone rang. and my father was on the phone and said impress what we found? a little pellet. the surgeon is going extract it. that's why he's got that little dimple in the chin. [laughter] >> it seems the key lesson is the good chart. if he missed a little bit it wouldn't be here; right. and i wouldn't be here to tell you share the story with you. [laughter] >> and moving forward in time, what age did both of you arrive in the u.s.? and what was it a challenge or benefit arriving as two newly immigrants? >> i came two years before sanjay, at this time, there was vietnam war was coming -- before watergate. at love you won't remember that because you weren't born. there was a shortage of physicians in this country. we had to go outside india to take the exam to come here, because india had -- [inaudible] banned the exam if. further more if you passed the exam you couldn't create the country with more than $8 foreign exchange regulation. you know the story. we had an uncle in the navy who was england at this time. he lend or gave me a gift of $100. i had $108. which if you're from india is a very us a push awe pushes number. all of that. and we have do do something auspicious. i spent it at gambling. when arrived in new york, jfk, i had nothing but in those days no cell phone, you to make calls and put money. but has been told me you can make the collect call. so i made collect call to the hospital in new jersey. they were so desperate they sent a helicopter. there was a shortage of doctors at that time. i my first experience of the united states was riding over manhattan in a helicopter looking at the manhattan skyline this time. and totally being wonder struck. i said this is manhattan? i want to go disney land. [laughter] shortly thereafter we arrived. i was joined by the nurse who was in the emergency room. i could take a nap. i went to the dorm twenty minutes later she called many and said dr., chopra, we have an extraction. i have no idea what the word meant. i said you bet i'll be there. [laughter] and bounded down the stairs. she showed me to the room with the dead person. lots of machines, no people. in india you see only people and no machines there. and so i looked at the patient, i looked at her, and made my first diagnose is. i said he's dead. she said i told you. you had an excavation. if he's dead why do you need a doctor? and she looked at me and she said, pronounce him. and said this is a bizarre statement for me. your body, your soul is going leave the body to the lady otherwise known as md. i pronounce -- then i realized like everybody else in our profession. we have ritual listen to the heart, check the pupil, so we had learned english in india, with which is a little similar to british english, where the words are in torch. said to the nurse, may have a torch. [laughter] [laughter] and she was looking at me very strangely. she looked at the other nurse and said she wants a torch. the other nurse sideses me up-and-down and said maybe he wants to do a cremation. talk about culture shock. [laughter] six months later i was totally at home. >> what was your first experience? >> we came -- my wife is also a physician. we were classmates at the same medical school. a very competitive medical school. 10,000 people would sit for an entrance exam. after you go there and premed. they would windle it down to nineteen. have an interview. in the book i write i was first -- my wife was first. she's a pediatrician and brilliant. out of 10,000 people. i was also first. i was first on the waiting list. [laughter] think about it. that's 25 out of all of india. so we had deepak had already been in the states for two years. we heard stories and occasionally we could call him and talk open the long distance call. we decided to come to tbons first before going to new jersey, the same hospital. so we stayed with key deepak and his wife for several dais. we had less culture shock. for me one of the most interesting things that happened on day one of the internship. i had already decided i wanted to be a gastro entrolings. and the person giving the lengture was a world famous professor. located in new jersey. he's about to give the talk within and there's a medical student from rutgers. he's sit ising in the front row and got the feet propped up in the air. and that would have been sack religious in india. that was culture student. a student sitting and his shoes are facing the world famous professor. we would yes, sir, no , sir, good morning, sir. and he gives a brilliant talk. i'm mesmerized and talk notes. the medical student raises his hands and said i have a question. so the doctor said, sure. hoe asked the question and he gave a brilliant answer and the student got the quizzical look on the face and said i don't buy that. and i said, wow, what an amazing country. you can disagree with a professor we would never conceive or think about doing something like that. to me that was the first episode of culture shock. the other was we were told as interns that when you leave the hospital you're not on call. call the hospital operator, call the operator and tell them him or her you're leaving the hospital. that you're signed out to whoever is on call. so the second day of the internship, one of the other doctors happened also to be from india, said sanjay can i have a dime? i said sure. i give him a dime. i see him go to the pay phone and he's calling the new jersey bell operator. doctor, this is dr. rajiv. i'm leaving the hospital. then he hung up. [laughter] [laughter] >> absolutely brilliant. >> deepak, how did you manage to basically educate a population, help change conservative western medicine to an equally important but different way to address some of the same issues most important and single handedly create a field of mind, body, medicine. you are one of the greatest contributors. you came to the states in the 1970. grow in different direction. he goes to harvard and you didn't stop with the per sis tens. and basically change the belief of what medicine was viewed in the states. how? several factor in hindsight. i specialized i did end crinology. it's the study of here mono. then -- hormone. for a short while at the va hospital i was rotating under the dr. see more, who was the president of the end crin society at that time. he was a neuroend crinnologist. he was just like he said. we had brilliant mentor. he was absolutely brilliant and identifying hormones we didn't know too much about at that time. hormone in the hype thalamus like stimulating growth factor. i had a degree at the time -- colleague at her time. later on went 0 to become the chief of brain chemistry at -- [inaudible] she's now at georgetown university. she identified something called. tide -- [inaudible] he boss won the nobel prize for identifying neurochemical. one day candace said to me, these things that we're looking at, because there was a new technique. the dr. was a va physician and won the nobel prize for discovering the technique. all we did as fellows and residents keep measuring the chemicals. and one day she said to me, these are the molecules of emotion. so i don't know if it was a best seller called molecule of emotion. i wrote the forward to it. it was a huge book. nobody had used that term. it was a little bit of insight that whatever happened in the mind is registered in the brain. you can't have a mental event without a brain representation. our could you? after the brain is what made the event. the brain representation is in the form of electrochemical event. there's nothing that happens in the brain that is not registered in the body. these chemicals, neuro peptides. the education centuries presentation i have a gut feeling made sense. it was molecule of emotion. he would tell you the gut makes the same chemical the brain does. this is a scientific background. the body of information. and the information is -- [inaudible] it's from consciousness. any physician will tell you you have two patients who get the same treatment who see the same doctor, have the same ill p -- illness and different outcome. the prognosis wouldn't be called proking in sis is -- [inaudible] people on this side and people on this side. and you can accurately make a diagnose is. you can never accurately make a prognosis. it's like the temperature in new york today is 62. because the average temperature in new york is 62. it doesn't make sense. by saying your income is $100,000 because you come from manhattan and the average and the median income -- it doesn't tell me anything about you. i was thinking to myself why do patients respond unpredictably? even though we can strategically get some idea. just like the individual particle you can't predict when it will pop in and out of the vacuum. no individual event in the universe has a cause. nobody would accept that in the medical journal. i started to write them in a popular book. nobody would accept that. this is one of the strange things i read an ad in "the new york times" by vanity publisher called vanity press. not vanity advantage press. i paid $5,000 and got 100 books published myself. it was called "creating help; mind, body connection." nobody had used that expression mind body connection. somebody convinced. i had a call from a publisher and it was the same publisher of today's book. okay. [inaudible] next thing i get a call from an agent in new york. i call -- i get a call from jackie kennedy and said we want to get you for a publisher. what i found i could make a case for the public they couldn't make a case for my own profession. that started in a sense the movement. >> yes. this incredible -- [inaudible] how children succeed. where do you think both of you had the same success -- [inaudible] are >> was tin stilled we were taught to be daring, to not to worry about failure. in adversity is the greater success. one of my favorite quotes is from -- [inaudible] a great danish policy for. he once said to dare is to lose one's feeting momentarily. not to dare is to lose one's self. t a beautiful quote. i think deepak was being modest when he started to talk about how he launched to this. i thought it was very gut sincerity and courageous when he embraced mind body connection. he has a thriving practice in boston. there were medical students who were rotating. one day he reads a book, -- joseph campbell. no it was anthony. goaf is the other. follow your -- yeah. >> yeah. >> that's joseph campbell. he read another book. by british anthony campbell. >> okay. >> "seven state of consciousness" on the back cover there was if you're interested about meditation call the number. he went and learned meditation with his wife. he came to our home, in new -- newtown massachusetts. told my wife and me i have been meditating. it's the most powerful life changing event. and i said to him, good for you. [laughter] i wasn't interested. my -- i had a concept of chanting and monks in robe. my wife, a pediatrician, absolutely brilliant learned it. i noticed amazing changes in her. for about a month then i said to the teacher meditation. i said i have three concerns. the first, i'm in a position as associate chief of medicine at the oxford medical center to occasionally reprimand brilliant doctors. i don't want to become mellow. i'm playing in a tennis tournament. i'm in the finals. i'm very competitive. i don't want to be just a applauding every passing shot my opponent hits. number three, i enjoy some scotch. i don't want to give that up. and he said, listen, in term of the scotch. most people start to drink less. in term of the tennis, i'll be back. and he comes back with a pamphlet called the team program and excellence in action. testimonials by olympics diving champion. i said that's good. but i will win. i said i can't guarantee that. if you lose you won't feel that bad. i said, okay, what about brilliant people at harvard medical school and disciplining? >> he said you'll be more assertive but from a silent level. and i learned meditation. it was the most powerful thing i have done. now i tell my colleagues and medical students as interviewed in the "boston globe." give us some piece of advice. i talked about meditation. the best thing, i think, is saying you should med -- meditate once a day. if you don't have time to do that, you should meditate twice a day. [laughter] >> it's not really clear what happened. there are so many circumstances that the story is true. but also at the certain point what happened i was in a practice with other physicians, cardiologists, et. and i started to notice they were embarrassed about being my colleague, and i realized i was -- at that time an assistant professor bu medical school. i got the feeling they were -- [inaudible] and i don't want to embarrass them. so at that time, i met another friend of mine who long since passed and invited me to california, and i left. so, you know, these are things in hindsight something was going on. i was very restless and, you know, they responded. >> just a comment. back then, it used to be called alternative medicine. as it's as though you western medicine or the alternative thing you could do to help yourself. and now even at harvard medical school we have complimentary medicine. deepak gives a talk every year i direct with my colleague of mine. about twelve years ago, the chairman of medicine at the medical center say we should invite your tbroar give a keynote. and see if he could talk about spirit -- spiritualty and healing in medicine. i said i wouldn't feel comfortable with that. that's like nepotism. you can inprovide -- invite him. he's been coming for the last ten or twelve years doing a session about duo, two and a half years. more recently -- [inaudible] i sit on the front row on the side and proud of my brother. and my colleague introduces dpee key -- deepak. >> when did you think outside harvard across the united states and also across the world. whether do you think mind body medicine will be on equally standing and more standing. most of the people here are strongly attracted to mind body medicine. when did you think it will get the respect it deserves? because it's affecting so many people so positively. when does it send in the curriculum and you mentioned harvard? .. >> as we find a the scientific findings, then there will be clinical studies. we are looking at the genome and the recent studies that have been sent and all of this is happening right now. the thing that people realize is that your body is active. and so when you look at this, it proves the utility and you can't stop the utility. so this kind of inside has been very important as we do political studies. we have done double-blind studies. so there are combining factors and the fact is that that are center we give credit for anyone who takes a mind and body education at our center. and this is an important part of integrated medicine. >> this is actually happening at harvard medical school. i am humbled and privileged to say that the faculty deans this education important. but under the jurisdiction of the department of continuing education, we have to 25 courses, distance learning, some have over 100 online modules. and we reach out to help the allied professionals throughout the world. a couple of years ago we had a seminar on psychotherapy and he did this on wisdom. was actually breathtakingly beautiful. the next day he did a seminar on compassion. richard davidson is considered one of the top 50 best scientists in the world. he would say that i don't know the answer to that. now, richard davidson has said that this is true and he has done some studies at harvard. not only do they have the subjective experience for these creative and better relationships, but we see anatomical changes in the brain. we do functional mris and we can see changes in different parts of the brain. so that is happening and that is the concept. we have a position at harvard medical school and he talks about the neurobiology of leadership. when you have time, read about it. the one of the most fascinating syndromes to me and medicine is phantom limb syndrome. so some have an amputation and they experience pain. but here is a study. some of these experiments involving phantom limb syndrome, next to him a stranger is sitting in massaging his right leg. nuance is he gets a lead the lead of his pain by witnessing this. so we are looking at the medicine and technology, now catching up with the subjective experience that people have had for thousands of years. one of my favorite things is the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. >> i want to give the people the opportunity to ask questions. since we are also being filmed by c-span and we are broadcasting, if you could just wait until microphone gets you the people on television can here. again, we want to start with people that are sending and we want to give as many as possible a chance. i also want to thank someone who is one of my favorite people and that is maggie. doing a great job getting everyone here. we get someone standing up all the way in the back, please raise your hands if you have a question. >> thank you. >> what are the obstacles and is it's very responsive, how do you find the monetary basis, especially with children and others in the financial business of medicine. >> as you go on to that, have you and your colleagues ever viewed it as western medicine being complementary to mind and body medicine? >> well, yes. >> the technology that is used is basically growing. the technology is basically catching up what has been done for thousands of years, treating people well for a long time. >> that is correct. but let me make a distinction here. i am the beneficiary of a right total hip. i had daily nocturnal pain. i didn't know better, i would think that i had prostate cancer. i saw the best surgeon and that is by the way just seven weeks ago. and we could go i played nine holes of golf. so i would challenge anyone into taking medicine to say if someone pneumonia, you need the right medications. you probably need a good orthopedic surgeon. so western medicine does amazing things that we should not forget about. i have a patient that had a liver transplant. so complementary and integrative medicine has a major role in preventive medicine. how do we prevent obesity and depression? there is, in my mind, a sort of limit to it. and i preface this by saying that i disagree. i had arthroscopic knee surgery and suddenly my knee was swollen. it was a beautiful day in boston. and he they said sanjay, you had this and my knee was really swollen. and then she got out of the car and she kicked her foot in the air to see how good it was. so the next day i had a little hiatus and i called the acupuncturists early in the morning and i went to see her. and she did the acupuncture and you can compare one knee to the other. and i called home and my wife is not there. so my wife is going to come home after doing some shopping. went to the country club and played nine holes of golf. and i agree with much of what you have said. but i want to answer your question. i want to ask you about remediation and how does this practice. this means the disease that has been the result of medical treatment. 80% of pharmaceuticals are of optional and marginal benefit. which means it can make a bit of a difference except for some side effects so in between the most common heart surgery is part of this. the second most common procedure for heart is angioplasty. it doesn't prolong life or stabilize it more than 3% of people. these are alarming statistics everywhere. back surgery, 98% is useless. hysterectomy, 95% is useless. we are talking about huge amounts of money that are spent on procedures. and the neurological diagnosis would be made with precision. if you don't walk out with a cat scan or mri, you are lucky. because no one has the ability to do it. so we have what we call health reform that is not health reform. it is insurance reform and has nothing to do with health reform. most of the expenditure is end-of-life care. i just said that i am not going to die in the hospital. i'm not going to have any of these resuscitative procedures. i have been in community hospitals were the same standards don't apply. and i have seen doctors talking about an aberration in electrolytes, which would cause a problem in the patient would die. so a lot of what we call prolongation is elongation of style. this has been a huge problem and i have discussed it with politicians and have even brought it up to the president. but we have a system. they have a system for every congressman in washington. every business is either lobbyists or military industrial so what when we think that our country makes money? they go to dubai and the trade, and we have huge problems when the incentive for treatment becomes an influence. if you go to a baker, what is he going to tell you i'm not saying that you shouldn't have chemotherapy, i'm asking everyone here to be a difficult patient. you will know more than the average medical provider. [applause] [applause] >> icy pace patients who develop the symptoms to who died of liver failure confuted spirit if you have acute liver failure, you better pray that you get a transplant. and every single year the medical literature can result in acute liver failure. 1 billion people in the world have asked every single patient about what you think and so what are you taking? the list goes on and on. it's like, i say, how much are you paying for that. i am paying out of pocket every month. and just because it is natural doesn't mean that it is safe. hurricane katrina, others that have happened, the tornadoes that they are a part of nature. so we have to have the ability to apply the same standards as we should that we do to complementary and integrative medicine as well. >> this is a discussion that needs to take place. we have the ability to talk about this. >> could we get someone up on the stairs? someone who needs strong supporters? anyone? could we get someone right behind the cameraman? >> yes, what do you think of this? >> well, this is a very good question. i don't know if you want to go into the whole story. the guy was ambushed i was ambushed by richard dawkins, the preeminent militant atheist of our time. we were talking of the conversation that we had. and then i was in a movie and if you want to check it out, there are a million people out there. the reason they ridiculed me was a shift in consciousness. .. wonder, by the way, what is healing? why do certain people in fact, you know, it's -- you have many inflammation disorders, including autoimmune diseases. they published study. what is happening by logically. what is happen together people is a return to -- [inaudible] a return to the word healing or the -- it means the same thing. they have bilogically what we learned in when we go to medical school, the first lesson we learn. one is in inflammation. the second body protecting us. if you injury yourself you need the inflammation response. if you have a exaggerated response you have autoimmune, allergies, all type of things. in fact, exaggerated inflammation is a disclosing factor for diseases. there's a movement among chemotherapy to treat inflammation first. it's a protective response. exaggerated information is not good. what is the healing response in a return to the baseline of i did -- dynamic nonchange in the change. it occurred to me the people getting better, what the treatment was. weather it was meditation or [inaudible] even massage or deep hypnosis, or bio feedback or what i like to call bioregulation, because we are all of these devices that can monitor that. they were going to a baseline state of homeostasis. okay when is the healing response. when we go to medical school, because we are so oriented to specialization, say this is a gastrotrolings. not feeling, not thinking. at the lem of being. at that level, evolution has designed us for self-repair and self-regulation nap is what is happening. it's a long answer, but i try to give it to you. [applause] >> we're going take two more questions. the lady here. one lady in the back. no, no, that lady back there. when it takes three questionses. they are dedicated. first here. both of you have been successful in life in your own respective ways. you each talked about being willing to take on the risk. so i siewm sometimes you've also had failure along the way. i wondered what some of your most impactive failures were. and how they informed your later path to success. >> i'll let deepak go first. [laughter] >> i washinged out -- walked out of a fellowship because i was asked a question that i didn't know the answer to. the question was how many mill -- milligrams of -- get in the 59 paper. and i said to my supervisor, my professor, i said, i think it was 2.3 million grams. but i'm not sure. let me look it up. in about twenty people. he said you should have the information in your head. i took the briefcase and dumped it on his head and said so you it in your head now. [laughter] i walked out of my fellowship. he called my wife and said your husband blew his career. he's finished. my wife was pregnant with our son. they were looking for a emergency room physician. i have no experience but a medical license. i need the money. he said, i'll train you. so for one year, i worked in moonlighting, basically. i did feel like a great failure at that time. i felt responsible for my wife, for my children, for the fact that, you know, i joined a press pretentious fellowship, walked out. it took me a long time to realize that as long as i lived for the approval of my peers and my spear yo yours, -- superior i would not be able to dare to dream. it took my awhile to realize if i wanted to explore what i thought was intuitively something that needed to be explored. now we talk about it. i said i have to be independent of criticism and flattery. it took me a awhile to recover from that. it took a whole year. >> so i remember in the early '80s i signed on one decade and my goal in life. and i put professional, physical, spiritual, family, social. and next to professional i wrote on the bunch of goals. one of them was i want to be a single author. have a book on disorders of the liver. i burn the midnight oil. i stopped playing tennis which was my passion. there was no such thing as google. i had to go to the medical library, which has the largest collection of medical books in the world. and got basement and the sub basement and dig up the original articles published in 1970. and then i wrote the preface, i wrote an introduction, table of content then three chapters. then i sent it to my publishers. and four of them said thank you very much. but we're not interested. we already have a major textbook in hep tolings. the first one from new york, actually, wrote back and said sanjiv i like your writing style. i would like to come boston and take you out to lunch. he said we're not interested in your book. i said you're kidding you came from new york. but we like your writing style, and we would like you to write or edit a book on gastrointestinal, which is called second year medical student. i ha thig, uncles said it. in every adverse i are is the feat of greater success. i said i'm going get two books. i'm still going get my disorders of the liver published, by good publishers and edit a second textbook. i invited a colleague of mine, and i said, roger we willed dit the book. we'll invite the entire boston mafia. i discovered ways in which it doesn't work. [laughter] then he was 57. his company burned down. his factory burned down. and a lot of people commiserated with him. he said why are you doing that? all of my mistakes have been burned. now i can start anew. the value were instilled in us when we were young. >> the two ladies in the front. and -- [inaudible] [inaudible] patients from the croinic lyme disease community were suffering greatly. we were wondering perhaps we can't -- we e can't reach homeostasis with the western medicine we have tried. we're not getting well. >> yeah. i'm sorry, i'm not the right person to be answering your question. my specialty is liver disease and hep tolings. i think the question could be best asked of a rheumatologies and rheumatologist who also embraces inte greative medicine in the mind body connection. that would be the best fit. maybe deepak can help. [laughter] >> there are integrated oncologist and rheumatologists. integrative infect use disease specialists. dr. andrew has life all of these people if you go on his website you'll get more information. i'm not the right person to answer that question. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> i know i'm asking a lot, but would you lead us in a group meditation? [laughter] [applause] >> did you meditate this morning? on your own? [inaudible] there was a wonderful saying you should meditate once a day. if you don't have time to do that you should med date twice a day. maybe deepak lhd lead the group. here is something. if you're not already familiar. tell me if you are familiar with the 21 demonstration challenge. please raise your hands. that's about i would say 15% of the people in this room. every three months the center along -- we offer this meditation on it. and the last time 700,000 people med dated together with us for three weeks. 21 day. i was traveling the world in moscow, korea, and latin america and said how many people have heard of the 21-day challenge? and 15% of people raised their hands just like this. i want to know if you go to chopra center, meditation.com. free of charge. you will participate with the largest experiment in meditation that has ever been done in the history of civilization. [applause] there's never been. i want to make the opportunity of telling you this. you can register now for free. that's the kind of movement we need to start to create a critical mass of awareness. i'll lead this and then -- [inaudible] >> let me -- after the meditation is done, everybody needs to remain seated for two minutes. because san jiff -- sanjiv and key prak have a media appearance. please, remain seated. [inaudible] ly start you on something if you start your day with it. your day will go a little better. okay. so close your eye. and put your awareness in your breath. and let your mind settle in to your breath. let your mind settle in to your breath. don't try to manipulate it. allow your mind to set to your breath. bring your awareness to your heart, and ask yourself who am i? and allow any sensations, images, feelings, or thoughts to spontaneously surface. question? who am i? [silence] [silence] now ask yourself the question, what do i want? again, allow any sensation, image, feeling, oar -- or thought to upon respondent usely arrive. what do i want? [silence] one final question. what is my purpose, how can i serve? what is my purpose, how can i serve? again, allow any question, allow any sensation, image, feeling, or thought to emerge. what is my purpose? how can i serve? [silence] a reminder you don't go searching for the answer. it's deep in your soul. just relax in to your body. and please open your eyes. okay. as i said, there are many kinds of meditation. this is reflection. there's self-awareness, there's conscious-choice making. there's knowing the difference between the perception and the actual -- if you just do three or four minute of reflection, living the question. first of all, you'll experience -- [inaudible] meaningful coincidence in response of the questions you asked. let's do this every day. your day will be much better. thank you. [applause] thank you. former mtv on politic and her years at mtv. >> i think mtv of incredibly powerful. they realize that, you know, they could tap in to a generation of future voters. also, you know, this is a time when you're in your teens and late teen and early 20s when you're most passionate about thing in your life. it they realize if you could turn it to politic it is would be an incredible force. regardless, if i agree or disagree with the politics of the people who served over me as my bosses. i like the fact they wanted to engage people. i like the fact they wanted people to express and learn about their own political feelings. every once awhile i jump in and get a little bloody and mix it up. i thought it was for the benefit of all. when you challenge one another, when you really learn what it is you believe and why you believe it. it will make you a better person. not just politically but all around. >> she spoke to booktv at the freedom fest in las vegas. along with our schedule, you can also see our programs any time at booktv.org. get the latest update throughout the week. follow us on facebook and twitter. >> senator ben carden, what is on your summer reading list. >> a book by my former colleague john lewis. he came to congress together. "march." i'm looking bard to reading. what an incredible story. i am looking forward to reading about his life and becoming more involved in making sure people know the john lewis story. this is ab hour and ten minutes. [inaudible] imagine being a fourth-grader who lived a rather isolated -- [inaudible] told about a far away place called disney land. she heard exciting things about it. she couldn't comprehend the magnitude of such a place. figuratively speaking, when her family emigratedded from china, she thought she was heading to disney land. what confronted her was a far cry from the magic kingdom. it wasn't the foreign language and culture. it was the shocking racism, eyelation, and disdain she encountered in her own backyard of oakland. her story is a perfect example of what made america great. courage to confront hardship and abuse, determination to move past it, and gratitude to a country that made it possible for anyone to succeed and discover one's self-worth. i highly recommend that you read the personal account of her amazing journey in her book "chinese girl in the ghetto." she has a come lang way with from the inner-city of oakland. she received her undergraduate degree from cornell and a law degree from harvard. she served as a -- [inaudible] she served as a visiting fellow. practiced law, managed corporate communications, which is the first mainland china-based internet company to list on the nasdaq. and served on the first professional staff of the congressional u.s. china economic and security review commission. she has also written article for the "the wall street journal," the international he recalled tribune, the los angeles thyme, the weekly standard, and others. currently she's a senior vice president of sd berk partner. a strategic advisory firm and policied a vierser of the heart land institute. a free market think tank. it's my pleasure to introduce mink -- ying ma. [applause] >> thank you very much. i want to say thanks to the volunteer who made this event happen. a special thanks to rita for all of her hard work and coronation in recent months, and howard, thank you for having me here. it's an honor for know tell you a bit about my book, and my story. but whenever i talk about my book, i have a tendency to think of another author, and that author is president barack obama. as you may recall, the liberal media raved about barack obama's writing ability in the 2008 election. back then, senator obama's résume was quite short, and his supporters often would say with a straight face, that he was just marvelous because he wrote two marvelous books about himself. at first i thought it was a joke. when senator obama actually became president obama, i realized it was no joke at all, i decided that i seriously needed to get with the program. and start believing in the dreamy barack obama world of yes, we can. so i thought that what i needed to do was to write two books about myself, and maybe i too can be president of the united states. [laughter] [applause] so i sat down and wrote a book about myself called "chinese girl in the ghetto." when people asked me what the book is about these days, i usually politely tell them it's about my family's journey from communist china to inner-city oakland california. it's about my journey of getting to know freedom. what i'm really thinking. usually what is really on my mind, i need to hurry up and write another book about myself. and why do, maybe i can go to all of those places that barack obama has been able to go. yes, we can! [laughter] i'm joking, of course. i was not born in this country, so i can't become president. [laughter] [applause] donald trump ceptd my hopes up for a long time. [laughter] he kept telling me and everybody else that barack obama wasn't born in this country either. so when barack obama finally released his birth certificate in the 2012 elections, i was pretty devastated. all of my hopes for the white house were dashed. it's a feeling that i'm sure senator marco rubio will become quite familiar with in 2016. in any case, when it became clear that writing another book wasn't going to do anything for my political ambition. i decided to focus on telling people about the book i have written, and i think it's a book that was worth writing for -- its own sake. let me team you a little bit about it. my story is an immigrant story. a legal immigrant story. [laughter] [applause] i was born in china at the time when the country had been devastated by decades of to tolltarian communist rule. my family lived in a apartment that had no running water, no modern toilet facility, no washer, no dier, -- direr and none of the amenity we take for granted here in the midwest. we live in a place that was considered to be quite modern and quite enviable for folks in china. we lived in a city and didn't have to do back breaking farm labor. back then, everyone who could leave china for america wanted to leave. everyone who couldn't leave wanted to leave too. when if my family had the opportunity come to america, we immediately took it. we moved to oakland, california, knowing almost nothing about it. we showed up there because we had relatives and we wanted to be close to our family members. yet, instead of finding an america with the streets were paved with gold, we found crumbling schools, unsafe streets, and racist people. that was because we had arrived in inner-city america. the heart of the welfare state. one by one the horror of the ghetto showed themselves to us. poverty and urban decay plagued our new city. store fronts had shattered windows, streets were pockmarked with pothole, bridges and tunnels were splashed with graffiti. the streets downtown even near city hall were often streets that smelled of urine, homeless men and women aggressively pan handled. that's when they were being nice to you and accosted tourists and residents alike. crime plagued our new city as well. drug dealing seemed more prevalent at time than employment. muggings took place in plain sight. and gunshots rang at night regularly interrupting my tv watching. racism also ruled my town. asians and didn't matter if we were chinese, vietnamese, we often only had one name. and that was chinamen. that was the case at school, on streets, on the bus, and seemingly everywhere and anywhere. on the sidewalks, teens had a habit of entertaining themselves by creeping up behind frail and elderly asian immigrants and frightening them by screaming at the top of their lungs their worst imitation of the chinese language. more often than not, racial slurs were backed by the threat of violence. and sometimes followed by violence itself. and because the racism of the perpetrators simply did not fit neatly in to the politically correct narrative that our culture so often prizes, main stream america paid no attention or simply looked away. in the ghetto, there was a general break down of law and order. and overwhelming absence of personal responsibility. it was prevalent and supposed to help. it only made the place even more dysfunctional. it provided food stamps but it could not stem hunger. it offer welfare checks but could not promote economic growth or create jobs. it excused laziness, turned a blind eye to gang banging, and con condoned a break down of the family unit. worst of all, it insilled a sense of entitlement in the subject, and took away their pride, sneered at their dignity. thankfully, for my family we didn't participate in the welfare state. this was in part because we spoke almost no english when we -- showed up in america. we had no idea how to apply for welfare benefits. [laughter] we didn't even know that welfare benefits existed for people like us, and back then they definitely existed because this was the day before welfare reform of 1996, and poor illegal immigrants in the country didn't have to have been here for five years before they became eligible for government money. maybe we didn't take advantage of these welfare programs simply because we weren't that bright. we never bothered to even inquire about the benefits because it didn't occur to us or hasn't occurred to us by come together united states meant we should hold out our hands and ask the federal or state government for money. perhaps our ignorance was actually a blessing in disguise. that meant we had to fight our way out of poverty the old fashioned way. we worked. we had limited financial resources, so my parents worked at menial your -- jobs, long hours in the beginning for less than minimum wage. we wore clothing from good will or handed down from our relatives. we used second, third, or fourth hand furniture, and at first my brother and i each slept on half the bed. he slept on the box springs. i slept on the mattress. i think he insisted i got the better end of the bargain. there was hardship and shared sacrifice. the mother who was once a well respected schoolteacher became a seam stress at the sweat shop. the father who was once a senior mechanic trailed by the group of apprentices became the kitchen help for a chinese-owned restaurant where the owners regularly verbally abused their employees. the children studied day and night instead of hanging out on the streets using drugs or otherwise poorly behavior. our family saved for homeownership instead of splunging on vacation. >> my brother and i learned english more quickly than they did, we took them to the hospital when they were sick. we filled out job applications for them when they were looking for work. we accompanied them to the unemployment office when they were laid off, and we haggled with the utilities companies usually with adults many years older than we were when they overcharged us. we did not demand that the government level the playing field by giving us handout or free byes. we accepted that life was unfair, and that not everybody -- not everyone could be born rich or even born in this country. we certainly didn't occupy public buildings or parks. we didn't urinate on the street. we didn't violate city ordinances. we did not destroy public park property. or steal private property even when things didn't go our way. we thought it was wrong to feel entitled to government already guess or other people's money. we also didn't demand that america somehow give us preferences in the form of racial and ethnic quota. in fact, being asian in california pretty much meant we didn't receive any of those quota or preferences. but racial quota and preferences were dolled out quite lavishly to sons and daughters of dennists, doctors, and other middle class professionals who belonged to racial categories that were far more in fashion in our society. regardless, in the end we prevailed. we prevailed over the welfare state. we got out. certainly we didn't do it alone. the kindness of the american people has always impressed me. i think it's something that impresses all immigrants to this country.

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Capitol Hill Hearings 20130816

who offered a helping hand and a warm smile. repeatedly, when i was reading a piece in the "the wall street journal" written by governor jeb bush, i thought of my family's journey out of the ghetto. he said "today the sad real city if you're born poor, if you're parents didn't go to college, if you don't know your father, and if english is not spoken at home, then the odds are stacked against you. you are more likely to stay poor today than at any other time since world war ii." what struck me about governor bush's piece was that all except one of his prerequisite for being condemned forest fire poverty applied to me. fortunately i know my father. but i was born poor. my parents didn't go to college, and english was not and still is not spoken at home. the odds were stacked against me. so like barack obama has been eager to harp on the odds for political purposes, in the narrative he has been pedaling for the four to five years. the little people at the bottom of the society don't get a fair shake. millions and billions, according to him, or the richest 1% have edged out everyone else from opportunities for success. america's economy has become a -- for the privilege few, and unless government barack obama's government intervenes heavily, the poor and the middle class will never thrive. in this paradigm, in mr. obama's paradigm i had no business getting out of the ghetto at least not without receiving a welfare check. this is because barack obama doesn't just peddle the benefit of the welfare state. he really ped dahls the welfare state mentality. the mentality is even worse than the welfare state itself. it absorbed individuals of personal responsibility. it confines them to grievants and encourages even justifies their sense of entitlement. since the election of last november, republicans have been hyper ventilating about how much more effectively mr. obama and his party can relate to the urban poor and minority. he seemed willing to point that the odds are always stacked against the poor. it's not supposed to be easy to get out of poverty. that's why you work harder, you purr -- pursue your stunt more aggressive and learn to be more nimble. it's a reality that conservatives should be ashamed or afraid to point out. in the conservative bar dime, in our paradigm, free men and women make choices. we take responsibility for our lives, and we extract ourselves from less than stellar circumstance. that was how i got out of the ghetto. despite the odds. unfortunately the el welfare state didn't just exist in the ghetto. it's plagued with racial strife, a break down of law and order. if you were to take away the latter two and the high crime rate, or the racial strife, big government is all over in this country. and find the welfare state everywhere. the welfare state really isn't just about welfare. it's about government intrusion from the top and entitlement mentality from the bottom. we live in a country where collectively we spend more money than we have. we are the takers who are like to take more from the makers. we have a president who uses every opportunity he can to land base the successful, to tell americans that fairness and progress can only occur which those who have the money given more via higher taxes to those who have less. taking and spending other people's money is what barack obama likes to call our shared commitment to each other. americans agree with him. at least enough to reelect him as president last year. unpleasant as it may be. the real city that it is always -- always difficult to convince people to say no to free money. it is always difficult to convince them to opt for the uncertainty of free market and free enterprise and walk away from government subsidizes. i may have emerged from the ghetto without received welfare benefits. but i think it was purely an accident. if i had known that welfare programs existed and my parents qualified for the welfare programs, i would have brought them myself to the relevant government officer -- offices, filled out the application, served as their translater, and anal 10, whatever it was i would made sure they got some free money. i never had to do that in oakland. i had family and friends -- and if my parents were to call qualify for welfare programs today, i would still be the first to hep them apply. the truth is, most people find it very hard to say no to free money and most simply don't. we all respond to monetary incentives. of course, we know that there's no such thing as free money. our big government is funded by people who work, people who create wealth, people who pay taxes. and it is funded by money we borrow by a national debt of approximately $17 trillion. we also know barack obama's welfare state didn't just hand out welfare check or food stamps. it also hands out goodies ranging from amnesty for illegal immigrants, free contraceptive for women. if you're at the receiving ends of those goodies, it's very hard to say no. so the key is not to be giving out the goodies in the first place. i know i'm supposed to provide an uplifting story tonight. the truth is we simply cannot defeat the welfare state on our own. in the grand scheme of thing it is makes little different that my family and i made it out of the ghetto without receiving welfare benefit. we got lucky and able to escape the tentacle of the welfare state. it to truly defeat the welfare state, we would have to defeat the welfare state mentality and roll back policy that incentivize dependency and foster a sense of entitlement. and when we do that, we will have a real story to tell about defeating the welfare state. that would be a truly great story. until then, i would merely leave with the greet my book. it's from the introduction. in china i couldn't avoid the randomness, or the weight of authoritarianism. i remained upbeat, cheerful, and happy. in the ghetto, i forgot what it meant to be joyful, but even in the ghetto, people have a chance to walk away from some of the worst attribute of the free society in to the finest virtue. it is disbelief that lies at the heart of my journey of getting to know freedom. i hope in the end freedom will defeat the welfare state and the entitlement mentality. thank you. thank you very much. [applause] those who would like to follow my work. it's yingma.org. you can find my writings and interviews there as well. >> thank you. and for those of you who have been here before. you know for the q & a we'll have people passing out cards like you see over here. and over here. and we'll take them to the person in the back who will read them for the speaker. so if so you questions, raise your hand. and we'll get a card. thank you. >> yes. i am. [inaudible] a child's life in china -- [inaudible] between the age of 8 and 18 -- [inaudible] not necessarily. i think that every -- i think that for people of my generation in china, no matter how happy they were in china, they were gavin chance to come to the united states they would come. and having gone through what i went through in oakland, i don't regret coming to america. i think that one lesson i would draw is that freedom isn't supposed to be easy just because you show up in a free society, a wealthy free society doesn't mean there are any guarantees. and so a success is not going to be there waiting for you. and i think that for people who live in communist countries, like the former soviet union, for instance, they would rather have the opportunity to fight for that freedom to fight for their success and than confined to a lifetime of immediate of course if i and hopelessness. i think it's hard to be an immigrant no matter what. it's hard to leave your friends and family. it's hard to leave a society that you're familiar with. and i think that for kids leading china today or any other country, that's going to be the case no matter what. but in this country, i think the opportunity is always beckon. it continues to beckon all kinds of people. i think policies that promote economic growth, policies that are business friendly. i think those help a lot. i think community groups and adults who actually teach children not think with an entitlement mentality helps as well. i think there a lot of things. i think part of it is that the government in oakland tends to be antifree market. very -- and it has not always been all that strong on law and order. those things are very important if you want a save -- stable environment. but at the same time you can't rely on the government to do everything, and so part of the problem with oak sland that the men -- at least when i was growing up there. the mentality was an awful one. until you get at the root of the mentality and teach kids not think that way anymore things won't change that much. >> to the comment you made is how would you -- how someone trapped in the mentality get out of it? if you're a friend of yours? >> well, i would say a few things. number one, don't make any excuses for yourself. when you grow up in a poor environment and unsafe environment, when your family doesn't have a lot of resources, it's very easy to make excuses. it's easy to say i can't do this. i can't do that, i can't go places because my family simply hasn't provided for me. and or, you know, my people are oppressed or whatnot. don't make any excuses for yourself. that's step number one. step number two, don't blame others. there are certainly bad people out there. there are always going to be people who don't necessarily wish you well, but there are so many people who will always be there to lend a hand. .. that is really just how it is and i grew up in it, his country before it liberalized its economy. everybody had the same number of opportunities which was not very many. so, the key is in a society that does provide opportunities you have to take advantage of them and you have to apply yourself. >> how long did it take your family to get a visa to get out of china? >> we -- it took approximately four to five years. in fact come to i wrote an article recently for "fox news".com called a legal immigrant story and you can find it on the web site trade in that story i describe how incredibly hard it was to jump through the hoops to actually do everything america asked us to do in order to come here legally. what's interesting is that these days you constantly hear people say that well our immigration system is broken. we wanted to come here legally but we couldn't or they were just too many obstacles. the truth is lots of people actually stand in line and wait for a very long time man they do that because they respect the rule of law and they also respect the country that they wish to adopt as their home. in my story, the story i wrote for "fox news".com a story entitled a legal immigrants story i talked about that process. i talked about how hard it was my remember seeing my mom come home from the american consulate and she came home crying. i knew that our days for immigrating to america had to wait a little bit longer. in our debate about immigration reform we should not forget those people who are legal immigrants and absolutely not let people talk us into forgetting the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. [applause] >> how did you get from a poor inner-city education to cornell university? >> well, i read a lot. they -- when i first came to this country i didn't speak english so what i did was i spent his summers reading chinese novels and they were very good novels but most likely my parents if they knew what was in those novels would have said they were really inappropriate for my age. they were written by a very famous novelist and asia and you know i spent my summers reading those novels. one because i didn't have access to books like that in china when i was growing up. back then under communist rule people weren't really allowed to read anything colorful or exciting. you read a lot of things that had a lot to do with communism and why communism was great. and as i got a little bit older and once i began to learn english i handed up spending a lot of time reading english books. it was terrible for my eyesight but the great thing is that books take you to all kinds of places that you can't even imagine and once i started digging into the books i realized there was a whole new world outside of the ghetto and i was eager to get out as soon as i could. one way for me to do that was to study as hard as i could. >> what the your thoughts about the gang of eight. [inaudible] >> well, i didn't seem too fond of the idea of marco rubio running for president earlier so i think that probably gives everybody a hand. first of all i hope it fails. [applause] at least i hope it fails in its current form. there were all kinds of efforts by different senators recently to try to make amendments to the gang of a proposal and to make it better to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms but those amendments were all shot down so in its current form it's a disaster. it has now gotten to about a thousand pages long. i actually wrote another article about this. it's called emigrating to america is not an entitlement and it addresses many of the flaws. [applause] and it addresses many of the common misperceptions of what immigration is about. i have a number of disagreements and i suspect that those of you in the audience do as well. i think that my number one disagreement with the bill is that it provides provisional legal status to approximately 11 million illegal immigrants who are in this country before and a significant and meaningful measures of enforcement actually take place before the border is actually secure. i think that is a huge problem. but in addition to that given that i've gone through the immigration process, i suppose i have a little bit of a problem with people saying that while america's immigration system is broken and hence we just get to come here legally. i am sure that many of you believe that our tax system is broken too and that you all believe that you don't want your tax dollars to go to our bloated welfare state. but it doesn't mean that you can stop paying your taxes and if the irs were to come after you you would say well i believe our tax system is broken and hence i stop paying. but that is however the situation we have with their immigration system. it is broken and everybody acknowledges that, let's fix fit but somehow it doesn't affect its broken all these people have a claim to being here because they just want to because they aspire to be american. i have a number of other disagreements and i would point you to my article. i think the title tells you how i feel about this issue. >> how do explain the chinese immigrants to come here resume a bully to -- to join and vote for liberal democrats? politicians are here from china. [laughter] >> i would say a few things. i am actually not sure -- i'm not convinced that people who escape tyranny from china come here and immediately start voting for liberal democrats. some of them probably do when they become citizens but i haven't seen enough studies that say the anti-communist folks in fact are more likely to vote democrat than they are to vote republican. what i do know is that oftentimes when you get to the second or third generation chinese-americans they do tend to be less conservative than their parents because the immigration experience is further away from them. the hardships that their parents with their grandparents had to go through aren't orange is relevant to them and many of these kids you know, apply themselves and end up as very good colleges. at these colleges what happens is they get brainwashed by liberal professors. [applause] so i think that's part of the problem. what is also part of the problem is that folks who tend to be very politically active in the asian community a lot of the easy to do it on the national level tend to be a lot more liberal than the people down the street than your average asian-american particularly more recent immigrants. for whatever reason these asian-american activists have decided that unless they adopt the rhetoric of the left-wing that somehow they have failed. many of these activists don't necessarily. >> the native languages of their respective communities. they don't necessarily know all that much or for all the details of the people or all the difficulties of the people they claim to represent and in many ways you know you can see a parallel between the asian community in the black community. lots would say jesse jackson or al sharpton publicly don't represent their points of view. someone like former representative allen west would in fact have said that quite a bit. in the asian community it's an issue that is not as pronounced. i think because they community probably isn't as politically active as a whole but there is also that this cannot from those national self-appointed spokespeople a disconnect between them and your average asian-american citizen simply because the former doesn't always understand the latter and the latter tends to be a bit more conservative. the third thing i would say is that i think immigrant communities tend to be more pragmatic and because china has undergone 30 years of economic liberalization it's not the same communist country as it used to be. it still is very repressive in many ways but i think for a lot of younger chinese don't necessarily know those awful days, at least they don't know intimately the awful days of the cultural revolution or those days of starvation under chairman mao. and so sometimes they actually can be very nationalistic. so instead of bearing hostility toward communism they might actually be very mad -- nationalistic toward china. i think overall the community may not be as ias ideological. for instance the cuban-american community and when people are less ideological and more practical if you give them a promise of a whole bunch of goodies contest they are likely to respond that way. if mitt romney says i'm going to cut the size of government and i'm going to cut -- i'm going to reform entitlement programs and i'm going to do tax reform but the other side says well that just means he's going to cut your benefits and is going to take away medicare and so on the pull respond to that. a lot of folks these are pocketbook issues and part of it is that they could very well swing the other way if you have someone who actually is a more charismatic political candidate, someone who can speak more direct you to their concerns. so, i have given you a whole bunch i guess. [inaudible] >> i think immigrants i think they are all over the bay area. obviously it's full of immigrants. there are lots of community groups. i think community groups whenever a particular group is close to the local level i think they tend to understand the needs of the people in that community far better. i mean there are lots of things. when i was a kid living in oakland one of the things i benefited the most from was approach i'm called the arthur ashe tennis program. i think this was something founded by arthur ashe. he was a tennis star. he was the first african-american to win wimbledon and the founded this program for inner-city kids to learn to play tennis and to give them something to do so that they wouldn't be out on the streets and to have coaches teach them sportsmanship and self-respect. that was where he learned to play tennis and the folks who taught them that program didn't get paid all that much i know. if they were to give private tennis lessons they would be paid a lot more and that is something that i benefited from quite a bit. i think they're all kinds of programs like that. there are ways to tutor folks. there are ways to -- even if you are let's say to donate clothing or money i am sure there are lots of -- out there to serve immigrant communities. you know their needs range from everything from food to clothing or sometimes to do translation ,-com,-com ma translation help to things like maybe sometimes they need legal services and can't afford them. there is a wide range of services that folks need and i think there is no shortage of groups here in the bay area to try to help them. getting involved with one of those groups is one way to do it. another way is i think a lot of times it perhaps doesn't even require participation in some sort of organization. i think just being kind and being decent to somebody and trading in immigrants just like he you would treat one of your friends, that i think that often goes a long way to make an immigrant feel at home in this country. and i think that would be a good place to start. >> you have any ideas on how to encourage young people in the ghetto to seek role models from successful people and other individuals with backgrounds that might help them? >> you know what, i would say especially to people in the ghetto there are role models everywhere. i think our culture has just gotten so politically correct that we often make it seem like if somebody does not share your color or your ethnicity or your cultural background that somehow you can't look up to them. we are constantly saying we have to provide a role model for a particular community. we have to find people of that race and that gender, that ethnicity. i think it's great to find role models of any gender or ethnicity or culture or race. i think for young people one of the things that adults or authority figures who deal with young people a lot what they shouldn't do is to inculcating young people's heads that somehow the only people you can look up to must look like you are sound like you. that is simply not the case. you know when i was growing up, to one of the instructors who was the kindest to me was an african-american instructor. he taught me in fifth grade and unfortunately has passed away since them. but i remember that you know this is my second year in the united states and they knew how to do math really well but i didn't speak english all that well and i didn't notice that i worked really hard to learn. i carried this pocketbook dictionary with me everywhere so that if any time i countered a word or a phrase i didn't understand i would look it up and see what the chinese translation was. he went out of his way you know to help me acclimate to american society but also to encourage me to do better. it didn't matter to me that he was not chinese. it didn't matter to me that he was black. he used to tell, in the class that i had with him, most of the students in my class were black. he used to tell the black kids of the time that they needed not to slack off and stop making excuses. they needed to work harder. it was great that they have a role model i cam but just because you don't have a role model that shares your particular color doesn't mean somehow you should stop looking. there are all kinds of people and i've seen all kinds of folks who have been willing and able to mentor people who didn't share their gender ethnicity or cultural background. i think actually, i think the mentoring goes both ways. people who mentor are willing to do it but you have to be willing to open yourself up to people who wish you well and want to help in the first that this to a bout those people who may not look like your sound like you to do that. >> do you have two or three specific recommendations for the city locally to improve itself? [laughter] >> you know it's interesting, that i haven't thought about that. i haven't lived there for a while and i know the city has changed quite a bit. you know, and i remember under mayor jerry brown i do remember that a number of improvements were were made in were made and i appreciated those improvements. i sort of feel like i've been gone for so long that this question probably would be better answered by a resident of oakland who really have to deal with the city government as well as other aspects of the city. i would say that i mean for me when it comes to making changes in inner-city areas i think it's very crucial for those areas to become business-friendly and two in courage small businesses to encourage entrepreneurship and i have to go back to the mentality the mentality among the city's residents fostered not just by people in government but also their families and churches and communities and your schools. i think for those cities that have inner-city areas that require a lot of help, i think getting to the root of that mentality is very key. >> many immigrants have dual citizenship and allegiance to the country from where they came. our system recognizes dual citizenship. do you think this should change? >> i think at the moment dual citizenship is not for everybody. dual citizenship is not allowed for people who immigrated to the u.s. from china for instance. usually i think dual citizenship is only allowed for those countries that are friendly to us. so if you are a swiss and u.s. citizen most people would like to think that you are going to be homeless. and you know, god my understanding is that if your home country as a country that is considered to be hostile to the united states for the most part the government won't actually allow you to hold dual citizenship. you either stick with a citizenship that you are recently had or renounce it and become an american city which makes perfect sense to me. [inaudible] [laughter] well, to that would go back to what i said earlier. i think strengthening enforcement mechanisms is very key. until you do that the rest of the talk is pretty much just talk. if you're not going to enforce our borders and if you're not going to deport people on a meaningful basis so for instance right now there is a union within the immigration and customs enforcement's unit and those officers complained that what the obama administration won't let them do are two things that are very crucial to their jobs. one is to actually detain folks who are here illegally and two is to deport them and the obama administration has adopted this policy that once you are here unless you have committed some sort of serious crime i mean the administration is not going to spend that much time supporting you or spends too many resources on things like that. when you have an immigration policy that really doesn't have a whole lot of teeth and when people don't think that there is severe punishment for severe consequences to coming here illegally, then obviously we have a broken system. i do believe that we should make this country far more friendly to tilt laborers from oversees. there are lots of people who would divide a lot of help to our economy who would provide their skills and their expertise and a three-year folks like that get what is called and h.b. one visa. there's a small quota for them and usually all the employers in the country that would like to hire people like that do want to have visas like that at the very beginning of the year and that was the case this year. they sort of hit the limit of those visas in january i believe. so it actually makes a lot of sense to make it easier for scientists and mathematicians and others with high skills to actually come here and provide their expertise and help our economy grow. i think that we need to get away from the identity politics that is often being played on immigration policy. unfortunately it's very hard to do because many illegal immigrants the largest group of illegal immigrantimmigrant s in this country are hispanics and within that are mexicans. it's often very hard to separate the two but the key is we actually need to have people who would be willing and not afraid to say that just because we want to enforce our immigration laws and just because we want to secure our borders does not mean that we are bunch of racists. and i think that is actually a tone republicans are constantly talking about how we got the tone wrong in the last election. well, one thing we should do is to set the right tone and the tone is we should stop actually letting people characterize conservatives as racists just because they want to secure our borders. i think rule of law something that conservatives have always cared a lot about and we shouldn't give up on that poor seabed to the other side just because we lost the election and by the way even if we did have the hispanic vote in the last election romney would not have one. anyway i think that there are lots of folks who have thought very intelligently and thoroughly about immigration issue but what we do have right now is obviously a system that doesn't work very well and we also have a proposal that is very imperfect. so we need to get beyond that. >> have you ever considered running for office? >> didn't you hear me earlier? i was thinking about running for president and that was why i wrote this book about myself. [laughter] and then of course since i'm not a natural-born citizen it turns out i can't do that anymore. >> as conservatives should we stop using the term illegal immigrants? >> no, absolutely not. [applause] be what do you think -- this is his sixth day that obama got 70% of patients votes and that is obviously not chinese but chinese filipino japanese korean whatever so what would you think would be the appeal to win this group of people to the conservative republican side? >> yeah, i have been asked that question a number of times since the last election. i don't think anybody has done an extensive polling or any substantive studies in the asian community to ask people why they voted the way they did. i think everybody who has talked about it really has just been taking a guess and i offered a few educated guesses. one of which i mentioned earlier which is that i think second or third generation asian-americans oftentimes are a bit -- they have a tendency to be a bit more liberal or a much more liberal than their parents or grandparents. i thinking governor romney's case my guess is that it's quite hostile that his tough rhetoric on china ended up turning off a lot of folks in the chinese community and like i said earlier these days there are a lot of chinese immigrants who are very nationalistic about china. and there are lots of americans who disagree with governor romney's proposals on what to do with china. i don't agree with him 100% on many issues but i think if you are somebody who is very nationalistic about china or your heritage and you hear one of the political candidates constantly talk about china and getting tough with china comes and i have no doubt the governor romney was talking about getting tough with the chinese communist regime but oftentimes voters don't make that distinction. they might think that governor romney is being anti-china and they might think maybe he is anti-chinese. that is simply a guess. i think somebody would have to to do is study and actually ask folks why they voted the way that they did. in addition to that, as i mentioned earlier governor romney also promised that he would roll back big government. i voted for him and was certainly counting on him to do that but the immigrant community is not insensitive to monetary incentives. as i said earlier there are lots of immigrants who do have failed themselves of government freebies. these days most people i guess and not as ignorant as my parents or my family was when we came here. people nowhere to go to find free money and people nowhere to go to apply for welfare benefits and people know what to do to make themselves appear eligible before government bureaucrats when they need to apply for those benefits. and i think that many of those people probably to vote and when they hear that one candidate is going to roll back the government they probably think you know that would affect their pocketbooks and that would mean fewer benefits for them. i know many people feel the asian community is more inclined to be conservative than a community that is hard-working and industrious. in many ways it is true but just because that is true doesn't mean that people don't want free money or would say no to it. if you are a hard-working immigrant did you come here poor and the government offers you free money you are going to take it. it's very unlikely that you would say no and i think that actually probably has an impact on how people float as well. >> this maybe is a question of optimism versus pessimism. if you look down the road 30 to 40 years what do you think the state of the welfare state will be? >> i think we need, i think conservatives need to start winning some elections. they weren't need to run candidates who are charismatic articulate a viable and conservative free-market thinkers and that we need to take back the white house. we need to take back the senate has if the government continues to be -- our federal government continues to be run by people who are big government types the welfare state will become ever more bloated. we will be staring down a path that greece is currently on and our society will become a huge entitlement state. so i would say i would like to be fairly optimistic. i would like to think that there are viable conservative candidates out there who can articulate a message without compromising on their principles. and you don't think there are lots of governors out there right now who fill that void. i think the key thing to do is to start winning some elections and we can turn things around. [inaudible] >> i have written about that too i think what people say is folks like president obama and liberal columnists like thomas friedman with "the new york times" as well as other big government types ever since the financial crisis hit they have been advocating heavy government spending. they wanted more infrastructure spending. they wanted more funding for renewable energy projects. they wanted all kinds of things and when they got pushback from free-market types and folks who believed in limited government they started using china as their example and they started using china to go to conservatives into sort of this position of having to adopt their rhetoric. china as many of you know has grown dramatic way in the past three decades or so. they began undertaking economic growth in 1978 and they opened up their economy to the world. but it's still a communist country and still politically oppressive and a lot of things are still run by the state which is why commentators these days like to refer to china's economy as a state capitalist economy. folks like barack obama for a long time he kept pointing to the roads and bridges that china was building and saying why are we just sitting here watching them build these roads and bridges, the airports and other big infrastructure projects while our infrastructure here is crumbling? he also says why are we sitting here not willing to give our noble energy companies funding while china is just shoving money in these companies directions and china has gotten to a point where it now dominates the solar industry. so for liberals china is kind of of -- when they look at the chinese government they see something that they would love to have which is the ability to spend freely without accountability to voters. it's very exciting to them. there is no meddlesome congress. [applause] there aren't any tea party types you now and so but when i've written about this topic but the research shows is that china started growing dramatically largely because it introduced more free-market mechanisms and to its economy not as it became more status. the chinese economy today is much freer than what it was 32 years ago when they first started their economic liberalization revolution and numerous chinese reform minded folks whether in government or small and medium-sized enterprises in china they all recognized at the hand of the government is intruding and interfering with the economy and it creates all kinds of inefficiencies. it creates or supports monopolies that in a fit lots of large state-owned enterprises and it suffocates certain industries. what a lot of reform minded chinese officials and economists what they advocate is that they would like to see further economic reform. in fact this is something that the new chinese leadership has been talking about. this is something that they would like to see too. they believe that in order for their economy to grow in the long run to really get to a modern first world economy they will have to implement some changes. if barack obama, he certainly has talked a lot about becoming more status like china but what a lot of chinese recognize if they actually need to become more free-market oriented. so i would say and this is something i say all the time. we shouldn't listen to barack obama for that matter. [applause] >> to believe that many first-generation chinese the most conservative ones do not vote? >> i am not sure about that. here in california we make voting easy for chinese immigrants. there are ballots that are translated into chinese so even if you don't speak the language you can go get yourself a chinese ballad and fill in the circles. obviously that is not the case in other states with smaller immigrant populations but i would just say here in california it's very easy for immigrants to vote. so many things are bilingual and multilingual. whether immigrants actually vote or not is a different issue. i haven't seen the polls are the studies so i'm not totally sure about the voting rates within a particular immigrant population but i mean i'm sure that like other in america there are lots of people who don't vote so it wouldn't surprise me if lots of first-generation immigrants don't vote either. >> you think america is still free? >> i think lots of things are relative so when people ask me that question i usually ask compared to what? there is an index of economic freedom and so every year hong kong and singapore come out of the very top of it so compared to hong kong and singapore are economy severely is free but when it comes to political freedom or other measures you know we certainly are much freer than modern day china and much freer than russia for instance and then i would say that you know i continue to refer to our society is a free society. i think there are ways for our markets to be freer. i think that there is a lot of government intrusion that interferes with that. but in recent years as a result of the financial crisis and the economic intervention that has taken place economic activity certainly has gotten freer certainly with the passage of obamacare but i remain hopeful that some of those things can be rolled back. [applause] steo follow-up question. you'd came from -- which is neighboring of hong kong. how does the united states freedom of economics compare with hong kong? >> i think hong kong has an extremely free economy. hong kong is constantly ranked by conservatives or free-market research institute says he did the number one or number two freest economies in the world. when you talk about it that way our economy definitely is less free compare to hong kong's. see i think that's it e-rate thank you. >> thank you so much. it's been an honor. [applause] >> thank you very much. she will be signing books over here in the corner. [applause] what's interesting about washington in this age is that once you have that title even if it's a very short title, even if you've been voted out after one term you can stay in washington and be a former chief of staff a former congressman tom, that a former chief of staff to congressman x. macroy. you are in the club and that's a striking departure from the days in which people would come to washington to serve, server little bit and then go back which is is as i guess how the founders intended. so there is a new dynamic now and a lot of it starts with money and the resources available for people to be very wealthy. >> last year president obama's signed a memorandum that called for deferred action for certain undocumented young people that came to the u.s. as children and had pursued education or military service. that action by the president was the topic of discussion today at the center for american progress. panelists looking at the initiative successes and challenges one year after was implemented at the department of homeland security. this is an hour and 20 minutes. >> hello everybody and thank you for coming today. i name is philip wolgin and i'm i'm -- at the the center vern in progress. we are excited to be a sting this event offers anniversary of the deferred action or daca directive. usa's began accepting applications for daca which is remarkable considering president obama only announced the directive three months earlier. daca represents a new usage of executive authority and prosecutorial discretion to prioritize who u.s. immigration enforcement focuses on namely criminals rather than in this case young unauthorized immigrants, people who grew up in this country and our americans in every way that their papers. daca gives eligible applicants a two-year reprieve from work authorization but unlike the d.r.e.a.m. act daca can't give permanent legal status and it's at best a temporary fix to a larger problem of a broken immigration system and a of a pathway to legal status for unauthoriunauthori zed immigrants. just over 1.7 million people are estimated to be eligible for daca with just over 900,000 of them eligible to apply immediately and given the uncertainuncertain ty in the first few months of the program remember it began during the presidential election when there was a real possibility that would and daca and send it directly. it really is remarkable how many people applied to get new government data from dhs just this morning. the shows over 570,000 people will have applied and over 400,000 have received the status. out of the total number of applications we expect that just under a third will be eligible and 61% of the people immediately eligible. .. we'll also what to know what lessons it can teach us for a wider legalization program for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country. that kind of program would obviously be as large. but share many of the same characteristic and potentially many of the same pitfall. more than anything, today's event is the beginning of a conversation. we'll need to know more, for example, about best practice is for service providers or government officials. or why disparities continue to per sì among different groups when it comes to application rates and acceptance rates. so we hope that this event will only spur further inquiry to the subject. we'll begin with an overview of new research by tom. the head of interdisciplinary team who have been analyzing docket data. we have a great panel to respond. he's a assistant professor of political sign at the university of california, san diego. has been a leader in statistical modeling how they will vote on immigration reform. and when it comes to issues of undocumented young people, this is an thash is very personal to tom. he was himself an undocumented immigrant once. like so many others, tom's parents brought him here at the young age on a tourist visa and stayed when it expired. it has been -- please join me in welcoming him. [applause] [applause] >> i'm not going to risk spilling that water. i'll leave my laptop here. thank you, phil, for the warm remarking. thank you for coming today. there's a lot to go through in the report. so we're going jump right in to it. so as phil mentioned, it's the product of the work of an interdisciplinary team. this include political sciences, issuologists, those with experience and immigrant and political participation, civic engagement, and demography. so it is no surprise that docc -- on the part of undocumented youth. for many we hear that data can is not enough. i hope it's something we can get to in the discussion today. the mixed findings we get when we evaluate the first year of the existence of daca. here we have a few different quotes from a new innovative survey actually administrated by undocumented youth, undocumented grad students in southern california about specific engagement of undocumented youth. as it relates here we see one person say i feel free in the u.s. now. i'm no longer living in fear. another i was able to get part-time job and save money for tuition. driver's licenses, building credit, those are some practical benefits of daca. one more person it has motivated me to continue organizing. so again this sort of resonates with the theme that daca is not enough. that the end of goal here is a path to citizenship. but here is a another response. i'm grateful for the opportunities that i have with daca, i'm still scared for my parent. daca doesn't protect them, my entire family. i'm still in fear of losing them. these mixed emotions around can reflect our finding about the mixed result to the implementation of data. some of the main research questions we pursue in our report is daca prfning evenly across the country? are any particular groups being left behind? these can be national origin group, men v us is women, et. cetera. what impact has community-based organizations had? one focus of our report is actually to identify things that may be useful for service providers on the ground. and lastly, how restrictive state level immigration policies like sb 1070 sometime mid daca. how do we answer these questions? through numbers. and if this were an academic presentation, i would sort of show out some equation to stroke my academic ego. suffice to say, we are using data obtained from the freedom of information act request. phil mentioned the overall number thus far. they do a great job? recording summary statistic about daca. in order to answer some of the questions we're interested in we need better data. we have -- individual level records from applicants. from august? based on the last release of daca information from uscis. things still are, for the most part true. over 400,000 approved. 99% of application with final decisions have been approved. so one of the numbers that have been thrown out is 75% of approval rate. if we think about the case review status of daca application. we have approved, we are have denied. we have pending. it if we throw pending to the mix and think about approval in light of pending application, then the approval rate is about 75%. but if we think about those applications with final decisions meaning approved or denied. we are talking about 99%. the most recent release today changes this number a bit. that's 98.3% approval rate of those with final decisions and 1.7% of applications with final decisions have been denied. and we'll talk more about the national origin with you in a second. here daca applicants are overwhelmingly latin america. okay. so i do apologize because this is in part stroking our my academic centuries go. it's throwing a bunch of number and stuff at you. it's meaningful. so one of the first questionses that we address is it performing evenly? the answer is no when we look at the implementation rate or the actual number of applications that have been received in a state real toif what we expect, we can begin to identify where daca is underperforming, and whether or not the under perform is statistically significant. meaning it's not random. the make take away there are 13 states that are underperforming when it comes to daca, california, texas, arizona, nevada, montana, and there's a printout of the powerpoint presentation so you will have the slide. there's some commonality across the states within all southern borders states are included in this table. the states tend to have the largest number of daca eligible youth. these states also tend to have a larger population. larger asian population real toif other states, and have almost twice as much his pan knick latino in the state relative to other states. this is about identifying where new bolstered outreach related to daca is needed. so i was able to rerun this analysis this morning. so instead of face timing with my 3-year-old triplet boys this morning, which, which, i deeply regret now, because the slide didn't make it in. it's okay, phil. so i did rerun the analysis based on the updated number released today. this table remains unchanged. the 13 at a states are the same. there's one new addition. that's the district of columbia. so in the past report d.c. was actually sort of performing as we would expect, but now it's underperforming in that difference statistically significant. so that was about identifying where new bolstered data a can outreach may be needed. it's about identifying to bhom the outreach should be targeted. here we're talking about whether or not daca is reaching all groups evenly. and so here a another table you have in the printout -- here is the maintaining away. when we take the individual level records from the data, store all of those individuals in to their country of birth or region of origin, and then we begin to evaluate what we see versus what we expect. we can then identify particular national origins groups or particular regions that are underrepresented in the sample. and so here what we see is that applicants born in mexico are actually doing very well in the daca process. they are actually overrepresented in the poor daca applicants. those from central america, asia, and europe, on the other hand, are underrepresented in the pool of applicants so far. and for these three groups, this underrepresentation is also statistically significant. so adjust reminder here, i'm going through the sort of top line findings, and this discussion hopefully will impact some of the reasons why. okay. so we can move beyond national origin. this is where i do apologize. it should have been removed. it's about stroking academic centuries go. this is just the most progression able spins it's a way to take the data, analyzing the data. underrepresentation is one thing, and new bolstered outreach to the national origin group can correct that underrepresentation. but are all groups experiencing daca sort of equally? another way we can address the question is look at denial. and so when we think about approval versus denial we ask ourselves are any particular groups dis proportionately being denied? it may be one of the most pivotal questions not just from the policy point of view. but service providers on the ground. this table here answers that question controlling for the age of the applicant, the sex of the applicant, and where the applicant is from. the make take away is here. there may be strong reasons to rupt that mexican-born applicant may be discriminated against in the daca process. when we think about thing like sb 1070, et. cetera. there's a clear focus. it is not about what european undocumented immigrants for the most part. we think of sheriff arpaio, and we think about tent city and we think about who is in there. there's a clear racial and ethnic sort of direction of those policies. and so we can think perhaps that mexican-born applicants are more likely to be denied in dat can process. they also form the largest bulk of applicants and so lot of mexican born of a -- applicants maybe we would expect a lot of denial. that's not what we see. mexican born applicants are actually the least likely out of all group to be denied. and so what we can do is evaluate denial rates for other groups relative to mexican born applicants since they represent the lowest rate of denial. when we mush all groups together, then he can sort of say this sort of nice little statistic. all other daca applicants are 1.8 more times likely to be denied than mexican bosch applicant. the result is statistically significant. but we want to unpack this a little bit. this is where the multivaried analysis comes in. in one of the model here, we actually take each of the national origin groupings and compare denial rate to the denial rate for mexican-born applicants. here what we see is a following. south americans are doing okay. their denial rates are on par with mexican born applicants. central american, asian, and europeans are about 1.8 times. that average or 1.8 times more likely to be denied than mexican born applicants. the most staggering number is that the other category, which is comprised mostly of african born daca applicants. they are seven times more likely to be denied than a mexican born applicant. and so this, again, is about identifying to whom daca outreach should be targeted. it we see disproportionately higher central americans, asia, and european and at the most stream end the other category which is mostly african born of a cant. maybe it can provide some sort of insight for service providers to design new outreach programs. i will skip this. [laughter] okay so we can also think about denials not just by sort of, you know, group being racial and ethnic group or country of birth and region of or begin. we can also think about male versus female, and the age structure of daca applicants. here what we see is that in general all men even though they have fewer daca applications than women. 1.4 times more likely to be denied. that's the general finding. but when we sort of throw the information in to the multivarious model, what we can do is actually identify particular sort of kind of men and particular kinds of women. question look at the 31-year-old male and compare denial rates for that particular individual to a 23-year-old male. and so we pick 23 years old because that's the average age of a deny applicant. what we see is that 31-year-old males are 4.3 times more likely to be denied than 23-year-old males. and so this combines the finding for sex and age. males are more likely to be denied. and older applicants are more likely to be denied. the finding for a 31-year-old female is 3.7% times more likely than a 23-year-old female. the graph kind of shows the denial rate and how they increase with age for males and females. so we're also interested in potential facilityive factor for daca. what is happening on the ground that leads to increased daca applications? and the first thing that we looked at are those immigrant organizations. those non-profit that serve immigrant community. one cut draft that shows an undenial positive relationship meaning more immigrant serving organizations, means more daca applications. you can think of the daca clinic, the daca workshop, everything that the organizations are doing also we have new daca iphone apps that help individuals sort of determine whether or not they are eligible for daca. all of these combined to improve the overall implementation of the program. but when we cut the data a different way, the results are less clear. we can think about the overall number daca of application. we want to see more of them. we can also think about the different implementation rate across states of daca. what this is looking at how many open -- applicants have been in the state relative to how many there are. because when the number reaches 100%. that means everybody eligible has been touched by daca. when we sort of look at different metric of immigrant serving organizations, different outcomes like implementation rate. we see less clear results. these are three different ways that we look at whether or not the density of immigrants serving organizations, actual has an impact on implementation rates. and all of these results are statistically insignificant. now we can remove some outliers there. new york and california because they have a large number of immigrants serving organizations. and the results are unchanged. so here this is a mixed portrait . more immigrant serving organizations, more daca application. it doesn't necessarily translate to higher implementation rates response in the interest of time, i will just say for those policies that are designed, you know, to drive undocumented immigrants out of the country or underground or to self-deport eg sb 1070. they are not having an impact on daca. they are not driving undocumented youth away from the country to the point where they are not even up here to apply. there's absolutely no relationship. for the chris coback of the world, sorry, but what you're doing is not having an effect on daca. here main conclusion, because i think i went past my time. daca is not performing evenly across the country. 13 states plus district of columbia are places where we have identified our underperforming and with the underperformance is statistically significant. central americans, asian, european and others are statistically significantly more likely to be denied than the reference group which is mexican born applicants. because again, they are the least likely to be denied. males are 1.4 times more likely to be denied than females. and we see this result alsoer intersect with age. older applicants statistically more likely to be denied than younger. and while immigrant serving organizations are having a measurable effect, the results that we sort of find are unclear. and lastly, this is a generally sort of take away. a lot has been done with daca so far. a lot of work remains. [applause] [inaudible conversations] all right. thank you so much. let me introduce our great panel we have to discuss interesting findings. in addition to tom, next to him we have are we one of the founding member of the drm action coalition. and finally awe degree singer, senior fellow in the metropolitan policy program. i want to start with you turning from the data it to the more personal narrative. as somebody who received daca what has the status meant to you and the dreamer community as whole? >> yeah. of course. so i think being not only a dreamer but an advocate is a little bit different than the overall population of the dreamers. but to me i think that it was more than a personal benefit. it was a win. because of so many years of advocacies, and so many years of, you know, sort of trying to figure out how to come out of the shadow and thing the doings so we can put a face to the undocumented community. it was definitely a win for us. but also i guess in the personal level, you know, having a family that targeted by joe arpaio and anything else in arizona, having a mother that wasn't to be work because of the rate she was in when joe arpaio of doing his thing. it was very -- i guess it impacted me so much that i was able to get a job and contribute a lot more to the household. but again, it just like, you know, some of the quotes you showed it was just interesting to me that the same day that i was able to get an offer for a job, exact same day i come home and immigration knocks on my door. right, and try to take my mother and my brother. and so it kind of just shows that it's important to have this. it's sort of a step forward. but at the same time for us, you know, we can't focus on the win we have on a personal level. we have a lot more wins to fight. a lot more battles we need to get through so our families families are nothing but sufficient. i'm not okay with just having a job. i need to have my family with me to make sure that i am as happy as i can be. >> hard to follow that up. since you work with the same data. i know, you have been interviewing service providers and applicants. what jumps at you from the data? >> yeah, sure. so tom and i have been playing around with the same data in different ways. i have some developed a profile of the people who have applied for daca so far. we have about 87% of all accepted application in the data set. they're not estimates. they represent real people. it allows us to know more about the population and the characteristic of the population . we don't yet know much about the people who have not applied. by definition it's an el losive population. the data we have provides a window to this daca or dream group. and the portrait is still emerging. the program is ongoing, applications are still being accepted and adjudicated. this is just a snapshot in time. more than half of those estimated to be immediately eligible have applied. the success rate is very high. nearly equal number of young men and women have applied. women slightly older. by my count there's 192 companies represented. the vast majority are 75% are from mexico. central meshes make up another 10% of the total. with el calf and that order are the four largest groups. asians comprise about 4% of the total. south dakota korea ranks fifth. it stands out. philippines, india, and pakistan are the next three largest groups and notably china is not on the list of the top 25. including any country with more than 1,000 applications. and applicants and europeans make up 1% each. poland and nigh nigeria are the largest group there. they live in every state. 28% in california, another 18% in texas. along with new york, illinois those four states have more than half of all daca applicants. and the most some of the most interesting thing about the group have to do with the age. a large share of teens, high school age, a time when we are making important transition to adulthood, driver's license, graduating from high school, applying for jobs, perhaps applying for college or joining the military. these applicants are relatively young. more than a third or 36% were 18 or younger when they applied. only 24% were 24 years of age or older and in the middle 19 to 23-year-old larger group of 40%. so they are relatively young and young when they arrived. two-thirds of them. ten years of age or years older. one-third were five years old or younger. so this is a very group that have has been in the u.s. far long time. the majority have been in the united states for a decade or more. that's important. they have spent a good portion of their life in the united states. another thing. i think her comments to this, because many of them came here as young people, they are likely to be in once they get daca, they are likely to have different status from other people in the household, younger or -- including parents and other adults. so this is the big discussion that is also brewing about how to handle this. >> we can get in to the oh stuff later. >> i'll tell you a couple of -- i've been interviewing organizations that are implementing helping people apply for daca, and there is three main things i've been hearing. i'll talk about them more, i mean, when we have faller discussion. eye don't want to take much too much time. i have an sight to pace and trends in application and tampering of daca application. what makes a case easy, what makes a case hard. insight in to the population that is not applying not being served either. and the third thing that has been enlightening is the staff at the non-profit who are running clinics who are providing legal services, many of them are lawyers, are very much defining the method of documenting and undocumented status. and so this is a very important thing that is happening organically in different places. piece are strategizing perhaps with groups that they're associated with, but this is a really important part of the process when you think about a large legalization program and the meaning of documenting continuous residents in the united states. >> all right. so what we're told. i know, you have been putting together one of the most wide ranging survey of undocumented youth. those eligible and those applied. tell us a bit about the survey and what you have found. >> sure. july 1, we launched a national survey of daca eligible young adults. 18 to 31. and in the six weeks since we launched the survey, 2,000 young adults have taken the survey. essentially those young people come from 38 states, 41% are male. 59 are female. roughly a third of the respondent have a high school degree or less. a third have some college. a third of them have a college degree between an aa and professional degree. today my colleaguer have -- in collaboration with the immigration policy center and the center for the study of immigrant integrations -- and so i want to briefly share some of those findings with you all. what we're focusing on is the roughly 1400. i guess 140 14- 02 of the survey responders have received daca. and these are the young people i'm going talk about. so we're finding strong evidence that daca resip gent are benefiting from increased access to the american dream. for example, 61% of those young people reported they have a new job since daca. 61% now have driver's licenses. 54% have a bank account. and 38 percent have obtained a credit card. as we all know daca's benefit are only temporary and partial. daca recipients want further social integration. they feel american and want to be full americans. and overwhelming number of the respondents. 94% of them said if given a chance to receive citizenship they would. there's another side to the story. tom alluded and erica also did. over the last several years, immigrant communities have witnessed a shrinking of rights, and increase enforcement efforts. right, such that some 1100 people have a day have been deported over the last several years. that's undoubtly had effects. nearly 50%. one out of every two of our respondents all right report that they worry all the time or most of the time that a family member or friend will be deported. emergency room two-thirds of them know somebody that has been deported. 14% of them have a parent or siblings deported. and another 57 percent know a friend, neighbor, coworker, or somebody else in their who has been deported. indeed daca recipient don't live in a vacuum. they are part of family and communities and their fates are tied to what happened to their parents, to their neighbors. , and so forth. overwhelmry respondent ends indicated their families would benefit from immigration reform. these numbers are staggering. 86% said their mother would benefit. 75% reported their father would benefit from immigration reform. 62% reported a siblings would benefit from immigration reform. and 60% said that another family member would benefit from immigration reform. so the story here is one of important although partial access to the american dream. whether we have a lot of work to do. >> let me bring you in here to weigh on what you heard. >> well, i mean, the there's so much. in term of the survey. i think it's one of the next steps at least from a research perspective. in term how we can integrate daca and how it performed in the first year and undocumented youth are doing with daca. with the broader immigration reform debate is to actually figure out what undocumented youth are doing with their daca status. this is something we would refer to as the counter factual in casual inference. this is what is legalization happens. and so, you know, all of those questions and answers that mentioned in the survey are incredibly telling and speak to the urgency and need for immigration reform. something that a lot of undocumented youth who i've talked to kind of share is this motivation to use their daca status to prove something. to prove to whoever is out there they are fully american, as phil said, in every sense of the word except in paper. and that they can actually use this status to succeed and succeed beyond expectations. and so that is something that i get from are burr tow's comments here. and using daca and the new status that is undocumented youth have ooze evidence for why we need a broader path to citizenship is the next step in research that can potentially inform policy. erica's story, i mean, these are heart breaking stories. i only met you today. i saw the youtube video. these are things that traumatize and humanize the undocumented immigrant experience. and it, you know, stories like yours, i am not afraid to say that they invoke emotions. i would cry if you weren't looking at me. these are things that in the 21st century in 2013, i think our immigration policies should not be geared toward. which is separating families. separating american families. and we need team up. we have can colot with the data. painting a profile. identifying unmet need. i think that's a new research sort of opportunity moving forward. especially when it comes to program evaluation comparing the outreach strategy of organizations to identify practices. if it represents the sort of precursor to a broader legalization program than getting this right means potentially getting it right for 11 million undocumented immigrants. >> yeah. that's great. i think that cig ways nicely. let take a deeper dig. i think you identified two things. the profile and the organization. solet start with the profile. i'm struck by the differences what groups are applying and what groups are denying. what are the obstacles keeping people in possibly different communities from fully access daca? i'll open it up for everybody. >> i'll take a stab at it. i think what i'm hearing and reading from other people's work is that there are a couple of key things. one, is that a lot of people don't realize that they qualify for daca. even though the criteria are, you know, -- we often find people don't necessarily take that in and think they'll be able to do it. that's one thing. other people may not especially if they are young, may not realize they are undocumented. and i think some parents shield their children from nap once they start going through these life course moments like applying for things, like a driver's license or seeing their siblings do that. they understand it. that's another thing. the fee, the cost of applying is $465. if you're young, if you're not working, or if you're working in a very low wage job and your parents are too, it may take awhile to scrape together the money to apply. i think that's another thing. and then the final thing, which is maybe the biggest is that people don't feel like they have the reck with documentation strategy to prove they have been count usely resident in the united. so the requirement is that you had to be present since june 15th, 2007. so, you know. the older you are, the harder it is to show it on a regular basis. that may be also why we're seeing this population skew young. [inaudible] >> her last comment. ic it's no mistake those who got daca really were the younger dreamers. those in school. those who hadless of a trouble proving continuous residents. providing all the documentation needed. i think what we're seeing is for those who haven't applied and those late in aplaying is those who have been out of school for any number of years, those who are growing older, and having responsibilities in their household and communities that it's a much tougher effort to provide all that documentation necessary. i would just add -- yes. i would add that part of the evidence area requirement are continuous residentially sincerity. there's also a very basic sort of requirement of establishing some sort of nationallalty. who is undocumented here in the united. part of me undocument survey, the survey for undocumented youth ask a set of daca related question. there are some who identify not having a birth certificate is one of the reasons they haven't applied for daca. so when we look at the numbers and see that the denial rate from mexican born app can't significantly lower. well, there is a very good reason for it. and that has to do with the work of the mexican consulate. i was able to speak with folks from the mexican consulate for this, you know, not for this project, but the panel, to get some background information, we're talking about the mexican consulate across the country increasing staff, increasing hours, increased seability. specifically, for those daca eligible youth who go to the consulate and say i'm putting my application together. i need my birth certificate. there's even an effort right now among the mexican government to try to facility that process online. to make getting a birth certificate and acquiring those identity documents much easier. i have not heard the same for other consulates. and so so yeah. >> i would just, i mean, i'm not an expert on the numbers. i would say that, i mean, at my job i have applications and work with some of the organizations that and what i noted is that sometimes people in the commune drink afraid of going a lawyer or don't know there's free services. and so sort of defining those two leaves people not even trying to apply. because, you know, we are afraid of applying for anything on immigration without being consulted by a lawyer or even in the community there's a lot of -- [inaudible] i think that's the big one as well. a lot of people at consulate things like oh my god, i didn't know thfts free ways of doing this. i went to a lawyer and they were charging me $2,000. there's a lot of, you know, very high fees to even just apply. plus you have the $465. >> that's great. ting gives a good sense of the overall the and mexican applicants might be more likely to apply. but what is going on in the asia and particularly african communities? we are seeing such low numbers? >> so i can start with asian community. that a few month ago when the first batch of daca were being released. we south korea in particular being high on the list. in the l.a. area where there's arguably the largest pocket of chinese national, and the chinese i dids a per are a. there was a sense among serving organization in the l.a. area that more outreach needed to be in mandrin or cantonese to target specifically chinese daca eligible use. they got that because korean ethnic media was doing a great job just like spanish. not just informing people. let's not forget the best recruiters are those who have gone through the process and speak to the process. and early on, in another batch of data i received, i was able to map the geography of chinese applicants in the l.a. area specifically. it was very clear under representation. what it meant is advocacy organization in the area reaching tout chinese ethnic media to try to replicate the same model that spanningish language media employmented. let talk people through the process. current language media have done that. chinese language media tried to do that, but numbers do not show it's been very successful. in term of african born applicants, i have nothing to say except speculation which is that one african born of a cant, in term of language, diversity, i think of asian language diversity. it's pretty complex. if we think about the african continent. the language diversity is exponentially more diverse. when we think about different outreach strategies, lang wanl at -- culturally specific and sensitive outreach strategy. i haven't heard of many organizations specifically focused on africa daca applicants. and those groups that have the capacity to put some programs together, well, you'll be leaders as far as i can tell. >> i echo some of the things tom said. a lot is speculation because we're talking to different people at different point in time. it's not been very systemic yet. i think tom is right that the outreach that has happened or not happened to different groups is one of the determining factor and the type of outreach and the idea of having testimonial and success stories play a bigger role. it's very important. i think also when you look at the approval rate by country of origin and region of origin, there's another group that is very low. those from the caribbean. it seems like the outreach and coordination and information flow there may also, you know, there's a lot of language. several languages. there's a lot of different countries. there's some clustering of these groups in the country, but, you know, they're a small group. another opportunity for greater outreach. >> thing is a good segue to talk about serving knob profit and advocacy group. from -- we certainly know very important to integration. i think what i'm hearing is kind of a mix of we know they are important and organizations means more applications. but, you know, talk to us more about what role they're playing here and the challenges they are facing. it's statistically correct. [laughter] i think that i can tell you when we start doing the outreach in arizona with the arizona dream on coalition and -- we were able to get, i mean, we're trying to serve about 100 to 200 people. we didn't have as much as a capacity to serve more. so we have a surprise with the fact we filled an entire auditorium of the school. they were hundreds and hundreds of people that were trying apply, what we found is not at love those folks ended up applying. because they, you know, they broader documentation they had, you know. they brought whatever they could. when they went back home many didn't necessarily have, you know, the check already or will were some pieces they didn't have yet. when they go home they say i forgot i had it there and don't know i have to have a birth certificate or a passport. it's a challenge to some follow up with them. you follow up with them. many times they will tell you they are trying to raise the money and so on and so forth. there's at love, you know, arizona i can say only mostly from the latino community. we don't have a big, you know, population of the asian community or any others. but there is still at love programs being developed. that are -- but the national is called -- >> we own the dream. >> yeah. we own the dream right now like you mentioned before. putting out apps. putting out videos. we are putting out everything we can to reach people through social media. we're also looking for more feedback how to best serve other population and how best to have people actually apply and not just come and take the information with them. >> i think going back to the sky level view. we look at the immigrant serving non-profit in the sample. there's a wide distribution in term of the experience that the organizations have. and so when we sort look specifically at the founding or want to make sure the organizations were around prior to the announcement of daca. for statistical reason. we see that overwhelmingly about 91% of all of the, you know, 2100 or so organizations in oure diferlgt organizations we can consult them up in a lot of ways and expect how we cut them up may be two very different outcomes. some more positive than others less positive. but there's another thing. at love organizations are densely packed together especially places like los angeles and new york. something i heard there's not a lot of sort of cooperation between organizations to coordinate undaca-related services. working on cir, and working with lots of organizations and lots of different interests i have learned how dpiflt it is to bring them together to share similar objective. down the road -- may be something that improves daca implementation. i think the capacity and resources issue is a major one. you know, this is something that developed over the last year to the announcement was a little over the year ago staffing up and trying to figure out how to serve the population has been a challenge. we have also seen a tamper of applications. and now the question is how to reach people that are harder to reach whether it's geographically or national origin group or language group that, you know, other than spanish, basically. and i think one of the important things is that a lot of the people who have come through the application process already have had some ties to other institutions and organizations. there's been a lot of recruitment through school and higher ed programs. there are people trying to work through other organizations in order to, you know, reach people who may not otherwise reach. but i think there are -- as we continue going to be harder and harder to reach people because some people may have given up already. [inaudible] >> very shortly. i don't know i have anything specific to add to the excellent comments. if we look at it from even more altitude a couple of things stand out. over the last several years as congress has been unable topaz any sort of immigration reform. what we have seen is states and counties taking upon themselves to pass their own sort of immigration reform. baa with we have seen across the country is the uneven geography of immigration policy and practice. what we have also seen to overlay on top of that is imgrants are moving to very different what scholars call new destination area. so spread across the united. i think finally there's also an uneven distribution of kind of local level infrastructure when it comes to immigrant serving organization and the capacity to respond to the need of immigrant young people in their families. >> so thing is a segue to a final question before going to the audience response putting on your policy maker hat, both for daca going forward and if daca is the blueprint for larger legalization program. what recommendations do you have for policy makers, advocate, service providers, whatever level. i'm asking each of you. >> i think the first is to identify unmet needs which i'll report begins to do it's not the final word. it begins to do that. where to whom it's needed. that's the first step for service providers and u.s. cis local engagement team to think about the places strategically where they should be. those people who they are targeting so they can come up not only language appropriate event but also appropriate informational material to distribute. i think that's one sort of critical thing as it relates to daca. but two the policy recommendation, i mean, past immigration reform and the path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. it mean we won't talk about daca at this point next year. we talk about how to implement a larger and more difficult task. >> i think i would second his comment and especially the second. in the meantime, i think we have certainly found out that cost is a huge barrier. i said it a few month ago when i was here. i think we need to be talking about a flat family fee. in several families, fraternities have to come up with money for -- as she talked about. $465 for one child but if i they have two, three, four children, on top of that have to pay lawyer's fee. a flat family fee would really help to move a lot more young people through the pipeline. second, daca has done a good job at providing multiple educational pathways. ged programs, for example, what we're seeing across the country is in a lot of places in new york recently responded to this is there are not enough seed in the programs. so thofm these programs there's an opportunity available they're underfounded. and we need to figure out how to provide more resources in to these alternative education programs. we've been talking about immigration reform for awhile. it's close this year. we hope that we really move it past the goal line. in the meantime, young people and their families have to carry out their every day lives. how do we think about integrating them to the community and a broader level? work through internship, apprenticeships, through opportunities to legally engage in the they to day life of the community. finally, as we talk about issue of enforcement and deportation and family being separated, many of the young people that are going through daca are also transitioning in to adult hollywood with very, very stressed mental and emotional health. how do we think about mobilizing the mental health community to address some of these really important needs? >> so, i mean, to repeat to said. adding one more thing in term of implementation. i think it would be important to figure out ways to get more folks to get the ged in different states. i think that, i mean, i don't know looking at the data before i think one of the republicans that a lot of older folks are not necessarily applying as much. i think it has a lot to do with not having a ged. you can apply and good to go. older folks definitely i found a lot of community members that are trying to figure out where to get the ged. because there's not as much outreach to try to do that as well. it's a challenge. in term of policy immigration reform and so forth. we're going keep pushing as -- we're still, you know, still very targeted. i don't have a driver's license. i cannot get one in arizona. it's like i'm half dacamented. my mother is still in deportation proceedings. we only have about now five months to see what is going to be happening next year. she was gavin one year stay. as undacamented with we're going to keep pushing not only congress but the president as well to stop the deportation. you know, for us, it's not black and white. it's not immigration path or not. it's about, you know, there's no other way in congress we are going to search for something bigger in term of daca. perhapses for parent or people that are not necessarily dreamers. people didn't believe we could it with dreamers and we pushed and proved wrong and able to push the president to do this. and so there is a way, you know, we're going of course push congress for a longer term. there is no question. at the same time we also have urgency. and reality is that, you know, i'm not going to live -- i'm going to push for it either way i can. >> to add to the comments my fellow panelists have made. i guess i would say that if daca has been a kind of test for uscif for a broader legalization program if it -- not if, when we extend legalization to many more people in this country. it's important to take note of what happened already. the uscis has been keeping up with the application process. the fact they have made decisions on 75% of them already. it's a rolling process. everybody people are submitting and every day being adjudicated. i think it's important note. it's going really ramp up in the future. and i think the reason why that is important qualityively and in the live of people is probably the number one reason people are applying to get work off authorization. and the young, you know, the longer gap between applying and getting your card, you know, the harder it makes having they hold the key to what this process is going to look like. they know on the ground what works and what doesn't work. i think that's a big door we have to walk through. >> one thing i forgot to mention. they have been great in term of providing data. those updates they give about these national view and the data they have given. to the extend we can help as researchers make daca work better. we need better data. i think with sort of you know what is happened recently with data analysis, this is the age of big data. and they have a wealthy of it that can help us identify how to make this process better. if they can be more forth coming with data. we can do a better job. but in the absence of that, those service providers can also provide for us a wealth of information. thinking about the intake survey that these organizations do, there can be very specific questions related to not just the applicant but who the applicant knows so we can actually map out the networking of where those who haven't been serve bid daca are. that's a form of networking analysis. but those organizations, you know, in the absence of cooperation can be the to call point for the data necessary to help improve the program down the road. i stay because i know some of the immigrant organizations are working here. [inaudible] it's more of a policy question i'm not privy to whether or not the president can do this. they mentioned earlier a lot of daca people feel that this is not enough. of course, congress needs to approve immigration reform. up with and for all. my question from a policy perspective, can the president just like he was pressured to authorizing daca last year. can he effects tent to the parent of the dreamers or in other words what the limits to what he can or cannot do while congress decide whether or not they'll pass immigration reform this year. thank you. >> this is sort of my thinking we have been able a lot of immigrant youth organization. we've been to be actually, you know, stop deportation with something called a memo -- or [inaudible] we've been to be fight a lot of cases just like with my mom. we have been able to stop deportation one by one. and takes a lot of pressure and, you know, people to call immigration and do this kind of thing. and so our thinking and we sort of think through this. we're not going stay without anything. people are family can be deported. daca was sort of the same thing we try to get. it was a discretion for dreamers. now, i mean, we look for the way to do it . e with can talk to lawyers like the deferred action. we think we can expand something where the discretion can be granted to our parents and our older siblings sort of any the same way. i guess, you know. >> what i would say is that one thing that can certainly be done is stop the deportation. but i also want to say from my perspective the book is not closed on with 2013 for immigration reform. the house is coming back next month, and it look like there's increasing pressure on how republicans is more of them are coming forward and supporting immigration reform. i think we have a good change this year to push forward some really important legislation that include a pathway. and- you know, to me that's the most important thing. i think that many people are of the thinking that it can still be done. >> great. >> great dinner to the panelists for the pre-event. i'm with the national latino institute for reproductive health. the immigrant latino we work with. they were tremendously excited when the program was announced. for the first time they felt their contribution were being recognize and invited to come forward and participate in society. unfortunately, a few weeks later the u.s. department of the health and human services issued a rule noted unlike others daca recipient are not present effectively shutting them out for med -- [inaudible] , you know, unfortunately the tremendous benefit of data. there was a lot of disappointment they were looking forward to getting health insurance for the first time. being to be pay to the system. and so there's a lot of talk about integration. i was wondering for you could speak to some of the how -- in term of the program and integration what impact -- in some of the communities and some of these were coming have from the restriction on health care and daca have been -- [inaudible] >> i think i want to take a stab in thinking about this. in the survey i mentioned i'm wrapping up a third year study. i'm following up 150 in los angeles since 2003. i started without broad sober logical question about educational attainment, jobs, civic and political participation. enone thing i found overwhelmingly that i didn't expect was that almost to the person of those young people i talked to. these are young adults that come to the u.s. before the age of 12 who have grown up here. at love people we're talking about today. almost to the person they described mental and physical manifestation of stress. chronic headache, chronic tooth ache. trouble sleeping, trouble getting out of bed. eating problems, thought offed is, attemptedded is. real, real intense problems. and i think that -- this segment of the population that is also economically challenged doesn't have access to health care but having enormous needs. i think it's something that needs to be changed. >> i would say that part of the broader immigration reform debate has been around health access for undocumented and newly -- it's an upclimb climb. despite what the findings suggest and the absolute moral impartive of serving this community. and meeting the health needs of the community, we see health access being a bargaining chip and here's an example in twik -- 2006 with the senate bill boxer introduced an amendment that we can create an state impact fund we can take money from the application from the path of citizenship and distribute that to states to help some of the cost of health services, for example. instead of taking the must be away from the health and increase of overall costs of applying for this path to citizenship. and so at the end of the day, if we're talking about undocument use who are negatively impacted in term of health, and if they do sort of fall to the lower income category. access to health may be unattainment. it may be there, but may be un attainable based on the high cost. in the senate bill round that language was clearly excluded. barbara boxer's office was considering the amendment before they shut the down on the senate bill. we know in the house, you know, the affordable care act is a rallying against all things obama in the house with the 40th or 50th on bureaucracy. so policy wide it's an uphill climb. >> i think we have time for one more question. >> thank you. my name is -- [inaudible] i'm a professor at arizona state university doing research on immigration poll. i'm here at the directing the -- [inaudible] i say that in case people are looking for research funding and want to talk to me. [laughter] yeah, hi. [laughter] one of the things i'm finding works i'm doing on discretion is on the number of people who are not eligible for discretion because of the 1996 laws and what has been defined. i'm speculating, but it's only speculation and i would love to hear your thought that part of the reason why the denial rate has been so low is for daca had been a, they have done a good job of putting up on the website what makes you eligible and not eligible. don't bother applying for you have a dui. and the agency, the non-profit are working with people in saying you're not going to get it. don't come -- because are nervous. i'm assuming there's some hard conversations where advocates are saying you're probably not going qualify. i would love to hear about research grown you find that research. also how you respond to the opponent of daca who are saying everybody is getting it. so this isn't really a fair kind of thing. i'm guessing what is happening is that the earlier process is reading out people who would not qualify. but like i said, it's pure speculation on our part. i'm wondering for there's time for a second point is in the data you have, do you have other information on education, family occupation, anything else like that that gets you to do -- in your work? >> yeah. >> yeah. i figured from the qualitative part. >> sure. i think your hunches are the same as mine. it's hard get a bigger perspective on it. it it does seem to be that the slam deng have gone through are going through and that people who even themselves think they may not qualify are probably holding back. what i do have in the paper -- in the brookings paper there's a table of the top countries of birth, and you can see the share of all app cants from each country that were approved. and there you can see that some of the lowest apriewfl rates from nonspanish speaking countries. and, you know, jamie can it's not like all jamaican applicants. it's all adjudicated. so there is something about maybe people flying so low on this. it brings down their success rate. just to add to her point. in term of -- try to interpret the finding related to the denial rate for men versus women and how that increases with age. and so fits neatly within the sociological phenomena of criminality among men. and right within that sort of age frame too. and so this isn't to say large pool of criminal males in the sample of daca applicants. we're talking about, you know, tenths of percentages here. because there's a sort of disproportionate number of males who are denied and increases with age the issues yolingses on the team point to the sociological reality of sort of criminality in the united states. .. >> i certainly support a greater love all of data but in the meantime we your getting some of aggregate data on these important questions. i would be happy to talk to you more about that. >> that is a good place to leave it. i just want to reiterate this is just the beginning of the conversation with the trends we have highlighted today or the trend or approval of what happens to people going forward. we will have you back to continue the conversation. please join me in giving a round of applause. [applause] >> continues to be one of the department of defense top priorities for carver's service member deserves a safe environment in which they are free of from sexual harassment or assault we must continue to improve our response programs. it may secretary hegel strength of our programs in the areas of commander accountability victim advocacy and safety. today the secretary directed the immediate implementation of the following additional measures to improve victim support, strengthen pre-trial investigations, enhance oversight, make prevention response efforts more consistent across military services. first, creating a legal advocacy program to provide a legal representation to sexual assault victims throughout the judicial process. next coming insuring all pre-trial investigative hearings and related charges conducted. third, providing commanders of options accused of sexual assaults in order to eliminate contact law respecting the rights of those victims or the accused. requiring the officer within the chain of command shows the timely follow-up reports of responses. directing dod to evaluate closed sexual assault evaluations. standardizing prohibition on inappropriate behavior between recruiters and traders across dod and finally, developing changes to the manual to let victims give input during the court-martial. follow these measures give rights and protection and legal support to ensure that a sexual assault proceedings are conducted fairly and professionally. and for fiscal year 2013 this panel is reviewing to investigate, prosecute and adjudicate crimes involving sexual assaults under the uniform code of military justice. the secretary has met with members and will closely review the recommendations. sexual assaults is a state on the men and women to serve our country as well as a disciplining competion of our forces. this must be stamped out. secretary hegel will continue to meet weekly with the senior leadership team to personally review these efforts to ensure the directors and programs are being implemented effectively and the department will work closely with both congress and the white house to eliminate sexual assault in the united states military. we are all accountable to fix this problem and we will do so together. his decision in very much supported all the time. there were other sayings attributed to her that i wish they could be back over they best belonged but she honestly believed her husband would be acquitted in a very proud when he was then she said she knew it would happen. she knew it. risk their own lives. hosted by the cato institute in washington d.c., this is an hour and a half. >> [inaudible conversations]ute. wrote:everybody to the cato institute i live from the center of global prosperity theo since the beginning of then hasb sheerur immigration is a burning public policy issue in washington for the first time in decades the united s states is considering a major reform and how itimmigran. deals of the immigrants. the ensuing debate of reform are welcome, but the fact is isliticians are writing very light -- relate to the issue because in this country there is the gap between restrictive laws and the reality of immigration with ecomicp that reflects economic and social fact that there are millions ofns americans and millions of immigrants from mexico and central america of that wish wi to work together to engage in peaceful and voluntary change exchange but not legally allowed to do so. that inconsistency has produced problems associated with legal immigration. pro many serious problems imagines. the prospects of reform have also stimulated the debate about econic andral have jobs? what does the evidence say about the extent to which immigrants are assimilating into american culture in recent decades? are immigrants and net drain or contributors to the welfare state and did they mainly come here to today many come here? impact of immigration is something that has been debated. what should we expect from increased legal immigration in that regard first is the status quo? these are legitimate questions that go to the heart of one's worldviews on such issues as in equality and fairness the proper role of the state in regulating business and labor, cultural and national identity issues, and fiscal policy just to name a few issues so it's no wonder the sudden interest on the part of republicans and democrats to address this issue has caused heated exchanges exaggerated claims come to and some amount of nastiness. that is why i am pleased today to be able to host a forum for a book that takes a balanced look at a wide range of issues that are being discussed today. the book comcast "global crossings" immigration, civilization and america by alvaro vargas llosa comes at a perfect moment and it puts immigration in historical context showing how so much of the debate today is not actually new in american politics and that we can be guided by a lot of american experience, long american experience. it's better to let the author talk to us about that. my good friend alvaro vargas llosa is the senior fellow at the center for global prosperity at the independent institute who publishes -- who has published this book. he has been a nationally syndicated columnist for the "washington post" writers group. he has been the author of numerous books including the che guevara risk and the guide to perfect latin american idiot which was a bestseller in the spanish edition in latin america. he is a big what has in his columns that appear throughout latin america every week and has contributed to leading newspapers in the united states. he has been a board member of the "miami herald" publishing company and an op-ed page editor and columnist for the "miami herald." i could go on and on that i would say one more thing. he has also been one of the great champions of liberty in latin america, very present in all of the most important places on the right side of the issue i believe in with this book i could say in the americas. please help me welcome alvaro vargas llosa. [applause] >> thank you very much ian for that wonderful and generous presentation and thank you to the cato institute for hosting this and alex for being so kind and helping put it together. we have been asked why did i write this book? why was i interested in this topic? and welcome to there are several reasons. perhaps one of them has to do with diet i guess identity problem. i have been called a spaniard in peru. i have then called a pejorative term for south american. i've been called a pakistani in london where i was based for a while and now i m. called spanish, liberian which means spaniard so i don't really know where i belong and who i am but i guess it's probably a good enough reason to explore this important issue today. so let me tell you a little bit about what i do in this book. what i do is i take on all the different myths that i have seen over the years that are really driving this discussion and this debate, including the current discussion in the senate and soon in the house as well. about immigration reform. i won't cover all of that but i will share with you a few and give you my perspective on them and i hope that this will help at least clarify some of the misinformation that is out there it's really quite striking. one first myths and all i am going to say i have heard many people say, people with all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of places. i didn't make any of this up. one argument basically says we are getting the wrong kinds of immigrants and we used to get the right kind of immigrants. i'm not anti-immigration. i'm just against this current type of them a grant that getting today. the answer to that is the united states always got the wrong kind of immigrants. that has always been the case. the variety of immigrants sources and types of immigration that this country has received in the last two centuries, two and half centuries is simply astounding. of course between 1830 in 1880 yes it was mostly northern europeans but between 1880 and 1920 it was all about southern europeans and eastern europeans in central europeans had nothing to do with northern europeans. they look different in the different cultures. they were the mexicans of yesteryear and of course after that you had an and even before that you had people from asia. you have the chinese with with the gold rush and the chinese in the early 20th century and yes you had spent -- hispanics and you had indians after 1965 because of the changes that evolved that triggered an unintended consequence so there has always been the wrong kind of immigrant in united dates. it's simply not true. another important myth says that the u.s. is getting a disproportionate number of immigrants. just this morning on a radio show i heard we are getting more than any other country in the world. they are all wanting to come here and they don't want to go to other countries. again, but this is very silly. about 3% of the world population is made up of first-generation immigrants and illegal immigrants constitute about one sixth of the immigrants that travel from one place to another every year. so the total number of immigrants every year is about 215 and the total number of illegal immigrants about 30 million. the u.s. gets in terms of just illegal immigrants one sixth of 1% of its population so clearly a much smaller proportion than any other country is getting. so again it's not sure that the u.s. is getting a disproportionate number of immigrants. this is a worldwide phenomenon and other countries are relatively getting more immigrants than the united states, undocumented immigrants into the united states. another myth says that the only motive behind immigration is poverty. why should we in the united states solve world poverty? we have enough poor of our own. let us take care of our own and let's not solve world poverty. that is not true. that's not the only motive behind migration and in fact the poorest of the poor almost never migrate from one country to another. they migrate within the borders of their own country. let's take europe. until the 1980s, early 1980s europe was a source of migration of outmigration i mean, people leaving europe and that was a wealthy and prosperous continent before they got into this mess which is a different story. germany, the richest among the rich and europe was exporting half a million people every year until the 1980s. so clearly the motivation for that was not poverty. south korea has a significant number of immigrants or immigrants to come to the united states. that is a rich country. bangladeshi women who are very poor, the poorest among the poor , by great even in asia which is the continent that has the greatest number of migrants every year. so i could go on and on and on. what are the motives? do they very? yes of course great economic conditions are part of the story but you have everything including depressed conditions at home politically institutionally and economically. family ties occupational preference adventure, all sorts of different reasons for migrating. historical ties have a lot to do with it as well. the u.s. has historically been entangled around the world in conflicts and all sorts of exchanges, sometimes friendly and sometimes not so friendly and that is created conditions for permanent migration. there has been a significant bit of immigration to the united states as we all know and that has to do with the involvement in the war at the end of the 19th century and also with the encouragement that the united states gave to filipinos to come to the united states to start including a special program set up after the second world war for filipino notices. all those were signals that the u.s. sent saying it's okay to come. we recognize we are bound together succumb to the united states. mexican migration, the origin of mexican migration it to the united states is not poor mexicans wanting a better life in the united states. it was u.s. business, needing to replace eastern europeans. first japanese japanese workers in an eastern european workers in the early 20th century so they went to mexico and asked for mexican workers and mexican worker started coming to the united states to work particularly in railroad construction. all these historical ties have a lot to do with it as well. another important myth is the fact that there has never been any hostility to immigration in the united states. we have always been a country of immigrants and we have always welcome -- welcomed immigrants. we have always valued people coming from oversees to contribute to the society and again that is not true. there has always been hostility towards immigration and of course it hasn't always taken place exactly in the same way. it's not been as intense but historically it has always been the case that there was significant hostility to immigrants. if you look at what happened in the gold rush, the chinese were the object of vilification at the time. they were frowned upon by all those who were taken native born americans who are taking part in the gold rush. the japanese at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century would office and and -- often undergo tremendous illegal restrictions. they have had to find all sorts of ways to get around the law. in the middle of the 19th century, the whole nativist movement was born with the famous know nothing party were very much hostile towards immigration and they had an impact on the government and generally the outlook of society towards immigration. so it has been the case and that is why we have seen throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century and evolving situation from the point of view of how the law address immigration. that has always been i guess an evolution towards more or a change towards more and more restriction. that reflected the mindset, the mindset that was relatively hostile. not everybody of course partook in this. not everybody was reflected in these attitudes. there has always been a force for pro-immigration opinion in the united states but what i'm trying to get at is this is not something necessarily new or very different. one thing that i think we need to understand and this is also part of the myth is that whenever there is a big disconnect between the law and reality you are going to get -- it happens with goods, it happens with services, it happens with things but it also happens with evil. you constantly hear this argument and of course i can see where they are coming from. we cannot as a country governed by the rule of law except people who violate the law. we are just not that the country. this is not something that is morally or legally accepted and yes on paper of course that's an extremely powerful argument. who can argue with that? however the problem is the law is simply not realistic, when the law does not take reality into account then you create conditions for a systematic violation of the law on a grand scale. when that happens usually something is wrong with the law. not necessarily with the nature of the people who are violating that law. it's simply the way it works. it works with all sorts of other contacts, social contacts that stem from the criminalization of things that should not be held as being criminal by the law. so the same sort of thing happens with immigrants which is why when people say there is a disproportionate number of criminals who are immigrants of course if you penalize immigrants you have just made the condition of an immigrant a conditional one. if you adjust for age there are no more criminals who are immigrant then who are native-born. it's about the same rate. there are all sorts of studies but yes you had a significant number of people in jail sometimes on the way to deportation particularly in the last few years who could have been considered criminal simply because it was criminal to be an immigrant. so, it's important to get this myth out-of-the-way if we are going to find a legal way to deal with what is a social problem having almost 12 million people operating in the shadows outside of of the law is a social problem. we just need to make sure that is addressed from the starting point of believing these people are somehow biologically criminal. these people are simply the result of the disconnect between the law and reality. another important myth has to do with culture. i heard this time and time again and i'm sure many of you have heard this. these people are culturally different. unlike the previous waves of immigrants who are culturally in tune with our values. these people are different and yet if you look at this in so many different ways you find exactly the same pattern. immigrants today are culturally in tune with us-born people, with u.s. society almost any way you look at it. if you look at religion for instance, in the last 20 years but talk about hispanics for a moment and immigrants in that period of time. 70% of them are catholic and about 23% are partisan. of the ones who call themselves catholic one fifth of them call themselves born-again which is by the way something you never hear in latin america. latin american people never describe themselves as born-again. they are describing themselves as protestants in the united states of this is clearly an effort to tell the united states that we are like you. we believe just like you. we pray just like you. if you look at family values which is something i don't think conservatives who are critical of immigration clearly understand, you will find that there is probably more inclination towards family values today among immigrants than among any other part of society. for instance, half of all households are made up of couples with children and only 13% of households are headed by a single parent against one third in the case of native-born americans. so again if we stand for values values -- family values and we want a society based on family values then this is surely a source of great comfort among immigrants. they are all about family values. if we can convince them of this which is a tough thing to do that they will say out of there having many -- too many children. i don't i that argument with a problem that the well for state is a problem with immigration. that has not been the case. the birthrate is going down and down just as it's going down and down across latin america. it's still a little bit higher among hispanic women in the united states but only 60%. just half a child more than native warren women and the trend is going down. in latin america there is this new discussion and until a few years ago of course there was a high birthrate. today it's going down in an incredible way and so those societies are beginning to face some of the issues that developed countries have been facing in terms of the rate of course contributors to the system of transfer to beneficiaries. so they are facing the same issues. no matter how you look at it, for they are culturally compatible. if you look at all those neighborhoods that they have helped regenerate and i mention a few in the book in south florida, in new york. a process called gender fixation. communities that were in a complete disaster and they have become very nice communities thanks to the efforts of hispanics particularly but that general democrats have put into this. that is a cultural side of perfect compatibility with the host nation. i will grant you this though. it is true that most culturalism has distorted things a bit and i think we would -- it would not be fair if we did not recognize that. in the early part of the 20th century there was something that used to be called americanization. friedrich hayek for instance one of our heroes of course praised americanization very much. he attributed to americanization the virtue of having values and ideas relating to the free society. and yes i think there is something to be said for americanization. there were some aspects they were that were kind of chauvinistic and i guess there were abuses but by and large it was a healthy thing. it was not so much government policy. it was just a general cultural attitudes across society that somehow created incentives for people who came to become familiar with the values of society and all of these things. it was a positive thing. that began to change in the 1960s of course when this whole new paradigm what we call multiculturalism today emerged. i don't go into a lot of detail because there's a whole chapter in the book and it's a fascinating discussion but i don't want to be sidetracked. just quickly i would say that essentially what happened was europe's decolonization after the second world war we began to look at values in a different way through relativism. we began to see values as an exchange and all values were equal. all place of looking at society and institutions were pretty much equal. that gave rise of course to a whole new way of analyzing and studying societies from the past and then from that we went on to think of minorities as collectivist entities that were somehow in need of special protection, special rights to correct an imbalance that was historicahistorica l in nature that was the legacy of past abuses. this in turn translated of course into all sorts of i guess social engineering based on ethnicity and we saw things like gerrymandering along ethnic lines and unequal and employment opportunities and positive discrimination in all sorts of things that gradually i think went beyond what was really compatible with a truly free society governed by the principle of the quality before the law. that was bound to generate a backlash at some point and of course it did but my argument is this. people who are to blame for multiculturalism are not immigrants. they are u.s. academics mostly and it was mostly something that emerged out of academia not just in in the united states but to be fair also in europe. so yeah there has been a distortion there and yes there things i myself was an immigrant here do not feel it all comfortable with but if we are going to fight multiculturalism the way to do it is not defied immigration. it's to fight the ideology behind multiculturalism. so from that and this is one way to prove that it's not immigrants that are to blame for this. i am constantly told i drove past such community and reading spanish newspapers. it used to be that way of course. it always was that way. german communities in the west what did they do? a printed german papers and they spoke german among themselves. that is what first-generation italians did and that is what nations did and sometimes they do that still. it's human nature. people want to feel they belong to something and they want to protect themselves for a little while but that doesn't stop her and sarah the process of assimilation. it's a three generation process. the first-generation make some progress in the second generation is bilingual but they speak english better than any other language we are talking about and by the third generation they don't even speak the native tongue as we say anymore. i see that among hispanics and it's really a fascinating process. that was case. that was the way it was for their times in the polls and the germans and it's always been that kind of dynamic. again just as in the past the second generation does better financially than the first-generation and until the assimilation is completed if you look at marriage beyond the community which is one way to look at this, we see the same pattern today as we saw in the past. i compared second-generation italians in the early part of the 20 century with mexican state. the rate of marriage was 17% today it's a little higher, almost 20%. by the third generation of marriage is very strong. so again very similar patterns of assimilating, assimilation. of course since you have a constant permanent inflow of first-generation hispanics it's only natural that you are going to see some pockets of i guess spanish speaking communities almost on a constant basis but that is not because they are not assimilating. it simply because -- so there is nothing to fear. they are assimilating and i think that is something that we need to embrace. so let's just go into the economy. again it's another important source of myth. i am always hearing this. we would like to have high-skilled immigrants but these low-skilled immigrants, why do we need these low-skilled immigrants? because the modern economy needs low-skilled immigrants. since the second world war we had all these imbalances that needed to be corrected through basically migration. that is why the germans signed treaties with the turks. they needed turkish workers and the spanish with the moroccans the french with the algerians and the united states with the mexicans. that's the way it works. even in a high-tech economy you certain repetitious mechanical jobs that will be part of it. somebody will have to fill those , take up those jobs and that's something that migration helps to do. do they hurt the economy? they do exactly the opposite. immigrants help enlarge the pie again help make the pie bigger. i went to one of the most prominent academic critics and even he recognizes illegal immigrants contribute $22 billion to the economy every year so we updated that data. it's a very conservative statistics and i think it's more than that but let's accept that for a moment. which we just updated his calculation and that would translate into about $36 billion today. you make that legal it probably would be increased by 2.5 times, three times almost 100 lean dollars a year and a per decade over a trillion dollars. that's a contribution to the economy by immigrants. how does the process works quite fair producers and they are consumers. when they come in at the low-end of the scale they help others move up the scale. yes they have a very tiny temporary effect on wages at the lower end. our calculaticalculati on 1.45% in others very little bit but it's a very small impact but that is offset by people who are moving up the scale and earning higher wages and also offset by the fact that immigrants help these labor-intensive industries be more productive and they help keep prices down. so as consumers everybody in society is benefiting from that. the effect is of course a very potent one, positive potent not to speak of high-skilled immigration. again how could that not be a huge contribution to the economy? one third of doctors in engineering technology sciences involve immigrants. immigrants. one fourth of nobel prize winners throughout the 20th century in the u.s. have been immigrants. immigrants made silicon valley. the silicon valley miracle between 95 and 2005 immigrants founded many companies and created half a billion jobs. there is -- it was always absurd that the rules, i hope they're going to change now but were such that the quota for h. one bbs as high-skilled visas with the exhausted on day one. as soon as it was open for applications they would be taken up because 65,000 until a few years ago because it was of greater demand. that was economic suicide on the part of united states. let's finish but touching very quickly on the issue of cost versus benefit. that's another huge myth the idea that immigrants cost a lot more than they contribute fiscally i mean. that is simply not true. there is one great study a couple of decades ago by the natural research counsel. they calculated not only the fiscal impact of legalizing immigrants now, they calculated what would happen for the next 50 years because of course as you know they are young so we would expect they would be working for the next 50 years and they calculated them at present value of those 50 years in terms of what they will put into the system or take out of the system. that concluded of course -- included children better in public school today that will come out and work for the next 50 years or you have to bring all of that into the equation. their calculation was a net cost a one-off cost present-day value of $5000 which is nothing if you weigh that against the contribution i just talked about to the economy. other studies beyond that even the net contribution without taking into account the contribution to the economy, just the fiscal impact is going to be positive in terms of generating more revenue than they are taken taken out in outlooks has written about this very forcefully. my message is basically this. we are in an age of globalization. we have one case for free trade. we can say this point that we have ideal free trade conditions across the world but we have won the intellectual case for free trade. no one speaks against free trade on an intellectual level. no one says i'm against free trade. they say i'm for free trade but and then they talk about the level playing field and all that. the intellects really won the case for free trade trade we have made the case for free immigration and it's simply not reasonable to expect that a world moving grassley towards free trade can continue to contemplate immigration and the way it is. trade in goods constitutes the equivalent of 45% of wealth gdp. about 20% of world savings are invested outside of the country where they originate and 3% of the population is first-generation immigrant. this imbalance will have to be corrected. the dynamics are pushing the world in that direction so you can either accept and embrace and channel that energy through legal channels or you can try and put barriers against it and you will be overwhelmed either because the negative effect of actually being able and managing to control this will be huge or because you will not be able to control it. by the time you accept that you realize you will have spent a lot of money and with all the side effects that come with it and trying to -- immigration is not a danger to the united states to its values to its economy to its standing in the world. it is exactly the opposite. it is i think one of the best ways to keep the united states a free country keep it up rospars country and to keep it as a model for the rest of the world. thank you very much. [applause] see thank you. our next speaker is alex. he worked at the competitive and enterprise institute on immigration issues. he has degrees in economics and economic history from george mason university. he has been an exemplary policy analyst at the cato is two and has been quite involved and very influential in the current debate on immigration. please help me welcome alex nowrasteh. [applause] >> thank you ian for that very nice introduction and thank you i'll there'll for coming talking about your fantastic book. i want to save part of the reason why free trade is accepted intellectually by so many people around the world today as opposed to 50 or 60 years ago is because of the hard work of alberto and other classical liberals around the world the united states in central and south america and everywhere around the world. that hard work i think is really paid off. we are able to do so much at the cato institute in part because people like myself are able to stand on the shoulders of intellects like alvaro and others who have forcefully argued the point for generations of thank you very much. now i want to go into some other details about this fantastic book "global crossings" some details that we weren't able to touch on in a limited amount of time that we have but one of the main issues that a lot of people raise when it comes to in the gration is they think national security. today is a different environment if you have global terrorism and we have al qaeda and issues like these and because of this we can't be as open to immigration as we were in the past because of all these issues. just like the other points made in this book that is no different from what it was 100 years ago. there was an intense terrorist campaign in the united states in the early 20th century carried out mainly by italian anarchists and communists who had different points blew up dozens and up to 100 bombs across united states targeting people like the attorney general of the united states a mitchell palmer and numerous public officials across the country at the time. people had a reaction at that point. they said we can't have this type of thing. this is a new experience. this was at a time when communists were marching across the world and having success in europe and eastern europe and the chaos in the soviet union. these people were seen as an extension of that and we needed to close their borders to block the sale. that is not different than what we hear today about islamic terrorism and other issues like that. but what is even more astonishing is how a lot of our immigration policy makes it easier for national security threats to exist, makes it easier for these problems to grow in a lot of cases increase the ability of the national security threats in these opponents of liberty across the world to more exploit their advantages by taking advantage of american immigration law. one modern example of this is in 2010 there were about a dozen some always arrested in mexico. there were rumors that they were aimed members of the al-shabaab militia which is an islamist terrorist militia based in somali. the mexican authorities in their incompetence release them early without any kind of records. there was a big for of a better word freak out in the american media. these guys are deftly coming here and coming to the united states. they're going to wreak havoc and as a result border patrol and these people were eventually apprehended or they faded away and nothing happened but the point is because american immigration enforcement because our immigration laws are so focused on keeping people out for economic reasons or for any other types of reasons a small amount of what they are pulled to do focus on legitimate threats. instead they are more concerned with asking how will an additional worker affect the wages for american tomato pickers? they're more concerned with how one additional worker will affect the labor market conditions or computer programmers in silicon valley. they are more concerned with where a high-skilled immigrants will take a conference call with her is at his home or whether that home is listed as a place of residence or as a place of work than they are about these legitimate threats that are out there. we are really concerned about this. if we think that we live in an age that is so dangerous internationally that immigration needs to be restricted and regulated okay if you believe that's true than you should argue for a total refocusing immigration away from keeping out willing workers and separating them and focus entirely on the small but real national security threats that exist. throughout history these threats have also been used to our disadvantage. think about the numerous hoops and hurdles american immigration enforcement but in the 1930s and early 1940s on scientist trying to flee europe and come to the united states to work and eventually were employed to work in a manhattan project to help win the war. there is enormous bureaucratic fear and keeping these people out because of national security. a lot of these people had ties ties to common is our alleged ties to communist. because of the fear of national security -- one of my favorite examples is there was a chinese rocket scientist. he died in 2009. he was involved with rocket research in united states in the 50s. because of the national security law that said that communist could not be employed or emigrates united states he was investigated by the fbi and they said there was enough circumstantial evidence that he had attended a communist rally 20 years before the end he was kicked out of united states and deported to communist china where he was the founder of international rocket and missile program. the entire rocket program in china is based on the internetting expertise of this immigrant to the united states who wanted to stay here and live and work but was forced back to china as a result of that. i am a libertarian and i don't leave china is an accidental threat to the united states anything like that but if you are worried about this about national security issues coming from other countries the last thing you want to do is to send talented foreigners who have come here to learn these issues back to their home countries. that's pretty much the last thing you want to do. now i think switching gears to culture and how really americans have taken a look at immigrants and treated them to the much the same throughout history. we have always been skeptical of them and compare them negatively to previous immigrants. it's a quote i thomas sowell and a recent article written on june 4 titled abstract immigrants where he writes the immigrants of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived here 100 years ago. i think he massively exaggerates the differences between immigrants today and back then. we heard a lot about these differences but what is also different or americans today. it's true multiculturalism has impacted american society to an extent and i think that's a bad ideology that we are also in a lot of ways more welcoming. americans today may say nasty things about immigrants today but let's not forget the largest mass lynching in american history's was in the 1890s in new orleans of italian immigrants by a mob of white americans that thought they had committed a crime and had gotten away with it. in in the 30s ahead matzo protestant americans going out and burning down churches catholic churches occupy by the irish burning down and destroying confidence raping the nuns inside and horrible things like this. the rhetoric today about immigration of americans who are opposed is nasty and it is gross but we don't have this level of cultural aversion violence to the extent that people are going out and doing this. americans are behaving much better in the face of immigration than they did back in the day. and i think that comes across as well. these worries about immigrants being different or totally exaggerated. the catholic example is a great one. immigrants today are majority catholic just like they weren't 100 years ago. they come from different countries in the world in different parts of the world. what is most remarkable about assimilation especially for mexican-americans and the descendents of mexican-americans is that so many of them came in illegally. they came to this country illegally and they lived for years oftentimes in the black market. the extent to which they and their children have assimilated truly in a lot of ways outpaces the tying immigrants who came legally 100 years ago who were able to live entirely within the legal market. what is truly remarkable and i think if immigration was allowed to be dashed to the extent that all had come legally they would see a better pace of assimilation. looking at it that way in realizing immigrants to come today are more un-american when they calm and they become americans faster despite having to live in the black market i think is a testament not just to the entrepreneurial and energetic spirit of immigrants today and how they want to become american but also a testament to how much american culture has influenced so many people throughout the world and how we we are still a beacon for millions of people who want to come here and want to become americans. i think this book really goes into fantastic detail about that process about the cultural process by which people become americans. it differentiated from a lot of other books out there that sociologists write about assimilation. it really describe the process. it creates a model for how it happens and it was the first time i'd read that third generation. your parents are born here and you look longingly back on that ethnic or religious identifier where your parents came from or your grandparegrandpare nts came from and that is a feature of success. that is a market success of becoming an american because because as merrick is we don't have an ethnic or racial identifier. the largest ethnic group in the united states is german. that's going to change in the near future. that is the largest group. we don't have any blood borders culture conception of being american. it's a value conception, it's a civic notion of being american and that is something that is virtually unique throughout the world and unique throughout history and what this book does is describe that in some of the best detail i have ever read anywhere in the literature and both sociology and economic academics and even in popular books made for a popular audience. for that notion i think it made me -- a steady immigration policy and sometimes i become skeptical of the way my government does things and i've become skeptical of the united states and its immigration policy but this really filled me with more enthusiasm and more hope for the future of this country and the ability to assimilate immigrants and to be a beacon than virtually any book i've read in my years of working on this topic so i highly recommend it to all of you. i couldn't recommend it more. it's a beautiful book and thank you very much for coming today. [applause] >> thank you alex. we have time for questions and if you have a question please raise your hand and wait for the microphone. identify yourself and your affiliation. so we will take the first question up here in the front, please. wait for the microphone please. >> hi. my name is stephen. i have no affiliation. i was kind of interested in this notion of low unskilled workers versus high-skilled workers as whether we want immigrants are high-skilled or low-skilled. it always seemed to me that human beings are a resource and therefore if lots of low-skilled employees is a resource because -- it doesn't mean that we don't need the high-skilled but this idea that there is only a set number of jobs for low-skilled -- look at all the people that came to new york city that were low-skilled at the turn-of-the-century area jobs were created. in other words i think there is a misconception that you look at an economy and you say well we only have this amount of need right now for low-skilled but i think the answer is if you bring more resources that is more low-skilled workers, businesses will take advantage of that low-skilled. we will produce goods that will take advantage of these low-skilled workers. even if that production doesn't constitute this it will come to exist because the incentive. what i am saying to you my question is isn't that another big misconception that you guys seemed to overlook and you always hear so many people say we only want high-skilled labor with immigration. >> thank you very much. i couldn't agree with you more. i look at it in a different way. one way to look at it is just look at it domestic league. much of this discussion would be better understood by people if they thought these issues in the domestic context. since the second world war the u.s. has added about 100 million people to the workforce if you count baby boomers in general and women in particular. if the argument is made against immigrants were true on the economic level that those 100 million people would have destroyed the u.s. economy it would have generated so much unemployment and that would be the number one issue in the united states on a permanent basis and that is not the case. in the 60 years there has never been long-term unemployment of any kind. there has been unemployment of course in times of recession but that have different causes. look at arizona for instance which is such a sensitive place for this debate. just before the bursting of the bubble i looked at unemployment rates in arizona. among the lowest in the country, 4% and is sometimes less than 4% and get 10% of the workforce was and ice and continues to be immigrant. so clearly it's not generating unemployment. it is generating growth because arizona is a wealthy state and it is helping make as i said the pie larger. that includes both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants. .. yet at the same time we had an constant inflow of immigrant. it wouldn't have been possible if immigrants were hurting that productive process. >> if i could -- yeah, if i could add one small thing to do that. i have been doing a series of debates for the last couple of times this week. i have another one on sunday. the issue is always brought up, and the analogy i like to use is if we have 100 high-skilled people in a room. 100 college grads and bring in 50 more. the economy gets bigger production increases. the rejoinder critics say you lower the average education level in the room by doing that. that really shows, i think, the danger of knowing a little bit of math and knowing not very much economics. an average of the terrible way to describe that. it's a example of the danny devito fallacy. the average height in the room will i did crease. -- decrease. nobody is actually any shorter. that's something that is pervasive. talking about public policy and the impact of immigration on the economy by using broad averages like this, really is probably one of the worst ways to do it and betray a total of lack of understanding how economics works. >> question right there. >> my name is steven. a wonderful, wholly convincing presentation. one aspect i'm wondering about the effect on the nation that immigrants leave from. are those nations any worse off? for example, it was said that when the 1848 revolution failed failed in germany. a lot of german liberals here and germany became more autocratic. today as much as we complaib in the building about economic regulation. a lot of immigrants see the united as a more fertile place for -- applying entrepreneurial skills. are countries that immigrants leave from worse off, say, in term of entrepreneurial skills? >> that's a great question. well, what -- if we look at -- forget about nation-states and borders for a moment. what are we talking about? we are talking about how people are able to create the most value. in other words, they choose their location according where they can create the most value and exchange the friewft our labor according to what we need and what we can offer. if you look at that way you'll realize people moving in or out is not going have a long-term effect of a negative kind in any way. europe was exporting people, again, until the 1980. the country were becoming more and more prosperous. they are a mess today for different reason. we had the same in latin america. people my grated to vens with a lay from countries such as peru on a consistent basis for half a century. it's a wealthier country than venezuela. look at it this way as well. chinese immigration in the united states has played a key role in the growing economic prosperity of china, they have not only of course been able to export stuff and import stuff to them. they invested in china response i think that borders and barriers are really art initial term of the impact on the economy. we all benefit from the constant circulation as people. the same is happening in europe. some of the eastern -- or central european countries have been -- in the last few years. it became legal to do so. and yet they have been becoming more and more prosperous. poland is more prosperous. it export the an incredible amount of people to spain. >> i have some small things to add. he's 100% right. about the german 1848ers. they left behind complained about the liberals leaving. americans who experienced and met them complained about the autocratic germans who are bringing their socialist notion of collectism. 1848 formed a core of what became the republican party in the antislavery wing. that's a little about dote about the feeling of immigrants destroying the core of america no matter where they're from. the issue you talk about, you know, does immigration an e leave the sending country worse off? that usually takes the frame of the brain drain. that's what people call it. they say the best and the brightest and the most energetic leave and what is left behind everybody else suffers. that's assumes a person in a country is a property of everybody else in that country. which is a terrible notion that no person who has any concept of individual freedom or liberal in the classic call sense interpretation could actually deal. what we actually see is when the opportunities to e mate, -- e grate. they go to school more. they acquire more skills in order to do better in the source -- and in a country where they want to go to. at love them end up staying. we see this in south africa, in nursing scoop. a lot of lot of people go there to try to emigrate to the utah. a lot stay behind. we see it in the philippines. the filipino nursing program. they have some of the highest percentage of nurses of any country in the world because there's a possibility to leave when they have it. as a result the rest of the pill fee knows -- filipinos gain from that. you're right it's a weird argument used by most i are restrictionist to say immigration is bad for people in poor countries when it's not true. >> i guess i would add, i mean, -- so it does the opposite. >> yes. >> george washington university. i'm one of the academics you speak of. and i, you know, i love the presentation. thank you. i'm a little bit uncomfortable with your romantic vision of assimilation and acceptance. because we know that some groups are more asimilarble than others. perhaps you tell us a little bit about how you define assimilation; right. because, you know, how many times have the third or fourth generation immigrant been asked where are you from? all right. what language do you speak. maybe you can talk about how you think about assimilation. assimilation is not only based on the desire for individual but also on the desire for the larger society to allow that person to assimilate. >> well, about the first part is are they asimilar plaiting -- assimilating, you know, immigrants assimilating today the way they did in the past? and the an is definitely yes. the research is very extensive. i looked in to this in a lot of detail. there's many ways to measure it. whether it's, you know, the use of english. or mingling with the native born population. marriage, whether it's entrepreneurship. that's another way to measure this. the idea that the lot of entrepreneurship that is home grown but these hispanics are bringing in notions, you know, to entrepreneurship. that's not true. the rate of self-employment among hispanics almost equal the rate for native born americans. almost 12%. and the number of companies that are founding every year is just amazing and astounding. what does happen is this, which is something alex touched upon in his comment in the book, which is fascinating. the first generation of course, is first generation. they are trying to find their way around and try to fit in. at the same time they have attachments back home. incidentally you should look, people ask me mexicans are tied to their home country. it didn't used to be the case. read some of the letters italian were sending back home in the 120th century. full of italian passion. expressing profound follow stall georgia and sending money back home as well. that's totally natural. the second generation moveses in the opposite destruction. they are 0 conscious of being seen by u.s. society as not really fitting in, as being somehow different they escape from their root. they reject the roots to an extent. i wouldn't -- that's not fair, you know, for everybody, but certainly there's big percentage of that. yet, by the third generation they feel so secure they go back to those roots but the a different way. a purely sentimental way they begin to -- simply because they know they are so secure and accepted by u.s. society that there's no risk in that. that's really how cinco de mayo was born. it was never a big deal in mexico. it's a big deal here. because it's a big deal here mexicans back home start thinking it's uncomfortable because mexico immigrants are more patriotic than we are. we have to assume it's a national holiday. now in mexico they are celebrating it. that was the result not of first generation immigrants. certainly not of second generation immigrants. this was third generation immigrant they thought of it about time to celebrate that. who celebrates cinco de mayo it's not just mexicos. it's americans just like irish and italian holiday. as alex said, the country is not based on the nation-state here is not based on flood. it's based open credo. it's not a nation-state it's a nation of nations. a state based on credo. i think the reality speaks to that. >> i think the cinco de mayo example is great. i can't think a more american holiday than the defeat of the french army. that's what it is. and, you know, to go in to some, you know, more. this is what he writes a chapter here about the phenomena. it's about the immigrants moving toward the main stream society and in the main stream society moves toward them. whey learned in the book everything i like to do on sundays comes from the germans. i mean, i like to go bowling. i like to go to the shooting range nap is something that germans did on sunday that was really un-american in the 1870. people were afraid of that because, you know, the old puritanical version of sunday was you sit at home and, you know, go to church. you sit at home, you read the bible, and basically don't do anything that is fun. and the germans were like, no, we're not going do that. what to do we do on sunday? go out and have picnic and have a good time. that's app example of american society and changing partly to the immigrant and their culture. it's pretty clear that the immigrants do most of the changing. >> we'll take question in the back. >> hi. i'm emily colins from the atlas networking. my question for you, it seems like there a couple of institutional thing in the government that may need to change in relation to immigrant such as the minimum wage or welfare. at love immigrants work under the minimum wage and illegal immigrants may take welfare or became legal might take more welfare. people argue it would be associate drain on society. i was wondering for you would speak on whether or not that has been discussed in the house or in the senate or your opinion on that. >> sure. the congressional budget office just came up with a report calculating what the impact in fiscal terms would be legalizing 12 million people for the next decade and beyond. they did two different calculations. you know, a -- i don't want to get too technical something called dynamic scoring. you calculate the effect on the economy will be. and you calculate what the fiscal impact of that will be. the other way of doing that is calculate the fiscal impact assume there no huge change in the economy. chevre way you look at it, the impact is beneficial. what they to is simply calculate what intake is going to be on the deficit and it's going to be a very positive impact in term of reducing the deficit. but as i said, there are many studies that very respectable studies that indicate that contribution is very positive. just thinking of one of the point. i mention the national research council. there's another one that was very significant at the time. jeffrey did a study of what happened between the 1970 and the 1990s. that's two-decade period. he came up with a figure i think very significant. the net contribution was $25 billion. but again, when you look at it, you always think that the effect of immigration on the economy goes beyond what they themselves produce and consume and they themselves pay and what they themselves take out of the system. the impact the whole of u.s. society. they make all of society more productive. the entire economy more productive. ultimately it's almost impossible calculate what the impact will be. we know it will be positive because if the economy becomes more product iand producing more goods and services. by definition you're going bring more revenue to the government. ultimately, if that were not the case, though, that's a great argument to get rid of the welfare state. i mean, immigrant were not to blame are not to blame for the fact that government spending has gone up by a factor of 50 in the last seize pry until the second world war they weren't entitled relief programs. we had welfare reform in the 1990s that impacted immigrants as well. now they are able to use that system only in a very limited way. >> there's very few things more dangerous about the welfare state than it changes the perception of being asset and good for society to liabilities. to viewing people entirely of cost and to look at this, you know, one government agency to look at that and say people who take from there are a net cost are terrible. we did research here at the cato institute. we hired a couple of professors, recently at george washington to do a study about how much welfare for poor immigrants use compared to poor native-born americans. that's the relevant comparison. you want apples to apple. poor people to poor people. what we found is poor americans use medicaid at the same rate as poor immigrant and took the same amount of immigrants the program would be 42% smaller. it would be a huge savings. for some people when they look at the immigrant of taking a dollar of welfare. the damage is magnified beyond all comprehension compared to an american citizens taking the same amount. now, you know, i favor getting rid of the welfare state for everybody. but if we can't do that,let build wall around it, at least, and try to improve the perception and try remove the perception that immigrants are takers. they make far, far more an contribute far more to society than the paltry amount they take in welfare. >> okay. a question in the front row. >> thank you. my name is -- [inaudible] i'm an economist. thank you very much for the presentation. especially for the -- i couldn't agree more. in spite of the overwheking economic and cultural of the benefit -- everywhere across the world. how is it it the anti-immigration arguments find a for the fertile soil. you look at the experience of other countries, i'm sure you have done in the book, but can we draw any lessons from the way the country say europe or canada the way they have dealt with the myth in order have an immigration policy which makes culture sense. second question there's one myth where i couldn't agree with you. you said that the myth of the immigrants have a lot of children. i think that the myth that cannot be refuted because they a lot of more children. it's one of the economic benefits that immigrants bring younger population and generation or so. they have more children, and bring in influx of younger people to the nation and to the economy. that's a plus. >> great points you make. first, answer ting has to do with fear. any community that is faced faced faced with an influx of newcomers will be afraid. it will rationize that fear with arguments of the kind we tend hear because you proved to them those arguments are not true. you prove they are myth. you throw at them the statistics and historical experience. and yet that fear remains. i think it has to do with fear. that's how stereo type were born. you know, at the time of the irish immigration, the idea was irishmen were drunk. that was a stereo type. all italians were mobster. there may have been one or two but not all italians were mobsters. not all catholicses were repressive. we embrace them because they are about religion and values. catholic were hated a few centuries ago. they saw him as european repressers so today we have the stereotype that his pans -- hispanics are different and worse. we begin to embrace indians because of contribution to silicon valley. they were also the object of stereo type. about children, it's definitely coming down. even in europe. there's no question. it's slightly higher that night native rate in europe it's about two children. here it's 60% higher than the native rate. but the tendency is coming down. that's also the case in latin america. and incidentally one more point about the previous question connected to this. the average age for immigrants is 27. the average age for americans is 42. so again, that's a -- welfare state is what we really care about. clearly that's a plus. that's more years of con fry biewtion to the system. and in term of taking money out of the system, of the tran for system, only 1.2% of immigrant over 65 against 12% for the u.s. population. so, again, if those arguments were real, then, you know, those fears should be dispelled by the evidence. i think there's fear at the heart of this. it's very difficult to dispel. >> about why the rest of civilization and society doesn't take up the well known argument and fact and economics. i mean, i wish that immigration was the only instance of that. , i mean, there are so many economic notions that have been known for quite a long time that are not taken up in the main stream society. intellectually, i think we won the debate about free trade. when you ask the common person, you know, do you think we should be able to import goods and social securities from china without any kind of government. it's no, it takes american job. of course there should be barrier. i think the notion goes beyond this to the conception that there is a fixed pie. i think people have this ingrained notion there's a fixed pie of wealth. a fixed pie of jobs, a fixed pie of x, y, z. having more people come to the country will decrease the amount available us. i think it's a wrong headed notion. it's something we have been fighting against every sphere of public policy. for a long period of time when it has to go economics. and we have a lot of work do with immigration especially but numerous other issues. >> we have time for one more question if there is one. we'll take right there. >> hi. my name is mike. i'm a retired foreign service office with the agency for national development. i was previously the officer in charge of central america. we looked at the lot of issues in central america. and basically i looked in your book and i was going through the idea that most of the poor people do -- maybe within central america. i read in your prolowing mostly poor central americans and mexicans as, you know, in effect the drug war going on. this is a key issue. we have disease in central america right now for coffee plants called coffee rust. it's going impact about 3 million workers in central america that work in that sector. there is talking about 40 to 50% loss of the sector and loss of their employment. if they can move north, i think they may. i'm not sure it's on anybody's radar screen. it you are right you won't move north. they'll basically change their area of location within central america. that will also have impact. i would like to get your perspective on what could happen. it happened in the past. that's why we have different type of migration from central america before inspect is pending and coming up. >> well, i mean, it's not inconceivable that a small percentage of them will try to move north and eventually come to the united -- united states but they indicate they will mostly my grate within the area. if that what happened in central america. even in mexico. it's something people don't talk about all that much. i know, the experience of my home country of peru very well. it's a country in the last fifty years has seen a huge amount of migration internally. so much so everything has been impacted. the story incidentally is no different than the united states. domestic immigration is four times larger than international immigration for the united states. so it's just a pattern that seems to be repeating itself everywhere. so i don't know exangtly what will happen with the people. if we can go by historical precedent, it's very likely that that will not have a huge impact in term of international migration. of course, it would probably have an specific domestically in term of the economy. that will take us to the whole issue of the central american economy, institution, drug war, and all of that. it's a different issue. >> yeah. a few hispanics in the research, they looked from 2002, 2010, the increase in origin of different countries of my grants. central america was 16.5%. it was off the charts compared to any other origin. the next was 9% for south america. mexican country of origin was like 2% increase. something is happening. ethan, you map it out here incredibly difficult to come. but people still coming. and from central america, they're really coming. >> it's because central america is not doing that well and mexico has been doing better the last few years. which is why i predicted that a few years from now, the debate in the u.s. will be where are we going to get immigrants from? the mexicans don't want to come anymore. mexico is growing in 4% a year. i think it that will go to 6% and enough to ash absorb the new work force. they will be comingless and less and probably replaced by central americas for awhile until they take out the reform they need and get rid of the drug war which is devastating the whole area, by the way. in which case we need find them. i don't know where. it's going to be an issue. it will be, believe me, it will be an issue. there being recorded. twenty years from now mexicans won't want to don't united states anymore. >> and, you know, it's interesting, since 2008 of lawful immigrants coming to the united states, asians have outnumbered the hispanics. now we use hispanic broadly. i'm an american, so i use it central and south americans. asians have outnumbered them in term of the lawful migration system. and the gulf is getting wider every and every year. asia is the new source going forward of immigrants to the united states. it's going the new historical dynamic. so i predict my kid, when they are adults. they will look back and say, alex, why were so many people upset about his cantic or mexican immigrant. it's absurd. these indians or, you know, these southeast asians. they are different. they are taking our jobs this time. that's when i'm going to hear, i think, in the future not only from my kids if i have done a poor job educating them but also people in society. >> it's fascinating and encouraging discussion. i hope our friends on capitol hill pay attention to the points made today and read out of the book on sale here at the discount for all of you interested. thank you all for coming. please, join me in thanking our great speakers today. [applause] [applause] [applause] >> thank you very much. before we get started, i want to tell everybody a quick story. as much you know, we have you can only come here as a guest. we have the golden rule one time. today depack depack is going break his own record. it's at fourth time. we make an exemption for him. the amount of people come out and how great he is. and we were delighted to learn of the incredible bock that was coming out, and to see his other half, or as some people would say, your better half. [laughter] anyway, redelighted to have both of them here. deepak and tonight also sanjay are going to impress us with an incredible fascinating story. we're going do a 45 minute conversation followed by about fifteen minute of audience questions. and for those people are standing. there's about ten seats in the first two rows. please feel free to come to the first duorows as there are seats in the first two rows. we don't want you to stand. so tell us, what was it like growing in india? how did that play in to your future but different careers? >> so growing up in india was an absolutely enchanting experience. we had the most loving parents, we had uncles and aunts, amazing grandparents. each one of them was an amazing story teller. growing up, we participated in the ancient ritual. every few weeks an uncle would arrive, an aunt would stay with us. our grandmother lived with us for many years. and hearing stories from them was absolutely intoxicating. it was a vibrant colorful experience. i can't ever forget it. deepak, what role did growing up in india play on your future career? >> sanjay say, we grew up with stories. our mother told us stories. mostly from spiritual literature from the mythological literature, and it was many, many years later i realized that everyone's life here is a story, you know. there's a story with us standing on the streets 2,500 years ago and lot of traffic on the street. and it was crowded even 2,500 years ago. and waiting for the camels to, you know, clear the traffic and -- [inaudible] explain life to me. that points to the char yacht passing by at the moment. and we have three divisions. life is like that. the will have karma, memory, and desire. and this is we experience our thoughts. we tell the story. we lived the story. we call it life. we were fortunate, as he said, to live in a household of stories. then we became doctors, and we realized that every person that comes to see us comes to see us because they have a story. you know, that have the tradition we grew up. we got stories from our families but also our parents. and also from my father about his experiences with his patients who were his best teachers and we learned later that was the same for us as well. >> and three -- [inaudible] i'm going pass along the mike phone. i know, some people are able to hear the microphone. there's three more streets up front and i think more in the back. >> all the stories had a lesson. what that instilled in us was the core values of growing up in india. the principles that we now -- hopefully passed on to our own kids. and now to our grandchildren. >> and your father was an incredible individual, one of the most famous doctors in india. what do you think he provided you for both of your future journeys? >> i have a dhapt in the book called blindfold a day. and i -- it's a true story. we were started in saint columbus high cool. e were -- hindi with an irish accent. after the a match on sunday, i was reading reader's digest. i fell asleep and woke up 45 minutes later and i'm blind. i cannot see. i nudged deepak and he's next to me and i said i can't see. he raised his hand in front of me. as if he's going poke my eye. i didn't believe. then he knew official that i was blind. he started crying. he said i have one brother and he's gone blind. [laughter] and then we were staying with our -- suddenly. suddenly. we were staying with our fathers younger brother, and he took us to the military hospital. they had no idea what was going on. they were using the term hysterical blindness. i was a 12-year-old kid who was a great athlete, a good student, and there was no reason for me to fake it. finally they got ahold of my father who was 300 miles away on a military jeep in a field trip. this is the art of medicine. he said tell me everything that happened to sanjay in the last two months. he's been fine. he's been perfectly. tell me everything. did he have any injuries? any new medicine. sure enough i had a laceration from a cricket. a week later, and i received stitches. so he put -- any antibiotic. did he get a tetanus shot the answer was yes. he ain't biotic and a shot. he said what kind of tetanus shot. this was 1961. antitetanus zero. and the app was antitetanus zero. our father was a cardiologist a specialist in heart disease but ably brilliant and said to the doctor he's having a rare id owe -- idiosyncretic give him masses doses of steroids. so they did that, and after that i could see gray and finally see deepak. it was an amazing experience. that's when i decided to become a doctor like our father. i told this story to professors of ophthalmologist. they are bedazzled. they said oh my god. such a rare reaction in 1961. >> here is another story. and this is when he was? england. my father and my mother. we were staying with our uncles. i was six he was maybe close to three and a half. my father was at eden eden burr roy and passed his exam he became a member of the royal college of physicians. in those days know e-mail. we got a telegram from england that he passed his exams. and so my grandfather, his father, took us both out that evening to see a movie. i still remember the movie, i don't know if you do. -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> then we went to a carnival they took us out for dinner. then in the middle of the night, we were woken up to the wailing of women crying. my grandfather had died. he skyed of a heart attack that -- died of a heart attack that evening. the next day they took him to the cree -- the same uncle he's talking about. he used interesting remarks and said what is a man, what is human being one day taking the children out to see a movie and a carnival, the next day he comes back as a bunch of ashes. for a 6-year-old to see someone and disappeared completely. he started losing his skin. his skin started peeling like a snake. he had sores everywhere. and they took him to see lot of doctors. and nobody could make the diagnoses. until my father was in england. remember, it take ace while to get the information. he made a diagnose is from opening land. he said he's feeling vulnerable. so he's losing his skin. he's feeling insecure about what happened. and then he actually he was going stay there longer, but he didn't. he took a boat and two week later he arrived in bomb dosh bombay. his skin came back. in hindsight, i'm thinking, you know, i wondered about this. if it was the mind body connection. a long time ago and my obsession with the meaning of death. >> bril -- brilliant. you have a fascinating funny story. i was hoping you could share it with us and also the qerks of how that really helps start this lifelong bond between both of you. >> right. so those of you who are sitting in the front, if you have met deepak before will realize and appreciate he has a dimple in the chin. i call it douglas chin. and with great pride, i want to tell you that i'm responsible for that. [laughter] so i was about nine years of age, and deepak was 11. i was a very good shot with bow and arrow, one our uncles gave him a gift of a bb gun as a birth certificate day present. bsh birthday present. i took a can of cherry blossom shoe polish and knocking it. and deepak comes and stands next to me and said shoot. he said what are you saying? i have a gun. he said you never -- remember the story of will -- [inaudible] i'm your older brother. i'm telling you to shoot. so i was -- i shot and missed the can and it hit him in the chin. so he said you know what? we have to go home, mom is there, and our grandmother is there. stay us with, and he said, i'm going to say i tripped and there was a piece of barbed wire on the ground and it anybodied me. i said, deepak, that's a lie. he said listen, mommy has been telling the story of ancient epic spiritual test. in it there's the guard, the guard, and younger brother, and i am -- i'm the older brother and you're the younger. you have to listen to everything i say. barbed wire. so we go home, he's bleeding weab my mother comes out. she cleans and said what happened? so i said tripped. there was a piece of barbed wire. [laughter] and that night our father return, he would come home often at 9:00 in night seeing patients in the hospital, teaching. we would wait for him for dinner. we were sitting for dinner. enhe said what happened to deepak. i said he tripped on a barbed wire. two days later there's a lump here. my grandmotherred a demon and people come from all over india to see you, and you have not met the diagnoses in your own son. there's probably a piece of rue barbed wire stuck in there. go get him an x-ray. it's the summer holiday. off he goes in the morning for an x-ray. i'm facing ther have ran data. and every two minutes i go, mom, did they call from the hospital? she said, you know, you're worried about this. just as she said that. the phone rang. and my father was on the phone and said impress what we found? a little pellet. the surgeon is going extract it. that's why he's got that little dimple in the chin. [laughter] >> it seems the key lesson is the good chart. if he missed a little bit it wouldn't be here; right. and i wouldn't be here to tell you share the story with you. [laughter] >> and moving forward in time, what age did both of you arrive in the u.s.? and what was it a challenge or benefit arriving as two newly immigrants? >> i came two years before sanjay, at this time, there was vietnam war was coming -- before watergate. at love you won't remember that because you weren't born. there was a shortage of physicians in this country. we had to go outside india to take the exam to come here, because india had -- [inaudible] banned the exam if. further more if you passed the exam you couldn't create the country with more than $8 foreign exchange regulation. you know the story. we had an uncle in the navy who was england at this time. he lend or gave me a gift of $100. i had $108. which if you're from india is a very us a push awe pushes number. all of that. and we have do do something auspicious. i spent it at gambling. when arrived in new york, jfk, i had nothing but in those days no cell phone, you to make calls and put money. but has been told me you can make the collect call. so i made collect call to the hospital in new jersey. they were so desperate they sent a helicopter. there was a shortage of doctors at that time. i my first experience of the united states was riding over manhattan in a helicopter looking at the manhattan skyline this time. and totally being wonder struck. i said this is manhattan? i want to go disney land. [laughter] shortly thereafter we arrived. i was joined by the nurse who was in the emergency room. i could take a nap. i went to the dorm twenty minutes later she called many and said dr., chopra, we have an extraction. i have no idea what the word meant. i said you bet i'll be there. [laughter] and bounded down the stairs. she showed me to the room with the dead person. lots of machines, no people. in india you see only people and no machines there. and so i looked at the patient, i looked at her, and made my first diagnose is. i said he's dead. she said i told you. you had an excavation. if he's dead why do you need a doctor? and she looked at me and she said, pronounce him. and said this is a bizarre statement for me. your body, your soul is leave the body to the lady otherwise known as md. i pronounce -- then i realized like everybody else in our profession. we have ritual listen to the heart, check the pupil, so we had learned english in india, with which is a little similar to british english, where the words are in torch. said to the nurse, may have a torch. [laughter] [laughter] and she was looking at me very strangely. she looked at the other nurse and said she wants a torch. the other nurse sideses me up-and-down and said maybe he wants to do a cremation. talk about culture shock. [laughter] six months later i was totally at home. >> what was your first experience? >> we came -- my wife is also a physician. we were classmates at the same medical school. a very competitive medical school. 10,000 people would sit for an entrance exam. after you go there and premed. they would windle it down to nineteen. have an interview. in the book i write i was first -- my wife was first. she's a pediatrician and brilliant. out of 10,000 people. i was also first. i was first on the waiting list. [laughter] think about it. that's 25 out of all of india. so we had deepak had already been in the states for two years. we heard stories and occasionally we could call him and talk open the long distance call. we decided to come to tbons first before going to new jersey, the same hospital. so we stayed with key deepak and his wife for several dais. we had less culture shock. for me one of the most interesting things that happened on day one of the internship. i had already decided i wanted to be a gastro entrolings. and the person giving the lengture was a world famous professor. located in new jersey. he's about to give the talk within and there's a medical student from rutgers. he's sit ising in the front row and got the feet propped up in the air. and that would have been sack religious in india. that was culture student. a student sitting and his shoes are facing the world famous professor. we would yes, sir, no , sir, good morning, sir. and he gives a brilliant talk. i'm mesmerized and talk notes. the medical student raises his hands and said i have a question. so the doctor said, sure. hoe asked the question and he gave a brilliant answer and the student got the quizzical look on the face and said i don't buy that. and i said, wow, what an amazing country. you can disagree with a professor we would never conceive or think about doing something like that. to me that was the first episode of culture shock. the other was we were told as interns that when you leave the hospital you're not on call. call the hospital operator, call the operator and tell them him or her you're leaving the hospital. that you're signed out to whoever is on call. so the second day of the internship, one of the other doctors happened also to be from india, said sanjay can i have a dime? i said sure. i give him a dime. i see him go to the pay phone and he's calling the new jersey bell operator. doctor, this is dr. rajiv. i'm leaving the hospital. then he hung up. [laughter] [laughter] >> absolutely brilliant. >> deepak, how did you manage to basically educate a population, help change conservative western medicine to an equally important but different way to address some of the same issues most important and single handedly create a field of mind, body, medicine. you are one of the greatest contributors. you came to the states in the 1970. grow in different direction. he goes to harvard and you didn't stop with the per sis tens. and basically change the belief of what medicine was viewed in the states. how? several factor in hindsight. i specialized i did end crinology. it's the study of here mono. then -- hormone. for a short while at the va hospital i was rotating under the dr. see more, who was the president of the end crin society at that time. he was a neuroend crinnologist. he was just like he said. we had brilliant mentor. he was absolutely brilliant and identifying hormones we didn't know too much about at that time. hormone in the hype thalamus like stimulating growth factor. i had a degree at the time -- colleague at her time. later on went 0 to become the chief of brain chemistry at -- [inaudible] she's now at georgetown university. she identified something called. tide -- [inaudible] he boss won the nobel prize for identifying neurochemical. one day candace said to me, these things that we're looking at, because there was a new technique. the dr. was a va physician and won the nobel prize for discovering the technique. all we did as fellows and residents keep measuring the chemicals. and one day she said to me, these are the molecules of emotion. so i don't know if it was a best seller called molecule of emotion. i wrote the forward to it. it was a huge book. nobody had used that term. it was a little bit of insight that whatever happened in the mind is registered in the brain. you can't have a mental event without a brain representation. our could you? after the brain is what made the event. the brain representation is in the form of electrochemical event. there's nothing that happens in the brain that is not registered in the body. these chemicals, neuro peptides. the education centuries presentation i have a gut feeling made sense. it was molecule of emotion. he would tell you the gut makes the same chemical the brain does. this is a scientific background. the body of information. and the information is -- [inaudible] it's from consciousness. any physician will tell you you have two patients who get the same treatment who see the same doctor, have the same ill p -- illness and different outcome. the prognosis wouldn't be called proking in sis is -- [inaudible] people on this side and people on this side. and you can accurately make a diagnose is. you can never accurately make a prognosis. it's like the temperature in new york today is 62. because the average temperature in new york is 62. it doesn't make sense. by saying your income is $100,000 because you come from manhattan and the average and the median income -- it doesn't tell me anything about you. i was thinking to myself why do patients respond unpredictably? even though we can strategically get some idea. just like the individual particle you can't predict when it will pop in and out of the vacuum. no individual event in the universe has a cause. nobody would accept that in the medical journal. i started to write them in a popular book. nobody would accept that. this is one of the strange things i read an ad in "the new york times" by vanity publisher called vanity press. not vanity advantage press. i paid $5,000 and got 100 books published myself. it was called "creating help; mind, body connection." nobody had used that expression mind body connection. somebody convinced. i had a call from a publisher and it was the same publisher of today's book. okay. [inaudible] next thing i get a call from an agent in new york. i call -- i get a call from jackie kennedy and said we want to get you for a publisher. what i found i could make a case for the public they couldn't make a case for my own profession. that started in a sense the movement. >> yes. this incredible -- [inaudible] how children succeed. where do you think both of you had the same success -- [inaudible] are >> was tin stilled we were taught to be daring, to not to worry about failure. in adversity is the greater success. one of my favorite quotes is from -- [inaudible] a great danish policy for. he once said to dare is to lose one's feeting momentarily. not to dare is to lose one's self. t a beautiful quote. i think deepak was being modest when he started to talk about how he launched to this. i thought it was very gut sincerity and courageous when he embraced mind body connection. he has a thriving practice in boston. there were medical students who were rotating. one day he reads a book, -- joseph campbell. no it was anthony. goaf is the other. follow your -- yeah. >> yeah. >> that's joseph campbell. he read another book. by british anthony campbell. >> okay. >> "seven state of consciousness" on the back cover there was if you're interested about meditation call the number. he went and learned meditation with his wife. he came to our home, in new -- newtown massachusetts. told my wife and me i have been meditating. it's the most powerful life changing event. and i said to him, good for you. [laughter] i wasn't interested. my -- i had a concept of chanting and monks in robe. my wife, a pediatrician, absolutely brilliant learned it. i noticed amazing changes in her. for about a month then i said to the teacher meditation. i said i have three concerns. the first, i'm in a position as associate chief of medicine at the oxford medical center to occasionally reprimand brilliant doctors. i don't want to become mellow. i'm playing in a tennis tournament. i'm in the finals. i'm very competitive. i don't want to be just a applauding every passing shot my opponent hits. number three, i enjoy some scotch. i don't want to give that up. and he said, listen, in term of the scotch. most people start to drink less. in term of the tennis, i'll be back. and he comes back with a pamphlet called the team program and excellence in action. testimonials by olympics diving champion. i said that's good. but i will win. i said i can't guarantee that. if you lose you won't feel that bad. i said, okay, what about brilliant people at harvard medical school and disciplining? >> he said you'll be more assertive but from a silent level. and i learned meditation. it was the most powerful thing i have done. now i tell my colleagues and medical students as interviewed in the "boston globe." give us some piece of advice. i talked about meditation. the best thing, i think, is saying you should med -- meditate once a day. if you don't have time to do that, you should meditate twice a day. [laughter] >> it's not really clear what happened. there are so many circumstances that the story is true. but also at the certain point what happened i was in a practice with other physicians, cardiologists, et. and i started to notice they were embarrassed about being my colleague, and i realized i was -- at that time an assistant professor bu medical school. i got the feeling they were -- [inaudible] and i don't want to embarrass them. so at that time, i met another friend of mine who long since passed and invited me to california, and i left. so, you know, these are things in hindsight something was going on. i was very restless and, you know, they responded. >> just a comment. back then, it used to be called alternative medicine. as it's as though you western medicine or the alternative thing you could do to help yourself. and now even at harvard medical school we have complimentary medicine. deepak gives a talk every year i direct with my colleague of mine. about twelve years ago, the chairman of medicine at the medical center say we should invite your tbroar give a keynote. and see if he could talk about spirit -- spiritualty and healing in medicine. i said i wouldn't feel comfortable with that. that's like nepotism. you can inprovide -- invite him. he's been coming for the last ten or twelve years doing a session about duo, two and a half years. more recently -- [inaudible] i sit on the front row on the side and proud of my brother. and my colleague introduces dpee key -- deepak. >> when did you think outside harvard across the united states and also across the world. whether do you think mind body medicine will be on equally standing and more standing. most of the people here are strongly attracted to mind body medicine. when did you think it will get the respect it deserves? because it's affecting so many people so positively. when does it send in the curriculum and you mentioned harvard? .. >> as we find a the scientific findings, then there will be clinical studies. we are looking at the genome and the recent studies that have been sent and all of this is happening right now. the thing that people realize is that your body is active. and so when you look at this, it proves the utility and you can't stop the utility. so this kind of inside has been very important as we do political studies. we have done double-blind studies. so there are combining factors and the fact is that that are center we give credit for anyone who takes a mind and body education at our center. and this is an important part of integrated medicine. >> this is actually happening at harvard medical school. i am humbled and privileged to say that the faculty deans this education important. but under the jurisdiction of the department of continuing education, we have to 25 courses, distance learning, some have over 100 online modules. and we reach out to help the allied professionals throughout the world. a couple of years ago we had a seminar on psychotherapy and he did this on wisdom. was actually breathtakingly beautiful. the next day he did a seminar on compassion. richard davidson is considered one of the top 50 best scientists in the world. he would say that i don't know the answer to that. now, richard davidson has said that this is true and he has done some studies at harvard. not only do they have the subjective experience for these creative and better relationships, but we see anatomical changes in the brain. we do functional mris and we can see changes in different parts of the brain. so that is happening and that is the concept. we have a position at harvard medical school and he talks about the neurobiology of leadership. when you have time, read about it. the one of the most fascinating syndromes to me and medicine is phantom limb syndrome. so some have an amputation and they experience pain. but here is a study. some of these experiments involving phantom limb syndrome, next to him a stranger is sitting in massaging his right leg. nuance is he gets a lead the lead of his pain by witnessing this. so we are looking at the medicine and technology, now catching up with the subjective experience that people have had for thousands of years. one of my favorite things is the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. >> i want to give the people the opportunity to ask questions. since we are also being filmed by c-span and we are broadcasting, if you could just wait until microphone gets you the people on television can here. again, we want to start with people that are sending and we want to give as many as possible a chance. i also want to thank someone who is one of my favorite people and that is maggie. doing a great job getting everyone here. we get someone standing up all the way in the back, please raise your hands if you have a question. >> thank you. >> what are the obstacles and is it's very responsive, how do you find the monetary basis, especially with children and others in the financial business of medicine. >> as you go on to that, have you and your colleagues ever viewed it as western medicine being complementary to mind and body medicine? >> well, yes. >> the technology that is used is basically growing. the technology is basically catching up what has been done for thousands of years, treating people well for a long time. >> that is correct. but let me make a distinction here. i am the beneficiary of a right total hip. i had daily nocturnal pain. i didn't know better, i would think that i had prostate cancer. i saw the best surgeon and that is by the way just seven weeks ago. and we could go i played nine holes of golf. so i would challenge anyone into taking medicine to say if someone pneumonia, you need the right medications. you probably need a good orthopedic surgeon. so western medicine does amazing things that we should not forget about. i have a patient that had a liver transplant. so complementary and integrative medicine has a major role in preventive medicine. how do we prevent obesity and depression? there is, in my mind, a sort of limit to it. and i preface this by saying that i disagree. i had arthroscopic knee surgery and suddenly my knee was swollen. it was a beautiful day in boston. and he they said sanjay, you had this and my knee was really swollen. and then she got out of the car and she kicked her foot in the air to see how good it was. so the next day i had a little hiatus and i called the acupuncturists early in the morning and i went to see her. and she did the acupuncture and you can compare one knee to the other. and i called home and my wife is not there. so my wife is going to come home after doing some shopping. went to the country club and played nine holes of golf. and i agree with much of what you have said. but i want to answer your question. i want to ask you about remediation and how does this practice. this means the disease that has been the result of medical treatment. 80% of pharmaceuticals are of optional and marginal benefit. which means it can make a bit of a difference except for some side effects so in between the most common heart surgery is part of this. the second most common procedure for heart is angioplasty. it doesn't prolong life or stabilize it more than 3% of people. these are alarming statistics everywhere. back surgery, 98% is useless. hysterectomy, 95% is useless. we are talking about huge amounts of money that are spent on procedures. and the neurological diagnosis would be made with precision. if you don't walk out with a cat scan or mri, you are lucky. because no one has the ability to do it. so we have what we call health reform that is not health reform. it is insurance reform and has nothing to do with health reform. most of the expenditure is end-of-life care. i just said that i am not going to die in the hospital. i'm not going to have any of these resuscitative procedures. i have been in community hospitals were the same standards don't apply. and i have seen doctors talking about an aberration in electrolytes, which would cause a problem in the patient would die. so a lot of what we call prolongation is elongation of style. this has been a huge problem and i have discussed it with politicians and have even brought it up to the president. but we have a system. they have a system for every congressman in washington. every business is either lobbyists or military industrial so what when we think that our country makes money? they go to dubai and the trade, and we have huge problems when the incentive for treatment becomes an influence. if you go to a baker, what is he going to tell you i'm not saying that you shouldn't have chemotherapy, i'm asking everyone here to be a difficult patient. you will know more than the average medical provider. [applause] [applause] >> icy pace patients who develop the symptoms to who died of liver failure confuted spirit if you have acute liver failure, you better pray that you get a transplant. and every single year the medical literature can result in acute liver failure. 1 billion people in the world have asked every single patient about what you think and so what are you taking? the list goes on and on. it's like, i say, how much are you paying for that. i am paying out of pocket every month. and just because it is natural doesn't mean that it is safe. hurricane katrina, others that have happened, the tornadoes that they are a part of nature. so we have to have the ability to apply the same standards as we should that we do to complementary and integrative medicine as well. >> this is a discussion that needs to take place. we have the ability to talk about this. >> could we get someone up on the stairs? someone who needs strong supporters? anyone? could we get someone right behind the cameraman? >> yes, what do you think of this? >> well, this is a very good question. i don't know if you want to go into the whole story. the guy was ambushed i was ambushed by richard dawkins, the preeminent militant atheist of our time. we were talking of the conversation that we had. and then i was in a movie and if you want to check it out, there are a million people out there. the reason they ridiculed me was a shift in consciousness. .. wonder, by the way, what is healing? why do certain people in fact, you know, it's -- you have many inflammation disorders, including autoimmune diseases. they published study. what is happening by logically. what is happen together people is a return to -- [inaudible] a return to the word healing or the -- it means the same thing. they have bilogically what we learned in when we go to medical school, the first lesson we learn. one is in inflammation. the second body protecting us. if you injury yourself you need the inflammation response. if you have a exaggerated response you have autoimmune, allergies, all type of things. in fact, exaggerated inflammation is a disclosing factor for diseases. there's a movement among chemotherapy to treat inflammation first. it's a protective response. exaggerated information is not good. what is the healing response in a return to the baseline of i did -- dynamic nonchange in the change. it occurred to me the people getting better, what the treatment was. weather it was meditation or [inaudible] even massage or deep hypnosis, or bio feedback or what i like to call bioregulation, because we are all of these devices that can monitor that. they were going to a baseline state of homeostasis. okay when is the healing response. when we go to medical school, because we are so oriented to specialization, say this is a gastrotrolings. not feeling, not thinking. at the lem of being. at that level, evolution has designed us for self-repair and self-regulation nap is what is happening. it's a long answer, but i try to give it to you. [applause] >> we're going take two more questions. the lady here. one lady in the back. no, no, that lady back there. when it takes three questionses. they are dedicated. first here. both of you have been successful in life in your own respective ways. you each talked about being willing to take on the risk. so i siewm sometimes you've also had failure along the way. i wondered what some of your most impactive failures were. and how they informed your later path to success. >> i'll let deepak go first. [laughter] >> i washinged out -- walked out of a fellowship because i was asked a question that i didn't know the answer to. the question was how many mill -- milligrams of -- get in the 59 paper. and i said to my supervisor, my professor, i said, i think it was 2.3 million grams. but i'm not sure. let me look it up. in about twenty people. he said you should have the information in your head. i took the briefcase and dumped it on his head and said so you it in your head now. [laughter] i walked out of my fellowship. he called my wife and said your husband blew his career. he's finished. my wife was pregnant with our son. they were looking for a emergency room physician. i have no experience but a medical license. i need the money. he said, i'll train you. so for one year, i worked in moonlighting, basically. i did feel like a great failure at that time. i felt responsible for my wife, for my children, for the fact that, you know, i joined a press pretentious fellowship, walked out. it took me a long time to realize that as long as i lived for the approval of my peers and my spear yo yours, -- superior i would not be able to dare to dream. it took my awhile to realize if i wanted to explore what i thought was intuitively something that needed to be explored. now we talk about it. i said i have to be independent of criticism and flattery. it took me a awhile to recover from that. it took a whole year. >> so i remember in the early '80s i signed on one decade and my goal in life. and i put professional, physical, spiritual, family, social. and next to professional i wrote on the bunch of goals. one of them was i want to be a single author. have a book on disorders of the liver. i burn the midnight oil. i stopped playing tennis which was my passion. there was no such thing as google. i had to go to the medical library, which has the largest collection of medical books in the world. and got basement and the sub basement and dig up the original articles published in 1970. and then i wrote the preface, i wrote an introduction, table of content then three chapters. then i sent it to my publishers. and four of them said thank you very much. but we're not interested. we already have a major textbook in hep tolings. the first one from new york, actually, wrote back and said sanjiv i like your writing style. i would like to come boston and take you out to lunch. he said we're not interested in your book. i said you're kidding you came from new york. but we like your writing style, and we would like you to write or edit a book on gastrointestinal, which is called second year medical student. i had a thing, i don't know deepak said it or one my uncles said it. in every adverse i are is the feat of greater success. i said i'm going get two books. i'm still going get my disorders of the liver published, by good publishers and edit a second textbook. i invited a colleague of mine, and i said, roger we willed dit the book. we'll invite the entire boston mafia. i discovered ways in which it doesn't work. [laughter] then he was 57. his company burned down. his factory burned down. and a lot of people commiserated with him. he said why are you doing that? all of my mistakes have been burned. now i can start anew. the value were instilled in us when we were young. >> the two ladies in the front. and -- [inaudible] [inaudible] patients from the croinic lyme disease community were suffering greatly. we were wondering perhaps we can't -- we e can't reach homeostasis with the western medicine we have tried. we're not getting well. >> yeah. i'm sorry, i'm not the right person to be answering your question. my specialty is liver disease and hep tolings. i think the question could be best asked of a rheumatologies and rheumatologist who also embraces inte greative medicine in the mind body connection. that would be the best fit. maybe deepak can help. [laughter] >> there are integrated oncologist and rheumatologists. integrative infect use disease specialists. dr. andrew has life all of these people if you go on his website you'll get more information. i'm not the right person to answer that question. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> i know i'm asking a lot, but would you lead us in a group meditation? [laughter] [applause] >> did you meditate this morning? on your own? [inaudible] there was a wonderful saying you should meditate once a day. if you don't have time to do that you should med date twice a day. maybe deepak lhd lead the group. here is something. if you're not already familiar. tell me if you are familiar with the 21 demonstration challenge. please raise your hands. that's about i would say 15% of the people in this room. every three months the center along -- we offer this meditation on it. and the last time 700,000 people med dated together with us for three weeks. 21 day. i was traveling the world in moscow, korea, and latin america and said how many people have heard of the 21-day challenge? and 15% of people raised their hands just like this. i want to know if you go to chopra center, meditation.com. free of charge. you will participate with the largest experiment in meditation that has ever been done in the history of civilization. [applause] there's never been. i want to make the opportunity of telling you this. you can register now for free. that's the kind of movement we need to start to create a critical mass of awareness. i'll lead this and then -- [inaudible] >> let me -- after the meditation is done, everybody needs to remain seated for two minutes. because san jiff -- sanjiv and key prak have a media appearance. please, remain seated. [inaudible] ly start you on something if you start your day with it. your day will go a little better. okay. so close your eye. and put your awareness in your breath. and let your mind settle in to your breath. let your mind settle in to your breath. don't try to manipulate it. allow your mind to set to your breath. bring your awareness to your heart, and ask yourself who am i? and allow any sensations, images, feelings, or thoughts to spontaneously surface. question? who am i? [silence] [silence] now ask yourself the question, what do i want? again, allow any sensation, image, feeling, oar -- or thought to upon respondent usely arrive. what do i want? [silence] one final question. what is my purpose, how can i serve? what is my purpose, how can i serve? again, allow any question, allow any sensation, image, feeling, or thought to emerge. what is my purpose? how can i serve? [silence] a reminder you don't go searching for the answer. it's deep in your soul. just relax in to your body. and please open your eyes. okay. as i said, there are many kinds of meditation. this is reflection. there's self-awareness, there's conscious-choice making. there's knowing the difference between the perception and the actual -- if you just do three or four minute of reflection, living the question. first of all, you'll experience -- [inaudible] meaningful coincidence in response of the questions you asked. let's do this every day. your day will be much better. thank you. [applause] risk their own lives. hosted by the cato institute in washington d.c., this is an hour and a half. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome everybody to the cato institute. i am the director here at cato. since the beginning of this year immigration has become a burning public policy issue in washington. for the first time in decades the united states is considering a major reform in the way that it deals with immigrants. the ensuing debate and the possibility of reform is welcome but the fact is politicians are arriving very late to this issue. and that is because in this country there has long been a wide gap between restrictive laws and the reality of immigration. there is a gap that reflects the economic and social fact that there are millions of americans and millions of immigrants from mexico and elsewhere who wish to work together in this country and engage in peaceful voluntary exchange but are not legally allowed to do so. and that inconsistency has produced a lot of the problems associated with illegal immigration. many serious problems and some imagined. the prospects of reform have also stimulated the debate about economic and cultural issues surrounding immigration and its impact and it's a debate that cuts across party lines and it's one that has generated a lot of of -- how would a possible legalization of millions of unauthorized immigrants and the creation of a guestworker program affect wages and jobs? what does the evidence say about the extent to which immigrants are assimilating into american culture in recent decades? are immigrants and net drain or contributors to the welfare state and did they mainly come here to work or to get state and if it's? for that matter the political impact of immigration is something that has been debated. what should we expect from increased legal immigration in that regard first is the status quo? these are legitimate questions that go to the heart of one's worldviews on such issues as in equality and fairness the proper role of the state in regulating business and labor, cultural and national identity issues, and fiscal policy just to name a few issues so it's no wonder the sudden interest on the part of republicans and democrats to address this issue has caused heated exchanges exaggerated claims come to and some amount of nastiness. that is why i am pleased today to be able to host a forum for a book that takes a balanced look at a wide range of issues that are being discussed today. the book comcast "global crossings" immigration, civilization and america by alvaro vargas llosa comes at a perfect moment and it puts immigration in historical context showing how so much of the debate today is not actually new in american politics and that we can be guided by a lot of american experience, long american experience. it's better to let the author talk to us about that. my good friend alvaro vargas llosa is the senior fellow at the center for global prosperity at the independent institute who publishes -- who has published this book. he has been a nationally syndicated columnist for the "washington post" writers group. he has been the author of numerous books including the che guevara risk and the guide to perfect latin american idiot which was a bestseller in the spanish edition in latin america. he is a big what has in his columns that appear throughout latin america every week and has contributed to leading newspapers in the united states. he has been a board member of the "miami herald" publishing company and an op-ed page editor and columnist for the "miami herald." i could go on and on that i would say one more thing. he has also been one of the great champions of liberty in latin america, very present in all of the most important places on the right side of the issue i believe in with this book i could say in the americas. please help me welcome alvaro vargas llosa. [applause] >> thank you very much ian for that wonderful and generous presentation and thank you to the cato institute for hosting this and alex for being so kind and helping put it together. we have been asked why did i write this book? why was i interested in this topic? and welcome to there are several reasons. perhaps one of them has to do with diet i guess identity problem. i have been called a spaniard in peru. i have then called a pejorative term for south american. i've been called a pakistani in london where i was based for a while and now i m. called spanish, liberian which means spaniard so i don't really know where i belong and who i am but i guess it's probably a good enough reason to explore this important issue today. so let me tell you a little bit about what i do in this book. what i do is i take on all the different myths that i have seen over the years that are really driving this discussion and this debate, including the current discussion in the senate and soon in the house as well. about immigration reform. i won't cover all of that but i will share with you a few and give you my perspective on them and i hope that this will help at least clarify some of the misinformation that is out there it's really quite striking. one first myths and all i am going to say i have heard many people say, people with all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of places. i didn't make any of this up. one argument basically says we are getting the wrong kinds of immigrants and we used to get the right kind of immigrants. i'm not anti-immigration. i'm just against this current type of them a grant that getting today. the answer to that is the united states always got the wrong kind of immigrants. that has always been the case. the variety of immigrants sources and types of immigration that this country has received in the last two centuries, two and half centuries is simply astounding. of course between 1830 in 1880 yes it was mostly northern europeans but between 1880 and 1920 it was all about southern europeans and eastern europeans in central europeans had nothing to do with northern europeans. they look different in the different cultures. they were the mexicans of yesteryear and of course after that you had an and even before that you had people from asia. you have the chinese with with the gold rush and the chinese in the early 20th century and yes you had spent -- hispanics and you had indians after 1965 because of the changes that evolved that triggered an unintended consequence so there has always been the wrong kind of immigrant in united dates. it's simply not true. another important myth says that the u.s. is getting a disproportionate number of immigrants. just this morning on a radio show i heard we are getting more than any other country in the world. they are all wanting to come here and they don't want to go to other countries. again, but this is very silly. about 3% of the world population is made up of first-generation immigrants and illegal immigrants constitute about one sixth of the immigrants that travel from one place to another every year. so the total number of immigrants every year is about 215 and the total number of illegal immigrants about 30 million. the u.s. gets in terms of just illegal immigrants one sixth of 1% of its population so clearly a much smaller proportion than any other country is getting. so again it's not sure that the u.s. is getting a disproportionate number of immigrants. this is a worldwide phenomenon and other countries are relatively getting more immigrants than the united states, undocumented immigrants into the united states. another myth says that the only motive behind immigration is poverty. why should we in the united states solve world poverty? we have enough poor of our own. let us take care of our own and let's not solve world poverty. that is not true. that's not the only motive behind migration and in fact the poorest of the poor almost never migrate from one country to another. they migrate within the borders of their own country. let's take europe. until the 1980s, early 1980s europe was a source of migration of outmigration i mean, people leaving europe and that was a wealthy and prosperous continent before they got into this mess which is a different story. germany, the richest among the rich and europe was exporting half a million people every year until the 1980s. so clearly the motivation for that was not poverty. south korea has a significant number of immigrants or immigrants to come to the united states. that is a rich country. bangladeshi women who are very poor, the poorest among the poor , by great even in asia which is the continent that has the greatest number of migrants every year. so i could go on and on and on. what are the motives? do they very? yes of course great economic conditions are part of the story but you have everything including depressed conditions at home politically institutionally and economically. family ties occupational preference adventure, all sorts of different reasons for migrating. historical ties have a lot to do with it as well. the u.s. has historically been entangled around the world in conflicts and all sorts of exchanges, sometimes friendly and sometimes not so friendly and that is created conditions for permanent migration. there has been a significant bit of immigration to the united states as we all know and that has to do with the involvement in the war at the end of the 19th century and also with the encouragement that the united states gave to filipinos to come to the united states to start including a special program set up after the second world war for filipino notices. all those were signals that the u.s. sent saying it's okay to come. we recognize we are bound together succumb to the united states. mexican migration, the origin of mexican migration it to the united states is not poor mexicans wanting a better life in the united states. it was u.s. business, needing to replace eastern europeans. first japanese japanese workers in an eastern european workers in the early 20th century so they went to mexico and asked for mexican workers and mexican worker started coming to the united states to work particularly in railroad construction. all these historical ties have a lot to do with it as well. another important myth is the fact that there has never been any hostility to immigration in the united states. we have always been a country of immigrants and we have always welcome -- welcomed immigrants. we have always valued people coming from oversees to contribute to the society and again that is not true. there has always been hostility towards immigration and of course it hasn't always taken place exactly in the same way. it's not been as intense but historically it has always been the case that there was significant hostility to immigrants. if you look at what happened in the gold rush, the chinese were the object of vilification at the time. they were frowned upon by all those who were taken native born americans who are taking part in the gold rush. the japanese at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century would office and and -- often undergo tremendous illegal restrictions. they have had to find all sorts of ways to get around the law. in the middle of the 19th century, the whole nativist movement was born with the famous know nothing party were very much hostile towards immigration and they had an impact on the government and generally the outlook of society towards immigration. so it has been the case and that is why we have seen throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century and evolving situation from the point of view of how the law address immigration. that has always been i guess an evolution towards more or a change towards more and more restriction. that reflected the mindset, the mindset that was relatively hostile. not everybody of course partook in this. not everybody was reflected in these attitudes. there has always been a force for pro-immigration opinion in the united states but what i'm trying to get at is this is not something necessarily new or very different. one thing that i think we need to understand and this is also part of the myth is that whenever there is a big disconnect between the law and reality you are going to get -- it happens with goods, it happens with services, it happens with things but it also happens with evil. you constantly hear this argument and of course i can see where they are coming from. we cannot as a country governed by the rule of law except people who violate the law. we are just not that the country. this is not something that is morally or legally accepted and yes on paper of course that's an extremely powerful argument. who can argue with that? however the problem is the law is simply not realistic, when the law does not take reality into account then you create conditions for a systematic violation of the law on a grand scale. when that happens usually something is wrong with the law. not necessarily with the nature of the people who are violating that law. it's simply the way it works. it works with all sorts of other contacts, social contacts that stem from the criminalization of things that should not be held as being criminal by the law. so the same sort of thing happens with immigrants which is why when people say there is a disproportionate number of criminals who are immigrants of course if you penalize immigrants you have just made the condition of an immigrant a conditional one. if you adjust for age there are no more criminals who are immigrant then who are native-born. it's about the same rate. there are all sorts of studies but yes you had a significant number of people in jail sometimes on the way to deportation particularly in the last few years who could have been considered criminal simply because it was criminal to be an immigrant. so, it's important to get this myth out-of-the-way if we are going to find a legal way to deal with what is a social problem having almost 12 million people operating in the shadows outside of of the law is a social problem. we just need to make sure that is addressed from the starting point of believing these people are somehow biologically criminal. these people are simply the result of the disconnect between the law and reality. another important myth has to do with culture. i heard this time and time again and i'm sure many of you have heard this. these people are culturally different. unlike the previous waves of immigrants who are culturally in tune with our values. these people are different and yet if you look at this in so many different ways you find exactly the same pattern. immigrants today are culturally in tune with us-born people, with u.s. society almost any way you look at it. if you look at religion for instance, in the last 20 years but talk about hispanics for a moment and immigrants in that period of time. 70% of them are catholic and about 23% are partisan. of the ones who call themselves catholic one fifth of them call themselves born-again which is by the way something you never hear in latin america. latin american people never describe themselves as born-again. they are describing themselves as protestants in the united states of this is clearly an effort to tell the united states that we are like you. we believe just like you. we pray just like you. if you look at family values which is something i don't think conservatives who are critical of immigration clearly understand, you will find that there is probably more inclination towards family values today among immigrants than among any other part of society. for instance, half of all households are made up of couples with children and only 13% of households are headed by a single parent against one third in the case of native-born americans. so again if we stand for values values -- family values and we want a society based on family values then this is surely a source of great comfort among immigrants. they are all about family values. if we can convince them of this which is a tough thing to do that they will say out of there having many -- too many children. i don't i that argument with a problem that the well for state is a problem with immigration. that has not been the case. the birthrate is going down and down just as it's going down and down across latin america. it's still a little bit higher among hispanic women in the united states but only 60%. just half a child more than native warren women and the trend is going down. in latin america there is this new discussion and until a few years ago of course there was a high birthrate. today it's going down in an incredible way and so those societies are beginning to face some of the issues that developed countries have been facing in terms of the rate of course contributors to the system of transfer to beneficiaries. so they are facing the same issues. no matter how you look at it, for they are culturally compatible. if you look at all those neighborhoods that they have helped regenerate and i mention a few in the book in south florida, in new york. a process called gender fixation. communities that were in a complete disaster and they have become very nice communities thanks to the efforts of hispanics particularly but that general democrats have put into this. that is a cultural side of perfect compatibility with the host nation. i will grant you this though. it is true that most culturalism has distorted things a bit and i think we would -- it would not be fair if we did not recognize that. in the early part of the 20th century there was something that used to be called americanization. friedrich hayek for instance one of our heroes of course praised americanization very much. he attributed to americanization the virtue of having values and ideas relating to the free society. and yes i think there is something to be said for americanization. there were some aspects they were that were kind of chauvinistic and i guess there were abuses but by and large it was a healthy thing. it was not so much government policy. it was just a general cultural attitudes across society that somehow created incentives for people who came to become familiar with the values of society and all of these things. it was a positive thing. that began to change in the 1960s of course when this whole new paradigm what we call multiculturalism today emerged. i don't go into a lot of detail because there's a whole chapter in the book and it's a fascinating discussion but i don't want to be sidetracked. just quickly i would say that essentially what happened was europe's decolonization after the second world war we began to look at values in a different way through relativism. we began to see values as an exchange and all values were equal. all place of looking at society and institutions were pretty much equal. that gave rise of course to a whole new way of analyzing and studying societies from the past and then from that we went on to think of minorities as collectivist entities that were somehow in need of special protection, special rights to correct an imbalance that was historicahistorica l in nature that was the legacy of past abuses. this in turn translated of course into all sorts of i guess social engineering based on ethnicity and we saw things like gerrymandering along ethnic lines and unequal and employment opportunities and positive discrimination in all sorts of things that gradually i think went beyond what was really compatible with a truly free society governed by the principle of the quality before the law. that was bound to generate a backlash at some point and of course it did but my argument is this. people who are to blame for multiculturalism are not immigrants. they are u.s. academics mostly and it was mostly something that emerged out of academia not just in in the united states but to be fair also in europe. so yeah there has been a distortion there and yes there things i myself was an immigrant here do not feel it all comfortable with but if we are going to fight multiculturalism the way to do it is not defied immigration. it's to fight the ideology behind multiculturalism. so from that and this is one way to prove that it's not immigrants that are to blame for this. i am constantly told i drove past such community and reading spanish newspapers. it used to be that way of course. it always was that way. german communities in the west what did they do? a printed german papers and they spoke german among themselves. that is what first-generation italians did and that is what nations did and sometimes they do that still. it's human nature. people want to feel they belong to something and they want to protect themselves for a little while but that doesn't stop her and sarah the process of assimilation. it's a three generation process. the first-generation make some progress in the second generation is bilingual but they speak english better than any other language we are talking about and by the third generation they don't even speak the native tongue as we say anymore. i see that among hispanics and it's really a fascinating process. that was case. that was the way it was for their times in the polls and the germans and it's always been that kind of dynamic. again just as in the past the second generation does better financially than the first-generation and until the assimilation is completed if you look at marriage beyond the community which is one way to look at this, we see the same pattern today as we saw in the past. i compared second-generation italians in the early part of the 20 century with mexican state. the rate of marriage was 17% today it's a little higher, almost 20%. by the third generation of marriage is very strong. so again very similar patterns of assimilating, assimilation. of course since you have a constant permanent inflow of first-generation hispanics it's only natural that you are going to see some pockets of i guess spanish speaking communities almost on a constant basis but that is not because they are not assimilating. it simply because -- so there is nothing to fear. they are assimilating and i think that is something that we need to embrace. so let's just go into the economy. again it's another important source of myth. i am always hearing this. we would like to have high-skilled immigrants but these low-skilled immigrants, why do we need these low-skilled immigrants? because the modern economy needs low-skilled immigrants. since the second world war we had all these imbalances that needed to be corrected through basically migration. that is why the germans signed treaties with the turks. they needed turkish workers and the spanish with the moroccans the french with the algerians and the united states with the mexicans. that's the way it works. even in a high-tech economy you certain repetitious mechanical jobs that will be part of it. somebody will have to fill those , take up those jobs and that's something that migration helps to do. do they hurt the economy? they do exactly the opposite. immigrants help enlarge the pie again help make the pie bigger. i went to one of the most prominent academic critics and even he recognizes illegal immigrants contribute $22 billion to the economy every year so we updated that data. it's a very conservative statistics and i think it's more than that but let's accept that for a moment. which we just updated his calculation and that would translate into about $36 billion today. you make that legal it probably would be increased by 2.5 times, three times almost 100 lean dollars a year and a per decade over a trillion dollars. that's a contribution to the economy by immigrants. how does the process works quite fair producers and they are consumers. when they come in at the low-end of the scale they help others move up the scale. yes they have a very tiny temporary effect on wages at the lower end. our calculaticalculati on 1.45% in others very little bit but it's a very small impact but that is offset by people who are moving up the scale and earning higher wages and also offset by the fact that immigrants help these labor-intensive industries be more productive and they help keep prices down. so as consumers everybody in society is benefiting from that. the effect is of course a very potent one, positive potent not to speak of high-skilled immigration. again how could that not be a huge contribution to the economy? one third of doctors in engineering technology sciences involve immigrants. immigrants. one fourth of nobel prize winners throughout the 20th century in the u.s. have been immigrants. immigrants made silicon valley. the silicon valley miracle between 95 and 2005 immigrants founded many companies and created half a billion jobs. there is -- it was always absurd that the rules, i hope they're going to change now but were such that the quota for h. one bbs as high-skilled visas with the exhausted on day one. as soon as it was open for applications they would be taken up because 65,000 until a few years ago because it was of greater demand. that was economic suicide on the part of united states. let's finish but touching very quickly on the issue of cost versus benefit. that's another huge myth the idea that immigrants cost a lot more than they contribute fiscally i mean. that is simply not true. there is one great study a couple of decades ago by the natural research counsel. they calculated not only the fiscal impact of legalizing immigrants now, they calculated what would happen for the next 50 years because of course as you know they are young so we would expect they would be working for the next 50 years and they calculated them at present value of those 50 years in terms of what they will put into the system or take out of the system. that concluded of course -- included children better in public school today that will come out and work for the next 50 years or you have to bring all of that into the equation. their calculation was a net cost a one-off cost present-day value of $5000 which is nothing if you weigh that against the contribution i just talked about to the economy. other studies beyond that even the net contribution without taking into account the contribution to the economy, just the fiscal impact is going to be positive in terms of generating more revenue than they are taken taken out in outlooks has written about this very forcefully. my message is basically this. we are in an age of globalization. we have one case for free trade. we can say this point that we have ideal free trade conditions across the world but we have won the intellectual case for free trade. no one speaks against free trade on an intellectual level. no one says i'm against free trade. they say i'm for free trade but and then they talk about the level playing field and all that. the intellects really won the case for free trade trade we have made the case for free immigration and it's simply not reasonable to expect that a world moving grassley towards free trade can continue to contemplate immigration and the way it is. trade in goods constitutes the equivalent of 45% of wealth gdp. about 20% of world savings are invested outside of the country where they originate and 3% of the population is first-generation immigrant. this imbalance will have to be corrected. the dynamics are pushing the world in that direction so you can either accept and embrace and channel that energy through legal channels or you can try and put barriers against it and you will be overwhelmed either because the negative effect of actually being able and managing to control this will be huge or because you will not be able to control it. by the time you accept that you realize you will have spent a lot of money and with all the side effects that come with it and trying to -- immigration is not a danger to the united states to its values to its economy to its standing in the world. it is exactly the opposite. it is i think one of the best ways to keep the united states a free country keep it up rospars country and to keep it as a model for the rest of the world. thank you very much. [applause] see thank you. our next speaker is alex. he worked at the competitive and enterprise institute on immigration issues. he has degrees in economics and economic history from george mason university. he has been an exemplary policy analyst at the cato is two and has been quite involved and very influential in the current debate on immigration. please help me welcome alex nowrasteh. [applause] >> thank you ian for that very nice introduction and thank you i'll there'll for coming talking about your fantastic book. i want to save part of the reason why free trade is accepted intellectually by so many people around the world today as opposed to 50 or 60 years ago is because of the hard work of alberto and other classical liberals around the world the united states in central and south america and everywhere around the world. that hard work i think is really paid off. we are able to do so much at the cato institute in part because people like myself are able to stand on the shoulders of intellects like alvaro and others who have forcefully argued the point for generations of thank you very much. now i want to go into some other details about this fantastic book "global crossings" some details that we weren't able to touch on in a limited amount of time that we have but one of the main issues that a lot of people raise when it comes to in the gration is they think national security. today is a different environment if you have global terrorism and we have al qaeda and issues like these and because of this we can't be as open to immigration as we were in the past because of all these issues. just like the other points made in this book that is no different from what it was 100 years ago. there was an intense terrorist campaign in the united states in the early 20th century carried out mainly by italian anarchists and communists who had different points blew up dozens and up to 100 bombs across united states targeting people like the attorney general of the united states a mitchell palmer and numerous public officials across the country at the time. people had a reaction at that point. they said we can't have this type of thing. this is a new experience. this was at a time when communists were marching across the world and having success in europe and eastern europe and the chaos in the soviet union. these people were seen as an extension of that and we needed to close their borders to block the sale. that is not different than what we hear today about islamic terrorism and other issues like that. but what is even more astonishing is how a lot of our immigration policy makes it easier for national security threats to exist, makes it easier for these problems to grow in a lot of cases increase the ability of the national security threats in these opponents of liberty across the world to more exploit their advantages by taking advantage of american immigration law. one modern example of this is in 2010 there were about a dozen some always arrested in mexico. there were rumors that they were aimed members of the al-shabaab militia which is an islamist terrorist militia based in somali. the mexican authorities

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Capitol Hill Hearings 20130816

incompetence release them early without any kind of records. there was a big for of a better word freak out in the american media. these guys are deftly coming here and coming to the united states. they're going to wreak havoc and as a result border patrol and these people were eventually apprehended or they faded away and nothing happened but the point is because american immigration enforcement because our immigration laws are so focused on keeping people out for economic reasons or for any other types of reasons a small amount of what they are pulled to do focus on legitimate threats. instead they are more concerned with asking how will an additional worker affect the wages for american tomato pickers? they're more concerned with how one additional worker will affect the labor market conditions or computer programmers in silicon valley. they are more concerned with where a high-skilled immigrants will take a conference call with her is at his home or whether that home is listed as a place of residence or as a place of work than they are about these legitimate threats that are out there. we are really concerned about this. if we think that we live in an age that is so dangerous internationally that immigration needs to be restricted and regulated okay if you believe that's true than you should argue for a total refocusing immigration away from keeping out willing workers and separating them and focus entirely on the small but real national security threats that exist. throughout history these threats have also been used to our disadvantage. think about the numerous hoops and hurdles american immigration enforcement but in the 1930s and early 1940s on scientist trying to flee europe and come to the united states to work and eventually were employed to work in a manhattan project to help win the war. there is enormous bureaucratic fear and keeping these people out because of national security. a lot of these people had ties ties to common is our alleged ties to communist. because of the fear of national security -- one of my favorite examples is there was a chinese rocket scientist. he died in 2009. he was involved with rocket research in united states in the 50s. because of the national security law that said that communist could not be employed or emigrates united states he was investigated by the fbi and they said there was enough circumstantial evidence that he had attended a communist rally 20 years before the end he was kicked out of united states and deported to communist china where he was the founder of international rocket and missile program. the entire rocket program in china is based on the internetting expertise of this immigrant to the united states who wanted to stay here and live and work but was forced back to china as a result of that. i am a libertarian and i don't leave china is an accidental threat to the united states anything like that but if you are worried about this about national security issues coming from other countries the last thing you want to do is to send talented foreigners who have come here to learn these issues back to their home countries. that's pretty much the last thing you want to do. now i think switching gears to culture and how really americans have taken a look at immigrants and treated them to the much the same throughout history. we have always been skeptical of them and compare them negatively to previous immigrants. it's a quote i thomas sowell and a recent article written on june 4 titled abstract immigrants where he writes the immigrants of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived here 100 years ago. i think he massively exaggerates the differences between immigrants today and back then. we heard a lot about these differences but what is also different or americans today. it's true multiculturalism has impacted american society to an extent and i think that's a bad ideology that we are also in a lot of ways more welcoming. americans today may say nasty things about immigrants today but let's not forget the largest mass lynching in american history's was in the 1890s in new orleans of italian immigrants by a mob of white americans that thought they had committed a crime and had gotten away with it. in in the 30s ahead matzo protestant americans going out and burning down churches catholic churches occupy by the irish burning down and destroying confidence raping the nuns inside and horrible things like this. the rhetoric today about immigration of americans who are opposed is nasty and it is gross but we don't have this level of cultural aversion violence to the extent that people are going out and doing this. americans are behaving much better in the face of immigration than they did back in the day. and i think that comes across as well. these worries about immigrants being different or totally exaggerated. the catholic example is a great one. immigrants today are majority catholic just like they weren't 100 years ago. they come from different countries in the world in different parts of the world. what is most remarkable about assimilation especially for mexican-americans and the descendents of mexican-americans is that so many of them came in illegally. they came to this country illegally and they lived for years oftentimes in the black market. the extent to which they and their children have assimilated truly in a lot of ways outpaces the tying immigrants who came legally 100 years ago who were able to live entirely within the legal market. what is truly remarkable and i think if immigration was allowed to be dashed to the extent that all had come legally they would see a better pace of assimilation. looking at it that way in realizing immigrants to come today are more un-american when they calm and they become americans faster despite having to live in the black market i think is a testament not just to the entrepreneurial and energetic spirit of immigrants today and how they want to become american but also a testament to how much american culture has influenced so many people throughout the world and how we we are still a beacon for millions of people who want to come here and want to become americans. i think this book really goes into fantastic detail about that process about the cultural process by which people become americans. it differentiated from a lot of other books out there that sociologists write about assimilation. it really describe the process. it creates a model for how it happens and it was the first time i'd read that third generation. your parents are born here and you look longingly back on that ethnic or religious identifier where your parents came from or your grandparegrandpare nts came from and that is a feature of success. that is a market success of becoming an american because because as merrick is we don't have an ethnic or racial identifier. the largest ethnic group in the united states is german. that's going to change in the near future. that is the largest group. we don't have any blood borders culture conception of being american. it's a value conception, it's a civic notion of being american and that is something that is virtually unique throughout the world and unique throughout history and what this book does is describe that in some of the best detail i have ever read anywhere in the literature and both sociology and economic academics and even in popular books made for a popular audience. for that notion i think it made me -- a steady immigration policy and sometimes i become skeptical of the way my government does things and i've become skeptical of the united states and its immigration policy but this really filled me with more enthusiasm and more hope for the future of this country and the ability to assimilate immigrants and to be a beacon than virtually any book i've read in my years of working on this topic so i highly recommend it to all of you. i couldn't recommend it more. it's a beautiful book and thank you very much for coming today. [applause] >> thank you alex. we have time for questions and if you have a question please raise your hand and wait for the microphone. identify yourself and your affiliation. so we will take the first question up here in the front, please. wait for the microphone please. >> hi. my name is stephen. i have no affiliation. i was kind of interested in this notion of low unskilled workers versus high-skilled workers as whether we want immigrants are high-skilled or low-skilled. it always seemed to me that human beings are a resource and therefore if lots of low-skilled employees is a resource because -- it doesn't mean that we don't need the high-skilled but this idea that there is only a set number of jobs for low-skilled -- look at all the people that came to new york city that were low-skilled at the turn-of-the-century area jobs were created. in other words i think there is a misconception that you look at an economy and you say well we only have this amount of need right now for low-skilled but i think the answer is if you bring more resources that is more low-skilled workers, businesses will take advantage of that low-skilled. we will produce goods that will take advantage of these low-skilled workers. even if that production doesn't constitute this it will come to exist because the incentive. what i am saying to you my question is isn't that another big misconception that you guys seemed to overlook and you always hear so many people say we only want high-skilled labor with immigration. >> thank you very much. i couldn't agree with you more. i look at it in a different way. one way to look at it is just look at it domestic league. much of this discussion would be better understood by people if they thought these issues in the domestic context. since the second world war the u.s. has added about 100 million people to the workforce if you count baby boomers in general and women in particular. if the argument is made against immigrants were true on the economic level that those 100 million people would have destroyed the u.s. economy it would have generated so much unemployment and that would be the number one issue in the united states on a permanent basis and that is not the case. in the 60 years there has never been long-term unemployment of any kind. there has been unemployment of course in times of recession but that have different causes. look at arizona for instance which is such a sensitive place for this debate. just before the bursting of the bubble i looked at unemployment rates in arizona. among the lowest in the country, 4% and is sometimes less than 4% and get 10% of the workforce was and ice and continues to be immigrant. so clearly it's not generating unemployment. it is generating growth because arizona is a wealthy state and it is helping make as i said the pie larger. that includes both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants. .. yet at the same time we had an constant inflow of immigrant. it wouldn't have been possible if immigrants were hurting that productive process. >> if i could -- yeah, if i could add one small thing to do that. i have been doing a series of debates for the last couple of times this week. i have another one on sunday. the issue is always brought up, and the analogy i like to use is if we have 100 high-skilled people in a room. 100 college grads and bring in 50 more. the economy gets bigger production increases. the rejoinder critics say you lower the average education level in the room by doing that. that really shows, i think, the danger of knowing a little bit of math and knowing not very much economics. an average of the terrible way to describe that. it's a example of the danny devito fallacy. the average height in the room will i did crease. -- decrease. nobody is actually any shorter. that's something that is pervasive. talking about public policy and the impact of immigration on the economy by using broad averages like this, really is probably one of the worst ways to do it and betray a total of lack of understanding how economics works. >> question right there. >> my name is steven. a wonderful, wholly convincing presentation. one aspect i'm wondering about the effect on the nation that immigrants leave from. are those nations any worse off? for example, it was said that when the 1848 revolution failed failed in germany. a lot of german liberals here and germany became more autocratic. today as much as we complaib in the building about economic regulation. a lot of immigrants see the united as a more fertile place for -- applying entrepreneurial skills. are countries that immigrants leave from worse off, say, in term of entrepreneurial skills? >> that's a great question. well, what -- if we look at -- forget about nation-states and borders for a moment. what are we talking about? we are talking about how people are able to create the most value. in other words, they choose their location according where they can create the most value and exchange the friewft our labor according to what we need and what we can offer. if you look at that way you'll realize people moving in or out is not going have a long-term effect of a negative kind in any way. europe was exporting people, again, until the 1980. the country were becoming more and more prosperous. they are a mess today for different reason. we had the same in latin america. people my grated to vens with a lay from countries such as peru on a consistent basis for half a century. it's a wealthier country than venezuela. look at it this way as well. chinese immigration in the united states has played a key role in the growing economic prosperity of china, they have not only of course been able to export stuff and import stuff to them. they invested in china response i think that borders and barriers are really art initial term of the impact on the economy. we all benefit from the constant circulation as people. the same is happening in europe. some of the eastern -- or central european countries have been -- in the last few years. it became legal to do so. and yet they have been becoming more and more prosperous. poland is more prosperous. it export the an incredible amount of people to spain. >> i have some small things to add. he's 100% right. about the german 1848ers. they left behind complained about the liberals leaving. americans who experienced and met them complained about the autocratic germans who are bringing their socialist notion of collectism. 1848 formed a core of what became the republican party in the antislavery wing. that's a little about dote about the feeling of immigrants destroying the core of america no matter where they're from. the issue you talk about, you know, does immigration an e leave the sending country worse off? that usually takes the frame of the brain drain. that's what people call it. they say the best and the brightest and the most energetic leave and what is left behind everybody else suffers. that's assumes a person in a country is a property of everybody else in that country. which is a terrible notion that no person who has any concept of individual freedom or liberal in the classic call sense interpretation could actually deal. what we actually see is when the opportunities to e mate, -- e grate. they go to school more. they acquire more skills in order to do better in the source -- and in a country where they want to go to. at love them end up staying. we see this in south africa, in nursing scoop. a lot of lot of people go there to try to emigrate to the utah. a lot stay behind. we see it in the philippines. the filipino nursing program. they have some of the highest percentage of nurses of any country in the world because there's a possibility to leave when they have it. as a result the rest of the pill fee knows -- filipinos gain from that. you're right it's a weird argument used by most i are restrictionist to say immigration is bad for people in poor countries when it's not true. >> i guess i would add, i mean, -- so it does the opposite. >> yes. >> george washington university. i'm one of the academics you speak of. and i, you know, i love the presentation. thank you. i'm a little bit uncomfortable with your romantic vision of assimilation and acceptance. because we know that some groups are more asimilarble than others. perhaps you tell us a little bit about how you define assimilation; right. because, you know, how many times have the third or fourth generation immigrant been asked where are you from? all right. what language do you speak. maybe you can talk about how you think about assimilation. assimilation is not only based on the desire for individual but also on the desire for the larger society to allow that person to assimilate. >> well, about the first part is are they asimilar plaiting -- assimilating, you know, immigrants assimilating today the way they did in the past? and the an is definitely yes. the research is very extensive. i looked in to this in a lot of detail. there's many ways to measure it. whether it's, you know, the use of english. or mingling with the native born population. marriage, whether it's entrepreneurship. that's another way to measure this. the idea that the lot of entrepreneurship that is home grown but these hispanics are bringing in notions, you know, to entrepreneurship. that's not true. the rate of self-employment among hispanics almost equal the rate for native born americans. almost 12%. and the number of companies that are founding every year is just amazing and astounding. what does happen is this, which is something alex touched upon in his comment in the book, which is fascinating. the first generation of course, is first generation. they are trying to find their way around and try to fit in. at the same time they have attachments back home. incidentally you should look, people ask me mexicans are tied to their home country. it didn't used to be the case. read some of the letters italian were sending back home in the 120th century. full of italian passion. expressing profound follow stall georgia and sending money back home as well. that's totally natural. the second generation moveses in the opposite destruction. they are 0 conscious of being seen by u.s. society as not really fitting in, as being somehow different they escape from their root. they reject the roots to an extent. i wouldn't -- that's not fair, you know, for everybody, but certainly there's big percentage of that. yet, by the third generation they feel so secure they go back to those roots but the a different way. a purely sentimental way they begin to -- simply because they know they are so secure and accepted by u.s. society that there's no risk in that. that's really how cinco de mayo was born. it was never a big deal in mexico. it's a big deal here. because it's a big deal here mexicans back home start thinking it's uncomfortable because mexico immigrants are more patriotic than we are. we have to assume it's a national holiday. now in mexico they are celebrating it. that was the result not of first generation immigrants. certainly not of second generation immigrants. this was third generation immigrant they thought of it about time to celebrate that. who celebrates cinco de mayo it's not just mexicos. it's americans just like irish and italian holiday. as alex said, the country is not based on the nation-state here is not based on flood. it's based open credo. it's not a nation-state it's a nation of nations. a state based on credo. i think the reality speaks to that. >> i think the cinco de mayo example is great. i can't think a more american holiday than the defeat of the french army. that's what it is. and, you know, to go in to some, you know, more. this is what he writes a chapter here about the phenomena. it's about the immigrants moving toward the main stream society and in the main stream society moves toward them. whey learned in the book everything i like to do on sundays comes from the germans. i mean, i like to go bowling. i like to go to the shooting range nap is something that germans did on sunday that was really un-american in the 1870. people were afraid of that because, you know, the old puritanical version of sunday was you sit at home and, you know, go to church. you sit at home, you read the bible, and basically don't do anything that is fun. and the germans were like, no, we're not going do that. what to do we do on sunday? go out and have picnic and have a good time. that's app example of american society and changing partly to the immigrant and their culture. it's pretty clear that the immigrants do most of the changing. >> we'll take question in the back. >> hi. i'm emily colins from the atlas networking. my question for you, it seems like there a couple of institutional thing in the government that may need to change in relation to immigrant such as the minimum wage or welfare. at love immigrants work under the minimum wage and illegal immigrants may take welfare or became legal might take more welfare. people argue it would be associate drain on society. i was wondering for you would speak on whether or not that has been discussed in the house or in the senate or your opinion on that. >> sure. the congressional budget office just came up with a report calculating what the impact in fiscal terms would be legalizing 12 million people for the next decade and beyond. they did two different calculations. you know, a -- i don't want to get too technical something called dynamic scoring. you calculate the effect on the economy will be. and you calculate what the fiscal impact of that will be. the other way of doing that is calculate the fiscal impact assume there no huge change in the economy. chevre way you look at it, the impact is beneficial. what they to is simply calculate what intake is going to be on the deficit and it's going to be a very positive impact in term of reducing the deficit. but as i said, there are many studies that very respectable studies that indicate that contribution is very positive. just thinking of one of the point. i mention the national research council. there's another one that was very significant at the time. jeffrey did a study of what happened between the 1970 and the 1990s. that's two-decade period. he came up with a figure i think very significant. the net contribution was $25 billion. but again, when you look at it, you always think that the effect of immigration on the economy goes beyond what they themselves produce and consume and they themselves pay and what they themselves take out of the system. the impact the whole of u.s. society. they make all of society more productive. the entire economy more productive. ultimately it's almost impossible calculate what the impact will be. we know it will be positive because if the economy becomes more product iand producing more goods and services. by definition you're going bring more revenue to the government. ultimately, if that were not the case, though, that's a great argument to get rid of the welfare state. i mean, immigrant were not to blame are not to blame for the fact that government spending has gone up by a factor of 50 in the last seize pry until the second world war they weren't entitled relief programs. we had welfare reform in the 1990s that impacted immigrants as well. now they are able to use that system only in a very limited way. >> there's very few things more dangerous about the welfare state than it changes the perception of being asset and good for society to liabilities. to viewing people entirely of cost and to look at this, you know, one government agency to look at that and say people who take from there are a net cost are terrible. we did research here at the cato institute. we hired a couple of professors, recently at george washington to do a study about how much welfare for poor immigrants use compared to poor native-born americans. that's the relevant comparison. you want apples to apple. poor people to poor people. what we found is poor americans use medicaid at the same rate as poor immigrant and took the same amount of immigrants the program would be 42% smaller. it would be a huge savings. for some people when they look at the immigrant of taking a dollar of welfare. the damage is magnified beyond all comprehension compared to an american citizens taking the same amount. now, you know, i favor getting rid of the welfare state for everybody. but if we can't do that,let build wall around it, at least, and try to improve the perception and try remove the perception that immigrants are takers. they make far, far more an contribute far more to society than the paltry amount they take in welfare. >> okay. a question in the front row. >> thank you. my name is -- [inaudible] i'm an economist. thank you very much for the presentation. especially for the -- i couldn't agree more. in spite of the overwheking economic and cultural of the benefit -- everywhere across the world. how is it it the anti-immigration arguments find a for the fertile soil. you look at the experience of other countries, i'm sure you have done in the book, but can we draw any lessons from the way the country say europe or canada the way they have dealt with the myth in order have an immigration policy which makes culture sense. second question there's one myth where i couldn't agree with you. you said that the myth of the immigrants have a lot of children. i think that the myth that cannot be refuted because they a lot of more children. it's one of the economic benefits that immigrants bring younger population and generation or so. they have more children, and bring in influx of younger people to the nation and to the economy. that's a plus. >> great points you make. first, answer ting has to do with fear. any community that is faced faced faced with an influx of newcomers will be afraid. it will rationize that fear with arguments of the kind we tend hear because you proved to them those arguments are not true. you prove they are myth. you throw at them the statistics and historical experience. and yet that fear remains. i think it has to do with fear. that's how stereo type were born. you know, at the time of the irish immigration, the idea was irishmen were drunk. that was a stereo type. all italians were mobster. there may have been one or two but not all italians were mobsters. not all catholicses were repressive. we embrace them because they are about religion and values. catholic were hated a few centuries ago. they saw him as european repressers so today we have the stereotype that his pans -- hispanics are different and worse. we begin to embrace indians because of contribution to silicon valley. they were also the object of stereo type. about children, it's definitely coming down. even in europe. there's no question. it's slightly higher that night native rate in europe it's about two children. here it's 60% higher than the native rate. but the tendency is coming down. that's also the case in latin america. and incidentally one more point about the previous question connected to this. the average age for immigrants is 27. the average age for americans is 42. so again, that's a -- welfare state is what we really care about. clearly that's a plus. that's more years of con fry biewtion to the system. and in term of taking money out of the system, of the tran for system, only 1.2% of immigrant over 65 against 12% for the u.s. population. so, again, if those arguments were real, then, you know, those fears should be dispelled by the evidence. i think there's fear at the heart of this. it's very difficult to dispel. >> about why the rest of civilization and society doesn't take up the well known argument and fact and economics. i mean, i wish that immigration was the only instance of that. , i mean, there are so many economic notions that have been known for quite a long time that are not taken up in the main stream society. intellectually, i think we won the debate about free trade. when you ask the common person, you know, do you think we should be able to import goods and social securities from china without any kind of government. it's no, it takes american job. of course there should be barrier. i think the notion goes beyond this to the conception that there is a fixed pie. i think people have this ingrained notion there's a fixed pie of wealth. a fixed pie of jobs, a fixed pie of x, y, z. having more people come to the country will decrease the amount available us. i think it's a wrong headed notion. it's something we have been fighting against every sphere of public policy. for a long period of time when it has to go economics. and we have a lot of work do with immigration especially but numerous other issues. >> we have time for one more question if there is one. we'll take right there. >> hi. my name is mike. i'm a retired foreign service office with the agency for national development. i was previously the officer in charge of central america. we looked at the lot of issues in central america. and basically i looked in your book and i was going through the idea that most of the poor people do -- maybe within central america. i read in your prolowing mostly poor central americans and mexicans as, you know, in effect the drug war going on. this is a key issue. we have disease in central america right now for coffee plants called coffee rust. it's going impact about 3 million workers in central america that work in that sector. there is talking about 40 to 50% loss of the sector and loss of their employment. if they can move north, i think they may. i'm not sure it's on anybody's radar screen. it you are right you won't move north. they'll basically change their area of location within central america. that will also have impact. i would like to get your perspective on what could happen. it happened in the past. that's why we have different type of migration from central america before inspect is pending and coming up. >> well, i mean, it's not inconceivable that a small percentage of them will try to move north and eventually come to the united -- united states but they indicate they will mostly my grate within the area. if that what happened in central america. even in mexico. it's something people don't talk about all that much. i know, the experience of my home country of peru very well. it's a country in the last fifty years has seen a huge amount of migration internally. so much so everything has been impacted. the story incidentally is no different than the united states. domestic immigration is four times larger than international immigration for the united states. so it's just a pattern that seems to be repeating itself everywhere. so i don't know exangtly what will happen with the people. if we can go by historical precedent, it's very likely that that will not have a huge impact in term of international migration. of course, it would probably have an specific domestically in term of the economy. that will take us to the whole issue of the central american economy, institution, drug war, and all of that. it's a different issue. >> yeah. a few hispanics in the research, they looked from 2002, 2010, the increase in origin of different countries of my grants. central america was 16.5%. it was off the charts compared to any other origin. the next was 9% for south america. mexican country of origin was like 2% increase. something is happening. ethan, you map it out here incredibly difficult to come. but people still coming. and from central america, they're really coming. >> it's because central america is not doing that well and mexico has been doing better the last few years. which is why i predicted that a few years from now, the debate in the u.s. will be where are we going to get immigrants from? the mexicans don't want to come anymore. mexico is growing in 4% a year. i think it that will go to 6% and enough to ash absorb the new work force. they will be comingless and less and probably replaced by central americas for awhile until they take out the reform they need and get rid of the drug war which is devastating the whole area, by the way. in which case we need find them. i don't know where. it's going to be an issue. it will be, believe me, it will be an issue. there being recorded. twenty years from now mexicans won't want to don't united states anymore. >> and, you know, it's interesting, since 2008 of lawful immigrants coming to the united states, asians have outnumbered the hispanics. now we use hispanic broadly. i'm an american, so i use it central and south americans. asians have outnumbered them in term of the lawful migration system. and the gulf is getting wider every and every year. asia is the new source going forward of immigrants to the united states. it's going the new historical dynamic. so i predict my kid, when they are adults. they will look back and say, alex, why were so many people upset about his cantic or mexican immigrant. it's absurd. these indians or, you know, these southeast asians. they are different. they are taking our jobs this time. that's when i'm going to hear, i think, in the future not only from my kids if i have done a poor job educating them but also people in society. >> it's fascinating and encouraging discussion. i hope our friends on capitol hill pay attention to the points made today and read out of the book on sale here at the discount for all of you interested. thank you all for coming. please, join me in thanking our great speakers today. [applause] >> a luncheon following upstairs. sanjiv.me to years befo at the time the vietnam war was coming to an end. this was before watergate. a lot of you wouldn't remember that because you were born. and there is a shortage of physicians in this country. we had to go outside, and we had to take the exam to come your. furthermore even if you passed the exam you couldn't leave the country with more than $8, foreign exchange regulations. you know the story. you know the time. so we had an uncle in the navy. he gave me a gift of $100, $908, which if you're from india is a very auspicious number, 108, all of that. so i thought we have to do something really auspicious, and i went to paris and i spent my 108 at the moulin rouge. [laughter] when i arrived here in new york at jfk, i had nothing. in those days no cell phones. unity made calls and get to put money. somebody told me you can make a collect call. so i made a collect call to a hospital in new jersey. they were so desperate that they sent a helicopter. there were such a shortage of doctors at that time. so my first experience of the united states is writing over manhattan and helicopter looking at the manhattan skyline come edge is totally being -- i want to go to disneyland. [laughter] but shortly thereafter we arrived, i was joined by the nurse who was in charge of the emergency room which was going to be my first rotation that i could take some rest, jet lag and so. so i went to the dorm, but 20 minutes later she called me and said, dr. chopra, we have -- i had no idea what that meant. but, of course, i didn't want to let on so i said deepak, i'll be back. [laughter] accounted down the stairs but she showed me to a room and there was a dead person, lots of machines, no people. in india you see only people and no machines. so i looked at the patient. i looked at her. i made my first diagnosis. i said, he's dead. [laughter] she said, i told you. i said, but if he's dead why do you need a doctor? and she looked at me and she said, pronounce him. this is kind of a bizarre statement for me. your body, your soul can't leave your body until a medical -- otherwise known as indeed. so i release you, you are pronounced. [laughter] then i realized like everybody else in our profession -- even in the face of the obvious, listen to the hard. we have learned english in india which is a little similar to british english where the word for flashlight is a torch. sunset to the nurse, may i have a torch, please? [laughter] and she now was looking at me very strangely. another nurse outside, chillicothe of the nurse, he wants a torch. [laughter] the other nurse qaeda sized me up and down and said maybe he wants to be a clinician. [laughter] talk about culture shock. but six hours later i was totally at home, you know? speared sanjiv, what were your first experience? >> weekend, i wife is also a physician. we were classmates at the same medical school that deepak also went to two years earlier. a very competitive medical school, 10,000 people would sit for an entrance exam. out of got a certain score in pre-med, then they would whittle it down to 19, have an interview and than 35 are selected. in the book i write, my wife was first. she pediatrician and brilliant. out of 10,000 people are that i was also first. i was first on the waiting list. [laughter] to think about it, deepak had already been in the states for two years and we had heard stories and occasionally we would call him and talk on the long distance call. we decided to come to boston first before also going to new jersey, the same hospital where deepak had gotten his internship. so we stayed with deepak and his wife for starbase. so we've sort of less culture shock, but for me one of the most interesting things that happen on day one of the internship, i had already decided i wanted to be gastroenterologist and a specialist in liver disease. the person giving the lecture anytime was a professor, was a gastroenterologist from new jersey. so he's about to give the talk, and there's a medical student from rutgers and he sitting in the front row and he's got his feet propped up in the air. and that would've been sacrilegious in india, and that was culture shock. a student sitting, and he sues are facing this world-famous professor. we would say yes or no, sir. good morning, sir. and it is a brilliant talk. i'm mesmerized. i take notes. i ask a question. in the medical student raises his hand, and he says i have a question. so doctor palmer said, sure. he asked a question and doctor palmer gave what i thought was a brilliant answer and the student had this quizzical look on his face and he said, and i don't buy that. and i said, wow, what an amazing country. you can disagree. [laughter] with the professor. we would never even conceive of what think about doing something like that. so that to me was the first episode of culture shock. the other was we were told as interns that when you leave the hospital, you're not on call. call the hospital operator, call the operator and tell them, tell him or her that you were leaving the hospital and that you are signed out to whoever's on call. so the second day of the internship, one of the other doctors happened to be also from india, sanjiv, can i have done? i said, sure. i give them a dime. i see him go to the pain phone and he's calling the new jersey bell operator. this is the doctor, i'm leaving the hospital. [laughter] and then he hung up. >> brilliant. deepak come how did you manage to basically educate a population, help change conservative western medicine to an equally important but different way to address some of the same issues, the most important no single-handedly create the feel of mind-body medicine? you were one of the greatest contributors to appear to come to the states in the 1970s. you and sanjiv going to the directions. sanjiv basically goes to harvard and you just did not stop with your persistence. you basically change the belief of what medicine was viewed in the states. how? >> several factors, in hindsight, okay? so i specialized and you went to gastric indeed all day -- gastroenterology. then for a short while when i was at the va hospital, i was rotating at tufts under a doctor was the president of the endocrine society at that time. and he was a near endocrinology. he was the president of the society of america. he was just like, as the second we brilliant mentors. he was absolutely brilliant in those days, he was identifying hormones that we did know too much about at that time. hormones and the hypothalamus like stimulating hormone, like growth factors, et cetera. i had a colleague at that time, her name was candace. she later went on to become the chief of brain chemistry at nih. she's now at georgetown university. check invite something called peptide -- if you know anything about it. but her boss won the nobel prize for identifying number of chemicals. -- muro chemicals. one day she said to me, you know these things that we're looking at, because there was a new technique, had won the nobel prize for discovering this technique. so all we did as fellows and residents was keep measuring these chemicals. and one day she said to me, you know these are the molecules of emotion. so i don't know -- [inaudible] the molecules of emotion by candace. i wrote the forward to. it was a huge book, and nobody had used that term, molecules of emotion. and so that was a little bit of insight that whatever happens in the mind is registered in the brain. you can't have a mental event without a brain representation. how could you? after all, the brain is what mediates the event. the brain representation is in the form of electrochemical event. and then there's nothing that happens in the brain that is not registered in the body. in fact, what we found was that these chemicals, neural peptides, the receptors to them in the cells of the body, suddenly i have a gut feeling, a sense because that was responding to molecules of emotion. we will tell you that get makes the same chemicals the brain does within nerve chemistry. so this was a scientific background that the body, the network, this information, and information is mental. it's from consciousness but that's a whole different story. but then as a physician, any physician will tell you you can have two patients who get the same treatment, who see the same doctor, have the same illness, and there are different outcomes. our prognosis, what we call prognosis, people on this site, people on this site, and although you can actually make a diagnosis, you can never accurately make a prognosis. it's like saying the temperature today in new york is 62 because the average temperature in new york is 62. it doesn't make sense. or your singer income is $100,000 because you come from manhattan, and the median income. it doesn't tell me anything about you. i was thinking to myself, why do patients respond unpredictably? even though we can statistically get some idea, but for the individual you can't. just like for the individual particle, you cannot predict when it will pop in and out of the quantum vacuum. in fact, no individual event in the universe has a cause. until much later. so this is all scientifically going on. i started to write the experiences of my patients. nobody would accept that in a medical journal. i started to write them in a popular book. nobody would accept that. so this is, you know, one of those very strange things. i read an ad in "the new york times" by a vanity publisher called vanity press, or vantage press. i paid 5000, got a hundred books published myself with the experiences of my patients. it was called creating health. somebody convinced the harvard school to put it in picked annexing i get a call from an agent or choose and why don't you have a partnership? i said because i tried. she said let me get you one. it was the same publisher of today's book, okay? in boston the next thing i get a call from a continued. i get a call from jackie on nasa's, of all the people. and she said, we want to get you published. what i've found was i could make a case for the public that it could make a case for my own profession. and that started in a sense the movement. >> this is an incredible bestseller out now called how children succeed. why do you think both of you have had the same success taking completely different roads? >> that's a great question. i have to reflect on. i think it's the core values that were instilled in us by our parents and grandparents. and we were told, you know, to be airing -- daring, cannot worry about fed up. that in every adversity is a seat of greater success. one of my favorite quotes is from kierkegaard, great danish philosopher, and he once said, today it is to lose once footing momentarily. not to dare is to lose one's self. it's a beautiful quote. today dare is to lose once put momentarily. i think deepak was being modest when he started to talk about how he launched into his. i thought it was very gutsy and courageous when he embraced the mind-body connection. he had a thriving practice in boston. there were medical students from tufts university rotating. and one day he reads a book, anthony campbell? joseph campbell. no, it was anthony. joseph campbell is the other campbell. mythology. [laughter] follow your blessed -- doors will open, that's a joseph campbell. but he writes another book by anthony campbell, seven states of consciousness. and the back cover there was, if you're more interested about meditation, call this number. so he went and learned meditation with his wife. he came to her home in newton, massachusetts, told my wife in the eye been editing for a month. it's the most powerful, life-changing event that's occurred to me. and i said to him, good for you. [laughter] i wasn't interested. if i had this concept of roads and satin robes and chanting. and my wife, a pediatrician and absolutely brilliant, went and learned. then i noticed some amazing changes in her but i was a holdout for about a month. and then i said to the teacher of transcendental meditation, i said i three concerns about learning meditation. the first one is i'm in a position as the associate chief of medicine at the medical center, brilliant medical students, even junior college, and i don't want to become mellow. number two -- [laughter] i am playing in a tennis tournament and i'm in the finals, and a very competitive and i don't want to be just a plotting every passing shot that my opponent hits last night and number three, i enjoy that and i don't want to give it up. and he said listen, in terms of the scotch, most people start to drink less but in terms of attendance, i'll be back. and he comes back with the pamphlets that's called the teen program in ethics -- in athletics, excellence in action. so i said that's good but will i win? and he said, i can't guarantee that but if you lose you won't feel that bad. [laughter] and then i said, okay, what about disciplining brilliant people at harvard medical school? he said, you'll be more assertive but from a silent level. and so i've learned meditation. it was the most powerful thing of them. now i tell my colleagues and medical students and house staff, i was interviewed in "the boston globe," give us some piece of advice at the end of the year. i talked about meditation. and the best thing i think is, it's an ancient saying, it says you should meditate once a day. if you don't have time to do that, you should meditate twice a day. [laughter] >> as an aside i should say though, you know, it's not really clear what happens. there so many circumstances that story is true. the story i said is true, but also at a certain point what happened is i was in the practice with other physicians, a cardiologist, gastroenterologist, et cetera, and i started to notice that they were embarrassed about being my colleague. and i also realized that i was, at that time, an assistant professor at bu medical school. school. be and i got the feeling that they would fire me anyway so i should leave before they fire me. and i don't want to embarrass them. so at the time i met another friend of mine who has long since passed, and he invited me to california, and i left. so you know, these are things in hindsight something was going on. i was very restless. >> just a comment about that. back then they used to be called alternative medicine. it's as though you either took off western medicine or this was an alternative thing you could do to help yourself as a patient. and even at harvard medical school we have complementary medicine, integrative medicine at deepak comes and gives a talk every year at a course of a drug with colleague of mine, martin, who's at the diabetes center. about 12 years ago the chairman of medicine at the medical center where i had my clinical appointment said, sanjiv, we should invite your brother to be the keynote. see if he could talk about spirituality and healing in medicine. and i said to them, i said, boss, i wouldn't feel comfortable with it. that's like a nepotism. but you can invite him. he invited him and the deepak has been coming for the last 12 years and doing a session that too, two and half hours about spirituality and healing. more recently superb rant beyond bring. and i sit in the front row on the side i'm very proud of my brother, and martin abramson, my colleague was like a younger brother to me, introduces deep deepak. >> taking it for the winter you think outside harvard, across the united states and also across the world, when do you think mind-body medicine will be on equal standing and fully accepted universally? more and more people, most of the people here are real strongly attracted to mind-body medicine. when do you think it will get the respect that it deserves? because it's affecting so many people so positively but when does it enter the curriculum question mention harvard but how about all types of other universities? >> we are going of a different take on this. let deepak go first. >> so for things to be accepted there has to be evidence and there has to be documentation, write? so right now on the research side the main interest is in cellular biology and a measuring genomic activity and what -- the super brain. it turns out that only 5% of your genes are fully penetrant. the rest respond to your lifestyle, okay? which means everything from sleep to diet and exercise distress to personal relationships, social interactions, environment, everything that is other than the genes, okay? that's brand-new information. nor plasticity, brand-new information. as you get a scientific findings in o.b. clinical studies but right now we're doing studies with a nobel laureate, elizabeth blackburn from looking at the genome. it was a weakness -- there was a recent study. the thing that people are realizing is that your body is not a noun. it's a verb. see, when we look at a molecule it's like taking my photo and saying, that's deepak. the body is an activity. when you look at something you freeze the activity and you call it a molecule, but you can't stop the activity. so this kind of insight is going to influence the way research is done, it's going to influence the way we do clinical studies and the clinical studies are, we call them double-blind studies. but there's a problem because there's always a doctor-patient interaction no matter how double-blind you are. and you can't really measure that so easily. so the are compounding factors, but the fact is at our center we have 35 hours of cme credit for anyone who takes a mind-body training at our center, given by the american medical association. we have students from u.s. cd going to our center. almost every hospital in the u.s. anyway has a department of integrative medicine. so we have come a long way. >> it's actually happening at harvard medical school. i'm very humbled and proud to serve as a faculty dean for continuing medical education at harvard medical school. i direct 12 postgraduate courses, but under the jurisdiction of the aegis of continued education, we have 275 postgraduate courses, distance learning, 70,000 people, 100 models. we reach out to about 90,000 clinicians and physicians and allied health professionals throughout the world. a couple of years ago we had a course called medication and psychotherapy. the keynote speaker there was his holiness, the dalai lama. he did a three hour session on wisdom one day, and the next a three-hour session on compassion. and it was actually breathtakingly beautiful. as part of the faculty in addition to harvard medical school faculty, we have richard davidson. and he's considered one of the top 50 neuroscientists in the world. and talk about humility, sometimes someone would ask the dalai lama a question and he would succumb i don't know the answer to that, please ask my guru, richard davidson. richard davidson has some studies, but this is true, deepak has mentioned it, and he is done some studies at harvard. not going to people in meditation have a subjective experience of feeling happy, creative, better relationships, but you see anatomical changes in the brain. you can see them on cat scan. you to functional mri and you can see changes in different parts of the brain. so that's happening and that's the concept of nerve plasticity. we have a physician, a brilliant professor of neurology at harvard medical school, and he talks about nerve plasticity. he talks about neurons. he talks about an earl biology of leadership. when you have time, if you haven't heard about neurons, read about it. but one of the most fascinating syndromes to me in medicine is phantom limb syndrome to someone has an amputation of albany on the right side and they experience pain. in the missing limb, and here's a study that a lot of us quoted, he has done some of the research. so somebody is expensing phantom limb syndrome and ex-im a stranger is sitting and massaging his right leg. and then iran's in this patient, this phantom limb syndrome fire and he gets relief of his pain. that's uncanny. western medicine and the technology looking at cat scan, functional mri is now catching up with a subjective experience that people have had for thousands of years. one of my favorite sayings is the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. so the fact that we don't have these double-blind randomized controlled ironclad studies doesn't mean that it's not true. it will happen. it may take years for the research to catch up. >> ladies and gentlemen, since there's a lot of people standing, i want to give the people that are standing the opportunity to ask questions. and since we're also being filmed by c-span and they are broadcast, if you could just wait until a mic gets to use the people on television, millions of people can here. again, we will star with people or stand and want to give as many of those people as possible a chance to cut also i just want to again thank just wanted your friend and summer that's one of my favorite people in industry for making this event happen, and that's maggie of amazon publishing. and doing a great job publishing the books better but here in the audience has. [applause] can we get somebody may be from the restricted to you from standing up all the way in the back box please raise your hand if you have a question. yes, you right there if you can. >> [inaudible] >> the financial business of medicine. >> before you answer that question, complementary medicine as opposed to alternative. have you and your colleagues at harvard ever viewed it as western medicine being complementary to mind-body medicine? you were just talking -- >> the. >> now using the technology, the technology that has been catching up with and has been done for thousands of years and treating people well for a long time. >> right. but let me make it very clear distinction here are i'm the beneficiary of the right total hip. i had daily, nocturnal and nocturnal pain but if i didn't know better i would think i had cancer to the bone. and i saw the best surgeon and i got a wonderful procedure. that was by the way just seven weeks ago. a week ago i played nine holes of golf. that's how good it is. so i would challenge anyone in integrative medicine to say, could you have done that? if somebody has pneumococcal pneumonia from unique medicine. if somebody has hiv or hepatitis c, you need the right medications. somebody fractured a bone, you probably need a sling and a good orthopedic surgeon. so western medicine does amazing things, and we shouldn't forget that. somebody needs a liver transplant. i had a patient who required 100 units of blood, and survived the liver transplant and two years later ran the boston marathon. so complementary and integrative medicine has a major role in preventive medicine. how do we prevent obesity? how do we prevent depression? can we cure somebodies released? but there is in my mind a limit to it. as in that -- deepak and i will disappear. so it has a role. i've actually experienced, i had arthroscopic knee surgery, and all of the, mine useful and, and i had actually canceled the gulf i was going to play the weekend, which was very depressing. a beautiful summer, spring day in boston but then i meet a friend and she said, sanjay, you mentioned you got released from your back pain. i had a herniated disc. by an acupuncture to ask a went and saw that lady and my knee was really hurting. it was swollen and i got acupuncture and then she got out of the car in the parking lot of the country club and kicked her foot into the air. see how good it is? so the next day, friday evening around 4:00 i had a little hiatus and i called the acupuncturist early in the morning. i went to see her, and she did the acupuncture, and i got up and you could compare one knee to the other it and suddenly the swelling was gone. i couldn't believe the. i don't understand how it happened. i called home. my wife was not there, so i called her on her cell phone and she's going to come home two hours later, doing some shopping. i went to the country club i played nine holes of golf. so i have benefited from acupuncture and things of that sort. i'll pass it on to the back. >> i have benefited through what i practice. i don't take any medication. i've never had surgery. never been hospitalized. but i agree with what he said but i want to answer your question, because yes a very specific question about remuneration. now, sanjiv comes from harvard medical school. it's the gold standard on there are many other places like that. but here are some statistics. [laughter] here are some statistics. you can look them up. i swear i didn't make these up. between 36 and 40% of patients suffer from a disease which means disease that has been a result of medical treatment. 80% of pharmaceuticals are of optional or marginal benefit. which means if we didn't use them, it would make a bit of a difference to the natural history of disease except some side effects and money. next time you watch television look at the commercial for any pharmaceutical whether it's a migraine, they could give you sexual impetus and it could cause death. [laughter] in between is a total panorama. also the worst heart disease is coronary. [inaudible] it doesn't prolong life in more than 2% of people but it's the most common procedure. the second most common procedure for heart is angioplasty. does not prolong life for more than 3% of people. these are alarming statistics and get these urges are being done everywhere. back surgery, 98% is useless. hysterectomy, 95% is useless. so we are talking about huge amounts of money that are spent on procedures, okay, my father, our father would make a diagnosis come and your logical diagnosis with precision. today if you the headache you go to the emergency room, if you don't walk out with a cat scan or an mri, you are lucky, okay? because nobody has the time to do it. so we have a crisis. what we call health reform is not health reform. it's insurance reform. it has nothing to do with health. most of the expenditure is end-of-life care. nobody is allowed to die in the house. i just made my will and i said i am not going to die in the hospital. i'm not going to have any of these resuscitative procedures. i have been in committee hospital where there's the same standards don't apply an icy doctors directing something called -- a little miner, not minor but aberration and electrolytes which if you didn't correct would cause a cardiac arrest and the patient would die. but they keep directing it even though what is there has no life there. so a lot of what we call prolonging life is actually prolong suffering to build the people who make money are the medical providers. so this is a huge problem. i discussed it with politicians. i've even brought it up to our president, okay, but we have a system -- [applause] we have a system, and this again, nothing to do with the gold standard were sanjiv practices. [laughter] we have a system where for every congressman, there are 28 lobbyists in washington. they, the only business, they either medical industrial complex lobbyists or they are military-industrial. so you know, where do we think our country makes money? they supply arms to afghanistan. they supply arms to india. we have huge problems when the incentives for treatment becomes money, and it becomes corrupting influence. if you go to baker, what will he saw the? read. how do you think they make money? for every chemotherapy treatment that make it. am i saying you shouldn't have chemotherapy? i'm not saying they. i ask everyone here to be a difficult patient. question your doctors, get specifics, go to google, get the information -- [laughter] and you will know -- and you will know more than the average medical provider. [applause] >> but i would say to that, don't only question the medical practitioner, the person who has the same degree, but also the herbalist. i see patients who develop what's called -- they're going to die within a few days. from liver failure. if you have liver failure, you can get dialysis. if you have severe lung problems you can be on a ventilator until things are figured out and you can be fixed. if you acute liver failure, you better pray that you get a transplant in time. and every single year the articles published in the medical literature herbs, natural, right, part of nature that kill people. hardheaded, kidney disease, acute liver failure. my patients, a variety of liver disorders, by the way 1 billion people in would have chronic liver disease. 1 billion people in would have chronic liver disease. i ask every single patient about what do you take, and the majority of them are taking things that are never told any other physician. they're taking herbs. i say what are you taking? the list goes on and on. dr. chopra what you think about that? i said, how much are you paying? i think $342 out of pocket a month. i say, i call that a wallet biopsy. and just because it's not -- the tornadoes that happening right now which is what deepak and i will not be on tv tonight. tornadoes swept us off the show. it's part of nature. so we have to have them we have to apply the same standards as we should to western medicine that we do to concentrate integrated medicine as well. >> it's good you ask this question, because this is a discussion that needs to take place and sanjiv is right. we have the ability to be informed these days, and you should be informed of everything. >> if we could get some it up on the stands that has a question? anybody? could we get somebody in the back standing up? the lady right behind the cameraman. no, no, no. right there. >> what do you think of shaman is him speak with this is very good question. because many years ago i don't know if i want to go into the whole story but i was not a long story but i was ambushed by, well i will, because i hope he watches the program. i was ambushed by richard dawkins, the atheist of our times. in england and became as reporter for channel four and i was very happy with the conversation which we had, which was about two hours. then i was in the movie that he produced called enemies of reason to if you want to check it out go to youtube. there's a million hits. i was not totally offended but the reason he read economy is i said a shift in consciousness causes a shift in biology. which is a very important statement. so your biology is different in sleet. it's different in the dream state. different now than it would be when you wer you are sleeping. it's different when you're anxious. it's different when you're angry. it's different when you feel keys, love, compassion, joy. and the traditions there's a -- i don't have time to go into right now, so consciousness, cosmic consciousness, god consciousness, unity consciousness. so what does shaman to? they shift your consciousness and when you shift your consciousness, there's a lot of good research coming out. one of the things, i used to wonder by the way what the ceiling? why do certain people in fact, and you know, while we say it's all good for preventive medicine, it's not true. you can reverse heart disease. you can cure asthma. you have reversal of many inflammatory disorders, including many diseases. they are published studies on all of these. i used to wonder what is happening biologically? and finally i realized that what is common to all these people is a return to wholeness, a return to the word healing, holy, holistic all means the same thing. that they have biologically what we learned when we go to medical school, the first few lessons we learned is homeostasis. they are protecting us. if you inject yourself you have an inflammatory response. but if you have an exaggerated inflammatory response then you have autoimmune, allergies, all sorts of things. exaggerated inflammation tends to be a predisposing factor for most every disease. now there's a movement among chemotherapy is to treat inflammation first and chemotherapy second. because you think of many cancers as a chronic disease. so inflammation is a protective response. exaggerated inflammation is not good. but what is the healing response? its return to homeostasis. your baseline status of dynamic non-change in the midst of change. it occurred to me that these people who are getting better, a respective of what the treatment was, whether it was meditation or shamanism or even massaged or deep and -- hypnosis are what i like to call by a regulation because the of all these devices that can monitor that. they were going to baseline state of homeostasis. okay, which is the healing response. so when you go to medical school because we are so oriented to specialization, say this is a gastroenterologist and cardiologist. the fundamental state of our being, being, not feeling, not thinking, not doing but being at the level of being, we are human beings, we are not human thinking. at that level evolution has designed as for self repair and self-regulation. and that's what's happening in shaman is a but it's a long answer, but i felt compelled to give it. [applause] >> we are going to take two more questions. yes, that lady there and then there's one lady all the weight in the back that's waving her hand back -- we will take three questions. they are really dedicated. >> [inaudible] you each talked about being willing to dare and take on risk. so i assume sometimes you've also had failures along the way, and i wondered what some of the most impactful failures were and how they informed your later path to success. >> i let deepak ago first. [laughter] >> i mentioned in the book a chapter where i walked out of the fellowship which is very prestigious, because i was asked a question that i did know the answer to. the question was how many milligrams -- get in the 59 papers? and i said to my supervisor, my professor, i said, i think it was 2.3 milligrams, but i'm not sure, let me look it up. in front of about 20 people, of the fellas can he said he should have information in your head by now. so i took my briefcase, i dumped all the papers and i said you have it now. last night and i walked out of my fellowship, and he called my wife and he said your husband blew his career. he's finished. my wife was pregnant with our son, and we were earning $600 a month. i was out of the fellowship. i actually come again, read in "the boston globe" they were looking for an emergency room physician. i went there, there was a hispanic doctor, doctor gonzalez who became a great friend of mine. i said i have no experience i have a medical license and i need the money. and so for one year i worked in the emergency room moonlighting basically, and i did feel like a great failure at that time. i was responsible for my wife and my children, for the fact that a joint a prestigious fellowship, walked out of it. and it took me a long time to realize that as long as i live for the approval of my peers and my superiors, i would not be able to do with sanjiv says, dare to dream. so it took me a while to realize that if i wanted to explore what i thought was intuitively something that needed to be explored. now we talk about science as good science. so i said i have to be independent of both criticism and flattery. it took me a while to recover from the. it was able here. >> so, i remember in the early '80s i sat down one day and i made my goals in life, and i put professional, spiritual, family, social. and next to professional i wrote on a bunch of quotes. one of them was i want to be a single author, have a book on disorders of the liver. so i burned the midnight oil. that was my passion back then, there was no such thing as google. you had to go to i have to go to the county medical library which had the largest collection of medical books in the world and go to the basement and the subbasement and dig up the original articles published in 1970. and then i wrote an introduction. i did the table comments and then i wrote three chapters and then i sent it to five publishers. and four of them said, thank you very much but we are not interested. we already have a major book on hepatology. my fifth one from new york, they wrote back and said sanjiv, i really like your writing style. i like to come to boston and take you out to lunch. i'm thrilled and we sit down, we go to lunch and as i'm sitting down, he says, we are not interested in your book. i said you're kidding which you can all the way from new york to take me out to lunch and tell me that? and he said, but we like your writing style. and we would like you to write or edit a book on gastrointestinal physiology which we taught all over america to second to medical students. though i had this thing, i don't know if the bank had said or it is one of my uncles have been come in every adversity is the seat of great success. and i said to myself, ma i'm going to do to books. i'm still going to get my disorders of the liver published, but a good publisher and i'm going to edit the second jet textbook. then invited a colleague of mine companies to be at massachusetts, and we will invite the entire boston g.i. at a children's hospital, union medical center, deaconess and so on. and we did that. you know, addison once asked how does it feel to fail? he said i didn't feel. i discovered 9009 of 99 ways in which it doesn't work. when he was 57, this factory burned down, and a lot of people commiserate with them. and he said why are you doing that? all my mistakes have been burned and now i can start anew. so chilly attitude i think. we were very fortunate, deepak and i, that those values were instilled in us when we were young. >> first the lady behind you. >> [inaudible] i was wondering, patients with chronic lyme disease committee are suffering greatly and we were hoping that perhaps maybe we could get some help for our suffering because we can't reach homeostasis. with all the alternative medicine come we've tried all the western medicine. we've tried, we are not getting well. >> i'm sorry, i'm not the right person to be answering your question. my specialty is ever disease, hepatology. i think this question would best be asked of a rheumatologist and somebody, there's a rheumatologist who also embraces integrated medicine and the mind-body connection. that would be your best bet. maybe deepak can help. [laughter] >> there are integrated on colleges, integrated rheumatologists, integrated infectious disease specialists. there's a list of all these people if you go to the website you can get more information. i am not the right person to answer that question. >> and lastly the lady that is right in front. >> i know i'm asking a lot -- >> repeated for one more time. >> i said, i know i am asking a lot, but when you lead us in a group meditation? [laughter] [applause] >> i want to ask a question. did you meditate this morning? [laughter] on your own? [inaudible] >> so there's a wonderful engine saying you should meditate once a day, and if you don't have time to do that, you should meditate twice a day. >> you said that. >> but maybe deepak will lead the group. >> here's something. if you're not already familiar with how many people are familiar with the 21 day meditation challenge? please raise your hand. so that's about i would say 50% of the people in this room. every three months the chopra center along with oprah winfrey, we offer this meditation on line, and the last time 700,000 people meditated together with us for three weeks. i was traveling the world in moscow and korea and latin america. isotonic people have heard of the 21 day challenge? and 15% of people would raise their hand, just like this. so i just want you to know, if you go to the chopra center meditation.com, free of charge, you will participate with the largest betterment in meditation that has ever been done in the history of civilization. there has never been -- [applause] >> okay, so i don't want to miss the opportunity of telling you this. you can register now for free. and that's the kind of movement need to start to create critical mass of awareness. so i will lead is two minutes and then we should -- >> after the meditation is done, everybody needs to remain seated for two minutes, because sanjiv and deepak will have immediate appearance and they need to make it out. so again, please just remain seated. spent okay, why don't you, there are many kinds of meditation, transcending meditation, self aware meditation. i will start you on something that if you just start your day with your day will go a little better, okay? so close your eyes. and put your awareness on your breath and let your mind settled into your breath. let your mind settled into your breath. don't try to make the lady. just allow your mind to settle into your breath. now bring your awareness to your heart, and ask yourself who am i? and allow any sensation, images, feelings to spontaneously surface. question, who am i? a nap ask yourself the question, what do i want -- and now ask yourself the question, what do i want? then allow any sensation and image, feeling spontaneously arise here what do i want? and now one final question. what's my purpose and how can i serve? what's my purpose and how can i serve? again, allow any question, allow any sensation, image, feeling or thought to emerge. what's my purpose and how can i serve? just a reminder, you don't go looking for the answer. you only ask the question. the answer is deep in your soul. just relax into your body. and please open your eyes. okay, so i said there are many kinds of meditation. this is reflection. there's a self-awareness, there's transcendence, there's conscious choice making to their story the difference between the perceptual and the actual, but if you just do three, four minutes of reflection, living the question, first of all, you will veterans synchronicity which is many twin cities is in in response to the questions you and -- asked. so let's do this everyday and your date will be much better. thank you. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, i can, join me in thanking the brilliant sun chief and deepak. thank you. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations] what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i have a couple of books. i don't finish anyone book at one time. i keep going back and forth to different ones. "1861", about the first year of the civil war. i'm over to 1863 now and what's happening in gettysburg. which is commemorated that battle, but really getting a sense of what was happening during 1861, the first shots fired at fort sumter, and all the behind the scenes going on there at the time, what was happening around the country as it pertained to slave and a lot of other issues, obviously during that time as well, leading up to ultimately the emancipation proclamation and the lincoln administration. fast forwarding about 100 years, "fire and rain," a great book about 1969 and 1970 about the breakup of the beatles, about the emergence of james taylor, crosby stills nash and young, from a musical standpoint, what was happening politically at the time. you know, we had woodstock in 69. you had really the remnants of the civil rights movement moving to the war in vietnam and the political unrest, can't state, all that was happening during that time, a remarkable book. .. >> that took place just as our country was at its dawning, and it was the trial of a gentleman by the name of levi weekes who was from manhattan, and he was on trial for the murder of a woman named alma sands. and mr. weekes' defense attorneys were pote aaron burr -- both aaron wu and alexander ham hamilton. and it really was a remarkable trial that took place, as i said, a as our country was coming into being, and to have both these two rivals as your defense attorney. i won't give away the ending of the trial or the book itself, but it's a remarkable book as well. so so far those are the four books that i'm presently juggling around here and there. >> let us though what you're reading this summer. tweet us @booktv, post it on our facebook page or send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org. >> booktv is on facebook. like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers, watch videos and get up-to-date information on events. facebook.com/booktv. >> next, ying ma on her book, "chinese girl in the ghetto," a telling of her experiencing moving from china to oakland, california. this is an hour and ten minutes. >> imagine being a fourth grader who lived a rather isolatedrat existence and was told about a faraway place called disneyland. she had heard exciting thingsi about it, but she really couldn't comprehend the magnitude of such a place. when ying ma and her family immigrated to the u.s. fromadin china, she thought she was heading to disneyland. [laughter] what confronted her was a far cry from the magic kingdom. it wasn't the foreign language and culture that proved the most difficult. rather, it was the shocking racism, isolation and disdain that she encountered in our owne backyard of oakland. ying ma's story is a perfecte example of what made america great; courage to confront hardship and abuse,, determination to move past it and gratitude to a country thato made it possible for anyone to succeed and discover one's self-worth. i highly recommend that you read the personal account of her amazing journey in her book, "chinese girl in the ghetto," which she will be selling and signing tonight. ying ma has, indeed, come a long way from the inner city ofe re oakland. she received her undergraduate degree f from cornell and a law degree from hard said. -- harvard. she has served as -- [inaudible] >> thank you. corporate communications, which is the first mainland china-based internet company to list on the nasdaq. and served on the first professional staff of the congressional u.s. china economic and security review commission. she has also written article for the "the wall street journal," the international he recalled tribune, the los angeles thyme, the weekly standard, and others. currently she's a senior vice president of sd berk partner. a strategic advisory firm and policied a vierser of the heart land institute. a free market think tank. it's my pleasure to introduce mink -- ying ma. [applause] >> thank you very much. i want to say thanks to the volunteer who made this event happen. a special thanks to rita for all of her hard work and coronation in recent months, and howard, thank you for having me here. it's an honor for know tell you a bit about my book, and my story. but whenever i talk about my book, i have a tendency to think of another author, and that author is president barack obama. as you may recall, the liberal media raved about barack obama's writing ability in the 2008 election. back then, senator obama's résume was quite short, and his supporters often would say with a straight face, that he was just marvelous because he wrote two marvelous books about himself. at first i thought it was a joke. when senator obama actually became president obama, i realized it was no joke at all, i decided that i seriously needed to get with the program. and start believing in the dreamy barack obama world of yes, we can. so i thought that what i needed to do was to write two books about myself, and maybe i too can be president of the united states. [laughter] [applause] so i sat down and wrote a book about myself called "chinese girl in the ghetto." when people asked me what the book is about these days, i usually politely tell them it's about my family's journey from communist china to inner-city oakland california. it's about my journey of getting to know freedom. what i'm really thinking. usually what is really on my mind, i need to hurry up and write another book about myself. and why do, maybe i can go to all of those places that barack obama has been able to go. yes, we can! [laughter] i'm joking, of course. i was not born in this country, so i can't become president. [laughter] [applause] donald trump ceptd my hopes up for a long time. [laughter] he kept telling me and everybody else that barack obama wasn't born in this country either. so when barack obama finally released his birth certificate in the 2012 elections, i was pretty devastated. all of my hopes for the white house were dashed. it's a feeling that i'm sure senator marco rubio will become quite familiar with in 2016. in any case, when it became clear that writing another book wasn't going to do anything for my political ambition. i decided to focus on telling people about the book i have written, and i think it's a book that was worth writing for -- its own sake. let me team you a little bit about it. my story is an immigrant story. a legal immigrant story. [laughter] [applause] i was born in china at the time when the country had been devastated by decades of to tolltarian communist rule. my family lived in a apartment that had no running water, no modern toilet facility, no washer, no dier, -- direr and none of the amenity we take for granted here in the midwest. we live in a place that was considered to be quite modern and quite enviable for folks in china. we lived in a city and didn't have to do back breaking farm labor. back then, everyone who could leave china for america wanted to leave. everyone who couldn't leave wanted to leave too. when if my family had the opportunity come to america, we immediately took it. we moved to oakland, california, knowing almost nothing about it. we showed up there because we had relatives and we wanted to be close to our family members. yet, instead of finding an america with the streets were paved with gold, we found crumbling schools, unsafe streets, and racist people. that was because we had arrived in inner-city america. the heart of the welfare state. one by one the horror of the ghetto showed themselves to us. poverty and urban decay plagued our new city. store fronts had shattered windows, streets were pockmarked with pothole, bridges and tunnels were splashed with graffiti. the streets downtown even near city hall were often streets that smelled of urine, homeless men and women aggressively pan handled. that's when they were being nice to you and accosted tourists and residents alike. crime plagued our new city as well. drug dealing seemed more prevalent at time than employment. muggings took place in plain sight. and gunshots rang at night regularly interrupting my tv watching. racism also ruled my town. asians and didn't matter if we were chinese, vietnamese, we often only had one name. and that was chinamen. that was the case at school, on streets, on the bus, and seemingly everywhere and anywhere. on the sidewalks, teens had a habit of entertaining themselves by creeping up behind frail and elderly asian immigrants and frightening them by screaming at the top of their lungs their worst imitation of the chinese language. more often than not, racial slurs were backed by the threat of violence. and sometimes followed by violence itself. and because the racism of the perpetrators simply did not fit neatly in to the politically correct narrative that our culture so often prizes, main stream america paid no attention or simply looked away. in the ghetto, there was a general break down of law and order. and overwhelming absence of personal responsibility. it was prevalent and supposed to help. it only made the place even more dysfunctional. it provided food stamps but it could not stem hunger. it offer welfare checks but could not promote economic growth or create jobs. it excused laziness, turned a blind eye to gang banging, and con condoned a break down of the family unit. worst of all, it insilled a sense of entitlement in the subject, and took away their pride, sneered at their dignity. thankfully, for my family we didn't participate in the welfare state. this was in part because we spoke almost no english when we -- showed up in america. we had no idea how to apply for welfare benefits. [laughter] we didn't even know that welfare benefits existed for people like us, and back then they definitely existed because this was the day before welfare reform of 1996, and poor illegal immigrants in the country didn't have to have been here for five years before they became eligible for government money. maybe we didn't take advantage of these welfare programs simply because we weren't that bright. we never bothered to even inquire about the benefits because it didn't occur to us or hasn't occurred to us by come together united states meant we should hold out our hands and ask the federal or state government for money. perhaps our ignorance was actually a blessing in disguise. that meant we had to fight our way out of poverty the old fashioned way. we worked. we had limited financial resources, so my parents worked at menial your -- jobs, long hours in the beginning for less than minimum wage. we wore clothing from good will or handed down from our relatives. we used second, third, or fourth hand furniture, and at first my brother and i each slept on half the bed. he slept on the box springs. i slept on the mattress. i think he insisted i got the better end of the bargain. there was hardship and shared sacrifice. the mother who was once a well respected schoolteacher became a seam stress at the sweat shop. the father who was once a senior mechanic trailed by the group of apprentices became the kitchen help for a chinese-owned restaurant where the owners regularly verbally abused their employees. the children studied day and night instead of hanging out on the streets using drugs or otherwise poorly behavior. our family saved for homeownership instead of splunging on vacation. >> my brother and i learned english more quickly than they did, we took them to the hospital when they were sick. we filled out job applications for them when they were looking for work. we accompanied them to the unemployment office when they were laid off, and we haggled with the utilities companies usually with adults many years older than we were when they overcharged us. we did not demand that the government level the playing field by giving us handout or free byes. we accepted that life was unfair, and that not everybody -- not everyone could be born rich or even born in this country. we certainly didn't occupy public buildings or parks. we didn't urinate on the street. we didn't violate city ordinances. we did not destroy public park property. or steal private property even when things didn't go our way. we thought it was wrong to feel entitled to government already guess or other people's money. we also didn't demand that america somehow give us preferences in the form of racial and ethnic quota. in fact, being asian in california pretty much meant we didn't receive any of thoserefe. but racial quota and preferences were dolled out quite lavishly to sons and daughters of dennists, doctors, and other middle class professionals who belonged to racial categories that were far more in fashion in our society. regardless, in the end we prevailed. we prevailed over the welfare state. we got out. certainly we didn't do it alone. the kindness of the american people has always impressed me. i think it's something that impresses all immigrants to this country. and we remain grateful to those who offered a helping hand and a warm smile. repeatedly, when i was reading a piece in the "the wall street journal" written by governor jeb bush, i thought of my family's journey out of the ghetto. he said "today the sad real city if you're born poor, if you're parents didn't go to college, if you don't know your father, and if english is not spoken at home, then the odds are stacked against you. you are more likely to stay poor today than at any other time since world war ii." what struck me about governor bush's piece was that all except one of his prerequisite for being condemned forest fire poverty applied to me. fortunately i know my father. but i was born poor. my parents didn't go to college, and english was not and still is not spoken at home. the odds were stacked against me. so like barack obama has been eager to harp on the odds for political purposes, in the narrative he has been pedaling for the four to five years. the little people at the bottom of the society don't get a fair shake. millions and billions, according to him, or the richest 1% have edged out everyone else from opportunities for success. america's economy has become a -- for the privilege few, and unless government barack obama's government intervenes heavily, the poor and the middle class will never thrive. in this paradigm, in mr. obama's paradigm i had no business getting out of the ghetto at least not without receiving a welfare check. this is because barack obama doesn't just peddle the benefit of the welfare state. he really ped dahls the welfare state mentality. the mentality is even worse than the welfare state itself. it absorbed individuals of personal responsibility. it confines them to grievants and encourages even justifies their sense of entitlement. since the election of last november, republicans have been hyper ventilating about how much more effectively mr. obama and his party can relate to the urban poor and minority. he seemed willing to point that the odds are always stacked against the poor. it's not supposed to be easy to get out of poverty. that's why you work harder, you purr -- pursue your stunt more aggressive and learn to be more nimble. it's a reality that conservatives should be ashamed or afraid to point out. in the conservative bar dime, in our paradigm, free men and women make choices. we take responsibility for our lives, and we extract ourselves from less than stellar circumstance. that was how i got out of the ghetto. despite the odds. unfortunately the el welfare state didn't just exist in the ghetto. it's plagued with racial strife, a break down of law and order. if you were to take away the latter two and the high crime rate, or the racial strife, big government is all over in this country. and find the welfare state everywhere. the welfare state really isn't just about welfare. it's about government intrusion from the top and entitlement mentality from the bottom. we live in a country where collectively we spend more money than we have. we are the takers who are like to take more from the makers. we have a president who uses every opportunity he can to land base the successful, to tell americans that fairness and progress can only occur which those who have the money given more via higher taxes to those who have less. taking and spending other people's money is what barack obama likes to call our shared commitment to each other. americans agree with him. at least enough to reelect him as president last year. unpleasant as it may be. the real city that it is always -- always difficult to convince people to say no to free money. it is always difficult to convince them to opt for the uncertainty of free market and free enterprise and walk away from government subsidizes. i may have emerged from the ghetto without received welfare benefits. but i think it was purely an accident. if i had known that welfare programs existed and my parents qualified for the welfare programs, i would have brought them myself to the relevant government officer -- offices, filled out the application, served as their translater, and anal 10, whatever it was i would made sure they got some free money. i never had to do that in oakland. i had family and friends -- and if my parents were to call qualify for welfare programs today, i would still be the first to hep them apply. the truth is, most people find it very hard to say no to free money and most simply don't. we all respond to monetary incentives. of course, we know that there's no such thing as free money. our big government is funded by people who work, people who create wealth, people who pay taxes. and it is funded by money we borrow by a national debt of approximately $17 trillion. we also know barack obama's welfare state didn't just hand out welfare check or food stamps. it also hands out goodies ranging from amnesty for illegal immigrants, free contraceptive for women. if you're at the receiving ends of those goodies, it's very hard to say no. so the key is not to be giving out the goodies in the first place. i know i'm supposed to provide an uplifting story tonight. the truth is we simply cannot defeat the welfare state on our own. in the grand scheme of thing it is makes little different that my family and i made it out of the ghetto without receiving welfare benefit. we got lucky and able to escape the tentacle of the welfare state. it to truly defeat the welfare state, we would have to defeat the welfare state mentality and roll back policy that incentivize dependency and foster a sense of entitlement. and when we do that, we will have a real story to tell about defeating the welfare state. that would be a truly great story. until then, i would merely leave with the greet my book. it's from the introduction. in china i couldn't avoid the randomness, or the weight of authoritarianism. i remained upbeat, cheerful, and happy. in the ghetto, i forgot what it meant to be joyful, but even in the ghetto, people have a chance to walk away from some of the worst attribute of the free society in to the finest virtue. it is disbelief that lies at the heart of my journey of getting to know freedom. i hope in the end freedom will defeat the welfare state and the entitlement mentality. thank you. thank you very much. [applause] those who would like to follow my work. it's yingma.org. you can find my writings and interviews there as well. >> thank you. and for those of you who have been here before. you know for the q & a we'll have people passing out cards like you see over here. and over here. and we'll take them to the person in the back who will read them for the speaker. so if so you questions, raise your hand. and we'll get a card. thank you. >> yes. i am. [inaudible] a child's life in china -- [inaudible] between the age of 8 and 18 -- [inaudible] not necessarily. i think that every -- i think that for people of my generation in china, no matter how happy they were in china, they were gavin chance to come to the united states they would come. and having gone through what i went through in oakland, i don't regret coming to america. i think that one lesson i would draw is that freedom isn't supposed to be easy just because you show up in a free society, a wealthy free society doesn't mean there are any guarantees. and so a success is not going to be there waiting for you. and i think that for people who live in communist countries, like the former soviet union, for instance, they would rather have the opportunity to fight for that freedom to fight for their success and than confined to a lifetime of immediate of course if i and hopelessness. i think it's hard to be an immigrant no matter what. it's hard to leave your friends and family. it's hard to leave a society that you're familiar with. and i think that for kids leading china today or any other country, that's going to be the case no matter what. but in this country, i think the opportunity is always beckon. it continues to beckon all kinds of people. i think policies that promote economic growth, policies that are business friendly. i think those help a lot. i think cmmu >> i think those help a lot. i think community groups and adults who actually teach childrenw not to think with anh entitlement mentality helps as well. i think there are lots ofh things. i think part of it is that the government in oakland tends to be very anti-free market, very -- and it has not alwayse been all that strong on law andd order. those things are very important if you want a stable environment. but at the same time, you can'tn rely on the government to do everything, and so part of the problem with oakland is that the -- at least when i wasrowi growing up there, the mentality really was an awful one. and until you get at the root of that mentality, until you teach kids motto think that wayt anymore, things aren't going to change all that much. much. >> to the comment you made is how would you -- how someone trapped in the mentality get out of it? if you're a friend of yours? >> well, i would say a few things. number one, don't make any excuses for yourself. when you grow up in a poor environment and unsafe environment, when your family doesn't have a lot of resources, it's very easy to make excuses. it's easy to say i can't do this. i can't do that, i can't go places because my family simply hasn't provided for me. and or, you know, my people are oppressed or whatnot. don't make any excuses for yourself. that's step number one. step number two, don't blame others. there are certainly bad people out there. there are always going to be people who don't necessarily wish you well, but there are so many people who will always be there to lend a hand. .. that is really just how it is and i grew up in it, his country before it liberalized its economy. everybody had the same number of opportunities which was not very many. so, the key is in a society that does provide opportunities you have to take advantage of them and you have to apply yourself. >> how long did it take your family to get a visa to get out of china? >> we -- it took approximately four to five years. in fact come to i wrote an article recently for "fox news".com called a legal immigrant story and you can find it on the web site trade in that story i describe how incredibly hard it was to jump through the hoops to actually do everything america asked us to do in order to come here legally. what's interesting is that these days you constantly hear people say that well our immigration system is broken. we wanted to come here legally but we couldn't or they were just too many obstacles. the truth is lots of people actually stand in line and wait for a very long time man they do that because they respect the rule of law and they also respect the country that they wish to adopt as their home. in my story, the story i wrote for "fox news".com a story entitled a legal immigrants story i talked about that process. i talked about how hard it was my remember seeing my mom come home from the american consulate and she came home crying. i knew that our days for immigrating to america had to wait a little bit longer. in our debate about immigration reform we should not forget those people who are legal immigrants and absolutely not let people talk us into forgetting the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. [applause] >> how did you get from a poor inner-city education to cornell university? >> well, i read a lot. they -- when i first came to this country i didn't speak english so what i did was i spent his summers reading chinese novels and they were very good novels but most likely my parents if they knew what was in those novels would have said they were really inappropriate for my age. they were written by a very famous novelist and asia and you know i spent my summers reading those novels. one because i didn't have access to books like that in china when i was growing up. back then under communist rule people weren't really allowed to read anything colorful or exciting. you read a lot of things that had a lot to do with communism and why communism was great. and as i got a little bit older and once i began to learn english i handed up spending a lot of time reading english books. it was terrible for my eyesight but the great thing is that books take you to all kinds of places that you can't even imagine and once i started digging into the books i realized there was a whole new world outside of the ghetto and i was eager to get out as soon as i could. one way for me to do that was to study as hard as i could. >> what the your thoughts about the gang of eight. [inaudible] >> well, i didn't seem too fond of the idea of marco rubio running for president earlier so i think that probably gives everybody a hand. first of all i hope it fails. [applause] at least i hope it fails in its current form. there were all kinds of efforts by different senators recently to try to make amendments to the gang of a proposal and to make it better to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms but those amendments were all shot down so in its current form it's a disaster. it has now gotten to about a thousand pages long. i actually wrote another article about this. it's called emigrating to america is not an entitlement and it addresses many of the flaws. [applause] and it addresses many of the common misperceptions of what immigration is about. i have a number of disagreements and i suspect that those of you in the audience do as well. i think that my number one disagreement with the bill is that it provides provisional legal status to approximately 11 million illegal immigrants who are in this country before and a significant and meaningful measures of enforcement actually take place before the border is actually secure. i think that is a huge problem. but in addition to that given that i've gone through the immigration process, i suppose i have a little bit of a problem with people saying that while america's immigration system is broken and hence we just get to come here legally. i am sure that many of you believe that our tax system is broken too and that you all believe that you don't want your tax dollars to go to our bloated welfare state. but it doesn't mean that you can stop paying your taxes and if the irs were to come after you you would say well i believe our tax system is broken and hence i stop paying. but that is however the situation we have with their immigration system. it is broken and everybody acknowledges that, let's fix fit but somehow it doesn't affect its broken all these people have a claim to being here because they just want to because they aspire to be american. i have a number of other disagreements and i would point you to my article. i think the title tells you how i feel about this issue. >> how do explain the chinese immigrants to come here resume a bully to -- to join and vote for liberal democrats? politicians are here from china. [laughter] >> i would say a few things. i am actually not sure -- i'm not convinced that people who escape tyranny from china come here and immediately start voting for liberal democrats. some of them probably do when they become citizens but i haven't seen enough studies that say the anti-communist folks in fact are more likely to vote democrat than they are to vote republican. what i do know is that oftentimes when you get to the second or third generation chinese-americans they do tend to be less conservative than their parents because the immigration experience is further away from them. the hardships that their parents with their grandparents had to go through aren't orange is relevant to them and many of these kids you know, apply themselves and end up as very good colleges. at these colleges what happens is they get brainwashed by liberal professors. [applause] so i think that's part of the problem. what is also part of the problem is that folks who tend to be very politically active in the asian community a lot of the easy to do it on the national level tend to be a lot more liberal than the people down the street than your average asian-american particularly more recent immigrants. for whatever reason these asian-american activists have decided that unless they adopt the rhetoric of the left-wing that somehow they have failed. many of these activists don't necessarily. >> the native languages of their respective communities. they don't necessarily know all that much or for all the details of the people or all the difficulties of the people they claim to represent and in many ways you know you can see a parallel between the asian community in the black community. lots would say jesse jackson or al sharpton publicly don't represent their points of view. someone like former representative allen west would in fact have said that quite a bit. in the asian community it's an issue that is not as pronounced. i think because they community probably isn't as politically active as a whole but there is also that this cannot from those national self-appointed spokespeople a disconnect between them and your average asian-american citizen simply because the former doesn't always understand the latter and the latter tends to be a bit more conservative. the third thing i would say is that i think immigrant communities tend to be more pragmatic and because china has undergone 30 years of economic liberalization it's not the same communist country as it used to be. it still is very repressive in many ways but i think for a lot of younger chinese don't necessarily know those awful days, at least they don't know intimately the awful days of the cultural revolution or those days of starvation under chairman mao. and so sometimes they actually can be very nationalistic. so instead of bearing hostility toward communism they might actually be very mad -- nationalistic toward china. i think overall the community may not be as ias ideological. for instance the cuban-american community and when people are less ideological and more practical if you give them a promise of a whole bunch of goodies contest they are likely to respond that way. if mitt romney says i'm going to cut the size of government and i'm going to cut -- i'm going to reform entitlement programs and i'm going to do tax reform but the other side says well that just means he's going to cut your benefits and is going to take away medicare and so on the pull respond to that. a lot of folks these are pocketbook issues and part of it is that they could very well swing the other way if you have someone who actually is a more charismatic political candidate, someone who can speak more direct you to their concerns. so, i have given you a whole bunch i guess. [inaudible] >> i think immigrants i think they are all over the bay area. obviously it's full of immigrants. there are lots of community groups. i think community groups whenever a particular group is close to the local level i think they tend to understand the needs of the people in that community far better. i mean there are lots of things. when i was a kid living in oakland one of the things i benefited the most from was approach i'm called the arthur ashe tennis program. i think this was something founded by arthur ashe. he was a tennis star. he was the first african-american to win wimbledon and the founded this program for inner-city kids to learn to play tennis and to give them something to do so that they wouldn't be out on the streets and to have coaches teach them sportsmanship and self-respect. that was where he learned to play tennis and the folks who taught them that program didn't get paid all that much i know. if they were to give private tennis lessons they would be paid a lot more and that is something that i brom .. folks. there are ways to -- even if you are let's say to donate clothing or money i am sure there are lots of -- out there to serve immigrant communities. you know their needs range from everything from food to clothing or sometimes to do translation ,-com,-com ma translation help to things like maybe sometimes they need legal services and can't afford them. there is a wide range of services that folks need and i think there is no shortage of groups here in the bay area to try to help them. getting involved with one of those groups is one way to do it. another way is i think a lot of times it perhaps doesn't even require participation in some sort of organization. i think just being kind and being decent to somebody and trading in immigrants just like he you would treat one of your friends, that i think that often goes a long way to make an immigrant feel at home in this country. and i think that would be a good place to start. >> you have any ideas on how to encourage young people in the ghetto to seek role models from successful people and other individuals with backgrounds that might help them? >> you know what, i would say especially to people in the ghetto there are role models everywhere. i think our culture has just gotten so politically correct that we often make it seem like if somebody does not share your color or your ethnicity or your cultural background that somehow you can't look up to them. we are constantly saying we have to provide a role model for a particular community. we have to find people of that race and that gender, that ethnicity. i think it's great to find role models of any gender or ethnicity or culture or race. i think for young people one of the things that adults or authority figures who deal with young people a lot what they shouldn't do is to inculcating young people's heads that somehow the only people you can look up to must look like you are sound like you. that is simply not the case. you know when i was growing up, to one of the instructors who was the kindest to me was an african-american instructor. he taught me in fifth grade and unfortunately has passed away since them. but i remember that you know this is my second year in the united states and they knew how to do math really well but i didn't speak english all that well and i didn't notice that i worked really hard to learn. i carried this pocketbook dictionary with me everywhere so that if any time i countered a word or a phrase i didn't understand i would look it up and see what the chinese translation was. he went out of his way you know to help me acclimate to american society but also to encourage me to do better. it didn't matter to me that he was not chinese. it didn't matter to me that he was black. he used to tell, in the class that i had with him, most of the students in my class were black. he used to tell the black kids of the time that they needed not to slack off and stop making excuses. they needed to work harder. it was great that they have a role model i cam but just because you don't have a role model that shares your particular color doesn't mean somehow you should stop looking. there are all kinds of people and i've seen all kinds of folks who have been willing and able to mentor people who didn't share their gender ethnicity or cultural background. i think actually, i think the mentoring goes both ways. people who mentor are willing to do it but you have to be willing to open yourself up to people who wish you well and want to help in the first that this to a bout those people who may not look like your sound like you to do that. >> do you have two or three specific recommendations for the city locally to improve itself? [laughter] >> you know it's interesting, that i haven't thought about that. i haven't lived there for a while and i know the city has changed quite a bit. you know, and i remember under mayor jerry brown i do remember that a number of improvements were were made in were made and i appreciated those improvements. i sort of feel like i've been gone for so long that this question probably would be better answered by a resident of oakland who really have to deal with the city government as well as other aspects of the city. i would say that i mean for me when it comes to making changes in inner-city areas i think it's very crucial for those areas to become business-friendly and two in courage small businesses to encourage entrepreneurship and i have to go back to the mentality the mentality among the city's residents fostered not just by people in government but also their families and churches and communities and your schools. i think for those cities that have inner-city areas that require a lot of help, i think getting to the root of that mentality is very key. >> many immigrants have dual citizenship and allegiance to the country from where they came. our system recognizes dual citizenship. do you think this should change? >> i think at the moment dual citizenship is not for everybody. dual citizenship is not allowed for people who immigrated to the u.s. from china for instance. usually i think dual citizenship is only allowed for those countries that are friendly to us. so if you are a swiss and u.s. citizen most people would like to think that you are going to be homeless. and you know, god my understanding is that if your home country as a country that is considered to be hostile to the united states for the most part the government won't actually allow you to hold dual citizenship. you either stick with a citizenship that you are recently had or renounce it and become an american city which makes perfect sense to me. [inaudible] [laughter] well, to that would go back to what i said earlier. i think strengthening enforcement mechanisms is very key. until you do that the rest of the talk is pretty much just talk. if you're not going to enforce our borders and if you're not going to deport people on a meaningful basis so for instance right now there is a union within the immigration and customs enforcement's unit and those officers complained that what the obama administration won't let them do are two things that are very crucial to their jobs. one is to actually detain folks who are here illegally and two is to deport them and the obama administration has adopted this policy that once you are here unless you have committed some sort of serious crime i mean the administration is not going to spend that much time supporting you or spends too many resources on things like that. when you have an immigration policy that really doesn't have a whole lot of teeth and when people don't think that there is severe punishment for severe consequences to coming here illegally, then obviously we have a broken system. i do believe that we should make this country far more friendly to tilt laborers from oversees. there are lots of people who would divide a lot of help to our economy who would provide their skills and their expertise and a three-year folks like that get what is called and h.b. one visa. there's a small quota for them and usually all the employers in the country that would like to hire people like that do want to have visas like that at the very beginning of the year and that was the case this year. they sort of hit the limit of those visas in january i believe. so it actually makes a lot of sense to make it easier for scientists and mathematicians and others with high skills to actually come here and provide their expertise and help our economy grow. i think that we need to get away from the identity politics that is often being played on immigration policy. unfortunately it's very hard to do because many illegal immigrants the largest group of illegal immigrantimmigrant s in this country are hispanics and within that are mexicans. it's often very hard to separate the two but the key is we actually need to have people who would be willing and not afraid to say that just because we want to enforce our immigration laws and just because we want to secure our borders does not mean that we are bunch of racists. and i think that is actually a tone republicans are constantly talking about how we got the tone wrong in the last election. well, one thing we should do is to set the right tone and the tone is we should stop actually letting people characterize conservatives as racists just because they want to secure our borders. i think rule of law something that conservatives have always cared a lot about and we shouldn't give up on that poor seabed to the other side just because we lost the election and by the way even if we did have the hispanic vote in the last election romney would not have one. anyway i think that there are lots of folks who have thought very intelligently and thoroughly about immigration issue but what we do have right now is obviously a system that doesn't work very well and we also have a proposal that is very imperfect. so we need to get beyond that. >> have you ever considered running for office? >> didn't you hear me earlier? i was thinking about running for president and that was why i wrote this book about myself. [laughter] and then of course since i'm not a natural-born citizen it turns out i can't do that anymore. >> as conservatives should we stop using the term illegal immigrants? >> no, absolutely not. [applause] be what do you think -- this is his sixth day that obama got 70% of patients votes and that is obviously not chinese but chinese filipino japanese korean whatever so what would you think would be the appeal to win this group of people to the conservative republican side? >> yeah, i have been asked that question a number of times since the last election. i don't think anybody has done an extensive polling or any substantive studies in the asian community to ask people why they voted the way they did. i think everybody who has talked about it really has just been taking a guess and i offered a few educated guesses. one of which i mentioned earlier which is that i think second or third generation asian-americans oftentimes are a bit -- they have a tendency to be a bit more liberal or a much more liberal than their parents or grandparents. i thinking governor romney's case my guess is that it's quite hostile that his tough rhetoric on china ended up turning off a lot of folks in the chinese community and like i said earlier these days there are a lot of chinese immigrants who are very nationalistic about china. and there are lots of americans who disagree with governor romney's proposals on what to do with china. i don't agree with him 100% on many issues but i think if you are somebody who is very nationalistic about china or your heritage and you hear one of the political candidates constantly talk about china and getting tough with china comes and i have no doubt the governor romney was talking about getting tough with the chinese communist regime but oftentimes voters don't make that distinction. they might think that governor romney is being anti-china and they might think maybe he is anti-chinese. that is simply a guess. i think somebody would have to to do is study and actually ask folks why they voted the way that they did. in addition to that, as i mentioned earlier governor romney also promised that he would roll back big government. i voted for him and was certainly counting on him to do that but the immigrant community is not insensitive to monetary incentives. as i said earlier there are lots of immigrants who do have failed themselves of government freebies. these days most people i guess and not as ignorant as my parents or my family was when we came here. people nowhere to go to find free money and people nowhere to go to apply for welfare benefits and people know what to do to make themselves appear eligible before government bureaucrats when they need to apply for those benefits. and i think that many of those people probably to vote and when they hear that one candidate is going to roll back the government they probably think you know that would affect their pocketbooks and that would mean fewer benefits for them. i know many people feel the asian community is more inclined to be conservative than a community that is hard-working and industrious. in many ways it is true but just because that is true doesn't mean that people don't want free money or would say no to it. if you are a hard-working immigrant did you come here poor and the government offers you free money you are going to take it. it's very unlikely that you would say no and i think that actually probably has an impact on how people float as well. >> this maybe is a question of optimism versus pessimism. if you look down the road 30 to 40 years what do you think the state of the welfare state will be? >> i think we need, i think conservatives need to start winning some elections. they weren't need to run candidates who are charismatic articulate a viable and conservative free-market thinkers and that we need to take back the white house. we need to take back the senate has if the government continues to be -- our federal government continues to be run by people who are big government types the welfare state will become ever more bloated. we will be staring down a path that greece is currently on and our society will become a huge entitlement state. so i would say i would like to be fairly optimistic. i would like to think that there are viable conservative candidates out there who can articulate a message without compromising on their principles. and you don't think there are lots of governors out there right now who fill that void. i think the key thing to do is to start winning some elections and we can turn things around. [inaudible] >> i have written about that too i think what people say is folks like president obama and liberal columnists like thomas friedman with "the new york times" as well as other big government types ever since the financial crisis hit they have been advocating heavy government spending. they wanted more infrastructure spending. they wanted more funding for renewable energy projects. they wanted all kinds of things and when they got pushback from free-market types and folks who believed in limited government they started using china as their example and they started using china to go to conservatives into sort of this position of having to adopt their rhetoric. china as many of you know has grown dramatic way in the past three decades or so. they began undertaking economic growth in 1978 and they opened up their economy to the world. but it's still a communist country and still politically oppressive and a lot of things are still run by the state which is why commentators these days like to refer to china's economy as a state capitalist economy. folks like barack obama for a long time he kept pointing to the roads and bridges that china was building and saying why are we just sitting here watching them build these roads and bridges, the airports and other big infrastructure projects while our infrastructure here is crumbling? he also says why are we sitting here not willing to give our noble energy companies funding while china is just shoving money in these companies directions and china has gotten to a point where it now dominates the solar industry. so for liberals china is kind of of -- when they look at the chinese government they see something that they would love to have which is the ability to spend freely without accountability to voters. it's very exciting to them. there is no meddlesome congress. [applause] there aren't any tea party types you now and so but when i've written about this topic but the research shows is that china started growing dramatically largely because it introduced more free-market mechanisms and to its economy not as it became more status. the chinese economy today is much freer than what it was 32 years ago when they first started their economic liberalization revolution and numerous chinese reform minded folks whether in government or small and medium-sized enterprises in china they all recognized at the hand of the government is intruding and interfering with the economy and it creates all kinds of inefficiencies. it creates or supports monopolies that in a fit lots of large state-owned enterprises and it suffocates certain industries. what a lot of reform minded chinese officials and economists what they advocate is that they would like to see further economic reform. in fact this is something that the new chinese leadership has been talking about. this is something that they would like to see too. they believe that in order for their economy to grow in the long run to really get to a modern first world economy they will have to implement some changes. if barack obama, he certainly has talked a lot about becoming more status like china but what a lot of chinese recognize if they actually need to become more free-market oriented. so i would say and this is something i say all the time. we shouldn't listen to barack obama for that matter. [applause] >> to believe that many first-generation chinese the most conservative ones do not vote? >> i am not sure about that. here in california we make voting easy for chinese immigrants. there are ballots that are translated into chinese so even if you don't speak the language you can go get yourself a chinese ballad and fill in the circles. obviously that is not the case in other states with smaller immigrant populations but i would just say here in california it's very easy for immigrants to vote. so many things are bilingual and multilingual. whether immigrants actually vote or not is a different issue. i haven't seen the polls are the studies so i'm not totally sure about the voting rates within a particular immigrant population but i mean i'm sure that like other in america there are lots of people who don't vote so it wouldn't surprise me if lots of first-generation immigrants don't vote either. >> you think america is still free? >> i think lots of things are relative so when people ask me that question i usually ask compared to what? there is an index of economic freedom and so every year hong kong and singapore come out of the very top of it so compared to hong kong and singapore are economy severely is free but when it comes to political freedom or other measures you know we certainly are much freer than modern day china and much freer than russia for instance and then i would say that you know i continue to refer to our society is a free society. i think there are ways for our markets to be freer. i think that there is a lot of government intrusion that interferes with that. but in recent years as a result of the financial crisis and the economic intervention that has taken place economic activity certainly has gotten freer certainly with the passage of obamacare but i remain hopeful that some of those things can be rolled back. [applause] steo follow-up question. you'd came from -- which is neighboring of hong kong. how does the united states freedom of economics compare with hong kong? >> i think hong kong has an extremely free economy. hong kong is constantly ranked by conservatives or free-market research institute says he did the number one or number two freest economies in the world. when you talk about it that way our economy definitely is less free compare to hong kong's. see i think that's it e-rate thank you. >> thank you so much. it's been an honor. [applause] than american diplomats. >> this weekend on c-span, nicholas burns on the history of u.s. diplomatic efforts in the middle east. saturday morning at 10 eastern on c-span2's booktv. how would you define the american dream? the dream from the great depression through the 21st century saturday at 7:30 p.m. why change this to the truth is more exciting? true tales of the founding fathers sunday at noon eastern. >> now a discussion on the public health care system and whether it can handle a disaster either man-made or natural. representatives from the centers for disease control and prevention, and the american public health association joined state government officials in this hour and 40 minute discussion hosted by the alliance for health reform. >> good afternoon. my name is ed howard. i'm with the alliance for health reform, and i want to welcome you on behalf of senator rockefeller, senator blunt, our board of directors to this program on how well america is prepared to deal with both natural and man-made disasters. and i should say up top, this is not an intellectual exercise. and i want to illustrate that i stealing a sentence from a letter written by one of our panelists today, doctor ali khan of the center for disease control and prevention. a couple years ago transmitting the nation's first national strategic plan for public health repaired is in response, he chronicled what was then recent major disasters, and this is the verbatim quote. in the last five years alone, national and global health security has been threatened by incidents including hurricane katrina, west nile virus, h1n1 influenza pandemic, bacterial contamination of food by e. coli and salmonella, the deepwater horizon oil spill, the haiti earthquake, and following cholera outbreak and the japanese tsunami and subsequent radiation released. end of quote. that's a pretty breathtaking listing for only five years. and today we're going to maybe speculate on what the next five years will bring and examine how well prepared are to deal with that list. we are pleased to have as a partner today in sponsoring the briefing, the robert wood johnson foundation, which has been helping americans enjoy healthier lives and get the care they need for 40 years now. and we are very lucky to have with us, to co-moderate the program, dr. john lumpkin was a senior vice president of the foundation and director of its health care group. and i should note that before joining the foundation, he directed the illinois department of public health for 12 years, so he brings a great deal of experience and expertise to today's discussion. john? >> thank you for -- now i am on. thank you all, for coming. this is a very critical topic. from my viewpoint at state of illinois, i was able to actually charge with participating in response to a number of disasters, some of which, many of the people outside of illinois might not have been familiar with but we had major flooding in 1993. and i became quite interested in that because my background before it came into public health was in emergency medicine. and as someone who's been involved in doing disaster planning for most of my career, i began to bring that is part of what we'r we are doing in public health. but i can tell you that that is a really challenging task. one of the things back in the late 90s that i felt was absolutely critical, and it's more commonplace now, is we would have a molecular biology lab. up till then we will would basically grow cultures in the lab. you would see what they may show in a day or two, and trying to track an outbreak of disease was really challenging. from molecular biology lab you can do dna fingerprint. i thought that was something that was really important. so i had a conversation with a beer of the budget and the governor's office when i did my annual budget and they said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. next. in the following year we had the same conversation. then we had september 11. in 2001 we rapidly set up a molecular biology lab. fortunately, because with thousands of samples that people have sent in to the lab because they were concerned that this was going to be anthrax. now, that could be the end of the story. we increased our preparedness. but in 2002, there was an event that occurred in a small town outside of springfield, illinois, where a bunch of people had come to this music festival and they started coming down with e. coli. we had the capability to the fingerprinting that would enable us to track individuals who are sick and it scattered across the country to this one particular site in one particular type of food. then in 2002 when west nile hit our state the fact that we had a molecular biology lab enable us to be able to respond to the outbreak and to run thousands of deaths of people who thought that they may have been infected with this disease. this is why we at the robert wood johnson foundation feel that this particular issue of preparedness is so important, because it's not just about responding to the major disasters that make the news. but that preparedness is also about making sure that our public health system is ready to deal with the small disasters. the small difference they can have an impact on how of the people are and how they live their lives. so we are pleased to be cosponsors of this event, and to recognize that what we're going to be talking about has an impact on everyone's lives as part of beefing up the public health system. at the same time as beefing up the ability of this country to respond to major catastrophic events. >> thanks very much, john. let me just do a little housekeeping here. you have written materials in your packets, including a graphical information about each of our speakers are power points presentation, hard copies, if we have them. if you're watching on c-span or you're watching the webcast of our briefing on our website, if you have access to a computer, you can not only watch a long as the presentations are given, but have access to the same powerpoint presentations and background materials that the folks in the room have. there will be a transcript of this briefing that will be available in a couple of days on the alliance website at allhealth.org. and in this room i want you to know, of course there is a green question card in your packets. you can write a question once we get to the q&a session. and you can also go to one of the microphones that is set up in the room where you can ask the question in your own voice. if you're part of the twitterverse, you can take part using the hashtag @peppertalk i believe this. it is on the title slide you see on the screen. one last note, going to have a very good discussion about the preparedness of the public health system, and they don't want you to think that we are not aware that there is another part of the responsive system that we don't have time to cover with any detail today. and that is, the preparedness of the health care system your hospitals, nursing homes, other entities, all have a part to play in being able to respond to the kind of disasters that we will be talking about. there's an assistant secretary for preparedness that has responsibility for other programs that are useful in this regard. and we hope to turn our attention to that at some future point. so let us get to the program. we have a terrific panel lined up for you. and then we'l we will turn to yr questions, and we're going to start with dr. georges benjamin dickies executive director of the american public health association which represents our country's public health professionals. he is a board-certified internist. he's run apha for more than a dozen years. and before that he headed marilyn's department of health and mental hygiene so he's somebody who is way with public health and its role in dealing with different types of disasters at many levels. and were happy to have you back on our panel, dr. benjamin. >> thank you very much for having me here today. i'm going to start by just putting out our new -- >> microphone, please. >> there we go. can you may not? i want to start about talk about a new reality, the fact that we are clearly in a dangerous world where dangers people both with and without state sponsorship, the technology that we have today very, very different than technology we had 20, 30 years ago. with very rapid scientific advancements and lots of people with knowledge of lethal organisms. also point out the nature and we also see the nature is the first terrorist, just because the enormous impact that the nature can have both in creating infectious diseases as well as extreme weather events. globalization is both a blessing and a curse, the fact that we can have rapid movement of infectiouinfectiou s diseases across borders. we often talk about being one plana right away from being something very bad. we are also one plane ride away from infectious this paper also when playing right away or i should say one e-mail away from communication of very dangerous information that should be out of the hands of people that are very dangerous. we are certainly very, very challenging world today. and as i think you've heard from both our earlier speakers here, about the fact that we still have significant threats around. just remind you that we current have an outbreak which is a foodborne outbreak. without a recent epidemic which shows us a lot about our need to really refine our vaccination program as well as some of the challenges we've had around infrastructure for public health. the fertilizer explosion tells us a lot about what could happen even in fundamentally rural america, that every part of our community needs to be prepared. and, of course, the annual run of tornadoes that we continue to have through the midwest each and every year that can devastate whole communities. the importance of this is that public health is a central role in all of these things. and, of course, i point out even the boston bombings. what many people don't know, of course, is that the central role of the health department in terms of respond because the health commission oversees the emergency management function in the city and, of course, they were heralded for their fine work in responding to this emergency. but i remind you that they did good work in a staged event and things were tragically as they should work. button that tells you the importance of preparedness but if you talk to those folks they will tell you that training and preparedness and resources clearly made the difference in their response. i say that because public health needs to have a range of capacities, and these are the capacities of public health needs to have. this is kind of a snapshot of that. we kind of need to know when the new disease enters a community, if we can't prevent. we need to be able to measure it, do surveillance, track what it does, address the health threats. there's a range of capacities that the public health system needs to have. and that's each and every community. not at a selected number, not just our big cities. each and every community needs to have these capabilities. i also want to point out that he prepared community is one of resilience. so i'm going to use for the sake of discussion today the definition of resilience that we are using a national security strategy. but functionally it basically means, the ability of a community to get back on its feet, be able to respond quickly when you something that happens we have changing conditions. and then recovery is very important. and if you think about the various disasters we've had over the last 10, 15 years, and you think about the capacity of the various communities to recover, that tells you a lot about the internal capacity of communities. all communities have strengths, but communities are different. and i think the goal we have is to make sure that all of our communities have the resilience that's necessary for them to adapt to and recover very quickly from a disaster. we know that too many americans don't take their individual preparedness seriously. they are underprepared. there have been lots of surveys. this is an example of a survey done last of it basically says that half of individuals, having done some of the simple things that are necessary to be prepared. that's a significant problem that we need to begin to address. and i know the american public health association working with the public to try to address some of these, what we call our get ready campaign to our get ready campaign is a campaign that is designed to build resilience but our goal is to try to make sure that every american can protect themselves, their families and their communities from serious refundable health threats. we've done that by creating a series of resources to try to allow communities to become prepared. we have gotten a very engaged in the social media world, so that we have blogs and e-mails and twitter activity. we have had events and we have a cat calendar and the dog calendar, all kinds of things to remind people that it's important to get prepared and try to engage them in very, very active ways to try to improve their health, both of the families and other community. i'm going to leave you with one final note, because we're all in this amazing time of trying to ensure that we get universal access to health care for all americans. but i need to point out that even when we achieve a well functioning, health care system of the highest quality that provides that care at an optimal cost, we don't have that yet but we are all working to do that. .. was not done by the health care delivery system. a lot of this stuff is done by the public health system, and i think when you hear from the other speakers they will talk a lot more about that in greater detail than i can this morning. with that, i thank you and turn back over to you. >> thank you, georges. we are now going to turn to ali khan. dr. khan direct the office of public health preparedness and response at the centers for disease control and prevention. note that duality of purpose, preparedness and response. dr. khan was a primary force behind the cdc terrorist program and directed its response to the 2001 anthrax at tax, which some of you may recall actually shut down this very building, the senate office building at the time. dr. khan is an internist and pediatrician, and we are very pleased to have you with us today. >> thank you. >> press sit and wait for a moment. don't press it again. now try. technology. in action. >> good afternoon, everybody. thank you very much for that generous introduction. so, i have a wonderful responsibility and the amazing honor to support the nation's health security efforts. and this is to make sure that americans are save 24/7 from all public health threats no matter what their nature, foreign or domestic, bioterrorism, chemical terrorism, whether they are natural disasters, panamax, a large spills or the public routine threats of everyday that you read in your paper. now, what was very clear, thank you georges from your presentation, while public health defense are very clearly local and state event, there are fiscal and economic ramifications of those events that require national response. and that's why increasingly over the past couple of years we have been talking about public health in the context of ensuring this nation's health security. our secretary, secretary sebelius, was at the cdc of this weekend during the cost of the conversation with her, she mentioned that we should think of cdc and our public health functions more broadly as part of ensuring our national security altogether. now, as part of our activities -- let's see if this piece of technology works -- >> there we go. >> there you go. not that i need these. i can tell you in one slide what we do. and policy. make sure for national health security make sure we are driving innovation and continuous improvement in our public health programs. we are very fortunate to have about $1.3 billion to help fund those activities, not just at the cdc, but the state and local health departments. and we also run some critical operations that many of you are likely aware of. the emergency operations center, this is the public health center for the nation, and as we talk with our national and other domestic partners we've learned the strategic national stockpile. this is almost a 4 billion-dollar stock pile of materials we hold and trust for americans for any large public health threat to make sure that we can get life-saving medications and materials to americans when they need them after a public health threat. finally, we also run the regulatory program here in the united states that regulates 300 labs, the most dangerous pathogens in the world. now, the crown jewel of the program without a doubt is our state and local preparedness program. and we put out approximately 600 to $700 million a year still to our state and local health departments to prepare them for all public health threats. and this is a reflection of the reality of public health. and i think why dr. benjamin preceded me, which is public health doesn't happen at the cdc. public health have been set your state and local level. and that's where the initial detection occurs and the initial response occurs, and we need to make sure that our committees are ready for public health threats and are able to respond to them when they occur. over the past couple of years we have structured this preparedness program around capabilities consistent with the national preparedness goal, and with of this slide i presented for you it shows how we present the 15 capabilities of the state and local level. now, these funds go out not just to the 50 states, a couple of large cities and territories but essentially to 1200 public health departments across the united states. so, at the end of the day it gets quite diffuse. but you will see from these slides that about one-fifth of the dollars go out for the core epidemiology, disease and investigation, disease monitoring work and the same thing is true for the laboratory activities than the next big chunk for community preparedness. so that's how these dollars are being used in your communities. now what i would like to do is make that a little bit less abstract. i'm missing that slide. i want to make that a little less abstract. i can talk with the capabilities but how does this translate to what's happening in your communities? all you have to do is open up the newspaper to understand what public health is doing in your communities and with these resources are doing in the communities to help with disease, tracking coming emergency operations, communication efforts. sophie outbreak for example but we are up to 550, 560 odd cases, we are currently activating in response to that and the same set of capabilities help for all sorts of other food or not breaks that you may hear about. today we've released an alert i think it was yesterday we released an alert to all state and local health departments and all clinicians about a solution of calcium that was contaminated with the bacterial product that wasn't sterile. so we've released an alert to get those off the market and ensure the patient or not being infused with this contaminated calcium carbonate. many of you know the story of the fungal meningitis outbreak. 750 cases that occurred. and these were prepared netz -- there's multiple resources the were brought to plead to respond to this topic. but that included preparedness activities to make sure we get epidemiologists who can investigate the outbreak, make sure we have tracking systems, to make sure we have an emergency operation system to make sure that we have the relationships with law enforcement to potentially track down people who couldn't otherwise track down to tell them excuse me, we would like you to see your clinician to see whether or not you may have been infected with these contaminated steroids. the west nile outbreak we were very fortunate to be able to help our colleagues in texas. i think last year there were about five or 6,000 cases of west nile. about one-third of them actually occurred -- anybody from dallas? no takers. lucky for you. about one-third of the cases occurred in dallas. we were able to use the public health preparedness resources to help them with mosquito spray in the basement efforts. so an example there, same thing you've already heard about the boston marathon and how we in conjunction with our partners in the hospital preparedness program were able to get the community ready for that bombing and other such events. i could go along with c ante and influenza. but just examples that this isn't abstract. this is what is going on in your communities every day to make sure that you are protected from public health threats. this is to give you a reality of the situation of what happened to the public health funding within your state and local health departments over the last decade. and going off of your comment, i would like to have platinum level hold for all americans if we can arrange that going forward. but you can see there's been a free 40% decline for public health preparedness and response activities within our communities. so, let me end with of these slides. we are always trying to improve our program. there's a couple things we would like to do. one is continue to ensure that we enhance global security efforts. as you heard, pathogens don't need passports. so they are crossing borders and once upon a time i had a couple of uniformed officers from the public health service. we used to be lucky when the incubation period to get some place was shorter than the time to get here so if you're on a ship coming here to the united states we pretty much knew you had a yellow fever on the ship and we could quarantine the ship. now you can take a plane and be anywhere in ours that is shorter than the addition period of the most devotees diseases in the world saw you walk into the port already infected and ready to go in a new place so we need to think globally about protecting americans. how do we improve our surveillance efforts? how do we improve our disease monitoring activities in the united states and take advantage of a number around the electronic golf gods, looking at other sources of information such as animals? we need to do a better job with that. one of the key things i've noticed in my experience with disaster, so pretty much all of the disaster as you heard about at the beginning of this presentation i've had some opportunity to participate in them and i've done 20 years of outbreaks over my lifetime and what's become very clear to me is how we get judged as a society during the response is how we respond to the needs of the most vulnerable populations in the communities and we need to get the right so vulnerable populations are communities the need to be -- be the children or people with other disabilities there cannot be annexes to the plan. the have to be integral to think about how we respond and nate vv come meet their needs. how we continue to improve the efficiency of our programs and then finally come an effort that we are heavily involved with with johnson foundation is how do we improve the measurement of preparedness activities with the trust for america and maybe somebody in the audience right there, how are you they put out a yearly report of things they want to focus on and we are currently working on a national preparedness index, which is a state-by-state effort to look more collectively and comprehensively at public health and health care preparedness activities to think about how we take care of and address the gaps and how we improve those efforts and how do we improve the science of our preparedness. with those priorities i think what i want to leave you with is this. there's a lot of challenges to the preparedness activities and health security ensuring the nation's health security. naturally emerging infectious diseases all i have to do is say age seven, eight and nine and everybody knows by talking about. we are always just at the cusp of another pandemic. i try to be careful to remind people fear is not a public health measure or strategy that knowledge is a public health strategy to recognize how a small disease like sars all of a sudden can go global given the right circumstances. modified versions of microbes, doing it yourself mix that increasingly likely. devolving terrorist threats from car bombs that come in printer cartridges. terrorists are always rethinking their strategies and we need to always be evolving our strategy is to be ready. obviously the continuing economic crisis and what that has come to public health preparedness funding and then climate disruption of fact and what that can mean for natural disasters in the united states. thank you. >> thank you very much, dr. khan. a comprehensive and very useful picture of what's going on. we are going to turn now to as prats who's the director of emergency preparedness for the louisiana department of health and hospitals. that puts her smack in the middle of coordinating among federal, state and local agencies that are dealing with and preparing for that disaster this type. she has a rich and various background and health administration roles. she was around during the katrina days and has been around the department more than 20 years. we are really pleased to have you with us today. >> be sure i've got this right. can you hear me? all right. well good afternoon. i think i was one of the last panelists to be picked up on this very distinguished panel. so i thought i would talk to you from what i know in terms of my strength is more in obligations. usually i never had a loss for words. from an operations perspective if you told me, you know, that the problem is katrina, rita, gustav, ike, the oil spill. they're some of the operation concerns we have. if you said okay how are we going to evacuate have the coast line and a 32 hour period i know who to go to and how long it's going to take. you work with how many hospitals you have in your respective communities and in your state. how many you expect will be evacuated or not, how many can help themselves, how many need the state's assistance and how many of those will need federal assistance. i can tell you. and today, even last night i was talking to some of my colleagues here, too, all of a sudden i find myself not coming up with some words or anxious about what i would say to you as policy makers. and i find that we are asking for your help to advocate for dollars to be returned because of the things that i know in terms of operations. i can tell you trust from american red cross has a 23 sq. feet per person capacity numbers for buildings. that's slowly been increasing as recommendations are made through groups such as yourself to have special requirements for pediatrics or children that we should have played areas and various things for children so that capacity is now increasing to about 52 square foot per person. what does that mean and operations? that means the number of bills you have before, the capacity is now just lower. so if you could have fit 300 people in the building using the american red cross standards, now you might have to find two buildings to fit the same number of people. so, the things that you advocate for will definitely have an impact on our operations. so, in terms of issues, from the planning perspective, the grants that we have come of the hpp grant has allowed us to water game with each other and sit in the same room with public health , hospitals so that you can try to figure out what if and your partners behind them in terms of resources from the response perspective we do know the states will be asking for assistance when it comes to the team's and other types of federal assistance to states typically ask for and the drainings can come to the states to help work and play along side of our states and local partners we ask the hospitals to start up in terms of planning but at the same time the act doesn't allow for the reimbursement when it comes to response. so there are still some issues in terms of disconnect that have to occur. we become crisp and more organized in terms of how we are going to approach the response. but again there are still some things we know we need to address when it comes to health health and medical will get interest immersed so they can help with some of those response efforts. finally in terms of the planted the changing landscape. we say that the only as good as the last disaster, each disaster is a different monster. the populations are different, the vulnerabilities are different if we can get out bootstraps to everybody perhaps the burden on the state or government, with local, state or federal wouldn't be as demanding but we also have some vulnerable citizens. the definitions from what used to be just ada with the challenge of being blind and being in a wheelchair are now broadening because of all of the grants that we have that you increase the number of local citizens that you have which are lle more of children, just with a range of grants that we have with most of the grants we will always identify your other types of a vulnerable citizens. the field of sheltering going on and you are trying in that environment to hook them up to various types of social programs so an 18-year-old young lady that might be pregnant i have a social program that she can connect them to but not the same thing for an 18-year-old man. so those are just age differences, formidable differences. the changing landscape with wealthy obamacare issues brann when it comes to response? different insurance payment. i'm sure there might be some vulnerable citizens in that arena as well. and i think if we have some think tanks at the policy level as to how we can best leverage the dollars. in our own communities i think there would be best for this industry, both public health, the emergency preparedness and response community along with the hpp industry as well. >> and, just so we know what you're talking about, hpp is the health system hospital preparedness program. very good. all right, thanks very much. we are going to turn finally now to jack herrmann who's a senior adviser and chief of public health preparedness at the national association of county and city health officials. he has a background in a mental health aspects of disasters and is a licensed mental health counselor in new york. so jackie brings some special viewpoint and some special expertise and we are very pleased. i also want to thank the alliance for the invitation to today's briefing. and i would like to start my remarks more from a personal nature. august and september represents a very poignant and bittersweet months and a professional career we will be celebrating, not really celebrating with happiness but celebrating as a milestone the anniversary of 9/11. i vividly remember being deployed that morning to new york city from my home in rochester new york and as i drove and came upon the landscape of new york city i saw the billowing smoke in the air and then entered in lower manhattan and then drove over the debris from the towers that had collapsed only hours before. and was volunteering as an american across and working with the new york city department of mental health and hygiene to take care of the mental health needs of the families affected by one of the world's most tragic acts of terrorism. a couple years later in 2003, i responded again to new york city. i happened to be there that day for a red cross disaster training when the blackout occurred. in the early hours of the blackout, there was a psychological and next cast over the city because many people felt this might be another act of terrorism. over the course of the night spent time with the red cross staff and volunteers deploying disaster action teams across the city to over 85 years in eight hours. finally in just a couple of weeks august 29th will mark the eighth anniversary of hurricane katrina, a storm that cost almost 1500 deaths and displaced 1.5 million people. and many of you already know the tragic stories that came out of that devastating disaster. these events and many others that have occurred since then, to use an overplayed phrase it took a village to respond to and a critical member of the village is local health departments. i'm representing the national association of county and city health officials and nonprofit national organizations that is the voice of the nation's 2800 local health departments. we attempt to be a leader, a partner, katulis for the local health department so they can ensure the conditions in their communities to promote health and equity, combat disease and improve the quality and length of life and protect the overall health of those that live there. a lot of people really don't know what their local health department does. i'm going to switch -- here we go, to a map here. and try to articulate that local health departments are county, city, metropolitan district and tribal government will agencies. the report to the mayors, city councils, said the boards of health or county commissions. some local health departments are units of their state government, some are locally controlled, and others share that authority between the state and local. and as i said earlier, everyday local health departments work to protect and promote health and well-being for all of the people in those local communities. if you look at the demographics of the 2800 local health departments over 60% covered restrictions very small over 50,000 population. the minority of the health department is about 5% of the local health departments serve the large metropolitan areas but they cover almost half of the nation's population. these are urban centers like l.a., new york, chicago and d.c.. as i tried to emphasize in my earlier remarks all disasters strike locally and the local health departments are a critical part of our communities first response to the disease outbreaks, emergencies and acts of terrorism. over the past year, local public health has engaged in the response to and recover from many major events which some of my co panelists have talked about. both manmade and naturally occurring. hurricane sandy that ravaged the midlantic in the east coast, the boston marathon bombing and the fertilizer plant explosion and west texas are examples of those and the activities that you see in the slide represent a key devotee the local public health brings to bear the response to those disasters. those are the capabilities that the doctor outlined earlier that are represented in the public of preparedness cable the some national standards. we heard about many of the challenges in response to that event. the experience of their fair of challenges even though we see those as largely successful defense they still were to plunge into the local health departments. the department of health and hygiene had to coordinate a variety of public health services in the hardest-hit areas of the storm hiking up the high rise apartment buildings in the effort to reach out to vulnerable populations making sure they have food, water and life sustaining medications supporting shelters for displaced persons, and working alongside hospitals that needed to evacuate before or during the storm. in new jersey the health department partnered with their state and federal agencies to provide services to residents and activated the local metal coal reserve corps and other volunteers to take care of the health and welfare of those impacted by the storm. and if you haven't seen the robert wood johnson video highlighting the heroic efforts of the new jersey state and local health departments, go to their web site and take a look. it really is a well done video. many lessons were learned. one of the most important for health departments is the need to ensure coordination with partners ahead of time so that no one or no community goes unassisted. another lesson learned with the importance of understanding the influential role that social media can play in a disaster and all local health departments need to be able to anticipate and meet the expectations of the people in their communities during a response. the boston marathon bombing in april of this year involved the health department and the medical research corporation coming out in full force. they had spent many months planning to produce a the dennett marathon and were already on the scene of that world renowned event. nearly 200 boston health department personnel were on site overseeing medical activities and trading runners with injuries and health problems in medical tests along the route. when the bombing occurred, they were able to respond within seconds, contributing life-saving measures to those who were injured. and officials in boston decided the trend hospital public health, public safety training and exercises that they had been conducting over the years as critical to this success of that day. finally, in west texas with a fertilizer plant explosion in this past april which was only a couple days after the bombing, the county public health department worked with the waco emergency management to respond to that event and they also activated their local mrc unit in the aftermath of the disaster and assisted in the coordination of the mental health case management with local mental health authorities. they also describe longstanding partnership between the health to prevent, local hospitals, state level agencies and emergency management with creating the mutual trust that a greatly contributed to the success of that public health response. public health preparedness and response is not just limited to large-scale disasters. local health departments perform critical roles in other health related incidents that occurred over this past year. and as we have talked about some of those this morning, the fungal meningitis outbreak in october of 2012 where health departments for conducting the contract tracing and the local boots on the ground during the investigations in the 23 states that led back to the source of the outbreak that killed almost 50 people and required scores more to seek life-saving medical treatment. health departments and the impacted state rules are responsible for contacting health care facilities that receive products from the compound in pharmacy to ensure that the utility's stock using the product that potentially could have taken or killed many more. some of you may have heard about the hepatitis outbreak in tulsa. was allegedly resulting from unsanitary conditions and in proper sterilization procedures used in a local dentist office. an investigation screening and the multi jurisdictional testing can be was executed by tulsa and oklahoma's departments if held. the health department actually had to set up the testing clinics for the 7,000 patients who may have been exposed. and there were over 70 confirmed cases of hepatitis and three hiv cases. though this could have potentially lead to more cases of hiv and hepatitis if it were not for the efforts of the local health department. other infectious disease outbreaks occurred throughout the country this year in sheboygan, wisconsin. there was an outbreak for the local health department to activate their incident command system and conduct a large scale of testing and monitoring outbreak campaign in the sheboygan school system and also worked with the county's purchasing agent to find an apartment to isolate an individual who was diagnosed with multi drug-resistant tuberculosis. previous and current investments and preparedness largely contributed to the county public health department being ready to handle the ball break. training and exercising along with the health department's partners helped them better understand the role and follow the principles in those partnerships also help them work together seamlessly to amplify the key public health messages that had to go out around this incident to the public. many of you have heard about the outbreak across the country that's affected 19 states and resulted in almost 550 cases to date and the hospitalization of 34 individuals. there were also responsible for helping to trace and identify the source of the parasite back to the prepackaged salad mix and the local health departments continue to conduct investigations and interviews today with suspected patients. so that take away of these events is that preparedness is not a static process. vignette a process that requires ongoing planning, training and exercises and the sustainment of the capabilities to protect the nation's health and welfare. preparedness happens before and even occurs, not during. the fire department doesn't sit back and wait for a fire and then decide to go out and buy a fire truck to respond to the fire. when you think about it though, that is exactly what we do during a disaster. think back to the big federal funds that went out the door after 9/11, hurricane katrina, h1 in one, and then most recently superstore sandy putative investment in public health prepared mess need to be made in advance if we respect any -- i expect a successful response. the preparedness of the local health departments today that they use to respond exist because of that investment of dollars, the investment of time and resources personnel provided at all levels of the government, local, state, federal as well as those from the non-profit and private sectors. however it is critical health program including those in preparedness or cuts. the ability to sustain the key devotees and capacities for local health departments response diminishes. let's look a little bit at what the health department supports their public health missions including public health preparedness. this chart illustrates the funding sources for local health departments. and you can see that federal funding makes up about 20% of the health department's overall budget. the remainder is coming from the fee-for-service, state and local tax assessment or other funding mechanisms. however, almost 60% of local health departments rely exclusively on federal funding to support their preparedness activities. four of the nation's largest cities receive direct federal funding for public health prepared mess through the cdc preparedness grant program and the hospital preparedness program. while the rest of the local health departments rely on an allocation of these grants passed through the state health department. it's also in part to the point out that fema is separate from the previously mentioned programs, but it's not duplicative. this program ensures that the first responder agencies, police, fire have the resources they need to respond to the disasters large and small so the take away message here is when any federal grant program is cut khayat has significant and sometimes dangerous impact on the programs that rely on. the survey conducted in the latter part of 2011 found that almost 60% of health department's cut or eliminated one public health program area as a result of federal funding cuts in that same year almost a quarter of the local health departments had to reduce or eliminate the prepare best programs because of these funding cuts. since 2008 we have lost almost 44,000 jobs in the local public health work force, and that those jobs represent real activities in local health departments they are there to prepare for disaster, respond to disaster and will be used in the yvette that community needed to distribute and dispense lifesaving medical countermeasures in the aftermath of the disaster. the cuts that have been seen in public health emergency preparedness funding. the hospital preparedness grant, the hospital prepared must grant proposed 114 million-dollar cuts in fiscal year 14. those funds largely support public health departments, hospitals and health care coalitions to prepare and plan for disasters. just to draw your attention today these cuts have created significant impact on the local health departments as i have been mentioning and this slide talks about health department in wisconsin and kentucky and frederick county maryland who have had to shoulder their immunization clinics or lay off staff who largely would be the people they would rely on to either prepare or create their plans for the disasters or actually respond to disasters. so finally our takeaway and recommendations undoubtedly the system is more secure than the events of september 11th and the texas have supported critical public health preparedness programs. we build a strong and vibrant national preparedness capability that begins and ends the local level and we need to sustain those investments. the local public health community acknowledges the need for science based measures to improve the capabilities and show the return on investment to congress and the people. and some can say that the response to some of the defense i talked about this witness to return on such investment. and we have to remember that the state of preparedness is not an end state. it is a process. every preparedness funding has tangible consequences for your constituents and the communities you serve. the support of training and exercising through the public health grants i mentioned keep communities agile for the response and resilient to the recovery. investment provides the staff and service necessary to support long-term recovery. and the continued support and investment in the development of the critical public of capabilities and capacity at the local, state, regional levels ultimately builds a nation prepared and protected. >> thank you very much, jack. let me ask one question to clarify something. if you get back to jack's slide on the job losses over time, your note talked about 4300 jobs being lost. they are being created so that there was a small net loss. it represents real people in positions that were identified in public health to provide public health services and health departments coming and even though the figure for 2012 may look promising and bright that doesn't account for the impact sequestration that we will have on those jobs and positions in the health department's. >> now we get to the point you can join the dialogue if you would like. as i mentioned, there are microphones to which you can come and ask a question in person in which case we would ask you to identify yourself and keep the question as brief as you possibly can. you can write the question now if you hold it up someone from the staff will snatch it from your fingers and bring it forward. i would also encourage the members of the panel and the doctor co moderator to join at any point of this dialogue that you feel the need to. you have the first question in the sequence. >> in recent months have there been any changes and additions to the partnerships taking place with volunteers, particularly those affiliated with religious communities >> with other organizations in the community has long been the practice and local health departments. they recognize they can't do it alone. and so for many years there have been efforts and attempts to link with a variety of partners including the feith based organizations. and so, as you look across the country they are reaching into those organizations to populate the medical reserve corps, the red cross team coming disaster mental health team. so i would say that it is common practice to reach into the organizations to ensure they, are there. those communities are there to help out during a disaster. >> are they replacing any of the lost jobs? there is a possession and health departments, staff positions in health department that just because of the h.r. law they can't use volunteers but speaking with health departments because of the attrition that the have seen over these years they have had to reserve duty to rely on the medical research corporation and other assets in their community to conduct preparedness outreach campaigns to go out and do staff health affairs and things like that on behalf of the health department. >> to put this into a little bit of a perspective, one of the things that has impressed me at the disaster sites that i've seen is the role of the volunteers. the american red cross for instance is one organization that is slated by congress to be actively participating in disasters. but when i went on to some of the relief efforts it was the southern baptists serving the meals and they do that all up and down the east coast and the west coast and in the recovery period they have an incredible system of helping people put their homes back together. one of the stuff that came to the foundation had a health department in new hampshire and they lead off the staff who were involved in doing contact tracing for diseases, sexually transmitted diseases which would include hiv. so if the outbreak that had happened in texas had occurred in a hampshire that isn't something volunteers can do. it takes training and public health. what happens is when those individuals get laid off, and this happens to me in my agency when i was back in illinois they get hired by the private sector. and if those jobs are then created again it's very difficult for the public health agencies to hire people with those kinds of skills, those public health skills which are very hard to hire so it does create a lasting deficit and the ability of the public health system to respond. >> i have a question for dr. khan. you mentioned the preparedness index the cdc was putting together and i wondered if you could elaborate what purpose that is going to serve and when it is going to be available, what elements are going to be included. >> the doctor serves on the index. so let me start and then handed over to john. this is a state-by-state comprehensive index of preparedness but over 150 of measures and health care and public health that are publicly available. at the index the process is designed to draw preparedness in the communities and provide objective evidence and concrete beams, actionable things the community can do to improve their preparedness and then to drive the science. we are very big on accountability and we need to measure preparedness in the communities. we've gotten a lot better over the last couple of years and we want to continue to improve those measures of preparedness. this is an effort that is being shepherded by the territorial health department's. and dr. lumpkin as i said serves as the chair of the government's group. since this is many partners coming together and doing this it is and the cdc alone. >> let me also say that one of the reasons why this index, and it was a process that has been initiated by the centers for disease control and prevention as well as the association for the state and territorial officials and our foundation is happy to have an opportunity to participate in that process. the preparedness is part of the charge also. but it's really challenging to figure out where are you going to spend your next dollar if you're going to increase preparedness. the increased preparedness and if you are trying to do work how do you do quality work within preparedness and so this index is designed to be initiated by the cdc but not part of the process of reviewing the grants and that is a critical component. it's not to review how well the state is doing on the cbc or the grant from the office of the assistant secretary for preparedness response. it is a tool for the states to use working with local communities and local health departments to assess the level of preparedness and to assess quality improvement. the first numbers will be coming out in october and will not be designed to rank or compare states. again it's going to deal to help the measure and an initial one and then over time help the work on preparedness is progressing. >> my question is for ms. prats. i'm a reporter with ceq. you touched on the issues with the stafford act. can you just elaborate a lot more particularly on the issue of reimbursement. the stafford act is whenever there is a natural disaster you have a stafford act cake and which pretty much the rules for what gets reimbursed and what does not get reimbursed. so usually you have that reimbursement flow versus the on stafford act issues which are more of. bp has to make it whole. so you will see the company that would pay for the damages. they're usually has to be a funding streams and then you can get various things reimbursed. >> was that an issue with her working katrina at all? >> the reimbursement? yes, ma'am. >> thank you. >> there are some things and it's worth looking at the stafford act. it says the federal government only pays for bringing whether it is a hospital or a community back to where it was before the incident occurred. and that is understandable because if you have a house and you have a 20-year-old furnace, you don't want the act to be replaced in the furnace and the windows and of the roof if they are not damaged. one of the peculiarities if you will remember from super storm sandy the hospital closed down in manhattan and it closed down because when the storm came they had moved their generators up but they kept the fuel on the lower floor because of was a little bit safer. when the water flooded they've recognized, the sensors recognized it as being a fuel spill and it cut off the generators and they lost power. so the generators were operating now they are going to rebuild that. they would rebuild the hospital to move to become moved from the basement at the higher floors. some of the provisions sometimes it is very hard set and was very clear to understand sometimes there are intended consequences. >> dr. lumpkin is very right. those are the subtleties when it comes to patient care. if he wore a hospital and you uxor all these people that started to evacuate so they don't meet the criteria and if they met the criteria then they get medicare and medicaid, third-party reimbursement. but anything else. so if you were sheltering from the hospital couldn't claim any of the costs through the stafford act and in fact there is no other means for them to claim any of those sheltering costs. i'm not sure they have that money. we have reports anecdotal at this point no full study it hospitals would continue to shelter and surge, we know the operational costs go up at least 50%. so if you have a neurosurgeon today, you can pay him during normal business but during the storm the are going to start decompressing their facilities, they might start helping with the sheltering operation. but the hospital still has to pay those operating costs. and there is no where to claim some of those costs. so if you take it from a store environment that's like three to five days you might lose some funds but what happens if you have a pandemic flu? if you are out for months, five weeks or months, what happens to those types of costs? i'm not sure that there is a solution for the public health issues that might come up related to the surging. >> go ahead. >> i am with the senate committee on small business and entrepreneurship, and my question is particularly to mr. herrmann that either of the panelists and it is what kind of preparedness techniques or prepared best are you getting ready for when it comes to small business because as we know a lot of times people are at work when these disasters occur. so what's happening in terms of keeping employees safe or even safe from an actual disaster if something were to occur at the work place? >> that is a great question. and the quick answer is not enough. but with the local health departments are doing is finding ways to partner with business small and large to help them understand how to develop the continuity of operations plan so that in the face of disaster they will be able to take care of their employees and be able to carry out business, which is important to the economy of those communities and you raise issues like what would happen in a disaster like say the flu pandemic where many of these individuals may have to be out of work because they are sick or taking care of sick family members and that business has to be shot down. in the communities all business is vital so those are the type of issues they bring to the table with businesses to help them kind of work through how is your business and how large your employees prepared to handle a disaster if it strikes them. >> dr. khan? >> that is a thoughtful question. over 40% of small businesses are closed after a disaster. so clearly this is an impact on small business. you've heard about the efforts the local and state health department and other efforts with the critical infrastructure work to help the business think about the continuity of operations. and it's always important i try to mention in this fema the supply chains and other elements if we can try to understand what's going on in the communities and outbreaks the will the information available to understand what is the impact on the business. we've spent months in singapore helping them to respond to the of greed and some of you may know the large airlines almost went out of business because nobody wanted to go to southeast asia anymore. so there are global impacts of these outbreaks and significant economic impact. >> let me add one other thing. >> to think of small community providers and small business, as we are very much concerned about hospitals but the truth of the matter is while they are a challenge, any time these disasters occur, the small community-based providers have all the same challenges. they lose infrastructure. it's really in the outpatient setting, not the hospitals. so that is a big capacity that we lose and that is true of people in vulnerable populations, substance abuse, mental health providers and primary care providers. >> we have a question that relates to the supply chain as dr. khan was talking about what it does get us back to hospitals. give us your thoughts the questioner asks on the vulnerability is the hospitals have been relying on offsite providers of services such as land in santa gallons and waste disposals to keep the hospital running on the pandemic to be this bill if it is a problem, what in the world could you do about it? >> it is a planning issue for communities. one of the things we were doing right before 9/11 is looking at that question of the supply chain in the state of maryland. what we discovered was every hospital had a wonderful plan and they all rely on the same provider. so what happened is in many communities the planners are looking at that and they are challenging supply chain to make sure that they are both backup suppliers so the redundancy working with hospitals and hospital associations and they are very much aware of that as an issue that continues to be resolved. >> that really ties into a commented jack and the other speakers made which is that preparedness is not a destination. it is a journey. every time you do a disaster or drill and work through that, you begin to ask questions and solve problems. and then when you go again, you find other problems. the first disaster drill i ever worked for is when i was at the university of chicago and we will schedule the duralast 9:00 and we are sitting down in the er and 9:00 came and went and 9:15 came and went and finally 9:30 the operator gave a call to tell us that there was a mac drill. they were given a call list and the emergency department was all the way down at the bottom. you wouldn't have known that until you have gone to the drill or had gone through a disaster. .. it really describes the importance of ongoing preparedness. >> i couldn't agree more and i think that question gets to the heart of this. you get to preparedness and isolation thought, always reminded during certain responses when nursing homes plan to evacuate each other. because they hadn't spoken to each other, and so they send patients to each other and that was their response plan. i think that talks to the wonderful work being done by the hospital preparedness program, it talks about the work done by your local state health departments, talks about kenya be prepared to get to integrate your plans and looked cohesively of wha which were doing. and i also want to remind you all, you individually have a role to play to protect yourself, your family and your community. >> go back to your slide showing that half the folks who are serving didn't have that kind of plan. it gives you some sort of mentioned that part of the problem. >> minus danielle. unrepresented organization called amplify. piggyback off this idea prepared to my question which to the data and receiving data when networks go down in disaster. i'm kind of talking about the lockbox issue. a lot of the exchange of data is relied upon broadband or towers that may be affected and i was respecting efforts to go about that, the issues that arise from it. >> let me start by saying, it would be nice to even have that problem. because our biggest problem is still the lack of having all the information in a data system anywhere. and building a robust electronic medical records system. but when you do build that you do have to build a redundancy you talked about. i think that's very important. there's not a proof of concept here. after katrina, it was very clear that those systems that electronic medical records, that the ability to reconstruct patient's medication lists and medical problems and things were enhanced. we did see that, again, lesson learned from katrina. fast-forward to superstorm sandy, those hospitals in new york that they can have a robust system and, of course, new york city's of course new york city's health departments but it was a fairly robust medical record system. they were also able to very rapidly reconstruct that information. but it does rely on not just having the information in one place but having a robust, hardened back up system and maybe to, for the data, and the capacity to rapidly reintegrate the networks when they have those disasters. >> anybody else? yes, go ahead. >> thank you. i'm with an organization called the secure id coalition. when we talk to electronic health records and having data on a second benefit web, when and how people are treated in emergency situation. i'm reminded of a story. i was in san antonio -- san antonio, texas, last year, there were smartcard some people which hasn't information on them like allergic to penicillin, diabetic which a lesser better treatment. there's one group that had the first group i think was normal populations like we would be now without any information. the second population of the cards that had the information on them, you know, secure readers, encrypted, all that. i wish is when if you guys had heard about that and what do we do you think about something like that? >> i participate in the exercise on very family with the. you know, a couple things. anything we can do to better prepare the public to tell us, public health and health care, what kinds of medical conditions they have, what kind of medications they have, other kinds of illnesses that ultimate are going to make them vulnerable in the aftermath of disaster is an important thing to have come or it's important information to the. but it's not the only thing. it's not a panacea. frechette to get people to remember to take the card with them when they run out of the house. then you have to make sure that the sites they're going to show up in and have the ability to read that card. then the third thing is you have to have the staff to know how to interpret the data and understand that david so that they can protect the patient's health. but it is an important mechanism. it could be an important mechanism in saving lives and ensure that people get the right help when they need it. >> jack, was there any resistance to that initiative on the basis of privacy concerns a? >> interesting, the ama did a series of surveys and public engagement, and that, while it was an issue that was raised, it wasn't one that was enough to say we can't look at this as an option. clearly, people will always be concerned about where their private information is going. and as we've experienced over the last number of months with releases of information, people wonder how much access the government has come information on them, it will always be a concern. but the overarching message is we need to look at what's in the best interest of the people. and in this case, we know that many people come to shelters during a storm, having a number of medical illnesses. many of them only know, well, i take a white bill before go to bed. i take a purple pill in the morning. they don't know the name and the dosage of their medication. and so anything that the public health and health care community can have access to to help them better treat that individual i think is warranted. >> we've got a question that maybe rosanne can take initial crack at. in past disasters, many people would not evacuate when told they could not bring their pets. what steps are being taken to ensure the safety of animals in future disasters? what do you do about dogs in louisiana? >> welcome i think if i die i want to come back as a pet because you would have a lot of stuff that, you, you would be provided and you would be well taken care of. but that is true. in katrina their instances of people who become very attached to the pets and you even get separated if they could not bring their pet within. so we doesn't very robust plans when it comes to enabling an evacuation both with coach buses and along with the coach buses there are other types of places we can put the pe patch on those vehicles, usually tagging along a high in the coach bus. so people at different types of pets that you're not always easy, small little dog. they can be large animals, and of course people have vulnerable issues don't want to have the pets on the bus within. so you get into all kinds of operational logistical details when you're trying to organize an evacuation. and, of course, the point the big dogs that you got, snakes and some people put the snakes in, you know, what -- just a bag. call it a cajun suitcase, you, your plastic bag. [laughter] something comes crawling out and you might have, people would have gerbils and it's not -- so yes, we have cages, pet cages your we have the veteran marion -- veteran and community and the volunteer community that is truly become very engaged with trying to assist with this type of evacuation. so we've got not only general shelters, but we have pet shelters along with it and it ty will have people that can go visit their pets to help take care of their pet. because they know what their pet likes to do or not likes to do, and they come down as well. and while i have your attention from the larger evacuation is not only the human evacuation but is the evacuation of cattle. so you would not expect that in talking to health and medical, but planning alongside your partners, i didn't realize this but you can get into the eyes of cattle -- did you know that? so i guess it got me something today. so you have an evacuation and we need, we have e-mac. we have the e-mac cowboys and their horses that come down and help with an evacuation of cattle. so it's all kinds of evacuation lanes that go on between human movement, pet movement, cattle movement, hospital movement, nursing a movement, and the state is right in the middle of your local communities and all these needs. and they're just sometimes overwhelm. so again we are advocating that we can get these grant dollars with planning. >> jack, what about the snakes? >> i have seen many a stake in my travels. we chuckle about this, but really pet prepared as is very, very serious. in fact, the reluctance of people to leave their pet does create threats to injury and death. and so health departments as part of their planning criteria had to talk about what they are doing, to working with the community in order to prepare for how individuals might evacuate their pets or what kind of plans to have anything of disasters in their community. organizations like the american red cross are working with national and local organizations, veterinarians, to increase health preparedness and medical reserve corps. even are looking for veterinarians and other animal specialists to work alongside other health care professionals to be able to respond to pet needs during disasters. >> does anyone else want to throw in a pet comment? okay. several questions that people have submitted by guard that would like to get our panels response to. as we have seen this person writes over the past several years, climatological disasters, natural ones can have been a great more frequently and with greater severity, often leading to infectious disease outbreaks and/or technological catastrophes. what steps, if any, are cbc and nato taking to address the ramifications of climate change? specifically at the state and local level, which i guess means, rosanne, if you want to chime in on that we would like to do that. or georges as well. >> i guess from -- we have approximately 30 straight -- state declared disasters the year. usually that means the state starts to lean forward and notify all the local basra recall parish departments to start being ready, weather, to respond to whether that's flooding, tornadoes, et cetera. so what are we doing? we have a lot of frequent, we called we are the live labs. it's no longer just trying to plan. we are actively engaged. we're trying to be in response. we do eat up a lot of funding for that, so i guess that's just another plug for yes, we are saying that natural, that increase of disasters, and that is requiring the state and the locals to start ramping up at least 30 times a year. >> how about national in? >> -- national in? >> so, the american public health association has been working very diligently just about 99 with cdc naccho to do -- personal, bring awareness to public health practitioners. number two, to try to strengthen their skills and helping build capacity in their communities. we did two things. number one, adoption, fanfare how to adapt their communities, and to be involved in the mitigation aspects of the. so what does all that mean? number one, you know, one of the challenges we have with all these very severe climate events is, one can rebuilding in the same places, not changing the way we are building, not putting up seawalls when they need to be up. one of the lessons learned i think from katrina that we so or heard john talk about in new york was hospitals are now moving her generator from the basements is where we used to put them and putting them in other places, putting them on higher floors. but you do learn new lessons want to do that, and john talked about the fuel lesson. but we have a lot of older cities and a lot of the older cities still have wires in the air. and those are very vulnerable to trees falling on them and disrupting power lines. i think getting public health of the table so they are a part of the discussion, so we are often speaking about the public health being now and able for hurricanes and tornadoes, but also think that extreme weather events, things that are too cold, seeing a lot of extreme weather events when things are getting lots of snow and ice, et cetera in places that were not designed to get snow and ice. the housing isn't built for very cold weather. the same thing is happening in places that are getting very hot weather for prolonged period of time. so those places are much more at risk for heat related injuries. group you know, prolonged heat, high humidity for three or four days. so building those plans so that you can address, educating community can making sure you have water to drink, identify where foldable populations are so that when the power goes out you can get to those people and get them plugged in to someplace that's either cool or or where they can get their medical needs met, or their depend on electronic equipment for medical equipment for these kind of things, giving them there. all those are the kinds of things that have to have have a very strong public health role in doing that. but as jack said, most of this happens at the committee level at the local community level. and requires people, training, skills and expertise to make that happen. >> we have time for just a few more questions. one, from a congressional staffer asks what's been done to ensure that populations with language barriers are aware of the services that are available turning a disaster. jack? >> this is also, we talk about all the important issues that go into disaster preparedness, and certainly this is one of those that ranks right up there. winning individual is here and their primary language is not english, it presents a vulnerability for them. especially in a predominantly english-speaking society where there may not be services to translate those important education materials and other information into different languages that those individuals speak in those communities. let me call out -- has done an amazing job with this. they found a way to work with partners to translate many other disaster preparedness material into multiple languages that reflect their communities. but they first needed to go out and find out what length which is people spoke in those communities. and work with the leaders of those communities whether they were religious or otherwise, to help translate those materials and educate those communities about what they needed to do during times of disaster. what services would be available to them, and how they could take care of themselves and protect their family members. >> let me add they get ready campaign we have that apha. with fact sheets and about 50 link which. so get ready campaign is a much designed for the community, individual and the community to get ready. we are working hard to get everything we have in multiple languages. i can't say that everything is but i don't think with everything in 50 languages, but we have different -- 50 different leverages for the very fact sheets that we have. >> let me just ask as we are dealing with these last questions that you fill out that green -- blue? so we can respond to your wishes and your needs in future programs your for the panel, the questioner asks that you speak to social media and a state of local health departments are using social media for preparedness and response. >> jack, your our leadoff hitter. >> social media and is, has just exploded on the disaster preparedness front. and i think, i had wanted a fortune opportunities to be in the red cross national headquarters disaster operational center during hurricane stand him and part of my job was to work on monitoring social media and better understand what were the public health and mental health challenges that individuals were experiencing, and writing over social media technology. and we were flooded with thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of tweets and face the posts and other things, people talk about the disaster and the experiences they were going to at the time. and it was a lesson that somehow we have to do better at being able to monitor social media and quickly respond to the needs and expectations of those individuals and communities. it creates quite a demand on public health in an effort to better understand how the kennedy is using social media technology -- how the community is using social media technology, and more important, an outlet for situational awareness as to what's happening in those communities during times of disaster. >> and i can tell you that nationally at apha, our twitter account of we have a quarter of many people on our social media activity, and so the twitter account for apha is packed, get ready. something happens we are always putting out information, so that people can begin having a conversation and get information about the event. >> similarly at the cdc with embrace social media for different purposes but classically can people think of it as a way to share information. we have the third largest government weaker -- 20. it's also way to listen to her communities. we do monitor social media aggressively and we're about to put out a project that will be available to archimedes called project dragon far as we to understand what is going on in their community very quickly and take action based on the link to the federal agencies. it's a wonderful way to get target information out to our communities. >> i think we're at the point where i would like to call on dr. lumpkin foreclosing remark or two. >> great. well, thank you again to the panel for coming and to all of you for listening, and asking really probing and important questions. i think perhaps the most critical take away is that if you think about being in a place where you have state or local government is going to be responsible for helping your 20 recover from a disaster. you don't want those individuals to be exchanging business cards at the sight of the disaster. you want to know that they've been talking to each other. but you've also heard it's equally as important for people to know and to think about this because the time to think about the disaster is not when the hurricane is bearing down on your house but you want to think about these figures before that. all of that means that these mechanisms need to be in place. they need to be tested. and people need to be reminded. many years ago when i was back in unites its government, running a nuclear power plants we handed out pills or iodine because there's a disaster, people should take iodine to protect the thyroid. how many of those people know where those pills are today? this process of ongoing preparedness of making the system, reminding people is what will enable us to have the best out, so that the people of this country can not only survive but survive in a way that will enable them to quickly recover and return back to their normal ways of life. >> great, thank you much, john. let me just say, a, don't forget about the evaluations. b, i want to call attention to erin began on our staff who is finishing up an internship at george washington university and he did the bulk of the work on this briefing as an exercise that was both academic and real world. thank you very much. and something that -- yes, absolutely applaud the. >> and something that john lumpkin can do and that is to think the robert wood foundation for the shaving and the cosponsorship of this briefing. and let me reiterate john's thanks to the panelists and ask you to help us thank them for an extremely useful and great discussion on every tough topic. [applause] >> a couple of programs coming up later today. robert draper wrote a national geographic magazine cover story about moammar gadhafi 42 year rule of libya and the future of the country as a democracy and has joined us on "washington journal" and you can see that conversation today beginning at 7:05 p.m. eastern. booktv in primetime continues tonight with author and columnist melanie phillips, the author of nine books including her latest guardian angel, a memoir for personal and professional life as a journalist in the uk. you can see the interview from our in depth series at 8 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. later today minnesota senator amy klobuchar speaks to north iowa democrats and clearly. she is the keynote speaker at a fundraiser, and according to the "des moines register" she is the first democratic hopeful to visit iowa for a possible 2016 presidential campaign. more about that now from jennifer jacobs of the "des moines register." >> we will be covering the amy klobuchar event in clear lake, iowa, was called the wingding. tell us about this event. she speaking but she is honoring hillary clinton. how is that going to work? >> right. so they are getting an award hillary clinton at the calving sm county democrats up north in the mason city a. they get together and each year they give an award to a democrat. and amy klobuchar is this year coming simply to help for bruce braley who is running for the senate. she's also spoken to some i was at the national convention. our activists have seen a couple times so she says is meant to work for bruce braley spent does amy klobuchar are have an interest or is there talk about her possibly form some sort of interest in running for president in 2016 speak was yes. when we asked her in north carolina she brushed off our questions about running for president but we had some activists who were here last week and they're promoting a generic male candidate for president and amy klobuchar was one of the names that the president of emily's list name dropped. if you look at pretty much any hot list of possible democratic candidates that hillary clinton is not run, amy klobuchar ourselves always on that list. >> just remind you ca can see or road to the white house 26 in coverage from clear lake, senator klobuchar's comments, our coverage getting underway at 7 p.m. eastern on c-span, also on c-span radio and online at c-span.org. >> tonight on c-span's encore presentation of first ladies -- >> she was very proud of her husband, no question, she support all of his decisions but once again she was a very private person. so it was fine for husband to be in politics, my friend for the washington and be in a senate committee and congress come but she didn't want to be part of it. and yet she causally supported his decision to do that all of the time and she was very much supported during his impeachment i know there were other things that were attributed to her that she wished that she could be back on where they belong and things of that nature but she honestly believed that her husband would be acquitted and was ripped out of it when he was but she kept saying she knew that what happened or chaplain the. spent the encore presentation of our original series continues tonight at nine eastern on c-span. >> defense secretary chuck hagel released a statement yesterday outlining new efforts to prevent and respond to sexual assault in the military. pentagon officials briefed reporters on the new initiative saying the sector plan still weekly meetings on the subject. george little also comments on the president's decision yesterday to cancel a planned joint military exercise with egypt in response to the violence in that country. >> a limiting sexual assault from united states armed forces continues to be one of the department of defense's top priorities. every service member and dod civilian deserve a safe environment in which they are free from his threat of sexual harassment and assault. secretary hagel will continue in iowa and approve prevention and response programs. in may, secretary hagel directed a range of measures designed to strengthen our program in the areas of demand accountability, command climate, victim advocacy, and safety. today, the secretary directed the implementation of the following additional measures to improve victim support, strengthened pretrial investigations, enhance oversight, and make prevention and response efforts more consistent across the military services. first, creating legal advocacy programs in each militants with the provided legal representation to sexual assault victims throughout the judicial process. next, ensuring that all pretrial investigative hearings are conducted -- [inaudible]. third, providing commands with option to re-sign or transfer service members accused of sexual assault or related offenses in order to eliminate continued contact while respecting the rights of those victims and the accused. requiring that the first journal officer with enchantment receive timely follow-up reports on incidents and responses. directing dod's inspector general to regulate evaluate close of sexual assault investigations. standardizing prohibition on inappropriate behavior between recruiters and trainers and their recruits and trainees across dod. and, finally, developing and proposing changes to the manual for courts-martial when victims give input during sentencing phase for courts-martial. all of these measures will provide victims with additional rights, protections and legal support, and help ensure that social related investigations and judicial proceedings are conducted thoroughly and professionally. the department of defense has also established an independent panel in accordance with the national defense authorization act for fiscal year 2013, ma and this penetrating and assessing their views do investigate and prosecute and adjudicate crimes involving sexual assault and related offenses under the uniform code of military justice. secretary hagel has met with panel members and he will closely review their recommendations when complete. sexual assault is a stain on the honor of our men and women who serve our country, as well as a threat to the discipline and the cohesion of our force your it must be stamped out. secretary hagel will continue to meet weekly with duties senior leadership team to personally review dod's efforts and ensure that directors and programs are being implemented effectively and the department will continue to work closely with both congress and the white house on a limiting sexual assault in the united states military. we are all accountable to fix this problem and we will fix it together. >> a reminder can you can see that briefing anytime online at c-span.org but also send at about 2:45 p.m. eastern on c-span. next, key members of the supreme court case discuss the future of marriage in america, lgbt rights and the effects of the supreme court decision to strike down the defense of marriage act and proposition eight in california for this discussion took place in july figures martyred by the yolanda jackson of the bar association of san francisco. is an hour and 15 minutes. >> so, good evening everybody. i can't tell you how excited i am to be at a podium again with a group of such illustrious trailblazers of this area. i have a great opportunity to do this several months ago before the decision came down. matt was on that panel with us, and they never disappoint. they have so many nuggets of information to share her to walk away scratching your head ready to cry a little bit, ready to smile a little bit and you here tonight that even with the great decisions there's still a lot of work to be done and i want to spell to really help you all sort that out, all sort that i forget what are the next steps, what does this mean to us nationally -- i cannot talk tonight. that's not a good day for the static nationally for marriage in america. i would like to really take a quick moment to introduce the leader of the bar association of san francisco, dan burkart, who is here, and a president bashir, our 100th president, chris carney. so please join me -- [applause] >> okay, and a brief introduction of our esteemed panel this evening. to my far right is angry came in august and he is the attorney for sandra. and he is an attorney with the law firm of gibson, dunn and crutcher. to his left is kristin perry, and she is one of the plaintiffs in the hollinghurst versus perry case. they we have sandra who is a plaintiff in the hollinghurst ursus perry case. next to her is matt was the deputy national legal director of the aclu. and last but not least, christopher stoll was the senior staff attorney for the national center for lesbian rights. again, let's welcome our panel. [applause] >> so, matt, have you had a chance to catch her breath? >> i have. >> we are starting with you. can you give us a brief overview of what was decide exactly into property cases? and did the supreme court get it right in the decision, in your opinion? >> well, the supreme court, the edge the last question is always yes. let me say to framing things. one is that are really two sets of marriage cases in the supreme court last week reversed the way to case and the case of the poor in the united states report, and any by john robert on one and kennedy on the of the there's the winter day days and the very case that were reported in the new york times, cbs news and across the blogosphere and i think they are very different cases. i think those political cases where enormous victories but i think the legal cases were somewhat more modest victory but it's important for the public and lawyers not to confuse the two, something that i'm sure we will return to. the property case i think probably needs no introduction at we all remember prop eight. the california supreme court in may of 2008 decide that it was a violation of the state constitution not to allow same-sex couples to marry. opponents had qualified a proposition, buy the most expensive noncorporate proposition ever to go before the voters. they cost about $84 million. and we lost 52-40. there were state court challenges that failed and this was the famous federal court challenge claiming that prop eight violent the federal constitution famously brought by ken olson and david boyd. claiming that prop eight was invalid under the federal constitution. that was the greece was originally presented was good the states under the federal constitution good income prohibit same-sex couples to marry? was committee will, framed original as a 50 state case. the case has a surprise in it, almost from the start which is a state of california watch and under eckstein governor, arnold switch axes, is a constitutional? i don't know. why don't you tell me. and the attorney general goes in the behalf of the state and says, well, we're not going to issue these marriage licenses but it is unconstitutional to in 1996, congress passes the so-called junta called so-called defense of marriage act. it's fast as i think i will readily admit to be used as a device against william clinton the upcoming presidential election when he vetoes it. and the defense of marriage act says when you put it together with the rest of the federal code, we come the federal government really don't care very much about the definition of marriage. we an entirely leave it to your state but sometimes a state that performs the national sometimes the state you live we don't have any definition of marriage. and less your state recognizes the marriage of a same-sex couple in which case we won't recognize it under any circumstances for any purpose under federal law whatsoever. a remarkable thing. nothing like that ever quite passed before. the case comes up when he went to live with her partner for 41 years had been married for the last three i think our partner died. she is executive of her estate. she is compelled to pay 350,000-dollar federal estate tax because the federal government under doma treats them as unmarried, even their own state treats them as many. discriminate against same-sex couples by the federal government under doma and constitution. and there's another surprise, not unlike the surprise in the perry case which is the federal government comes in and it says we're not going to give her the check so we are enforcing the defense of marriage act. right, we think she's right action. it's unconstitutional. it violates the federal constitution. so you have to cases posing a very similar question. can you deny same-sex couples attributed to opposite sex couples in marriage and in both cases the government is coming and saying we will law but actually we think the laws unconstitutional. it changes when the governor in california refuses to appeal the case. and the government in the winter case keeps appealing it and keeps it alive. so the cases arrived at the supreme court with two questions in each of them but one question, does it deny equal treatment under the federal constitution to treat same-sex couples differently? the second question or is there still a fight? is there anyone with a live dog in the fight? and hear something how they come out. in the prop eight case the courses there isn't anybody with a live dog in the fight anymore. and people are trying to fend this case wouldn't be bound by the order they would have to pay attorneys fees if they lost the they wouldn't have to pay court costs if they don't have a stake in the case. the cases over. it ended in district court when the attorney general failed to file an appeal. it is one of the most constitution was would call a real but terribly uninteresting article iii of the federal constitution, a case about standing or whether there's a real case. in windsor they look over and they say at least there was a real case because she wants her money and they won't pay it. even if they have an agreement about what the law is. and 5-format and what i would call a vintage classic confusing anthony kang opinion, the court says that doma is unconstitutional and it's got a lot of great rhetoric but very, very little constitutional law. that's what i meant to say they are modestly the victory to a legal victory in the prop eight case, supreme court essentially saying take us away. we really don't want to decide this yet the taking at all would back down to the district court. and in the winter case, the court 5-4, as close as it could become and somewhat monday in advancing this attitude is unconstitutional. but politically, very different. >> so this is for the plaintiff. what made you decide to become the lead place in the prop eight cases? what was the greatest impact of the actual trial on you, on your family? and but with most challenging moments for you and your family? and what were the most rewarding and so the most challenging and the most rewarding, center, we will start with you. >> that's a lot to answer. well, what they want to be placed in the case is that we believed in the approach. we had been through the prop eight campaign, and some of the same disappointment that everyone else did. and it was quite devastating to us but we been married in 2004 in san francisco when it was allowed and that marriage was taken away from us. even though we have a lovely wedding and her friends and family felt that it was, in fact, taken away from us legally. and that really dealt a blow to us in our family and our relationship to it was a difficult to celebrate something so wonderful in our lives and then experience disappointment truly humiliation of losing that. we did not get married in 2008 in the brief window because we were so concerned about the possibility of suffering the same humiliation and we decided to wait until it was really legal, permanent legal and we could have that and not worry about having it taken away. when we had the opportunity to get involved in the case, we talked about it, not about we both really agreed in a strategy but we knew it was possible to impact our family. so we asked the kids if they felt like they would support it. and told them that there could be a certain amount of media involved if we didn't know at the time how large it might become. and, of course, he became quite large. [laughter] the kids all supported us really without hesitation which is really heartening for us, and we made the decision because we felt like it was the right fight, the right place, the right lawyers, the right strategy and, in fact, it was. and so we were of course quite thrilled with the victory. that's how we got involved in the case. >> kristin? >> well, we didn't choose to be lead plaintiffs in the case. that may come as a surprise to lawyers, or maybe you already knew that. plaintiffs don't choose to become lead plaintiff. they can do with the problem and the problem was we've been in a relationship for 10 years, we have four children and we want to be married and we were doing everything couples do to establish security and permanence and allies, ma and yet we couldn't be married. we tried, even through the city hall wedding in 2004, and that was taken away. so we sort of went dormant in the sense that i think we took our lives back private and we just started going back to work and parenting as we always had. when we found out that there might be a legal challenge and the reason we found that was that i was an acquaintance of chad griffin he was at the time was working in los angeles, was actively looking for people for this case, not just place, lawyers and others who could support this effort. and by being an acquaintance of his we became involved in the case. that's how we got involved. somebody really challenging part of the trial were, no one, that there was a trial. [laughter] what you might not realize or maybe remember now that most of the marriage cases, if not all, and the non-but i can't take this, with one of% said i'll talk to, marriage cases and counseling have been handled through an initiative process and plaintiffs were not visible, or the survey when the spokespeople for group of people. they might have been inflicted to the effort and made some advances, but in this case we thought we would be doing the. that's what we thought we signed up for. [laughter] >> and they really didn't turn out that way. in fact, i can remember when we went to court to hear about the calendaring and scheduling that the lawyers need to know about in order to file the brief and to all the work that they do, and boy, do they do a lot of work. you are all amazing. for anyone here who did any help with amicus brief weekend to watch a went to support the lawyers on our team in some way, thank you. because really it took a team of dozens and dozens of attorneys over many years, and not just these attorneys but attorneys on other cases. the challenge part was that it was a trial, and then having to sit through almost three weeks of testimony and argue this from the other side that were very familiar because they sound like the political rhetoric that the use in the campaign but and if you all recall, sort of strategy that relied upon and at the local campaign was sort of caste living and gay couples as different and disagree and not worthy of something as special as marriage and certain not good enough to be a deterrent to for sandy and i with four children we love dearly and the friends who we loved it and all the other children in california who want help, that was just to much to tolerate and it was hard windows conduct overcame the we watched the ad seeking to listen to them, talk to the judge or how we were not worthy and her children with her and her that as well. and i think is a really difficult experience and to help someday the video is sensitive and all of you can see what we saw and heard in that courtroom because even though they wanted to convince the judge that they were right, they had no evidence and they couldn't back up any other claims, and i think that's why we want is that the 17 witnesses we have compared to the queue they had were using data and evidence. to explain how meaningful and helpful marriage is, the people are married are healthier and wealthier, that they are happier in many cases and that their lives are enriched by marriage, and certainly knowing you the option to be married what you choose or not to seem helpful. so that was a great, but how is the good news come and the hard part was the news that came out from their site. >> enrique, what made you decide in what made you choose these particular plaintiffs in this one out they didn't get to choose to be the plaintiff. and in other words, with the been the perfect test case? attorneys the fight for civil rights tended use cases where the facts on key with rights cases. >> our plaintiffs are heroes in our nation's fight for equality. but for the courage and tenacity and their true sacrifice, california would still be forcing property can be would be denied their fundamental right to marry. you know, we didn't have an official search party for plaintiffs as chris alluded to. chris insane and paul and jeff were acquaintaacquainta nces of chad griffin who's the former chair of the american foundation for equal rights, which started -- he asked them and they agreed. what we were looking for couples who were in loving, committed relationships and who are willing to make this sacrifice, willing to take steps towards federal litigation where other people were not ready to do it. we were so lucky to find chris and sandy and paul and jeff. i think their stories rang so true and were so moving. you just look at them and you feel like they should be together. one of the happiest point of my life, for people to go see them get married once the ninth circuit lifted its stay and we're in l.a. and we ran down to that saw that happen. it was a beautiful day. and congratulations. >> thank you. >> chris insane, where were you when the decisions speed as we were in the supreme court. we were, and, in fact, so happy to be in the supreme court paper also there on the day of the argument. and again i'll say lay people and not attorneys have we really learned a lot about the legal system and count respected even more than we already did. for its protocols, processes and the decorum and the from out of it i think brings a lot of respect for couples like us who often are not treated that way. and so to come into a place, our nation's highest court, and to be treated in the same whatever else is treated in that room i think was a very personally meaningful thing for me. and i was really happy we are in the courtroom both days, argument day and decision day. because not only were we in a room with people who cared deeply about this as we do, i think the whole countries help by these decisions, even though i think there is a public opinion and the court opinion and they are slightly different. i think it brought us together as a country, as a state, unlike any decision recently. so what i loved about being there was for ever remembering sandy why my side, jeff and paul, chad, and all the people of been with us for four and a half years just waiting for the day that it would be over. because even though it ended differently that we might have hoped, it was over. [laughter] and that was really a good thi thing. and every time without something was over to our lawyer said no, it's not over. [laughter] and i just thought well, okay, so we will go back again on an unknown date. but it is over and we walked out and people were so joyous and celebratory outside the court the entire day i felt like we're sort of writing on a cloud of happiness. >> chris, is there any way that these decisions can be undone in the future? >> well, for joy that's an easy answer but i think the chances essentially is zero that these cases could be undone. one of the nice things about being in the supreme court is when you're interpreting the federal constitution, your decision is about as final as file gets. so the only way the supreme court decision could be overturned would be either a federal constitution amendment, which is very, very difficult to do, or a future change in the composition of the court that causes them to reconsider their decision. neither of those is very likely any time in the foreseeable future. >> so chris and matt, can you griffin described what you believe the national impact of the supreme court decision is? and from a legal perspective, can you respond to that from a civil rights perspective question you respond to that and then from a societal perspective? >> well, from a legal perspective, as i said, in some ways the prop eight case from you, judge walker's decision is in place but i think judge walker's decision is best decision in a marriage case there's been so far but as you know, the decision of one trendy district judge is not binding even on any of the united states district judge. so from a strictly legal sense it's a modest. i think judge walker's decision because it is so good will be valuable from a legal standpoint. the doma case gives us a little more. for the first time the court really suggests that even when, the court has two basic ways of looking at the quality. most of the time it says we leave question of whether two groups of people are equal or unequal to legislatures and congress. that surprises most people but that's basically what the rulers. we will presume that different treatment is constitutional because people are really in a totally didn't situation. and quiet rarely they will say, we are historic was suspicious of certain kinds of classification of race, gender, nationality and we always look at those very carefully. the doma case dozens they will treat sexual orientation classification carefully. it still leaves us with anybody can tell back and presumptively constitutional. but it does say that when there's evidence that you single people for different treatment based on hostility or a sense that they're really different, does that change the calculus and make the court take a closer look at a? and i think that will make it helpful. it's taking down anti-marriage laws and other places. but i think it means you've got to be very, very smart about how we do it. we've got to look for the best targets at the. there's a lot of targets, about 45 targets out there, and we've got to look for the best because there are great differences between them. from a civil rights perspective, because the prop eight case doesn't get to the constitutional issues and the doma case does so languidly of this, i don't think there much of a boost. the courts decide that its judgment about voting rights was more important than congress is voting rights and more important than the unanimous united states kind of disappears earlier. i don't think there's a great boost to civil rights, i really don't. they are fabulous. i mean, really, i think the political sense of this is it's not going to be stuck. we are on it. they key is to make sure you make maximum use of political traction can smart use of the legal traction which is probably at this point a somewhat modest -- get things lined up. justice scalia's dissent is always important to read the justice scalia's dissent in the windsor case says there are five vote to destroy damage. get the case as quickly as possible. you may think he is our friend and telling us what to do. you may think he was just exasperated and throwing up his hands and thinking. or you may think, as i do, that he thinks this is the last chance to get a supreme court majority is that states don't have to require -- if he wants to get something through an unwell crafted it as quick as possible so you can use it as if he can get anthony kennedy, which come with this, the way everybody thinks this is breaking. kennedy says not a word in any of these opinions about how he feels about that question. he is deeply tormented. what i take away from us, make as much out of this politically as we can. be a smart about it from a legal standpoint as we can. >> where do you think the next best target is? >> i think there's a bunch out there. i would go after the most extreme amendments. and doma that are out there, virginia thing for example, even invalidates the will between same sex couples. i think that's really extreme. there's a case in north carolina that frames the marriage question up in terms of recognizing people as parents but i think it's a great way to do it. especially with justice kennedy. generally speaking, i think statutory defense of marriage acts are better than constitutional is because they give you better watch said record work with and you don't have to ascribe a motive for the entire pipe us of the state. you've seen the state legislatures. it easier to do it there. i don't think there's a single answer to what the best witness but i think there are a range of considerations out there. >> chris, legal, civil rights, society. society. >> i take a slightly different optimistic view of the decisions legal effects than matt does. we had this amazing language -- by the way, i should mention went to was in aclu case so we have -- met and the aclu to thank for that wonderful decision. and it really is the most sweeping affirmation of lgbt called reversing from our supreme court, you know, the first time we've ever seen language like justice kennedy's language talking about doma as a long that denigrates same-sex couples and their children and since this terrible message of any court to the children and marks them as second class, the relationship as second class marriages. and i think all of that language and all of the reasoning behind it is going to be tremendously helpful as we go forward, because a law from a state that says we're not going to recognize your marriage, if you move here from california it is ever bit as denigrated and every bit as much of a marker as second class status as doma was. and i think we will find that windsor is a big driver of the quality, legally and socially. >> enrique? prop eight supporters have been saying the statements were not victory for the lgbt community. it cannot create a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage as it did for abortion in 1973. and it did not declare same-sex marriage as a civil rights along the lines as it did for ethnicity and nationality. how would you respond to those statements? .. just like everybody else in that allowing the people to get married isn't going to affect anybody is heterosexual marriage. so when we have a state like california that is so large allowing more same-sex couples to get married and have families, i think that really pushes forward the discourse and marriage a quality that much sooner. >> what is your response to that? >> technically right and socially wrong. they are technically right that it doesn't us -- the nation why the right but the technically right it is in that sense the kind of legal watershed that gives way. but that is just people trying to deny what is going on in the country. look, if you go back to 2008 when proposition 8 past, we have two states that allow same-sex couples to get married at the time proposition eight was passed. within a few weeks if we picked up a few more, we picked up iows embrey que said the numbers that get us to 13 with california and most of the states through the state legislature is acting not through the courts doing it today anybody that misses the significance of this becoming i think in america since something that needs to happen, something that historical is going to happen that needs to happen soon. it is just to underrate the scope of the victory by the technicalities. >> okay. kristin. many will tell you that achieving marriage equality in california is the beginning of a much bigger challenge. next up are issues like employment discrimination, for example the 29 states, lgb are not protected from workplace discrimination and in 33 states, transgendered will not be protected. protection against bullying and adequate punishment for bullying is an issue. there's been an uptick in the lgb community and no marriage equality in other states just to name a few. what did you see as the most important issue on the path to equality for the lgbt community? >> first of all, enjoy the fact that for now -- no, no. for the result one of the problems which is sort of this enormous problem of our government telling us that we are not equal. and the harm that that was causing sandy and i and literally thousands of other california residents. and most importantly, children. and i think when you look at any of the other laws that discriminate in employment sites or schools where children are permitted or encouraged to be mean to other children. but that really all reflects is a very big problem of homophobia still in america. and those policies are just formal sort of mandates in that homophobia. what was important about the trial, and i do believe the decision is incredibly powerful and so is the record, is it shows how insidious and painful homophobia is, and even in the term we do some of the things to ourselves as gay people, lesbian and gay, transgendered people that people aren't even doing to us. and if we are doing this to ourselves, telling ourselves we don't deserve certain jobs or to live certain places or be happy and the parents, we are transmitting that to another generation and another generation. of course there are policies and of course there are laws that formalize those beliefs. the work may be to go out and undo a bunch of laws or pass new and better laws that underwrite those other law. my passion is more about humanity and human development and the capacity to be more loving and accepting verses to be so exclusive. and that is a state of mind you can make a great policies and do great things as a lawmaker and an elected official and great things as a teacher and an employer. but someone has to get through to you that you are harming people in your workplace and school and home or neighborhood. and i see that as the work sandy and i still have to do. it's one thing we got to be married and it feels great. and i can tell you being equal feels better. it does feel better. our children can tell us it already feels better. we are so sad they are already 18 and older and didn't have their parents married when they were growing up. but they found something historic and momentous happen. and that will change their lives and i think they will expect more than other people. and i hope all of you and young people across the country and in the state will see this as an inspirational moment that helps them us buyer to lead in their own life. and that is what changes all of that other nonsense actually that's going on out there where people get away with putting these terrible laws on the books. >> it's just be heading that way. >> so, sandy what do you think is the next most important issue on the path to lgbt ecology? >> after this inspirational talk about humanity, i think we have to have a country where you don't have to live in a certain state to get your rights. i think the fight is not over. i'm from iowa and i cannot tell you how ironic i found it to be. [laughter] my conservative mother saying can you believe i ely has a marriage and california does not and i actually kind of couldn't believe it. but i felt like marriage equality, workplace discrimination laws. antibullying, transgender writes, they all matter but we cannot have a country for just cause you were born in a certain state that means you just have to live a second class existence your entire life. we have to have more balance in this country. and we have to find a way to support our southern brothers and sisters and families so that we might have more balance in our country. i feel like we have such a divide between urban and rural and sometimes coastal and mom coastal, and right now we certainly have a huge divide over how we are received in terms of the government. and in fact the federal government recognizes us which is a fantastic and wonderful achievement and makes it all the more painful waiting for individuals to be in these other states to get past their own state law to try to reach the same benefits and the same rights that people who may be with 10 feet away. you shouldn't have to move. you shouldn't have to leave. you should be able to grow up and raise your family in the place that you ought to be around your relative and your home and have the same rights as anybody else in our country. so i think we have got to bridge that divide that we have geographically in the country. i absolutely think we have to address it as a human issue as well. >> what is your take on that what is the next best issue in your life? >> we can take a page out of history and kind of learn from the civil rights movement and really see that attaining the formal legal equality is not the end of the struggle. it's really just the beginning. and we have seen obviously in cases this year how long that struggle has been in the civil rights movement and how even there are defeats. w important it is that we not leave out the other half of america in terms of getting formal marriage equality and recognition that there are a whole host of other issues that are longer-term and harder to solve and do not lend themselves to one big impact case and you're done, things like bullying in schools and employment discrimination all these things that require constant work in the legislatures through policy advocacy and on a case by case basis and they don't just get better with one case. that's what we are going to get focused on i think. >> i think chris and sandy have put it really well. you can't really make the change. it's a lesson that every movement for social change in the 20th century. you can't make the change unless you change the rules and get people to accept the change in the rules. for the movements that have sputtered as i think largely some point or another focused too much on the formal legal equal the and not on that second part and i think it is essential to make any kind of change real. the other thing we should keep in mind is while public attention for the last, certainly the last five and maybe closer to the last ten years has been largely focused on lgbt issues on marriage. it's not like there haven't been other things going on. i can tell you that nclr and the aclu didn't stop doing things on bullying cases and child custody cases, didn't stop working on gender equality and trans equality. almost all of us expanded and took on a bigger program and of those things haven't gone away. and the marriage in california that the federal defensive marriage act isn't going to make it go away. they are all moving forward and the key to this is i think that persuading people that humanly we are not really different. we have the same kind of relationship, the same kind of emotional attachments good and bad that everybody else does. when you see that range is the same that is the key to fighting off all of those. marriage is a great way to illustrate but it's not the only way. we have to keep pushing the whole thing forward. kristin and sandy other than the fact you were the first to be married in city hall -- congratulations by the we -- how has the outcome of these two cases changed your life in the last month or so? >> i'm 48-years-old, and for 30 years since i turned 18i just assumed i would never be married. know whether i found love or not i would never be married, and for two weeks i've been married to that i don't believe it until i see sandy and i remember that i really am married. and i can tell you that everything that our heterosexual lawyers and mary the lawyers told us was important about this institution is true. there is a sense of responsibility and commitment that deepened and we talked about it for both a little bit in awe cow it shifted us from this temporary worried that the outcome wouldn't be one that would be on to celebrate and that would be taking a big risk and not be successful so the worry of that was very big. having about lifted and then be replaced with a great sense of permanence and a bright future has been wonderful. absolutely wonderful. i wanted to laugh. [laughter] >> i had an interesting experience a couple days ago. we were in washington, d.c. and i was renting a car. i was staring at the paper work and things that are you the only driver and i said no i want a second driver. do they have to be here? they said no, as long as you're married. i said i am married. [laughter] i'm not used to it. my first cool little benefit. he said okay then i will just put your husband's naim down and i said no it's my wife. he said i'm sorry. of course, i will just put that down. i will put down spouse. and i thought yack put down spouse and change your forms and don't ever ask anybody that again. [applause] but i'm so used to using the word partner and having that feeling about that like it feels sort of bad. it does feel second class. it is second class. i'm not a lawyer and i never aspired to be a partner in my life. [laughter] but the word wife is working out pretty well. it really does change. the day we got married and i got my ring, because we are gay people we need lots of rings to commemorate our marriages. [laughter] the day we got married, i honestly felt calmer. i felt like my heart rate and blood pressure went down a little bit. like yes, things are going to be okay. this is the real deal. our families are going to understand it better. and we can stop fighting for it and stop being in court over it. and we just both felt a lot calmer and i felt a legitimate in some bizarre way because in our country and in our society, marriage means something. like one of the other plaintiffs said come it didn't matter so much we wouldn't be here. it does matter and that's why $84 million to try to keeping us from having it. it matters in a different way. it matters to us. it's benefitting knous and other people. i cannot underscore this enough. we have heard stories about couples who had they just been able to get married, you know, one couple that we heard about from our lawyer, a couple in california, one of them passed away just before you could legally get married and before the doma came down. because of that, her partner of many years will just suffer from the consequences of that. and they are very severe for those families. very severe for the bread of winning this house passed away and the stay at home mom was left. these are significant consequences. and like it was said in court, every day that you do not come to this long, people suffer and it's true they suffered. it's not just emotional. it can be financial. and there are horrible consequences. and for us it is wonderful to be married. we feel so happy about it and i'm less worried about our future but i also feel like good, there are people out there that got their just reward today and that matters so much just not even funny. we are so happy about that part knowing that the people we don't know have a better day to day. >> so what have your children said have change for them since you have been married? >> well, you know our children are now adults so we see this in a sort of random way that you see your adult children. they are all extremely happy and relieved as we are. and i think they all have friends tell them how impressed and happy they are why this struggle that we have been in and that we made it to the other side. so, i think for them. recognition and support has been a huge part of this and in some ways they feel admired i think for having been involved in something that has affected lots of other families. and also i believe they are so happy for sandy and i that we are done. this is part of our lives the was full of uncertainty, and now it's still possible have a future. and they want that for us. while they are starting their new life we are starting our new life. >> of the california case on procedural grounds, the supreme court avoided unnecessary reckoning about a fundamental violation of the equal protection created by the state law that prohibits the same-sex couples from marrying during its perpetuated a patchwork in which the newlywed couples may not be considered married when they cross the borders. therefore, if a couple was married in a state that recognize same-sex marriage like california, what are the implications of that couple moving to a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage such as tax filing, getting divorces, etc.. >> i can start now that we have doma gone, one thing that is very clear is couple's daughter married in a state like california that permit same-sex couples to marry and live in a state that permits same-sex couples to marry, those couples will be entitled to every federal right and benefit that any married couple has. that's very clear and it's a matter of time before the federal government implement all those things as they have moved very quickly to do. that is absolutely clear. the only other complication arises when a couple married in california or in another state moves to a state like florida or texas that doesn't respect their marriage. and until we succeed in getting rid of the remaining marriage bans in these states, it's clear that those state governments will not recognize these couples that are married and they will get some but probably not all of the federal benefits that they would get if they were living in a state that respected their marriage. the administration has been coming out with guidance on various benefits since the decision came down. so we do have some answers at this point. it seems pretty clear that for immigration purposes, the federal government is going to respect the marriages of couples that were married in any jurisdiction that allows that no matter where the couple lives now. it's clear now that federal employees will be able to get spousal health insurance and other benefits if they are legally married in any state regardless of where they currently live. the same for military spouses. so we do have some clarity on some of these issues. the two big ones that are sort of standing and that we are still waiting for guidance from the administration on our social security and taxes and i expect we will get guidance in the near future. there are additional issues with those two because of some statutory language that excess and the administration is kind of working through what benefits can be provided in those areas. so that's where we are on a practical matter in terms of the federal benefits. >> on the one hand about taxes if you are living in a state that recognizes the same-sex couples there is no question that he would be treated for tax purposes like any married couple. the purpose is whether as an immigration our military they can't ask that further out and it's much tougher than it is in some other areas to do it because as chris said the statutory framework. ultimately, people think that the federal constitution requires the state to recognize marriage even though it was entered into another state. the truth is states do that almost universally but not because anybody has ever interpreted the federal constitution to say they have to. they just do it. they can extend the recognition to the driver's licenses, corporation papers or marriages. the question that comes up is what happens when the state does it? there is widespread in this country for much of the latter 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th century that wouldn't recognize interracial marriages. but none of those cases just about the cross border recognition never got very far in the federal court system. so we don't know whether one state can refuse to recognize marriage from another state. i will say this. the way that i get the rules it seems pretty clear to me that if you are married in the state recognizes your marriage, new york or california and you are traveling to another state and that state institution doesn't recognize your marriage i think they are going to have to. we may bring a challenge but they will have to. if your travel and you were in hospital but refuses to recognize marriage i think there would be a good case to bring. it transfers harder but the more the transfer looks like something in voluntary, the better unlike the case i think it comes from somebody across the state line to get married because their state won't marry them and then it hops back and that isn't a very good case. >> i will just add this situation we have states not recognizing the marriages means even now for california couples that are married it is very important to have things like health care proxy's and power of attorneys for finances and to do at options for your children and have those papers with you because you never know what might happen when you are traveling in another state and you really want to protect yourself as best you can >> so if someone wanted to learn about this mismatch of benefits now that we know people have and some are still trying to figure out, where can they go to figure that out for themselves? >> we have lots of information on both of our website. actually, for the federal benefits, all of the major lgbt organizations have put together fact sheets that are available on all our web sites that go through the federal benefits, and particularly dealing with this question about what happens if he moved to the nonrecognition state. and on our web site, that is that nclrights.org/afterdoma and other web sites. >> we are going to move to the part of the program i call round robin. you have been through this with me before. i'm going to throw out a statement and you are going to take about 15 seconds to give me a provocative fault or opinion on the statement. so, since the supreme court decision, how impact spousal green card, anybody? >> the federal government will recognize your marriage but still talk to the experienced immigration lawyer because there are many other things that can affect you. >> he's right. >> it doesn't have to be a legal opinion. the ideas on the spousal green card applicants after these positions. >> i think a lot of people are going to be relieved. >> social security, 401k and veteran's benefits. >> we are all getting older. [laughter] we have to pay attention. it's really important to have equal access to the kind of economic safety net that the rest of our society has. >> this stuff is complicated if you are in a heterosexual relationship. now it is at least the same level of complexity that everybody else does. >> health care rights and partner decisions for the lgbt community. >> i don't think that you can just assume because you are married that you really know what to do in the case of your partner having a health crisis are having to make decisions for them that they can't make for themselves. it doesn't automatically make you omniscient. we have to have a conversation again because even though we didn't run 12 years ago, we are probably due for a check at. so i would say this is a nice reminder that it's time to get those conversations going again because the state planning and health planning are important and they are not address in your marriage. >> we still see some cases where people that have the proper papers don't have the relationships respected, and that can still happen. >> having an or adopting and raising children is really, really hard. [laughter] >> hopefully this will make it easier for people to form families. but almost as importantly, those children that they have to grow up more secure feeling like their family is more like families around them and that is remarkably important for the social and psychological development of children. >> and for young children growing up that haven't fallen in love yet and haven't decided who they want to marry or if they want to marry or if they want to have children. the idea that all of that potential is there is such a beautiful thing and to feel with -- live with the feeling i don't get to believe what is above it is over for a number of people. and in this state we want it to be over for everybody. having kids is an incredible wonderful thing and to feel protected at the same time is even better. >> we've struggled across the country for years to get the second parents recognized as legal parents. and this doesn't completely make the problem go away. but it makes an awful lot of it go away in the states that recognize marriage for same-sex couples. >> it was about their four boys and the recognition the state would give them and how they would feel in the major theme that came up with justice kennedy was very concerned about the 40,000 children that live in the families led by same-sex couples. i think it's a really big deal. >> i think that covers it. >> after these decisions, what do you think about whether the transgender rights are still a step behind lesbian, gay and transsexual rights? >> i think they are behind but in the issues for transgendered people it is different. so the things that are important are access, nondiscriminatory access to quality health care, access to identity documents and things that do not face same-sex couples necessarily. >> after these two decisions, what do you think about political involvement in our personal life? >> one of the great things about this case has been the allies that we have been able to create, the bridges with other organizations. being gay and lesbian is one aspect of the community that we have many different communities. we are latino and african-american, and we are able to build these collisions. and so i think that moving forward i think that our community hopeful we will go on coalitions built and we will be able to help others in their fight so that we can get that support back for our own a continued move towards equality. >> i think one thing that made our case so successful is that it was not really -- it didn't move forward on the political lines. but by having these bipartisan lawyers, we approached it as a common cause. it's not a political fight. it's a civil rights fight. and i think that that helps us be successful. and i think that could be we could leverage that type of approach to other causes as well because they don't need to be political with their civil rights. >> at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we have got 13 states. that means we have 37 more on marriage. we have all the other issues that we outlined. and the one thing that we know would be a mistake would be to start thinking just about changing the legal rules and getting the formal legal equality. if we do that we will falter and then we will have a great wind behind it now and will not succeed. so the bottom line is get to work, and that does mean political in your personal life. >> did you have a comment? that segues nicely into my statement. what are your thoughts on how the impact of this decision, the impact of the decision will have on the discussions around the race and class and sexism in this country? >> fools rush in i guess.

Transcripts For DW PopXport - Bands Trends And Events - The Best Music From Germany 20180318

clouds. and and fire on one of the winning bands in the match at home at rock. indie rock house has just launched. and i have to say it's really something it includes a thirty three minute song that takes and twenty five years of germany's history to accompany this news to come marathon there's a new film which recently premiered at a house concert and their hometown hamburg export was there. for some reason there's a. big. cuts across performing in hamburg as mojo club the german newcomers are launching their debut album titled narrow as loud more than loud. the climax of the show certainly is the louder this song lyric in your or your children is accompanied by a film both the song and the film deal with childhood and growing up in a reunified germany from one nine hundred ninety on the bed to the song in the film are both an astounding thirty three minutes long. longer one with a song if it wasn't intended to be so long on the funk i just started writing and then i was a verse for every year when i was twelve i was a form of concert that means twenty five cents from one thousand nine hundred ninety to twenty fifteen you that's why it can't be cut down on a quote from an attack on a refugee shelter in rostock in one thousand nine hundred two events like this are also part of the song and the film which is set in a rented home in east berlin. for the filmmakers depicting twenty five years of german history was a real challenge. to see idea was to pack all the stories and characters mentioned in a song into the house and to see the kids growing up together. and then to see what they all go through and what happens. in the title. of this biggest so it's more than just a music video backdrop for the band it's an actual film in its own right and. the band from hamburg got the idea for this song in two thousand and fourteen when some people in the former east germany began to protest the government's migration policies. under the rallies to counter picket there was a slogan that developed your children will be like us hope what life is like saying we can change you but your children can only turn out my car that had that idea took hold of me and i began to our client to my own life and that of my friends slogan him to task. is to speak. to. the. incoming. the result of a song and film to take a clear stand against xenophobia and nationalism. a topic with relevance far beyond eastern germany. in the song it deals with how this division between east and west is actually quite weird is not just an east german issue it's relevant to all of germany. twenty five years and every unified germany seen through the eyes of someone who grew up in this time people are struck by the combination of music and film. their own music i'm a musician myself i don't know how you can memorize half an hour of lyrics complicated ones to. actually so imagine me of the stocks of pink floyd songs they made long songs that last is about just on top and i would switch it off. if you want to experience the full force of crowds songs you have to see them live otherwise there is their debut album. and impressive film. as you heard the song i have a kid and your children it's thirty three minutes long so we can fit it into the show instead something new from casper a german record with american roots and a husky voice here's a dramatic video to his new song. maybe five. can be about how can you go to san antonio. that's pretty emotional and a side of caspar i'm not used to seeing but the red bar will be hitting festival stages starting in may this year and now he has more news from that german music scene. it was a big evening for the winners of the german music alterable it embedded and gave a performance rights organization based in germany on a german composers like prince p. in the category for best hip hop lyrics. you know thanks very much thanks to everyone who makes music with me german rocket have a kind of i presented the popular x. of war to sing about being a. class study got picked up a lifetime achievement award the jazz composer read classics like the legendary tune to the german t.v. crime series taught. honest most and was awarded for her mega hit no roots and ramstein won in the uk michelle category congratulations from pop export to see those few thousands of children will die if we do not help now to food. together with the athletes anthony campbell and months the german rocket little in the back is helping to fight hunger he's an ambassador for unicef stop ten seconds campaign it refers to the fact that every ten seconds a child under the age of five dies of hunger the aim is to save children's lives in south sudan with a joint season starting in my food supplies could become scarce many celebrities have already donated like model and singer in the back and tennis legend bar inspector. from the original image of the world have him a small group of heaven shall burn up touring across europe with songs from their current album one jura. everything from the vibrant world of pop music on facebook at the w music store. stars in the latest from the music scene. join us in the universe of pop on facebook and send us a message we love hearing from. we continue with an up and coming artist from of area. little better known as lily among clouds makes melancholy pop and reminds me a little bit of lana del rey among clouts has performed at festivals in finland australia and the us she's been touring with her new album aerial perspective where we caught up with her. it. might only be an adopted home for lily among clowns but it's like performing for a home crowd normally shy she comes out of her shell. she captivates her audience with the energy and very personal larynx. second on my feet and i always say i'm not offering a solution in the songs but if people feel what you've lived through then they know that they're not the only idiots that have bad things happen to them. that's enough to change something but it doesn't take the problems away is that. the twenty nine year olds debut album aerial perspective is an indie pop can't. do the voice is amazing i'll for performance just makes a very likeable odgers the third down to out i really like her voice she has such a standout sound system. eighty years ago a little bit but not aka lily among clowns moved towards book she was a student of political science and she made a lot of music her first e.p. came out in twenty fifteen with find songs written by her. it was only them that she decided to devote herself entirely to music. it was a difficult step to take because i was always a bit scared of being an artist. when kalki at some stage then it became clear people like to listen to me so i either put everything into it all nothing at all two years ago i thought i have to try it on months it's. you album came out in the autumn of twenty seventeen she's been torn with it ever since. among counters perform some pretty big gigs for such a new talent she performed to a crowd of ten thousand in finland and played in australia and after south by southwest festival in texas english language lyrics have universal appeal. as sureness had it learn anything is that i always wanted to travel and for early on everyone always said sing in german it's much easier it's in demand downs of us and i always said i can only do what i write and that's. it and it's brilliant because you travel with it so it has its benefits office. feels most comfortable on stage and every performance is different. it was. predictable things happen which makes performances so much more exciting and lively and i guess so the evening can be an also or an exhausting month. but if it's a good evening and that is magic it works and nobody can artificially create. it. there were definitely magical concert moments for what's broken audience johnny's indie pop discovering. from atmospheric in the pub we now go to hip hop from all excess the german rep are with rusin and ukrainian roots has managed to do what few others have he talked to both but german single and album charts in the same week he has the cliff to his hit single magic with vocalist eighteen. the nuclear club. used. to. get through the cycle to figure out. from the long haul you. focus a little. bit but this is this is. the first. place to go to. this group is. the cool. cool cool looking through the. roof. but this is the. from that in germany to hong kong with a declaration of love and threats now let's look at some new releases alan kohler. made the twins heiko and the omen lock on the east the eighteen year old you tube stars went to bangkok thailand to film the music video about the. colors. of the clara louise the twenty five year old was born in germany and now lives insults for australian. lives the man. is a balance in. the land kristen bush is thirty years old and has already made music with rap pacts like america's crow and the all sims now he's doing his own thing and it's pretty on bad. luck. the german comeback bell book and candle landed an international hit with rescue me in the ninety's their most recent album came out in two thousand and finds thirteen years omes the berlin trio are making a comeback in their own language. now for all you fans of distorted at. and counting that of and from around the world face off in the metal battle at the back open air who is the fastest hardest and the loudest each month we feature one of the five winning bands from the last competition and their place in fair that metaphor lists from the netherlands'. to surprise package at the metal battle of twenty seventeen in fareham the average age of the band members is just nineteen the jets group only got together nine months before the competition knocking was their biggest to get so practice was keep. this three times a week and we're just drilling the songs you know just as over and over every parts we play the hundred times of everything didn't need to be perfect and as well as it did was really really fun to do we saw. we saw itself grow as a band and it was really really cool to see. hard work is a must but to win against twenty seven international acts in banking you also need luck. and it seems the weather gods were smiling down on you in terror. to look at the weather channel this morning and the largest was saying yeah it's raining really plagues everyone is inside. the us ourselves and he said yeah it was raining so hard and everyone just stormed inside of the tent so i think we're lucky that that's raining. until now in. i have never performed in front of more than one hundred people here they have to wow an overcrowded tent but it's not a problem the musicians from the dutch city of eindhoven know how it's done because they've studied their craft. all started a. college. that's where it all started with a few line up changes it's called for because a lot of teachers there are. only from one of them say shit like that but we are talking about the business side of music so we have an advantage and that's how to take. so studies at the music academy were worth it as the middle madelyne back in the band came in third place. in favor of the metal newcomers might still be young but they were already like seasoned pros so watch this space. it's time again for the export quits join and you could win awesome c.d.'s today we hear niagara shania from kenya with the german follow up global hit stolen dance if you tell us who did the original you could win albums with music from today's show and. you. tube. what a great cover but who sang the original may oncet to d.w. up export. six in one three three five five berland germany or via e-mail to export at w dot com and don't forget to include your mailing address up for grabs is music from clara luis cast lily among clouds and an album with a textbook from the band house finally i have a cup clip for you now it was released in march twenty years ago that primavera by sash the dance project by d.j. sasha has. the single make charts in ten countries making it to third place in great britain and s. the song says. a spring of love fill your hearts with love and joy the video i love ina thanks for watching. odd. it's about more than energy it's about power. the north string to the russian energy giant gazprom pipeline through the middle of the baltic directly to germany . move the bilateral undertaking has met with a lot of opposition mob college explicit pipelines in europe and natural gas. in sixteen minutes on d w. climate change the bush. pollution. isn't it time for good news go in africa people and projects that are changing our lives are meant for the best her it's up to us to make a difference let's destroy each other. be good enough. environment magazine. d.w. started out with some junk and instructions from a book. at the age of fourteen william coming. from malawi wanted to build a wind turbine to provide his village with electricity. playland commitment to this idea changed his life a place of all of it much of an exciting journey a humble world speaking. hero's story. and the winter starting march twenty first on t.w. . the race for immortality has begun played leading neuroscientists are researching ways to replicate the human brain play androids are taking over physical labor. and the code of the human brain is deciphered. to determine which play enjoys for the artificial consciousness or the number one item on the market and the generation needs front against such an attempt to do the cooking. you're putting the transfer of the human mind into an avatar is successful immortality is within reach. but what tricks the men do you think would smooth the planet and will make sure you wouldn't want it. ring factory starting march twenty fourth on t.w. claim. voting is underway in russia's presidential election voters and vladivostok in the country's far east lined up to cast their ballots eight candidates are in the running but president vladimir putin is expected to win a fourth term in office by a clear margin. thousands of people have been streaming out.

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