About, i know we will talk about immigration because immigration has been a policy issue that has fueled your Public Service but lets talk about you say in the book you landed in the airport with two suitcases and that was it. Guest that is right. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. You are right. Its such a pleasure to have an indepth conversation with a colleague and something you just dont get to do. Yes, i landed here a few months before i turned 17 and again by myself. My dad had about 5000 dollars in his big account and used all of it to send me here because he really believed that this was the place i would get the best education and have the most opportunities. I show up at jfk airport with my two suitcases because that is all you are allowed to bring without having to pay for more baggage we did not have money to pay for more baggage. I just remember and i write about this in the book is how strange it was to see, first of all, not the diversity of people but its pretty diverse, new york is, a lot of displays of physical affection that i was not used to seeing in asia and smells of mcdonalds and burger king which you sort of jumped about when you are in indonesia but they had not made it to that part of the world yet. And then just being in a completely new place with a completely new environment, not really knowing if you would fit in or how you would fit in and i went to Georgetown University undergraduate here in the Nations Capital and i remember when i landed at georgetown and went to the oren Student Office to get all my information and they said, they said something about being a foreign student but not having gotten my rooming assignment and the guy who is very wellmeaning, i think all he heard was foreign student in stock and said do you speak english and i remember saying and being so surprised by that insane jokingly saying well, i do but only if you talk very slowly. [laughter] that was the beginning of my entry to the United States and i dont think i could have ever dreamt i would have sitting here talking to is a member of congress. Host yeah, absolutely. I would encourage people to read the book just to see how somebody arrives at age 17 in the United States for the First Time Ever that results in that person becoming a member of congress but one of the reasons this conversation will be fun is you have a high profile of the leftist wing of the Democratic Party and i am a leader of the new democrat division, the more centrist wing, and one of the things that was fun your book was anybody that wanted is a Progressive Left to grapple with the fact that you went to Business School and worked on wall street and you worked for a medical Device Corporation so that is wonderfully rich portrait of how the world is such more comp gated and so talk a little bit about that and how they worked in the private sector to inform how you think about working in the private sector. Guest that stems from my dad wanted me to be the ceo of ibm who he said if i will use all my money and send you cross the ocean, you better be a doctor, engineer or lawyer. Politician was not one of them. And so when i went to college i got a degree in economics but somewhere along the way i decided that i wanted to be in english lit major and called my dad with one phone call i had a year to tell him i would be an english major and he screamed at me and said you know, i do not send you to the United States to learn how to speak english, you already know how to speak english. I promised him i would go get the same job with an english degree that it wouldve gotten with an economics degree. At that time was the mid 1980s and Mike Milliken was [inaudible] and wall street was the place you wanted to work if you are smart and competitive and that was the thing you tried to go do and so that is what i did. I went to work on wall street and in Investment Banking and i did a lot of things that no 20 yearold should ever have done frankly and representing companies and bankruptcy proceedings and working on leveraged buyouts and i realized it wasnt for me but one of the things i tell people i mentor all the time is that its really important to find out what you dont want to do just as much as you find out what you do want to do. Also, the skills you gained along the way are invaluable and so anybody can put a spreadsheet in front of me and i worked on very complex 300 page spread streets back before xl was the thing, back in the lotus one, two, three days and i could finally understand Financial Statements and went on to get a masters in business and worked in Economic Development and i think like every one of those things has made me better prepared to be in congress because as you were implying people think about the progressive as being somehow completely devoid from business, not Understanding Economic but he dont think those betrayals are true. I think people are always surprised to hear about my background but it is really helped inform my view of wall street accountability and the need to support mainstream and about what actually makes good economic sense and what is traumatic and practical in my world based on how i think about what the future looks like from an Economic Perspective as well as political perspective. Host yeah, no, really interesting and i worked at a bank for a while and i was 22 when i was doing that so. Guest a whole two years older than me. [laughter] host but i agree with you 100 that i, like you, enjoyed that or i felt like i was learning a lot and a lot of negotiations skills and a lot of the writing skills that are important to politics and i did learn [inaudible]s are related to that. Then make a wonderful transition and will play this allows us to transition into the issues i think really animate your book that you are not satisfied you are not saying that for the social engagement in the private sector and you go abroad to a camp but all of a sudden now the new concept of immigration that you come or stay in the book you understand what drives migrant so lets talk about immigration because there is so much of your story and its at the core of not just the policy debates but we sort of play defense against the president who has, as i tell my constituents, crated this redhot core of anger and baloney, quite frankly, to drive these immigrants like criminals. Given where you come from and this book its key that the immigration debate is based on morality and with your experience, here we are at a moment where we are having the most dysfunctional non conversation about immigration that i can number so i know 911 was important to you but walk me through what really gets you so passionate about morals, moral immigration policy . Guest when i was in thailand and this was the summer between graduate school i had this opportunity and working for three months in thailand for the largest nonprofit and i happen to go to site to which was the largest refugee camp of the time mostly refugees from cambodia and laos and it was a stunning experience for me. Really deeply moving to see people bombed and there was a bombing days before i arrived there so is still a very active camp in that sense. Most of the folks they are thought they would be there for a short time before been able to get permanently settled again and coming out of war, losing children and family and you just see the resilience that people have. You see how difficult life is for people who are put in terrible situations, economic situations. It was the formation and i dont think i thought about it as immigration or migration in the moment but i think i was just experiencing what was happening but it was definitely a core piece of how i had related to the issue of immigration when it was about other people. My experience as an immigrant is a few pieces of everything but it was relatively privileged, as hard as it was. I spoke the language and i went to college and all these differ in things that allowed my experience to be a lot easier than most of the people i worked with and later when i switched from a private sector i worked in International Talent and development for several years running a fund and i worked all over the world, i work in india, africa, asia, latin america, everywhere. Again, i saw the challenges that are the root causes of migration and that has always been my orientation is how we think about immigration in terms of root causes of sending countries and how do people get there and then when 911 hit i then started to think about it from this perspective of being a u. S. Citizen and an immigrant here in the United States and this is our immigration policy and what it needs to be. It really became very, very ensconced in that and started with it being the largest immigrant Advocacy Organization in Washington State. In fact, many of us policies in washington were one of the best states along with california for immigrants who live and i think a lot of that is because of the work we did over the last two decades to preserve dignity and rights and opportunities for everybody. And so, i got to know the policy detail of immigration to and i talked about in the book how there is such a lack of nuance to the debate about immigration in this country and in fact, the immigration system is so unbelievably complex and everybody has a story to tell about immigration unless you are native american and of course if youre African American or on a slave ship unwillingness was very different situation but everybody else has a story to tell about a parent or grandparent or great grandparent coming to the United States and the more core of the identity that forms the United States of america as a nation of immigrants and so that has been, i think, very important to me to make sure that we explained to the American People how we have not had a system of immigration laws. They have a few laws here and there but there have been a few times in history where president has managed to meet and the congress has managed to move a complete overhaul of immigration laws forward but it has been decades. Our system has not been fixed in decades. There has been no major change and that is untenable for a country that has such deep Economic Needs and such deep societal and familial needs and whose identity is focused on the role of immigrants in building our country. Host yeah, thats absolutely right. One of the things i think for all of us that arent subscribers to the president s point of view on immigration which i think its a deeply immoral point of view but we will come back to how morality influences our policies. As you point out, we are a nation of immigrants and secondly if you talk to Business People you dont even take the moral approach they will tell you absolutely essential to our economy to have more robust immigration, not just acrosstheboard but from Washington State and that is the agricultural worker in the folks that are deemed essential but i was in her restaurants and its that sort of thing. So, describe for us because its not hard to look at the current net and its a moral method and we can come back to family separation but i think its good to think in moral terms but describe what you think since this is really your thing and has been for decades if you could wave a magic wand and, you know, American Innovation policy would change overnight, what would it look like and how to that compare to you werent here in washington yet but the bill passed the United States senate five, six years ago with 67 senatorial votes and had [inaudible] it had an advanced sort of employment identification and verification in all sorts of things but tell us what your view of a good immigration policy would look like and how did it compare to what got us through the senate in a very strong bipartisan manner five, six years ago. Guest yeah, i was on the outside pushing for that bill and it had a lot of compromises prickly that we did not all like but it had the major components. The key thing here to thing about is a lot of americans will say because of what the president has said or people before the president frankly this issue has been a political football for a long time but its taken to a new level in demonizing immigrants and something no other president before him is done in the same way in recent history. The first thing is people say you should get in line. You have to understand there is no line in the United States. There is no system for people to even come here legally. I will give myself as an example. It took me 18 years to get my citizenship for a whole host of reasons but i came in on a student visa so first thing we need to do is need to rectify the system so there are processes easy for people to navigate, whether youre coming on a Business Visa or whether to join the family or whether you are coming here to work temporarily or be a student. Those quotas they were set three decades ago, those need to be completely updated. Now, in addition to that that allows you to have a functioning system going forward. In addition to that you have to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 12 billion undocumented immigrants that are here. Why . Because these are folks who primarily have been living here for 16, 17 years, decades and it is hypocritical for us to say they should not be allowed to stay when, in fact, if they all left that they were all deported it would cost the taxpayers an enormous amount of money but secondly if they all left the entire economy would collapse. Lets recognize that we have not had a system that has allowed them to do the work they need but to also stay and they are americans in all ways except that piece of paper. Give them a path to citizenship and allow them to come out of the shadows and be full contributors and understand when they do that. Host by the way, that position seems exotic because the way President Trump talks about the undocumented but that concept that you were here a half decade ago got republican support because they understood that if nothing else our food supply chain, farms, our meatpacking plants when when they simply dont work without that population. Guest that is right. In spite of what trump has said, what you said is exactly right. There is still substantial support for a path to citizenship. It is kind of amazing given the demonization the jump is done but, you know, my [inaudible] who are staunch republicans in Eastern Washington and visit the chamber of commerce there is a clear sense they are that we need a path to citizenship and comprehensive and humane reform just as it is clear to human rights activists that might get there for Different Reasons but for everybody people understand we need to fix the system. Third, jim, i would say we need to make sure that we have humanitarian ways for people to continue to see the United States as that beacon of hope and light. Our asylum or Refugee Resettlement processes and this is another area where they have been traditionally bipartisan support. Speaker pelosi would like to talk about that the even jello goals who call Refugee Resettlement program the crown jewel of humanitarianism. I think this is another place where donald trump has destroyed everything that has to do with people seeking refuge. He is absolutely shut down the Refugee Resettlement program and we are barely taking any pre he shut down the Asylum Program and we are barely taking any and he shut off all illegal legal ways for people to come. We should be clear donald trump opposition is not just to undocumented immigrants but to all legal immigration. That is why he tried to ban student visas and it is why he tried to shut down legal immigrant programs for people who are coming here to work, spousal visas and he rolled back all of that. Lets be clear, his agenda and the agenda of the white house with Steven Miller and others around him in the white house is no immigration. This country will die without immigration and that is just clear. Host so, i agree with your statement that no president has made immigration such a toxic part of their approach but sadly however, this is at some level same old same old where chinese immigrants were talked about in the late 1800s and absolutely brutalized and dehumanized on the west coast and that is been the experience of every wave of immigrants with the irish catholics, the mediterranean immigrants and they were different and the Northern European immigrants so very strong reoccurring themes and its ironic because as you point out all of us came from somewhere unless we are indigenous to the continent so lets get behind a policy and the politics of this and on some level that is absurd that this country the president s value is all about immigration and being a beacon to the world but for 240 years practically the country has also been absolutely brutal to the latest wave of immigrants so what is going on there and how to be change that because if we dont change that there will be if it happened in the past it can happen in the future where there is a demagogue to take on the latest round of immigration. How do we change that . Guest we have to change the policy and it requires that despite of what people say. Any immigration form that is happened it happened with tremendous resistance but the president that has overseen that has actually moved forward despite any concerns that he might have abo