Might do us harm. This is consistent with the overall vision we have had and we anticipated, as we were drawing down troops there were times when we might need to slow things down or fill gaps in afghan capacity. This is a reflection of that. It is a dangerous area, so part of what we are trying to balance is making sure afghans are out a there doing what they need to do. But that we are giving them a chance to succeed and that we are making sure they can conduct that our force posture in the area in terms of conducting those narrow missions that we need to conduct, we can do so relatively safely. There are still risks involved. Force protection, the ability of our embassies to operate effectively, those things all factor in. So we have to constantly reviewed these approaches. The important thing i want to emphasize is that the nature of the mission has not changed. The cessation of our combat role has not changed. Now, the 25 military and civilians killed last year, that always weighs on my mind, and 25 deaths are 25 to many, degree for the families of the fallen. But understand relative to what was involved when we were in an active, role and actively engage in war in afghanistan was a very different scenario. Here you have a situation where we have clarity about our mission and a partner that wants to work with us. We are going to continually make adjustments to ensure we give the best possibilities for success. I suspect we will continue to evaluate this Going Forward as will the next president. As conditions improve, we will be in a position to make other further adjustments. Im confident this is the right thing to do. In i am not disappointed because my view has always been how do we achieve our goals while minimizing the strain and exposure on our men and women in uniform and make sure we are constantly encouraging and sending a message to the Afghan People this is their country and they have to defend it. But we will be a steady partner for them. Ok . Thank you everybody. In the mirror and i dont see a president. My response was, quit looking in the mirror. On his book a run mitchell run about his longtime friend Mitch Daniels and his decision not to run for president in 2012. I am i became convinced as we were toward the end of the process that he is very competitive. Ithe made a decision to do he wouldve had his heart and soul into it. It is not something he really ever thirsted after. Tonight on cspans q and a. The Charitable Trusts held a discussion on the states decisionmaking process for issuing drivers licenses to Illegal Immigrants. 10 states and the District Of Columbia have allowed Illegal Immigrants to obtain licenses. This is about an hour and a half. Good afternoon everyone and thank you all for coming. I am tom conroy, Vice President for government performance here. Thank you for sharing some time with us today. On behalf of our president and all of my colleagues, it is my privilege to welcome all of you here today. The few Charitable Trust is an independent nonpartisan nonpublic policy institution dedicated to serving the public. We are speaking today on the topic of immigration in that vein. Our immigration in the states to explorecreated this intersection of federal, state, and local immigration policies and practices. Panelists tonk my share their experiences on how this intersection of federal state and local policies and practices actually affect their communities. With that i will turn over this program. Going to focus on drivers licenses in these communities. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you. We dont see broad Immigration Reform be enacted in congress is in the horizon on the near term. States have been active in passing immigration laws. According to the National Conference of state legislatures, 171 laws were passed in 2014, across such policy areas as wide ranging as lawenforcement, health, and education. Immigration in the state project explored this dynamic. Pre it isacy not to take a position on any particular policy but to explore them across levels of government to assess the impacts of the state policy choices. Today focus is gaining attention in many statehouses across the country and was the subject of our most recent report. If those licenses have distinctive markings and text indicating they are not accepted for federal identification or for official purposes. The licenses if a righty of names, such as privileged cars or driver authorization cars. This map highlights the places where unauthorized immigrants may have obtained these licenses today. We have eight states and the. Istrict of columbia while the yellow two states, washington and new mexico, issued the same drivers license to everyone regardless of immigration status, delaware and hawaii, the two states of here both passed laws this year in 2014. To deepen our understanding of the issues states confront, we brought together panelists from three states, each with different roles and experiences. You have for their complete bios and their programs, so allow me to judys them they are sitting here now. Enemy to introduce them as they are sitting here now. Allow me to introduce them to sitting here now. Overseeing implementation of this new program is going to be one of the key tasks. Terry joins us from nevada. He has an extensive public career standing. Is thes to us today administrator of the Management Services and Program Division of the department of Motor Vehicles. She has worked in that capacity to implement the driver authorization card, which is been issued since january 2014. Governor sandoval appointed terry to be the interim director later this month. Third we have erica, who joins us from the golden state of california, where she is chief of staff to sponsor that key creates an alternative drivers license going into effect to just earlier this year. Finally we have my colleague who let our research team. I would like to start by turning over to michelle, the opportunity to share with you some findings of our report. Michelle good afternoon, thank you. We conducted research on all of the states currently issuing drivers license to unauthorized immigrants. We analyzed their laws and legislative reports. We spoke to other experts about their experiences implementing these laws. So that we could analyze the critical decision that they made and the diverse approaches they took. While we also look at who made those decisions, in some states the legislator put very specific instructions and the legislative language. We did not look at the factors who let the state to make the decision to issue i should issue licenses to unauthorized immigrants. Q q does not take a position. We do believe policymakers can learn from the experiences of another state. We identified four areas where states made critical policy decisions that allowed unauthorized immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. Issuing procedures and outreach and education. See howteresting to these four areas interact with one another. Im going to highlight those examples as well. It really affects every other step of implementation. Upfront planning is totes who really need estimate how many people will be eligible for their license, how many people will actually applied, and how often they need to renew their license. The keys totes are determining startup costs, such as technological upgrades. And costs associated with the administration. These estimates determine the revenues that the issuing agency can expect to collect from new customers. These are generally expected to planninghemselves, but is the key to make sure that actually happens. Obviously this environment, the states are making very important decisions and need to plan ahead. Estimates are going to very widely. In vermont, where unauthorized immigrants make up less than one states, they estimated 1500 would apply. These very different estimates affect the choices they made. They opened five new facilities to accommodate the subpopulation accommodate this population. We will see these estimates turned out to be low. States determined the to improves residency. Some states have applicants sign an affidavit saying they are ineligible for a Social Security number. In delaware we understand they will require fingerprints and background checks. The decision turned out to be key to implementation. Immigrants dont have the same instances legal immigrants have. Determining what documents unauthorized immigrants actually have and how reliable these documents are. The number of applicants and by reliefssued directly to the people who can meet the requirements and produce the right documents. Takete estimate needs to into account the people that will actually be able to meet the eligibility requirements. Next we have issuance procedures. States make decisions about how and where and unauthorized immigrant can apply for, obtain, and renew their drive us licenses. Some states hired more staff and opened more offices. Some create appointment systems to regulate the flow of customers in a timely manner. Decisions are directly related to the amount of resources that a state has for these purposes. The estimates for needed resources needs to take things into account like staffing and facilities. To think about this when planning their systems. How many facilities and staff they will have available to serve this population . How many appointments they can actually accommodate. And is this enough to meet the demand . The number of apartment available mean states determine thisurse in the end affects the amount of revenues. We have outreach and education. To understand no program can be successful unless the target group knows how to access it. States used various tohod various methods replace these laws. The department of the the dmv in illinois they used mobile units to educate the community and make initial consultation on peoples documentation. The dmv makes Information Available through public libraries. One ton albee we found is they worked really closely with foreign consulates and with trusted Community Organizations to educate them about where and how to apply and what documents they need to show up to the dmv with. Stressed the importance of reaching out to immigrant communities to warn them about the potential of consumer fraud. We heard stories that unscrupulous individuals may try to charge these applicants for things that should be free, such as booking an appointment. You can see how outreach and education is related to the other areas of decisionmaking. An estimate of potential applicants wont be correct if the audience doesnt know about the program or is uncomfortable coming forward actually apply for a license. Public outreach can also make sure that people know about the licenses and actually apply. It is critical to know that the and comere ready to the dmv with all the proper documentation. They can pass those the first time i dont have to come back multiple times. We recently contacted all the states that began issuing days issuing these licenses. On how these licenses will be issued as of july 23, 2015. 800,000 alternative drivers licenses had been issued by these the places. It deftly correlated with the size of the unauthorized population. We want to know what are the factors that interlude the number of applicants and alternative licenses issued. We have already identified a couple of those. Availability,t applicants ability to meet the eligibility requirements and education being effective. It affects how long it takes for one applicant to go through the process of getting a drivers license. There are other anticipated events that could affect other here vermont is a real outlier. This state had estimated 1500 people would be eligible for a drivers license. They had issued nearly 50,000 alternative licenses. We spoke to the director of the vermont dmv. The vermont drivers privilege who was available to anyone is an undocumented immigrant. Citizens and. S. Illegal immigrants have decided to receive this alternative though they are eligible for the standard compliant license. Others didnt have the documentation they needed. They were able to meet the requirements for the christmas card. We heard fraud may have been an issue. A dmv administrator noted there were some evidence of advertisement in some to get aate newspapers vermont driver privilege party. A number of alternative licenses have most likely most likely gone to state residents. As a result the number of licenses has exceeded the expectations. Finally we have looked at the existing literature on the impact of these drivers license laws on Public Safety and the economy. It is available now on our website. There are several challenges when try to ascertain the impact of an authorized impact. Perhaps most importantly, eight onlye 11 jurisdictions began issuing in 2013 or later. Passedugh time had together meaningful data. Literaturethe between licensing unauthorized immigrants and insurance cover rates, accident rates, and , which isemployment related to immigration tax contributions and spending. While there is some literature about unlicensed drivers being very littlehere is specific information about an unauthorized immigrant and access. This points to a need for more research. Aboutomplete information the fact that allows unauthorized immigrant to get drivers licenses and perform a costbenefit analysis of their proposed legislation, and it would allow state policy makers make more informed decisions. We hope information offers the to our state policymakers who are currently making decisions about issuing licenses and how to in and how to design and implement those laws. Thank you. Thank you very much, michelle. I have panelists coming up on stage. We are going to take this conversation to the practical realities. We are not going to have each panelist to a presentation. Im going to facilitate a discussion and ask a couple of questions i think is going to tease out some approaches. We are quite a star with a topic we have not covered yet. Using your perks coming from the could youe branch, take us inside the legislative debate, highlighting areas where there may have been disagreement in your build moving forward in your bill moving forward. Erika thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and particularly to share some perspective from california. To your question, i kept looking at the fact sheet. The conversation of drivers licenses has been long. Approved the back in 2003. It was not only in effect it was available for three months. 4s the conversation and political debate has been very long. It was never a question about who is going to drive. We knew there were undocumented individuals driving in our state. The question is how do we integrate and what is the responsibility to ensure we are with themoving forward value of many of our resentatives have wrong on the values many of our representatives have run on. Had Large Populations they wanted to provide relief for that population. One of the debates was marking many legislators, who at the , he was ae debate chairman of the latino caucus, representing over 25 members of the legislature in each house. Clearly the latino caucus wanted to provide relief for the population with very little penalty. The individual marking was huge. For the real id compliance, if a state was going to succeed with issuing and issuing an alternative drivers license, there has to be a distinguishing mark. For our legislature, it was very important that marking not exists. There are many members of the legislature doing the caucus that did not want to marking. Felt it was going to be very difficult for people to come out and take advantage of the opportunity. Eventually that proved to be an area that could make or break the legislature and the legislation. Members and other that they wanted to proceed with a legislative solution. That is the debate that then moves the bill forward. Turning to delaware but in the state of free of limitation, delaware took a unique approach. The legislature worked with communities and put together a task force of Community Members wide ranging to help them shape the legislative process. You were a participant of that task force. Can you tell us about that experience. Like california this is something we have been considering for a long time. Once it really started to take great we have a relationship with our legislature. We were able to do a lot of preplanning before a bill is drafted. In this case we said before we do this, why do we bring together all the stakeholders and find out what is going on and the potential sponsors of the bill. Said, Senate Resolution to a foreign task force. We involved on the stakeholders we could possibly think of. We have lawenforcement theesentation, members of hispanic community. The chair of the Hispanic Commission. Legislators representing the senate and the house. Months justmer debating this topic of whether delaware should enter into the business of offering a privilege card to undocumented immigrants. The need was clear. These folks are driving on our roads. Highway safety publications by not having them properly credentialed. The desire to necessarily do that is what we were debating and how people are going about doing that. Brought an external stakeholders to give us presentations. We ask the coalition of secure drivers license to come in and present information on what our states are doing. A are also trying to get natural view of what is going on throughout the country regarding this topic. We took that information at the end of it decided to go forward with legislation and incorporating things we felt were very important in our state to make sure everybody that was involved is comfortable with this legislation. And some key components in trying to identify someone, we do require fingerprinting. We also required two years of tax returns. It was a great process and one to getwould recommend that stakeholder fine. It helped us put forward a bill that was going to benefit everyone. How did you manage participation and did you include members of that task thoughto may not have themselves part of this issue. That was one area where my understanding was there was some initial opposition, because we are in the business of identifying people and how you do that if there arent any documents to identify. We made sure we had a pretty balanced approach. Maybe not straight opposition but concern. And then. Or it. Mostingerprinting was the debated topic. Maybe two or three meetings whether fingerprinting made any sense for our state. As was mentioned, dela