Ms. Craig good morning, everyone. How is everyone doing . Good. First of all, i would like to say happy st. Patricks day. Were happy to have so many of you are here bright and early in the morning. Thank you for pinchhitting for peter robinson, who was quite ill, couldnt travel. And then the yoga and the jog this morning. There were people there and they did a great job. So good. In addition to welcoming you today, and after yesterdays packed program, and i know many of you took note of the fact that we took no breaks went straight through. Our intention is to the same today. We have a couple of changes. Kellyanne conway we are switching her time. She had a meeting at the white house. I asked her to change it because of her schedule, but they said no. [laughter] but our panel decided to switch the time to bright and early, and i appreciate that. There will be a couple of other things during the day where we could possibly have a break, with people coming later in the day who have a day job, which is the reason why they are on our panel, but we will try to accommodate them as best we can. Orthere may be a break here there with maybe five or 10 minutes. Otherwise, we will run right through the schedule that you have. Enjoy. Thank you. Mr. Salam thanks very much, lindsay. My name is reihan salam and at the National Review i am an executive editor institute. We are here today to discuss immigration policy. Immigration policy has emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the country at large but also as one of the most contentious issues on the political right. Today by three very i am joined distinguished panelists. Theave kristie de pena of Immigration Policy Council at the niskanen center. My krikorian, executive director of the center for Immigration Studies and heather macdonald, the thomas smith fellow at the manhattan institute. Thanks for joining us, guys. So our goal for this panel today is to really clarify some of the disagreements within the fight on immration a also to look ahead to potential federal immigration legislation, what it might look like, what it ought to look like. So first, ill just start i talking at the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. I would say for the last 20 to 30 years or so, this has been considered one of the most important, crucial distinctions in immigration policy. It has also been a big source of the controversy around comprehensive Immigration Reform efforts. Mark, youve argued the distinction between legal and illegal immigration is not necessarily the most important immigration policy question. Mr. Krikorian obviously, it matters significantly that Illegal Immigrants are illegal. So its not that theres no difference. Its just that almost all the concerns other than the rule of law and kind of basic order issues that we talk about with regard to illegal immigration also apply to legal immigration. There is Something Like three times as many legal immigrants as they are illegal aliens. Issues with regard to assimilation, with regard to public services, impact on education, all that stuff, theres really not that much difference. If you have an illegal immigrant if you have a legal immigrant let me put it this way. If you have a legal immigrant with only an eighth grade education and give them a green card, he still will not have an education. Its not like in the wizard of oz where you give the scacrow the diploma and he starts quoting pythagoras. So we have focused way too much, in my opinion, on the illegal, the illegality. It is not that it is unimportant, it is just that it is an easy way for lot of politicians, and frankly a lot of people, to avoid thinking about the broader issues of immigration and focus just on the illegality. Mr. Salam kristie, the gang of eight bill looked as though it was inevitably going to pass. There was an enormous amount of confidence. People have been working on immigration from under the Bush Administration and a similar package was being pushed in the obama years as well. What went wrong . Pena i think the part of what went wrong is that while there were a fair number of people within the middle of both parties willing to talk about reforms and changes in the bill, up being sort of a bandaid. It really was not a true solution to a lot of the problems we have in immigration. And this time around, ideally, a good reform bill, or a package of bills, which is much more likely to happen, is going to have the support of not only the middle portions of each political party, but it will also have the support of President Trump as well. And thats going to make a big difference. Thats krikorian i dont disagree but i think theres an underlying problem that explains why both bushs amnesty push failed as06 and 2007 those of the gang of eight, and that is a basic trust gap, that people dont come nobody believes the promises that if we legalize Illegal Immigrants today we will enforce the tomorrow. Popby, what he says im glad you pay tuesday for a hamburger today, and he gets the hamburger and never pays. Thats what happened in 1986, where we had amnesty in exchange for promises of enforcement that were not kept. So this is essentially based on the same idea. Amnesty now in addition to increasing immigration. And we promise to enforce the law down the road. Nobody believes that. Mr. Salam there some early indications that over the short tenure of President Trump, weve seen a marked decrease in the number of unauthorized entries in the United States. Are there any lessons we can take away from that . Ms. Mac donald yes. Law enforcement works. The rule of law matters. You send signals for better or for worse you send a signal when youre not enforcing the law that we allow our immigration policy to be determined by people outside of the country in their decisions to come in. And when you announce that, in fact, you going to take the role the rule of law seriously people respond. , this is a message we learned in new york city with policing. That should be understood by every police chief today, that whether you decide to enforce the law or not, you do change behavior. And certainly one of the greatest travesties that we are experiencing today and that i applaud President Trump for focusing on so relentlessly is the sanctuary city movements. Where you have bigcity Police Chiefs, who should know better, betraying everything they understand about lawbreang in order to coddle the illega immigration lobby. And so they are saying it doesnt matter that an illegal alien has committed a lowlevel crime, we are going to prevent i. C. E. From even making an inquiry about that illegal alien criminal. That is a constitutional violation of the highest order, for the locals to defy federal authority this way, but it also undermines the public order, the sense of cities being in control, that bigcity Police Chiefs otherwise understand. Mr. Salam kristie, tell me about your sense about the recent change in priorities, visavis Immigration Enforcement. Do you have a similar view as heather or do you see things definitely . Ms. De pena slightly different way. Enforcement is a huge part of Immigration Reform. It absolutely has to be, but you also have to consider why people want to come to the United States and address those issues. We are constantly going to see people wanting to violate our sovereign borders to come here to work. If we can Better Change our guest Worker Programs and some of the other reasons that people try to violate our border sovereignty, we can focus more on collecting the criminals that are hiding in our cities, making sure that there are not drug traffickers running across the border. But that has to work handinhand. Mr. Salam mark, i do want you to respond but have another followup question for kristie. This is a little unrelated, but there is a group of mexican pharmacy government officials and lawmakers which has expressly talked about coordinating with unauthorized mexican migrants in the United States and encouraging them to essentially try to defy deportation orders and what have you, giving them various kinds of guidance, so as to help them work around the u. S. Immigration enforcement. I wonder if you believe these efforts aid the cause of advocates have increased illegal integration or do you think they underwritten it . Ms. De pena i think anything that violates the rule of law is a hindrance. Whether or not that law needs to be changed is a separate discussion, but we should not be advocating for anyone to violate the law as it stands. Orian i want to respond to her first point. In effect, and i am simple the fact is but theres no practical limit for the number of people who would want to come to the United States. Over time, there are hundreds of millions of people abroad who would move here if they could. And it is not just depended on labor market demand, because frankly, living in the streets in the United States beats living in a hut in much of the world. So my point here is we can never meet the demand for immigration to the United States simply by increasing the numbers and thereby eliminating illegal immigration. It just, it cant work that way. Were going to have to have limits, and well have to enforce the limit. Ms. De pena i completely agree. Will probably never meet the we need to have limits, and we will probably ner meet the demand of all the people want to enter the United States. 100 agreebut thatwhe lawmakers coming to make sure that the limits that we have in place makes sense for the United States and for humanitarian reasons abroad as well. And so that we set smart limits on these policies, so that we can set an amount of people to come in that makes sense, rather than coming up with these sort of arbitrary numbers that havent really serve any purpose in the past. That what might sense make sense for lowwage employers may not make sense for taxpayers . If you want to see the future , i invite you to go to my home state of california. It is on the vanguard of the radical demographic change that has occurred 60 what is virtually an open border policy that favors mass, low skilled immigration. Used to be the leader in education from k to 12. California and 60s, led the nation in the quality of high school graduates. Today, it resembles a seven backwater like mississippi, alabama or arkansas, with all due respect to those wonderful states, but they are not necearily at the top of the educational heat. Educational heep. A third of all california eighthgraders lack the most rudimentary math and reading skills. California spends endless amounts of redistribution of tax dollars to try and close the achievement gap between hispanic and white students, and it has not budged since 1990. Hispanics are massive users of Public Health care, Government Health care, and, accordingly, the biggest supporter they were the biggest support of obamacare. So, the usual discourse that you hear from, more the proimmigration lobby is that theres a benefit, and economic benefit, an economic benefit to all types of immigration. Failed to note the difference between high skilled and low skill and failed to take into account inevitably of the taxpayer cost of supporting efforts at the education level, we are creatg a second underclass. The incarceration rate of mexicanamericans jumps eightfold between the first and Second Generation to equal that of blacks. And it ignores the healthcare cost. So yes, there is a large welfare component to low skills immigration that is really taking into account. You mentioned earlier on documenting immigration. Generally, speaking my understanding is that you mention immigration is refugee immigration. I noticed a striking fact from migration policy institute, mpi observed, in fact, children are children of refugee immigrants are somewhat less likely to live below the poverty line that none refugee poverty line than nonrefugee immigrants. Yet in principle, nonrefugee immigrants are meant to be held to the standards that are supposed to become selfsufficient. What do you think about that question you think they merge some kind of imbalance between refugee and none refugee immigration . I think you have to consider that, the differences between refugees and every other immigrant category. Certainly these people are coming from areas where they may been in refugee camps with the previous decade pick you to consider that spirit you expecting too much much poor which is why i found it surprising that among more poor if not more so. Often i think some of the difference can be explained, because refugees often come over with their families. They have a strong sense of family. They are initially offered a lot of resettlement and assimilation services that are very beneficial to them, including english as a second language services. That often aids in their ability to kind of work into their have immediate access to safety nets whereas other for most visas. And then you often see once the children going to school they can aid in the Family Learning english, kind of navigating the u. S. Healthcare system which is very complex. They tend to do very well. They reenergize a lot of sense. We assume they are helpless. We assume they require humanitarian assistance. Yet, nonrefugee immigrants appear to be heavily reliant on the safety net. Not to get too much into the weeds here, but what theyre finding is the Adult Children of refugees are not the children of the refugees where getting now. Were getting now. They are the children of cubans, and russian. In other words, part of this is a function of where the refugees came from and a level of education when they got here. So, we looking look at the children of an earlier wave of refugees, and todays refugees are dramatically different in their human capital. I want to talk about what we know about safety net reliance for nonrefugee immigrants. There is a five year limit, yet most lawful immigrants in the country have been in the country for longer than five years. We look at the Census Survey that does the best job at ttinat use of welfare. What wfound was that among welfare understood broadly understood any means tested program, not Social Security which is not means tested but food stamps, medicaid, tanf, et cetera. What we found was that about half of all families headed by immigrants, legal or illegal, are using at least one welfare program. Basically, what it boils down to is the less skilled immigrants cannot earn enough to feed their own children in the United States. This is a pretty basic fact that has to be taken into account when making immigration policy decisions. As heather was talking about, what we are doing or what we have been doing after decades is advertising the benefits of low skilled immigration that restaurants and landscapers and other people use by keeping their wage costs down, then socializing the cost on everybody else. This is why the National Academy of sciences just last you did just just last year did this magister stood study on immigration to what they found was net immigration as a small positive effect on the economy, but that small positive effect as to important caveats. One is it comes from taking wealth from the poor and getting it to anybody else. Because the people who compete with immigrants are worse off. Everybody else is slightly better off, and yet the second point that that Small Economic benefit is totally wiped out by the extra social source spirit i extra social service. I have a question first for heather. There was for a very long time consensus among libertarian minded thinkers and now that is being challenged in lots of interesting use of ways but the consensus that large scaled less skilled immigration would be just fine if we did not have a safety net. Although, it occurs the recent debate over obamacare a program that is in fact, quite young thisandsaw been on the books are very short amount of time its a difficult to reverse this recent and quite modest extension of the social safety net. Do you believe thats plausible that were going to dismantle the larger social safety net in the United States in the near future . I dont i dont think that the aclu and others will go away in the future. So, they are going to be pressing the notion that everybody is entitled to government support. So, i dont think its likely. But even so, if we carry out that thought experiment and say that the importation of poverty, of multigenerational poverty that is occurring with mass low skilled immigration, is not met with government programs, im still not certain that its a net benefit, because you still have people who are not advancing. That are not necessarily adding to the nations ability to compete. Social capital matter. Culture matters. The usual trick is, when people are talking about more immigration, is to invoke sergei brin. Obviously, hes an immigrant that we like to say. Were phds in mathematics from russia. It was pretty predictable that he is going to be a major contributor to American Innovation and competitiveness. But the endless importation of people, as mark says, eighth grade or third grade education, and a culture that reflects their own countries is not necessarily, regardless of whether they are using welfare programs or not. It takes a different view from other libertarian think tanks on the verge of taking it. Tells a bit about that . I think first we need to talk about this idea that all those immigrants are coming to the United States and settling here permanently. With the right program, you can ensure that we are getting the low skilled guestworkers that we need, and they dont necessarily have to live in the United S