On the economics of Immigration Reform reform now. And this could not be a more timely coming together and discussion. I cannot say whether it was on the front page or not, but the wall street journal ran aa major story on the thorny economics of ilLegal Immigration. That story says, few issues in the president ial campaign are more explosive than whether and how much to crackdown on ilLegal Immigration, which some in particular blame for americas economic woes. And so this is a timely issue not only because of the campaigns but because it has been a timely issue for too many years. As many of us struggle to bring about reform of our very broken immigration system, and we will hear about the economics of Immigration Reform. It is a timeless story. As Bruce Springsteen writes about the marriott throngs who have sought to make their home in this american land, he writes, the nichols, the southeast, the blacks, argentines, germans and jews came across the water thousand miles home with nothing in their bellies but the fires down below. They died building the railroads. They died in the field and factories being scattered in the wind. They died to get your hundred years ago and are still dying now, the hands of both the country were always trying to keep out. Now, as randy noted in his introductory remarks earlier , director of ajc houston, committed to fair and generous treatment of immigrants as a jewish value. As the lyrics of the song note, this is not only about humane treatment that is the case immigrants 100 years ago and today of the hands that fill this country. Todaycountry. Today we will talk about how important it is for the wellbeing of this country from our economy, how important immigrants have been. So i will invite in a moment up to join us the president of the Perryman Group to deliver a keynote address on this issue. The gentleman to people down for me to my right. And the mere going to have some brief remarks by our respondents beginning of my far right with jesus romero, director of Immigration Service for the Christian Life commission of the baptist General Convention of texas. That is a mouthful. But we will then here from the president of four us command finally, to my immediate right here from steve murdock, director of the hobby center for the study of texas and rice university. Lets begin. Thank you. Try to waive my way to the podium. In fact, i was talking to her house legislative caucus and found out they had a 28inch podium. I was away from the steps. I decided i would jump up there and discovered i had a 26inch vertical leap. And i was already back. I have to be honest with you. It is great to be here with you. I appreciate you being here. I will not say how long. Steve murdock and taught and jesus. I appreciate everyone who put this together. It is a very important issue before i do talk about it, one more littlelittle thing about myself because you did not say enough about me. I just recently got a little award i am proud of. A thousand people, and a distinguished alumni award. Love that. It is all right. I had not been there a while my wife asked me what it was like. I told her the wonderful things about it. Over the challenges . It was a small town. It is a drivers education and Sex Education in the same car. And then she said, she thought about that a minute. You dont drive very well either. Just to give you an idea of how much respect i get home. You are going to hear and have been hearing a lot about this issue in the coming months. We are in an election cycle. We cannot avoid it. It will be with us for months, and you are hearing a lot of things said, some very compassionate, some very cool, some in between, but it will be talked about a lot, unafraid much of it will shed more heat than light on the issue. And so what im trying to do and have done throughout our entire careers is called unlikely see them. The numbers are what they are, and that is the bottom line. Im going to start with one very simple number. A few years ago we did a 50 state study. Every state had the same general direction of impact, but this is a startling number. All we hear all the time, these folks are taking jobs away from americans. Let me give you a simple statistic. There are twice as many undocumented workers in the state of texas today as there are employed people in the state of texas today. Let that sink in for a 2nd twice as many people want to work today on documented in the state of texas asis people who are on the unemployment rolls in the state of texas. Now, never mind a lot of those folks are employed for all kinds of reasons, dont have the physical skills to do jobs, dont have the training, construction trades, lets put that aside. Lets pretend for the moment you could swap them out one for one. Lets say that she could. You would suddenly have a gap ofa gap of about 600,000 workers in the state of texas in one day. How would you go about filling that gap . And the answer is you would not. And it would create a difficult and disruptive situation, and that is the basic economics of the situation. Markets have always had remarkable ability to find ways to get things done. And the reason we have a lot more undocumented workers today than 30 years ago is simple. The baby boomers got old. So we had shortages of workers, and we did all kinds of things to fill the shortage, encourage more folks, more immigrants to come in conflict daycare and childcare and parent care in the workplace to keep people working. We started job sharing, letting people work from home, started using more and more technology to take the place of workers are start encouraging retired people to come back to the workforce. We did all of those things because the market so we have to find more folks to work. And we started having more undocumented workers, and you can track the numbers. You canthe contract numbers, and it fluctuates with the economy. During good times you have more and during other times you have less because it is a labor force, and that is the response you get. Answer given that we ask these questions, what is the Economic Impact . We did numbers on that contract numbers of the folks working and then the multiplier effects, and they are both very big numbers. If you dont like multipliers we are looking at about 10 percent of the texas economy. If you like multipliers, we are looking at about 20 percent. They are looking at somewhere between 1. 2 and 3 million jobs, looking at somewhere between almost 150,000,000,300,000,000,000 and gross state product in a state that generates 1. 4 or 1. 5 trillion. And those are very, very big numbers, very significant, and it, and it indicates how important it is. The other thing you hear, and i call these things like the numbers come out. The other thing that youhere is, these folks are such a drain on the Public Service system, such a drain. Here is the reality. The people measure that and come up with those numbers command you see it all the time, we forget is when a person works, the tax revenue they generate is not just the tax revenue that they pay. When a person works by definition they are working for somebody else and producing something. And the fact that they produce that generates additional tax dollars, and im not talking about multipliers but the mere fact that that work was done that comes directly as a result of those votes being here. You recognize taxes are paid for which no benefits are drawn command we tried to measure this and measure it every way to be as conservative as we could. And we included because i know it is a controversial issue, if you have undocumented parents and they have an american citizen child comeau we included a child. They are all in on the impacts here trying to measure this. The federal government makes about 20 billion a year off of these folks all considered. The state of texas government makes about 11 billion a year. And even local government make almost a billion, about 800 million. That would surprise me a little bit. That one surprised me a little bit. High valueadded industries were folks are working command it made the difference. That is not mean every government is a winner. There are some sectors right now that come up behind in the system. And that is because if you look at local government, most of the revenue they generate is sales tax. Most sales tax goes to cities. The services that they consume are typically Healthcare Services and Education Services provided by School Districts and counties that rely on property taxes, and so consequently the carve up of the local money does not always match the need. There are local governments going through strains and difficulties in the system. When you have a surplus there is a simple way to fix that. It is not hard at all. If it was not for that pesky thing called politics. They would not be hard at all to solve the problem, but the bottom line is, this is a vital part of our economy. And i am leaving politics out of it, the human issues. This is a vital part of our economy. We do not have a way to replace this workforce. Whether youre a conservative, liberal, compassionate, and a pure dollars and since numbers way we need to have policies that make sense in this regard. And when you look at it that way, it becomes simple. If you create policies that make it harder the Economic Cost of the higher. If you create policies that make it more efficient where these workers can be here in a way that is not the cruel when they sometimes have to get here now, if you make it a more rational process to get here and work and to be contributors to the economy, you make the system more efficient. And economists often look at things whether it is efficiency reducing or efficiency enhancing. A lot of what we do today is efficiency reducing. A lot of what is being proposed right now is really efficiency reducing. Because it could literally, and a big report through the numbers, there are so many different scenarios, we did one scenario, and it was not shut everything down immediately. We did one where we made it a lot more difficult and took amalgamations and reports. As you can imagine, the cost of the state becomes hundreds of thousands of jobs for me to when you give time for the market to adjust. On the other hand, if you make the process more efficient where people can come and go as they wish and as is needed because what you find is it is not that they just like to be away for their families and be here. They are here with their jobs. It is very much a case of Economic Opportunity and economic need that drives them, and it is a very, very important contribution. The worker span different industries. We had aa number of them in the oil and gas tank industry. But a large percentage of them are agricultural workers, workers in the Hospitality Industry and workers in construction. Think if you had an economy where you could not grow, build or go anywhere. Think about that for a minute. He could not grow anything, build anything camargo anywhere because that is what we are looking at. It is a vital cog in the economy that we need to preserve and protect. Protect. Protect. And put need to make the system work more efficiently. If we can do that we achieve wonderful goals. We achieve a lot of goals foreign equity and compassion perspective, a lot of important goals, but i was not asked to talk about those. I was asked to talk about what happens in the economy. We allow this great economic engine commanded is a great economic engine the fact that we can go through aa major oil bust and continue to grow is adequate testimony. A great economic engine driven by technology, minerals, healthcare, many, many things, wonderfully Diverse Economic engine. There are some things that we must do. We must invest in education, invest in the safety net, invest in infrastructure, and have a workforce that can meet our needs. If you look at the landscape right now, this is a vital, absolutely critical piece of it. If we do not preserve and help to improve that are going to pay economic consequences in texas. Thank you very much. [applause] first of all, as was noted, all of our speakers have very distinguished resumes and bios. You will find that in the packet in front of you. Second, at the end of the remarks, theyre may be a couple of questions to ask, but then we will turn to all of you. It should be cards on the table. Then we will read some questions out. Finally, in a literal change of direction, we will start with doctor murdock and ask you to proceed with your remarks and then go down the line. Thank you. Thank you. This gives me more protection. [laughter] am glad to be here. Very nice things are being said about me here. I am reminded of the talk i was giving a small town in texas. The gentleman who have been giving the job of introducing me got ill at the last moment. You know, done a lot of things. I dont think he had seen the word demographer before. The finally he said, well, i guess it is best just to think of him as a rural demagoguery. [laughter] i will try not to be today. I do want to start off with some basic facts. I think it is important about immigration. And undocumented immigration. Fortyseven immigrants of all forms, illegal, documented, undocumented in the United States. We know from estimates done by the best work in this area. 1. 61. 9. And when i heard these figures i often get people a rush of saying those are wrong. There 30 or 40 million in the United States. 3 million if there is a Single Person in texas. He is a demographer trained at the university of texas, the key person for the Pew Hispanic Center he does the estimates on undocumented immigration. And i said to him, you know, how do you know that there are 30 or 40 million of these people . And he said, well, there is one thing you cannot hide. And that is dying. And if there are literally 30 or 40 million of these people, they are the healthiest of the people who have ever walked the face of the earth because they died at a level of 11 to 13 million as you look across the country. I think one of the things that is important to understand are graphically is the fact, and we talked about this with labor force. When you start looking at populations, one of the things you see is that those in here that look like me that are not hispanic are disappearing. We are literally dying out. Now, let me tell you why i say that. If you look at the national figures, for example, and you look at the last census decade, for example, from 2000 to 2010 and you look at the children so that you see what is coming will you find is that the number of Nonhispanic White children declined by about 4 million. The number of hispanic children increased more than that. So if you just concentrate and hispanics are simply one of the immigrant groups, you can see how important these populations are to us simply maintaining a population. That is not to talk at all, pointing out something, not only are we dying out because we are not having enough kids, longterm, but we that look like were getting older and older so that if we look at immigration we need to see in that not only something that is impacting is now, but will impact us in the longterm and is something that if it does not occur america will demographically not be better. The other thing i think we need to look at we look at immigration and particularly as we look at the economic aspects, not only of their impact on our economy, but increasingly what happens to that proportion of the economy that they represent if they dont change the socioeconomics they go with the demographics. The reality of it is, and we have looked at this in a great deal of detail, the future of the United States, the future of texas is tied to its minority populations. And because minority populations are more likely to be every populations also to our immigrant populations, and the reality of it is thought i would like a texas the reality of it is, the future of both is tied to our minority and immigrant populations and how well they do is really how americans can do. [applause] you have given whole new meaning. Todd, please. I feel like i will go over here. Okay. Here me okay . My name is todd, president of an organization, and advocacy organization, about two and a half years old, and we were started by a bunch of leaders in the business and Tech Community who wanted to finish fix the broken immigration system. Comprehensive for commonsense immigration on foreign framework, fixed ilLegal Immigration system so it makes sense from this family and economy, sure the border, but with that we need a pathway to citizenship for the 11 and a half million and will be very differential. And these are all principles. Im going to talk a little bit about the high skilled space, because that is a space that we concentrate on. Before i do that, i think we are not going to talk about the politics, but i want to echo what has been said comeau one of the things we think is so important to get the truth out there and more on the issues that we wanted to is there are people who just have the feeling that they should have their own plaques. We run into questions about why dont we just secure the border 1st and get to this issue later. What of these people go to the back of the line, why dont they just illegal, fix the situation . And so as someone who spends the majority of his waking hours trying to get members of congress to be supportive on this issue, it is great to get to talk to people who are interested in passionate about this issue and you are working on this issue and who have been working on this issue longer than we have. So a high skilled immigration system, im going to do a fun experiment here. I left my phone over there. Reach in your pocket and put your phone up just for a 2nd. You should all take a picture of me. I look great. Now. [laughter] so everybody, okay. Now, if you are holding a phone that is not either running on a programming or designed by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant, immigrant, if you think you have that phone, keep it up. Otherwise put your phone down. Anybody . Okay. I feel pretty good that no one has like an old nokia from 2005. That is basically always figured out here. You are the exception as opposed to the rule. This is great. It has been 25 years s