Aurora:	[foreign language 00:00:01]. I am so happy that you are here with us this afternoon. I am Aurora [inaudible 00:00:08], I think that I know most of you. I teach Spanish and Latin American literature, Latin American Studies, here at the college. I also belong to a group called Solidarity with Immigrants at the college, as many of you here do, too, and so we are very, very happy to welcome my friend Rick Schwartz, whom I had not seen until a few hours ago for, I think, 29 years. 
Rick Swartz:	And, isn't she beautiful? She looks exactly the way she did 29 years ago.
Aurora:	[Right 00:00:48], Rick. And, so, we have been chatting outside about all sorts of things, we have remembered old names, we have remembered old friends, we have remembered very important incidents when bad legislation was about to be passed, and good legislation was very difficult to try to pass in Washington. So, I am absolutely delighted to bring a friend to the college, but he's not here because he is my friend, he's here because he's an expert on immigration policy, and, I think that the best person I could ever think of to explain to us what is happening with this new bill that has been introduced in the Senate.
	So, I have to tell you that Rick went to a college very much like Swarthmore. He has a BA from Amherst College, magna cum laude, he also received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 2975, and the University of Chicago is so proud of having him as a graduate that they gave him a first citizen recognition after he graduated, long after he graduated. 
	I first learned about Rick when he was working with refugees from Haiti. He was the lead lawyer, or one of the lead lawyers, in a major class action suit that obtained for them the name of refugee, the status of refugee, so that they could get the protections that refugees are supposed to get in the United States. To this day he remains involved in Haitian human rights, and that's very important for him. In 1982, Rick founded the National Immigration Forum in Washington DC, I was working at that time with the American Friend Service Committee, and the AFSC became part of this very important coalition, and it was there where I first saw Rick at work, at what he is the best at doing, which is making people who have apparently very, very different positions on issues be able to talk to each other.
	So, I became a very good friend of the person who represented zero population growth, and I represented the AFSC with positions that were totally antagonistic on immigration policy. Rick also represented the first Salvadoran, and the first South American asylee, in the United States, and those were precedent setting cases in court. I cannot tell you the tremendous importance of this work, and the very, very difficult work that it was. Later on, he left the forum in order to start Strategic Solutions, where he has been a broker for many process of discussing new legislation on a variety of issues, immigration, but also tax reform, electoral reform, and other issues that matter a great deal to all of us.
	But, what Rick does better than anyone is to analyze what is happening in Washington, the kinds of legislation that has been introduced in Capitol Hill, and to see which are the forces that are supporting the various pieces of that, usually very difficult compromise. And, this is what he's going to talk to us today. So, I cannot tell you how happy I am that you are here, and that Rick is here to talk to you. Rick likes to talk to the people he's talking to. Rick is an expert in dialogue, so you are going to be talking to him as well, and you should feel very comfortable and very free, as if you were in the smallest of your classrooms with the dearest of your professors, because he will be very interested in listening to what you have to say, and the questions that you will have about what he has to tell you. So, please welcome my very dear friend, Rick Schwartz.
Rick Swartz:	Thank you. Why aren't you guys outside enjoying the weather? Thanks a lot Swarthmore for showing up today, and your interest in this extraordinarily important human phenomena of migration. And, what I hope to do today is provide some insights, big picture, some history, and then hone in on the last 10 years of this debate setting the stage for the main part of our dialogue, which is what's going on now, what are the forces at work, what are the prospects for success, the risks of failure, more compromise, and all the tough choices that the country will be facing through its elected representatives.
	But first, I want to thank Aurora for inviting me, and for her gracious introduction, and for her gracious character, and for her dynamic, if gentle and quiet, way she has been, I'm sure she's extremely popular here, and I know and respect it, and I know that you're graduated, right, from the faculty, and a lot of the work that many of us have been involved in, in immigration over many years have benefited tremendously from Aurora's character and ideas, and insights, and guts. So, let's start with a thank you, Aurora.
	And, she knew she was taking a risk bringing me here, because I like to rock and roll, and have arguments, and engage, and so she suggested, and I'm going to give you a little quick outline about how I've organized my remarks. Let's talk. I'm not here to talk at you. I'm here to paint some pictures, and tell some stories, and try to provide a conceptual and political framework, but I'm also here to debate, and argue, and listen, and agree or disagree. So, I know nobody at Swarthmore's shy, so don't be shy, just speak up as we go along when you have something to say or something to ask, or something to declare, even. Okay, fair enough? I'll be happier if you guys are engaging, okay?
	So, here's the setup. I sometimes call myself a blacksmith of power. What I mean by that is that in many kinds of work, but this work in particular, I take an approach of galvanizing understanding, therefore blacksmith, galvanizing. What is going on? What's your understanding of the issues, the dynamics, the human stories behind them, power, interests, you have to have a galvanized understanding, come to trust it, you may change it, it may evolve with time, but if you're not asking the right questions, if you don't have a sense of what's happening that's presenting a political debate, you're probably going to be pretty ineffective, or get it wrong. It's like, you can't get a right answer unless you're asking the right question in the first place. So, galvanize understanding.
	That leads to galvanizing judgment. What are the judgements? What are the pros and cons when you're trying to stop legislation, move legislation, improve reality on the ground, in this case, for immigrants and refugees, and new Americans, as we call them. So, galvanize understanding, galvanize judgment, and then that leads to galvanizing action. You can't persuade a community, an organization, the country, the Congress, if you don't have a mindset that's roughly along those lines. People aren't going to act if they don't trust your judgment, and they're not going to trust your judgment if they don't think you've got a pretty solid understanding of the dynamics and the reality. So, just, whatever you end up doing in life, I have found it useful, galvanize understanding, galvanize judgment, and then galvanize action.
	I'm going to try to tell the story of immigration with those mindsets in mind. I'm going to do this in three sort of sections. Some big picture, big back row pictures, I'm not going to take too long on that. Has nothing to do with the United States necessarily, per se, it has to do with the phenomena of migration, and its role, the central role through human history all over the world. And then, I'm going to talk about, a bit, the American historical legacy on immigration. There's no country like American in the world where migration has been so essential to our character, our development, our energy, and now, on a global age, our connections to the rest of the world. Family to family, friend to friend. 
	When Aurora and I were first involved in this, there were no cell phones. There was no email. There was very little international media of any sort. People wrote letters to stay in touch with those they had left. 300 years ago, people wrote letters too, but it took weeks to travel, [inaudible 00:11:25] letter to travel by boat from the US back to the old country, primarily in Europe. It's pretty different today, isn't it? Your generation is in the middle of the information revolution, where there's instantaneous communication all over the world for even among the poorest of the poor.
	I'll give you one little fact that you probably know, there are over four billion people in the world today, four billion who have a cell phone. In Africa, cell phones have become a from of commercial transaction, where people are sending money, buying goods, with a cell phone. And, as this revolution continues, the world is getting smaller and smaller, communication's more and more immediate, and your generation, as you become leaders in your respective fields of interest, will be grappling with this phenomena of globalization, of which migration is a huge and essential element.
	So, some big picture, some US history, then the last 10 years of the debate in Washington, some snapshots, and stories, and anecdotes of how we got to today, choices made, failures, bad legislation being enacted, and then we'll hone in on the current debate, and I'll sketch what I think is going on, and I hope that in the course of each of these sections, you have a question, you have a comment, just state it. Do they have to raise hands? Is that something Swarthmore does, raise hands? Just speak up. 
	And, remember, bottom line, at the end of the day, doesn't matter what I say at the end of the day, it matters, but it's not the heart of matter what happens in Washington. What matters is what happens on the ground, in communities, in the neighborhoods, in the family. So, when I think about legislation, and these big ideas and debates, I encourage people, do your analysis, galvanize your understanding and your judgment by thinking backwards. Think from the end game consequences on the ground. Imagine what policies would do in those neighborhoods, to those families, to their employers, and then work and think backwards from the ground back. That's the way you evaluate and engage in rigorous critical thinking bout debates at the national level, which can be very abstract, and can be very artificial and very political, but you gotta imagine, what's going to happen on the ground if a law like this passes, and think backwards. Often, that's the best way to move forward.
	So, some of the big picture concepts. Three thoughts, biology ... This is not a biology class, but biology is essential to understanding migration. Self interest rightly understood, that comes from Alexis de Tocqueville, in his fabulous two volume, Democracy in America. We wrote four pages that I use all the time. How Americans combat individualism through the principle of self interest rightly understood, and what de Tocqueville was observing, unlike Europe where virtue was understood as an end unto itself as a high quality, often religiously encouraged, de Tocqueville said in America, these folks understand that virtue is practical, it's often in their self interest to help the other person, and there was a culture, he discerned, barn burns down, in some outlet in the Kentucky, in 1834 when he was traveling around, a whole community came together to rebuild that neighbor's barn.
	Not just because it was an act of generosity or charity, it was in their self interest, because they were creating a culture, that if they were the unlucky one whose barn burned down next, the community would rally to help them rebuild their barn. Think of immigration like that. Immigration's not simply an act of charity, it's in our self interest. Self interest rightly understood.
	The challenge and perversity of tribalism. Challenge and perversity of tribalism and I'll come back to that in a minute. So, on the [Bahaji 00:16:49] theme, just think of it. Life on land involved migration from the seas. I just read a New York Times, the first fish who had fins that became legs over time, over millions if not hundreds of millions of years, but it was a migration from sea to land. Out of Africa, the human race, migration out of Africa. Think how long ago that was, how fundamental it was, how biological it was, seeking to survive, to find more and greater opportunity. It's a primordial human biological, not just human biological, phenomena and force, it's one of the centers of gravity in understanding the immigration debate.
	And then, of course, we have migration from nation to nation. Throughout human history, once nation states emerged, and especially from other lands to ours. Self interest rightly understood is like the golden rule, in effect, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, it's a very basic principle. Japan, and China, and Europe ... You don't think Japan? China, you'd say, "What are you talking about?" They face a demographic challenge of enormity because of their aging populations, their declining birth rates, or one child policies, and absent migration, they're going to be in trouble in the future. 
	The United States, if we can maintain, and sustain, and expand our understanding of our own self interest as it comes to migration, we will continue to have a growing population, a more diverse population, a population more connected to the rest of the world, than any other country on earth, but if we cut immigration off, nobody's talking about that right now, but there's certainly a strain of thought in the country, "Cut it off, shut it down," we become weaker, we have fewer people, all the problems of social security and entitlement become more intense and harder to resolve.
	So, demography is destiny, is an old phrase, and migration's part of that phenomena, and how we define ourselves as a country. The perversity of tribalism. Well, fear of the stranger, think through human history, fear of the stranger has been fertile ground for demagoguery and hatred, the roots of fascism, in the more modern age. Fear of the stranger, the stranger as the other. Think about that as of today. No human being is illegal. Human beings, and yet, the anti-immigration movement, not just today, throughout our history, Ben Franklin was fearful of the Germans coming in to Pennsylvania, or the Huns, because of their language, they wouldn't acculturate, they wouldn't assimilate. He said, "This migration thing, of certain types of tribes, may not be good for us." 
	The know nothing party, for those of you who are students of history, was an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-black political movement that became a party that Abraham Lincoln dismissed as un-American, but it was real, and it was there. The Ku Klux Klan in its early history was not just against blacks, wasn't just a mob action of lynchings of African Americans. They were against Catholics, they were against Italians, they were against others, or the others, who were not like them. Keep it in mind, there are neo-fascist parties in Europe today. The anti-immigration movement tried to take over the reform party that Ross Perot founded.
	There are candidates running on explicit anti-immigration, fear the stranger platforms. Again, fertile ground for demagoguery, and it's dangerous, we have to fight it. And, in a perverse way, you're against the newcomer, person of color, the gay or lesbian, the other, and you want them to become like you. But, when you discriminate against them, you turn them inward. Their self identity becomes less one of the whole, and more of the group or the tribe of which they feel most identified, because it's natural to recoil. It's natural to turn inward when you're being attacked by outsiders because you are an other.
	So, it has a perverse consequence. It doesn't promote community, it intensifies fear and prejudice, and a sense of isolation among those who are the targets. There's a young man up in Boston who knows exactly what the story is. They were well acculturated Americans, but they felt, apparently, from early news accounts, isolated, as strangers, and as strangers, rooted in their religion and homeland, and that sense of alienation. I don't know exactly what the story is, maybe we'll never know, but just that recent event and the self descriptions helps us understand that if you want to build a more coherent, more inclusive, more of a communal understanding in a society, welcome the stranger. Treat them as Leviticus taught us, as your family. 
	So, those are some big picture dynamics and considerations, and let me stop there for a minute, because I think those themes flow right into the history of the debate over immigration policy and what's going on today. Any questions, comments? Pushback? Shaking of heads, that makes no sense. Makes some sense? Just as a frame. You gotta start at sort of the underbelly of trying to galvanize understanding, okay? And, this kinda [thicken 00:24:06] ... Now, I know I went to a second rate school at Amherst, but I learned some things there in the late '60s and early '70s, in that time of turmoil, as well as, intellectually, it helps to inform how I go about thinking and acting as an activist. 
	So far so good? How we doing on time, I'm okay?
Aurora:	[inaudible 00:24:34].
Rick Swartz:	Well, that's because you had such a long introduction, Aurora.
	So I've gotta go a little bit faster on the history. Immigrants are strivers, by definition. You don't pick up and leave your homeland unless you've got guts, determination, you're willing to overcome fear, you're leaving your family behind, and whether you're an undocumented 16 year old, or my great grandfather who came here at 14 as a coal miner in the fields of western Pennsylvania, you gotta have guts. So, by self selection, we're getting many of the best people, many of the most determined people from other parts of the world. It's in our self interest. You have to be special to be a migrant, you have to have guts.
	Power and greed, exploitation, whether the most vicious and violent of all, slavery, forced migration, okay? So, too, power and greed, throughout our history. The coal mining corporations and executives 100 years ago, they worked these people to the bone, the exploited them. They took advantage that they had no organized power. But, there was a response. It was called the union movement, and a lot of the early union organizing on behalf of workers and workers' rights was just down the road, Pittsburgh, West Virginia.
	My great grandfather [woulda 00:26:25] came here at 14 as a coal miner, he had 5,000 people at his funeral, because he became a labor leader, organizing those early immigrants, and I know I got some of his blood in my bones because his story has helped me find my course in life. That story can be told millions of times in one way or another. Fighting back, the power and greed are real, and they're real today in the current debate, whether it's farm workers or the exploitation of the undocumented who live day by day in fear, and when you're living in fear and you're trying to protect your family, you don't know if you're going to get picked up that day, and your kids, and sent to detention, and your kids are going to come home and there's no parent.
	You're more readily exploited, you're less likely to complain about working conditions or wages, you're afraid to take your kid for healthcare, because you're afraid of being arrested, and that leads to abuse and exploitation. Immigrants help us regain and find, again and again, our sense of justice, when they organize and remind the rest of us what our history, in this respect, has been like. Immigrants have played key roles in all of our major wars, in all of our major wars. I'm not going to dwell on this, but Irish immigrants provided a backbone of the Union forces during the Civil War. Regiments, just like they were regiments, eventually, under Lincoln's direction, of slaves that had been freed, or had escaped, joining Union forces, or non-slave African Americans in New England, forging their own regiments to fight for the Union, and to fight to end slavery.
	So, in all sorts of ways, and I'll just use one, there's Vietnam where the Italians and the Jews comprised the backbones of our armies in the Second World War. Immigrants have defended the country, the country that they came to and adopted. Those experiences changed the perception of many white Americans towards African Americans in the Civil War, toward the new immigrants, at the turn of the century, in the '30s, essential roles, people forget that. Today's all volunteer army. What are the demographics? Look at the names. Gonzales, Lin, meaning Lin, Asian, from China. There are a lot of Smiths and Browns in the all volunteer army. There are a lot of immigrants and the children of immigrants who are defending the country today. Very important that the public at large understand that, that they don't.
	We've had major eras, and I'm just going to, just not even talk about them, just note them. If you want to know more, read more. Check it out, do your own investigations. 1880's, Chinese exclusion. Fear that the Chinese coming in to build the railroads were taking jobs from Americans, have you heard that argument before? 1880, Congress passed a law, thank you for building the railroads, no more Chinese. Chinese Exclusion Acts. 1924, National Origins, not repealed until 1965. It was a system of determining who's eligible for a visa to come to the United States based upon historical patterns, which meant white folks. Very few non whites under National Origins. It was explicit, deliberately, admittedly, racist. That was the [inaudible 00:30:42] of the times after the First World War.
	Crackdowns on dissidents and radicals, and Jews, partly because they're the stranger. They have strange ideas, they're dangerous. Cautified, 1924, in our immigration policies. 1965 under the leadership of Senator Ted Kennedy, remember President John Kennedy wrote a book called, a Nation of Immigrants, as one of his springboards to the presidency, and the democratic party focused more on organizing immigrants as their demography and the numbers grew, and it was second and third generations, and so we changed the system, as part of the civil rights revolution, so that immigration was based primarily on family ties.
	Refugee and asylum policies were, to some extent, initiated for the first time, and our immigration laws began to move into the more modern era with a less of an exclusionary bias or premise, by overturning the ideas that formed the 1924 National Origins Act. 1980, we passed the Refugee Act, was very important, I won't go into detail. Committed the United States to not deport persons who could establish a well founded fear of persecution. Another [inaudible 00:32:15], the Haitians that Aurora referenced to where I really began my career. Rubber stamped denials under the Jimmy Carter administration. 10,000 Haitian asylum applications, each single one of them denied. They were from Haiti, but [if they were 00:32:30] from Cuba, a communist country, you're automatically get a green card if you get to the United States, ideological, as well as racial discrimination.
	Well, we reversed that through a combination of litigation, political work, administrative advocacy, media work, and most important, and I was in the middle of it, the refugees themselves became their best advocates. The lawyers played a very important role, but when we had television opportunities, or we did marches, or we had Congressional testimony, a judgment was made ... Yeah, I testified a fair amount in Congress, but I wanted [Jean-Juste 00:33:16], the leader of the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami front and center so that a human face was identified with these black people from Haiti who were being shunned and pushed back, but justice prevailed. Still a mess in Haiti, but it was essential to changing the ideological discrimination that informed much of our refugee policy.
	The first Salvadoran granted asylum in the US, the first South African granted asylum in the United States, these were precedent cases because these were not people fleeing communism. They fled apartheid and civil war, and it began to open more doors for more people based on the merits that they fear and faced a well founded danger of persecution if returned. 1986, we enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It legalized about 2.7 million people out of maybe five, give or take, that were here. The cutoff date was 1982, so you had to have been in the country for at least four years plus to qualify, so that left out some recent arrivals. We won that vote in Congress, and particularly in the House of Representatives on the concept of a generalized legalization program by seven votes on the House floor. We actually won by 12, had seven votes flipped and gone the other way, the whole concept would've been defeated. None of these people would've gotten status.
	It just shows you how, by the skin of our teeth, were we, the [Pro Immigrant 00:35:13] Coalition, able to achieve freedom and security for close to three million people, but it was a dog fight, and we got lucky, and luck sometimes has something to do with outcomes. But, you're more likely to get lucky if you've got a solid understanding and you're making rigorous judgements, and you're organizing actions that actually inspire people to trust, this is the right thing to do, and I'm going to join the movement, join the effort, seven votes made the difference for close to three million people. 
	The debate that ended up in the '86 law started really in '79 with a select commission of immigration refugee policy. Reagan came into office, this immigration forum hadn't been founded yet, but we were beginning to organize and mobilize, and we worked with the Reagan transition team. We're a bunch of lefties, but we were bringing to the table immigrants and refugees, and labor, and churches, and business, because broad base, many people disagreed in our coalition, but they had a common understanding that immigration done right is a good thing, for them, as interests, for the country as a whole, and we worked to try to find common ground to mobilize consensus so that we could become more of a force.
	But, they started with a very big, huge, comprehensive bill, just like the bills from '06 and '07, and the bill today, and we killed it. From '81 till '85, small band of us, didn't have much money, didn't have much power, had a lot of energy, and empowerment, and friends in key places in the Congress. The main reason we could kill it, because it had a bunch of bad stuff. It slashed family visas, it would've established a national identification card, it restricted significantly access to asylum, due process rights of non-citizens, but the fact that it was so big and covered so many issues, meant it was full of conflict, and other committees had jurisdiction.
	So, we created delays and conflicts by working with certain allies to have this big immigration bill not go to the judiciary committee alone, primary committee of jurisdiction, but to Ways and Means, because there were some tax and benefit implications to it, to Education and Labor, because they had a slice of jurisdiction on it, and about six other committees, and that became a strategy and a tactic to defeat. And, you were not prepared to have bottom line and say, maybe this law that was introduced in '82 or '84, yeah, it would've legalized some people, but the terms were rigorous. Many people wouldn't qualify. That was a good thing, conceptually, but we didn't think it was going to work, and the price was a bunch of garbage.
	So, an understanding had to be emerged on the substance, and judgements had to be made, we can just take the bad in order to get a slice of the good, or do we say no? We said no, and were effective, and then over the course of the next several years, the bill got smaller and smaller, and better and better, and all the bad stuff, not all of it, most of the bad stuff, was dropped to the wayside, because we had demonstrated the power to kill, the power to say no. And, we had a friend in Peter Rodino, then the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who worked very closely with us, because he fundamentally agreed, and he played his own games behind the scene to help us, as did others, stop something big and bad in order to move towards something smaller and better, and I'm going to come back to that when we talk about comprehensive immigration reform. It's one of the great dangers I see. We may be repeating the mistakes that our enemies made 35 years ago, by trying to do everything in one big bill. 
Audience:	[inaudible 00:39:48].
Rick Swartz:	Hmm?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:39:52].
Rick Swartz:	Was a Congressman from New Jersey ... I know none of you were born during Watergate, but you've heard of Watergate, and the Nixon impeachment. Rodino was Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and he presided over the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and that was his sort of national rise to fame. Big believer in immigration, strong labor guy. We didn't agree on everything. He was a strong supporter with labor encouragement, of employer sanctions, making it illegal to knowingly hire an undocumented worker. Aurora and Friend Service Committee, and MALDEF, most of us thought, "Bad idea, won't work," we were being told, "Well, it's cutting off employment, it's the key to cutting off immigration. We're going to target the employers," but the Reagan administration agreed with us.
	Okay? There's an anecdote about Ronald Regan, when the idea of a national ID card came up, and I think this has been reported in some history books, and Reagan's looking at his advisors, and he shakes his head, "No, why don't we just tattoo their babies if we need to have identifiers?" Killed the idea, in the Reagan administration, which enabled us to kill it in Congress. Without that strange bed fellow, left right, coalition working coalition, we might've lost that, and it's coming right back at you now in 2013. Same issues, same debates, 35 years later. 
	Now, in 1990, there was an effort to slash legal visas by 40%, passed the Senate twice. Slash legal immigration. Build a left right coalition with Wall Street, with growth Jack Kemp, growth Republicans, supply siders who believed immigration's a source of energy and people, and in six months after a campaign, flipped the whole debate, and in 1990, we enacted legislation that increased visas by 40%. Set up the H1B program for high skilled temporary workers, established temporary protected status for Salvadorans, per se, and then the concept, which was very important, and it was an eight year fight, literally, could've been try to get it as part of the '86 law, couldn't. Kept fighting, got it as part of the '90 one. 
	That was for people who were not refugees or asylees per se, they were fleeing war, so they weren't being singled out for persecution. They were fleeing natural disaster, Hondurans eventually got it, because of earthquakes. Fleeing kind of generalized conditions that put people at risk, as a group, and gave the president the power to designate certain groups as entitled to temporary protected status. It's not a green card, it's not the right to get citizenship, not necessarily the right to be here forever, this is temporary protected status. Since then, I would wager a million and a half people, give or take, maybe not quite, at least a million people have benefited from the concept enacted in the law of temporary protected status. And, a lot of them have been in that status for a lot of years. 
	They're going to be part of this upcoming debate. What happens to them? They're not illegal, but they're not fully legal green card illegible either. Do they get a special path, like the dreamers, or like farm workers, because they're not exactly in the same circumstances. I think the answer's probably going to be yes, but it's going to be debated. So, that's a history through 1990, basically from '65 to 1990 with ups and downs, of progress, and progress in the political culture. Back to this notion of self interest rightly understood.
	In '96, a very draconian enforcement law was enacted. Limited due process, limited access to lawyers, strengthened grounds for deportation. Nasty, nasty stuff. My side generally didn't want to tackle enforcement issues, so here's another lesson. If you're trying to fight something that's bad, like an enforcement regime, you better have an alternative. You can't fight something with nothing, but whether it was the ACLU, or the Friends Service Committee, some of the Latino groups, that's not our job. We're just going to say no. They got crushed. They got crushed. Lost very bad. Consequences affecting people still today.
	Second part of that bill was to go back and try again to slash legal immigration, and establish a national ID card, so that employer sanctions could be more effective, and we built a left right coalition, couldn't agree on a lot of stuff, but we had the Cato Institute, Libertarian, we had the Club for Growth, Supply Side Right, we had Grover Norquist, the anti-tax guy, we had Ralph Reed, then the head of the Christian Coalition, all on our side together with a bunch of groups from the left, and the churches and labor, on a strategy we called, split the bill. Cut the bill in half. We had a huge fight in Congress and won it. All those things I just outlined, the visas, the national ID, were dropped, because we had the the strange bed fellow coalition that overwhelmed the establishment at the end of the day, and the stuff was dropped out, otherwise the bill as a whole was going to blow up.
	Some people argued against that, so we should've kept the cuts in the bill, and all this bad stuff on families in the bill in order to take the whole thing down, but some of us, not everybody by any means, on the left, or the pro-immigrant side, we can't stop the enforcement part without having our own enforcement proposals. They're not willing to do that. So, seems necessary we come up with another approach to say what we can say, and it worked, big fights.
	There's a Wired magazine story. You want to learn something about how this works day in and day out? Wired magazine, 1996, John Heilemann, who now is a top political writer from New York Magazine, wrote an article in Wired called, Do You Know the Way to Ban Jose? And, it tells, what journalists call a tick tock, it's literally a kind of a blow by blow story of this fight in '96. We worked with high techs, because their high skilled visas were on the table and at risk. They weren't trusting the family groups and the ethnic groups. I was the broker, I was gone from the forum, still playing this kinda role, and it was very fragile, and up and down, and back and forth, divide and conquer became the strategy of our enemies, trying to buy off high techs, or buy off some other group so that our fragile, nobody could believe this was pulled together coalition, would shatter.
	I'll stop there, read Wired, it'll be a real insight. Yes ma'am?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:48:27].
Rick Swartz:	Yes, I can imagine that, but not in a comprehensive approach, and not, in other words, we could do some things piece meal, not every issue under the sun. The dreamers, farm workers, high skilled increases, impact aid for state and local governments, we could've enacted some of these things in 2000, or 2004, but ... there's some anecdotes and stories that are instructive, which I'll get to in a minute. Didn't happen, and it didn't happen in part because of resistance from the left, who said, "We can't help farm workers in 2000, or 2003, or four, where we had more than 60 Senate votes in favor of the deal we have cut between the growers and the UFW, and other farm worker justice organizations ..."
Audience:	[inaudible 00:49:57].
Rick Swartz:	For ag jobs, because we need to keep that issue hostage to our larger vision of comprehensive immigration reform, which was beginning to peculate, because we want the power of the growers as part of the comprehensive deal. See what I mean?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:50:16].
Rick Swartz:	They're a whole cadre. But, examples, as I perceived it, National [inaudible 00:50:32]. Cecilia Muñoz, who's now the head of the Domestic Policy Council, resisted, resisted, resisted the ag jobs farm worker thing in 2000, in 2003, in 2004, so that it would be part of, and the power of the ag industry would be part of. Well, she's now running the show out of the White House. I'll stop there on her. In terms of some of the groups who did want to have an affirmative enforcement agenda, which can include things like labor law enforcement, trouble damages, if you're exploiting a worker who's undocumented, as opposed to just raids and pickups. Go after the bad guy employers in targeted ways. Republicans don't like that by and large, because it's kind of labor law.
	But, on the other hand, in cutting these deals, a bunch of the agriculture industry said, "You were right, Rick, we need to throw our bad guy employers under the bus, those who do exploit, in order to move forward," and it's even the right thing to do from a business point of view because the employer who obeys the law, pays the required wages, provides the required OSHA and other labor standards, provides water in the fields, that's an expense to them, so their costs are up, whereas the exploiters who don't do that kinda stuff, their costs are lower, so they get a competitive advantage. You're right, we gotta throw the exploiters under the bus because they're not just hurting workers, they're hurting other employers by virtue of their exploitation.
	Catholic bishops, back and forth, back and forth. They ended opposing the 2007 comprehensive bill because it got so bad as it went through the process. The National Immigration Law Center, which is focused on low income immigrants, opposed the 2007 bill, because it got so bad, at the end, because it got so bad as it went through the process. Others were caught up in it, and GW Bush, power, because he wanted this badly, as on the merits, and as a legacy, was eroding, and he couldn't move the Republican party the way he might've, when he tried, initially, with Vincente Fox in 2001, before 9/11.
	And, of course, 9/11 changed everything. Does that give you a taste? A flavor? Now, there are a lot of groups, center, center left, left ...
Audience:	[inaudible 00:53:21].
Rick Swartz:	Okay, so let me stop there on that, but, you see the picture? 
	So, 2013, tried comprehensive reform in 2006, and 2007, failed badly. I thought the whole thing was a huge strategic mistake, partly because of the story I told you earlier about [inaudible 00:53:46]. You want something to get killed, the bigger it is, the easier it is to kill it. The anti-immigration movement, organizations like FAIR, Numbers USA, Center for Immigration Studies, I've got a network of probably ... Californians for Population Stabilization. They're rooted in the population control movement, ideologically, but they recruit African Americans who fear that Mexicans are taking their jobs. They've been around for about 35 years, too.
	They're the ones who the '06 and '07 debates mobilized, letters and faxes. So, in the debate in 2006, and seven, on CIR, the letters and the emails, and the faxes were running 500 to 1,000 to one against legalization coming from the public at large. They mobilized. So, for every pro-immigrant letter that went into a member of Congress, 500 or more were going in against all this stuff. That's real. Members of Congress, at the end of the day, they weight, and they balance, and what's in the national interest, end of the day, they want to get re-elected, and they're looking at who's active in their district, or in their state, and what's the volume of mail.
	When you have somebody say, "Well, the mail from the guys on the opposite side is this high today, and the mail from your allies is this low today," you know you've got a problem. One of the problems becomes, do we really have a grass roots movement? I'm not sure we do, because there's a lot of top down work going on. Some of you remember the Sensenbrenner Bill from 2005, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants and Latinos in particular, but not exclusively, came on the streets, pretty spontaneously. It was radio hosts, it wasn't DC groups, it wasn't labor unions, it wasn't the churches. It was local organizers, radio personalities, they were reacting in a massive, nobody had seen it before way, ever, to the Sensenbrenner Bill, which was not only enforcement only, but it made every undocumented immigrant in the country a felon. 
	No human being is illegal became, again the rallying cry, and people felt it. It wasn't just immigrants. It was their American friends and family. It was others who came out and said, "This country cannot, by law, declare with a slash of a pen, that these folks, simply because they're in the country undocumented, are illegal." Think of the language. AP, Associated Press just, in the last month, they're no longer going to use the phrase, illegal alien, because it connotes, it evokes, these people are the other. They're illegal. They're not fully human. Nazis did the same thing. The Nazis did the same thing. Gotta wear the star of David. You're illegal, your shop's going to be closed down. You're illegal. You are not human. Yes ma'am?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:57:19].
Rick Swartz:	I don't know the inside story per se, but I know it was an organized campaign coming from activists, particularly an outfit called Presente.org, out in California, and Roberto Lovato, who's a journalist and activist, and Roberto's the guy who organized the campaign to get Lou Dobbs off of CNN. So, he kinda knew the pressure points in that world of big media. I just talked to him a couple days ago, and they're thrilled, and I'm thrilled too. Something as simple as that, the use of the world illegal to describe a human being, sends a message to the country as a whole, and it's not a positive message, it's a derogatory, dangerous message.
	So, that skirmish is a big deal, and it's going to be, now, a big deal forever, because AP sets the standards. May or may not change the votes in Congress later this year, but it sends a message. We're talking about human beings here. I would never have done, I wasn't in charge, I wasn't running it, in fact, I was exiled myself from the pro-immigrant movement because I disagreed. I would never have tried comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 because had it succeed in the Senate, it would've been paired up with this enforcement only House bill that declared people felons, and people who've been around a fair amount knew that the Republicans had no intention of having a House Senate conference, so it was a free vote in the Senate, because there was never going to be a law enacted, so why spend all this time and energy, and rile up the public and feed ammunition to the anti-immigration movement, against amnesty, when you know you can't possibly achieve an outcome that's positive, or any outcome at all?
	See what I'm saying? Galvanize understanding, what's the big deal here? There ain't going to be a law in 2006, and if there is, it's going to be paired with this nasty, nasty piece that the house enacted by very big margins. We should've stepped back, and let that moment pass, and regrouped. Instead, we lost, and as the debate went along, the original, what was called McCain Kennedy, pretty big bill, very generous, much more positive on the merits, but it was downhill from the moment the bill was introduced. So, the committee markups, the floor debates in the Senate, the amendments, the mail running 500 or 1,000 to one, the bill got worse and worse, and worse, and worse, and worse as it went through the process. No outcome.
	Except, the whole terms of the debate shifted to the right. So, when they started again in 2007, they started way to the ... I moved left, way to the right of where they had started in 2005. So, you had a new starting point where you're already in a hole. And, through the process of 2007, worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, until a lot of pro-immigrant groups, not all of them, said, I was all for this, because I wanted to legalize 11 million people, but the path to legalization has now become so torturous, that a lot of people won't be able to qualify, or will be afraid to try, or the system won't be able to handle the numbers, and we're going to give up family visas, and we're going to have a national ID card, and a legalization program that can't work on the ground.
	But, it was almost a self inflicted wound, as I saw it, from our allies, because they didn't make ... In retrospect it's easier to say, they didn't have the right understanding, they were drinking the Kooliad, they were too positive, they were too enthusiastic, and they were getting too rich, because the foundations in New York poured 150 million dollars over three or four years through about 10 DC based groups into that effort, and it was all about the slogan, comprehensive immigration reform. So, they couldn't give up, because, yes, it was feeding the baby. Whether it was the organizational baby or the family baby. No money coming from the ground. It was one of the huge problems in this debate throughout these 35 years, is that the activists, the activist organizations, the establishment pro-immigrant organizations. They're not raising money from the community. They're not owned by the community. They're raising money from Wal Mart, Ford Foundation, [Carnegie 01:02:41] Foundation, so you got program officers and CEOs calling the shots because they control the purse.
	That may be a harsh thing to say. Think hard when you're involved in this kind of work. Follow the money. Because, the folks with the cash, even if you're a do-gooder of the purest quality, are often going to be the ones calling the shots, and their motivations and interests are different. So, what are we looking at now? 2013, it seems like there's this huge national consensus, the gang of eight in the Senate, the gang of eight in the House, President Obama, who's deported more people in the last four and a half years, two million plus, than any president ever. Like, three times as many as George W Bush. Why are they doing that? Well, they say that Congress made them do it.
	Well, I haven't seen them say, "We don't want the money, we want to divert the resources to other purposes, we don't want that authority, we're going to take administrative action to mitigate the harm done." No, they have a strategic view, because democrats don't want to be soft on undocumented, illegal immigrants. All partisan perspective. They read polls. It's not just polls of conservative Americans, it's polls of African Americans. Polling data on African Americans and immigrations is very challenging, and just anecdotally, I mean I have a lot of black friends, look at construction sites in DC, which is a heavily African American town, it's all Latinos, and they're angry about it, and that's visceral.
	The NAACP is all for comprehensive immigration reform. Establishment organization, part of the center left Democratic Party coalition. Talk to folks on the street, they have a different point of view, back to fear, sense of competition. Strong argument can be made that legalization is in the interest of all American workers, because you're lifting people out of the shadows, they're less easily exploitable. Looking at longer term ,we've got an aging population, declining workforce, that affects everybody from a macro-economic point of view. But, the anti-immigration groups are buying radio ads on black radio stations and retaining black academics, some of whom I've debated with, to make the case that Mexicans, immigrants generally, the undocumented in particular, are stealing jobs and hurting the African American community, working class Americans, poor Americans, and it's easier to sell fear and loathing than it is self interest rightly understood.
	So, the 2013 bill, Senate bill just introduced last week, is 870 pages long, like the early '86, or pre '86, great big, massive bill. The anti-immigration movement's going to do everything they can, and their allies, everything they can to kill it, and I think they're going to look at the same kind of tactics we used. Have their allies in the House, in particular, send the bill to seven committees, slows it all down. Most people think in order to get this done by August, it won't get done, maybe September, because it gets too close to the next election.
	Something's very different than what we did in '86, and what we did in '90, and what we did in '96, we did some piecemeal things for Central Americans and others, and Haitians, in '97 and '98, because the economy was booming. That sense of economic insecurity and competition was not as visceral. We got 25 million Americans today who can't find work they're looking for. 25 million. Look at the unemployment statistics of, what is it now, eight point something percent, but that doesn't include people who've given up, people who have only part-time employment, or sometimes people are holding two part-time jobs, they're not counted. 
	So, when you count the discouraged, those who have given up, those who can only find part-time work, we're talking 20, 23 million people who want more work than they can find. It's a tough macro-context to say, "Okay, we're going to legalize 11 million more, and we're going to increase visas for certain work categories, and we're going to create a guest worker program, not just for agriculture, but for construction, and restaurants, hospitality." It's all part of this Senate bill. Going to have different positions on that, pro-[inaudible 01:08:01]. Today's economy, it's much harder to make the case to the public at large, we need more workers in the million, and you watch as the anti-immigration groups stir that fear of competition. And, their key talking point, "We're doing what, when 25 million Americans can't find work?" Fertile ground for demagoguery, regardless of the merits.
	National ID card's back in the picture. Remember Reagan, "Why don't we just tattoo their babies?" Because, the only way you can make the law from '86, it's illegal to knowingly hire an undocumented worker effective, the conventional wisdom goes, is to require people to have biometric ID cards, use a system called e-verify, where you check the applicant's [bonifieds 01:09:01] with databases. So, security databases, IRS databases, immigration databases. One of the little details here, I think is right, because I haven't actually read the bill yet, it's 800 pages, it appears that only non-citizens will be required to have this biometric card with a retina scan, or your fingerprint, that can be read by a computer.
	What happens to the immigrant, wherever he or she may be from, who's a US citizen, doesn't have a biometric card, maybe was born here, but has an accent, or looks like a foreigner? "What do you mean, you ran me through the system? You want this card for me, I'm not required to have a card, I'm a citizen." "Prove it." "Prove it how?" "Bring me your birth certificate." That gets right back into fraudulent documents, and think of the risks of discrimination at the counter where somebody's trying to get a job, and employers dealing with a new system, and we had these arguments in '86, and '85, saying, "Well, I don't know who you are, you just walked in the door, and you say you're a US citizen, but I don't trust it, and where's your card, you don't have one, and I now, I'm mandated to use this new electronic matching system, go away. I got plenty of other people applying for this job who sound and look like me."
	Think of the risk. Well, judgment call, is it worth it because we're going to legalize 11 million people. People will disagree. Establishment in Washington, a lot of these center left groups, the Obama administration, they've totally bought in to the concept, and as it goes along, it's going to get tougher and more restricted, and less generous on the legalization side. There's a study done by the Migration Policy Institute, they have a great website, that was done in '09, I think, doing a very detailed analysis of the 2007 requirements for legalization, in the 2007 bill.
	You know what their conclusion was? Less than half of the estimated 11 million undocumented would be qualified. They wouldn't have the money to pay the fees, they wouldn't have the money to pay the fines, they wouldn't have the money to pay the back taxes, they were women working in households, or day laborers working around and about, no employment records, really, or they were farm workers migrating to different jobs. How do you prove [inaudible 01:11:52]. The ones who were going to get hurt the most, this isn't me, this is the most pre-eminent think tank in the world on migration, less than half would've qualified.
	We've got all these groups crying and moaning on the left because that bill blew up, but they didn't do their homework. They were selling a false story to the community. Half were going to qualify or less, where they were saying it's about the 11 million. Sometimes you gotta say, "No, no, no, let's be rigorous here." It's not what you make it seem to be, it's a lot less. But, if you're never prepared to say no, or never prepared to have bottom lines where you back off, whether you're a member of Congress or you're a major interest group or coalition of interest groups, then your enemies will just keep moving the goal post, because they know you're determined to get something called comprehensive immigration reform, and they'll say, "Okay, well, you gotta make this concession on the ID card, you gotta make this concession on due process, you gotta make this concession on ratcheting drones on the border, and border enforcement," and so the fervor for getting something called comprehensive, the whole debate shift right, to the point where less than half would've qualified.
	I don't know, I was against it, largely for that, the trade offs were, like, not at all reasonable, but the political process and the mindsets of the activists, and the partisan considerations drove a lot of decision making that, at the end of the day, was going to help some immigrants, and leave most out. Today's debate has the same danger and the same risk. The starting point, 2013, the gang of eight in the Senate, is built upon the 2007 bill before it blew up. Not every detail's the same. Some have changed, [inaudible 01:14:01], installment plan for paying taxes and fines, that's an improvement. They don't have to come up with five grand to start the process, but you can pay your fees, and your fines, and your taxes over time, yeah, that's an improvement.
	It's going to be minimum of 10 years, if you get in, before you're eligible for a green card. Who's going to represent these people? [inaudible 01:14:28] capacity issues. In '86 we legislated something called qualified designated ends, where we got a boatload of federal money to go to church groups and labor groups, and immigrant community service organizations to council people and help people, and assuage their fears, pull their documents together, and then have lawyers review it. I can't find anything in the outline about a similar concept. You look at community based groups all over the country, they're closing their doors. They've got more demand for services in this economy than ever, not just immigrants, generally speaking.
	Desperate for cash. Where are they going to come up with the resources to council and help pull together applications on the ground for the people who may well be eligible, but have to do a tremendous amount of work to prove it? I don't know. We brought 15 class action lawsuits in implementing the '86 law. Without those lawsuits, we would've legalized maybe a million people rather than 2.7. Those lawsuits are prohibitive, concession to the right, they don't like class actions. Well, what's going to happen when you've got ... forget Janet Napolitano. Who do you think wants a job at the Department of Homeland Security? Exactly, folks with a mindset of no, a mindset of no, an enforcement mindset. They're the ones making the adjudications. If there's no review ...
	Some good people there, too. It's the luck of the draw. You get a badass adjudicator, or you get someone who's open minded, going to try to help you out, and sees that their job is turn down those who don't qualify, and help those who can. Bureaucracy is not going to be friendly when it comes to implementation. Without litigation, they're going to get away with a lot of stuff, like they tried to do until we beat them in the courts. So, this issue of, are you going to do lawsuits or not, allowed, is a huge one, when it comes to being real about ... I could go on, and on, and on. We haven't even talked about the House. Controlled by Republicans. Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the Rodino of today, guy by the name Goodlatte from the mountains of Virginia, against the Dream Act, against legalization, for national ID cards and crackdowns. He's going to be the primary guy running the show, and the primary committee of jurisdiction.
	Homeland Security, very tough people running it on the Republican side. They have jurisdiction, and I'm pretty sure they're going to assert it. There's some wishful thinking that John [Baner 01:17:25] is going to bring ... the Senate passes the bill, straight to the house floor, ain't gonna happen. [Those 01:17:31] gotta go through ... whatever happens in the Senate, they're just starting over in the House, and the House bill that Luis Gutiérrez and others have been working on, on a bipartisan basis, come up with their version of the gang of eight, their version for the ... Just in the newspapers yesterday, Rubén Hinojosa, the Chairman of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. Well, it's probably going to be a 15 to 17 year path for those who get in before you're eligible for a green card, compared to 10 in the Senate, and it's going to get worse in the House as it goes through the committee.
	So, lot at stake. Millions of lives at risk. Deportations under the Obama administration continue apace, half a million plus a year. And the left, with the exception of kind of the far left, is part of the game, is part of the game. And so, they're caught up in this dynamic as I see it, and the anti-immigration forces haven't seen the whites of their eyes yet. They're waiting for the legislation to come out before they reach into that 250 million dollar war chest, and are running ads all over the country, are targeting members, and they're going to their allies in Congress to play the same game we played in the early '80s. Delay, conflict, multiple committees of jurisdiction, delay, mean, conflict, means defeat.
	Now, that's a bleak picture, and maybe it'll be better, maybe it'll play out better than that, because Republicans know they have a huge big difference because of the election. They got creamed among Latino voters, but immigration was issue number five on the priority list of Latino citizen voters, not number one. There's a really affinity, it's a very important issue, but they made a judgment that they need to be better on immigration than they've been, but not if it's going to divide the party. The Tea Party ain't gonna take it, [that wing 01:19:39] ain't gonna take it. Lamar Smith, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is against everything that's positive, and for everything that's enforcement. He's got allies, he's been there 30 years, he's got the best staff in Washington on these issues, and the most experienced, the most clever. It's going to be a war. There may be efforts by the Democrats to jam it, make it move fast in the Senate. It's a lot easier to kill than to enact anything, especially when it's big and huge.
	Couple of tidbits. Construction industry isn't happy, because their piece of the non ag guest worker is limited to 15,000 a year. Buddy of mine in LA, Antonio Gonzales, he runs a [inaudible 01:20:31]. He hates this bill. He's getting calls from major home builders in Southern California to see whether they can work together to kill it. The house building industry, under the senate bill, non of the people legalized are going to be eligible for a single federal [inaudible 01:20:52] tested program, whether that's food stamps, or aid to families with dependent children, or it's Obamacare. Part of the deal that was cut in order to bring Republicans on board. Well, what's going to happen? Where are those people going to go when they're in need?
	The strapped social service agencies, back to the emergency room, more costs on state and local governments that are crushed by the economy at large. State and locals played a huge role in our success in '85, '86, [they were 01:21:28] part of our coalition, [inaudible 01:21:30], and we gave them impact aid, and four billion dollars to help mitigate the costs associated with people getting legalized and becoming eligible for state and local programs. There's no concept like that, that I've discerned, at least, in this comprehensive bill that's been debated. So, imagine now an 850 page bill with scores and scores of issues, some big, big, big, like these, some are technical, but they're important to somebody, and some member of Congress, and creates a lot of opportunity for mischief, and delay, and conflict, which slows the whole process down. 
	I'll close on this. How did the Dream Act Affirmant program happen? Okay? So, it was an inside game. So, Gaby Pacheco was one of the four students from Miami who walked to DC, and I've been advising her, and a guy by the name of Mohammed, I can't pronounce his last name, from Iran, who's been the one around the country mobilizing a lot of the sit ins and the demonstrations. They don't talk to each other, they both talk to me. And, I've known Marco Rubio's Chief of Staff for a long time, 20 years, and I've worked with him on these things.
	So, Rubio, his first attitude when it comes to Washington is, I'm not touching immigration. Then, he switches, I'm going to take on the Dream Act. I advised Gaby, work with Rubio. Work with Rubio. Why? Because, if the Democrats and Obama think the dreamers are not in their back pocket, you've got more power. They're competing. You've got more power, and you've gotta learn how to use it. She took the advice, and there was lots of pleading, and lots of advocacy in the Obama White House to do this administrative action, and they were just getting brushed aside, brushed aside, brushed aside, until Gaby got invited to meet with Valerie Jarrett and Cecilia Muñoz, and a bunch of the DC establishment groups that are tight with the White House, and I said, "Gaby, tell them you won't meet unless you're meeting with them alone. You don't need an interpreter, you don't need these DC groups to represent you, represent yourself."
	She took the advice. Freaked everybody out. She made it clear to the two most powerful people in the White House besides the president on this issue that we're working with Rubio, and you're doing nothing, and we've been pounding to get this administrative action taken, which you say you don't have the authority to take. Well, guess what happened? White House got very nervous. It was an undocumented 26 year old woman from Florida, and her small band of activists, took on the establishments and said, "We will speak for ourselves, we will do it in a way we think is best, and we're not owned by anybody," and the White House got very nervous.
	And, but for the Rubio initiative, and how the dreamers went along and played, and they're power grew, and forced the White House's hand, and even the National Council [inaudible 01:25:03], and others of kind of part of the crowd admit, but for Rubio, Obama doesn't take this action, and but for Gaby, Rubio doesn't get legitimacy. The most powerless setting the terms of engagement for the most woefuller. It's inspiring to me, and I feel privileged to be able to be a mentor and a teacher. So, let me stop, that's the story, there's a lot more to it. I'm sorry if the history was too much, but on the other hand, to understand today and tomorrow, you often have to understand where you're coming from, and what's preceded you, and how the dynamic works, and we're starting in a deeper hole today, by far, than we were in 2005 on comprehensive immigration reform, and I think we need a plan B.
	Because, if I had to bet my house on it, I think this thing's going to blow up, not get to the finish line. I don't know that, I'm not sure of that, at some point you have to be prepared to say, as an activist, "I'm sorry, there's some good things in here, but the bad outweighs the good, or you get rolled. Thanks. Right on time. 
	Can we take another couple minutes just to see if questions or comments on this last piece?
Aurora:	[inaudible 01:26:40].
Rick Swartz:	Okay.
Aurora:	[inaudible 01:26:43].
Rick Swartz:	Okay. Does this guy get the first question?
Aurora:	[inaudible 01:27:10].
Audience:	Now, the other side of the coin for [inaudible 01:27:15], then, is [inaudible 01:27:16].
Rick Swartz:	Right.
Audience:	So, what would be your sense of priority [inaudible 01:27:23]?
Rick Swartz:	Right, it would be Dream Act, the ag deal, I guess it would be the new ag deal, the new ag deal's not as good as the 2000 ag deal, but there's a UFW grower deal on it. Most of the high tech provisions in the CIR, which means ... but I'm not a big fan of guest workers per se. I believe that we need your work, you deserve a green card, and guest workers, because they're tied to an employer, kind of under their thumb. But, the skilled have more ways to navigate that than others. I would say if you're a masters degree or higher graduate, [inaudible 01:28:10] student graduate in science, technology, et cetera, you get the degree, you're otherwise clean, you've got a job offer, you get a green card.
Audience:	[inaudible 01:28:25].
Rick Swartz:	It does sound a little bit like Mitt Romney, but part of the power here is Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, they're spending-
Audience:	How do you prevent them from stopping [inaudible 01:28:37]?
Rick Swartz:	Excuse me?
Audience:	How do you prevent the reform [inaudible 01:28:47]? They got all the computer programmers they want [inaudible 01:28:45].
Rick Swartz:	That's the argument made, but I would also do family backlog reduction, I would do impact aid to state and local government, I'd do something for hospitality, I'd make progress. And, yeah, the argument against is, if you don't do everything in one great big bill, you're not holding these other industries hostage, or workers hostage, then your chances of getting legalization for the 11 million are diminished. It's an argument, and it's an argument to take seriously. Hasn't worked yet, and if I'm wrong fundamentally, and the bill gets better rather than worse on legalization requirements and length of time, and all that, good luck, or some really bad stuff doesn't get in it because the gangs of eight have enough power to beat nasty amendments, well, then the CIR strategy, maybe you take it.
Audience:	[inaudible 01:29:54].
Rick Swartz:	Yeah, it could be both arguments are right, but if you're a member of Congress, or you're an activist leader and you have influence, you gotta make judgment calls.
Audience:	[inaudible 01:30:06].
Rick Swartz:	Best guess would be, they sort of cut the difference, but there'd be a lot of horse trading on other aspects of the bill. And, it depends on how the House handles it, because the House, they do a comprehensive approach to immigration, but through four or five separate bills, and kinda see how they merge. A lot of horse trading goes on in these kinds of dynamics. Most conferences, House and Senate conferences these days, are behind closed doors. In our day, they were public, then you knew what everybody was doing.
	But, hard to predict, but again, the general rule to watch out for, to be alert to, to guard against, is that with rare exceptions on these matters as you go through the process, it gets more restrictive, and that may well include a House Senate conference. Now, let's say the House passes something with 70 votes, or the Senate and the House passes something with a five vote margin. Well, the House members then say, "We can't accept that more liberal version, because we lose our five votes, and then the whole thing's dead." So, pay attention.
Aurora:	[inaudible 01:31:38].
Rick Swartz:	Okay, I've got one, since I obviously have to have a bit of an ego to do this kind of work. Did it work for you guys? Was this a reasonable way to explain, and illustrate, some of the history, how it relates to today? Because, I don't do this very much anymore, so I'm just looking for a little, "Yeah, it was okay." Yeah, it was okay? All right, thanks.
Aurora:	[inaudible 01:32:03].
Rick Swartz:	I had a lot of fun.
Aurora:	Talk about [crosstalk 01:32:10].
Rick Swartz:	Thank you for coming out on such a great day, and you're probably heading into exams even, right? Really appreciate it. And, if you're into this stuff, get active, and ask hard questions.