| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The scrutiny of social media accounts that more than these speech students are now being subjected to. | |
| Can you talk a little bit about that? | ||
| Why are you doing that now? | ||
| Look, we look at a lot of different ways to find people we need to find, whether it's a criminal history, immigration issues, social media, undercover operations, surveillance. | ||
| There's a whole myriad of law enforcement systems we use to find people and see our people in danger of the community. | ||
| Social media is one of them. | ||
| And we'll continue to. | ||
| We don't arrest anybody for free speech. | ||
| I mean, free speech is legal, but there's a limit to that, too. | ||
| I can't look at you and make a count about my desire to assassinate a president. | ||
| Is that not free speech? | ||
| Or is that a crime? | ||
| I can't sit in a movie theater and yell fire and watch people get trampled to death. | ||
| Is that free speech? | ||
| Or is it a crime? | ||
| There's a limit to free speech, but we're not arresting people based on free speech. | ||
| It's what they said plus what they did. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Hon. And now a discussion on local initiatives for immigration and community needs, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. | |
| It's about an hour. | ||
| By the time I'm your age, they're just going to be putting me down anyways. | ||
| They're going to be calling us for the sword and green. | ||
| All right, good afternoon. | ||
| Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| My name is Stan Voyger. | ||
| I'm a senior fellow here. | ||
| Delighted to host today's event on place-based immigration programs. | ||
| Good afternoon as well to our online and C-SPAN viewership. | ||
| The immigration policy debate, as all of you know, remains quite contentious at the federal level. | ||
| In response, two recent proposals let local communities opt into a new visa program. | ||
| The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has proposed the so-called community-based visa program, which could revitalize local economies with declining population by helping them attract the immigrants they want. | ||
| The Economic Innovation Group's proposal focuses on stimulating growth and investment in such regions by letting them bring in, in particular, high-skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants. | ||
| Now, it's unlikely that these proposals will become law and reality in the very near future, but I believe it's important to think about their design implementation now so policymakers have options to turn to when the moment comes. | ||
| Now, to discuss these proposals and other initiatives along similar lines, I'm delighted to welcome three expert guests today. | ||
| Christina Rodriguez is the Latham Homer Serbic Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. | ||
| Also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. | ||
| In that role, she recently chaired a working group on the community-based visa program that I mentioned earlier. | ||
| Full disclosure, I was a member of the working group, and so is my colleague Pierre Rhinias. | ||
| Adam Ozemek is Chief Economist of the Economic Innovation Group, which recently put out a proposal for the Heartland visas that I described. | ||
| EIG has proposed a number of policies meant to address regional disparities in the United States. | ||
| I look forward to Adam's discussion of how immigrants fit into that broader agenda. | ||
| Then finally, Michael Clemens is a professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. | ||
| And he has graciously agreed to serve as discussing today. | ||
| So the run of the show is going to be straightforward. | ||
| Christina and Adam are going to present their proposals. | ||
| Michael shares views, and we'll chat amongst ourselves. | ||
| We'll do some Q ⁇ A with you guys. | ||
| If you're not in the room, you can also submit questions. | ||
| So, either to tanga.aucovi.aei.org, that's on the website for spelling purposes, or you can do it via Twitter. | ||
| With that, Christina, please take a stage. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Well, thank you very much to AEI and to Stan Voiger for having us here. | ||
| It's my pleasure to present this report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences working group on community partnership visas, how immigration can boost local economies. | ||
| The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a nonpartisan membership organization and think tank. | ||
| In 2023, the Academy convened a commission on reimagining our economy, and it issued a final report, which included 15 different recommendations for improving the economic prospects and security of all Americans. | ||
| Among those proposals was the idea for community partnership visas, though it was suggested only in the Commission's report. | ||
| And so, in the summer of 2024, the Academy convened a working group to try to flesh out the idea. | ||
| I had the fortune of co-chairing that group. | ||
| Stan, as he mentioned, was a member of that group. | ||
| And our task was to develop the proposal and think about how it might actually work in practice. | ||
| What would the criteria be for participation and how might we think about its implementation? | ||
| As we'll hear, the idea of place-based immigration programs allows specific regions to sponsor immigrants with the goal of revitalizing local economies. | ||
| The idea has been around since at least the early 2000s, and in recent years, it's been developed into policy proposals, including the one from the Economic Innovation Group that we'll hear about later, called and known as the Heartland Visa, Economic Advisors, and a member of our working group. | ||
| And it became a part of the Commission's overall strategy for revitalizing economies and communities around the country, and was our primary task to develop. | ||
| I think, to advance the slide, do I screen button? | ||
| Okay, this is the photo of the Academy. | ||
| So, why community partnership visas? | ||
| These visas, the idea, aims to channel immigrants to places that would benefit greatly economically and socially from their arrival. | ||
| There are communities across the United States with stagnant or flagging economies, and there is a robust economics literature that supports the idea that immigration is a source of economic growth. | ||
| But immigrants, even though they've spread out increasingly around the country, still tend to concentrate geographically in just a handful of places, primarily along the coasts and primarily in cities that are already thriving economically. | ||
| So, the community partnership visa idea would create a new visa stream that would allow communities themselves that might have an interest in immigration as a source of economic revitalization to apply to the federal government to bring in immigrants from various occupations and skill levels on work visas. | ||
| And the goal would be to reverse population decline and spur economic growth in these places. | ||
| The way we've designed the program is for it to be flexible and responsive, both for the communities themselves and also for the visa recipients. | ||
| Crucially, communities would opt into the program, ensuring that participants are places that themselves have identified the need for new workers and new residents. | ||
| Also important to our conception of the proposal is that given the diversity of community needs, the diversity of needs of the communities that are often described as having been left behind, we thought that both high-skilled and non-high-skilled workers should be eligible to participate in the program, with the communities themselves able to decide what kinds of workers they felt that they needed. | ||
| So as I said, the goal of the report was to outline the design details. | ||
| And there's a one-page summary of some of these details. | ||
| It also contains a QR code that would send you to the final report that's circulating. | ||
| So here, I just want to highlight a few of the features of the program, perhaps the most important of which, and the one that led to the most significant amount of deliberation and work on the part both of the Commission itself or the working group itself and the members of the staff of the Academy, was to determine who would be eligible as a community to apply. | ||
| So the guiding principle here is that this program would be aimed for communities in the middle. | ||
| Some places across the country are doing well enough economically that they don't require a special visa stream or are not in need of more immigration than they already have. | ||
| And some places are struggling so much that it would be unfair to the visa recipients themselves to send them to a place where they wouldn't have a realistic chance of economic opportunity and where immigration might end up being a burden as opposed to an economic benefit. | ||
| The way that the group identified those communities in the middle was through four criteria. | ||
| Through population growth, through prime age labor force participation rate ages 25 to 54, through median income growth, and based on the local cost of living. | ||
| The first of these three criteria are proxies for economic performance. | ||
| Medium income growth and prime labor force participation we ultimately aggregated into a single number and we built a distribution of geographical units based on this aggregation and population growth. | ||
| So based on these metrics and their combination, we determined that communities that were above the 80th percentile or below the 20th percentile would be ineligible for community partnership visas. | ||
| Hence, they would be visas for the middle. | ||
| Also importantly, we excluded communities above the 20th percentile on local cost of living, even if there might be other measures that would align with the criteria on the view that the decline in population in some of these places was the result of the cost of living and not because of economic stagnation. | ||
| In addition to defining these criteria, we also had to determine what the geographic unit would be where we would apply the criteria. | ||
| And the geographic unit that the group chose was the commuting zone. | ||
| I'm going to show you a map that divides the country up into commuting zones. | ||
| There are 583 of them in the United States, and I'll explain what they are in a moment. | ||
| And on this map, you see the commuting zones that are eligible in blue and not eligible in orange based on our criteria. | ||
| So a commuting zone, and this is, I think, an innovation of this particular proposal, contains a number of different units of counties and cities. | ||
| And it's a designation first developed by the federal government in the 1980s based on census data concerning individuals travel to and from their jobs. | ||
| It's a unit that is intended to capture an integrated economic geographic entity. | ||
| And the commuting zones that we relied on were built by a geographer named Christopher Fowler in 2020. | ||
| And ultimately, as I said, divides the country into 583 zones. | ||
| The idea was to capture where you have economic integration as opposed to arguably arbitrary county and city lines. | ||
| So we defined eligibility based on the way the criteria applied in the commuting zones, and you can see that the eligible commuting zones, those that are within the 60th percentile of the distribution, are dotted throughout the country. | ||
| Now, commuting zones are not juridical units. | ||
| They are geographic entities created through the federal government and then through academic study. | ||
| So the applications themselves in our proposal would not come from the commuting zones. | ||
| They would have to come from a juridical unit inside the commuting zone. | ||
| That might be a county, it might be a city. | ||
| And we suggest, therefore, that there might be more than one entity within a commuting zone that would seek to apply because they would qualify by virtue of being in an eligible commuting zone to the federal government. | ||
| That is among the things that would have to be worked out through an implementation proposal. | ||
| But you'll see if you then look at the distribution according to counties, this is the United States divided up into counties, and you see how many counties would ultimately be eligible. | ||
| 30% of counties in the United States would be eligible for the community partnership visa, which accounts for about 19% of the U.S. population. | ||
| And there would be eligible counties in 39 of the 50 states. | ||
| These are the key details and the key innovations of this particular approach to place-based visas. | ||
| There were a number of other details that we worked through in the proposal itself. | ||
| I'll mention just a few, but in the interest of time and the opportunity for people to ask questions, we can talk about those that are of interest during the question and answer. | ||
| We did talk about the eligibility of the visa recipients themselves, not just the eligibility of the communities that could apply, and determined that only those between the ages of 18 and 49 should be eligible because the point is to produce economic revitalization and growth. | ||
| We included in the eligible population of visa recipients individuals who are already in the United States on a temporary visa, not just people coming from outside the country, including people on temporary protected status, DACA, and other parole statuses. | ||
| We also determined that it was important because the goal was to revitalize particular communities that visa holders be required to live within the county or locale that applied for the visa in the first place and that they should be required to find employment within the overall commuting zone, which is the integrated economic unit. | ||
| We do not suggest or propose that there be a requirement of a job offer. | ||
| Instead, the overseeing federal agency would engage in the process of matching communities where there's both need and opportunity with eligible visa applicants. | ||
| And then organizations like resettlement organizations and other workforce boards might assist in the process of both resettlement and the location of a job. | ||
| We thought it important also that visa holders unable to immediately find employment or within a reasonable period of time able to find employment be able to then petition to move to another commuting zone. | ||
| This underscores that we had a couple of values that animated all of our work together. | ||
| This is also behind our conception that these visas should ultimately be portable and that recipients should be allowed to petition to move between eligible communities at certain stages of the process. | ||
| And those values were agency and flexibility. | ||
| That the program ought to respect the agency of visa recipients, the agency of the communities that are seeking to bring immigrants for the purposes of growth and revitalization, but also flexibility. | ||
| That a program like this will only work if its criteria are flexible. | ||
| If they don't result in people being trapped without jobs or easily losing their visas. | ||
| So, both of those principles, regardless of what the design details might include, are important to ensure that this is a dynamic program that actually serves to promote its goals, which is the revitalization of communities in the middle, where that sort of economic growth and dynamism that comes through immigration is likely to make a big difference. | ||
| There are many other elements to the proposal, but I will leave it at that and welcome a complimentary proposal to ours to hear about its details and then to talk through where the divergences might be and how we can work together to make this something that's not just an idea, but something that comes to fruition. | ||
| Adam? | ||
| Thank you, Christina. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, and thank you for that proposal. | ||
| It's great to have multiple organizations working in this space, thinking about how can immigration help places that have been left behind. | ||
| This is our version of the proposal. | ||
| I'll start by running through the big picture and then talk about a legislative version of it that's been introduced. | ||
| So demographic decline is widespread. | ||
| This is the fundamental problem here. | ||
| This is a problem that's been growing over time. | ||
| You have a higher share of counties experiencing outright population loss now than you have in a very long time. | ||
| And demographic decline comes with a lot of economic problems. | ||
| This is a mistake that economists, I think, often make where they see population loss as being this neutral or equilibriating factor. | ||
| You lose your population, so your wages go up. | ||
| The workers who are left behind are better off. | ||
| I don't think that's really the case. | ||
| I think when populations fall, you have depressed housing markets and the negative effects that come along with that, vacancy, blight, and then in turn, negative impacts on municipal finances. | ||
| So the tax base shrinks. | ||
| This is especially true because a lot of the population loss is what you call skill biased. | ||
| A lot of these demographically declining places are losing their highest human capital individuals, the people who would have had the highest impact on the tax base. | ||
| So you've got housing markets declining, municipal finances declining, entrepreneurship very reliably follows when you have fewer people, fewer customers, and fewer workers, less likely to start businesses. | ||
| And human capital flight, so you've got the urban wage premiums, part of this story, pulling people out of depressed areas to make more money and hiding from cities, as Stan's research has shown. | ||
| And then patenting rates decline. | ||
| So you think about all these impacts of population loss, it's very narrow to say, well, but labor supply has gone down, so wage will go up. | ||
| It's really not going to be the case on average. | ||
| So what can we do about this? | ||
| Our core theory is that high-skilled immigration can have a very big impact. | ||
| So what does high-skilled immigration do for these places? | ||
| It can catalyze growth in communities suffering from deindustrialization. | ||
| Here, there's a lot of outside literature you can look to that's very informative here. | ||
| If you look at the places that survived the China shock, if you look at the places that have suffered from deindustrialization but bounced back, what are the characteristics of those places? | ||
| They have a lot of highly educated people. | ||
| High human capital is a huge part of resilience. | ||
| They're able to find next best opportunities for those places and put assets and people to work. | ||
| Through this, they boost wages for native workers and reduce monopsony through more entrepreneurship. | ||
| They bring in outside investment, they increase the tax base. | ||
| Another really interesting angle here, which was not true when we started writing about place-based visas over a decade ago, is the potential of remote work to be something that allows high-skilled people to live in these communities. | ||
| And the last part, obviously, is we have more concern today about industrial policy trying to spread manufacturing, advanced manufacturing throughout the country into a lot of heartland communities. | ||
| And obviously, if you're putting capital in, a very nice complement to that is human capital. | ||
| So that's the big picture of how high-skill immigration helps. | ||
| But how would the policy actually work? | ||
| So we start very similarly to counties experiencing economic and demographic decline. | ||
| That's our big focus, is the county decline. | ||
| We don't rule out any countries, any counties as being too much, having too much decline. | ||
| Counties have to opt in. | ||
| So this is dual opt-in. | ||
| Counties have to opt in, and the immigrant has to opt in. | ||
| We're presuming a fixed number of visas, right? | ||
| And so once you start with the presumption that you can't have open borders, you have to have a way to allocate. | ||
| And so our presumption is that we would allocate according to something like an auction, but it's mostly based on wages, right? | ||
| Someone comes, they have a job offer, whoever has the highest wages for a job offer in that community, they get access to the program. | ||
| We provide no restrictions by occupation or industry. | ||
| What's useful here is that this is in contrast to the H-1B where you come here and you say I'm an actuary and then you have to prove every job you take I'm an actuary. | ||
| Don't worry, I'm only doing level one actuary work. | ||
| So it's much, and you can move more freely between companies as long as you're hitting that wage target that you came in on. | ||
| Lastly, and we think this is essential, a dedicated green card pathway for those with high earnings while on the heartland visa. | ||
| So this is a green card pathway that is not based on employer sponsorship, that is not based on a stack of paperwork this high. | ||
| It's based on how much did you earn while you were here. | ||
| Are you in the top 15% of earners for your area? | ||
| Then you are probably very additive to the economy and if you're following the rules then you should know that there's a green card at the end there for you. | ||
| Uncapped. | ||
| Do the capping on the front end, not the back end. | ||
| That's one of the unintended consequences of our immigration system. | ||
| We have far less caps on who comes in and then who can get the green card so you end up with these decades-long wait lists. | ||
| We want to make sure that doesn't happen with heartland visas. | ||
| So a little bit more in who qualifies. | ||
| So we're focused on close to falling population, so 0.5 population and prime age growth between 2010 and 2020. | ||
| And we are also concerned about the housing market as well. | ||
| So if your median home value has to be no greater than the national, because as you point out, some places aren't growing because they choose not to grow, because they choose not to build new houses. | ||
| It doesn't make sense to give them access to a special immigration program that will just crowd out other people. | ||
| We also widen it a little bit on the recent momentum criteria. | ||
| In the process of this, we discovered that there are a lot of post-industrial cities that are experiencing a little bit of bounce back. | ||
| They're still way far below their historical population levels, places like Cleveland and Buffalo, and you want to lower the standards a little bit for places like that because those seem like places with a lot of potential. | ||
| So if their population peaked before 19, then you have slightly lower bar to hit. | ||
| But still, median home value, no greater than the national median. | ||
| So this is what our map looks like. | ||
| 1,761 eligible counties. | ||
| The green ones are the ones that we added in with the sort of expanded criteria to capture some post-industrial cities. | ||
| I think a key differentiator between the two proposals, as you can see, there are a lot of places there that are doing poorly and would not be included in the prior proposal. | ||
| If you look at Appalachia, there's large swaths of Appalachia that wouldn't have been included in theirs, and we include them in ours and up and down the Mississippi. | ||
| So you can see the greater breadth of distress that we allow targeted here. | ||
| It's 58 million residents in those places as of 2020. | ||
| So just to give you an idea of some of these places, what they look like, you've got Detroit, you've got Pittsburgh, you've got Cleveland, you can see these cities. | ||
| A lot of post-industrial cities, a lot of places that have promise. | ||
| So something that I hear a lot when we propose heartland visas is like, well, nobody wants to live there, right? | ||
| Nobody wants to live in a part of the country that people are living. | ||
| But these are great cities in the global competition. | ||
| If you're a high-skilled immigrant and you're looking across the world, these are globally competitive cities, especially if there's a pathway to a green card. | ||
| So this is sort of summarizing the difference between eligible and ineligible places. | ||
| Eligible places have been declining by 3.3% over the decade. | ||
| Prime age population is down 11.4%. | ||
| Think about how drastic that is for a community. | ||
| That the prime working age population on average in these places has fallen by 10% in a decade. | ||
| That has huge impacts for tax bases, entrepreneurship, all sorts of things that matter. | ||
| So one of the things we want to make sure everyone knows is the pandemic, while it did push some more people into rural areas, these places are still on average declining post-pandemic. | ||
| Higher poverty, lower median household income. | ||
| So just across the board, they are more distressed places. | ||
| So that's our big picture idea. | ||
| We would propose several hundred thousand these visas. | ||
| You'd be able to essentially move within clusters of counties within states, so sort of 50 heartland visa areas, and each the prices in the states would be set differently in the auctions. | ||
| So when you have a big program of hundreds of thousands, part of the one that we want to avoid is too many people trying to rush into Buffalo or Cleveland, right? | ||
| You don't want to create blowback that's disruptive to the program. | ||
| You want to allow sort of a program that's gradual. | ||
| And if you're allowing in hundreds of thousands of people, you run the risk of disruption. | ||
| So with a large program, we propose a sort of state heartland visa clusters. | ||
| And we would allow states to partner together, right? | ||
| If you only have a few counties, states can partner together. | ||
| When it came time to actually drop legislation with Senators Manich and Young, we settled on 50,000 per year. | ||
| Now, that doesn't include dependents and spouses, so the population number would be larger. | ||
| But at that smaller number, we thought that it was much more manageable to have a national, if you can sort of move and work in any heartland visa qualifying county. | ||
| And so when you allow this kind of mobility, whether it's within state or within the national area, there's much less concern about the cutting off the sort of most distressed places and saying they don't have a chance because like it's a wage-based employment-based program. | ||
| If it's true that there's nothing in those counties for an entrepreneur or remote worker to do, then they just won't go there. | ||
| They won't have a job there. | ||
| They won't qualify. | ||
| So the design of the policy is sort of self-correcting for that kind of problem if that it proves true. | ||
| Lastly, I do think that this is one of the strongest arguments for our approach, other than the massively disproportionate effect of high-skill immigration. | ||
| There is bipartisan support for high-skill immigration. | ||
| So this is a survey we ran at the end of last year. | ||
| Support for more high-skilled immigration is true across the political spectrum. | ||
| You can see even among Trump voters, 71% support more high-skilled immigration. | ||
| People don't like when you talk about illegal immigration, that gets now you've got polarized outcome, right? | ||
| A lot of people they support them, refugees they support them, and then other people don't high school immigration. | ||
| It is a consensus issue. | ||
| You have support on both sides, and even sometimes the president, sometimes. | ||
| All right, those are my comments. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Thanks a lot for being here. | ||
| Thanks so much for inviting me to discuss these two visionary proposals. | ||
| They are really proposing a way to craft an immigration policy that is apt for this century, for the 21st century. | ||
| And I want to explain what I mean by that. | ||
| This is not the America I grew up in right now. | ||
| There's a vast change that happened in the last 30 years that very few Americans are even aware of. | ||
| And it's the shift from demographic assent to demographic decline. | ||
| What I mean by that is right here, you're looking at the U.S. Census Bureau's projections in 1975 of what the working age population in green would look like with zero immigration, no immigrants, no children of immigrants after 1975. | ||
| It's growing a lot, and it's growing much faster than the population of elderly people in the zero immigration scenario. | ||
| This is what it looks like now. | ||
| That turned from positive to negative. | ||
| The zero immigration growth of the working age population of the U.S. about 15 years ago turned from positive to negative. | ||
| Not at some distant point in the future, right now, today, under the zero immigration scenario, we are permanently losing 1 million workers per year to demographic change. | ||
| And not just that, but the elderly population in the zero immigration scenario is growing much faster now than it was in the late 20th century. | ||
| And this process, which is acute and immediate right now, today, as our speakers have been discussing, is particularly acute, much more acute than this in lots of corners of the country, specific places. | ||
| So here we are facing that new reality with tools, institutional tools, laws that were designed 60 years ago by these people, my grandparents and great-grandparents generation. | ||
| And one of the things they did, I saw in a new light in a brilliant book by Christina and her co-author Adam Cox called The President and Immigration Law, in which she points out that under the 1965 law, whose basic structure is our regulation today, Congress did something remarkable, which is that it delegated a whole lot of discretion of immigration regulation to the president, but in a lopsided way. | ||
| It delegated enormous discretion to exclude to the president, but not to include. | ||
| That is, the president has the authority to and does often partner with local authorities to remove migrants according to local priorities in the 287G agreements and other things like that. | ||
| There is no authority for the president to partner with local authorities to include migrants, to create lawful channels for migration according to local needs. | ||
| And that lopsided institutional feature is kind of like giving the president an eraser but not a pencil. | ||
| It's something that is very asymmetrical. | ||
| And one way to think of these proposals is kind of the mirror image of 287G. | ||
| What would an authority that is not so lopsided look like? | ||
| I teach my students at George Mason University when they're studying economics this policy triad, three necessary conditions for good economic policy. | ||
| Of course, it has to be welfare maximizing, like a good economist would think, but not just that, it has to be politically supportable. | ||
| We're not designing policy for the hypothetical benevolent dictators. | ||
| Like Friedrich Hayek wrote, the role of an economist is to make the politically impossible politically possible. | ||
| And not just that, but we have to think about what's administratively feasible. | ||
| What could a, as Hayek also wrote, what could a real government with its many constraints, including informational constraints, actually pull off. | ||
| So I want to go through these one by one. | ||
| There is a very solid grounding in economic theory for the welfare maximizing nature of policy like these. | ||
| The workhorse model is from Charles Thibault, and that is actually how he pronounced his name, Thiebaud, which with many complexities is about the optimal decentralization of policy. | ||
| To what extent should regulations on public goods and public bads be centralized and to what extent should it be federalized? | ||
| And in a highly simplified version of that model, when there are different preferences, for example, for immigration across districts, districts with different local conditions, demographic conditions, economic conditions, the benefits of decentralization go up because people can get more in local areas of what they want. | ||
| But to the extent that there are spillovers, negative spillovers, real or perceived, across districts, the costs of decentralization go up. | ||
| And that naturally limits the extent to which the benefits of decentralization can be realized. | ||
| It has to be to the left of that blue star there where the benefits exceed the costs. | ||
| What both of these proposals are doing by limiting the spatial mobility of migrants is attempting to decrease those real or perceived negative spillovers and therefore allow more of the capturing the benefits of decentralization. | ||
| So there's really sound and old and well-established economic theory behind these. | ||
| What about politically supportable and administratively feasible? | ||
| I would really give both of these proposals high marks in both of those areas. | ||
| Politically supportable, there is recent legislation, bipartisan legislation, proposing more local control of our existing employment-based visa programs. | ||
| This is something that is supported on both sides of the aisle extensively. | ||
| There have been state laws passed in Utah, in Georgia, in Colorado, establishing the rough equivalent of state-level work visas. | ||
| Those have not been blue-state initiatives, according to the stereotype. | ||
| A lot of them have been red-state initiatives. | ||
| It was Republicans in Utah that passed such a law. | ||
| And it was the Democratic President Obama's Department of Justice that sued to block them from doing that. | ||
| This is not at all a stereotypical blue state kind of initiative. | ||
| And of course, the Conference of Mayors has repeatedly and by name endorsed the Heartland visa. | ||
| How about administratively feasible? | ||
| Well, as people often mention, Australia and Canada right now have systems of provincial sponsorship. | ||
| Canada has a lot of devolved authority to local levels, reflecting its history of francophones versus anglophones. | ||
| Not just provincial sponsorship across the whole country, but it actually has a separate work visa just for four Atlantic provinces that have had especially acute demographic decline. | ||
| Australia has a regional sponsorship program both for migrants who don't have a sponsor, who just have a desirable occupation and no employer sponsor, and a separate program for people who have a job offer and an employer sponsor. | ||
| And not just the often mentioned Canada and Australia, but Switzerland, Germany, Belgium have respectively different system level and regional level Autonomy in the regulation of work-based and humanitarian immigration. | ||
| These are things which are working and are generally well regarded in all five of those countries right now today. | ||
| And of course, in U.S. history, we have many examples of devolution of things that were once uniformly considered to be exclusive, uniform, federal, nationwide regulations to state-level control, local level control. | ||
| I'm listed a few here, but there are many more. | ||
| Alcohol in 1933 with the end of prohibition, the Clean Air Act was once a uniform nationwide set of standards in 1967 that was amended to allow California and 16 other states to set their own standards. | ||
| The speed limit in 1995, when I was a kid, there was only one nationwide speed limit. | ||
| That was changed. | ||
| Welfare reform in 1996 allowed states to set different criteria for eligibility that had once been uniform nationwide. | ||
| All of these things were done while retaining federal supremacy and capturing more of the benefits of local control. | ||
| These are things which are administratively feasible. | ||
| There's supposed to be an emoji there, but we'll have to imagine that. | ||
| That was a handshake emoji reflecting the many points of agreement of these two proposals. | ||
| Both of them have a lot of high decentralization in them. | ||
| They are not just state-level proposals. | ||
| They are local areas, county-level in the case of the Hardland visa, or even city-level in the case of the community partnership visa. | ||
| They are both double-opt-in proposals, so migrants are not being sent somewhere they don't want to live. | ||
| Communities are not being sent migrants they don't want. | ||
| They reflect any sector and year-round work. | ||
| One of the highly, highly damaging and constraining features of our current employment-based visa system is that it's mostly seasonal and it's only for a few sectors. | ||
| And even large sectors that desperately need workers, like the entire dairy industry, the entire elder care industry, have access to nothing. | ||
| These visas are for any sector and they're for year-round work because these demographic changes are not seasonal and they're not temporary. | ||
| They both have short renewable terms, three or five years, depending on the proposal. | ||
| They both cover a similar, even though they cover quite different geographic areas, when you add up the population living in those areas, it turns out to be almost the same. | ||
| It's 18 or 19% of the population has access to these visas. | ||
| Well, it gave you one of the hands, but not the other one. | ||
| Those are hands punching each other, indicating the areas of disagreement. | ||
| The most fundamental one, if I had to just say it in one sentence, is that the hardland visas approach is more restrictive on skills, but less on the area of the country that has access. | ||
| The community partnership visas is less restrictive on skills, but more restrictive on the area of the country that has access. | ||
| So that's a fundamental trade-off that they're taking two different positions on. | ||
| This is reflecting now the specific differences between the proposals. | ||
| And this is not the Manchin and Young bill. | ||
| This is the Hardland Visa proposal as it's written in EIG's publication. | ||
| On education, the Hardland Visas proposal is for college workers and above. | ||
| The community partnership proposal is for whatever skills the community wants. | ||
| The Hardland Visas proposal requires a job offer. | ||
| The Community Partnership proposal allows migrants to seek a job once in the community. | ||
| The Hardland Visas proposal, as written, against not in that legislation, with a floor of 100,000 workers, minimum of 100,000 workers. | ||
| That might sound like a lot until you think about the total dependence of all labor force growth in America right now, not at some future point, on immigration. | ||
| Again, without immigrants, we're losing one million workers permanently every year today, right now. | ||
| And then the community partnership visa doesn't have an explicit cap or quota, but mentions the number 66,000 as a reference point. | ||
| That's the H2B visa, a statutory quota for the H2B visa right now. | ||
| As I mentioned, the number of areas in the Heartland Visa proposal is somewhat broader. | ||
| It's about 1,700 counties, the community partnership visa, 942 counties, partly reflecting the fact that some of the least dynamic and most troubled counties are actually left out deliberately of the community partnership visa, as Christina mentioned. | ||
| And another key difference is that in the Heartland Visa, you have to live in the sponsoring area, but you can work anywhere, including maybe remotely for an employer across the country. | ||
| In the community partnership visa, you have to work in the commuting zone, which is near and around the place that's sponsoring you. | ||
| If I had to pick as an opinion which of these wins, neither of them wins, I like, sorry, Adam, I like different aspects of both of them. | ||
| The community partnership approach of inviting skills as needed really strikes me as a better choice. | ||
| In that, remember that we're having, this is a double opt-in proposal. | ||
| If what a community says it needs is seafood packers and elder care workers, why would we restrict them to only workers doing college work that requires a college degree? | ||
| Nobody's going to be sending them any low-skilled workers that they don't want. | ||
| The number could be debated. | ||
| As I said, I think any numbers should be set in consciousness of the magnitude of the challenge. | ||
| The 66,000 number for the H-2B visa was set 35 years ago in a very different economy, and again, at a time of demographic ascent in America. | ||
| So I would not tend to use that as a reference point for the kind of numbers that are needed, but I know it's difficult to get consensus in a diverse group of people. | ||
| For the areas, I like better the Heartland Visa approach in that, yes, it's a good idea. | ||
| I like how carefully you've thought through the ability of local areas to absorb migrants, and should we make ineligible places that are the least dynamic and are the least populated. | ||
| But again, given that this is a double opt-in proposal, nobody's going to be sending some of the poorest and least dynamic areas of the country migrants they don't want. | ||
| If they say they want them, why do we need to protect them from the government sending them anybody? | ||
| The government isn't going to be sending them anybody that they don't want. | ||
| And I think there are desirable features of either of these. | ||
| All of that said, either of them, a wholesale as it's written, would be just such a drastic and visionary improvement on what we've had so far that it would be just tremendous for the country and for all of our futures. | ||
| So thank you so much for proposing them. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Thank you, Michael. | ||
| And thank you, everyone. | ||
| Any comments about each other's proposals? | ||
| Beyond what's been... | ||
| Beyond what's been said. | ||
| Christina, maybe I can ask you, Adam, I think, implicitly said, you know, why is there no number in the community-based visa proposal? | ||
| Do you want to talk about that a little bit, maybe? | ||
| Why we haven't set what we think number should be. | ||
| I think that is because it's a difficult question to answer and is one of the design details that the group decided to leave ultimately up to debate and the policy process. | ||
| I do though think that we were all clear that the program can't be so small that it has no impact, but it can't be so large that it swamps existing streams of immigration unless we pair it with a reimagination of our system as a whole. | ||
| And within those two very open-ended parameters, there are lots of space for larger or smaller. | ||
| And so we decided to just compare it to an existing stream. | ||
| But your point is very well taken about that being something that's quite dated in its conception. | ||
| And I think in the realm of hundreds of thousands, seems like it fits the criteria that we discussed within the group. | ||
| So I think that is something where there's a lot of room for discussion. | ||
| And ultimately, even though our report lays out a number of design details, many of them are ones that could be negotiated over where there's room for discussion with other people who've proposed similar proposals to discern which is the best approach. | ||
| I do think that some of the features of the program which we share, the double opt-in feature, the renewability, the portability, and the path to a green card, those are things that seem essential. | ||
| And then much of the rest of it, I think we can debate. | ||
| Adam, something I was wondering about, you in the I guess in the bill version of the proposal, there's a lot of freedom for people to move to different parts of the heartland, I guess, as Hay would put it. | ||
| The population you guys are targeting is quite similar to the H-1B population, I think, if I understand correctly. | ||
| Of course, H-1B recipients are hyper-concentrated in a few places in the country. | ||
| Are you concerned that if your proposal were to become law, everyone would just move to Pittsburgh or whatever the most attractive place on the list is? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| So we have graduation criteria, essentially. | ||
| We wouldn't turn the program off overnight. | ||
| You use sort of slow-moving qualitative criteria about population growth. | ||
| But there is graduation criteria. | ||
| So if you have a long period of high population growth, you would lose access to the program. | ||
| Now, imagine if that does happen, right? | ||
| So I think probably like Buffalo is a great contender, Cleveland's a great contender, Pittsburgh's a great contender. | ||
| Imagine the world in which we invite in 50,000 ISCO immigrants and their families, and you push these post-industrial cities to new population peaks, to faster population growth in the country as a whole, and then they graduate. | ||
| That seems like a great world to be in, you know? | ||
| And then they graduate, and then the next sort of tier of desirable are the ones who benefit. | ||
| So I agree that is something that, however, the design of the program should account for that. | ||
| And it was much, when we did a 50,000 proposal, it was much easier to go with a national scheme like that than if we had been able to sell 200,000, 300,000, then that's when you need the sort of state-based quotas so that you don't have that. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Michael? | ||
| Just two things that came up. | ||
| I mean, you heard the perspective of an economist for me, but also of an American who has ties to these areas of three of your counties that qualify or places where my family home has been. | ||
| The idea that nobody wants to live there in Cascade County, Montana, or Montgomery County, Ohio is just really ridiculous. | ||
| Where migrants want to live systematically across U.S. history across the world is where previous migrants have gone. | ||
| And this is an opportunity to plant those seeds in parts of the country that need them. | ||
| And that will draw migrants to very desirable places. | ||
| And on the visa quota, as somebody who works on the H2B visa, I got curious one day. | ||
| 66,000, that's written into law since 1990, not 65, not 70, 66. | ||
| Who chose that number? | ||
| Where'd that number come from? | ||
| A friend of mine's mom was Ted Kenny's chief of staff. | ||
| So I call her up. | ||
| Where'd that number come from? | ||
| Oh gosh, I don't know. | ||
| Talk to Carl Hamp. | ||
| I emailed him. | ||
| He kindly answered and said, I'm not sure. | ||
| I talked to so-and-so. | ||
| Three networking steps later, I ended up with one of the octogenarian authors of the bill who told me, oh, it's simple. | ||
| We took the number of H-2B visas in the INS yearbook of 1989 and tripled it because, and here's the punchline, we were sure that would never be reached. | ||
| The country would never want more than that. | ||
| 35 years ago, that was kind of reasonable. | ||
| Now it's oversubscribed by several hundred percent in a totally different demographic, economic, technological situation. | ||
| That number is not a number that deserves to be a reference point right now. | ||
| We should be thinking from the ground up. | ||
| And I do think the decentralized nature of both of these programs means that it's possible that it can start small and grow if the interest is there, if it proves to be successful in some parts of the country. | ||
| And the key to having legislation that adapts is building in mechanisms so that any limit that gets imposed can be changed. | ||
| That's one of the problems we have in our existing systems that we have these old limits that cannot be changed. | ||
| And so I think we should think in terms of how you enable without new legislation the program to expand and you might start small and build in the possibility of growth depending on performance. | ||
| I want to say something about one of Michael's comments about why not let any community opt into whatever immigrants they want. | ||
| And I would say it's a little, it's not quite accurate to say it's just dual opt-in. | ||
| It's triple opt-in, right? | ||
| Because you have the county and you have the immigrant and you have the federal government. | ||
| And we need the federal government to opt into this program. | ||
| And I can tell you that both the political leaders and the voters are much, much more positive about skilled immigration. | ||
| And it is a federal decision. | ||
| How do we, you know, who gets to come here and who gets to become a citizen? | ||
| And that does impact all of us in the long run. | ||
| And so that's one argument against just saying, well, as long as they choose it, it must be beneficial. | ||
| The other one is we're talking about thousands of counties, 3,100 counties or something like that in total. | ||
| There's a lot of places where you have a small government, very sparse population, and like one big employer. | ||
| And just because the seafood manufacturing company in some 8,000 person county decides that they want an unlimited supply of low-skilled immigration does not guarantee that we have positive some policy happening. | ||
| So I think opting in is the right sort of decentralization. | ||
| I think allowing local governments to sort of design their whole policy wholesale is a little bit of a recipe for cronyism, especially when you're talking about small governments, low state capacity, lots of rural struggling areas. | ||
| Once all of the world's seafood packaging professionals have moved to that town, it'll graduate. | ||
| And so it will no longer be at this problem. | ||
| You've got to have the graduation criteria. | ||
| You've got to have it. | ||
| I do also, so one thing I want to say, which we haven't really touched upon it, I think this decentralized design actually fits in pretty nicely with the system as it exists in the sense that right now the U.S. gives a lot of responsibility to firms, families, universities. | ||
| And I think it makes sense to do the same thing with state and local governments. | ||
| It's quite a different direction from something you often hear, which is to have to give the federal government a much more important role in vetting through a point system or something like that, right? | ||
| That's much more centralized than what's being proposed here. | ||
| Yeah, I think what really matters is the centralization or decentralization, how robust is it to sort of gaming? | ||
| And immigration policy is like water. | ||
| Like the gaming of these systems is like water. | ||
| It will find a way to flow. | ||
| And so you reference employers and schools as playing a role in immigration systems. | ||
| In countries where we don't have well-designed systems, where they aren't incentive compatible, what you find is those systems get corrupted and you have schools that aren't real, jobs that aren't real, employers that aren't real. | ||
| And so I think you have to consider that when you're designing the system. | ||
| And it is one of the nice things about a sort of wage-based system. | ||
| It's very transparent. | ||
| It's very easy to check. | ||
| It doesn't take a ton of paperwork to find out is that a real company? | ||
| Are they really paying that person that real salary versus like a school? | ||
| Is this school handing out degrees that are what they say they are to this person in this occupation doing what they say they're doing? | ||
| So I think that whatever system you have, you've got to think about incentive compatibility, or you'll end up in a situation like Canada where they're getting a lot of blowback a few years later. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Let's take a couple of questions from the audience. | ||
| We have very bright lights. | ||
| I kind of disease you. | ||
| Otherwise, I have questions here. | ||
| Anyone in the room? | ||
| Arm? | ||
| Arm? | ||
| Yeah, let's go over there all the way in the back. | ||
| And then over. | ||
| Hi, Adam Khan, but Tesla, but I'm here in a personal capacity. | ||
| There's a lot of focus on skilled workers, but let's not forget to support a skilled company, you need unskilled workers as well. | ||
| So for a typical tech company of 1,000 workers, you need about 10 to 20% of unskilled workforce. | ||
| For a construction or a manufacturing company, you need about two to five workers per skilled worker. | ||
| So I think let's also talk about unskilled workforce. | ||
| And that has a flywheel effect when you have unskilled immigrants who are coming in and then their kids become skilled workers down the road. | ||
| So I think that's something to think about. | ||
| It's going to be very hard to attract people to Pittsburgh. | ||
| I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. | ||
| I left Dayton, Ohio for a reason. | ||
| When California exists, when New York exists, so I think you have to talk about how do we make these heartland communities more attractive to immigrants. | ||
| Hollywood played a big role in making LA, San Francisco, New York, you know, you think about shows like Sex in the City. | ||
| We need that kind of effort for heartland communities to attract immigrants as well. | ||
| On the skilled point, your initial point is well taken, and I think that one of the points of discussion in our group was recognizing the value of lots of forms of labor and work to the goal of revitalizing communities. | ||
| Because that was the impetus for our community partnership visa, because it came out of this larger commission on how to revitalize communities that are struggling. | ||
| Acknowledging the importance of different kinds of work that complement high-skilled immigration drove the ultimate decision to make it not a high-skilled visa program. | ||
| And what Michael points out about the need for elder care and the changing demographics also is one example to add to yours of forms of work that are absolutely essential to flourishing communities. | ||
| And so even though it might be easier to sell high-skilled immigration to some people and to some lawmakers, the bigger picture requires, I think, a bigger scope for the program. | ||
| So I don't want to be too critical about low-skill immigration. | ||
| I believe it's positive. | ||
| I believe in the sort of Smithian effects, the gains from specialization. | ||
| I think on average the impact of low-skill immigration on the median wage is positive. | ||
| But look at what the literature says here. | ||
| Look at what constitutes the divide in the literature. | ||
| You have the optimists like Giovanni Perry, I'm exaggerating a little bit here, saying high school immigration or low-skill immigration is great for this country. | ||
| The impact is like positive 4% on wages. | ||
| And you have people like George Borjas who say, like, no, no, it's terrible for the country. | ||
| The impact is negative 4%. | ||
| We're dealing with a range of like this to this. | ||
| In contrast, you look at estimates of the total share of innovation in the country that come from high-skilled immigrants from 1990 forward, it's like 36%. | ||
| That's not the kind of change that moves wages from a little below zero to a little above zero. | ||
| Those are transformative changes. | ||
| And so I do think that while we do have positive economic impacts, it's of a different kind of magnitude. | ||
| The other thing I would say is one of the defining features of the U.S. economy over the last few decades has been that the college wage premium goes higher and higher and higher. | ||
| Our economy is screaming to us that we aren't producing enough skilled workers relative to the demand for skilled work. | ||
| So that's a macro problem, and it's going to be true in struggling places as well. | ||
| Honestly, if you go to these struggling places, people who are exiting the labor force are the low-skilled workers. | ||
| If you look at China-shocked communities, it's not the high-skilled workers who stopped working, it's the low-skilled workers who stopped working. | ||
| And one of the ways you can make them better off is by bringing in high-skilled workers, and that has high spillovers. | ||
| You increase the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled. | ||
| That's beneficial for the community. | ||
| And I just don't think in those communities that the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled is a problem where you want to, they need to be tilted more towards the low-skilled so that you have enough health care workers or something like that. | ||
| That's not the nature of their problem. | ||
| Let's do a very quick question here. | ||
| By the way, in Adam's defense, I do think the children of high-skilled workers are more like high-skilled immigrants are more likely to be high-skilled themselves than the children of low-skilled workers. | ||
| But isn't that good? | ||
| No, no, I'm saying in your defense. | ||
| Right, and so the speaker's questioner's point, like he said that's a good thing, right? | ||
| But why is it a good thing that they're if what we need is more low-skilled workers, shouldn't we wish for their children to be low-skilled too as well? | ||
| I shouldn't have given you that opportunity. | ||
| What I didn't really understand, and maybe it's my question is off the mark, but what would happen if one of these plans went into effect to a place like Washington, D.C., which currently, I believe, gets a lot of immigration. | ||
| We wouldn't want to have immigrants not show up here. | ||
| I wouldn't want to lose the immigrants coming to my non-heartland community because suddenly they were all going to Pittsburgh instead of D.C. | ||
| I think the idea for both of these programs is that they would add to the existing programs. | ||
| And so I don't think that's a concern. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you could see how if there are political trade-offs that have to be made, and there are people who believe that this is a proposal that seems worth trying because of who it will benefit, that that might then lead to reducing other streams of immigration accordingly. | ||
| And then that would present the kind of problem that you're describing. | ||
| But within our group, and I believe this is part of your proposal as well, the idea is ultimately to create a new stream that adds to the existing and then to have a new green card category that adds to what we already have that would ultimately channel, people would channel into. | ||
| So it's additive. | ||
| But again, the politics of it might mean that hard choices would have to be. | ||
| We're going to do one final question from an online question. | ||
| What happens if a county that's opted in flips politically or sentiment changes and they opt out? | ||
| What happens to the immigrants? | ||
| Under our proposal, they can turn off the flow, but they can't kick out the people who are there. | ||
| Sort of take that risk as a community. | ||
| You make the commitment to that person. | ||
| It's implicit in our proposal as well. | ||
| At the renewal stage, there's a question of whether the community has to continue to buy into the renewal. | ||
| That's exactly the kind of design detail you would want to work out, and it's a good point. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you all very much. | ||
| Thank you all for coming. | ||
| Have a nice rest of the evening. | ||
| I think we have some wine and cheese outside until we can chat a little bit more there. | ||
| Thank you, guys. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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