← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Linda Chavez. Linda was the highest ranking woman in the Reagan White House. She was a Republican nominee for Senate in Maryland, and she would have been Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush if not for a scandal that we discuss in this conversation. Linda described herself to me as the Forrest Gump of American politics, meaning that she has played a minor role in several major events, and that certainly seems to be true. For instance, she was at Watergate. Literally. She ran into one of the Watergate burglars while they were breaking into the DNC headquarters on June 17, 1972. And she tells the full story in our conversation. Immigration was the focus of this episode. Linda heard my recent episode with Lionel Shriver and she sent me some thoughtful pushbacks on various claims that I made, in particular about birthright citizenship. So I decided to just have her on and discuss those claims and the issue of immigration in general, which she has worked on for many decades. We also talk about the achievements and failures of the current Trump administration on immigration and much more. So without further ado, Linda Chavez. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at a coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time you're fine, but what if one day you come back and it's gone? Every time you connect to a public network, a cafe, a hotel, airport, your data isn't secure. Any hacker on the same network can steal your passwords, bank logins and credit card details. It doesn't take much. A clever 12 year old with cheap hardware could do it. Your data can sell for up to $1,000 on the dark web. ExpressVPN fixes that one button secure encrypted tunnel, and it works on every device rated number one by CNET and the Verge. And plans start at only3.49amonth. That's $3.49 a month. I interview a lot of people who prefer our conversations stay private, so I'm conscious of security in a way that most people aren't. At some point I just did the math. I'm on public networks constantly, traveling in airports, and I had zero protection at 12 cents a day. There's really no argument against a solution like this. Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com Coleman that's E-X P-R-E-S-S VPN.com Coleman to find out how you can get up to four extra months. That's ExpressVPN.com Coleman okay, Linda Chavez thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [02:46]
B
Great to be with you, Colman. Big fan.
- [02:49]
A
So, a few weeks ago, listeners will remember I had an episode with Lionel Shriver about her new novel about a family that accepts an illegal immigrant and chaos ensues due to their kind of over empathetic, naive worldview. That's a vast oversimplification, but people can go listen to that episode or better yet, read Lionel's book if they want. And you reached out to me with some, some thoughtful critiques and I looked into your background and your, your really impressive career and, and so I thought I'd just have you on the show and, and we could talk about many topics. But, you know, the first thing I want to say is it struck me, looking into your background, that the premise of Lionel's novel is actually something that you have lived.
- [03:44]
B
Absolutely.
- [03:45]
A
And had consequences from in a different way. So I don't want to preempt the story, but you accepted an illegal immigrant into your home. And can you talk about why you did that and what consequence it had for your. For your political career?
- [04:01]
B
Sure. So, yes, back in the early 1990s, I was asked by a friend if I would consider giving a place to live to a woman who, who was a friend of this man's housekeeper. She's a woman who had come from Guatemala, apparently escaping a very abusive relationship, ended up in the US Being promised a job. It didn't turn out that way. I think she was, for a time, in a shelter for women. And my friend asked me because he knew I had a history of taking in people. I had taken in Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s. I'd taken in other people sort of down on their luck over the years. And I had an extra bedroom. So I said, sure, why not? I took the woman in. I actually helped her find a job with someone in my neighborhood. I did not hire her because there is a law that says you cannot hire somebody illegally present in the United States. At the time, that law was pretty new. It was only about 4 or 5 years old. Nonetheless, I did help her. Helped her get enrolled in English classes. I helped her get driving lessons, taught her how to use the bus system. And she stayed with me for about a year. And then she was desperately lonely for her family, for her children. She had left, I believe it was two daughters behind. Didn't think a whole lot about that for a long time. Then in 2001, George W. Bush asked me to be Secretary of Labor. And that's when this story became public, because in the vetting process. Actually, the woman who hired this illegal immigrant neighbor of mine actually told the FBI, gee, you know, she had an illegal immigrant living with her. And I blame myself for not bringing this up with the transition team when I was interviewed for the job. I should have and I didn't. I hadn't broken any laws. There's nothing wrong, at least at the time. There was nothing illegal about giving refuge to somebody who happened not to be in the country illegally. But it was politically a problem. And so I ended up withdrawing my nomination to be Secretary of Labor and as a result went on to do lots of other things.
- [06:25]
A
So why would your neighbor tell that to the FBI?
- [06:29]
B
Well, she happened to be the sister of an ABC reporter, so that was one of the impetuses. But I think she was concerned that she was actually employing the woman and as a result of employing her, that she may have run afoul. She worked at the World bank at the time. I don't know what her motivations were, but she did come forward with a story. And as I say, I don't blame her as much as I blame myself. During the long vetting process, they ask you lots of questions. They asked me if I had ever employed anybody who was illegally in the country. Hadn't they asked me lots and lots of questions and I should have just been more forthcoming, I should have told them about it, and perhaps they would have decided not to nominate me. On the other hand, Governor Whitman, who is former governor of New Jersey, had actually employed, I believe it was two illegal immigrants, and she was nominated and managed to get through. I was controversial for lots of other reasons, Coleman. Mostly for my views on racial preferences, which I've opposed my entire life. And because I was head of the US Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan administration. I was often front page news and usually in a controversial way. So I should have known there was going to be opposition. I'd also been a Democrat at one time and became a Republican in order to support President Reagan. And that made the Democrats not really happy to see me in that position.
- [08:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, of all the reasons to not be. Not become Secretary of Labor, the idea that it was because you, out of presumably empathy, extended your home to someone who was having a tough time. To me, that it seems, well, it's depressing at minimum. Maybe. If nothing else, it speaks to the fact that people who are not easily characterizable as hardline conservative or hardline liberal end up having less leeway on. On everything because having not having not gone all in on One ideology or the other, you are more vulnerable in some way. Your career is an interesting case study in trying to find a reasonable middle path. You were, you were once a Democrat. You've advocated for and got into hot water for advocating English only education. And I want to ask you about that later. But you also clearly have, you don't have antipathy towards illegal immigrants that we see on the far corners of the right. Given that you have, it looks like, well, you've repeatedly sheltered immigrants in your home and at least in one case, an illegal immigrant. I'm curious, what did you think of Lionel Shriver's book, given that the inciting event of that novel is something you've actually lived in your life?
- [09:35]
B
Well, it was interesting because I think even in your discussion with her, you talked about the unlikelihood of somebody taking someone in. And there seemed to be a premise that only somebody was very naive and didn't understand it. So I listened to the book. I didn't read it. I listened to it on Audible, not my kind of book. I thought that the characters were a little flat. But, you know, this woman has sold a lot more books than I have. So I'm not going to be a critic here. I did think, though, and it was something that was said to me during my whole labor nomination, which was part of the reason people were attacking my story. Saturday Night Live did an episode, they basically suggested that I had kept this woman in slavery, was that Washington's not a place where people have a lot of empathy and certainly not on a personal level. So it was hard for people to believe. Why would you do this just simply out of the goodness of your heart? But I grew up in very difficult circumstances. I was quite poor growing up. I lived in a two room basement apartment for much of my growing up period. And when I say two room, I don't mean two bedrooms. I had siblings who were given up for adoption, siblings who died. My dad was a house painter. So I wasn't sort of the typical Reagan administration official. My background, I went to a state school. I didn't go to the Ivy League. And so I think I was an anomaly.
- [11:19]
A
Yeah. And you went from that background to become the, correct me if I'm wrong, the highest ranking woman in the Reagan administration.
- [11:27]
B
In the Reagan White House.
- [11:28]
A
Not in the Reagan White House.
- [11:29]
B
Right, right. Yeah. I was the highest ranking woman, you know, in those days. And this isn't ancient history. We're talking about the 1980s. Women did not have high positions in the White House. There was a role for someone called the Director of Public Liaison, this was typically the only senior staff position for a woman in the White House. And I occupied that for President Reag after leaving the US Commission on Civil Rights. So, yeah, it was a very steep trajectory. Required a lot of hard work and a lot of battles on the way.
- [12:08]
A
Okay. There's two other aspects of your bio I just want to touch quickly because they're way too cool and interesting. Before we get on to the issues I want to talk to you about. One you can probably predict is that you ran into the Watergate burglars as they were robbing the Watergate Hotel. Can you tell that story?
- [12:28]
B
Yeah. I'm the Forrest Gump of. Of Washington politics. I was played minor roles in a lot of very important stories, but very minor. So I was working at the Democratic National Committee at the time, and it was in June, and I remember the day because it was right around my birthday, which is June 17, and I was coming out of the ladies room in the Watergate Hotel, which is where the Democratic National Committee was headquartered. And that restroom was right next to the stairwell, a stairwell that led up to Lawrence o' Brien's office. And he was, of course, the head of the dnc, and it was his office that the Watergate burglars broke into. Apparently, their intention was to come and tape open that stairwell door so that they could come back later in the evening and get up to the office. I interrupted that. And one of the burglars looked like he had seen a ghost when he literally bumped into me. And I noticed it primarily because I recognized him as a fellow Latino. He looked to me like a Hispanic. And I had actually been stood up for a meeting with somebody I didn't know, and I thought. Who was also Hispanic. And I thought, well, maybe that was that guy. But he looked so terrified when he saw me, and he rushed out. I then opened the newspaper Sunday morning to see that the burglary had taken place. I guess it was Friday night, and they'd been arrested. In the early morning hours of Saturday, I saw this guy's face. So I was interviewed by the FBI, and, you know, that's my part in history.
- [14:11]
A
That's. That's crazy. The other story from your background I thought was really interesting was when you ran for Senate. Was it in Maryland in the 80s?
- [14:21]
B
Yes. 1986.
- [14:24]
A
You were running amongst a field. By this time, you're a Republican, and you're running in a field of Republicans trying to get the nomination. And you take a pop quiz on television and what happens?
- [14:37]
B
Well, it was very interesting because not only was I running in the Republican primary with nine other people, I think there were ten of us altogether. But on the Democratic side there was this sitting congressman, Barbara Mikulski, who was on the Foreign Affairs Committee. There was a former governor who was running. So it was a stellar group. And one of the TV stations decided to come test us. And each of us was tested separately. None of us knew that was going to happen. And they asked a series of questions. Among them, who is the leader of the, the African National Congress in South Africa? Who's the prime minister of Israel, and who will the next prime minister be? It was a power sharing agreement at that time. What's a TOW missile? And have we ever sold any of them to the Saudis? Well, I had just come from the White House and I knew the answers to those questions, and they didn't strike me as particularly hard questions, but apparently no one else did. And so this catapulted me to the top of the list. Running for the Senate. It was front page news, not just in the Washington Post. It became a national story. And George Bush, Vice President George Bush at the time told me that he even saw the story when he was in Amman, Jordan, because the whole question about TOW missiles and the Prime Minister of Israel was news there. The fact that people, including a congresswoman who was on the Foreign Relations Committee, didn't know the answers, though, so that was big news.
- [16:23]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I would love to see this happen today with our politicians, but I, I'm worried that people actually wouldn't care. Like the fact that you passing that pop quiz and, and everyone else failing it catapulted you to the top of a Senate race or to the nomination, essentially in the Republican Party. I think it says something about how much has changed, because I just, I can't imagine that failing that pop quiz now would be important enough to the public or would cut through and would, would, would override the other variables that lead voters to be attracted to politicians. Absolutely.
- [17:06]
B
I mean, I venture to say the President of the United States might not be able to answer a list of similar questions today. It really does say something about what's happened to our politics. And I don't think it's a good thing. It's not that being able to answer a pop quiz ought to be the primary qualification to be senator, but you sort of expect that people know basic things, that they understand our Constitution, that they have some sense of our history, that they understand the separation of powers all of those things. And unfortunately, a lot of people who are in elected office don't know those things.
- [17:46]
A
Yeah. I mean, we've just, in the past few months, we've had Pam Bondi say that, you know, hate speech isn't free speech, implying that there is a hate speech exception to the First Amendment, which is it's First Amendment 101. That that's not the case, although it's a surprisingly common myth. You don't expect to hear it out of the attorney general.
- [18:10]
B
And then it's even worse than that because, you know, it's Pam Bondi on the Republican side. I mean, those who argued for a hate speech exception toward, for the First Amendment were primarily on the left in the past. And it's not something you sort of expect a conservative to buy into.
- [18:29]
A
Yeah. And then more recently, I, I forget which former Trump. Was it a former Trump national security adviser or per. Maybe it was lower ranking than that woman who said that Congress has no role in the Declaration of War, which again, is, it's Article one.
- [18:49]
B
Yeah.
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A
It's like constitutional. I'm hardly a scholar of the U.S. constitution, and I, I, you know, I know that. So it does, it does seem like I don't know exactly what has degraded in our political culture. Maybe it's the fact that it's no longer a culture mediated by newspaper and, and written text so much as by viral clip and that somehow degrades the quality of conversations or the quality. The qualities required to cut through now are more TV qualities, not qualities that have to translate to the written page. That's at least one thing that might account for it.
- [19:36]
B
Well, I think that it starts not just in the home, but in the schools. And one of the many hats I wear, I serve on a number of boards. So one of the boards I serve on is the Jack Miller center, which is known here at the Free Press because they sponsor the Book Review Shiloh Brooks book podcast. And one of the things we advocate for is the teaching of our founding documents, acquainting students with the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and to learn about American history and to learn about our government. And I think that's really missing in a lot of schools this day. And it's not just at the elementary secondary level. It's missing in colleges. Colleges are not as involved in teaching American history. And when they do teach American history, it's often a kind of grievance history that they teach. Not the true story of America, our warts and all, but also the great accomplishments that we've had.
- [20:44]
A
Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about some of the immigration positions you've taken over the course of your career. One is about assimilation. Assimilation. If you grow up in left wing or progressive intellectual circles, assimilation is actually seen as a racist concept. In other words, the idea that the government should encourage or in certain respects require immigrants to take on elements of the dominant native culture. Not native in the sense of indigenous, but of the country you're immigrating to. In other words, do you have to speak English to come to the United States? Do you have to speak Swedish to immigrate to Sweden or, you know, whatever country we're talking about? And more broadly, do you expect cultures to. To. Do you expect especially the children or grandchildren of immigrants to basically become culturally more or less the same as the country that they're immigrating to? That expectation is seen as the same as racism or white supremacy, but it's one that you have defended in your career. First of all, can you talk about why you don't think that's a racist expectation? And secondly, can you talk about what the state of assimilation is right now in America vis a vis our current public policy? Do we have a pro assimilationist public policy now or are there aspects you would want to change?
- [22:30]
B
Well, first of all, you alluded to the fact that I have been an advocate for broad scale immigration throughout my career. It goes back even before I started writing about it. I think I agree with Ronald Reagan, who said in his last speech at the Statue of Liberty that immigrants make America great. So I believe in immigration, but the fact is, immigration only works if you are able to assimilate the people who are immigrant. You don't need to know English in order to immigrate here. You do need to know English in order to become a United States citizen. It's actually a requirement. But you also need to learn English in order to succeed and to become part of the community. I mean, there is a reason why we have been so successful at assimilating people from all over the world. I mean, if you look at the history of immigrants, in the 19th century, we had huge numbers of immigrants coming from into the United States, from Germany, from Central Europe, from Ireland. Now, the Irish spoke English, but the others did not. In the early 20th century, you had people coming primarily from Southern and Eastern European, all speaking separate languages. They were able to succeed because they came, they learned English mostly in school. It wasn't always that the immigrants themselves learned English. Certainly the women often did not because they were in the home or if they worked. They were working with other immigrants. So they didn't always learn English, but their children did. And that has been part of the beauty of America's ability to turn people as. Again, as Ronald Reagan said, you can go to France or go to Germany, you won't become a Frenchman or a German. You come to the United States, you become an American. And part of that process is learning the English, learning the language of English. You mentioned earlier that I was in favor of English only teaching. It's not quite accurate. If you want to be bilingual in America and you come here speaking Spanish or German or Tagalog for that matter, in order to be bilingual, you have to learn English. And the problem was, in particularly the 1970s, there was a movement in, basically to keep immigrant children speaking and being taught in their native language. I thought that was a terrible disservice to those children because they would not succeed in America if they didn't learn English. So I was advocating for teaching English as quickly as possible. And frankly, the best way to do that is to have kind of submersion techniques where children spend most of the day learning in English.
- [25:30]
A
Right. Well, that's. I mean, what's actually controversial about that? I mean, what was the argument on the other side? Because I don't think anyone doubts that full immersion is the quickest way to learn a language. That's. That's really, really hard to disagree with. So what was the argument on the other side of that?
- [25:47]
B
Well, it was really, you know, this was a time when we were celebrating multiculturalism, which I don't really believe in. I believe that we are a pluralist country. We have people come from many different place, but we have an American culture. And so on the left in particular, people wanted the immigrants who were coming here to hold on to their language, their culture, and their identity with their native land. That's a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for disaster for the individuals and for the country. If you want, as I say, if you want to be welcoming, if you want to have immigrants come here, the best way to succeed at that is to help them culturally acculturate and assimilate to the American mainstream. If you want to erect barriers and have people not want immigrants here, then keep them functioning in their own language, have them segregated, living in their own communities, have them identifying only with the country of their birth. That's a recipe for actually restricting immigration, because you're going to have a huge backlash if you do that.
- [27:02]
A
So I remember from Brian Kaplan's book Open Borders where he is actually making the case for Open Borders effectively. And it was a very good book, by the way. I don't know if I am, I'm not for Open Borders, but he makes the case better than I've ever seen it made. And if you doubt that, you should actually just buy the book and read it. But I remember from that book he talks about, you know, the fact that for America, many immigrants are somewhat pre. Assimilated. Pre assimilated meaning, you know, whether they live in West Africa or South America or Mexico or, you know, Southeast Asia in the age of the Internet, they've been imbibing American movies, American music, American pop culture in, in many ways are a lot more pre assimilated to America than, you know, I am pre assimilated to say, China. Right. So it's not quite the same as immigration that, that other countries face. You know, when a Syrian goes to Sweden, he like, he probably just knows very little about Swedish culture. I, I know very little about Swedish culture and I've been there. But America is a, is a global juggernaut in terms of exporting its culture around the world. And one of Kaplan's arguments is that actually helps us with immigration because not only do people know more when they get, when they arrive here, they also are more. They have a higher desire to assimilate to the culture. And this leads to. One question is like, so you talked about 19th century immigration, early 20th century immigration and how it worked. Did it work? I mean, you could, you could argue it led to a massive backlash, which is why we closed the borders and effectively closed the borders almost in the early 1920s. There were lots of complaints about crime from, from immigrant groups, which led to tough on crime policies in places like New York. And, and so would you consider that a successful example of immigration or the type that led exactly to backlash?
- [29:25]
B
Well, there's always a backlash to immigration, I will tell you, at least in a certain portion of the population. It's almost human nature. We don't really know if we like people who look different from us, who have different customs than we do, may not speak our language. It's, there's not necessarily anything racist about it. Intuitively it can become racist. But there was a backlash to every large wave of immigrant groups. And you asked me about assimilation earlier and I'll talk about it in the context of the difference between earlier forms of assimilation and current assimilation. I think you hit the nail on the head when you suggested in some ways assimilating now is the easier than it has ever been because of our exposure to American culture, because we have virtual cultural hegemony, certainly in terms of pop culture throughout the world. And so people are continuing to assimilate. We did have periods where people, as I say, I mentioned earlier, the mothers didn't always learn to speak English, but the kids went to school and they learned English. The same thing is happening today. And there is a difference between today and previous generations in that a huge portion of the people coming to the United States come from Latin America and speak one language, Spanish. And so in the past, in the early 20th century, people were coming speaking Yiddish and Italian and Greek and Spanish and, you know, dozens of other languages. And so having a common language, learning English, allowed them to communicate with each other. And now there are so many Spanish speakers coming that it is quite possible to live an isolated life and not necessarily learn English. So that's one of the barriers. But all of the studies that have been done suggest there is no difference between the assimilation rates today and the past. And if anything, people may be assimilating slightly faster now because of the proliferation of mass media, which is a tremendous avenue to learn a language. So assimilation is taking place. One of the reasons we don't necessarily recognize it is we have had this constant influx of newcomers. There's a difference between somebody who's been here five years and five days. By five years, you expect them to know a little English, and they mostly do five days, maybe not so much.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah. This was Brian Kaplan's other point is that if you just look at. For all the complaints about assimilation, if you look at the data on the children of Hispanic immigrants, the children speak English, and quite often the grandchildren don't even speak Spanish. I mean, that would be. I would be a case study of that. Like, I learned Spanish in school because I liked it. I would not have naturally learned Spanish, despite both my two parents being Puerto Rican and having weak English.
- [32:39]
B
Right, right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And in fact, you know, people see the name Chavez and assume, oh, you must be bilingual. No. Well, my family's been here a little bit longer. They came in the 1600s. So they did. By the middle of the 19th century, when New Mexico became part of the United, my ancestors were already speaking English. But, yeah, grandchildren of immigrants, by and large, not only do they speak English, but English may be not only their preferred language, but their only language. They don't retain that native language.
- [33:17]
A
So do you think English should be the official language?
- [33:21]
B
I advocated for that when I was the president of the U.S. english, I don't think it would be bad to have English as the official language. Lots of countries have languages as their official language. I don't think it would make a whole lot of difference in the way we lead our lives. We're always going to have to provide certain services in multiple languages, emergency services. You don't really want to live in a country where when you dial 911, if you don't speak English, you don't get any help. That's a danger not just to the individual, but to the society. If you're reporting a fire, for example, you want people there to be able to speak that language. So we're always going to have some services. But I do think it is absolutely important for all immigrants, and especially their children to learn to be at least proficient in spoken English.
- [34:24]
A
Okay, what do you make of the argument that immigrants, by definition, as if they're working class, they compete with working class Americans. And so there is a, you know, if politicians have a sort of fiduciary duty, as it were, to American citizens, they should restrict working class immigration because it brings down wages.
- [34:47]
B
Well, I know a lot about this because for a number of years I was a director on one of the largest chicken producers in the country, Pilgrim's Pride. We employed a lot of immigrants in that job. And it is absolutely true that those immigrants often replace native workers who had done the jobs for generations before. But there isn't really a one for one correlation here. It isn't that they replace that native worker and that person then ends up on welfare or destitute or whatever. Often it produces opportunities for that person to move up the economic ladder. And George Borjas is probably the most famous economist who's argued for the case that you're making that the competition between immigrants and the native born is to the disadvantage of the native born. Turns out that it's not quite right. What what really happens is there's competition between recent immigrants and immigrants who've been here a little bit longer. The native born, by and large, do not do the jobs that low skilled immigrants do. Working on a poultry line, for example, cleaning toilets in office buildings, taking care of babies, doing landscaping work. Those are jobs that are entry level jobs for many immigrants. And they will, over time will probably move up the economic ladder. But for sure their children will move up the economic ladder as they get more education. I don't think that's a good argument for restricting low skilled immigration. I would like our immigration system to be more based on the concept of skills, not just family reunification. As it is now. But we need people at both ends of the spectrum. We don't produce enough engineers or computer software people or doctors for that matter. And we don't produce enough people who are willing to take fairly low skilled jobs. So we ought to have a system that allows us to admit the people that we need. And by the way, we need about a million and a half to 2 million people every year legally if we are going to continue to grow as a nation and if we're going to continue to see our gross domestic product grow. The fact that we've had lower immigration in the last couple of years has not been good for our economy.
- [37:24]
A
Yeah. So what do you make of the Trump administration on immigration this term? I'll give you my own opinion first, which is that I was very happy to see that the border, the border crisis virtually overnight ended when Biden handed the keys over to Trump. I think that illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border is a disaster for a variety of reasons. First of all, the backlash, which is inevitable and justified, I think that that itself is, is a good reason. The idea that immigration isn't under democratic control, I think is, is a, it instigates political instability. Like when the voters don't feel that they have any control over who comes in the country. That anger is going to find a different outlet if it, if it can't find a democratic outlet. And then obviously there's like the first order problem of actually who is coming over. Do we, are we able to keep out elements of the criminal gangs that have made certain areas of, of northern Mexico almost uninhabitable? Like, we want to keep those elements out. They would have an economic incentive to come over in some way. We want to keep drugs out. We want to keep, we want to keep certain, certain people out. So there's all that. And I was very happy to see Trump put a stop to that. I was equally unhappy to see him send ICE into places like Minnesota with an apparent mandate to basically do whatever they felt was necessary to get every illegal immigrant out of ice, no matter how ugly the process was, no matter how much they antagonized the local population or trampled on actual, actual rights. The way I've seen ICE officers, you know, treat American protesters that are just filming them, for instance, like you have a right to film any police interaction peacefully and to take that as, as if you're being doxxed and then to then respond as if, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're being attacked as an officer is, to me, crazy. And, and, and Trump's. I do hold Trump responsible for the chaos he's unleashed there in terms of not training these officers enough, giving them, through his rhetoric and through his proxies through Department of Homeland Security, a sense of impunity. And so that's my overall take on Trump on immigration so far. I really want to find a middle ground where obviously we retain the right to deport illegal immigrants. We focus on those who have committed violent or other crimes here, and then we focus on having a border that is secure. So that's my take. What's your overall picture?
- [40:44]
B
Well, there's very little that you said that I disagree with. First of all, I think that the question of the border and securing the border is absolutely paramount and important. What happened in the last couple of years before Trump in the Biden administration was a disaster of enormous proportions. And you're absolutely right. I think that it sparked the kind of backlash that led to people saying mass deportation now because they were seeing the country literally being flooded. I mean, at one point, I mean, one of the years, I think it was 2.7 million people came into the country illegally. Now, by the way, they don't all stay. The peak number of illegal immigrants living in the country, the best estimates are about 14 million, and that was the highest in US history. It was higher than the previous peak, which was during The Clinton years, 1995 to 2000, when about 12 and a half million people lived here. But we do need to have. Have some say in who comes. I mean, we're a sovereign nation. Every nation has the right to say who gets to come and who gets to stay. The problem is that our laws are so outdated and so backward that they don't give us the opportunity to bring in people whom we need here. As I say, we need anywhere between 1.5 and 2 million people a year for just basically to renew us and to be able to take jobs that we need doing and that Americans either cannot do or are unwilling to do. But in order to do that, you have to have laws that make sense. And right now, our laws do not make sense. We have an asylum law that is entirely broken. Asylum is a good thing. As a country that has been humanitarian for most of our existence, we want to be able to give people asylum who truly need it, but they should be facing real persecution in their country, either because the country is persecuting them for their religious or their political beliefs, or the country is at war and they cannot remain there. But there ought to be ways to determine that. And unfortunately, our existing asylum law, which, by the way, the Democrats and the Republicans agreed to change that law right before the election. And the person who said, no, don't vote for that was Donald Trump, because he wanted to keep the immigration issue alive. So it was a disaster. We had people flooding in. We didn't know who they were, and we couldn't accommodate them. There weren't jobs. First of all, if you come over as an asylee, this is one of the things that I objected to Ms. Shriver's book was this notion that people ought to be working if they come here for asylum. Yeah, I agree. The problem is the law doesn't allow them to. You don't actually get a chance to work until you've been here. I think it's 180 days. It may even be longer now under Trump. So Trump, Trump managed to close the border. We have about a quarter of a million encounters now going on every year. That is the lowest in 50 years. And there's never gonna be nothing. It's never going to be zero. So that he did a good job on his overall policy, which is to restrict not just illegal immigration by deporting people and deporting people en masse rather than concentrating on criminals. People who have actually broken our laws once here, or people who are a danger or going to become a burden in some way to the country. They're just willy nilly going out and grabbing people off the streets who they think might be in the country illegally, who have brown skin or have an accent or are hanging around a Home Depot. That's a disaster. And they're doing it extrajudicially. In order to come into somebody's house, you need a warrant. And they are going into households where they suspect they're illegal immigrants without judicial warrants. That's just wrong. It violates the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. So they're going about it all wrong. And as a result, I think people are sort of waking up and seeing, gee, I didn't think Jose, who works down at my local restaurant, or Maria, who cleans my neighbor's house. I didn't think they were going to get them. I thought they were just going after the bad guys. So there's been a backlash and his policies are not very popular.
- [45:31]
A
Yeah, it's enormously shortsighted because if a Democrat wins almost two years from now, two and a half years from now, it's very possible the country may be so polarized that they just go back to the same Biden era policies that led to the border crisis to begin with. And we're on a kind of seesaw of extreme policies rather than finding the reasonable middle.
- [45:56]
B
We need legal immigration reform, but it takes a willingness of people to step across the aisle and to work together. We used to that we had proposed bills in the mid 2000, 2007, we had legislation. 2013, we had legislation proposed, but it became such a polarizing issue that it was never passed. And we got to get beyond that. We got to look at this rationally. We've got to do what's best for this country. And that means having a generous legal immigration program, but one that that does admit people legally, as opposed to just letting people cross the border.
- [46:35]
A
Okay, so I want to ask you this as well. From the perspective of progressive ideology, Trump's appeal to Hispanics has always been a paradox. In other words, if you're Hispanic, according to progressive identity politics, you're supposed to be very motivated by advancing your ethnic politics, broadly construed, so that if Trump says something like, you know, the people coming from Mexico, they're not bringing their best, they're criminals, they're rapists, et cetera. All the things that Trump has famously said about immigrants, that's supposed to be an animating issue for you, so that you'd expect Hispanics all to vote against Trump or to vote against Trump largely. In reality, what we've seen is that Trump's appeal with Hispanic has. Hispanics has always been pretty strong, and it's been growing over the three times that he's run for president. To some extent, that's true among African Americans as well, that it's been small but growing and much stronger than previous Republicans. So what do you make of that seeming paradox from the progressive point of view?
- [47:49]
B
Well, first of all, it's not a paradox to me. I wrote a book back in 1991, published a book called out of the Barrio Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. And in it, I describe the way in which Hispanics have been a natural constituency for conservative ideas. And in fact, Richard M. Nixon, in his reelection bid in 1972, won a third of all Mexican American votes. Ronald Reagan won almost half of Mexican and other Hispanic votes in his reelection in 1984. George W. Bush similarly won in the high 40s. So Hispanics have been voting Republican for a long time. And primarily they vote Republican because some of their social values are conservative, but also because particularly immigrants want economic opportunity. They want to be able to start a business, to be able to not to have to pay high taxes, not to be burdened by red tape. And the Republican Party has traditionally stood for that. When you saw those districts on the border areas in Texas that went largely Hispanic, that went for Donald Trump, they weren't voting for him based on his rhetoric. They were voting for him based on what they saw as a good economy pre Covid that he presided over. And so they were hoping, I think, that they were going to see that same kind of economy when he came back in. You're now seeing a turn on that because while immigration is not the single most important voting issue for Hispanic voters, I think economic issues are nonetheless the kind of anti immigration rhetoric. And what they've been seeing in terms of the mass deportation does frighten them because these are people they know. They may be family members. You have more than 4 million illegal immigrants are married to US citizens. So these are breaking up families in some cases. And many of them also have US Born children because of birthright citizenship.
- [50:06]
A
Fox News is now streaming live on Fox 1. When news breaks, we don't just report it. We go beyond the headlines to get the full story. Get live coverage in depth analysis and perspectives from the voices you trust all in one place. Whether you're at home or on the go. Stay connected to the stories shaping our world stream. Fox News on Fox 1 download today. So one of your thoughtful criticisms of my podcast with Lionel Shriver was when I said that, I said something like, you know, almost no country in the world has has birthright citizenship except America. And you point out to me that this isn't true. And I looked into it and you are definitely right. The reason that I came away with that impression is I think I was, whenever I was looking into that issue, I was looking at our peer countries that experience mass economic immigration. So I was thinking America, Western Europe, Australia. And I think it is true that none of those or almost none of those countries have a law, have law akin to the United States. And, and the great majority that do have some kind of birthright citizenship are largely in South America, in the Western
- [51:33]
B
Hemisphere, not just South America. Canada has it as well. Yeah. And it is a sort of new world phenomena. Although it came from England. England, the United Kingdom had birthright citizenship until 1983. And there's some historical reasons why I think it changed, in part having to do with Hong Kong and Hong Kong's relationship to the United Kingdom when it was given back to China. But be that as it may, birthright citizenship has been a part of this nation from its origins through the common law. And then in the 14th amendment, it was incorporated into the amendment.
- [52:21]
A
Yeah. So from my perspective, you know, so for, for instance, take the, the Second Amendment as, as, as, as an analogy, I've always thought it made a lot of sense that, you know, if you're talking about the Second Amendment, you're talking about a time where there was only muskets and in a time where you have AR15s, let's see what technology is like in a hundred years. You know, you, you really should revisit amendments based on how technology changes in ways that the framers of that amendment were very unlikely to have foreseen. And so with birthright citizenship, you know, whether, okay, we're talking about UK Common law. Okay, well, the United Kingdom's an island. And when, when, when common, when that common law developed, it was in a context where they couldn't have possibly foreseen 2 or 3 million immigrants coming over the pouring, pouring into the island in a single year, nor the phenomenon of anchor babies, that it could be a realistic strategy for a totally normal and understandable strategy for a woman who's pregnant to go over at a strategic time and anchor yourself in what is a much better country than the one that you're coming from. And so to me, it makes for the fact that we have birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment to be like. The argument that ends. The argument to me has made as little sense to me as the Second Amendment being the end of all arguments about gun regulation. And so I think that's the better version of the point that I wanted to make there to line up.
- [54:11]
B
Well, let me argue with you about that. So the 14th amendment was passed at a time of extraordinarily high immigration to the United States. Five and a half million immigrants were living in the United States at the time that the 14th Amendment was passed. That was in a nation of 31 million people. So it was one of the highest periods of immigration. And, and there are those who argue that the 14th Amendment was only about former slaves and ensuring that states could not pass laws that would restrict citizenship to people based on their race or former condition of slavery. In fact, there was a whole debate during the 14th Amendment consideration on the Senate floor about immigration and whether the children of immigrants were going to be given birthright citizenship. It was argued, and those who opposed birthright citizenship didn't win the argument. The people who claim that the 14th Amendment language that says that it's all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof somehow excludes the children of illegal immigrants. Well, of course, at the time of the 14th Amendment, we were an open borders country. We didn't have laws restricting immigration. People who got here basically were allowed to stay. It was only later in the 19th century when we started put in qualifications having to do with literacy, having to do with health, et cetera. But at the time the amendment was passed, basically you got here, you stepped foot on US Soil, and you were allowed to stay. So this was considered, and it was determined that the children of immigrants were in fact going to be given citizenship. And it was taken up not too long after, at the end of the 19th century, in a case called Wong Kim Ark, which was after the first restriction on immigration had been passed, the Chinese Exclusion act, the court again looked at this decision. And if Wong Kim Ark can be looked at in terms of his actual circumstances, by the time that case came to court, his parents had left the United States. They left after the Chinese Exclusion law and went back to China. Wong Kim Ark himself went back to China and lived there for a number of years before coming back. And it was only on the second time that he returned that he was denied entry. So this is not terribly unlike the situation of people illegally in the country. And it was determined that, in fact, Wong Kim Ark was entitled to birthright citizenship based on the fact that he was born in San Francisco to parents who were temporarily living in the United States. So I think the decision is a matter of law is closed. We will find out. The Supreme Court's considering this and is going to hand down a decision on the Trump executive order. Whether, as a matter of policy, we ought to rethink that, that I allow you to have whatever opinion you have and argue the case, but it's gonna take amending the Constitution, not just passing a law, and certainly not just signing an executive order, in my view.
- [57:47]
A
Right. Do you think it's a material difference or a distinction without a difference that the millions of immigrants we were getting in the 19th century were coming into Ellis island and giving their name and often changing their name and.
- [58:03]
B
But they weren't. They weren't. That was later. That was later. Ellis island was really later. No, they were just. They were showing up, they were coming by boat or across the Canadian or Mexican border into the United States. There was absolutely almost no restriction at all. I mean, we didn't question people. People who had immigrated from another country in some states were even allowed to vote. They didn't have to be naturalized citizens. They could just state their intention of naturalizing at some point to be allowed to vote in some elections. It was very loosey goosey back in the 19th century when it comes to immigration and what rights immigrants had.
- [58:50]
A
So what did you make of the controversy about the super bowl halftime show being in Spanish? I mean, there was a lot of funny memes because a lot of Spanish speakers actually also had no idea what Bad Bunny was saying because he's. He speaks.
- [59:06]
B
Right.
- [59:06]
A
Modern Puerto Rican slang.
- [59:08]
B
Right, right.
- [59:11]
A
Yeah, Boricua. Yeah, exactly. But what was your. What was your. And just to remind people, like, Republicans organized a contesting halftime show featuring Kid Rock. And it inspired, like, a lot more outrage and controversy than I would have ever expected. And I ended up mostly upset that our country's so culturally polarized that we can't just be easygoing about a Super bowl halftime show. That even that. That inspires such division and vitriol and feels so high stakes to people anyway. So what did you think of that?
- [59:53]
B
Well, I have to tell you, I did watch it. I didn't watch the super bowl, but I did watch the halftime. I felt an obligation to do so. I enjoyed the music. I am not fluent in Spanish, so I didn't understand most of the lyrics, but I liked the vibe, if you will. I like Latin music. I like, liked the dancing. I liked the way in which it portrayed communities. I thought that it was very family oriented. And now I'm told by some people that some of the lyrics of some of the songs may not have been the lyrics that were sung during the super bowl, but some of them were not really very family oriented. So there might have been people who objected on moral grounds, but I thought it was much ado about nothing. I mean, really, we have important issues in this country to deal with. And this was not. Not. Certainly not the. The hill I would have wanted to die on.
- [60:47]
A
Yeah. And I think. I mean, some people pointed out that a lot of America, a lot of the people angry about the super bowl wouldn't have been angry if, you know, a British citizen like Paul McCartney had played the Super Bowl. Right. It's like, is that American? I don't know. You can. You can make a lot of arguments.
- [61:03]
B
Rolling Stones do it one year. Am I wrong about that?
- [61:06]
A
That could be true.
- [61:07]
B
True. We've had a lot of foreign. And. And by the way, he's not Bad Bunny's not foreign. As, you know, being Puerto Rican, you are a citizen by birth.
- [61:19]
A
Yep. And that's why my grandparents were able to come here in the 1950s. It is. It is, though I think it is sad that our, our culture has become so polarized that we can't, can't just relax and enjoy like a non politicized Super Bowl. I think there is, you know, it's, it's, it's really the, the, the, the number of stories I've had people telling me on my podcast. You know, I can't even go talk to my family. We argue every Thanksgiving, yada, yada, yada. I mean this, this is not what it was like to grow up in America before I was, you know, like 20 years old. This is not, it's just not what it was like. You could be, you could have light hearted political arguments and disagreements. You could, you would, you would never think twice about going on a date with someone who had different politics than you. And we, we really have, the character of the country has changed in that respect and I don't think it's a change that is for the better.
- [62:30]
B
I agree. I mean, I think we are, in many ways we are way too political. And even though we are so political, we sort of ignore some of the bigger issues. I mean, people fight about ridiculous things and I just, I find that distressing. I don't like the fact that you cannot sit down and break bread with somebody who voted for a different candidate for president. I mean, that's just nonsense sense. And it means that we're. If you can't do that, if you can't solve these problems, if you can't be civil to each other in families, in communities, how do you expect to have a civil society? I mean, it just doesn't work.
- [63:13]
A
So I wanted to ask you this earlier but forgot. Do you think that if you, I mean, suspend disbelief on what would have to be different for this theoretical scenario to pan out, but if you had sheltered an illegal immigrant or taken in illegal immigrant today, would that require you to step down from a similar nomination for office?
- [63:40]
B
Well, I don't know. Looking at this current cabinet, there are people who were confirmed who did a lot of things that I think were far more egregious than that. And it shouldn't. Look, look, I don't totally hold myself blameless in this. The question is what would have happened if I had told the people who were vetting me that I had done this? Would I have still been nominated? I don't know the answer to that. It's one of those unknowable questions. I do think that it's very hard to live life in the kind of fishbowl that you have to if you want to assume public office either by election or being appointed. We do want to have people who have basic integrity, we want to have people who are not going to have conflicts of interest, et cetera. But if we make every indiscretion, everything we've done or said, no matter how many years ago or how minor it was disqualification, I think you're going to eliminate a lot of good people.
- [64:52]
A
Right. Okay. Finally, I want to talk to you about affirmative action. You've been an opponent of affirmative action, as have I throughout my career, shorter than yours, though it may be. And I think we've hit on at least one of the same arguments against it, which is the mismatch problem. In my book, I wrote about a study from Duke University economists, little dated at this point, maybe 10 years, which found, very clever study found that black students admitted under lower standards, not just black students, but all students admitted under lower standards, including legacy admits or student athletes. They all ended up either with lower, much lower GPAs and lower graduation rates than normal, but also many of them actually transferred out of harder majors into easier majors. And this had the effect of hiding the lower graduation rates because in many cases you see similar graduation rates. But it's because the 18 year old black kid who went in wanting to be an engineer found he was in the bottom 5% of every class because he's mismatched with the, with, with his peers, ends up switching to a liberal arts major where he can basically survive. And that's also, you know, that that was hidden in a lot of statistics on affirmative action, but it's a real cost because that was someone who would have likely become an engineer had he gone to a, a, a still good school, but you know, not, not mit, right?
- [66:38]
B
Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. Coleman. So I founded the center for equal opportunity in 1995. And my whole goal in doing it was to take a look at true equal opportunity, colorblind equal opportunity. What happens when you give racial preference to this group or that group? Is it a benefit even to the so called beneficiaries? Does it help them? And I started it because I have a long history in this. You alluded to that. I actually started teaching in affirmative action programs when I was a young graduate student, first at the University of Colorado and then at ucla. And what I discovered was this was at the very advent of these programs was that they admitted a whole lot of students who could not meet the qualifications to get into either of those schools. And then at the University of Colorado, I actually helped devise a program to Teach them the basic skills that they had missed out in high school. And they were going to be in that program for an extra year, they were going to get extra help for the first year and then go on into the university. Didn't last long. It didn't last long for political reasons. People found that objectionable. They didn't like the students having to take remedial classes. So they abandoned that approach at ucla. They didn't even try that approach. They basically just sort of threw them in the mix. And what happened was these were students who couldn't compete. I had one couple in one of my classes at ucla. They happened to be Native American. They were married couple who read at about the fourth grade education level. You can't succeed at UCLA if you read at the fourth grade education level. These were hardworking people. They were people who, if they had been put into some remedial classes, if they had started at a community college, for example, they might have been able to succeed. Fact is, they couldn't succeed. And so my center for Equal Opportunity has done studies at 80 universities, and we've taken a look at what happens to students who are admitted with lower grades and test scores. And what you described is exactly right. They drop out, they move to another school, or they end up in majors that are not as remunerative. So we're not helping them. And there have actually been studies done once California got rid of racial preferences and admissions, and there was a kind of cascade effect. Students that might have gotten into Berkeley or UCLA ended up at Riverside or Santa Barbara in the UC system. Turns out they then graduated. And because they were competing with people who had similar backgrounds, the education that they were offered was basically geared towards their skill level and they succeeded. So we're not doing favors to black and brown students by bringing them into these situations. And I'm very thankful for the Students for Fair Admissions study against Harvard and University of North Carolina that basically found these programs unconstitutional.
- [69:47]
A
One thing I was surprised by, and I agree with you, I was happy about that Supreme Court decision. One thing that surprised me was the lack of outrage on the left at that decision compared to what I expected. I'm not saying there was no outrage, but my, if you had asked me in like 2021, okay, Supreme Court rules against affirmative action, how, how, how do people on the left react? I would have said there would have been something like a women's march, hundreds of thousands of people descending on cities all over the country. But really it was rather quiet. And I wondered about that. I wondered what that said about how people really felt about affirmative action. Because the statistic I always pull out on this issue is Thomas Espenshade or Epson Shade, sociologist at Princeton, you've probably heard of. He, he has repeated the, the fact, the surprising fact that only 1% of black 18 year olds in any given year get into college because of affirmative action. The other 99% either don't graduate high school, do graduate high school, but don't go to college, go to a state college or a college that doesn't, doesn't require affirmative action. And so that's almost everybody. And then there's a small elite that has a stake in affirmative action. And it turns out if you get rid of that policy, it's like it doesn't affect 99% of people. How are you going to get hundreds of thousands of people into the street when this has always actually been a policy that only a small elite cares about one way or the other? And it has been portrayed as if it's a great equalizer. Right. As if it's a policy for the masses of people of color that many of whom actually are poor and are struggling. Right. It's been talked about in that language, but it's just never been that.
- [72:03]
B
Well, it is very much a program aimed at the elite and not at the average person. One of the things it's done is that it has diminished the achievement of black and brown people who do succeed on their own because they sort of carry this affirmative action burden over their head. You know, well, you wouldn't have gotten that job if you hadn't been Mexican, or you wouldn't have gotten that job if you hadn't been black, or you wouldn't got that job if you hadn't been a woman. And so it casts suspicion, which is very, very bad. But I will say the one thing not to get too complacent in thinking that everything's great now that the Supreme Court has handed down the decision. There is a lot of indication, again, my center for Equal Opportunity studies this, that some universities are looking for proxies for race that they can use and substitute so that they're still planning on doing much of the same thing. And again, I think it'll fail. Letting people in with lower grades and lower test scores who cannot compete at the same level as their peers is not going to benefit either the institution or the students that you're aiming on helping.
- [73:18]
A
Yeah. Okay, that's the end of my questions for now. Thank you for doing this. And can I point my listeners in the direction of your think tank. Where can they find you and what work should they look at?
- [73:33]
B
I will give a couple of plugs here. One is for my center for Equal Opportunity. The website is ceousa.org and the other is I have my own podcast. I don't want to be competition here only, but I've got a podcast for the Renew Democracy initiative called Older, Wiser, and you can check that out as well.
- [73:54]
A
Thank you, Linda.
- [73:55]
B
Thank you.