Immigration: Is There a Way Forward? - Sue and Jeff White Dialogues

Let's Find Common Ground

USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future

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5 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

CPF Director Bob Shrum joins immigration experts, Andrew Arthur, Steven Davis, Deisy del Real, Ed Goeas, and Ehsan Zaffar, for a discussion on the future of immigration policy. They discuss the current immigration system and policies, amnesty, immigrant's contribution to the U.S. economy, and immigration reforms possible in today’s political climate. We are immensely grateful to Sue and Jeff White for launching this nonpartisan dialogue series at USC.

Featuring:

Andrew Arthur: Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at Center for Immigration Studies
Steven Davis: Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Deisy del Real: International Migration Scholar; USC Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ed Goeas: Republican Pollster and Strategist, Spring 2025 Fellow; USC Center for the Political Future
Ehsan Zaffar: Professor at ASU’s College of Law; Executive Director, The Difference Engine; Civil Rights Attorney
Bob Shrum: Director, USC Center for the Political Future; Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics, USC Dornsife

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Let's Find Common Ground from the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California's Dornside College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.
0:15.3	I'm Bob Shrum, director of the center. And I'm Republican Mike Murphy, co-director of the Center. Our podcast brings together
0:23.1	America's leading politicians, strategists, journalists, and academics from across the
0:28.4	political spectrum for in-depth discussions where we respect each other and we respect the truth.
0:35.0	We hope you enjoy these conversations. I'm Bob Schrum, director of the
0:44.4	Center for the Political Future here at USC Dornseif. Welcome to the latest event in our program,
0:50.1	series and podcasts. Let's find common ground. Today's subject is now at the center of public debate.
0:56.3	Immigration is there a way forward. And let me thank Jeff and Sue White for making this program
1:01.3	possible. I will engage the panel for 50 minutes or an hour, and then we'll open this up to audience
1:07.9	questions. There was a time when I was teaching a course on the relationship
1:12.5	between policy and politics, when I taught an entire class on the history of immigration
1:18.8	policy in its political and policy fallouts. Let me just briefly say, just as background,
1:25.9	that for almost the first century and a half of the American Union,
1:30.1	with the shameful exception of the discrimination against certain groups, especially the Chinese,
1:35.8	coming to the U.S. was pretty much open to everybody, although the immigration came primarily
1:40.4	from Western and Northern Europe. In the 1920s, Congress enacted and the President signed
1:46.2	a racist immigration law that used national origin quotas to explicitly limit immigration from much of
1:54.4	the world. President Kennedy wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, called for reform,
1:59.5	and it was finally enacted the reform in 1965, signed in the law
2:04.8	by LBJ after Ted Kennedy led the fight for it in the Senate. Ronald Reagan, Kennedy, and others in the
2:11.2	House and Senate then worked together to pass an amnesty in 1986 that legalized millions of undocumented immigrants. Since then, with
2:21.7	minor exceptions, we have been largely deadlocked on this issue as the number of immigrants,
	...

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