>> now booktv on c-span2 is live coverage of the brooklyn festival. today's author scheduled includes chris hayes, while professor cheryl passion, the new yorker, national book award nominated author kathy o'neil, and recently named national book

award finalist. we are going to kick off today with a discussion on the immigrant experience. this is booktv live coverage of the brooklyn book festival.>> g >> good morning. welcome to the best law school in brooklyn. some of you get the punchline. being the only law school and the best and most vibrant and largest of the big apple the t greatest country on earth we've got that going for us. you hear a lot about divide these days but you also heard the brooklyn president talked

about for today may be the only divide that matters and that is america is basically only two groups of people. one is the group of people who live, work, study into the other is a pretty us who wish they could so we've got that going for us, too. on this day in late august, our law school welcomed a new class of students of 371 students pl plus, about 75 international students and they were old and bold with americans across the country at an event that was the totality, the day of the eclipse. people across the united states and our students and faculty gazed up with their safety glasses i hope and it was as if nature itself was conspiring to

bring us together if only for aa few hours. but that sense of unity and wonder why the meeting was very welcomed from the tumultuous events that continue to roil this country.of thi some of them are graduates from our law school, some of them are lawyers of the graduates arem lawyers but also lawyers are hoping for the cleanup and recovery from the devastation of hurricane from irma in florida and helping texas recover and also those in the caribbean. i know that's one of our most highly expected to speak martinez is unable to get out. he wasn't able to get to us. he will not be here but people have a wonderful substitute for his panel this afternoon.

meanwhile, we are returning to the things on our minds including white supremacists, neo-nazis march as in cities, north korea menacing the country and others in the pacific. we are worrying about immigrants and their future given the announcement of the decision from the white house and we are worried about other issues in terms of equal justice, peace, safety in our streets and also the rights of all americans including transgender individuals who serve the nation and the military. what do all of these events have to do with today's brooklyn book festival and the answer isthe aw everything. that is because throughout the history of mankind, knowledge,on

information and the freeommuni communications among young people has always been empowering, democratic use ofdet information and communication has been empowering industry critically important thing we dt in this country. once again in this country we are facing very basic questions the founders grappled with.ho how do we elect and govern and talk with each other and like the first panel here which is going to be very compelling how do we decide what we mean by either people and whether we mean to include immigrants or not.t. in other panels today in this courtroom you are going to hear about and get to engage on different critical issues facing our collective future, issues of unlawful assembly and free speech, the rights of all of our people, how t out to govern and

express ourselves how to reform that he was totally in theti political system so stay tuned in to get engaged, this is aa worthwhile program and i know i am looking forward to watching, observing, participating and following up and watching on c-span an and he parks the famo. i would be remiss to say that includes you all afterwards if you don't have them already purchased the author's books. they will be available in the plaza and also you will have an opportunity to have a word or two with our authors.ry gratitude to the brooklyn book festival for sponsoring this signature events every year this is now 12 brooklyn book festival and we are proud to be a part of it at brooklyn law school. thank you all very much. [applause] you ver thank you very much and i also

want to echo thanks for the invitation from the brooklynesta book festival and the law school for hosting the discussion and all of you to join us this morning both in person and watching from afar i think it's going to be a great discussion and a great panel. i am the executive director of the national immigration forum and while my book is not on the panel and i did a terrible job, i did write a book called there goes the neighborhood, but enough about me. our authors we are going to be hearing from our incredible people and they've written two books that i think are very different but also very similar because there are books about, stories about people in the places and going through their lives and one of the factors both positive and negative impact in the placeimpacting thr

lives. first is brooklyn's sunset park making a global immigrant neighborhood. i figure most of you know wherea that is not for those watching afar it is a little bit south of here. google maps helped me out there. it's a great book in that it ties together the factors impacting fast-changingin neighborhood from housing, regulations and zoning to banking to politics and there will be great to here as we go through the conversation. she has a long and impressive career, received an honorable mention from the associated collegiate planning and honored a book award in 2016 and is now working on a second book on chinese capital and rebuilding an immigrant new yorkers coming from new york university. the other is gabriel thompson

who edited chasing the harvest migrant workers in californiaigt agriculture having them myself born in santa cruz and raised since i was reading through the stories and interviews i could see the people he was talkings about in my own travels through the central coast. he's an independent journalist has written articles for "the new york times," slate, mother jones and many other publications. he's won he has won a number ofs including the sydney award. so two amazing people you're going to hear from you we will talk about a half an hour and take time for questions. let me start with you if you don't mind. give us a sense of why did you write this book of sunset park. >> thank you to the brooklyn book festival for inviting me to

speak about my sunset park book. the reason i wrote the book is twofold.hagr one is i grew up in the neighborhood. my parents moved to sunset parkp in 1974 which was near the height of the new york city fiscal crisis. we were one of the first chinese families in sunset park and my mother and father are immigrants and working to defeat thed in t typical immigrant niches. my dad was in a laundry and restaurant and my mom worked in manhattan chinatown's garment industry and the end line provided a direct link from the chinatown subway stations to th avenue in brooklyn. so during the time that i was growing up, i definitely

observed some very dramatic transformational changes in the neighborhood. i am an urban planner and i think is an urban planning graduate student, much of the literature if an any existed but immigrant neighborhoods tended to kind of emphasize its enclave qualities of self-sufficiencyf- and insularity and also that tht they're very ethnicallyy homogenous.no my experience is that it is one of the diverse neighborhoods in brooklyn even though eighth avenue and often times was referred to as the third satellite chinatown in new york city it's actually a majority'sj latino. historically puerto rican, butay increasingly mexican. in fact they are now the largest latino group in sunset park in

2013 and just on tuesday since e it led to the first to the new york city council and they are addressing the issues ofof the b environmental justice. i have to say that it's one of the best books i've read in terms of capturing how the neighborhood has been impactedsn by the broad range of factors that we all feel a. it's a 47 billion-dollar industry. it's hard to find an area in tht state where something isn'ttyouo

being grown. you go a mile south. i get lost often walking here so it's not specifically a kernrnpb county problem, but if they

cover more land than new york city, los angeles and sanit francisco combined you get the sense. it was wage theft which was aatg real issue. i would leave those interviews and think if that person was telling their own story about what mattered about their life coming from mexico to the u.s. we have a lot of other things

but that in fact they would have told a different story and so i would come back and blow up that small segment of their life. i did that over and over again and i think i came to the conclusion that cumulatively, almost all the articles that itm read presented them sort of at this big miserable downtrodden unhappy hyper exploitative people and they certainly face all sorts of challenges that i never did that many people heret not have faced.i left t but when i left those interviews that wasn't the sense i got from them and so i think one of the things i like most for me to step back from the page not knowing much about them i would ask an open-ended question into

these were three or four hour-long interviews and that's a lot for these folks to do that or they could talk about what mattered to them and so i think what emerges from the book is the chance for folks to invite 17 people into your living room who you probably might not know otherwise and sometimes if there is language barriers it can be pretty accessible to tell them what matters to them and howth they see their lives in theethe workplace and back in mexico and the decision to come here come the struggles they have and also the joy. if you don't understand that thebut theyoften take a lot of d even at times joy in their work

then you miss a big picture. coming out of the journalism that was an important school and it was surprising for me to see how rich the stories were when i wasn't trying to make sure they painted by then as. i want to kind of step back a little bit. the title of the panel is it's personal, not just policy. for us at the national immigration forum, we think that the debate isn't about politicss and policy but rather culture and values. how do you use the data to illustrate a story and gives a personal story to illustrate the data? i think both of you have done that in different ways than anyn of the particular books. so how do you strike that

balance to convey the point in the balance between the data and the stories? >> i think that we are expected to do more evidence-based research also some of my reviewers before the book was published said they wanted to hear more economic or fee so i tried to strike a balance given as a community stakeholder my dad still lives in sunset park and i am involved in that neighborhood.

one of the examples i can give is against gentrification. i think that we all know it when we see it but i think ultimately it's about the influx of capital and the interest of the real estate and capital and what a way to kind of document that besides getting the stories ofsh people's struggles making rent or the fact that the supermarket has been replaced by a supermarket where they catch up is to document the influx of the transnational capital and the kind of real estate development that is resulting in the neighborhood. so that is how i try to balance

this. >> there's a lot of facts in this book hopefully not too ma many. >> we are not against facts. >> the people who are in this book all have suffered really major crises that are endemic to farm workers in low-wage workers. there's a man named roberto whose 16-year-old son was working next to him and they refused to provide canopy is for shade its 150 degrees, his son passes out and is in a coma for a week and almost died. he then goes on to become a huge advocate for passing heaved regulations in the state in the day when.an

there's another woman that was sexually harassed and she has the courage to come forward after about a year launching a complete and worried she mightfi get fired and deported within three or four months she is fired and then deported and so it's not that these, then you can back up some of the current tests but this is not somethinge that just happened but it happens all over the place. th for me, what moves me into thinking people think differently it's seeing how they deal with them and how they work with them and the way in whichft it's the same way that it would affect my mom so it's not ans either or but it's a way to makw sure that people were able to see themselves in some way in

those stories so good for me if, i see a incredibly depressing fact sheet about how exploited farmworkers on to these who are, the feeling i get his powerlessness and when i interviewed farmworkers and after they've told me those stories, i don't walk away feeling like they feel powerless. i think that is important torstd understand is that it is much more complicated and just like we all love and hate part of our jobs farmworkers love and hate for their jobs and they are note that different. the dreams for their kids for a better life are pretty universal. i get the feeling from both books but they are very different approaches but almost in a more academic sense whether

it's the neighborhood overall for the individual story there is a sense of hope and inspiration and a path forward with that you talk about theset environmental justice. give us a sense of what that looks like and where you think this all goes.ou mig >> sunset park as some of you know is a waterfront neighborhood and at one point it had a infrastructure and was an important part of new york city's manufacturing and port economy.econom but since the 1950s with the start of the deindustrialization many of the factories have left and during the time that my family moved to sunset park in the 1970s the workingaterfr waterfront was kind of neglected.th

there were definitely structural lack of maintenance that went on and so it was a pretty desolate place.e. there were factories and the industrial waterfront is an important part of its new vision for the innovation economy and the industrial infrastructure is kind of these beautiful factory loft buildings and initially real estate developers were pitching it to the artists thatt were being priced out of neighborhoods so the waterfront

there were many working artists that were in those spaces but given new york city is kind of the center of the global capital and real estate development, there has been a lot of investors have purchaseded properties along the waterfront and renovate the space to accommodate the ecosystem which has defined modern manufacturins as part of the movement that's catered to the assumption and the desires of others of thee wealthy class and not the neighborhood folks, so i think that through certain points that have to deal with environmental issues along with waterfront

there are several fields into the expressway which is a multilane highway that cuts from the waterfront and thene neighborhood has had to deal with all of the particulates from this traffic congestion so the residents of sunset park kind of endured through the years in which it was neglected and did have these serious environmental hazards and now that the neighborhood is kind oo being rediscovered through the influx of all of this, the neighborhood is in fact improving.rove

they started on a shoestring if you could give a sense of those stories and did he have an impact in the world?

there were teachers of the. they worked hard a certain number of advantages other folks don't start growing his company into the operation.

there is another person that arrived not speaking very much spanish.

now it is an organization heed showed up. that's where he got to was limited by. we are going to open it up to questions asked also start thinking about your questions. what h we will ask you to do is yell them out and keep themks oh short. does that sound a plan that'snsp

whether you are in sunset park or the central valley, what are the three factors to keep in mind for the future to improve the quality of life for a game to farm worker or it is a long-term resident of sunset gabriel, let me park. >> it's hard not to talk about trump at this point. i'd be driving to visit focusing on the radio here about trump and the deportation. there's also this idea like he's too crazy to get elected and at the end of the interview there's

a number of undocumented and i ask them do you want me to useor your name or.se i said is that still the case and they said to a person i like to change my name. she runs the program at one of the corners in the country. it's 98% latino. they are getting really high quality child care to farmworkers but otherwise deposit to neighbors.

she had 200 people on the waiting list, the school was packed. as it was closed until further notice they didn't have enoughd. kids. you see in this area every one was in many ways retracting.rke it's too have stability so i think the question going forwa forward. but the way that it's impacting their daily lives and forces them to think about how they talk about this with their kids.

trying to balance how do you deal with this in a way that isn't going to totally stress. how much damage is going to be inflicted upon the groups that are pulling back from all the services although they need more of them they are there to make their lives easier. the neighborhoods in particular were working-class immigrant neighborhoods is a struggle to exist.

was the character andd affordability of the neighborhoods.nkt i think that these neighborhoods like sunset park or a testing ground.and its social and political inclusion and i think we also need to address going back to this policy question. many of these dynamics affect our daily lived experience as newnew yorkers and residents ofe neighborhoods trying to stay in the community. i think that we need to also address the issue of policy in particular economic policy.

it is a luxury development so i think that we need to address how we define the economic growth. i gave a presentation at the economic development corporation and asked how do we balance the city's need to grow andcommodat accommodate all of the people in this global city with the needs of the neighborhood. they think that the issue of xp and justice.

they are along the city to the multiracial and multiethnictirai neighborhoods. it's in terms of addressing the issues of shared concerns but it also has to do with representation and preserving the communities [inaudible]

[inaudible]

because of the inaction or the lack of capacity.ents? they make all this improvement ioffice improvement inhealth ano education [inaudible]

in my view it is the real facilitators they are undocumented and smarter than others and i think we need to talk about that. i think it applies to the urban environment gets not only the influx of the policy but also

capital. >> and not facilitating the things that could have easily been done. it had never been so in terms of the governments they are more desirable and immigrants are less desirable. certainly in terms of the influx of the national capital, one of the forms of this money is anala outcome of the 1990 immigration act which included the five employment categories of the type of workers that are needed or desired in the united states.

one of the categories is an investor categorinvestor categon fact if you invested 500,000 in an enterprise that would create ten jobs in the united states in the high unemployment area you know the members of your family and find the position of that category as employment-based category number five.at provisiw that provision was largely underutilized until the 2008 financial crisis when the developers didn't have access to the cheap capital they came to this program to set up regional centers to facilitate the flow of the immigrant investment.

i think we need to address thehe immigration policies and local impacts. i'm good at looking like i'm thinking. there is a pretty established pattern going back many years h which will have this push and pull and maybe that's through a government program or just looking the other way and as soon as it looks like things are tightening up than you have programthen you haveprograms lih pack and they are demonized and sent back. the picture of immigration in mexico and central america is

that there's a sort of schizophrenic policy that ebbs and flows with the economy or political leadership and how much they might be able to gain. that's the big picture we are all dealing with so that's big picture stuff that we all have to react to. i grew up in california and spend time driving through the area for much of my life.

so in your story, you're trying to present importantly the richness of the lives of the migrant workers. i'm wondering if there's a complementary view to the extent to which you didn't have more nuanced relationships with their workers, and connected with the bad and what you were sayinge what role do you think they are playing if any in the current immigration. does that affect them, i don'tte understand the his grandfather

had an original 40 acres andde have grounded into the biggest plum apricot store in the country. he was quoted in the times article about the growers in california having second thoughts about trump and it's going to devastate the agricultural industry. he grew up in one of these small towns. he speaks in his oral history.

it has the same schedule. he gets to see them in a way that is much more three-dimensional.

it's someone trying to remind folks who don't interact everyday.er it's an important part of the conversation going forward into folks that are successful businessman have done well forel themselves in those stories i've

had since then it's increasingly realized the workforce. this may come after people i worked with for decades. i think what gives me hope is that again as young people and in sunset park, it is our young

people that have the language facility to get to know each other to cross the racial and ethnic status boundaries. the students in that high school marched out of the school in the middle of the day and walked 6 miles to the agricultural fields to the district headquarters tuesda to say theyt

the teachers needed more pay and when you start spending time in the communities you see that there is real fear. they are inherently criminals and still sort of you talk to them to see they are doing a lot of stuff that doesn't make the news but points to this sense that they've talked through a

lot. please give the panelist a rouns of applause t scho

replacing them with schools operated by the best operators and bringing new schools and is watching these numbers, that kid is going to have a much better chance of being in a decent school. 60% of the kids the time of katrina went to school at the bottom 10% statewide on performance, mostly test scores. now 10% due just like the rest of the state. the point is there aren't too many bad schools left because they have a system that feeds them out. there are some.

it's far from perfect but better. a sort of static neighborhood-based school system in which most of the schools are.one many of the book is one ofur the most beloved and known historians, can you comment on the most recent elevated efforts to take down the national statutes? >> guest: i thought istatutes?gt was a complicated and emotionally chargeded i issue.

i think when the statue was built in memory of someone has a great show to do with whether or not it's something that ought tc come down. this touches to the heroes of the confederacy that were put up in the 1890s was at a time that racism is rampant in this south and people were being hanged by mobs. if a monumenthe monument was err someone like george washington owned slaves long before the civil war i would say no that'sj not how they felt about the subject then, it was very different. keep in mind the civil war was

fought on the principle that slavery had to stop, slavery was evil and those who fought against that were saying that it's all right, it can stay. that's very different. we lost more human beings than that for them any other thatat we've beebutwe've been involved. to ignore that, one side was right and the other is wrong is to live in a romanticism. i'm more concerned about thehe monuments and statues we have not raised. here we are in the nation's capitanationscapital and there't or anything in the honor of joht adams. we ought to think about the people for whom we should be

honoring for the most important and influential teachers in the country in every city we have and every town. they are doing the most important work of any of us and they have been doing it all along and they don't get enough credit. we don't celebrate them enough for what they do for our children and grandchildren and us conversations]