justice under george w. bush. thank you for being here. next, carlos gutierrez. we're honored to have secretary gutierrez, our conference co-chair, with -- alongside governor jeb bush with us today. he's the 35th secretary of the united states department of commerce. currently, secretary gutierrez is vice chairman of institutional -- of the institutional client group at citigroup. before his government service, he was working with tony the tiger as chairman and ceo of the kellogg company. thank you for being here. adam putnam. adam serves as florida's commissioner of agriculture. in this capacity he leads a state agency with the mission to promote the sector and foster it and provide a safe and abundant food supply and manage the forest resources and safeguard

consumers. previously he served five terms in congress representing florida's 12th district in the u.s. house of representatives. thank you, commissioner putnam, for being here. last but certainly not leers, secretary spellings is with us. the eighth u.s. secretary of education, currently she's president and ceo of margaret spellings and company and a strategic adviser to the united states chamber of commerce where she's president for the u.s. forum for policy innovation. as secretary of education, she led the implementation of the historic no child left behind. of course, our moderator and chief, the extraordinary dr. doug is back. doug, the floor is all yours. enjoy the panel. >> all right. thank you. welcome to the panel on immigration in the work force, dispelling the myths. as we did this morning, i thought we'd let the panelists

open with a few introductory remarks. in an effort to avoid boredom i defer to local politics and let the floridian open the remarks plchl put numb. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be part of this panel and talk about an issue that has become one of the hottest, most emotional, most passionate issues. it's generated an awful lot of heat but not a whole lot of light. hopefully in separating the myths from the reality, we can build the consensus we need to have. there's always a lot of talk about a tough immigration policy. what we need is a smart immigration policy. an immigration policy that makes sense in the 21st century. from the ak culture you're's perspective, it's a $100 billion industry. it's the second biggest industry when times are good when tourism and construction is done. it takes over as number one. because of the dysfunction and

the broken approach in washington, individual states have attempted to move forward on their own, which is an extraordinarily -- it's an extraordinary mistake. we need one smart national immigration policy, not 50 not so smart immigration policies. it's important to the economy and our security. it's important to global competitiveness. we want to continue to be that beacon that south florida has become. so when the florida legislature or other individual legislatures but particular florida, when they talk about going their own way with immigration policy, it threatens our place in the world. that's not something arizona has to worry about. they don't have a place in the world, do they? florida has a sterling reputation as a place where we are the financial center for latin america. we are a destination for international tourism and

investment and international travel and trade. that's what's at stake and what's so important that we have this single national smart policy that brings us into line and allows us to continue to recruit and attract the type of human talents in the united states. >> thank you. secretary spellings. >> a couple of observations. first, i love this issue, because like education it's very emotional and everybody has their own personal experience with this issue like we do with the schools. i first got acquainted with the issue when i was a domestic policy adviser at the white house and doug and i worked together. prior to 9/11 president bush was hard at work and at creating and thinking through a much more rational market based sensible comprehensive solution. what we know for sure is our current system is a nightmare. it's a mess. it's bureaucratic and doesn't make any sense, it's arbitrary

and just a crazy quilt of policy-making. we went to work on that. obviously after 9/11 that was shelved. we in the bush administration reupped the issue in january of '04 with the guest worker program, and then, of course, carlos led the major effort. one of the things i observed about this issue is the more you know about t-the more obvious the solutions become. that's why we had folks like senators kennedy and salazar and mccain and kyl and president bush and a whole really wide swath of folks were working on this, seeing the way to this more sensible policy. i think the biggest myth in education is that tons and tons of illegal are in our schools that we're paying the bills for, and they're not able to succeed and so on and so forth. i will tell you that of the

five-plus million students in this country who have at least one parent who is illegal, 79% of those kids were born in the united states. they are u.s. zints like us. obviously, they have all the rights and responsibilities of u.s. citizenship. so i think, you know, our biggest problem, of course, in education is we're doing a woefully inadequate job with educating kids of all stripes, creeds and colors in our schools. but these kids that are in our schools are largely u.s. citizens. the other thing i would say quickly is about bilingual education and so-called immersion. as adam rightly mentioned it's a crazy quilt of state policy that governed that. likewise, in-state higher ed tuition. so we'll get into that more in the topic about the whys and wherefores of this. when i was secretary and worked

in the white house, i will tell you one thing i noticed. all of us are from state that is have a lot of experience with this, texas and florida. it's amazing to me how folks in other parts of the country don't understand what immigration really does mean to them. i used to say have you eaten anything today? have you stayed in a hotel? do you live in something that was built? so i think the this idea that it's just an isolated few states really is not the case. so i'm thrilled to be here, doug, and thank you for having me. >> we appreciate it. secretary goout rutierrez. >> thank you. i'll talk a little bit about the impact on the economy, and at a time when we're talking about competitiveness and how do we get more competitive against the rest of the world and china is rising and what are we going to do, one of our biggest advantages lies in demographics and lies in immigration.

every country in the world, every developed country in the world has a demographic problem. japan, of course, is a country that's getting old very quickly. even china is going to get home before it gets rich. russia's population declined last year. they actually declined. and throughout europe, italy, portug portugal, you name it, spain. spain. i remember when they used to have 12 kids. today the average family is not having enough to replace the people who are passing on. so this is a big problem for their economy. we grow our economy on the basis of two things. productivity and the number of people in the work force. if you don't have enough people in the work force, you're going to have to do a very good job on productivity to grow gdp. so the key thing is to have

enough people entering the work force that allows you to grow. we have the advantage that people want to come here, that we attract immigrants, that immigrants have built this country. so if we get this right, if this get this immigration policy right -- by the way, i agree with adam putnam. this has to be a national immigration strategy that includes legal, illegal, what are we doing about the fact we don't have enough nurses? the laws in agriculture are crazy. we're forcing people to either do something illegal, to go out of business, or to send your farm to mexico. that's what our law does to them. so it impacts job creation. they build more businesses than the average growth of small

businesses in the country. you go to new york and you watch the dominican republic community, and the number of businesses they have. come to miami, you and realize what ris panic americans have dpon for this country. so it is an economic i am pair active. if we get this right, forget china and india and japan. we'll have an advantage for a century. if we get it wrong, shame on us. this could be our biggest, our biggest competitive advantage for the next 100 years. >> fabulous. thank you. alex. >> i would echo a lot of what you've already heard. this is a critical issue, and an issue that currently leadership is unwilling to tackle. it's a complex issue, and we need individuals that are willing to use political capital

as president bush was willing to do to take this on and to find real sloekzs that address both the issue of illegal immigration and a pathway to legal immigration. when we talk about immigration, it's very charged emotionally, and for me it harkens back to president reagan. some of my earliest political memories were of president reagan. i was a little kid, and what i remember about him was his positivism. he had this vision of our nation was a shining city upon a hill. later on i went back, and i looked up what that meant. i found his farewell address, his final words to our nation from the oval office in january as he was about to leave his presidency. i brought them with me because i think they set a good teen for this issue. he said that's about all i have

to say about tonight except for one thing. the past few days i've been sitting at my window upstairs and i've thought a bit about the shining city upon the hill. he wrote it to describe the america he saw. what he imagined was important because he was an early grim and early freedom man. he journeyed here in a little wooden boat. like other pilgrims he was looking for a home that would be free. the reality is today we have people journeying here on little wooden boats or rafts made of tires tied together, and they're coming here for the exact same reason. because they're looking. there's a second side to that that we have to take on when we talk about immigration, and that's what happens when it happens illegally. i was the federal prosecutor in

miami for five years, and i had some experiences that are horrific. i had the parents of an 8-year-old boy sitting in my office. the boy had drown in a passage coming from cuba. they were in my office thanking me because they stayed in in nation, and they wanted to come by to say thank you because we're able to have a funeral mass for our son. we're not sure that the passage from cuba was worth his life. as a matter of fact, we're really confused right now. at least we have freedom. i had a case where a woman was raped repeatedly on her way over from haiti because the smugglers, the folks, the coyotes that brought her over abused her, and she allowed it because for her that was the price of passage to our nation.

so the costs of illegal immigration is not simply exclusion, but it's abuse of those individuals that are looking to our nation as beacons of freedom. we need to take it on. we need to figure out a way to address the illegal immigration and give everyone a pathway to get here legally in a transparent way and in a fair way. >> thank you very much. i want to remind those that are not not in the hall, you can send in questions via twitter to the #hln12. we look forward to that. before that i wanted to echo one of the things secretary gutierrez said, was that if we get this right we'll have an economic advantage for the next century. for too long immigration policy in the united states was viewed not as part of economic policy.

it was a tool of family reunification, an appropriate avenue for those seeking asylum and safety from persecution. it is actually at the core of our success as an economy, and it is one of the great costs of the fact that we have a broken immigration system that weren't going to prosper to the extend that we could. the dream of a prosperity in america has been at the root of all immigration and it's one of the sad ironies we yurntd cut it with the broken immigration system. i wanted to get thoughts from those on the panel about some of the pieces that come off them and become contentious and make it hard to get the job done. do we need a temporary worker program, for example. does it have to be part of immigration reform in the united states? >> from agriculture's perspective it's essential to have a temporary guest worker program. we have an issue at boath ends f

the work force. we continue to be a magnet and come here and go to our university system and get ph.d.s and masters and all kinds of skill sets we desperately need. as soon as they get their diploma, we kick them out of the country. that's dumb on one side of the work force equation. at the other side of the work force equation, if we're to be food secure, if we're going to be independent and not reliant on other countries for our food, particularly for our produce, things that tend to be harvested by hand, then we need a method for harvesting that through a temporary guest worker program. if in the absence of that then you will see $100 billion industry in florida go away and a larger industry than that go away and we're dependent on other countries for that supply of food.

a temporary program is essential because that is skilled labor, contrary to the myth at the peak of the economic boom only about 10% of of estimates, only 10% of those in the country illegal nrp ag labor. it tends to be focused on ag labor, but there are any number of other industries that we need to continue to refresh the work force in. maybe it's hospitality and hotels and construction or landscaping or nursing as the secretary mentioned. there are a number of gaps in our work force in america. those gaps existed when the unemployment rate was 4%, and those gaps exist when the unemployment rate is 10%. many of these gaps have really not tracked the other macroeconomic trends affecting the labor force. >> let me jump in with the education implications with this.

what we really all aim to want to work for is a market-based approach that makes sense based on the needs of the economy or work force whether it's nurses or engineers or folks in agriculture. so if we believe that we're in a global knowledge economy, which we do, then obviously education is the pathway to have that very skilled work force, whether it's technically or academically skilled, that's the -- that's how we're going to bridge this gap. that's why 12 states including texas, california, and new york, as you may have heard about texas, have systems that allow their immigrant populations to attend public higher education at in-state tuition levels. four states have banded outright. alabama, indiana, georgia and colorado. and the rest have what i call kind of a don't ask don't tell policy, which basically leaves

it up to institutions to sort of ferret this out or not. so i think, you know, we -- one of the things i'll learn from president bush is to always keep your eye on the result. what is it we want to have? we want a thriving economy. he we want human capital system that prepares folks to do that work. we want systems that set that up. we're doing anything but that right now. so it makes all the sense in the world to me that we educate kids to high levels as quickly as possible and in places like texas and florida and others that have large i am grammigran populations that you're smart about how quickly and effect efly you educated those kids. >> you know, we talk about immigration as a whole, and we generalize. where do you get the immigration from is a big question.

this being a hispanic group will understand that another advantage that the u.s. has is a border with latin america. and, therefore, immigrants who come to this country to work and to dream and to have a better life and to have the promise of a better future for their kids don't really come to threaten our way of life or -- you know, this thing about assimilation is cra crazy. hispanic asimile is another one of these buzz words, and i wish all kids a sssimilated the same way. frankly we need more than one

langua language. you can't have a questionnaire in spanish. why not? l country. we do business around the world. the chinese pick up a u.s. plan and they re we could pick up a chinese plan and we get busy. so we need more people to, you know -- [ applause ] >> one more thing. the other thing is in europe, they're having a hard time with immigration, hard time. because most of their immigration is coming from the middle east, and in some cases -- i'm not going to say in all cases -- but in some cases they have refused to assimilate.

in many cases they're not going to work because the people who are going are not of working age. older than working age. so they have a problem. japan has never had immigration, so where are they going to get it from? neither has china. we have immigration from latin america, and latins fit in here as good or better than anyone else. you know, the language, the faith, the western values, the family, it is what this country is. latins are what this country is, so that's another advantage is that we have a border with latin america, and i'll tell you, given latin america's growth and given the population growth in mexico, there is going to come a time -- maybe not in five years, but in 30 years, 40 years where mexico will say, sorry, but we

don't have any more people to send, because our population isn't growing fast enough, and we need them to stay here. so, again, it's just another reason for acting now because the future is so clear. you don't have to be a soot soothe sayer to see it coming. >> we're going to open up questions to the audience. given we have such an enormous range of problems, what is the one thing you would do for immigration? >> try to foster a rational conversation about this issue, what it means to everyone, what it means to our economy and our country. >> that's what i'm supposed to be doing. >> but i think it would be useful for the president of the united states -- god willing it will be ours -- to have an

educational effort around this thing, because we are talking past each other and we get down to the fence and all this other stuff, and it's just red herring nonsense, honestly, in many, many cases. >> totally agree. totally agree. immigration has been a political football, and the democrats have used it very cleverly, you know. every time there is an election coming, harry reid introduces a bill which he knows will never pass. but when it doesn't pass, he blames it on the republicans and the hispanic community who were promised are just being used. and they understand it. and they realize that they're being taken for a ride because they were promised a lot, the president has been in power for three years. the first two years he had both houses. nothing happened. he could have made it happen. nothing happened. i'm concerned about some of

these approaches -- speaker gingrich mentioned. well, comprehension doesn't work, so, therefore, piecemeal. the problem with the political football is precisely because we hand people piecemeal bills so that they can play with them and they can make immigrants have this great excitement about something, and all of a sudden they realize nothing, not even a vote, took place. so that's the trap with piecemeal. i happen to think governor romney, what he was talking about is, you know, immigration is the whole thing, is the 4.5 million people waiting to get in. what is our national immigration strategy, what is our policy as part of our kmcompetitiveness approach? within that, you'll eventually get to what do you do with the 12 million with the fence, with the 3 million who were born here? that's part of the big strategy. the problem is we start there

and we start with the most difficult part. a and very often we start with the most difficult part because we're just playing with it. we're using it for political tactics, and that's what one of the many things that bothers me, is that in the meantime, hispanics keep waiting for something, they keep being promised, but it's all about tactics and just keep your eye on it next time it comes up. i'm sure it's going to come up over the next 12 months. [ applause ] >> alex? >> i think that's absolutely right, and if there's one thing i could do, i would put a clock, a deadline on comprehensive immigration solutions. because i keep hearing, you know, bills introduced and they go nowhere. and as the secretary said, they're not meant to go anywhere, they're meant to -- it's just simply to rile up the motion. but we need a solution. and several individuals up here on the panel were involved in finding a solution several years

ago under president bush, and we need someone that's going to say, we have to enact comprehensive immigration solutions. part of that means figuring out what we do with all the individuals that are already in our nation. we need them here. they provide construction jobs, they provide agricultural jobs. we need to figure out a way to address that. we need to figure out a way to then have a pathway to further future legal immigration. and if we don't take it all at once, we're not going to solve it, because you can't solve part of it without solving the other part. you can't address immigration without answering what do you do with the individuals that are already in the united states? and so let's just get it done and let's get it done quickly. >> it requires leadership and courage, as has been said, and that begins at the top. and we just haven't had that

since president bush, somebody who is really willing to have the national conversation about what this means to the future of our country. and most members of congress understand it. they find reasons not to understand it, but intuitively, they get it. they know it's broken. it only takes a passing glance at the patchwork of who is in and who is out, who is in the express lane and who is not in the express lane to see that it's desperately in need of modernization. what we need first is that national leader who will facilitate that national conversation on the importance of this. if you deal with getting the legal path right and the temporary piece right and the visa program right and modernize this antiquated system that's as messed up as it was when they were trying to bring chinese in to build the railroad across the continent, i mean, it really is

that messed up, if you get that part right, the part who are already here takes care of itself. it really begins to take care of itself as you fix the early pieces on security and the legal pieces, you're now creating a natural magnet to get your status where it ought to be. but everybody who is interested in killing it in its infancy start with the hardest piece. >> we're going to go to the audience. if you have a question, raise your hand. we'll get you a microphone. please identify yourself and ask your question in the form of a question. right here. >> hi. my name is linda vasquez, and you've been talking about comprehension immigration law, which i presume you're talking about federal level enforcement