these sanctions rolled back, and it's their choice whether they want to do what's necessary. >> what about crimea? how come we no longer hear crimea mentioned? is it something that we accepted as reality or does that continue to be a part of our conversation, that crimea should be returned rightfully? >> i mentioned crimea here in my opening. the secretary mentioned every time he speaks publicly in russia. we will maintain the sanctions which are significant, both u.s. and eu. >> when they took over crimea, there was a sense, and i thought it would be a boondoggle for the russian government. it would cost a lot of money to maintain the area. has it turned out, other than the geo strategic advantage, do we have a sense as to how many resources tie have to put in to maintain this as part of their national territory. >> it's our estimate that russia is spending billions of ruples trying to maintain its foothold

in crimea. the most concerning factor is they're fully militarizing crimea. dr. carpenter might want to speak to that. >> thank you. >> senator. >> well, i would just say that absolutely, that russia is militarizing crimea. they put in very sophisticated a2ad capabilities there since the start of the conflict. >> very good. senator murphy. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. welcome to both of you. thank you for taking so much time with us. i know that there's some conversation with senator perdue over the u.s./georgia bilateral relationship, but i wanted to explore that relationship in the context of the upcoming nato summit. we are hopeful that we will continue on track to offer membership to montenegro. i think they are ready, and it is an important signal that nato still has an open door policy for those that are ready and that in general trans-atlantic institutions are still open for

business despite the aggressive tactics of moscow. but the georgians are likely going to leave warsaw disappointed. and the question remains whether there is any future for georgia inside nato, while there is still a contest over these territories. what we know is putin's ambition, i don't think, what i believe is that putin's ambition is not to militarily own ukraine. he wants to continue clouded title over a portion of that country so that eventually there becomes such economic and political tur multithat a government is installed that is much more friendly to moscow's interests so it's in our interests to make it clear to the russians to the extent they're successful in ukraine or other places in the future of created clouded title over portions of pairatory, it doesn't prevent those

territories from being able to join trans-atlantic institutions. happy that both of you are involved in this book of business. so talk to me about what the future of georgia's potential nato membership is? i'm someone who supports at least a membership action plan for georgia. and is concerned that without the settlement of these territorial questions, georgia will forever be disappointed walking away from nato summit after nato summit. >> senator, i think we expected the war sawarsaw summit that th alliance will reiterate the message we had to georgia since 2008, regarding our expectations of membership. one of the things that we are seeking to do as an alliance for georgia is reorient nato georgia relations, u.s. georgia relations, in security terms,

away from simply preparing them to deploy with us in afghanistan oricose sove and much more on a focus on their homeland security needs, their national defense resilience, et cetera. we're working on that. the best antidote to russian pressure is a successful prosperous democratic georgia. that's why we work so hard with them on justice reform, on rule of law, on strong institutions, on market access. we are also encouraging georgia in its relationship with the european union as it implements the trade benefits of that to reach out and make it possible for them to have the benefits of the trade relationship with europe. so that some day those parts of georgia may see stronger benefit than what anything that is being offered by any external neighbor. but you're absolutely right that it's essential for us to

continue to be strong supporters of georgia's aspirations. >> let me actually ask a different question of you. dr. carter, you can answer this as well if you like. military assistance for military assistance for the ukrainians, there have been many members of the senate who have been disappointed at the level of military assistance we have provided. it is not a coincidence that the ukrainians have become much more effective at rebutting russian advances. and it is not a coincidence that this has happened during a time in which not withstanding a question over the future of javal and missiles we have been transported pretty important technology and training resources for the ukrainians. there's a success story to tell about the integration of the department of defense here and the ukrainian military which is part of the story as to why, while insufficient, the lines have been able to largely hold over a longer period of time.

can you talk to us about the success of the partnerships we have had with the ukrainian military? >> yes, absolutely. thank you, senator. so we have launched with ukraine a substantial training and equipping program. there's also an advisory component to this that is focused on defense reforms which is a fairly substantial effort. but the training equipping alone is hundreds of millions of dollars for this year. it's $335 million. and involves last year, we were focused on the national guard within the ministry of interior, we trained six companies. now we're training their conventional armed forces as well as special armed forces. all told by the time the training package is completed we will have trained close to 3,000 ukrainian troops. the results on the battlefield have been significant. a lot of the training process involved taking soldiers who have fought forming new units. we train them, primarily in

western ukraine, and we train them in realistic conditions. we run them through basic skills where they learn marksmanship and how to place artillery through more advanced techniques and send them as coherent units where they're able to defend their territory. one of the best examples as you referenced, senator, of ukraine being able to hold the line came a year ago in june when the separatists launched a massive assault on the town of marinka, and ukrainians had the capability to detect surveillance by the russian separatist combined teams and push back. resulting in significant casualties on the other side. and so i think our training and equipping program is very successful. we would like to be able to continue it, thanks to support from congress for this effort, usai, and we're very proud of the work that our folks are doing from the 173rd as well as from california national guard

to run this program. with regards to -- if i could tie this with regards to your earlier question about georgia, part of what we're trying to do now in georgia is to replicate some of the success we had with ukraine and to implement a training program that is not just focused on expeditionary operations that georgians perform in afghanistan, which are primarily counterinsurgency focused to training and equipping that is more focused on territorial defense because that is something that clearly georgia needs, as does ukraine after years of military mismanagement. >> thank you. >> absolutely. senator kaine. >> thank you, mr. chair. i'm going to ask you three questions, and i will submit these questions for the record for the second panel because i cannot stay to hear the answers to them. first, in your professional opinion, what would the likely effect on russian behavior be if the united states dramatically reduced or withdrew its support from nato?

>> as a former ambassador to na nato, i would say, senator, that that would be a strategic mistake for the united states. >> dr. carpenter? >> senator, i could think of no greater gift to russia and no greater strategic vulnerability for the united states than that course of action. >> second question, on the eve of the warsaw summit in early july, how concerned are european nato allies about a potential change in the u.s. level of support for nato? >> you know, obviously, allies

are watching the debate here in the united states with a lot of interest, as they always do. in our conversations, i think they find it very difficult to imagine that the united states would break a 70-year treaty commitment which has served us so well. >> dr. carpenter? >> senator, i will say that in my conversations and travels with my counterparts that i have heard significant concern, but i think a lot of our partners believe that we will remain committed members of nato. in fact, who play a leadership role in the alliance. >> in your professional opinion, is nato obsolete? >> nato is needed now more than ever. >> senator, i couldn't agree more. >> i don't have any or questions. thanks, mr. chair. >> i have no idea in what

context those questions were asked. but i would just follow up, and i do appreciate you asking those. i know we had madeleine albright here, we had people of various persuasions in here. obviously, the nato alliance is very important to us and very important to europe. as is hopefully t-tip over time where we end up economically tying the two sides of the ocean more closely together. what is it, on the other hand, we can do to leverage our nato allies, which let's face it, we're a global entity. 70% of the defense resources are spent by the united states. 30% by them. i realize we have other responsibilities around the world outside of nato, but what is it -- what is the real leverage point to get, for lack of a better word, those who are somewhat being laggards, if you

will, violating the treaty agreement, the 2% level of agreement. we keep wringing our hands, pressuring all of us on both sides of the aisle talk with our counterparts at munich and other places, but it just continues to be the case where we are the provider of security services. we appreciate so much what they did to help us, especially in afghanistan, which was a very unusual circumstance. we appreciate their commitment, but we still only have four countries that are honoring the monetary side of the treaty. >> senator, i would say that culmination of the kremlin and isil have motivated allies in a way that we hadn't seen for many years. as we head towards -- as you remember, at the wales summit, we got commitments from allies to reverse defense spending slide. 70% of allies are meeting those commitments. i think we'll be able to say at warsaw that most allies are now increasing their defense budgets and that within a few years

we'll have -- it will be in double digits on the number of allies who are at 2%. but we all have to continue to advocate and push, and we have to create structures in nato as we're trying to do as we head towards warsaw, where the burden sharing is built in as the u.s. is more evident in some countries, others are more evident in other countries as we did with afghanistan. so we're going to continue to work on that, but we very much value the advocacy that you all do when you're in europe, on a bipartisan basis. very important for europe to know that burden sharing is expected by all americans. >> thank you. dr. carpenter, do you wish to add to that? >> right now, we have five allies at 2%. a couple things. one, there is an additional pledge of 20% of defense spending spent on capital investments on equipment, which is very important to sustain the capabilities of the alliance going forward. it's important to accentuate that as well. we need to talk to allies about

this each and every day. but the other point i wanted to make is having just come from a trip to the western balkans where i met with some of our allies there, they also do provide troops to some of the nato missions that we run in afghanistan and other places, and so it is important to remember that in addition to their defense spending, that a lot of our allies are also contributing troops to the fight. >> thank you. you all have been outstanding witnesses. people have gained a lot from your knowledge and your willingness to be here. the record will close, if it will, on thursday at the end of the day. if you would respond to questions timely, i know you will. thank you for your service to our country and for being here to help us and with that, we'll move to the second panel. thank you both very much.

so, we thank our second panel for being here. i think you see that sometimes with our second panel, there's an exodus. what we have found that our second panels in many cases are more interesting and more enlightening. i'm not saying that's necessarily the case today, but we thank you both for being here. we have mr. david satter, a senior fellow from the hudson institute. thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. we have mr. vladimir kara-murza. i know you were at an earlier hearing we had this year, and all of us wanted to have you back. we thank you for making the effort to be here.

so with that, mr. satter, if you would begin with about five minutes, we would appreciate it. we'll move to mr. kara-murza. now it's on. good, thank you. >> thank you, senator. i'm very glad to be here. -- ine

a short, victorious war to boost the rating at that point of president yeltsin, who was suffering because of the aftereffects of privatization and the impoverishment of the population. the war proved to be neither short nor victorious. second chechen war was undertaken in order to guarantee the succession to yeltsin. this is one of the most important episodes of russian history. also one about which americans are very much in the dark. a terrorist act took place. it was used to justify a new war in chechnya. yeltsin -- putin, rather, who was very little known, became the prime minister. took charge of that war. on the strength of the successful prosecution of that war, was elected president.

later, the bombs that were placed began to appear very suspicious. a fifth bomb was found in the city outside of moscow, and the persons who put it in the bayment of that building turned out to be not chechen terrorists but actually agents of the fsb. the war broke out again. as a result of the events in ukraine, where a self-organizing anti-criminal revolution demonstrated to the russian people potentially how it might be possible to resist the kleptocratic authorities who were in charge in their own country. a massive, in effect, diversionary effort was made to distract russians from the true lessons of euro midan. and when the resistance of the

ukrainians proved greater than the russians expected, a new diversionary operation was launched in syria to distract the russian population from what was going on in ukraine. under these circumstances, one of the most important things that the united states can do is re-enforce the deterrence to using war in this manner, and also to make renewed efforts to reach the russian people about the true activities and motivations of their authorities. so that they're not just unwitting instruments in the hands of their leaders. but are in a position finally to make their leaders answer to them. this is the intellectual challenge that faces american policy, and over and above and

complementary to the challenge of strengthening the purely practical aspect of deterrence on which in fact european stability and world stability depend. >> thank you very much for that, mr. kara-murza. >> thank you very much, chairman corker, ranking member cardin, senator shaheen. thank you for holding this important hearing. >> senator markey stepped in, too. >> thank you for letting me testify before you. 25 years ago in a conference held in of all places, moscow, for the security and corporation of europe established as a principle that issues relating to democracy, human rights, and rule of law, and i quote, legitimate concern to all participating states, and to not belong exclusively to ininternal affairs of the state concerned.

to the membership of the council of europe, the russian federation has undertaken clear and binding commitments with respect to election standards, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and other important aspects of human rights. in all these principles also enshrined in the russian constitution. in its 60 years, nearly a full generation in power, vladimir putin's power has turned these principles into a dead election. today, elections serve as a ritual, with any meaningful opposition in most cases disqualified from the ballot and with voting mars by intimidation and fraud. not a single national election in russia has been assessed free and fair by the council of europe observers. and according to independent estimates, up to 14 million votes were stolen in favor of the ruling party in the most recent parliamentary election in twount 11, which was followed by the largest demonstrations under

vladimir putin's rule. more than 100,000 people went to the streets of moscow to protest against fraud. in preparations for this september's parliamentary vote are certainly not promising. with new restrictions imposed on campaigning and observation and with the establishment of a new national guard that will be allowed to use force and shoot without warning in the event of mass demonstrations after the election. for more than a decade not, the russian parliament has been devoid of genuine opposition. not a place for discussion in the unforgettable words of its own speaker. the saying applies to most media outlets. after shutting down independent television networks in the early years of putin's rule, the kremlin now controls all airwaves which it uses to rule against the outside world, primarily the u.s. and ukraine. as well as putin's political opponents at home who are denounced as traitors, foreign agents and enemies of russia. the few surviving pockets of

media independents are under pressure as we saw again recently with the editorial purchase of the rbc media group, following its coverage of the panama papers. the police, the prosecuting authorities, and the courts are used by the kremlin as tools for suppressing and punishing dissent. according to memorial, russia's most respected human right organization, there are currently 87 political prisoners in our country, a number which is already comparable with the late seveiate era. these include leftist politicians, the brother of an anti-corruption campaigner, opposition octoberivists who were jailed under a new law that targets individual street protests and the remaining hostage of the ukos case, and they also include pris prisoners of the case who came out to protest putin's inauguration. those who oppose him risk not

only their well being and their freedom, they also risk their lives. on the 27th of february of last year, boris nemsauv, form eer deputy prime minister was killed by five bullets in the back, as he walked home over a bridge. just 200 yards from the kremlin wall. a year on the investigation into his murder is stalling. although they have apprehended the alleged perpetrators, investigators have been unable to pursue the organizers and the mast masterminds. according to media reports, attempts to track the higher ups were personally vetoed by a general, the head of russia's investigative committee. and despite the obvious links between the murder suspect and kremlin appointed leader, he hasn't been formally questioned in the case. i can also speak to the dangers that face opposition activists in russia from personal experience. exactly one year ago in moscow,

i fell into a coma as a result of severe poisoning that led to multiple organ failure and was certainly intended to kill. in fact, doctors told my wife who is here today they estimated the chance of survival around 5%. i'm very fortunate and very happy to be here today and to be speaking and testifying before you. our friends in the west often ask how they can be helpful to the cause of human rights and democracy in russia. and the answer to this is very simple. please stay true to your values. we're not asking for your support. it is our task to fight for democracy and rule of law in our country. the only thing we ask from western leaders is that they stop supporting mr. putin by treating him as a respectable and worthy partner and by allowing mr. putin's cronies to use western countries as havens for their looted wealth. the u.s. has been a pioneer in putting a stop to this. nearly four years ago, this

congress passed the magnitsky act, a ground breaking law, which introduced personal responsibility for corruption, by prohibiting those who violate the rights of russian citizens and pillage the resources of russian citizens from traveling to the u.s. and using the u.s. financial system, and i would like to use this opportunity to thank you, senator cardin, for your leadership on this issue. testifying before this committee, in fact, in this very room, i was here with him on that day. in june 2013, boris nemsov called the mag nimsky ask, and i quote, the most pro-russian law in the history of any foreign parliament. it is my hope this law is implemented to its full extent without regard for rank or influence and that these rooks and these abusers get a clear message they will not be welcome here, and that would be the best possible way to support the cause of human rights in russia. thank you very much once again for the opportunity to testify. >> well, thank you both for your

testimony and certainly i appreciate the personal deep commitment you have and the personal experiences. we have a vote. i'm going to turn over to senator cardin for questions, and senator cardin, i think what i'll do is go vote so we can flip that. i want to thank you, though. i appreciate your mention of the magnitsky ask and i want to thank you senator cardin for his leadership for years on human rights issues but particularly in causing this to become law. thank you very much. >> let me first thank you the chairman for his incredible support in regards to this committee focusing on human rights issues. and let me thank you, mr mr. kara-murza for being here. i know it was a long trip from russia to come and visit. we thank that your wife is here, and we're thankful that you are healthy. we know the personal risk you have taken. let me just update you.

first, on the sergei munitsky global efforts that we're making so that the legislation we passed aimed toward russia can be used to help all countries protect the rights of their citizens. and you're absolutely right. the moscow document in 1990 made it very clear that the commitments to basic human rights are not an internal matter for a country but are legitimate interests of all the members of the osce. so the sergei magnitsky enforces that by saying if russia does not take action against the abusers, we're not going to give them the benefits of our country. it is, as i indicated in my opening statement, we have applied that numerous times in the united states against russians who have violated basic human rights and have not been held accountable by their government.

we believe it can be further used. today, the floor of the united states senate, by a unanimous consent, all 100 senators once again, second time, confirmed that the magnitsky law should be global. so we anticipate by the end of this congress that we will in fact have a global magnitsky law so that we can take our experience with russia and use it in other countries. as you know, russia's influence is also in other countries. it would be helpful. i want to drill down a little bit on your comments about personal safety. it's so important to put faces on issues. we saw that with sergei magnitsky who allowed us to pass a bill. otherwise when you talk about 50 people being in prison, it sorts of rolls off the international news stories pretty quickly. when you put a face to it and recognize what an individual has gone through, in your personal presence here today makes a huge

difference. and i thank you for bodoing tha. the elections are september. what type of opportunities do you believe opposition forces will have in russia, both directly participating in the elections and then expressing their views in regards to the parliamentary elections? will there be an opportunity for opposition participation? and you indicated that the protest after the 2011 was pretty embarrassing to russia. what do you anticipate will be done if the russian public believes these elections are not fair and want to express themselves? how will the government respond? >> thank you very much, senator cardin, for the question, and thank you also for your efforts on the global magnitsky act. i completely associate myself with what you said.

human rights are universal and the protection of human rights is universal so the responsibility for violating them should be universal too. on your question about the elengzs, as i mentioned, we haven't had a free and fair national election in russia in more than 16 years. if we take the gold standard of our election observation. and of course, we have no reason to believe that the upcoming parliamentary election on september 18th will be free and fair. in fact, we're seeing the preparations already. new restrictions imposed on election observers, new restrictions imposed on journalists who cover the elections, new restrictions on the campaign itself. this new national guard that is being prepared by the kremlin in the repeat of a protest that we saw in december 2011 and early 2012. and there's always this ongoing debate within the opposition whether we should even participate in the rigged and unfair elections. and i believe that, yes, we should, and my colleagues believe that yes, we should, because we can use even this

flawed and manipulated and rigged election process in order to help get our message across. get through that wall of propaganda and lies that's been built up by the regime. and also i think very importantly, to help this young generation of pro-democracy and civil society activists in our country to go through that process and gain the political experience they will need in the future because they will come when russia will have a free and fair election, and we have to start preparing for that, i think, now, and so the open russian movement, which i the honor of representing will be supporting candidates and individuals in the districts for the state across the country. it's a wide geography from st. petersburg across, and i'm going around the country and taking part in the campaign events and meeting with voters. was just in st. petersburg a few days ago, and you know, i'm seeing how effective and how necessary and how important that is. and i think it's also important

to mention that we have this opportunity to participate in this election this year thanks to boris nemsov, because two and a half years ago in 2013, he won a legislative seat in a region and according to russian law, a party that is represented in at least one of the regional legislatures in russia does not need to collect signatures in order to have access to the ballot. the putin regime usually uses the signatures as a filt toor get unwanted candidates off the ballot to disqualify them. because we have that opportunity, the people's freedom party, which was founded and led by boris, has in the opportunity, we will be on the ballot. our candidates will be on the ballot this september, and i think it's also -- it would be very important for our partners in the osc including the united states, to pay attention to what will be going on, to pay attention to a potential fraud to send a robaus monitoring mission as much as possible, and i know there will be an osc parliamentary session coming up in july.

it would be important to raise that issue that there should be a robust observation of the russian parliamentary election this september. if there are cases of fraud, they should be publicized and talked about and paid attention to because i think the only thing that this regime is afraid of is public reaction in russia. we saw how afraid they were in the mass protests in the wanter of 2011, 2012, and i think that we should -- the whole world should be watching closely as this september election approaches, especially as we're both mentioned today, election standards and human rights are not an internal affair. >> congressman smith and senator wicker will be leading a deligation in july. i will make sure that the russian election is part of our priorities for those discussions. and yes, we will participate within the osce on the monitoring. and we will make sure that we report accurately what happens in russia. we are concerned, though, that

knowing what happened in the previous election, that there could be some personal safety issues associated with participation in this election. do you have that concern? >> well, as you know, i had some reason to be worried about person safety. many of my colleagues face this risk on a daily basis, but i think those of us who are activists, leaders. public faces of the democratic opposition in russia, we have known for a long time that it's a dangers voekz to be in opposition to mr. putin's regime, but we have accepted that. we think, you know, frankly, that our country has no future under this regime. this regime is driving our country to a dead end. if we want to fight for our country's future, we have to accept those risks. i think there's nothing better this regime would like us to do than give up and run away. i don't think we should be giving them that pleasure.

>> you raise an almost frightening point that russia uses war for its domestic agenda more than -- not necessarily the importance of the battle itself, but the political significance or how it distracts from other issues. you anticipate that we might see more military action by russia to further its overall objectives, not so much the specific area where the military operations take place, but to further their domestic support for their broader goals? >> that's the key determinant. and that's the most important thing for the united states to keep in mind in anticipating possible russian aggression. that will motivate the russian authorities is not the desire to rebuild the soviet empire. they're actually, i think, indifferent to that.

they go to war to strengthen the hold on power of the small kleptocratic group which monopolizes the instruments of power and property in the country. if they feel threatened and they understand that the best way to consolidate their hold on power is to find a pretext for military aggression, they'll look for it. and that's why deterrence is so important. but not only deterrence in military terms but psychological deterrence. something which is very much neglected by the united states because we're -- we with great difficulty understand the cultural context in russia and the psychological context, what's really going on there. and all of the goodwill that we show, i was struck, in fact, by a statement of secretary kerry

recently when he said about secretary -- minister lavrov, that he lied to me to my face. and i was taken aback by that remark because i was surprised that kerry expected anything different. this is the indispensable background to policy decisions and awareness of the people with whom you're having -- with whom you're dealing. and this, i think, is what's missing. this is what has to be re-enfor re-enforced. this can also be an important element in deterrence. >> thank you for adding that. we're going to stay in brief recess until the chairman returns so that i can vote on the amendment that's pending on the floor of the senate. the committee will stay in brief recess.

gentlemen, it looks like you're having a nice conversation. >> please forgive us. >> i actually would like to just leave it open. i know you had five minutes for comments, and i very much appreciate your reference to the magnitsky agreement. or act.

i wonder if there's anything else from a personal standpoint you would like to share with us, why you're here. you heard the first two witnesses. from our professional standpoint. are there things that i know there were numbers of questions from committee members about things that we could be doing that we're not. are there observations that the two of you would have relative to additional pressure on russia, relative to what is happening internally, which is what most of your focus is here today? i know you didn't ask for help. i heard that in your testimony, but are there other things. i know you said remain true to our values, but on top of that, are there some additional activities we could be involved in? >> thank you for the question. also, thank you for your leadership on the global magnitsky ask which has been marked up by the committee is for senate resolution number 78,

which was dedicated to the memory of boris nemsov, and one of the points, task the u.s. government with the question of raising the investigation and the progress or the lack thereof in the investigation. every time they meet with the russian government counterparts, and that's important. thank you for this. on your question, i think first of all, it's very important to distinguish, and sometimes even informed commentators make this mistake. they use a shorthand by saying russia, when they actually mean is the putin regime and the kremlin and the behavior of the putin regime. as a russian citizen, that's a pretty important difference. i think these things should not be confused with each other. and the current regime, of course, is not the product of a democratic election. it's not the product of the free will of the russian people and it's important to bear this in mind. and on the question of what could be done, i think frankly a more robust and more active implementation of the magnitsky

act is the single most important thing that was mentioned in this regard. of course, this act targets not just those implicated on the magnitsky act itself, but section 4b widens its scope to other human rights abuses, and you know, there's been, i think, if i'm not mistaken, there has been 39 people added to the u.s. magnitsky list since the law came into force. but most of them have been low or mid-level human rights abuses. of course, they should be on the list, too, but as i mentioned, it's very important not to have any glass ceilings in terms of rank and influence. >> from your perspective, why do you think it's been mostly targeted towards low-level individuals? >> well, commenting on the motivations behind the u.s. administration's actions. i'm not an american. i'm a foreigner. i do understand that there are rigid criteria built into the

law itself so there has to be clear evidence. i think there frankly is clear evidence about very high-profile human rights abusers in the kremlin regimregime. there have been reports in the u.s. that people have been put on the classified part of the magnitsky act, and frankly, in my personal view, the most important aspect of this act is the public naming and shaming of human rights abusers. i see no reason why they should not be placed on the open list. in early 2014, when mr. nemsov came here for the last time, he had several meetings here on the hill with members of the leadership of both parties in both houses, and he suggested several names of high-profile human rights abusers in the putin regime that could be added to the list. one was the general. another was mr. chur ov, the now former head of the election commission who was responsible

for covering up the mass fraud in the 2011 and 2012 election cycle and earlier as well. i believe there were 13 names he suggested be put on the list, and so far, not a single one has been put on the list. a year ago, former russian prime minister and i came here and also had several meetings here on the hill. we suggested that the names of kremlin propaganda officials who call themselves journalists but who are not, they're state officials involved in effectively state-sponsored incitement against those who oppose mr. putin's regime, and we suggested that in particular those who are engaged in incitement against boris nemsov who called him a traitor, a foreign agent, an enemy of russia, who said he was fnlsed by the u.s., who said he would have welcomed nazi troops and i'm not making this up, these people responsible for incitement should be put on the sanction list. so far, not one of those has been put on the sanctions list. i really think that the most effective way, and frankly the

most principled and most honorable way to deal with those human rights abusers is to place them on that sanctions list, because the unique thing and the ground breaking thing about the magnitsky act is it was not sanctioning a country. they're not sanctioning russia. they're not sanctioning the russian government. these are sanctions against specific individuals, personally involved in human rights abuse and personally involved in corruption. and i think this is the way it should be done. >> let me ask you, your observation, when somebody is placed on the list, is it truly a significant punishment to them to be sanctioned in that manner? >> thank you. this is a very important question. and we can talk about many similarities that exist between the soviet regime and what we have in our country today. we have political prisoners, we have media censorship, lack of free and fair elections, and so on and so forth. but for all these similarities, there's also one important difference. that is that members of the soviet bureau do not hold their

bank accounts in the west, they do not send their kids to study in the west, they didn't buy real estate in the west. leaders of the current regime do that. and i think there's a double standard to this hypocrisy has to stop, and we certainly know from experience that when high-ranking human rights abusers are placed on the sanctions list, it has a very strong effect. i can give you one example. in 2007, when there was this whole controversy about the soviet war memorial in estonia, members of the pro-kremlin youth group engaged in a harassment campaign against the estonian ambassador to moscow. they were following her everywhere, trying to sabotage her press conferences, throwing things at her, shouting abuses. so the estonian government decided to impose visa sanctions on a man who was then the serving minister in mr. putin's government, minister for youth, and he was the leader of this group. he was placed on the visa ban

list. because estonia is a member of the agreement, this visa ban had a wide force. he could not travel to any shangen country, which is most of the european union. for nine years that have passed since then, the man has been desperately trying to get himself off that list, off the visa black list. for all those nine years, for all the other transgressions happening in our country, there hasn't been a single case of harassment against a foreign diplomat stationed in moscow. i think this is all we need to know about the effect and effectiveness of these types of personal targeted measures against the human rights abusers. >> do you want to add anything to it? >> hit the red button. >> i'm sorry. i think the future of russia depends -- i have been involved with russia for many years and have thought a great deal about it. i think the first priority, the danger of participating in elections which the regime

controls, although i'm not opposed to it, is that it gives legitimacy to the regime and actually under controlled circumstances, gives the impression to the population that what's taking place is a real that is what taking place is a real democratic process. this is the same dilemma people face. i faced it one time when i was receiving invitations to appear on russian television, that i did not want to take part in a performance that in fact was not honest and did not conform to normal ethical rules. but there is some value in taking part in these elections, as long as those who do so don't nurture illusions that this can change the regime. it can't. this is a process controlled by the regime. the regime will be changed in other ways. most important, in my view, requirement for russia's future

is something, a russian equivalent of the south african commission on truth and reconciliation. the 25 years of post-communist history are not well-understood. and unfortunately, the abuses began not with putin. putin is the hand-picked successor of boris yeltsin. they began with yeltsin. and the crimes began with yeltsin. they began with the massacre at the television tower in 1993, and the shelling of the russian parliament. the carpet bombing of grozny in 1995 in which it's estimated 20,000 people were killed, all of them, almost all of them civilians. now it appears that the 1996 elections in which yeltsin was, quote unquote, reelected, were falsified. and most important of all, the

circumstances under which putin became the new russian president. he became the president in the aftermath of the bombing of four apartment buildings in russia that terrified the entire country, galvanized support for a new and even more bloody war in chechnya, and created the conditions for putin, who had a 2% approval rating in the country, to become the national savior and the country's new preside president. when he took over as president, he brought with him his kgb/fsb entourage and they proceeded to eliminate what was left of the freedoms that had been tolerated under yeltsin. the precondition for putin's coming to power was the criminalization of russia under yeltsin, because only a provocation like the apartment

bombings could save such a kleptocratic regime as the one that was put in place by yeltsin, under conditions of formal democracy. this group that's now in power will do anything to hold onto power. but one of the most important instruments as their disposal is the ability to confuse the population about the population -- about the people's true interests and their true history. so the first requirement for russia's resurrection, in my view, is to clarify all of the historical episodes, the apartment bombings, the theater siege, the school massacre, in 2004, in which children and parents in a gymnasium who were held hostage by chechen

terrorists were attacked by russian troops with flame throwers and grenade launchers and burned alive. and of course the war, the wars in georgia and ukraine. only on the basis of a truly understanding of the country's history will it be possible to change the psychological state of the country, making it realistic to create a genuinely law-based system. and once that psychological and ethical basis exists, it's important for russia to have what it lost in 1918, when the bo bolsheviks created a real constitution, not the one created in the wake of the destruction of the russian

parliament in 1993 in order to suit the power requirements of yeltsin. under those circumstances, and with the understanding that those parts of the russian federation, including the caucuses, that wished to detach themselves and have an international existence, be given the right to do so. the conditions will then exist for russia to transform itself into a democratic country. it must be pointed out that as a result of 25 years of post-communist history, that russia has acquired an educated, sophisticated, worldly middle class for which this type of regime is absolutely inappropriate. and that process is going to continue, as globalization continues, and as people take advantage of the exposure to free information, which was denied them under the soviet

regime. >> we thank you both for being here. we will have a number of questions, i know, coming from people who weren't able to be here for the second panel. and we'll try to have all those in by the close of business on thursday. if y'all could respond fairly quickly to those. we know we don't have the same staff that the previous two witnesses had. but we thank you for the light you've shed here today, for your personal experiences, for your help. we look forward to having you back again in the near future. with that, the committee is adjourned. thank you.

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tonight on "the communicators," will hurd talks about cyber and data security in federal government agencies and the report cards had subcommittee released in may on the agency's management of information. >> the federal government has

almost 11,000. facebook has four. there's no reason that the federal government should have 11,000. four agencies have realized $2 billion worth of savings over the last few years by moving into the cloud. >> watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span2. i am pleased that the senate as a body has come to this conclusion. television in the senate will undoubtedly provide citizens with greater access and exposure to the actions of this body. this access will help all americans to be better informed of the problems and the issues which face this nation on a day by day basis. >> during the election, i had the occasion of meeting a woman who had supported me in my

campaign. and she decided to come to shake my hand and take a photograph. a wonderful woman. she wasn't asking for anything. and i was very grateful that she took the time to come by. it was an unexceptional moment except for the fact that she was born in 1894. her name was marguerite lewis, an african-american woman who had been born in louisiana, born in the shadow of slavery, born at a time when lynchings were commonplace, born at a time when african-americans and women could not vote. >> it took our country from the time of its founding until the mid-1980s to build up a national debt of $850 billion which was the size of the so-called stimulus package when it came over here. so we're talking about real borrowed money.

>> 30 years of coverage of the u.s. senate on c-span2. coming up on c-span3, a conversation on u.s.-mexico security and the possibility of creating a wall along the border. then a discussion on immigration, employment, and wages. later, a senate panel looking at wildfire prevention and forest management. c-span, "washington journal," live every day with news and policy issues that affect you. the supreme court ruled against the abortion law in texas. sam baker talks about this most significant ruling on abortion in almost two decades. the president of the constitutional accountability center discusses the court's ruling in the texas abortion access case and other key rulings this term. henry olson, author of "the four

faces of the republican party," shares his thoughts on this term's big supreme court cases and their potential impact on the 2016 presidential campaign. be sure to watch c-span's "washington journal" beginning live tuesday morning at 7:00 a.m. join the discussion. next, former bush administration officials take part in a discussion on u.s.-mexico security and economic relations between the two countries. we'll hear from former homeland security secretaries michael chertoff and tom ridge along with carlos guttierez. this event was hosted by the atlantic council.

hi, good afternoon, everyone. i'm jays on marzek, director of the atlantic center's economic growth initiative. thank you for joining us for this celebration on the importance of the u.s.-mexico relationship. there is a lot of misinformation out there about mexico and what it means for the u.s. it's time to put the facts on the table. i would like to thank secretaries michael chertoff, carlos guttierez, tom ridge, ambassador john negroponte, and thank you all very much for joining us. we're also delighted to be joined by the founder of our center who is sitting here in the first row. [ applause ] and as all of you know and as our round of applause shows, her vision and inspiration are helping to reframe thinking

about latin america. thank you, adrienne. today we have a great event. but this is all for a larger effort, our mexico initiative. the united states and mexico are strong partners with a relationship that is unparalleled and indispensable. from security to trade to immigration to culture, our two countries benefit enormously from a highly integrated partnership. this relationship is under attack. the presidential election has put mexico in the eye of a national political storm. the country is being wrongfully blamed, in fact i think scapegoated, for the anxieties many people have about how the world is changed and what it means for them. rhetoric is calling into question the benefits of strong commercial relations with an important ally and proposing unilateral action at the border to combat unauthorized immigration. but the kicker for all this? 6 million u.s. jobs depend on trade with mexico. and net migration with mexico is now below zero.

this type of rhetoric has angered our mexican allies, alienated many american citizens, and worried friends about the possibility of protectionist and confrontational policies becoming a reality. at the latin america center, dedicated to the region, it is our obligation to launch an initiative to highlight the importance of this bilateral relationship. this is unusual for a think tank, especially a non partispa one. as you can see from the speakers here today, this is not an issue that falls along party lines. discussions about our southern border must be responsible and grounded. that is the purpose of this initiative, to show this relationship, oftentimes taken for granted, should not only be defended but in fact broadened and deepened. today we've launched a major social media effort. you can find us on buzzfeed. we'll also share with you a video between the two panels that we've made.

and in the coming months we'll continue to highlight the importance of this relationship across industries and across regions. we hope you'll join us by sharing our work on social media, contributing your own opinion pieces and spreading information far and wide. today we have two excellent panels to highlight two of the critical elements of the u.s.-mexico relationship. the first on national security, and the second on the economic relationship, moderated by the director of the center. there will be plenty of time for q&a for each of the panels. feel free to start teeing up your questions. also feel free to get out your phones, but only to tweet. when doing so remember to use the #whymexico. before turning it over, i would like to thank our partners, new york university, george washington university, baker mackenzie. our media partner, the

huffington post, particularly thanks to amy glover for her help with outreach and inspiration for this event. we are grateful to our partners and find their enthusiasm reflective of the broad support we found for this initiative. i'm thrilled to turn it over to mary jordan, a national correspondent for "the washington post" covering the presidential complaiampaign. thank you all very much for being here today. >> even for such a timely discussion, we have an enormous amount of firepower here. i'm delighted, especially whether we're talking about facts, as i run around the country on this campaign trail. there's not a day or rally or

event where mexico doesn't seem to come up. yet there is an enormous amount of misinformation and a lack of understanding. so i wanted to introduce our panel here. we have governor tom ridge, who of course has extensive coverage in u.s. government. he was a member of the house of representatives, of course governor of pennsylvania, and the first ever secretary of homeland security under george w. bush. and today he runs ridge global, an international cybersecurity advisory firm. and we have secretary michael chertoff, who succeeded governor ridge. before that, when he was running homeland security from 2005 to 2009, he was a federal judge, as well as an assistant u.s. attorney general. now he runs the chertoff group, a risk management and security consulting firm. he's also senior of counsel to covington and burling.

ambassador john negroponte has served in many key diplomatic post including ambassador to the philippines and iraq. for our discussion today, very importantly, he was ambassador from our country to mexico. he was also the first ever director of national intelligence and he currently is the vice chairman of mcclarty. before we start getting into the nitty-gritty and interesting aspects of national security when it comes to mexico, i thought i would turn to our former ambassador and answer a key question i hear out there in ohio and pennsylvania about really, how does mexico affect the ordinary american. >> right. well, thank you very much, mary, and thank you to adrienne arsht and your center here for hosting what i think is a very important meeting. let me start with a sort of a

resounding yes to the point that jason made about the importance of the relationship. when i was deputy national security adviser under ronald reagan, and george herbert walker bush was elected, and i was asked what post i wanted to go to, mexico was my first choice. i was delighted to get it. and it was just a fabulous experience. it was the period during which we negotiated the north american free trade agreement. let me say that u.s.-mexico relations since really for almost 80 years, ever since dwight morrow and josephus daniels, franklin roosevelt's ambassador to mexico, have generally been good. they were good during world war ii. they were good during the ensuing period. closer to the present, i think generally the cooperation has been better in the economic area. and we all know in the u.s.

about how the relationship with mexico affects american lives. since the signing of the nafta trade with mexico has quadrupled to the point where we have $550 billion worth of two-way trade between the countries. we do something like $1.4 billion of trade with mexico every day. there are literally hundreds of millions of border crossings. mexico is the largest single destination for american tourists. just to give you a few examples of how our daily lives are affected. as i said, the economic relationship has generally been good, particularly since 1985, when mexico joint the gatt. that is what ultimately led to mexico's decision to be willing to negotiate a free trade agreement with us, which went into effect in 1994. security has generally been a little bit more neuralgic, for

reasons of sovereignty and reasons of history and so forth. i guess in recent times, in my memory, the low point was the so-called camerena case, when dea agent camerena was murdered by mexican drug dealers probably with the complicity of the mexican government in 1985. that left a hugely bitter taste and a baggage in history to overcome there. i think we've managed to work our way through that in the ensuing 30 years. there are some things about security cooperation that are really quite remarkable, if you think of them in the context of mexican history. i just cite one example, the willingness of mexico to extradite drug traffickers and other kinds of traffickers to the united states. during my time, the idea of an extradition of mexican nationals to the united states was just a

complete nonstarter with the mexican government. and there are levels today of cooperation between the mexican military and our military that again would have been unheard of 30 years ago. even small joint exercises, common communications facilities along the border. so that the issue of u.s.-mexican reconciliatiolatio longer who are we going to send down there. i think along with the nafta, the economic improvement, and improvement in these other forms of legal cooperation, things have reached a very, very high and i think comfortable level of cooperation between the two countries. >> that's perfect. we'll turn to secretary chertoff to talk about the breadth of the

security relationship. i think a lot of people don't quite get all the lines of communication. you want to begin this discussion and maybe tell us a few things that might surprise us. >> i think john is right. over the years, our cooperation has gotten better. now, there's no question that mexico does have a serious problem with organized criminal drug cartels. that's more a problem actually for mexico than for us. but both countries suffer. and there are some capacity limitations on mexico's ability to investigate and prosecute those people, although they have begun a process of reforming their prosecutorial and judicial system to make it more efficient for them to bring those cases. and as john pointed out, they have now increased their willingness to extradite to the u.s., so that's been very important from a cooperation standpoint as well. we've shared intelligence about what goes on on our common border. maybe more important, we've worked with the mexicans to

strengthen their capabilities in their southern border. you know, the idea that most illegal migrants in the u.s. are mexican is just completely hogwash. the very significant number come from latin and central america. they may come through mexico, but that doesn't make them mexicans. in fact mexico is as interested as we are in finding a way to manage that flow and prevent people from trying to sneak in and putting themselves at the mercy of these smuggling organizations and criminal gangs. so we've been working with the mexicans onset their southern border. finally, one of the things i used to hear all the time was, well, we're worried about terrorists coming through mexico. and i can't think of a single instance when i was secretary for four years that a terrorist came in from mexico. in fact we had quite good cooperation with mexico in terms of, again, identifying people who might be coming into the continent that might be

potentially terrorist threats. in fact, oddly, the neighbor where we have seen terrorists come in over the border is canada. we had rasam in 2000 who was caught by a border inspector. we've had other instances over the years where extremists have come in through canada but actually none that i'm aware of through mexico. again, that's a tribute to cooperation. and i'm not saying the situation is ideal. the issue of these criminal gangs is a problem for both countries. we have to acknowledge in fairness, we are partly responsible for this. we create the marketplace for drug consumption. and that is at least a portion of the economic fuel that allows trees drug cartels to flourish. but i do think we're making progress in cooperating. >> governor ridge, even though we haven't heard, there were a couple of cases, i was just in mexico and talked about to a couple of the former presidents of mexico who say we've been giving tips and there have been

some instances where we have stopped people coming in. but when you look at that border, what are the most important tools that we have that make that border secure? is it drones, is it intelligence, is it eyes on the ground? can you just give us kind of a surveillance of security on this incredibly long border? >> all of the above. that's exactly what it is. you've got 2,000 miles. we have almost 700 miles of fence. and people say we need 2,000. as secretary chertoff know and the people of mexico know, there's easily accessible areas but you can't put fences in mountains and things of that sort. it's about triangulating drones, it's about exchange betwein electronic intelligence between both governments. it's interesting that the atlantic council has this conversation in the two settingsettings segments, one is the security

portion and the economic portion, but they're really integrated, if you think about it. we've been blessed as a country to have good neighbors to the north and good neighbors to the south. we have to do what we can to preserve that. i remember in 2001, before the end of the year, before we even talked about a department, president bush said we need to sit down with the leaders of both countries and develop a smart border agreement, a smart border accord, where we can integrate our mutual interest but also ensure it doesn't impede our flow of services across the border. when it comes to security, it's pretty well embedded. it's intelligence sharing. it's drones. it's 20,000 customs and border protection agents. security is fine, but i think one of the unsung relationships that has proven pretty valuable to both countries is the sentry program where we prescreen millions of -- prescreen individual mexican citizens

coming back and forth across the program, and the secure trade, where people agree to a certain compliance regimen from the manufacturer to the warehouse to the driver to the ultimate importer and they expedite the trade. from day one the relationship has been, okay, it's in our mutual interests to preserve a secure border, to try to manage that risk as best we can, but let's do it in a way that doesn't impede this extraordinary trade relationship we have. >> so -- >> one other thing real quick. i got a threat matrix every day, every day. five, six days a week. some days it would be a couple of pages, some days a couple of dozen pages. i can't think of a single time when the intelligence community, when i was there, ever suggested on any single occasion, we had a problem with a potential terrorist crossing from our friends in mexico. >> why are they coming in from canada or somewhere else?

>> i don't want to knock canada, because the canadians are great partners and we share a lot of intelligence with them. but there were communities in canadian that had come in over the years from parts of the world which did in fact become radicalized and these radicalized communities did attract some people to come in, maybe with generous asylum, and some portion of those people wound up becoming potentially threatening to the u.s. in other words, there was a tendency for the communities themselves, because of their makeup and history, to be, you know, potential launching pads for admittedly a small number, but still a nontrivial number of terrorists. mexico didn't have that. there wasn't really a significant community there. people from parts of the world where radicalization was taking place. again, as tom said, we had a good sharing relationship with the mexicans, including sharing visibility, who was coming in from overseas and traveling in.

so we could help each other out. >> what do you think of the wall, the famous wall? if you build a 2,050-foot wall, do you then build a ladder? >> i think the wall is one of a number of tools. if you have an axe, you don't use an axe for example to hammer a nail into a wall. you use a hammer. you have to use the right tool for the right job. we built principally in areas where a border or a town or highway was relatively short. the idea was to slow up people coming in illegally so they could be intercepted. it doesn't make wall to build a wall in an impassable area or -- for example, the rio grande is wide. other tools are more important. surveillance, intelligence, unmanned air vehicles. one of the most important tools is what we do inside the country. many of the people who come to the country illegally, and

again, most of them are not mexican, they come from other parts of the world, including other parts of latin america, most of them are coming to work. and if people are willing to hire those who don't have work authority or authority to be in the country, that's going to be a huge magnet. so dealing with that issue of employment becomes important. the second thing, sadly, is more and more of the people coming from latin america are fleeing violence and failed states. as we see in certain parts of central america. it's the same thing that drives a lot of people out of syria. if we don't address the problem at its source and try to help the rule of law regain a footing in central america, people are going to continue to flee because their lives are at risk. >> before we talk about central america and what will make things safer, i just want to quickly, since it's so much in the news, quickly hear about, what do you think of this big giant wall we keep hearing about? does it make sense? >> i don't want to be too political, but i prefer presidents that tear down walls

rather than build them. that's just a political point of view. and i think the sad thing about it is, everybody's been running away from the notion that if you had a truly integrated system where men and women from mexico and central and south america come back and forth across the border prescreened, you wouldn't need more than 700 miles of fence. you wouldn't need an additional security member. you wouldn't need another customs and border protection agent. we don't have the means where people can lawfully go back and forth. i think it's a little arrogant for americans to think that every mexican or somebody from central or south america wants to come here to be an american citizen. it's not true. >> and the fact is migration has been steadily dropping from mexico. >> there's also misinformation, i think, about the number of illegals in this country that are of mexican heritage. i think we've heard estimates that almost half of them flew in

lawfully, and they stayed. the government gave us money to build the entry system, but we're sitting on millions and millions of fingerprints and photographs of people who came here and we never made sure they left. it's an almost a diversion from a really important and difficult issue, and is that is, how can we, with a neighbor, develop a sophisticated system, probably based on biometrics, where people can come back and forth across the border. it's like taking sentry and putting it on steroids. and if we did that, you don't need the wall. but it's like, oh, the easier thing to do is say i'll build a wall. i don't think you want to build a wall with a neighbor. >> do you want to weigh in on this? >> first of all, there's a lot of legal mexican migrations to the united states, family reunification, people who are petitioned for by their relatives. i remember back in my time, i think it was a decade going

forward, 100,000 people a year gaining legal entry into the united states, getting their green cards and eventually citizenship. we mustn't forget that. there's another reason you don't want a wall. it's dangerous out there. these terrible stories about dozens if not hundreds getting killed coming across illegally. we want some sort of orderly system between the two countries. and that would include, as governor ridge said, some kind of mechanism where people can go back and forth and get employment. the german guest worker program is not a bad idea. by not having that kind of program, by abolishing it in 1965, when lbj did under pressure from the afl-cio, there was no mechanism for people to come here legally to work and go back to their country because

they had to face the prospect of going illegally again. so they stayed and eventually brought their families over. by cancelling the program, we increased mexican migration to the united states, i'm convinced of that. >> in an era where millions of people cheer the idea of a wall, maybe because of not understanding the whole issue, what are some other solutions with the goal of making it more orlando? you're talking about a new guest worker program? can we talk about some solutions, if the idea is -- that's doable in this climate. >> a lot of things you need to do. you need to look at this as a system. i think both john and tom are right that in some ways we've created our own problem, by making it so difficult to come back and forth, that those who come in don't want to leave again. let me also say that you can't build a wall high enough that there's not a ladder to go over or a tunnel to go underneath.

some of those tunnels are really sophisticated. so here is what you do. first you look at, i think promoting economic development in mexico and other parts of latin america helps keep jobs there. i think establishing rule of law and order in parts of central america stops people from fleeing for their lives. having a legitimate guest worker program that satisfies the needs of american employers but gives people the ability to come and go with proper identification and proper tracking, answers two needs. the desire of people to work and the desire of employers to have workers. and experience shows that if you create that kind of a program, most of the people coming from overseas or from another country don't want to permanently settle here. they want to work and they want to go back. i think these are some of the things we can do if our leaders were honest with the american people about how to solve the problem instead of coming up with something that sounds like a nifty slogan but actually

makes no sense at all. >> can i just add one? i don't know if you'll agree with this or not, but enforce our immigration laws too. >> yes. >> domestically. we used to always treat this as just a border problem. it's not just a border problem. it's a domestic labor issue. >> absolutely. >> in talking recently in mexico to vicente fox and to calderoca they were talking emphatically about the importance of a good relationship overall with the u.s. president. just wondering, i don't think people tend to think they have that much leverage. do they? why does it matter that whoever is in the white house gets along with the president of mexico? >> i think in the world offa poliof geopolitics, establishing a trustful, respectful relationship, understanding that sovereigns will have their differences, but in that trusted relationship you try to minimize

them and really focus on the things to your mutual benefit. i think one of the challenges, and nobody has said it here, but i will again be a little bit different, i think the mexican government, if we had a better relationship with them, could and should do more in in terms of the flow of illegals. they said they would spend $2.3 million to support the mexico government's effort to deal with the contraband running, the drug runners, immigration to the southern border. i think a good, constructive relationship, a real personal relationship between leaders between any two countries, i think it matters immeasurably. >> you brought up central america, a hot, hot issue here. a lot of people are saying president obama is working with mexico on the southern border of mexico because a lot of the immigrants are coming through central america. but you have a lot of human rights people that say they're

fleeing kind of horrible lives. do we have the right policy there? are we being -- and we hit this right that we're supposed to be so harsh in turning them back, using mexico to turn back central americans at the border of southern mexico? >> well, i mean, i think a suggestion had been made that we have hoff a holistic policy. dealing just with the migration issue isn't going to get there for you. you've got to focus also on what's going to make central america better. i'm sad to say, as somebody who was ambassador to honduras in 1981, 35 years ago, that the situation in central america today, particularly in the northern tier of central america, is far worse than it was 35 years ago, in many, many respects, especially because of the gangs. i think we've got to help them,

to help make things right down in central america. >> i think we have time for an a couple of audience questions too. >> i want to put an exclamation point on that. this is a classic example where m america doesn't necessarily have to be nor necessarily should be in the lead. their neighbor, mexico. if you had that kind of relationship i talked about, that trusting relationship, you work with your friends and allies in mexico to help them do what they think is necessary to support those economies. >> so you think it's right to be working with mexico? >> john pointed out, it's got to be a collaborative enterprise. americans should be supportive of our friends in mexico, whether it's an economics or whatever it is, as they deal with their neighbors. it's in our interests to do so. >> we have time for a couple of audience questions. if you raise your hand and say who you are.

>> could i get your opinion about mr. trump's idea to deport 11 million mexican immigrants if he gets to the white house? secondly, president obama and the prime minister are meeting on wednesday. is there anything they can accomplish about their relationship in north america? >> i'll take the second one first. i attended a number of those meetings. i found they were very useful, again, particularly in promoting sharing of intelligence, common economic policies, things of that sort. on the first, as i've said publicly, i think it is delusional to believe you're going to deport 11 million people unless you repeal the constitution and put everybody to work as an immigration inspector. so i mean, i think it's nonsensical. in fact, again, as i think john said, if you enforced the rule against employers who employ

people illegally, you'll have a far greater impact and it will be a legal way to go about it than if you somehow suggest the fantasy that you're going to round people up and send them back. >> i just want to add something to that. i think the notion of identifying and sending back is delusional, it's a bumper sticker solution, but it's never going to happen. secondly, of the 11 billion mere, probably only half are from central and south america. that narrows it down. those who have come here illegally by and large came here to work, to add value, and they have. my view is that you simply create -- again, as part of an overall immigration package. i would like to see, when people say, we've got to do this and this first, sequencing it, i think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. i think we'll have stronger enforcement but i also think we can create a separate classification to legitimize their presence.

we don't have to make them citizens. but if you brought in 100 illegals here who haven't broken the law, who are raising their families and adding value, and we say, look, we have to get you out of the shadows, you're doing some good now but we want you to be visible, you could be a resident but you can't be a citizen, 99 out of a hundred could take it. >> i think congress could pass it. i was involved in dealing with this issue when i was in office, we spent a lot of time on this. i think the majority of members of congress could get on board with something along the lines of what tom said. if you poll consistently the american people, my experience is 60 to 70% support this. i know there are some people who are passionately and vocally against it. but the reality is that if you look at what the majority wants and what makes sense, if you want to fix the problem, doing exactly what tom says, which is having a structured way for people to work, legitimately

come out of the shadows, pay their taxes, pay the social security, is one of the best tools you have to reduce the amount of your legal flow that otherwise comes into the country. >> go ahead. >> hi. my name is simone. i'm a student with american university. we're talking about the imimmigration issue which naturally comes outline when you're speaking about the mexican border. i wanted to know if there are other issues we should be thinking about when it comes to national security. you briefly mentioned the mexico cartels, you briefly highlighted economic concerns. i'm just curious if there are other national security interests we should be considering. >> there's one there, and it goes to the leaders' meeting, i think all three of us attended these trip papatripartite meeti

took place once a year. since mexico is a source of opium, i hope the leaders agree to rachet up the efforts against the flow of those substances. i don't know what the chances are of suck succecess, but i tht would be a worthy area of additional dedicated effort. >> i agree. the issue of transnational crime, not limited to mexico but is a serious issue in latin america and other parts of the world, needs a lot of more attention, because these organizations recall challenge the ability of governments to manage their own countries. so they do pose in my mind a national security threat and something that we, again, have a collaborative interest in working to prevent. >> i meant to say heroin. >> let's see. who really wants to ask a question? okay.

these are the last two. go ahead and we'll get to you. >> first of all i wanted to thank you for -- i'm here as a mexican citizen, a u.s. citizen. the wonders of north america. first of all, i want to thank you for the theme of the conversation. i really think it really issued go without saying, but we do need to build a narrative that mexico and the u.s., our economies are very closely linked. we're among each other's biggest trading partners. and this narrative about jobs going to mexico and leaving the u.s. actually is a very incomplete picture. mexico's high end manufacturing industry is actually bringing a lot of high value, high paying jobs to the u.s. but i'm more than glad to cite some examples individually. but i want to move away for one moment from the very positive picture of the integrated north american market to talk a bit about firearms smuggling into

mexico. according to data from the government accountability office, from 2009 to 2014, upwards of 70,000 firearms that were -- >> they're going fast, right? >> yes. going south. a lot of them are illegally but also legally acquired. so can you speak to -- >> this actually is a big issue in mexico. >> the southward movement of firearms. thank you. >> thank you. >> i thought he made a statement, i didn't hear a question. >> he's talking about an issue in mexico. >> it is huge, the southward flow of arms and also bulk cash have both been big issues. steps have been taken to try and improve it. we have this e-trace mechanism and all of that. but it's very hard, because it is illegal to export a weapon from the united states without a license. but it's not illegal to buy one. and you get one and then you send it across. it's very hard to enforce it.

>> right here. yes, you had a question. right behind you, sorry. thanks. >> hi. thank you. i work at george washington university. i really appreciated your discussion of solutions and especially thinking about a holistic policy. so my question is how can we account for the strengths and limitations of each port of entry? that's to say, is one border policy towards security, towards immigration, towards trade, going to work across all 2,000 miles? or is there a way we can think about each port of entry as playing a specific role in that project? and also, if that is the case, how are we going to get municipal, state, county officials on board? thank you. >> let me start.

obviously i think you're quite right that there are different economic and personal issues that apply at each of the ports of entry. that's separate from what goes on between the ports of entry, where of course obviously we want to stop people from coming across without, you know, proper authorization. i think we can do a number of things. as tom pointed out, programs that prescreen and identify people who are regular travelers help speed things along. i think frankly our infrastructure at many of the ports of entry is out moded, so you get those very long lines. there would be a real value in compressing the capacity at each of the ports of entry. i think modern technology gives us more and more opportunity to track and match that up with respect to what we need to know about people before we admit them. i think if we applied all these elements, we could have a more smoothly flowing set of

travelers moving across the ports of entry. we would be more secure and we would actually produce economic value, particularly for those regions that are basically add adjacent to the border. >> we're running out of time, but i wanted to ask you one final thought. following on what you said, there's been a lot of talk about improving infrastructure on the border, about getting better technology that would help both the economic side and national security. so let's look out five years from now, at the national security relationship between washington and mexico city. right now it's pretty bad. i mean, i think on the street there's just a lot of rhetoric, there's a lot of parties in mexico that are not saying nice things about americans and back and forth. again, when you follow the trump campaign, it's amazing all the signs you see about mexican rapists and criminals.

how do you predict it will be different if five years, the relationship between these two countries, especially with focus on security relationship? >> well, nobody is going to jump into that frying pan, so i will. i think a large -- regardless of who prevails in the national election, i'm hopeful that whoever their secretary of commerce is, whoever their secretary of state is, whoever their secretary of department of homeland security is, because you really need to triangulate those three interests, are able to convince the president, whoever that might be, of the critical security and economic relationship we have. because i think it's been basically ignored. this is not a criticism of the incumbent white house, but i think he met three or four times with the prime minister of india, and that's a very important geopolitical relationship and a strategic relationship. i'm not sure we've spent enough

time consulted cultivating, cul our relationship with south america. so whoever prevails. there's the second largest market for export goods. there are a million, 2 million americans exporting goods. you need the try angulation of interests to hopefully convince the president, whoever that might be, it is in our national security interests and national economic interests, because they're integrated, to pay a lot more attention to the mexican-u.s. relationship than we ever have before. >> i would agree with that and i would add, look more broadly at central and south america. that is our hemisphere. as important as it is to pay attention to what's going on in the middle east and europe, it's also as important to look at the stability and economic development in our own hemisphere, because that has a direct impact that, again, we often feel through the issue of migration. >> first of all, it's never as

bad as it sounds. especially if you're hanging around the trump campaign, i'm sure you hear a lot of negative stuff. but i think it's going to be better five years from now. i think it's going to sink in even more to the american people that when you talk about latinos in this country, you're talking about the second largest ethnic group in the country, who will probably be close to something like 100 million strong by the year 2050. how on earth can you ignore an ethnic population as large as that? so it behooves us not only economically and politically and security-wise but socially, to take into proper account the presence and contribution of the latino and hispanic community in our country. >> a perfect place to end. thank you very much, i appreciate it. [ applause ] i know a couple of our panelists have to scoot off to airplanes but i encourage those who are here, we have an amazing panel

coming up. until the meantime, i want you to watch this video, please. thank you. the recent presidential elections had a lot of nasty things to say about mexico. so what do you know about the u.s.-mexico relationship? did you know 14 million american jobs depend on nafta? did you know that mexico is the number one tourist destination for americans? did you know that eight out of ten avocados consumed in the u.s. are from mexico, or that wonder bread, and thomas' english muffins are owned by a mexican bakery? that mexico is the main auto parts supplier to the united states? did you know 6 million u.s. jobs are supported by trade with mexico? that mexico is the third largest trade partner in the united states? and a top export destination for 28 u.s. states. for every dollar of mexican exports to the u.s., 40% remains in the u.s. mexicans and mexican americans

generate over 8% of u.s. gdp. that over a billion dollars crosses the rio grande every single day. did you know that more mexicans leave the united states than migrate to the united states? did you know that in 2015, 14 million american tourists spent $10 billion traveling in the united states? all this makes you wonder. does mexico really deserve all this blame? because now you know. [ applause ] and you thought the lang council watlantic council was a think tank. we're movie producers here. thank you all for taking an interest in mexico. we latin americanists tend to whine a lot about the fact that people don't pay a lot of attention to us, why don't we

get talked about in political campaigns. and boy, suddenly we were surprised when mexico has taken such an outsized role in this political campaign. as jason said, mexico has really become the eye of the storm. and all of us who follow latin america and care about mexico and about the region are stunned by how mexico has basically turned into this poster child for all the ills that are ascribed to immigration and all the ill than are ascribed to free trade. so i'm really delighted to be able to moderate this panel with two people who are really experts in the subject. secretary gutierrez, thank you. you're a friend and a visitor of this center. as all of you know, secretary gutierrez was the former secretary of commerce, the former ceo and chairman of kellogg, and is now reading a lot of the work with the

business world on reconciliation with cuba. he's the chairman of the cuba business council at the camer about chamber of commerce. we're always happy to have you here as a guest. jace shambo is a member of the council of economic advisers. jason furman was called into a meeting with one person who is more important than us. we're thankful to have you today. you're a professor of economics at international affairs. jay is a voice on international issues. he is a professor at george washington university, has been a visiting scholar at the international monetary fund, and has been a visiting professor at a number of other american and european institutions. so thank you very much for

coming today. secretary gutierrez, let me begin with you. and there's been a lot of discussion in this electoral cycle about trade relations and the impact that trade has on the american economy. and, you know, nowhere has that discussion been more acute than with mexico, and particularly with nafta. and tell us, sort of think forward a little bit, how is it going to be if our third large trading partner is suddenly delinked from our economy? how is that going to impact jobs? how is that going to be impact imports? how is that going to be impact exports? what is the effect going to be on the consumer? can you take us on a little bit of a tour, get on a magical carpet and take us on a tour. >> how is it going to be? it will be a disaster if we somehow cut trade relations with mexico. it will be a disaster for us, for the whole, you know,

canada/mexico triangle. you have -- nafta is worth about somewhere above $1 trillion. and throughout the years, 25 y companies have been setting up supply chains. they have opened up warehouses in certain parts of this country, canada, the u.s., mexico, so that goods can flow readi readily. they have opened up plants in certain parts of each of the individual countries because that's where they get raw materials and they are able to ship and manufacture easily, so you have this infrastructure that is embedded that you can't just say, well, i'll just leave it there is and go. so i don't -- in terms of nafta, i don't even know how you would get started. here's the thing. for a government official to say nafta is bad, it's part of my campaign, people are buying it

and they are going to vote for meso we're going to get rid of nafta, think about what you do to thousands and thousands of u.s. corporations who all of a sudden issen are turned upside down and they probably have to fire a lot of people. they have to pay huge write o s offs. they have to take a hit on their business. it's one of the craziest ideas or one of the crazier ideas that i have heard even in this campaign season. >> let me stick on the issue of nafta, if i may. there's been a lot of anti-trade rhetoric not only from one side, from all sides in this campaign. and some have really impugned nafta as an example of everything that trade should not be. can you take -- how is nafta worked out 20 years into this? >> i think one o of the really important things when people talk about trade policy is to

recognize the difference between trade and trade policy. globalization is something that's happening regardless of what we do, and trade policy whether it's nafta or tpp or something like that is in some sense how we decide to shape those it factors that are going on. so i think in that sense, it's not just the trade. it's the technological shifts. i think people often look to a time before a given trade agreement existed and think, e well, were it not for that trade agreement, everything would look like that. that just is not what reality would look like. whether it's on a manufacturing floor or whether it's on how supply chains are set up, changes in information technology, changes in transportation technology as the secretary said have linked firms together in ways and supply chains together in ways that are different from 30 years ago. so it's not simply looking at the changes over time a question

of nafta. what nafta allowed us to do, as the secretary said, link together more efficient supply chains across north america and integrate the economies in a way that really benefitted a lot of people. just on the really quick nerdy thing that people will sometimes focus on as trade economists is the thidea that one of the thin that happens when you expand markets is the better firms do better. that's important because the better firms are the more productive firms. they are the ones who pay higher wages. they employ a higher share of your economy so you get more people in those good jobs. that's one of the really important things through any of these issues that would raise the exporting ability of firms across all of north america, but in this case for u.s. firms is it means good firms grew faster. they were able to export more, which meant hired more people and pay on average about 18% more exporting firms than non-exporting firms.

>> let me change this a little bit and in the previous panel our moderator had asked the national security experts what they thought of the wall. she covers the -- she's the national security -- international security correspondent for the "washington post," but covering the campaigns. so she mentioned skrr interestingly that she goes to a lot of the rallies and has seen a lot of people with pla cards and reck rit about the wall. there's two suggestions which is the wall and the round up of undocumented immigrants. so we talked about the national security implications. let's talk about the economic implications. i presume the wall would slow down trade and have trouble with agricultural exports. walk e me through the economic implications. >> the wall is a talking point.

a bullet point on a chart that doesn't really mean much. the problem that we have to understand and for me it's at the core. the problem with immigration and the problem with illegal immigration is not that the wall isn't high enough. it's that our laws don't work. and our laws are outdated. and i'll give you some examples. and this was the recent senate bill that was going to be passed which is better than what we had. we have quota for agricultural workers of 110,000. if you talk to farmers around the country, they'll see we need about a million every year. well you can bring in 110,000 paraleg ly. what do you can do with the other 900,000? somehow you have to run your farm. so they are either closing down, sending the farm to mexico or

just sell iing a lot less. i was talking to a restaurant owner the other day. this did it in terms of just visualizing it. if i had more workers i would have five more because i would be able to resource and then i would hire more u.s. citizen ises as well. you have people like microsoft that can't glet enough engineers so they are building in vancouver. so it really is a crazy debate because first of all it's broken because it's our fault. our congress has not done the job and they have not updated laws that are 50 years old. we have quotas that make it impossible for people to run a business, to make it impossible for the private sector.

so the other solutions are temporary band-aids. they are not getting at the core issue. they come for one reason and one reason only and that's to work. just look around anywhere you see it. we wouldn't be able to run the economy if we didn't have them. the problem is it's a matter of providing a system. they can come in, go back home, come back in. they don't leave now because they won't get back in. there's a way of doing it. i think one thing we haven't tried that we should try is a bilateral immigration agreement where the private sector has to

play a role. and they have to have a voice. because right now it's politicians deciding how many people the private sector needs. there's been a lot of discussion about immigrants and the secretary was just really very smart about looking at it. but i have heard the chairman of the president's council talk also about the issue of dwindling numbers of males in the labor force and how that really is an issue that can have a long-term effect on the u.s. economy. you have also talked about how immigrants can help mitigate the negative impact of this. can you lay that out for us and how that enters into this debate. >> i think one of the things if you look just at the most basic idea. if you take the senate bill that secretary just referenced, cbo's estimate that would raise output by 3.2% in the longer run.

so i'm on the group that has to set the economic assumption and i can tell you we shed blood over the question of whether you raise or lower the growth rate. if you told us there was a button, that would be one of the biggest things we could possibly do. it connects to your other question as we look at whether it's declining labor force participation or whether it's possibility of productivity growth having slowed down. immigration reform can make substantial contributions on both those facts. if you reform immigration right now, it has real productivity impacts because you get people into the right jobs. so you have people who are in the shadows right now who can't necessarily be matched to the right jobs.

if you suddenly fix that you have higher productivity. there's that side of it. other issues whether it's shift in dwoemocracy or labor force participation over time putting pressure on things like social security trust funds and having common sense immigration reform can do a lot to fix issues like that as well. most studies that look at this find that wages for native-born americans go up. i think this is similar to your point about the restaurant person who would hire more native born workers as well. those wages go up as well. you improve productivity and lift economic growth. everyone winds up doing better off. so i think it's one of these issues that lifting productivity is hard. lifting growth is hard. it's not that there are 20 things on a menu that say i don't think i'll do those. this is one that people don't argue over in terms of how much it would help. it would help a lot.

you can argue over the magnitude, but it's big. it's something that would make a lot of sense. >> just to the point on demographics, which is a great point. the numbers shift, so i'll use one of the numbers i have heard. you can grow an economy two ways. the number of people you have working and the productivity of those people. so if you stopped immigration and said let's let the work force grow on the basis of who was here, i think the workforce would agree. i have seen numbers as low as .4%. .4 is not enough to e grow the economy. if you want to e grow it 2% and you have .4 workforce growth, you need 1.5% every year productivity. that's not easy. so it's a matter of numbers and

it's arithmetic and it's very clear. but we get sidetracked on issues that have nothing to do with solving the problem. >> the private sector ceo had on which is mexico over the last five, six, ten years has really transformed itself so the energy sector and you have seen at&t invest in the communication sector. you have seen there's going to be a large for the rigs that's coming in mexico. that's certainly american economies. part of the debate is also about should american companies be investing overseas s that good for us, this globalized world. i know this is really important to take this on head on. which is why is it good for

america when at&t invests in mexico. >> because then at&t has access to the mexican market. hopefully means they make more. if they make more than their shareholders are making more money. they can hire more people in the u.s. there are certain circumstances where they would pay more taxes to the u.s. i have never seen or known of a country that has been successful economically and has self-sufficiency. they have sought to look internally and we're going to produce everything we consume and we don't want to have trade.

that would take this economy into a serious dive. so i think that's where the rhetoric where the trump rhetoric is so alarming because if there are two things that have helped this economy for the last 200 years, it's immigration and trade. >> so trade. let's talk about tpp. >> sure. >> a lot of senior administration officials have warned of the importance of r radification of tpp. mexico is a tpp signatory. it's the exact opposite of what many trump recommendations are on trade. i have two questions. one is presuming that we don't rad if i, what's the effect

going to be on mexico. and talk about the economic advantages for mexico if we do ratify. >> on the first one, which is one i generally prefer not to think about, but if e we don't ratify, i think there's a real risk to the u.s. in its relationship with mexico, but more broadly in its relationship as a global leader with a lot of countries. and trade is going to happen regardless of what we do with tpp. and as i was saying before, the big question is how do i want to shake these economic relati relationships. what do you want the rules of the road to be? and tpp sets up a certain set of rules of the road. i think getting into not ratify

after having exhibited a lot of leadership, getting those to be put in place place in asia and across the pacific rim on this side of the pacific, would be seen as this massive failure of leadership. it would be very hard for us with any credibility to go to a lot of these countries and talk about any kind of global solution to anything. you look at the mexico/u.s. relationship now. on a number of issue, the u.s. and mexico stand together in important ways. whether it's things like global over capacity in steel and aluminum chrks is a real challenge we face where you have some economies that aren't operating in a manner and that distorts markets and that's hard and something that really takes some global cooperation and coming together and they have tried to work together on these issues. if other countries step up and we don't, i think you can just basically say we forfeited our ability to exhibit global leadership on economic issues.

on the flip side of what does it do, i think one of the ironies to me of many of the complaints. tpp in it some ways is designed to take a lot of these things on. later in environmental standards are part of the core part of tpp. so some of the complaints people say about nafta wind up get iti, a lot of things that people said they would like to see in trade is what's in tpp. that's the first thing. the second thing is just, again, much like immigration reform. this is a button you can push to make the economy grow faster. this is a way you could let high performing and growth to improve supply chains. it's not easy to get whatever productivity number you need. if you have an opportunity to

lift it in a way that's consistent with your values and just walk away from it. >> tpp point you made is excelle excellent, we are very underdeveloped in asia. when you think asia specific we have agreements with australia the idea they may be splitting apart some people call it plus

three, so it's the ten countries plus if it's three, japan, korea and china. in one trade block without the u.s. and some people think that perhaps without the u.s. dollar. so unless we're in there, ten years from now we run the risk of getting shut out. our companies run the risk of getting shut out. and right now as we speak, china is building roads coming down vietnam. they are getting ready. >> i want to open it up to questions from the audience. i'd like to end my questions with a question that's a little uncomfortable. which is as a leader, as a foreign policy leader, as an economic leader, as a his tpani and republican, why have the accusations against mexico been so successful with a portion of

the u.s. population in the last couple months? why has that seemed to have hit the mark? >> well, i would say they have been successful with a certain portion of the population, 12 million voters. you're talking about a lot more if you want to get elected nationally. i'm not sure this is an argument that it plays nationally. the way it was communicated was false. because it implied that the mexican government is sending us their worst people. wasn't that it the accusation? when actually we are getting mexico's hardest working, most adventurous, most ambitious because they are willing to risk their lives to come over. so it was that concept that somehow the mexican government

is send iing us their worst peoe that it's false advertising. and he sparked a lot of people because of something that's absolutely untrue. but again, you cannot get elected in this country -- i don't see the shape of the electric to get elected without 35% of the hispanic vote. romney had 27%. mccain had 33%. george w. bush had 34%. i doubt it. even though trump says he's going to win the hispanics, i doubt it.t's been that successful. >> let me open it up to questions. start with the gentleman there.

>> thank you. i wonder if you could talk about the role of education in the economic relationship between u.s. and mexico and economic coordination collaboration between the two countries. >> i think there are a lot of programs that go back and forth in terms of whether it's teachers or students where there's attempts at coordination and cooperation. i think it's a place where having nafta or a free trade agreement that makes these flows a little easier in terms of education is important. i think the other thing is honestly i think improving education on both sides of the border is a crucial piece because i think often people look at globalization when

really it's changes in the global economy. one of the things we know is upgrading the skills, upgrading the ability to work with technology, improving the education standards on both sides of the border is a crucial part to make sure both countries are successful and i think that's one of the. >> there are a lot of u.s. students in mexico. it's surprising how many mexican students are in mba programs here in the u.s. words are used on both sides of the border. mexico city is like a big billboard for american brands. there's such intimacy between the two countries that it's on one hand ridiculous but also painful we'd be talking about it the way we are.

you build a wall to lock out your neighbor, that's the kind of stuff that 10, 20 years from now creates revolutionary movements. but we just forget about it. and we're not thinking about what are e we really doing and how is this going to be perceived 30 years from now. it just feels good because it gets an applause line and someone may get the nomination because of it. >> other questions? >> i'm a student intern here. i'm just wondering as the u.s. signs trade deals with our atlantic and pacific partners, do you think our trade relationship with mexico will in the future decrease as well as our exposures to the mexican economy, especially as gravity

theory falls by the wayside. >> the short sans i would not expect tpp in particular say to decrease our trading relationship with mexico. frankly, we already have a trade agreement with mexico, but tpp goes further on in a number of dimensions than previous agreements with the number of the signatories of tpp already. i don't see it. than they are already but i don't think that would mean they would be less integrated with one another. the common supply chains across the borders would be even more important as you're then trying to say export to the asian market. so i think in that sense, it's not something i would expect to

decrease the ties at all. >> i agree with that. mexico is a border with the u.s. and that will never go away. that's an amazing asset. the other thing, too, since the 1980s there's been this manufacturing culture developed in mexico going all the way back to the process control and all those things. and it was taken seriously throughout the country. mexican manufacturers are very, very good and very competitive. you can companies with plants in mexico will tell you that's probably one of the most productive plants. so it is a very good hub for manufacturing with a border with the u.s., i would bet on that long-term.

>> why is it so hard to explain to people why trade is good? all over the world. why has it been so difficult for politicians to explain to people that trade is a good thing that benefits the general population or maybe there are negative things that had to be taken into account too. >> i'll take a quick shot at that and turn it over. there are 3 million jobs in the u.s. some people say 3 million. the chamber has a higher number. jobs associated with exports to mexico. and with those 3 million jobs be in existence or would they be more or less if we didn't have nafta. the problem with trade is if you

look at the three countries, look at 25 years before nafta, 25 years after nafta, the three numbers are better, the three countries. it's remarkable. anybody who has followed mexico and before nafta, you had inflation rates. you don't see that anymore. it's been remarkable ever since nafta came in. the problem is it's anecdotal. so i know a neighbor, who knows a cousin who just lost his job because the plant went to hex. it's true. it's real. but the national numbers are better. so how do you reconcile that the national numbers are better but some communities have been impacted. we have a program for trade

adjustment assistance to help communities that have been impacted by trade. but the numbers are there and the numbers show that trade has been good and nafta has been a tremendous success. not for everyone, but for the country as a whole. >> i think the question is to why trade doesn't resinate as a positive force is it's a complicated one in a few ways. there's the story about a person who moves to a town and builds a building and is able to sell cheaper. this person must have this incredible thing going on in that factory. until someone opens the door and realizes it's just a rail line going to a port and bringing in goods from out of town and people suddenly hate the person who they loved before. why is it we respond more positively to a technological shift that changes the cost of goods than a trade shift?

i think it's not necessarily a question economists answer as sociologists. other than to say i think one of the things is people do get to vote on trade. they don't get to vote on technology. they don't always recognize the extent to which many of the shifts they are responding to are technological shifts. manufacturing output has not gone down. it goes up every year. manufacturing employment does go down. in large part that's because we get much better and much more efficient at making the stuff we make here. i think we also import things. we export things too. when plants shut down because a plant is moved overseas, you see far less attention on the plants that are built here often that are we export bmws from the united states. people have jobs in that factory building german cars for export.

things do get lost. we don't do enough for the impacted workers and there are a lot of thing this is administration has proposed over time whether it's increasing the minimum wage to make sure people who are dislocated and wind up in a new job are still getting a reasonable wage. there's a wage insurance proposal in the 2017 budget that was a really important proposal that made it easier for people to find a new job and it was a lower wage to get some sort of wage insurance for a few years as they build up their skills in a different industry. there are a lot of things you can do to try to cushion the dislocations that do happen, whether it's due to trade or technology. in some sense, it doesn't matter. trade adjustment assistance is an important idea, but because it's hard to say did you lose your job to trade or technology, it winds up being hard for some people to get it. often broad based supports for people who lose jobs wind up being more effective to make

people have a more positive view. >> i think another way of doing it or one way to approach it is company by company. to have the plant manager or ceo go into the factories, offices and say thanks to trade, this is what it means for our company and our jobs. i really think it has to be company by company because it's hard to make a national argum t argument. >> we have time for one more question. i saw somebody with their hand raised here. i conduct every search and one particular state from which i am from in mexico because they are one of the top producers of the product and i know with the

immigration they have a great impact because currently they have about 40% of the population in agricultural workers are here in the united states. that's what the learned recently. having that immigration program in place or cultural worker increased, that is really going to take away some of the force labor and thinker not particularly interested in that. so my question is does it really benefit the states to have such program? and then the impact that it has in the free trade agreement. >> you mean does immigration to the u.s. hurt? >> yes. >> it's an interesting question.

in 1970 the average mexican woman had seven children. today it's about 2.2. the u.s. is about 2.1. and 2.1 tends to be holding steady. so there's going to come a day not far into the future where there are no mexican immigrants. or there aren't enough as we need because they also need the workforce because the population isn't growing as fast. there's a big number of small young people still so mexico is a lot of runway. but there's going to come a day where we're going to wish we had more mexican immigration. >> let me end by reminding everybody that on our website we

have a series of social media tools that you can use. they are educational tools. they are tools for all audiences. as i learn from my colleagues i urge you to spread some of the tiles on twitter. use this as a launch we'll try to have for the next few months. i want to thank both of you for joining and the previous panel as well. i want to thank my two colleagues for having worked so hard on this. it's been great. i think it's a really, really important cause. thank you all very much for coming. [ applause ]

two live events to tangherlini you about. eric fanning gives an update on the readiness and current state of the army. we had remarks live tomorrow morning at the association of the u.s. army at 7:20 a.m. eastern on c-span 2. in the afternoon donald trump gives a speech on the u.s. economy. mr. trump is in pennsylvania at 2:30 eastern. watch live road to the white house coverage on c-span. on july 1st, 1976 they opened the doors to the public. "american history tv" live coverage starts at 6:00 p.m. eastern. we'll tour the museum and see aviation and space atr facts including the spirit of st. louis. plus live events at the front of the building. learn about the museum the

curator share the museum's space history department. join the conversation as we'll be taking your phone calls, e-mails and tweets. the 40th an verse roift smithsonian air and space museum, live friday evening at 6:00 eastern on c-span 3's "american history tv." now a conversation on the impact that immigration has on employment and wages. the event hosted by the bipartisan policy center's immigration policy project. >> how is everybody doing. thank you for coming out on a monday. i am the director of the policy project here at the bipartisan policy center. i want to welcome you to our event today discussing the release of our report culprit or

scapegoat immigration's effect on wages. for those new, our mission is to actively seek to combine the best ideas from both parties to promote health, security, opportunity and really tackle some of the biggest and thorniest issues that america is facing. our process is to bring together very strongly interested parties on the issue, to hash out the ideas, the constructive clash, if you will. and bring policy solutions to the table through analysis, negotiation and advocacy. some of the analysis is some of the stuff you're going to hear about today. the immigration project here was started in 2013. our immigration task force is currently co-chaired by former governor ed rendell. our task force is issued a series of statements and reports on immigration over the last several years and actively working on policy

recommendations that we believe can take the debate to the next level post election with a a new president and congress. audience members on the live stream can hear you. state where you're from and ask a question. we prefer you to have questions rather than statements so keep them short and sweet. you can also tweet us on twitter. everyone knows by now immigration has been a key issue in this election cycle. one of the ongoing debate issues is the role of immigrants in our labor force. are immigrants taking jobs from americans? are immigrants low eriering the

wages or helping us fill labor shortages and expanding our workforce at a time it would be shrinking? our report issued today, the author will be presenting a summary, addresses those issues. somewhat maybe document a report. we will be taking questions later in the program and again if you are watching on the live stream and you want to ask a question, use #bpclive and we'll get the questions to the moderator. i will introduce our senior policy analyst to talk about our report.

this trend has been particularly pronounced among native-born americans. since 2000 employment declined d by 6% among native born americans. foreign born just 2%. opponents of immigration are quick to look at this trend and use this data as evidence that immigrants are displacing native foreign workers. that restricting immigration will boost native born employment. now will this argument make superficial sense, it's misguided as it fails to consider several other factors that influence employment trends. this evidenced by the fact that despite diverging employment rates, unemployment has remained roughly on par between native

and foreign born individuals over the past 15 years. why can employment have such a strong divergence but unemployment remain on par? this is due to the fact whereas employment measures the percentage of the population having a job, unemployment looks at those who are both out of work and actively seeking employment. so what this tells us is that native born americans have left the labor force for other reasons. namely to retire, enter disability or go back to school. as you can see, this is the percentage point change in these three activities over the past 15 years and among native born americans it's increased by close to 2%. whereas for foreign born individuals these activities have increased between 0 and 1%. so as you can see, native born

individuals are increasingly leaving the labor force for these reasons. why has the trend been more enforced? our research points to the fact that native born have far more flexibility and options to pursue these other activities. they like to qualify for social security benefits upon retirement. so the median native born married couple age 65 to 74 has about ten times more in financial assets than the median immigrant couple. and then native born workers tend to have spent longer in the labor force than foreign born, which generally allows them to qualify for a higher monthly social security benefit. with regard to school enrollment, foreign born

individuals face more barriers. language barriers and legal status that can prevent them from enrolling in higher education. with regard to disability, native born individuals are far more like think to qualify for federal disability benefits. namely the native born individuals. we found that if native-born individuals over the past 15 years exhibited the same rate of change in retirement disability and school enrollment as foreign-born this employment gap narrows. so basically these three factors explain the vast majority of the employment difference between native and foreign-born workers over the past 15 years.

another common refrain among opponents is that immigration suppresses the wages of native-born americans. while it's true that foreign-born workers tend to have a lower wage than native-born workers, the research is ultimately mixed on the impact immigration has on wages. so our research shows that wages have less to do women grags and more to do with skills, education and the industries that tend to employee foreign and native born workers. so native and foreign born individuals tend to be employed in different industries and we identified seven industries that collectively employee around 50% workers and an additional seven industries that employ around 50% of the foreign born workforce. we found broad differences between these industries. for example, the construction industry employs the workforce

but 4.5% of the foreign-born. on the flip side, management occupations around 12% of native-born workforce but just 8 8% of the foreign-born workforce. this is a trend that's persisted for the last 15 years. in general these native-born industries pay a lot better than the foreign-born industries on average at around $50,000 per year to $36,000 per year. and again, immigration opponents might say if we restrict immigration, wages in these foreign born industries will increase and we'll be able to narrow the employment gap. we don't know if this is necessarily the case because it has to do with skills. so on average, 50% of the occupations of the native born industries require at least a bachelors degree compared to 6% in the foreign born industries. so this basically tells us that

the wage differential there is more a product of skills and education educational attainment as opposed to the presence of immigrants. . so ultimately our analysis showed in the absence of immigration, it's unclear that nati native-born americans would flock to jobs in industry employ foreign-born workers. since nat i--born stend to have higher levels of education and can exit the labor force as we saw earlier, there might be less of an incentive to accept a lower wage occupation when you can retire or go back to school. this is actually shown with several foreign-born are reporting severe labor shortages. even as native-born employment has decreased in recent years. so the big examples are construction and agriculture, the construction industry

reported a shortage over 675,000 workers in 2015. the agriculture industry saw a 20% decrease in field workers over the past decade chrks has led to around a $3 billion per year in lost revenue. so in the absence of immigration, this problem would likely be exaggerated which would do little to improve the outcomes for native-born americans. at the end of the day, um grags is needed to plug these labor shortages. immigration can benefit workers by increasing demand for goods and services, which leads to economic growth and can lead to additional employment opportunities. ultimately our findings indicate it's a dynamic ingredient. immigrants do not harm the native born workforce. they compliment and enhance it. this about sums up mu research. thank you for joining us this morning and enjoy the rest of our program. [ applause ]

>> so you have heard our take on this, but for some alternative takes, we'll ask our panel to come up and i will introduce our moderator for today. moderator is a reporter with quartz, a global business news online site. he writes about politics, economic policy and space. he's the host of the actuality podcast. and he was a political reporter here in d.c. so he knows the area pretty well before he moved to los angeles as a business editor at good magazine. i will let tim introduce the panelists for today and thank you very much. >> can everyone hear me okay? seems like they are. thank you for joining us today. thung for organizing this panel. i u am here from a global news site where i cover politics and

past couple years that's been a lot of immigration-related issues or at least a lot of rhetoric about immigration. the question really is whether that rhetoric matches up with what is actually happening in the economy and to people. that's what we're going to talk about here today. we have a good panel. immediately to my left is the director of the immigration program at the economic policy institute chrks is four floors below us. and finally, we have the professor o at the university of southern california. welcome, guys. to start off understanding the question of whether immigration has a negative or positive impact on u.s. workers and the u.s. economy, there's actually despite a lot of heated arguments about this between politicians a pretty good consensus in the economic policy

world. i wonder if you could lay out some of the points of agreement and get into disagreements. >> so that was a nice report. reenforces a a lot of things we understand about what's going on as well. i would say if you read the newspapers, you might have a different sense of how much disagreement there is among economists. you have i would say a very broad consensus among people pitted against each other with real differences. but there's overall growth in the economy as a result of immigration, but there's an overall benefit to u.s. born workers that there's a particular benefit to women workers and some negative impacts on men with less than a high school education. although at the same time, i would say the obvious questions to me would be how do we benefit from those overall good things about immigration and try to

figure out how to address the questions rather than acting there's a a big disagreement about whether or not there's a a negative impact. and so one way to do that and to start talking about kenny's paper. daniel, you were interested in the comparison between the different labor force participation rates, but i think you want to complicate that discussion. >> you want to commend for doing a great report on very valuable. it was showing the reason for the divergence in labor force participation rates between native born workers and foreign born workers. he proves his points really well with good data, but there was one part he didn't prove enough.

this assertion there are labor shortages in the e lower skilled occupations. what he cites in the paper as evidence for this is two things. one, a survey of construction employers and an article which talks about it. even in consider the source ploy irs saying they can't find workers. what wages are they offering. and the report said itself that construction employers weren't offering enough wages to entice workers at or above their industries. the other report was a report done by a lobbying group that lob pis for higher number of guest workers. so how do you really assess labor shortages is with metrics. that's our wages rising, unemployment rates going down. and wages in all of the low skill occupations he shows over

the past decade wages have gone down in every one of those occupations. and some of my own research has looked at the same occupations and found very high occupational unemployment rate ace cross the board over the last decade. unemployment rates at or around double digits. and then there's other evidence there aren't these labor shortages. more broadly the council of economic adviser z put out a report this month about the long-term decline in prime age labor force participation and say the demand for e lower skilled labor is falling. they say they are not actually sure why it's falling. economists don't really know for sure. but part of the decline was tloat least driven by weaker employer demand by people from low skills. then a few years ago the mckinz

si institute predicted there's going to be large surpluses with a high school education or less. e we should take this point about labor shortages with a grain of salt and look more at the data and evidence. when we get comprehensive immigration reform, we can take this information into account. >> your research has been on this topic in context of h1 been and other worker programs. would there be more jobs? >> what you need to do to make that program fair to both the mie grant workers who come in and u.s. workers here is major sure that you heavily recruit and give u.s. workers a fair opportunity to apply for the jobs. the way the rules work in the

program, some of them pay lip service. some of them don't at all. some don't require that at all. then you require that you pay the workers you bring in at least no less than the average going rate for the job. and there's plenty of immediame reports and evidence that has not been happening. so if the system was more fair, you wouldn't have to worry about it so much because you're proving there's a labor shortage. that would be complimenting the workforce by definition. e we should shift to a system where we have an independent agency where the labor shortages are and give employers more direct access to workers. but that's very different than the system we have now and the workers who come in shouldn't be indentured to their employers. there's tons of fraud.

there's not much enforce m going on. the programs are a terrible way to manage migration. in general i agree with what david said about how it's good for the economy, but this is one place it's not working so well and we need major reforms. >> i think i would say i don't see a big reason for having temporary programs. i don't think what we're talking about is immigration for people to say you want people to come, learn english, get job skills and reap the benefit of that in our society and let them move to different jobs. i don't see real advantage except to some employer who is are taken advantage of it saying you can come but only come and be restricted to this job and have to go back again. it's like garn e teeing they are not going to do all those things we want them to do. >> the reasons we're going to need more immigrants in the next 50 years.

can you talk about the long-term population challenge? >> i would love to, thank you. a new idea occurred to me. immigration reform is always about the next 10 or 20 years. and yet most research is about the last ten years. that's the essential problem we always face. how do you take old facts and apply to the future. one thing we know is the demographic changes. i got my colleagues here from economics. i have to rib them a little bit. the reason they are smarter than economists is that even though economists is the most important thing, i agree. economists cannot predict interest rates three months ahead of time. they don't know anything. they can look in ten year's time everybody in this room you all are going to be ten years older.

apply that to the whole population and we're in the middle of a massive retirement of the baby boomers. there's 60 million baby boomers on deck to retire. not right now, but some of them already have gone. but over the next 10 and 20 years. we have to rebuild the the workforce online. not all at once. replacing workers as we go. the whole dimensions have shifted from the last ten years, which included the great recession and really high unemployment as kenny's report showed so well. those curves are wonderful showing the rising unemployment in decline in the boom period and now hopefully back to normal and we'll hold it now. kenny, hold it for the next ten years. no more retreats. but going forward in time, we have a shortage of workers. the native born actually don't generate enough new workers coming in. there's entrances to the workforce and there's exits. they have to balance. and if you're going to have any kind of growth, gdp, the calculations, i was just reviewing the economic reports

of the president. i went back and looked at some old ones from bush. even the last clinton one, a couple bush ones, a couple of obama ones, and they all use the same formula basically. gdp growth is based on labor force growth plus productivity. and the productivity's where they sort of get wishful. it hasn't been panning out the way they hoped. but we know pretty well the labor force grows. and it's not good. it's way down. used to be 1.8% growth per year. it's going to be down to .6% per year. one third the growth we used to have. so the labor force is really slowing down and gdp growth is slowing down and that's what we're bucking against the headwinds of that. macroeconomics. i'm a demographer. what do i know? i just know there's not enough people. so how do you get more people? immigration is part of that solution. and we don't realize that enough. >> i wonder if maybe someone wants to take on this idea because a lot of the misconception about how immigration affects the economy comes from kind of an econ 101 idea that you know, there's a supply of jobs, if one person

gets one job there's one fewer job for me. but that's not actually how things work in the real world and sort of can someone take on why that is? >> i'll do that. i think that is the way things work. right? that's just chart one of econ 101. you also need to do charts 2 and 3. right within -- econ joke. i think so if you're talking about just the labor market, right? more workers. more supply of workers is going to mean lower wages. but then more people also means more customers. more consumers. so you're also expanding the amount that people are spending, which means there's more demand for workers. and then the third piece of that i think is if you look at investment in business owners that immigrants are in fact disproportionately likely to be business owners. i think it's sometimes exaggerated. i don't think they're super entrepreneurs. but i think -- we know we've seen in our research about 16% of the labor force and about 18%

of business owners are immigrants. disproportionately likely to be business owners. what you see is not the econ 101 idea is a little bit of a misconception because people are thinking just if there are more workers there must be lower wages. if there were more workers and also the rest of the economy were static then that would be true. but what we see instead is the rest of the economy is growing in part as a result of immigrants. >> can i add a very quick point to that? i completely agree with that. but in terms of the immigration debate some of the giovanni perry's research has found that when you bring immigration into the united states during slow gross or a recession period, it takes longer for the economy to actually adjust. for the most part it doesn't impact too many people except the lowest wage, least educated workers. but the sort of policy solution is to tie immigration levels to the health of the economy. so you'd want -- when the economy's growing and unemployment rates are low you'd want to have more immigration.

during slow growth recessionary periods you'd want to have less so the economy can adjust so there are the least negative impacts on the smallest number of people. >> can we talk about where the negative impacts sort of wind up and why they exist there? it's an issue of i guess the kind of labor that people are doing or the kind of skills they have. >> i think the -- i guess it sort of leads to the discussion about the lower wages in these -- the foreign-born lower-wage jobs. the fact -- kenny i think mentioned in the report, he sort of ties it to the fact that they are lesser educated and these are low-wage jobs. that makes sense. it also says there's probably some globalization pressures and there's mechanization which can happen as well. and that sort of makes sense but i think that you know, in some

of these jobs there aren't globalization pressures on landscaping jobs, which is one of the big occupations, right? i think what's really happened is that wages being low in this occupation it's not because of immigration and immigrants, it's because employers and the public policies that they've managed to get governments to implement and that includes probably number one is deunionization. number two is a failure of the minimum wage to keep up. there's a lack of labor enforcement. wage theft misclassification. then you do have 5% of the labor force which is mostly in low-wage jobs which are unauthorized which can't assert their rights. they're deportable. they feel deportation. so they don't complain to the labor department. then you have indentures guest workers who were exploited, can't switch jobs, can't complain, fear deportation as well. but these are all policy solutions which you can do to sort of raise the bar. any negative impacts that might happen from immigration during

high -- high immigration during a recessionary period you can probably take care of that with a $15 wage. that would more than take care of the gap. these are policy levers in terms of the undocumented as well, legalization, easy solution right there. guest worker programs, reform those. you can -- it's not immigration that's keeping wages low. it's employers and policies. >> there's almost an inexhaustible supply of these by want to talk about one more immigration talking point. dowell, you can kind of explain. the claim that all new net gains in job growth has v. gone to immigrants in the united states since 2000, that is something that you will hear politicians say. is that true? if it is true, why is that? >> depends on the data that people are using. oftentimes it's based on short-term data, the calculations, which there's lots of noise in the data.

but over the longer term it does -- the data smooth out better. you know, basically, you have a lot of baby boomer retirees. did i say that already? i did, i know. a lot of older workers are retiring, and then there's new workers coming online. of the workers who are retiring, most of them are native born. like 90 personative born. there's a lot of native-born losses. native-born the majority of the new workers too. but there are not as many native-born new workers as there are retired workers. it's a net loss for the native-born. then the growth that occurs in net growth is among the foreign-born. you look at the double nets, you can say that then the immigrants are getting majority of all the net increase in workers, but really over half the new workers are native-born. so figure that one out. one technical question here, or problem that everybody has to resolve this, what do you do about the children of immigrants in do you call them immigrants

or do you call them native-born? what do you call them? it's not exactly clear how to do that. for some purposes people want to lump them in with their parents because they grew up in immigrants families. other times you want to lump them in with native-born because they're native-born citizens. so you can get some messed-up accounting if you count the children of immigrants as a cost because immigrants produce them and don't count the children of immigrants as a benefit when they become workers and taxpayers. that's a real problem in our accounting system. so politically some people play an arbitrage game with that and try to make it look back for the immigrants. other people try to make it look good for the immigrants. i just say you really should look at it both ways and make decisions on that. the national academy of science report that's due out within a month does it both ways i think to try to figure out howing to account for the costs and benefits of immigrants. you have to figure out how to treat the children.

children are expensive. native-born and foreign-born are expensive kids to produce through the education system. but then the major beneficiaries are providers when they become workers and earners and consumers and taxpayers. it's a dilemma how to do that. when people look at the net change and they say immigrants are taking the majority of the net jobs, that's only because they're not really taking account of all the native-born retirees who just went out the door. that's what's driving that. >> we've been talking so much about retirees we should ask this. how are immigrants contributing or drawing from u.s. social service programs whether it's medicare, medicaid, social security, all these sort of things we have set up. are they net contributors or are they net receivers? do we have good research on that? >> certainly if you want to talk about social security, i think immigrants are contributing more than they're getting. a lot of that has to do with what they're all saying, their age structure. they're more likely to be in

prime working age because people come here as young adults to work for the most part. some of it is because they don't qualify as often for benefits. undocumented immigrants about half are paying into social security and almost none of them are getting anything out of it. so social security is certainly benefiting. in that way -- although i would say the biggest piece of that is about the age structure. that social security say pay as go system for the most part. you want to have younger workers paying for the older workers. >> to speak to this succinctly, there's a ratio i call senior ratio, the number of elderly divided by working age. it's a traditional demographic measure. and it's been constant in the u.s. at about 24 seniors per 100 working age. i call working age 25 to 64. and it's constant. until now. and now it's skyrocketing, going up to about 42. so from 24 up to 42 or even higher. that's with immigration included

in the population. hypothetically, if you take the immigrants out of the calculation, this ratio that is going to increase by 3/4 over the next 20 years would then increase by 100%. so it's an extra quarter increase that we would suffer without any immigrant addition. the immigrants tend to come in to the working age population. they get older too. immigrants get older too but not all at once. we had this big problem here that we had this -- literally a cliff we're going up in the data because of so many retirees so quickly. and we need to soften that cliff. one way to do it built into it is with immigrant arrivals. but even then it's still not enough. how do we manage this? no one wants to talk about it. because we don't have a solution for aging. any politician could stop aging, they would campaign on it. there's no solution. there's entitlement programs, and we have to pay for them but we don't want to raise taxes. we also don't want to run a deficit and we don't want any more immigration. well, you can't have your cake

four different ways. something has to give here. and aging is not the one that's going to give. >> i don't have a solution to aging. i guess i'm also not a politician. but i think -- so i don't think -- i mean, i think it's not so hard to solve those problems. maybe we do need to raise taxes. that's an obvious possibility. productivity is -- so you're right, we can't predict that very well. but i think that we can make -- this is a pretty productive economy. we can make it more so with smart investments. that will deal with a lot of the issues. i do think to loop back to the question about whether there are labor shortages and also what they were talking about, you can't argue with the changes in the demographic structure, you know, i think -- i don't think that we -- i don't think there are big labor shortages. and i don't think we need immigrants to fill population to substitute for declining population. it's not inevitably a bad thing

for there to be a declining population but i think the fact we have this kind of age structure means we can absorb immigrants and we can do it very well. we've done it before in the past. it's part of the kind of picture we would see. i think the kind of levels we've seen have not really been a problem. the ways we've regulated it as daniel's pointing out i think have been a problem and getting a better fix on how do we have an overall immigration system that works better and is enforced better is a good idea. but i think it's not so much that we have shortages or we have needs that we can't otherwise deal with those problems. i think it's more that we can see that we know how to do this and it's gone pretty well for us and there's no real reason to think that's going to be a problem in the future. in fact, kind of to the contrary. >> one thing that people will point to as a symptom of how kind of broken our immigration system is is the large undocumented population. and obviously, we have the republican nominee out on the campaign trail saying we need to build a wall. what is the state of undocumented immigrants right

now? are they still a big presence? how are they affecting the u.s. economy? >> they're 5% of the labor market and 2/3 of them have been here for over ten years. about a fifth have been here for 20 years. so it's a past tense effect. >> well, their status has remained unchanged unfortunately thanks to the supreme court. but they're going to continue working in the industries that they do, and we know they suffer wage violations and other labor and employment law violations at much higher rates than u.s. workers. so we obviously need some sort of policy solution. i don't know what it's going to be. maybe it's status-blind labor enforcement. maybe it's what california has done, which is to pass a couple of laws that ban employers from making it legal for employers to threaten workers based on their immigrant status. and you know, states are probably going to have to come up with solutions, pro-worker

solutions. i don't know. but it's a big share of the labor market and we need to do something to protect them to -- because protecting them actually helps u.s. workers. that way they don't have to be undercut. >> daniel is exactly right that there's 11 million already here and have been here for a long time. they're not going to go somewhere else. that's an asset that's in place. it's their children again who are really in question. that's what the dakker program is aimed at these immigrant quloirds paid for for their schooling. we've already educated and are already ready to work, ready to produce taxes and do all kinds of good citizen type things. held back. they're in limbo. they don't even know the home country of the parents. they just didn't ever grow up there. am i right? is that the -- >> if you're an unauthorized immigrant who's been here for a while who doesn't have a criminal record the probability

you're going to get deported is already low and hopefully the president will make that even lower now that dopa hasn't passed. >> can you tell us what the supreme court decision last week means for daca and things like that? >> the original daca in 2012 is unchanged but the new program which would have impacted around 4 million of the parents of u.s. citizen-born children and legal permanent resident children is essentially in limbo, which means that the status of unauthorized immigrants is the same. it's going to go back to the lower court to be heard on the merits. it was a preliminary injunction that was at issue. but the program can't go forward and it's not going to be implemented while president obama is in office. so it will either have to wait a few more years or until comprehensive immigration reform happens. >> you can say in terms of this discussion today you're talking about daca and do pachlt. this is people who are here already. the 11 million here already. for the most part these are

already people in the labor force. it's a question of do you shift them from not having legal status to having some level of sort of bargaining power in the labor market so they can be more equal. and i think that's going to only be ab an improvement. you're not talking about new immigration. you're talking about shifting people from not having stat tuso having a provisional status. your first question, i would say 11 million people is a large number of people. but it's not really growing very much. it's shrunk and leveled off and maybe it's going up in the last year or so but we don't see the same kind of trend -- people see there's a constant flow of new -- of increases in undocumented immigration, and in fact at this point it seems like it's more of an outflow than an inflow for the last few years, maybe now reversing a little bit. >> we'd be negligent to not point out the economic benefits that would have accrued if dapa

would have passed. families with at least one dapa recipient, family income would have gone up by about 10% and poverty rates would have gone down by about 6%. and that's from the migrational policy and the urban institute estimates. >> it seems like we're leaving some low huanging fruit on the tree policywise. a lot of these ideas we're talking about. were they present in the 2013 comprehensive immigration bill that passed the senate and seems like the high point of recent immigration reform efforts? was that a good piece of legislation in all of your guys' view? or am i asking you to comment on things? >> i think -- i'm sure we could sit down and come up with something that we would like better. it dealt with the main issues. i would say there are three big issues that any kind of comprehensive reform deals with. how do you provide some kind of pathway to citizenship for them? you have to deal with how do you

have an enforcement system that works. and i think you can't have an enforcement system that works in building a wall or any level of dealing with the borders is only one part of the issue and it's one that's already been -- there's been an enormous amount of money thrown at that already. i think you need to have some kind of workplace enforcement and how do you make a system that works for workplace enforcement. this can include some level of inspections and -- anyway. so there's enforcement. and then there needs to be some change in the future way that immigrants come. how do you make it possible for people to come legally? because right now what you have is almost no possibility for anybody who's coming as a lower skilled worker to come to the united states. and i think the kind of system that daniel's talking about where you have some level of responsiveness to some kind of a panel of economists and others, to think about how do you judge when it makes sense to have more people coming and when it makes sense to have fewer.

so those are -- it has to be some kind of -- the 11 million who are here. dealing with enforcement in a better way. and future flows of immigrants. that's got to be part of it. there were compromises but that was a bipartisan deal in 2013. >> one small point to illustrate both what david and daniel said. daniel said i was critique whether there was construction work need because it came from construction firms and political lobbyists for construction -- >> it didn't include labor market data or metrics -- >> one of the elements, a minor element in the reform package, was a labor commission that would actually survey what are the labor force needs. i work in the housing area and there is a shortage of workers. ever since the great recession decimated the capacity of construction firms to build

housing they haven't been able to rebuild their labor force. they've had a hard time. that's anecdotal with me. but within the industry i see that. i'm not an advocate of the industry. we don't have any authoritative labor commission that can tell us how many workers do we need. we don't know. >> what's another way to get there, which is raising wages. a lot of those workers during the recession left construction because there weren't jobs. they're probably in other lower-paying jobs and they would come back if the wages went back up. >> prices have gone sky high because the land has gone sky high. we're trying to keep housing prices down i hope and so if we raise wages we'll make prices even higher. there's a real squeeze between the consumer and the producer. >> construction company owners will take less of a cut and more will go to the workers. >> i think the land has absorbed -- >> revise what i've said before. i don't want to suggest there's a labor market shortage.

but i think what you want is you don't want to solve every labor market shortage instantly by plugging that hole. i think you want to say -- that's the way a market economy is supposed to work, is when there's a shortage you want wages to go up. if there are not enough people being trained for nurses you want the industry to then be investing or the government maybe to be investing in how do we educate more people to be nurses. so i don't think you want to say, you know, every shortage should be filled by immigrants, and especially not by people coming temporarily and then going back home. i think you want to say how do you build a growing economy in which there's room for people to get those jobs but how do you -- just to make up a scenario, i mean, you want the labor demand in my opinion to be lagging a little behind -- i'm sorry, the labor supply to be lagging behind a little the demand at least in the economy today because you want wages especially in the bottom and middle to be going up. >> this question is really at the heart of all these reforms,

which is what kind of immigration do we want. one thing that a lot of people said in 2013 was maybe the most consensus is around high-skilled immigrants. let's just fix that part and get a pipeline for more skilled immigrants to come into the u.s. a lot of people who are advocates for low-skilled immigrants said no, we need to link those two things. but would it make sense to say we know we need x, can we get, that does it make sense to divide immigrants by skill level, how do you sort of answer that question? >> i think you're mischaracterizing the consensus on the high skilled immigration piece. this is dick durbin, both in hearings and in the "washington post" said that he started calling sm-44 the reform bill the h 1 b bill. he said that was the most contentious, difficult part to do and he felt he was outnumbered by other people on the gang of eight because he wanted some basic froefrmz u.s. workers in high skilled immigration. the industry essentially got what they wanted, which was many more high skilled workers but

with no real improvements on wages or having to recruit u.s. workers before you hire them. i think we have to make a decision on -- we're going to need -- i think everybody can agree we're going to need at some point immigration on the high and low skill side. we have to decide how that's going to be managed in a way that minimizes the cost and maximizes the benefits of how we do it. i don't know if you want my quick take on the immigration reform bill. it's a mixed bag. the legalization was the best part of it and that's probably why it was worth doing. but it had very huge increases in guest worker programs without -- in needed reforms. and there was really absolutely no money for increased labor law enforcement. and that which i think is too important to leave out. and there's no real biometric entry-exit tracking system for visa overstayers in the future.

there's an expansion of e-verify without modifying the system in a way that employers can't use it to use it as a tool of exploitation against workers. and then finally there was a huge militarization of the border that would have occurred, which was really terrible. and i think progressive groups that wanted immigration reform started to split off as a result of that as well. if was really a mixed bag. >> yeah. seems like the employer labor regulations are going to be a key issue in whatever comes going forward. it seems like that is a major kind of pivot point for all these policies. step away from the economy for just one second but talk about another aspect of immigration. a big thing we are seeing, that the u.s. immigration reform are people coming from central ameri america. we had a big media moment on that last year. we're seeing refugees coming from syria and africa. obviously a big issue in europe. are refugees coming to the united states any different than

the typical immigrant or migrant? do they have different economic benefits or costs? >> we actually just did a big report about refugees. i'm glad you raised it. happens to be top of my mind. i think the way people have absorbed what's going on is i think similar maybe to the way you described it. there is a big syrian refugee crisis and there is a big change in europe and turkey even more so and lebanon. the united states has taken 3,000 refugees from syria in the last, i don't know, five years. it's really not a significant number of people in terms of labor market impacts. 3,000 out of 300 million people in the country. and it hasn't changed very much over the last years. we take about 80,000 plus or minus 10,000 or so a year and we've been doing that the last number of years. we don't see in the united states the kind of increase in refugees the way they have in other parts of the world.

that said, refugees seem like they have a little different profile than immigrants. each group comes from a different kind of place. i can tell you very quickly the ones -- we looked at somali, burmese, and bosnian refugees and saw what we were particularly interested in was how they do over the longer term they're here because there's been very little good data about that, and saw they in fact integrate quite well, do well over time. they need some help to get started but after they've been here for ten years they in fact are doing quite well. >> one sort of other related question because we sort of are talking about immigrants as sort of ingredients in the u.s. economy a little bit during this panel. sometimes there are refugees and there's a moral imperative involved. there are some people in washington like michael clemens at the center for global development who would argue that bringing migrants to the united states is a better form of

foreign aid to help people in poor countries. do you guys think that's something policy makers should think about and do you think that's a good argument to make, it's a better form of foreign aid giving people wages they couldn't access in their home countries? >> it's clear that remittances that go back from the u.s. workers to their home countries is foreign aid. in that sense it is a literal substitute for foreign aid. but i worry about brain drain because you take the best and brightest out of these countries and keep them here in the u.s., then where does that leave them back home? that's a counterdevelopment strategy. so in the short run remittances are a plus. they diminish over time as immigrants have been here more than ten years. their remittances drop off. probably because their parents back home have died at that point and so they have les sip yents at home. what about the brain drain? that would be a negative for

foreign development. >> there's been some study between western europe and eastern europe. there's a brain drain in the way you're talking about but there's also the return migration and people bring new skills back to the countries at least potentially depending on what the country is. >> we know it promotes trade because they have trade connections. >> the trade potentially. >> there's no doubt what you're saying is the case, that this is by far the biggest source of foreign aid if you want to keep it that way, these remittances. and also we don't do a lot of foreign aid to the -- i'm always amazed when you look at the polls that show what percentage of the budget people think is going to foreign aid and it's like 15% of the budget must be going to foreign aid when it's less than 1%. i think it would be smart for us to do foreign aid and that would address some of the problems in places like -- it if we do it well, which is another question i have. in places like central america so you don't have people feeling

like they need to flee from very dangerous situations. that would be a better scenario than us benefiting from their coming here. >> i think i a proposal like michael clemens's would completely depend on how you manage the new migration flows. if you did something akin to open borders where there's a very large influx, all of a sudden, i would worry it would become a tool of corporate exploitation to lower bajz having all these new workers all at once. if would have to be garage sxl done in a fair way where people were coming in at market wages and not being used to undercut wages. >> so now we have a few minutes left before we get to q&a. i'm going to ask you that each respond to one final question from me and then feel free to

add any concluding remarks you have. it seems like the discussion we're having right now is pretty divorced from the political rhetoric as we mentioned. if there is one sort of fact or concept, there's not enough hair pulling as far as i'm concerned. if there's one fact about immigration in the u.s. that you could impress into the mind of every member of congress, what would it be? >> i've got my ready answer. >> you go first. >> i would start with what's happening with the native-born, by the way. impress on them the severity of the baby boomer retirements and how you can't bring replacements all in one year. you've got to bring them in steadily. right now it's about do i like immigrants, do i not like imgrants. forget immigrants, what about us? if we need immigrants it changes the entire attitude toward immigrants. i don't think we're conscious of what we need.

>> i don't think this is a fact that would change a lot of minds but it's so absent from the kind of conversation we're having is imdprags immigration is much more defense than people recognize. you have a lot of people in the higher skilled brackets and a lot in the middle as well. it's that there are reasons for focusing on each of those in various ways but i think to step back and say we have a tremendous -- diverse obviously also in terms of where people come from. educational backgrounds. cultural backgrounds. it's very exciting and very good for the vibrancy of the country and vitality of the economy. i think there's a tendency to zero in quickly on what about those mexican men working in construction and not talk about jamaican women working in child

care and the accountants, disproportionate numbers of accountants who are immigrants as well as silicon valley and all that. it's a much more -- and actually just your point about high skill and low skill before, the large majority of immigration is family unification. it's not economic in any -- they don't have those kind of higher skilled or lower skilled. it's not because of economic visas. and you know, we do very well with that in the united states. we could improve it. we con leave so much on the table in terms of ways we could benefit from immigration. and certainly we could improve our immigration system significantly. but somehow the country has managed to benefit nonetheless even with all of the problems and the lack of reform. >> i would say -- i would tell the members of congress that we really, really are lacking and need more and better data on immigration to improve the quality of the debate. better longitude na'll data.

better data on temporary worker programs. we have hardly any. it's difficult to assess what's going on with immigration, what the impact is on wages and unemployment. it's really tough. what's happening from the debate and the rhetoric. and that serves to increase the influence of powerful lobby groups who are pushing to deregulate the immigration system so they can disempower migrant workers. >> we'll do some q&a now. if you're watching the live stream, i guess you can tweet at us. #dpclive. and they'll give us your questions. before we go to the room, we do have a question online, and it is for daniel and it concerns the great construction worker dispute. this is from drew edwards who's a reporter with the construction labor report. she asks, construction industry employers insist they're having a hard time finding workers. like you said, they're some of the biggest proponents of guest

worker programs. besides increasing wages, what else can these employers do to astrakt more native-born workers to construction occupations? >> invest more in training and apprenticeships. training in apprenticeships has really, really, you know -- investment in that has decreased over the years. that's really it. there are going to be programs in place for when that isn't enough. but that's something that's been completely neglected. work with labor unions in order to improve those efforts. >> do we have questions in the room? we have one right here. we have the mike coming. if you could just say your name and your affiliation and make sure to ask a question in a brief period of time. >> i'm mitzi wertheim with the naval post-graduate school. my question is where are the jobs? and the reason i ask is i met way young man who works for silicon valley. didn't go to college.

earns $100,000. i said what's your job? he said to eliminate work. that's part of it. my concern is how do we get people like you to think about the whole question of employment as a holistic issue, not just this narrow piece over here? because it is so incredibly complicated. just telling us one small piece of the story doesn't help us understand in terms of what needs to be done. >> the question is how to think more broadly about employment? >> but i want you to communicate it in a way the general public can understand it. the vice president last week -- >> we're going to try. >> last monday was giving a speech. and he said we need people to think like wise men and communicate in the language of the people. so i ask you all if you would be willing to do that but think about these complex problems in a holistic way and how will you

make that happen. >> okay. i cannot field that one but maybe one of you three can? >> actually, it's interesting. the three of us i think are not particularly focused on immigration and are more general -- economic policy institute and fiscal policy institute. i certainly think a lot about those questions of overall employment and actually not -- we happen to be the one arm of both of those groups that look at immigration issues. i think that those are -- i think there are good questions. i think the -- my answers i guess would be that i think there needs -- first of all i think there is job growth and there are relative unemployment rates. there is this question that kenny raises about what's happening with people who are out of the labor force but not looking for a job. so there is some growth. but i think there could be much more. there's an idea there might be slower growth going forward. how do we do something like that? to me invest in education,

invest in infrastructure. i think there needs to be countercyclical investment now to make sure how do we make sure we're stimulating demand. there's clearly an absence of demand that's -- from consumers. that's the reason for the lack of growth. those would be my -- i don't know if that meets joe biden's criteria for being communicative enough. and i don't have any answer to how do you make that happen. but i think those are the big issues. >> i would just say that the central economic challenge of our time is getting wages to go up. capital share of income chabz xhapz to workers has record highs after the recession. there's a number of things we can do as david said, invest in infrastructure and increase unions and make better laws and rules so more people can collectively bargain, things like, that but it's not easy. >> in the language of the people the more you pay people the more they spend. the beauty of capitalism is it's

a circular system. and you'll get economic growth and more job growth if you pay people more money. not the richest people but the poorest people. because the poor people will spend everything they get and the rich people will save it or do other things. >> do we have another question? gentleman in the back. >> i'm paul donnelley with morrison public affairs group. and i'll confess to being a little disappointed because this has been a very sophisticated discussion about economics but a little too simple about immigration policy itself. it wasn't till the very end that dr. kalick mentioned most immigration is based on family, and most of the discussion has been as if all immigration is the same. in fact, permanent and temporary legal and illegal. it's all economics. and we can talk about it that way. dr. myers mentioned that in about a month the national academy of sciences is going to do a new report on the economic impact of immigration as i

understand it. they did one about 20 years ago, which concluded that immigration is a net but small benefit to the american economy as much as 10 billion a year in a $14 trillion economy. in other words, a dime. if you've got 140 bucks in your pocket. it seems to me, and i'm a green cards not guest worker guy. that's my bottom line on all immigration issues. it's a very simple question for you. why would we ever want more people with fewer rights? >> i kind of feel like we did say i don't think we do want that. i think we want to have a system of immigration that does respond to the american economy needs. and i think as well as humanitarian and other reasons. and i think certainly daniel and i both said and i don't think you're going to disagree. i think people who come as

immigrants with full rights and who are planning to stay here is better for the american economy than -- i mean -- than people who come with temporary visas and are forced to go back afterwards. there will always be some. you want people to sign on the dotted line and say you want to stay forever. that seems to me like what we benefit from most and what we should be encouraging rather than discouraging. >> if there's any role at all for temporary phone workers program, you can go through every single visa category and talk about numerous, countless cases about trafficking and wages not being paid. if there's any role for that, it has to be in a way where somebody comes a very short period of time and provisionally is able to self-petition fire green card to stay permanently. but it would be better to assess where labor shortages are and the people we bring in, just have them on a direct path to a green card which eventually can mean citizenship if they want

it. >> i'm with my co-panelists on this. i will also admit to being chagrined when i heard david say reunification. i realized we never mentioned that. it wasn't part of the economic analysis that people do. they don't distinguish really. h-1b is clearly not part of family reunification. it's unique in the u.s. in canada and australia they don't do it that way. they're more jobs-oriented. or refugees. but that's the american tradition. it's been a long-standing one. but back to my point earlier about immigration reform every 20 years, and it's a different time today than it was 20 years ago. when the last national academy of sciences report was done in the 1990s it was responding to a very different immigration climate and economic climate. immigrants today are much better educated than they were back then in the '90s. and the cost and benefits to immigrants has shifted

accordingly in the current period. i don't know what the exact calculations are in our report because it's so long i can't remember the numbers. i'm not supposed to remember them yet. but it tries to follow -- our report tries to follow what was done before in a similar way but with improved methodologies and with more updated contextual information. we've learned a lot over the last 20 years i think. from what they did before. >> can't convince you to give us an exclusive preview here today? >> one of the biggest issues that i think is plaguing our committee is what is the answer. what is the conclusion. it's 12 chapters. with lots of stuff. and we know the media will take one point and that will symbolize the whole report and yet it's a diverse report. we don't have a lot of debate among us. a lot of agreement, but many facets. and i really like what david said earlier about the diversity of immigration being a key point to take away. that is a key point. they stereotype it by one

figurehead they have in their mind. and the figurehead they have in their mind i won't say who it is but that person is disappearing or has disappeared or has gone negative in the last five years, and yet it still is a big enough feature in some people's minds, i don't want to say whose mind but they want to build a wall against this figment of imagination from the past. they make policy too much on the past ten years, remembering what our conventional wisdom is accumulated from the last 20 years. i should say i'm a demographer but i also teach in a policy school. so i think about the intersection of these things a lot. to get agreement among a committee you have to go to a common denominator. choosing something that's old, that's just how it works with community. some new idea won't win the day unless it's a shocking new thing like a major earthquake, something major. like brexit. no, i didn't say that. >> actually, i do want to bring up brexit because there's a sense that was driven by eu's immigration policies and i think a lot of people, probably far

too many people are looking at brexit and saying are there implications for the united states? we were talking about this a little bit before the panel. but do you see any lessons from brexit or from the uk/eu immigration system that apply here in. >> i hope not. i mean, so one thing i guess you could say is in the news today and yesterday is a lot of second thoughts or people who are saying some things and starting to backtrack and say oh, wait a second, peel there's not quite the same negative impact we said it was go to be, it looks like it does have economic consequence that's are going to be a problem for us. maybe we're not best off by being walled off from the rest of the world, that we actually benefit from the trade that we do in europe. so i mean, i guess i do think at the very broad level that the united states like england, like united kingdom remains that, benefit from being engaged with the world and in the back and

forth. but i think it is also a fairly different context. >> i would say i guess the one lesson i saw was i thought it was completely wrong to blame immigration for any real negative impacts in britain. i don't think there's evidence of it. but the immigration argument for brexit got a lot of momentum from the fact the government was wrong a couple of times about what they thought was going to happen. well, first when the eu expanded they thought only tens of thousands of new work grertz eu were going to come in. it ended up being half a million. david cameron spent ten years saying was going to get net migration down to the tens of thousands. it's never even come close to that. it gave a sense to the public that this government isn't able to adequately manage migration and so the system lost some credibility and there was a lot of angry people who voted for

brexit. i think the lesson for the united states is we should have a more transparent immigration system because vague more transparent immigration system with good evidence and data and a commission that's studying what's happening with immigration will lead into creased credibility of the system which in turn will lead to increased public support for immigration. >> it is also interesting to see, if you look at the map of the voting across the united kingsd m, the places where there's been immigration, david cameron was promising it to be lower, the places where there has been a lot of immigration they were voting for being in the eu. it was the places left behind for the overall economy where there's not a lot of immigration. in fact there's urban a lot of immigration because it's in the more rural areas that are not part of -- not benefiting as much from the modern economy. >> in the u.s. the gallup poll data do show that in counties where there's no immigration or very little immigration, those are the ones are the respondents are most likely to say that

immigrants come here for a free ride, not to work, because they have no idea what immigrants really do. whereas in immigrant counties where people know how hard they work, they have a very different attitude about immigrants because they've seen them. but everybody gets to vote in america, even those who live in counties where they don't know about what's going on but they vote on information given by political opportunists who try to terrorize them about some imaginary freeloaders or something. >> we're all up here talking about how brexit is a bad thing and i think we all probably agree that it is. but there was another part of the argument that didn't get much attention in the united states, which was a progressive leftist argument for leaving the eu. there's a movement called lexit, which is left exit. and that had to do with the fact that the eu has been a tool to implement austerity and force neoliberal reforms on countries where it didn't turn out so well. aus materiality was working terrible in the eu until they

started changing their policies. i think paul krugman referred to it as if you're punching yourself in the face and then you stop it's a little bit better, right? there was sort of an argument. i think on balance they did the wrong thing. but after what happened, you know, with greece, how greece was treated by the northern countries, that gave a little bit more credibility as well to the people who were voting against it. >> we have -- we can return to our shores now. we have a question from the internet from francine kiefer, i believe, of the "christian science monitor" who was wondering if the panelists could speak to african-americans and how they've been affected by immigration. >> so when i was summarizing the consensus i would say part of this is that overall there's been a positive effect on wages. i think overall for african-americans it's a positive effect on wages. but for african-american -- and for african-american women in

particular i see a gain. african-american men with less than high school education or maybe also with high school education do see some negative impacts, and i think that's -- and that's where there is in fact a controversy among economists is how big is that impact. and the range is -- how big is it and also how do you characterize the number that you get? so i would say it's a modest impacts and george borj sachlt, for example, has said it's a bigger impact, but i think that's real. and i would say if you were going to list what are the challenges facing black men with less than a high school education, immigration would be about tenth on that list or maybe 20th. there are a lot of challenges. but i think it would be wrong to say that it's not there. i think there is some. if you were going to think about what would you do to address that, well, first of all, you would say the best thing you can do is to have people graduate from high school, get better education. and in fact that's been

happening to an underrecognized degree. there are about 3 million fewer black men with less than high school education than there were just 15 years ago. the rates have gone down from i think 29 to 17% if i remember it right. but very dramatically over just a 15-year period. and i think that we also know what to do to make it better. investing in local schools, figuring out how do you have more access to college. how do you deal with the overincarceration of black men in particular. re-entry after you've been in prison, how do you get a job. these are all things that i think would be very appropriate for us to be doing anyway and certainly even more so as saying we're going to do something that's going to be good for the overall economy but might continue to have some, if we don't address it, some negative impacts on this population that's already been facing a lot of challenges. >> let me add to that too. because i like the way you said that, david. it is very complex. there are many different facets for african-americans. but there's a general point too,

which is that investment in human capital pays off. it pays off big-time. there's different multipliers. there's 4-1 payoff, 10-1 payoff. it depends what study you look at. and the younger you educate, the earlier you help young children, like age 1, age 4, preschool, you get the bigger payoffs over time. it accumulates over time. and we're learning that now from scientific studies. the evidence are very clear. here's the problem again, is it requires investment up front with payoffs coming 20 years down the road. in our democracy we make decisions on the present or in the next election cycle or the next budgetary cycle. and we're not able to think far enough ahead. but we can cultivate the quality of the workforce that we have here in place already. we wouldn't need as many workers to produce the same amount of goods. so maybe this gdp being built out of the labor force plus productivity, the ratio could be much more favorable for the

people who live here. and the biggest bang for the buck in my studies comes out of the most neglected segments of the population. they have the biggest upside potential. so if you don't bring in as many immigrants in, you sure better invest a lot more in the people you have. and i see that as part of comprehensive reform where we do both things, both cultivate the children who are here and cultivate our needs for more immigrant workers. >> do we have another question in the room? this guy right here. >> you have hinted there are some geographic disparities across the country with the way immigrants are able to contribute and benefit the overall economy. could you speak a little more explicitly to that? and maybe with some advice for state-level legislators on how to kind of reap the most benefits for everyone. >> and identify yourself for us. >> my name is ryan barr. i'm with the office of immigration statistics.

>> we've done some reports on this. looking at different metro areas. and i guess i would say so in general you see this very close correlation of economic growth with growth in immigrant share of the labor force and of the economy. and that's not a surprise. i think you see people, that's both people often ask is that because immigrants are attracted to places where there's growth or is it because when they go there they cause the growth. and i think the answer is sort of yes. it's both of those things. i think the people go where there is growth but also when they come they become consumers, they become business owners, they contribute their labor, they sort of help to expand the local economy. i think it's pretty interesting to see, though, some of the places where that's not been happening. and in fact so more and more of these in the last five years i would say really across the -- an area -- i've sometimes heard referred to as legacy cities or

more commonly known as the rust belt. cities like detroit, cleveland, cincinnati, pittsburgh. where there's been actually an interest in saying how do we get more immigrants to come here because the big problem with these cities is they don't have enough population, which means they don't have enough tax base to cover their services, which means there's a downward spiral of decline in schools and decline in police departments and decline in -- how do you pay for all that stuff if you don't have enough people living there to pay the property taxes and other taxes that support the base? they've been pirnted in the idea of how do you attract immigrants? some of them have tried to say let's do things like advertise to get immigrants to come here. i don't think you can do that very well. i think people respond to much more concrete things and i think what you can do to attract immigrants is make it better for immigrants who already are there. that will attract both u.s.-born people, which has the same effect, so that's good, and also will attract the people who are looking for opportunities. i think you can see a

particularly interesting role in relationship to what we call main street business ppz in a lot of these places, and this is in those kinds of cities, also in suburbs that have seen a decline in a lot of areas and rural areas as well. places where there are boarded up storefronts and not much happening in an area. that's both a direct impact because you don't have people working there but it also has the ripple foektz whole area because nobody wants to live where there's boarded-up storefronts and so there's a decline in the. we've seen over and over again that process reversed where immigrants are the first ones to come into an area like that. they open a restaurant. people start to come to the restaurant maybe from that ethnic group that the person who started it. but then somebody else starts to -- some local -- somebody starts to find out it's actually that ma lairnz food we hadn't had before is actually kind of good and start to go there and pretty cheap. then you get a store next door

to that. dry cleaners. and what we see as i was saying before is i think immigrants are more likely to be business boirnz not -- but i think that sometimes gets exaggerated. immigrants are in fact much more likely. in our data anyway. 18% of business roernz immigrants. 28% of these main street businesses are run by immigra s immigrants. that's a place where immigrants are making a disproportionate kind of difference and helping to turn around the dynamics often of places where other people get attracted to live there. >> a federalist point. sought localities that receive immigrants get their kids too and have to pay for them. and you have big arguments over taxation in the local area. and then when the kids grow up they don't stay in those towns. they move to another town or another county, another state, so it spreads the benefits. santa ana, california is doing the nation's business. it's incorporating immigrants. it's teaching their children. it's helping with the health care. and then it's graduating them on to another count qi or another

state. the federal government needs to help these local receptor areas to make those investments in the nation's business because it's the nation's workforce being built locally. that's mart of the political clash is over that. local taxpayers have to pay for this. they have promises about economic revitalization. and the storefronts being filled is a visible symbol of that, clearly. but really the real human capital investment that's going on is invisible to people except on orb did. >> it would make a lot of sense for the federal government to do that and given i don't see that happening in the short term, i would certainly support it. so maybe i shouldn't make any predictions. i think states can also do some of that. i think you often do see that within a state it's -- the people are growing up in the suburbs but moving to other places. the biggest cost is related to schools. and states and localities share the cost of schools and states can play a bigger role in equal thooigz and making sure it's more fair. that's a big point.

>> all right. my big countdown clock is telling me we're out of time unfortunately. i think we'll probably be around afterwards if anyone has any further questions. but thank you to the bipartisan policy center for hosting us. to our panelists, dowell, david, and daniel. we appreciate it. and hope you have a lovely day. [ applause ] >> i will add my thanks toefrn for coming out. just a couple of final housekeeping notes. you can get a copy of our report online at our website, bipartisanpolicy.org. you can also find our other research, blog posts and information about immigration under the immigration tab on that website. the video of today's event will be available on our website later today in its entirety. so if you missed anything, you're not sure what somebody said, you need to quote, it you can go look at it online later today. thank you, everybody, for coming and have a great day. a couple of live senate hearings to tell you about. special presidential envoy brett mcguirk testifies about global efforts to fight i.c.e. our live coverage of the senate

foreign relations committee begins at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. in the afternoon a senate judiciary subcommittee meets to look at fras radical terrorism. the hard fought 2016 primary season is over with historic conventions to follow this summer. >> colorado. >> florida. >> texas. >> ohio. >> watch c-span as the delegates consider the nomination of the first woman ever to head a major political party. and the first non-politician in several decades. watch live on c-span, listen on the c-span radio app or get video on demand at c-span.org. you have a front row seat to every minute of both conventions on c-span, all beginning on monday, july 18th.

now agriculture and interior department officials testify about wildfire prevention and forest management. alaska senator chairs energy and natural resources committee. >> good morning. the committee will come to order. we're meeting this morning to receive testimony on the legislative discussion draft entitled "the wildfire budgeting, response and management act." and i want to thank those who joined together when we released this draft, may 25th, along with ranking member senator cantwell, but senator wyden, you and senator crapo have been working this issue for a very long time. we thank you for your leadership. senator risch joined us. so, a good, strong team with

this draft. we've taken public comments on it. we're taking the next step today because i think we recognize that we face some serious challenges in an area that needs to be addressed. people across the country are realizing that wildfires are a growing crisis. we certainly know in alaska the devastation that wildfires bring to our state. about half of the 10 million acres that burned last year were in alaska. we've already seen over 200 fires this season alone. so, there's a recognition that it's a real problem, it's a growing problem, and resolving it would require a comprehensive approach that addresses both wildfire funding and forest management. we need to do both at once because we know the wildfire problem is not just a budgeting problem, it's also a management problem. now, i've worked through the appropriations process to provide temporary fixes to ensure our firefighters and forest managers have the resources they need. i added $1.6 billion for wildfire suppression to last year's omnibus $600 million above the average cost over the past ten years, likely enough to

prevent fire borrowing this year. last year's bill also included targeted increases in hazardous fuels reduction and timber programs to help mitigate fire hazards and keep our forested rural economies going. it was just last week, now closer to two weeks ago, we reported the interior probes bill for the next fiscal year. it again includes full funding for wildfire suppression as well as substantial commitment to prevention and forest management efforts. and i'm proud of that work, but i will also be among the first to say that our yearly appropriations bills are just temporary solutions. they get us from one year to the next, designed to hold us over as we develop longer-term solutions. and a longer-term solution is what we have in front of us

today. our draft bill includes a fiscally responsible fix to permanently end the destructive practice of fire borrowing. this is where agencies raid nonfire programs like recreation, wildlife and timber to pay for firefighting. our fix requires congress to provide resources to the agencies up front, enough to cover 100% of the average annual cost of firefighting over the past ten years, while allowing for a limited cap adjustment in those truly catastrophic fire years. in low fire years, we allow the agencies to invest leftover suppression funds in prevention projects. ending fire borrowing is something that members on and off the committee have called for. this is not just a western issue. just this week, senator schumer complained that fire borrowing takes federal dollars away from

efforts to fight the emerald, ash, bore and other invasive species in new york. undersecretary bonnie told this committee last year that fire borrowing has significant and lasting impacts across the entire forest service, not to mention its negative impacts on local businesses and economies. yet, despite widespread agreement that we need to end this unsustainable practice, the administration is not yet willing to embrace our bipartisan proposal to do just that. instead, it insists that congress should fund just 70% of the ten-year average of suppression costs. a proposed cap adjustment would pay for the rest as well as any costs above the ten-year average. congress has rejected this idea every year that it's been proposed. the administration claims that it will use the difference between 70% and 100% for forest restoration and other measures that allow you to get ahead of the problem, but regrettably, the president's budget request

for the forest service simply does not bear this out. using the 70/30 split, the forest service would move about $273 million off budget next year, but the administration does not seek to plus up wildlife land preparedness and wild liar management. those accounts are flat. it did not seek to increase forest health management on federal lands. that request is actually down. both national forest system budget and the forest service overall budgets are down. this just doesn't comport with the reality here. so, you can begin to see why wildfires are also a management problem. healthy, resilient forests are fire-resistant forests. and yet, despite knowing the value of fuel reduction treatments in mitigating wildfire risks, increasing firefighter safety and restoring the health of our forests, active management is still often met with a series of

discouraging and sometimes insurmountable obstacles. high upfront costs, long planning horizons and difficult regulatory requirements are impeding our ability to implement treatments at the pace and scale that wildfires are occurring. our discussion draft would take steps to reduce these hurdles without abandoning important environmental protections, by building on authorities within the existing healthy forest restoration act. we focus and expedite environmental reviews by limiting the number of alternatives that need to be analyzed for collaboratively developed projects, including those contained in community wildfire protection plans. our bill also pilots a new emergency environmental assessment for native ponderosa pine forests, which are highly susceptible to burning, in order to reduce the risk of the large, destructive and expensive wildfires that are unfortunately becoming the norm. addressing the management problem would not be complete

without attention to our nation's largest national forest, and that's the tongus in southeast alaska. when it comes to the tongus, i think we recognize there's not always going to be agreement, but i hope that we can at least agree that the transition to a program focused on predominantly young-growth timber needs to be real and not just something that looks good on paper. the forest service needs to do what's right and undertake what the tongus advisory committee, the tac, called for in its recommendation, and it called for a comprehensive, stand-level inventory, to address the uncertainties that exist in the supply, volume and timing of the available of young growth to support a transition. on january 21 of this year, the tac reiterated the importance of an inventory, calling it the number one priority investment, because modeling is not good enough for a clear picture of when young growth will come online. a successful transition will only be possible if it is grounded in strong science and

backed by comprehensive data. the point of our tongus provision in this draft is not to delay the transition that is already under way, but to allow for a meaningful inventory to take place before the land plan is amended. the last thing that i want to highlight is our emphasis on federal engagement with state and local fire agencies and other partners. this is critical to mitigate risk to communities and to manage and respond to wildfires. the investments we authorize will help communities become fire-adapted, which is an important piece of the solution to escalating wildfire suppression costs in the wildland urban interface. i'll close by thanking my colleagues for working with us on this discussion draft. i intend to advance it to the senate floor as soon as possible, and i would hope that members of our committee will recognize what's at stake here and join me in the effort. with that, i turn to senator cantwell. >> thank you, madam chair, and thank you for having this

hearing this morning. and i think this is a culmination this morning of a lot of hard work in this discussion draft more than two years, and if you include the work by our predecessors, probably two or three more years before that. so, i'm so glad that our colleagues, senator wyden and senator stabenow are both here because of the roles they have played on this issue as well. i, too, could start with some statistics from our state, the worst fire seasons in the last two years, 10 million acres burned, 4,600 houses destroyed, and obviously, the very sad fact of fatalities with our firefighters. we're going to hear from commissioner goldmark, who is hear from our state. and he is going to tell us in more detail about all of that. but i appreciate him being on the second panel. instead of going over more statistics, i would like to spend some time talking about what i think we should do to reduce the risk, reduce the

intensity and reduce the cost. scientists are telling us that these seasons, these fire seasons are both longer and hotter. an april report from headwaters economics said that one degree increase in temperature change, one degree results in a doubling of firefighting costs, 25% increase in the number of wildland fires, and a 35% increase in the number of acres burned. so, just one degree temperature change will make our national fire problems even more complex. so, i believe we must effectively address the root cause of the problems with fire risk and fire budgeting. and if this is the new normal, we need better strategies to deal with the problem. and i'm glad that undersecretary bonnie and mr. rice are here to talk about some of those strategies today. because i don't think the temperature change is going to stop. i think we're going to have continued risk. our efforts need to be guided by scientists, and the science is telling us that we need policies that will make our at-risk forests more resilient to fires

and keep our firefighters safer and protect our western communities from the impacts of wildfire, which we have seen the huge economic impacts of this in the last couple of years with the callville alone losing over $2 billion of timber revenue. so, we have also later the director of cal fire joining us on the second panel and chief pimlott's testimony discusses at length the need to treat the fuels that have built up on our national forests. the discussion draft includes a pine pilot as the chair said, and i think it is a key provision that any western senators should be interested in. as part of this what i see is the new strategy for firefighting on federal land management agencies, they need the tools to complete their job. we need to be proactive in reducing fire risk and the discussion draft today contains

a number of tools for doing that. i want to talk about this pine pilot in specifics. that section directs the agencies to focus their efforts that will take place in areas that are most at risk. we have printed out a couple of charts that hopefully we can show to people, that the science is built upon. the forest service has ranked the different parts of the national forests based on fire risk. the most at risk are in the red areas. the next chart is from a former head of fire from the forest service, who published an academic paper. the connection between ponderosa pines and the large fires we've been experiencing. so scientists are telling us that restoring the health to the

ponderosa pine forests through thinning and prescribed fire is the best way most effective way to deal with this issue. so after merging these two maps we've identified more than 2 million acres that we want the forest service to place a priority on in treating. these 2 million acres are the most at risk for far, the place to projects have the largest impact in reducing fuels, and the places that are best supported by the science in the public. in this pilot we would provide the tools to the agency such as long-term contracts to individual mills and preferences for cross laminated timber so we are securing more sustainable buildings. these tools will help us get this work done and will help us, and i believe, have a much more proactive discussion in the discussion that happens after the fire. we need to do reduction. implementing this program does change the fire risk. the science are showing that it can happen and there's actually video on the web that proves it. the spokane tribe released recent fuel treatment and how it fared last year in the carpenter

road fire. i recommend anybody who wants to look at that under the carpenter road fire, they fill treatment effectiveness, they installed lap time lapse time cameras where the fire burned through and the video show is compelling evidence that the value of this pine pilot could have both be held in the land and national forest wind. more broadly there are other provisions of this bill that i think we need to implement. but to me with one degree temperature change driving the challenge, the scientists are saying that this kind of investment reduces the size of the fires, and i think that is what we need to try to target. other provisions in the draft community preparedness, 600 million would be authorized to help at risk communities. i know my colleagues from the west understand this. whether you talk about twist or others, these communities are at

risk and they need help and support. they need to make sure that small communities who are on the front lines of fighting these fires have some immediate capital ready to do what we think is hasty response. also we have a section in the draft on new technology to deploy gps entrance of wildfire today reversed this technology as the holy grail of firefighting. for the first time ever managers would be able to see in real time the location of the fire and their crews. dozers are also ensure that we will work together effectively come ensuring agencies all of firefighting equipment available that can do wonders in helping to engage in what has again been defined in washington state by various entities as hasty response. last year as i traveled through the state and thinking i was going to be reviewing the previous year's fire season, we know a huge new fire season

opened up. community after community including a roundtable we held with cathy mcmorris rodgers, and later hearings, this issue could not have been more clear for my constituents. knit together a cooperative so that those on the front lines who have the tools to do some immediate response don't all of a sudden get stopped at a line that says dnr or national forest service can you do have the right to cross. figure it out because they're so much capacity when people want develop and coordinate, and i know we can do it. i know our community came together in the aftermath of oso and we worked diligently to try to find those individuals impacted by devastating landslide. i am sure we can do the same in fighting our fight. the discussion draft also helped ensure communications infrastructure remains functioning during wildfire

season. this was an issue where communities have been activated or trying to be activated but no broadband communities should exist. no one can get access to the broadbent until emergency is declared, which is like filing paperwork and sending it away for a month of deliberation. at that time they are still trying to communicate these various plans. we have to come up with and this draft does. i am ready to declare a fire borrowing the great debate. this senator is agnostic as to how we solve it, but i do have a couple of principles in general. first, we cannot rob peter to pay paul. the forest service needs both the amount of money to fight the fires and they need the money dedicated to do fuel reduction. we have to produce a draft out of here, madam chair, to give

them the ability to do both. and on the implementation of the pine forest, i would just say washington state invested $18 million in 2014 to rebuild the salmon habitat but most of it was burned up in 2015. so we need to have dedicated funds to protect our investments, the federal government investments if we're going to deal with the fire problem. we have to both dedicated funds for doing fuel reduction and dedicated funds to fighting the fires. today firefighting constitutes 50% of the forest service budget. reports say the proportion will grow to 67% over 10 years and that means over 700 million less for those non-fire accounts if we continue to try to solve it this way. i hope we will all work together and i look forward to undersecretary bonnie's comments on this is how we going to solve

this because we have had a shift in temperature that demands a new response. to date, senator murkowski and i have received a number of letters on this draft. a number groups want more things include into the. i personally want a more robust controlled burn section. this is a very complex issue and i know many of my constituents do not want to see smoke in their communities. we understand that. but trying to do prescribed burns and the drive out of months of august is the wrong idea. we need the flexibility to do it in the winter months of the pacific northwest, not when the fuel is so built up and our conditions are so dry. we need to work together on that. a number of groups want drafts provisions removed like the tongas and a number of groups have provided feedback on how to make sections more useful like discussions on the pine pilot. all i know is that we have to come together to solve this issue. i appreciate so much as i said my colleagues here today been

working on this issue for several years as well. i would like to submit also this chart that would show where the board feet of potential pine forest reductions would come from my state, and so my colleagues can see this. this is not something that, madam chair, that i come to easily. but i think this is a better path forward than the route we have been going with the aftermath of a fire and then trying to decide what to do with salvaged logs. if the federal government is going to be spending between $2 and $3 billion a year on fighting fires, because of the increasing risk, we need to do something to reduce the risk and i think this is a suggestion

worth considering. thank you. >> thank you, senator cantwell. appreciate the level of detail there. we will now turn to our first panel. we will have two panels this morning, and i know that there is much to be put on the table so we will proceed immediately to it. the first panel we're joined by mr. robert bonnie who was the undersecretary for natural resources and inside the u.s. department of agriculture as well as mr. bryan rice, director from the office of wild land fire at the department of the interior. welcome to the committee. i must tell you that i was very disappointed that we did not receive your testimony until at least 11:00 last night. i think for colleagues that were quite anxious to see the direction and the comments did not receive them until early this morning when folks came in. you can do a heck of a lot better and i just need to start the hearing unfortunate, with an is admonishment. i think the committee deserves a little more more, a little more

respect from the administration in terms of your statement. with that, if you would proceed. >> thank you, chairman murkowski, ranking member cantwell and members of the committee. thank you for having me here today. more importantly thank you for scheduling this hearing on the issue of such vital importance. everything the forest service does, everything is being negatively impacted because of the ever-growing proportion of the agency's budget spent fighting for. two decades ago the agency spent 1/6 of its budget on fire. today they routinely spend more than half of its budget on firefighting. non-fire staff in the agency has dropped by 39% since 1998 many with fewer staff to restore forests, provide recreation, manage habitat, you name it. investing forest restoration is critical to addressing the threat. since 2000 the administration has increased the number of acres restored across the national forest to prescribed fire and other means. by investing in collaboration

and landscape scale mesh with increased timber production by 20% the over the long can the agency will not be up to sustain these gains much less further increase the number of acres we restore unless congress fixes the fire budget. there's broad agreement among stakeholders to republicans democrats, that this problem the state. wild fires might be thought of as a western problem the truth is the budget impacts the forest service everywhere the agency works; east, west, north and south. fixing the fire budget problem requires doing two things. first we must end fire borrowing so that when the agency exhaust its fire suppression budget as it does in most years it doesn't have to transfer dollars from non-fire programs to fund firefighting. while congress we are versus the agency for the transferred funds, fire borrowing disrupts the agency's ability to get work done.

the second problem, the growth of fire suppression expenditures and the erosion of the rest of the forest service budget is actually far more debilitating to the agency than fire borrowing. let me explain. by law the forest service has defined fire suppression based on the average of suppression expenditures over the previous 10 years. the cost of firefighting is rising dramatically due to blogger fire season can increase your loads and development into the wild land urban interface. every year the forest service must set aside more money for fire. over each of the last two years the forest service has transferred more than $100 million from its non-fire programs to firefighting. that money was not borrowed. as long as fire costs keep rising as they surely will, that money is moved out of our non-fire programs and into

firefighting. so if you want to restore forest producer to catastrophic fire, we have to solve his second problem. and want to increase recreational access or fix a $300 million backlog in trails we have to solve it. if we want to does the 66 million dead trees in california, we have to solve this problem. the bipartisan wildfire act solves the problem but along the forest service to access disaster funds when it spends 70% of its suppression budget. this both prevents fire transfers and allows the agency to invest additional resources in forest management. there are other ways congress could address the second issue as well by providing additional capacity to the agency. you could cap a suppression budget 100% of 2015 levels, take the additional money that congress is investing in firefighting and devote it to restoration or recreation or what have you. with the comprehensive budget fix the administration can support efforts to providing agency with additional forest management tools to increase the pace and scale of restoration. such provision shall be built on collaboration among stakeholders

and a strong environmental safeguards. the fourth management provisions congress passed in the 2014 farmville struck the right balance and demonstrated it was possible to pass legislation with those forest industry and conservation support. let me address the tongas national forest. for decades the tongas has been mired in controversy. usda and the forest service have invested in collaboration in order to find a path forward that sustains a viable timber industry while transitioning away from over timber harvesting over the next 15 years but we oppose provisions dealing the amendment. most importantly i want to stress we look forward to working with this committee and others in congress to put together a legislative package that fixes the fire budget provides balance tools to increase forest restoration and management. thank you and i'm happy to answer any questions. >> thank you, mr. bonnie. mr. rice, welcome. >> good morning, chairman murkowski, ranking member cantwell, members of the

committee. thank you for the opportunity to come in today and provide the testimony from the department of the interior regarding the wildfire budget in response and forest management act of 2016. for introduction, the department of the interior works with the bureaus within the department of wild land fire responsibility and provide the leadership, the oversight focusing on budgets and policies that affects nearly 500 million acres across the department of the interior's land-base. where appropriate we work closely with other federal agencies, states, tribes and external partners as well as organizations to provide strategic leadership and support as well focusing on attendance of a cohesive strategy as well

as implementation of order 3336. the department would like to express thanks to our partners in congress for support for the wild land fire resilient landscapes program. that continued support is a critical step forward as we recently received over 75 pre-proposals for this next year that have nearly $74 million of requests. this on the heels of the 2015 fire season being the costliest on record and burning the most acres since we've been recording since 1960. as in past fire seasons the wildfires we are seeing in the season is going to be highly dependent upon the weather as well as other human factors. we are seeing impacts from climate change, drought, invasive species as well as our other factors and they're creating this landscape for more susceptibility to devastating wildfire. with an ever-expanding wildland-urban interface in the

inherent complexity associated with it the need for partnerships is continuing to grow. we are continuing to make proactive investments in fuels management and those resilient landscape activities across the landscape to better address the growing impact of wild land fire on communities and public lands. the resilient landscapes activity is coordinated with and supported by those resource management programs within the bureaus of the department of the interior, national park service, fish and wildlife service, as well as the bureau of indian affairs. those programs are working in concert with tribes, states and other organizations that are involved. on another note i would like to highlight, the department is showing leadership in providing training and job opportunities for our veterans that are coming back, and wishing to continue their service and working in

natural resources or other natural resource management programs. we are taking great pride in those men and women that are coming back to serve and realize bureau of land management has provided wildfire firefighter one into training for over 400 veteran volunteers over the last year. in regards to the draft bill, the department continues to support fixing the fire funding that ends transfers, recognizes catastrophic fire is a natural disaster and ensures our efforts to suppress those fires does not diminish our efforts to create more resilient landscapes. the department strongly opposes section 201 in title ii as currently written and looks

forward to working with the committee to find language that identifies standards that meet the goals of over all safety, interoperability and efficiency the department is leading many activities focusing on uas that seek to provide firefighter and public safety while ensuring operations are continued and carried on. we have examples from 2014, 2015. most recently here in 2016 on the north fire in new mexico where we have uas systems that are providing real-time mapping capabilities as well as infrared video. in regards to the last title and focus on some of the other land management activities, the department is focused on ensuring strong environmental safeguards and to further support increased resilience in landscape across the bureaus. in closing department of entry works close with our federal tribal state of local partners, and lastly we will continue to improve interagency forest and range land management while importantly upholding our trust responsibilities.

this concludes my statement and happy to answer any questions. thank you. >> thank you mr. rice. we would begin with a round of questions and let me begin with you, mr. bonnie. i want to start with the tongas inventory. i will tell you i am quite disturbed by the statement in a written test plan. you kind of glossed over it in your oral remarks this morning, but you make a statement that says that the requirement for inventory would be quote contrary to the recommendations of the tongas advisory committee as well as causing an

unnecessary delay. i'm really stunned by the level of the statement. when you look to forest service own website, to talk about the tongas inventory and the planned amendment, you on your website, you say an inventory is needed to address the uncertainties. the planned amendment needs to have credible information to accurately predict the time and supply of young growth. this can only be obtained by comprehensive stand level inventory. the statement from the secretary on your website again, secretary emphasizes transition must take place in a way that preserves a viable timber industry that provides jobs and opportunities for residents of southeast alaska. we all agree on that. the tac itself has said in january 21 the tac said there's a number of investments investment that need to be made. the number one priority investment is a forest inventory. because modeling is not good enough for a clear picture of when young growth will come online for the next 15 year period. so for you to say that this is contrary to the recommendations of the tac just does not comport with what the tac has said and said very clearly, as well as what you have on your own website.

what's up? >> so we are carrying out in inventory right now as you know in parallel with what the tac recommended in their final report. the level of inventory i think you are talking about is unnecessary for us to arrive at a decision on a planned amendment. >> who has decided that is unnecessary to arrive at the level of the plan recommendation? >> the inventory we are carrying out by that will give us information that will allow us to do projects in of the things that i think we had information we need right now to do a broad plan level amendment but the inventory suppling doing this allow us to plan sales. >> the inventory has been recognized as necessary to provide for that level of certainty for the plan. forest service recognizes it. the tac recognizes it. so to suggest that we know enough now that we can just move forward with the plan belies the concern from everyone saying we need to understand where we are in the growth stage, in terms of the visibility.

we recognize and inventory in the tongas is tough because the tongas is a tough area. but in order to have a plan that is based in reality, everyone recognizes we need to understand what we are dealing with with the trees. so are you going against the tac recommendation? >> no. i think we're in line with the tac recommendation to the asked us. they were very concerned about implementation. asked us to move forward with the inventory we are doing up as you we're doing in partnership with the state's i think were very much in keeping with what the tac has asked. >> what you are suggesting to me here in your words are, the requirement to inventory, and i would use your statement here, all 462,000 acres of young

growth sites on the tongas, before issuing a record of decision will cause an unnecessary delay would be contrary to the recommendations of the tongas advisory committee. i will just take you back to the statement from the tac itself on january 21 that says the number one priority investment is a forest inventory because modeling is not good enough for a clear picture of when young growth will come online during the next 15 year period. so no, the reason we included this requirement within this draft legislation is to follow

out the intent of the tac as well as what forest service has been saying all throughout this discussion, that we need to understand what we have in terms of available young growth so that we can make sure to use the secretary's words, we preserve a viable timber industry that provides jobs and opportunities for the residents of southeast. i'm going to turn to senator cantwell now. >> thank you undersecretary bonnie, and thank you for your testimony this morning. i wanted to go over this issue of fuel reduction because it's so important to so many of us. and this issue about fuel reduction by limiting the considerations one thing that kind of hits me. i know your testimony or the administration also talked about that and out you could elaborate on that point. >> i think what we've said all along is that with a conference at the happy to look at provisions, to workforce management of the national forest.

those provisions need to have strong environmental safeguards but they need to be based on collaborative and we think those two things can be really important in allowing us to move forward with those types of tools. and so any provisions that were look at i think those are going to be important. we recognize the need to get more work done. and critical to do is think about larger landscapes as you talk about but also working in collaborations we can reduce litigation risks so we can move forward with these projects more quickly. >> so that language would be problematic if it stayed in the draft? >> so i think what we would suggest if you talk about the action, the action section, i think what we were suggest is making sure it's got strong environmental safeguards. it needs to be discretionary, not mandatory. the language right now is mandatory and that's problematic

it was suggested adding a third alternative. >> and then on the pine pilot in general, what are your thoughts as a fuel reduction tool? >> you were thinking as i could write about thinking about larger landscapes and think about how we get fire back into these ecosystems. i think that's important. the collaboration is a board. and five as a safeguard to support. i told her staff were anxious to work with you on it for some provisions. >> mr. rice, on reducing risks by doing some fuel reduction, what are your thoughts about the pine pilot? >> thank you for the question, senator. i think for many of the projects specifically the pine pilot you referring to, the department in many instances will defer to usda to address many of these issues as it is focused on forest service lands, but the overriding themes as you pointed out in several cases so far of ensuring environmental

safeguards, strong environmental safeguards are in place, and further developing landscapers of the land is important. >> there's no secret here. i have discussed this issue with various people, and so this is about whether we all can get comfortable with the response to what's happening. can we all agree? i'm hearing from scientists in my state, university of washington and others who say these pine forests are going to burn down. i would prefer to keep them but if they're going to burn down, guess what, i don't get to keep them. i can get them managed. i can get the fuel reduced. i can make sure that the mills stay open by giving them long long-term contracts so they can continue to process. to me that is a win-win-win. if i don't get to keep it by forest because they will burn down, i would rather have some of it reduced and say the federal government dollars, so to our communities and be proud of the management of our timber products into sealed the.

i guess it's a question of whether both your agencies agree with these environmental assessments, have been presented to the about the forest and whether they're going, whether of the next decade of temperature increases is this the hazard we are facing. do either of you have a comment about that? >> there is a portion we've got to get more restoration done the many of our forest look differently because we've taken fire out. that combined with climate change as he spoke that is changing the nature of the fires we've seen now to make more destructive and larger and restoration is the key to reduce the severity of those fires. >> thank you. thank you, madam chair. >> thank you, chairman murkowski and ranking member cantwell. i gratefully put forward this draft, this is tireless work and i like the bipartisan spirit that made this possible. secretary bonnie, good to see again. i am dismayed at outraged.

we have breaking news coming out of montana that hit us the twist year lived up as just yesterday, warehouser announced it is closing two mills in columbia falls montana this summer. 100 montanans will lose their jobs. these are good paying jobs on top of another 100 job cuts that were previously announced. the companies said they been running below capacity because of an ongoing shortage of logs in the region. i want to put to rest this nonsense i hear from folks who are oppose saying the reason that mills are closing because of lack of demand. the issue is lack of logs and by the way, it's not lack of available timber. some of our mills today in montana are getting logs over 500 miles away.

we go to other states to get blogs if we go to other countries your we go to canada to get logs. it's got to end. this body needs it's got to end. this body needs to act to help save right now our forest and these jobs. i want to draw your attention to flathead national forest which surrounds much of columbia falls. this section in orange are the acres suitable for timber harvest. in fact, if you look at where the red circle is that's where the warehouser operations

is at. we just put this map together last night. we got news that nobody saw this coming. we knew our timber industry has been very clear that they can't get logs. that we just saw 100 montanans lose their jobs. if you look at that map there's about 700,000 acres of suitable we could get to a national forest. that's the colors on that chart. that's all within 100 miles of that weyerhaeuser operation. despite the hard work, the volumes of harvest coming off this forest and nearby national forest is not anywhere where it can and should be. the latest mill closing art due to enforcement. they are also not surprising over the past generation as i was a kid growing up in montana, we've lost two-thirds of our mills. we had over 30 when i was a kid. we are down to 10.

here is one more to put on the list. we have lost 40% of our product, would product workforce. the irony is we're talking with this job loss can go to the committee hearings, our counties, surrounded by our federal lands who've lost their natural resource base no longer have a tax base to fund their schools and their teachers and their infrastructure, and we've got these dying communities. the family of eureka which is nearby where this plant closing occurred, couple years ago was having dinner and they said basically we describe north was montana, poverty with a view. that's what's going on. we briefly discussed the impact of litigation in montana and we've had hearing after hearing and as a talk about getting one of the core, fix this problem and move forward to a responsible timber harvest we need to have some reforms in litigation to listen to disco this, there are currently 21 projects under litigation.

13 of these were developed using collaborative processes. recent objections filed by the environmental groups do not represent the 90% of most montanans that are stopping these projects. they are singling, they are seeing more litigation. my question of that is a backer. asked the committee works on this draft, if we can find common ground on litigation reform, expanding the balance of harms protections, closing loopholes that fringe groups that have exploited in the courtroom as we see in the cottonwood versus forest service case. can i get your commitment to work with us, to work with me and other members of this committee towards finding consensus for such solutions that can be incorporated into this emerging legislation? >> so we're happy to work with you. my concern about litigation is whether or not we can maintain a middle so we can move something

forward. >> do you believe litigation is -- >> litigation is a challenge and a big challenge in your part of the world, no question. >> can you work with us to find some common ground. >> we'll continue to work with you. i just say understand -- >> that's not a yes. i can get a yes? >> absolutely we'll work with you. >> i appreciate that. we're at a point now and this is something when your phones are ringing, when you're seeing 100 montana families losing jobs because of lack of logs, when you're surrounded by timber something has got to change here. all right. thank you. >> thank you. >> first, i want to thank the chair and ranking member for their work on this issue. this issue of how we fund our forests and their management is critical to, you know, to communities across the west. it's absolutely critical in many communities in new mexico.

as we speak right now the dog head fire continues to burn in the east mountains not far from my home in albuquerque, actually and last week we lost 24 homes, 21 other structures when that fire raced out of the mountains and into a subdivision. it is only thanks, really, to luck and favorable winds and the very hard work of our firefighters on the ground that the structure losses numbered in the dozens and not in the hundreds and that we had zero loss of life, thank goodness. this fire actually overlaps with a collaborative force project which includes partners like the nature conservancy, the chilean land grant and even though the neba crosses review on this project was completed back in 2012 the forest service didn't

have the funds to pay to do the actual work in the forest. it took two more years for the project partners to come with the pounds to start the work and still only 7,000 of 12,000 acres in the project were treated before the fire was ignited. so it's hard not to think about how things might have been different if this entire area had been successfully treated and restored before fire broke out last week. i know we all wish the forest service could improve projects faster, more efficiently. fact is that project approval is only first hurdle in getting work done to make our forests healthier. without a robust and stable budget all the stream lining process in the world done get trees cut. i look forward to hearing our witnesses and what they have to say about tissue but we can't wait any longer to get large

scale projects implemented in new mexico and for that matter across the west. undersecretary, bonnie, it's consuming a larger portion of the budget. last year for the first time the forest service spent more than half of its budget on fire activities and in 2025 it's expected to consume two-thirds of the budget. obviously this cuts out money, it crowds out money for nonfire related programs, recreational programs, personal firewood use permits which so important in new mexico, road and trail maintenance, forest restoration and watershed health. so i want to ask you, does this draft that we're discussing today do anything to address the growth over time in that ten year average? >> new york it doesn't. it just addresses the first problem i talked about, my testimony fire borrowing. >> if we fix the fire borrowing and don't take into account the continued changes we're seeing in climate what does that mean

for the nonfire program over time? >> as you point out the biggest impeiment is lack of capacity. it's affecting everything, again, as you point out. and to your specific point on restoration, if we want to get more work done, we have to solve this problem. >> we have got to figure this out because we have projects all over in forests across new mexico where the community has come to a generalized consensus about what needs to be done. the relationships with the forest service are positive. people generally agree on what we need to be done and oftentimes much of the planning has been done, but we can't get the funding because we're spending it all on firefighting and we gientd a way to move that back over time. before my time expires, i want to ask you a little bit about the ponderosa pilot project.

it describes eligible projects as hazardous fuel reduction projects. under the current draft would that include prescribed fires as well as mechanical thinning or do we need to clarify that because obviously the ideal is the first wave you go in and thin mechanically and that has a certain cost to it. then the second wave hopefully you maintain that by restoring fire into a firebase system at a much lower cost to the taxpayer. >> we would read it does include that but clarification i think would be welcomed. >> it looks like my time is expiring, madam chair. >> thank you, senator. >> thank you very much, madam chair. let me commend you and the bipartisan committee that went into this draft. i very much appreciate.

i do indeed. madam chair and colleagues, ending the plague of fire borrowing is now the longest running battle since the trojan war, and it is time to bring this to an end. and, madam chair, i know it's a little unorthodox, but i want to give a little history on this on behalf of senator crapo and i. the two of us have worked together on this and with you. our proposal to end fire borrowing now has the support of 258 organizations and given the history on this, especially appreciate your desire to get this done before the next fire season, and in terms of advancing that effort would just like to put into the record the colloquy that 11 of us entered

into a year ago and we said we would get it done in there credit you picked up on that proposition that now is clearly time. now, i want to make sure we're clear on the major issue with respect to the mix of ending fire borrowing and management. the chair and i have talked about this often because i have been supportive of management efforts as is senator crapo. the concern is if you take on too many difficult management issues you will not end fire borrowing and that has been the history. so it seems to me the chair and the ranking member on our side are saying here's where we would like to begin the discussion. we just want to make sure we end

up getting something done. we want to get something done. and as the chair and i have talked about getting something done is also a bicamera effort. so, on the fire borrowing issue, i just want to make sure we're clear on the administration's position. i believe the administration believes that to deal with fire borrowing, you have to freeze and i use that word specifically, you have to freeze the amount of money that is spent on fighting fire on a ten year average and if you don't have a freeze or something that resembles a budget control to liken that we won't get that done. do you support the concept of a freeze. >> yes.

we talked about the freeze and 70% in your legislation as well-to-do exactly what you're talking about. >> how about your colleague? what is his view with respect to this? >> thank you, senator. i'm in the same place. i think the administration's proposal of 70% as well as looking at 1% of fires and categorizing them as catastrophic wildfire and focusing on that element that will give us the flexibility to focus on landscape restoration. >> so, for purposes again -- i touched on with chairman and ranking minority members here as well, that's your take on what we need to do to fix fire borrowing.

now as i've indicated i support management as well. i mean clearly management is a central part of this and certainly going to be a central part of getting any kind of agreement wither to body. mr. bonnie, what are the bipartisan opportunities for management reforms in your view? in other words, when the chair and ranking minority member representing all of us in these discussions as a house and we'll be working with you on this because i want to get it done this time, make it happen for the serious fire season, the other part of congress will

insist on some management reforms. what are the kind of management reforms that could you support in those discussions? >> so i think you and many others here worked on the 2014 farm bill and some profit visions in there. they require collaboration. they require environmental safe guards. and i think using that as a basis and looking for things that, to use your thinking, something that we can get done, and i think there is common ground that we can find for across people in the conservation commune and industry and where else. >> my time super. can you get to the chair and ranking minority member and the rest of us on this committee the specifics of what management reforms the administration would support in addition to the effort to end finally once and for all the fire borrowing because that's going to have to be part of actually getting this done. >> yes. >> can we have that within two weeks? >> we'll try. >> we better have it within two weeks because fire season is on us and there aren't many days left in the congress. two weeks? >> i'm on it. >> thank you, madam chair. >> thank you. i appreciate you pushing for the specifics. as i mentioned in my opening statement it's my intention to be moving this, this proposal in a relatively direct manner and we don't have a lot of legislative days before we conclude for mid-july. so i would reiterate the request from senator wyden and ask that you be most expeditious within the next two weeks with specifics. let's turn to senator gardner. >> thank you, madam chair and thanks for holding this hearing

and welcome to the committee, thank you very much for being here. thank you for the work on this discussion draft and to reaffirm my commitment to all of us to address this very critical issue. it's something i hear from county commissioners, legislators every time i go back to colorado. colorado as well as many western states who mostly on this committee talked about today, i'm sure, impact significant loss that can occur from a forest fire, the issues of funding and staff to manage the forest, a big issue and of course with over 14 million national land, grasslands, it's all affected by drastic impacts we've had from budget reductions and other things how we currently fund wildfire suppression. mr. bonnie, thank you for being here. thanks for working with my office on these issues but we got to find an end to this fire borrowing practice. just this past week we saw a wildfire in northwestern colorado. the beaver creek fire. not what many people think beaver creek, different area of beaver creek, colorado but on the colorado/wyoming border

area. we've been in touch with forest service officials and that you feel -- thankful for the work the firefighters are doing at this time. so this is an important issue in real-time. i am concerned that the recreation program in the country is most heavily visited. reports have shown this forest lost 40% of budget and staff in the last five years while the recreation use has continued to increase. again most heavily visited national forest. one of the most negative kbagts, negative effects of this trends the agency is unable to be a responsible partner to deliver recreation to visitors. it's home to several world class ski resorts. during the forest service budget hearing in 2017 i asked chief tidwell how the agency planned to address this issue in the

white river forest and since then he's agreed to meet with me and ski resorts in early july to further address this question. i very much appreciate that commitment and ask you if you're aware to address the immediate issues with the white river forest? >> we used to have eight full time staff members that worked directly with the city industry and now we're two. we're not providing the level of service we need. it's a capacity problem. i've been in touch with folks from the ski industry, talked to two are willing to be engaged and how to solve this problem. >> turning now to another area of colorado, the durango southwestern railroad. an incredible railroad, great part of our history, crown jewel in colorado and really the west. but because it's a coal fired

old railroad they are required to have firefighting capabilities to address any spot fires that couple. these firefighting capabilities they possess include water tanks, pumps following the train and a helicopter that is on stand by to make water drops. so while the railroad is rightfully responsible for addressing fires, it's my understanding they are prohibited from fighting fires which come up beyond the rights of way in the forest service land and must instead just report it instead of actually using their resources to help fight it. on november 17, 2015 i asked questions of this committee during a hearing on wildfires, we talked about certification issues, and how they can be empowered to fight fires before

they get out of control. section 201 requires a single system for credentialing federal and state and provide interim acceptance of standards. it's my hope ending 12401 will address this situation. could you talk more about forest service's policies towards partnerships with private entities like the durango railroad? >> we do a lot of work with contractors to provide helicopters. the vast majority are through contractors. the caution i will raise on the certification issue has to do with air safety. we have had a number of accidents and so the standards we set are very important for the forest service, safety comes first. happy network with your office on the issue. the flag i would raise we just want to make sure whatever we do we're being as safe as we can. >> thank you.

look forward to ongoing conversation. again thanks for the work you're doing in colorado as we speak. >> thank you, madam chair, and thank you for the work that you and your committee have done. last year chief tidwell testified to this committee on the interaction of wildfire and climate change as chief shared scientists at the forest service believe climate change is one of the major factors leading to recent trends of longer fire seasons with wildfires that are larger and more intense. in fact, fire seasons are now on average nearly 80 days longer than they were in 1970, and wildfires burn twice as many acres today as they did 30 years ago. our climate is warming and we are experiencing unfamiliar and

unprecedented conditions, drought may be the new normal. invasive species and insect outbreaks may be the new normal. larger than average fire seasons may be the new normal. undersecretary bonnie, in your opinion, to what extent has climate change driven the increases in fire suppression costs that we have been seeing? >> there's no question it has had a significant impact. we're seeing larger, more catastrophic fires. it's not the only thing. it's also because we've taken more natural fires out of these eco systems we built fuel loads up. we have more development in the wildlife urban interface that drives costs up. >> so clearly climate change has a cost and this cost is having a serious impact. >> yes. >> on your agency.

unfortunately my colleagues across the aisle seem to be in denial about the real cost of climate change and for some of them, whether climate change even exists. do you expect the costs to rise as climate change continues to get worse? >> yes. and scientists believe will double the acreage we're burning by mid-century. >> in minnesota none native invasive species are a problem. unfortunately the invasive emerald ash bore has destroyed tens of millions of ash trees throughout the u.s. since it was first detected in 2002. undersecretary bonnie i want to thank for the work you're doing combat emerald ash bore in my state and throughout the country but i'm concerned that the growing cost of wildfire suppression is draining your budget and hindering some of this and other great work that the forest service is doing outside of fighting wildfires.

in fact, the forest service has, i think, as has been mentioned in this hearing that's 39% fewer staff in nonfire positions today than it did less than 20 years ago. so, mr. undersecretary, as you know it's not uncommon for staff or funds to get transferred mid-season to fight wildfires. the bill we're addressing today addresses the wildfire bill issue but doesn't fix wildfire suppression costs continue to groin overall forest budget. isn't that right? >> that's right. >> okay. that you feely minnesota typically doesn't experience catastrophic fires we see out west.

but the ever expanding cost of wildfire suppression still significantly impacts my state. i want to make sure that any wildfire legislation addresses the needs of minnesota. so that we too can tackle our most threatening issues like the emerald ash bore and protect our most treasured resources. anything i would like to see in any comprehensive fire legislation is finding a market for fuel and forest wastes. communities are increasingly built at the wildland urban interface and heavily wooded areas where they're at risk from economic damage from forest fires. we know that. removing hazardous fuel like under brush and immature trees can also help reduce the severity of wildfires especially when this is done right around communities year or within our forests. i see an opportunity to help pay for the removal of hazardous fuels by using this waste as a source of electricity for nearby communities. this could simultaneously reduce fire risk and bring economic benefit, bring heat and power and other facilities that use this as options. undersecretary bonnie, once it

is cut, what is done with hazardous fuel today? >> well so in many places we're paying people to remove them. to your point if we had greater markets for hazardous fuels we would actually be able to get more work done. forest service is making investments here but there's more to do. the budget constraints we're operating under makes it more difficult.