wanted to be two vacancies at the same time. they try to tame and dash time of their departures -- time their departures. she asked if he planned to retire in in the coming year. he said, no, he planned to stay on. she announced her retirement. justice roberts was the on the court of appeals and was nominated initially to fill justice o'connor's position. justiceat, chief rehnquist passed away from his illness. that left two vacancies. been whenad always chief rehnquist left, roberts promotionme chief by or as it turned out directly. his nomination for her seat was

withdrawn and resubmitted for the seat of the chief justice. justice alito was nominated to fill the vacant o'connor seat. host: some discussion on twitter on the subject of the cameras in the court. video coverage would expose the justices and their questions and competence to being judged of by the public and they do not want to that. we have time for one more question. vida is waiting. you are on with mark tushnet author of the book "in the balance." guest: yes, good morning. what a wonderful time for me to say the decision by john roberts absolutely floored me. i never thought he

was fitted to be a supreme court justice at all. to think you can tax the american people and to let the like bk gp --e on the kgb, i no longer have faith in the court. this the absolute worst thing that is ever occurred. i saw earlier something on their that somebody sent in on twitter. or one of those. was justice roberts threatened? i have wondered that exact same thing. we have lost faith. anyone could make that type of decision and think it is ok. millions of people are against it. we wanted it repealed. that comes from a person who comes left or right. right now, i am leaning up.

i do not know which way. think the only thing we can say in response to that , thevation is that constitutional issues which is all i am concerned about about whether congress can impose a tax this year is like $95 on people who do not purchase issue --surance, that that constitution issue is relatively straightforward. judgmentters from that , they did not express a view on the constitutional question. what they said was that it was unreasonable to interpret the statute to impose a tax rather than be a regulatory mandate which is punished by failure to

mandate is a punished by a financial exaction. chief justice roberts had a view about interpreting statutes to make, constitutional. said, you can. he said it not the most natural reason statute. if you look at it carefully and , it has a lot of the characteristics of things we call it taxes. the statute does impose a tax and once you are over that hurdle from a constitutional lawyer point of view, imposing a is of not doing something fine. there are taxes -- there used to

be, there was a court case about of peoplethe statues who do not register as gamblers or register as people who sell unlawful drugs. they do not register. and the supreme court said that is fine. course, there is substantial disagreement with the affordable care act. we will see how it is working out as a matter of politics which is basically the way i system ought to work anyway. host: if you want to read more on his views, you could pick up the book that is "in the balance ."

martin. [applause] >> good afternoon. i'm previoused to see all of you made it through the snow today. let me first of all give you a little background, personal background and a little bit of background on my organization before we get started. i am a retired foreign service officer. i had 28 years in the u.s. department of state as the u.s. diplomat. i've served in england. i've served in morocco and in served inmexico, i've nick waga and as part of that i was trained in immigration law

because as an officer which i did during part of that service s a foreign service officer, that's involved in issuing visas,s the involved in u.s. citizenship issues, things of that nature. i have issued immigrant visas. i have issued and rejected non-immigrant visas for people to come to the united states. i've worked on getting border crossing cards for mexicans to travel to the united states. this was some of my black ground from my professional career as a government employee before i ever got involved in the immigration issue in a non-profit. after retiring from the state years ent, a couple of after retiring i got involved in the immigration issue.

as a research director for immigration studies. that is a small non-profit organization in washington, d.c. that works basically entirely on research studies. as immigration was reaching sort terms y shen do point in of legislative change in 1996 i shifted from the center of immigration studies to federation for immigration reform which is an activist organization because i wanted to be involved on the activist side of trying to influence that congressional debate and to try to get legislation adopted in 1996 that i thought was important for the future of the country. that is a little bit of my background. with regard to the organization fair, fair was founded by a fwrupe of people that were

nvolved very much in the environmental movement in terms of trying to stabilize u.s. population, trying to limit u.s. population growth because they felt that was in the national interest in terms of natural resources, in terms of crowding, in terms of asimulation, things of that nature. ands the true to that purpose today, that is in effect our roots. at the present time however we're not dealing that much with the roots issue per southeast because so much of the debate about immigration at the present time is centered on the movement in the united states to try to don't comprehensive immigration reform which i believe you have been informed about is a combination of issues.

s the often described as a three-legged stool in terms of one leg being enforcement, another being amnesty for the illegal immigrant population and the third stool being an increase in immigration. are in favor of greater measures to try to deter illegal immigration to the country but we are also opposed to any increase in immigration and actually think it ought to be reduced. we think that those measures are very well understood. they are well understood in congress. there is general agreement on both sides of the aisle in congress that we need to do more to effectively deny job opportunities to people who come into the country illegally. that is something that was recommended in 1996 and i worked

for. it was included in that legislation. congress told the immigration authorities that they had to set up a system for controlling against illegal immigration by in effect allowing employers to be able to tell the difference between somebody who was legally in the country and a person who was not on the basis of the documents that they present when ad they applied for a job. earlier than thatted the been required since 1965 that all employees, new employees had to complete an i-9 document with the employer in which they identified their social security number. they had to identify their date and place of birth. and in that way, in theory in 1965 that would have presented

illegal immigrants from getting work in the united states. but it didn't work because there was no way for plorse to verify that documentation. as a result there was a widespread -- well, as a result of the 1969 reform that said that employers have to verify these documents -- i'm sorry, it was a voluntary system that allowed them to verify these documents but because it was voluntary most employers didn't bother to sign up for it. and as a result the illegal immigrant population in the country continued to use fake social security numbers, fake drivers licenses, fake immigration documents in order to continue to satisfy employers requirement to not knowingly hire illegal workers.

that continues to be agenda item of making that verification system a national mandatory system. as i said, there is general support for that on both sides of the aisle in congress buts the not passing. separate bills have been introduced to make that a national mandatory system but it has been opposed by those in favor of a comprehensive approach which includes amnesty for those illegally in the country at the present time. they said they will go along with that if that amnesty was adopted and that was one of the -744 which passed the senate last year. that basically talks a little bit about the agenda of my organization at the present time. but let me go back again to the

starting point of why we are concerned about immigration at the present time and what the idea of immigration limitation is all about. my t of all, where is computer? right here. first of all, i just want to show you the fact that the united states has a very large growing population. up until the last few years when we had the economic down tourn, the population was growing by about 1% per year, by about 3 million a year as our population neared 300 million residents in the united states. if any of you remember your math, 1% per year population growth rate implies a doubling of the population in 70 years. so in effect, had we continued

to keep up a rate of 1% per year, we would have been looking toadding another 300 million the population in your life times. that to look at what would mean in terms of traffic, of need to build more highways and land resources. but that is a very high rate of population growth ands the the highest rate of population growth of any developed country in the world. let me turn for a second to the foreign born population share of that population increase. it is a much population in growth. as a result of the immigration reform don'ted in 1965, we have

had increasing immigration every year since then. in theory, the 1965 limits were set and continued to apply, but those limits are not comprehensive. a major portion of our immigration intake system is for immediate relatives of u.s. citizens and there is no limit to that category of immigration and therefore every year it has continued to increase. a t that means in terms of foreign born population that is increasing in the united states and one that is generally younger than the overall u.s. population is that that population also tends to have a much higher birth rate than native born americans. part of that is because of the

fact that many immigrants are coming from cultures in which larger families are a norm and part of that is because of the demographics the immigration population tend to be a younger population in child bearing years. in any case we have this growing population of as a result of births through the immigrant population in the united states. as a result while this is also -- this is also the issue of immigrant admissions that i referred to in terms of being increasing. the blue line, the spike there is the amnesty provision that was don'ted in 1965 that led to the legal status given to about 2.8 million illegal immigrant who were in the country at the. as you can see, absent that we have had a steadily growing

immigrant population. -- we take the births and let me take the next point. when we take the births and admissions we get a much higher share of the population growth being due to immigration every year. this is temporary worker admissions. is is immigrant admissions projected if the senate bill were adopted. this is in accordance with information that was provided by the congressional research service analyzing what that legislation would do. it would increase legal immigration. it would give legal status to the illegal immigrant population currently in the united states.

and as i noted in this chart it would also increase the number of temporary worker admissions coming into the united states. so we have at the present time more than a million legal immigrants being admitted into the country for permanent residents every year. now that is a very large number. as a result of the immigrant admissions, the births to the immigrant population, immigration today is responsible for about 75% of our annual population growth. and the pew hispanic center has estimated that if the current trend continues, that over this decade that immigration will be responsible for 82% of the nation's population growth over that decade. so if you would be interested in

trying to stabilize population, it seems very clear that there would be no way to do that without reducing immigration simply because it is by far the major component in population increase every year in the united states. now let me just shift for a moment also. there are basically two ways of looking at the immigration issue. i've talked a lot about the numbers associated with immigration, the number of immigrants coming into the country, their share of population growth, their share of births in the united states. the other way of looking at immigration is the way that i think that probably most of you have tended to look at immigration and that is thinking termsms of immigration in of perhaps yourself or perhaps

your parents or perhaps friends or relatives or neighbors or maybe thinking in terms of the valedictorian of a high school whose parents were immigrants and never had more than a high school education or perhaps thinking in terms of refugees who we admit to the united states in keeping with our tradition as a nation of immigrants. in fact, we admit more refugees for permanent residence in the united states than the rest of the world combined. the issues looking at of immigration from the personal, from the individual perspective. and i was thinking about how to characterize the difference between these two perspectives,

between the numbers and the individuals and looking at the individuals. so i did a little research this morning and i found a nice wiki quote that sort of summarizes this situation. it said one should not lose sight of the forest for the trees. what does this mean? a forest is full of beautiful trees for the beholder, but one become so engrossed in looking at the individual trees that they may forget that each tree is merely one of thousands in the forest and lose sight of the big picture. that is basically the difference between those two different perspectives. most of the people who are on the side of the comprehensive immigration reform debate are looking at the immigration issue from the perspective of the trees, of the individuals. perhaps theking at

perspective of an employer who wants to be able to bring in a foreign-born worker to take a job. they may be looking at it from the perspective of an immigrant who wants to be able to sponsor a relative. they may be looking at it from the perspective of somebody who is illegally in the country who has u.s. citizen children and wants to try to get legal status so that they do not any longer fear the possibility of deportation. i want to open this up to questions fairly shortly, but i --t to get back again to the what basically came out as the big picture in the quote i pulled from wiki. focused, as an

organization, on the big picture in terms of resources basically. and i hope that all of you are very much aware of the fact that a generation, are facing some very severe resource constraints in your lifetimes. one of those major constraints is energy. i would assume you are all aware of that. you are certainly aware of the fact that petroleum resources are, in effect, a nonrenewable resource. are many petroleum fields that have already gone dry and other ones that are rapidly being depleted. and even though we have hit a blip recently in terms of the extraction methods of getting petroleum out of existing wells ,nd getting natural gas out

there has been a fairly steady decline in petroleum production in the united states. .or about a decade that is going to continue, whether or not the north slope is open to petroleum extraction, muchver time we become more dependent upon foreign exporters of petroleum products. a lot of that is canadian. some of it is mexican. some of it is venezuelan feared we have become more dependent upon middle east exporters as well. it is important to think about what happens as that resource declines. petroleum is not just necessary for fuelinga car or a plane. it is the chief ingredient in coke plastics. it is the chief ingredient in

inrtilizers, insecticides. when talking about fertilizers and insecticides, that involves the issue of agricultural production. we are meant -- we are using more of our agricultural production for creating biofuels, koran in particular, so that also cuts down on the -- ofility of our nesting harnessing all land area that could be in production of foods for some of that core energy production. one of the other major constraints that is facing the country and many other countries around the world is water resources. it is easy to think of water resources in terms of a continuing cycle of evaporation and rain or thinking of it in terms of snowfall today, but the

fact that that is a continuing cycle does not mean that it is an expanding amount of rainwater , freshwater resources that are by thele for consumption human population. the fact is that groundwater resources are already becoming aquifer in the ogallala in the center of the united states, and that is one of the largest aquifers in the world. but every year when new wells are put down to tap that resource, they have to go down deeper to reach that resource because it is being pumped out faster than it can be replaced. the colorado river is a major source of fresh water in the southwest of the united states. but the colorado river is

already 100% used for agriculture production and population consumption. that, in effect, means that in offt area, there is a trade- that is already real and will year andre acute every that is between agricultural use and human consumption. as population continues to grow into that area, as it is fairly rapidly, that is going to squeeze that resource in terms of being available for agricultural production. much of the prime agricultural land in coke california has already been paved over for the expansion of cities. aat is something that is also form of a constraint. there are other constraints in terms of precious metals.

the are important for production of computers, for example. those are going to be a limiting factor as well. constraints that are extremely important and lead us as an organization to believe that the united states will be stabilize its can population, rather than having it growing at a rate tween -- between about 2.7 million, which was what was reported by the 1 ass bureau on january the amount of population growth or 3en 2012 and 2013, million a year which it was running up to before the current recession. in order to stabilize the u.s.

population, you would have to reduce immigration to a level of about 300,000 people a year coming into the country for permanent residence. i say 300,000 because of the fact that there are about 300,000 u.s. residents who leave the united states for permanent residence abroad per year. you balance that and that is what it takes to stabilize the u.s. population. right now, the u.s. population growth rate from birth is higher , butthe number of deaths the number of births to the nativeborn population is just woman, and that is a population stabilization birthrate. if the foreign-born population coming into the country were to

be reduced, that birthrate will receive a bit to a point where that would not really be a significant factor in the population growth weight -- growth rate of the country. we are not the only ones that have favored a reduction in bankng immigration -- and -- in immigration. there was the u.s. commission on immigration reform, also known as the jordan commission. it was named after the chairperson of the commission, former congresswoman barbara fromn, a black democrat texas and also a law school professor. under the jordan commission, the issue of immigration reform which studied for a period of about three years, and i had the

opportunity of testifying before the jordan commission, and the recommendations of the jordan commission were that we should reduce legal immigration to a 550,000 people a year. that was a significant reduction whenwithin -- from then the level was about 850,000 a year. every declined since then year. they felt that 550,000 a year would be sufficient to take care of business needs for immigration and a continuing and admitting the immediate relatives of u.s. citizens. and thisrecommended, is one of the points my organization also supports, and

that is eliminating the category of sponsorship of emigrants by immigrants. in other words, when somebody emigrates to this country and they come in to the country and become a u.s. citizen, they then become entitled to sponsor brothers and sisters. parents and adult children. to puteffect, that tends emigrants in charge of a major component of our immigration policy. the jordan commission recommended getting rid of that ,ategory of immigration entirely getting rid of it. in our current immigration policy, have what is visa as the diversity system or the visa lottery 1990m which was adopted in at a level of 55,000 immigrant lotteryven away by every year. in effect, people around the

world were given the opportunity to send in a postcard to take a chance on winning an immigrant visa. still continues to this day, but it is currently operating at the level of 50,000 a year and you can send in your postcard electronically in order to facilitate your chances of winning a lottery. winning a lottery visa. there is a lot of fraud associated with that program, but i really do not want to get into that issue. the other category that the jordan commission recommended getting rid of was a category set aside immigrant visas for unskilled workers. that is a fairly small program. nevertheless, the commission felt that it made no sense to be setting aside immigrant visas

for an skilled workers when we had so many unskilled workers in the united states who were unemployed. they felt that it simply do not make any sense. we, as an organization, supported the jordan commission recommendations wholeheartedly, even though we felt it did not go quite far enough in terms of the reduction in immigration. for also recommended steps curtailing illegal immigration, and those were the recommendations that were being legislationthe 1969 to workwitched to fair in support of. we still have various problems with regard to illegal immigration. we still have a growing legal immigration system. we still do not have adequate controls over employers giving

jobs to illegal immigrants. we still have significant problems that require reform. reform agenda is one that has been proposed to congress for a number of years. we have worked with specific members of congress to get bills introduced. those bills have had hearings in some cases and others have not. have not succeeded in getting any of those reductions adopted. jordan, after her commission came up with those recommendations, met with argue forclinton to president clinton's support of those recommendations, and he verbally agreed to support those recommendations. unfortunately, shortly after that meeting, bartered -- diedra jordan died and with that was the support of president clinton for those

recommendations and he never did support those recommendations directly to congress. enough that probably is of an introduction to stimulate some questions, and i would be happy to take your questions. yes? >> [inaudible] the up old amnesty -- [inaudible] you have the chair of the judiciary committee. apparently he promised to come up with something by last october but the shutdown pushed that back to next year. john boehner just hired john advisor tomigration essentially help him write legislation. they cannot do this in the near

future because of the primaries coming up. so they are looking at a wonder -- at a window of june to august because they do not want to have to deal with their own voters at the same time they are proposing this legislation. my question is -- how many republicans in the house do you think will support amnesty without enforcements or what kind of package will they put together, and how many democrats do you think will be needed for leadership to get something to pass if that is what they want to do? largely, i think the situation in congress this year will be similar to the situation in congress in this past year. there will continue majority in the senate that would be in favor of a comprehensive approach. i say that with a caveat, and

that is that that might change if the republicans should win control of the senate, which is a possibility in the elections this year. , it would depend very much on what the influence of the more right wing of the role then party, what more right wing segment of the republican party plays in those that resulted in a change to a republican majority. that theuse, i think assessment is basically correct -744 had been brought to a vote, which basically it could not have because of the

fact that it originated in the senate and included revenue measures, but a similar legislation in the house subsequently was introduced by speaker pelosi, and if that had come to a vote in the house of is asentatives, there reasonably good possibility that there could have been a majority andavor of that legislation that quite possibly would be the same situation in the current year. so i think that it would be if that analysis is correct, to assume that what would prevent the comprehensive reform legislation from being enacted this year would be the reluctance of the republican majority in the house of

allowing a vote to come on that legislation. and that is basically the question mark in terms of mr. that ofs attitude and the republican leadership in the and how representatives much they are likely to be influenced by the more conservative members in the republican house seats. yes? >> there is some momentum in the senate towards immigration increasedt has , mainly inertia in the house. how much energy is there behind your answer to decrease immigration that that fair supports?

>> one way of answering that is at who you take a look is supporting the comprehensive approach and who is supporting , on thetation side comprehensive approach aside you find big business for obvious reasons, because of the fact that the more workers that are available, the more it gives the advantage to the hirer of those workers. big labor, afl-cio, which is more difficult to understand because of the fact that they traditionally were opposed to increases in immigration, but they have had troubles in terms in the big labor movement with the service employees international union

withdrawing from the afl-cio, in part because of the issue of immigration. because the sei you -- sciu has a large number of union members who are illegally in the country. they feel they would better be able to represent those workers and to unionize other locations that have large numbers of if amnestyorkers were adopted so that those workers could no longer be threatened with deportation if they became engaged in working for a union shop in their industries. business ando labor, you have ethnic advocacy of virtually every ethnicity and many different nationalities. one of the eye openers for me when i started working on this was finding that there was an

irish lobby for amnesty because of the illegal immigrant population from ireland in the country. mostdition, you have mainstream religious organizations in the country supporting comprehensive with roman reform, catholics pretty much of the leadership of that organization. of that alliance of religious groups. -- if, the question is you have all of these very major and very powerful groups -- i left out the university system. the university system is very much in favor of amnesty and increased immigration also because of the fact that they would like to see a greater -- for graduates who are foreign-born being able to

get jobs in the united states, because that makes the university more attractive to foreign students. if foreign students are paying full tuition, that is a benefit for the finances of the university. and universities have an open congressost members of in lobbying for their interests. we have all these major interests in favor of the comprehensive approach. in the question is, and this is your question -- who is on our side of the issue? the answer to that is we would not have a chance in this debate if it were not for the fact that we have a majority of the u.s. public opinion on our side of the issue. and the fact that congress is beholden to the u.s. public, in particular the voting population congress,r seats in

it basically influences them to be very cautious on what they do with regard to the immigration issue. opposition, the comprehensive advocates, have recognized this as a problem. increasingly over the past several years, they have come up with a number of public opinion polls designed to try to show that the american public has changed its opinion on this issue. i do not know if you have ever studied public opinion polling, but it depends very greatly on how you ask a question as to the answer you get. has gone verytion clever with asking questions and terms of if we required the ill legal immigrant population -- the illegal immigrant population, say the undocumented the undocumented

thereby sort of confusing the issue, if you require them to pay a fine and if you require there to be the adoption of reforms which stop and if youigration require them to learn english and if you require them to jump through a number of hoops in order to become u.s. citizens, would you go along with that? well, you know, you are not really given much of an alternative here and the answer be tended increasingly to yes that the u.s. public would go along with that. but if you go back to asking the same question that was asked earlier, and that is -- would you support an amnesty for illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants or

if you you term it, include the concept of amnesty, and majority of the american public says no, they would not support it. ont is the power we have had our side that basically has allowed us to confront the enormous financial resources of the other side of the immigration debate. another question? if we look at the comprehensive immigration reform as a spectrum with pro- immigration reform at one end and then this effort to reduce immigration on the other, there seems to be a lot of house members that are kind of in the middle who do not want to do anything about it at all. what are the practices that you and fair are taking to not only to also those members

move in your direction where we are working to reduce immigration? >> well, you're absolutely , becausehat immigration is a hot button issue in congress and regardless of how a person votes, they are going to antagonize some constituents, that there is a preference to avoid having to vote on the issue. except with regard to negative specific pieces of immigration reform legislation that are fairly noncontroversial. maybe i will back up -- i was going to say that fy systeme e-veri mandatory for all employers could be fairly noncontroversial, but my second thought on that is that all of the amnesty advocates would be

very much up in arms is that were brought -- up in arms if that were brought for a single vote as opposed to part of the comprehensive approach. that is true also with regard to an increase in legal immigration guest workers,in both of which are part of the s- 744 legislation. ,hat we do as an organization we turn out research studies. we have done a series of publications that i have worked on primarily of the fiscal cost of illegal immigration at the state level and at the national a comparisons of of that with taxes that are collected from illegal immigrant workers. and showing that that is in

effect a cost to the u.s. taxpayer of about $113 billion a from the education of the children of you legal immigrants , medicaid, birth to illegal immigrant mothers, some welfare programs that are available because of the children that are us-born, some university admission costs where state schools have started admitting illegally -- illegal aliens. some states are now providing financial assistance to illegal aliens. it is a fairly expensive prospect. that would not change significantly with amnesty. but we have tried to educate policymakers across the country becauseard to the issue

there are measures that can be taken at the state level. we have been very much involved in the movement at the state as at the national level. we were very much involved in the legislation that was adopted in arizona that required mandatory use of the e-verify system and in other states that have also adopted the same requirement. includes, unlike -- anyer immigration other organization on our side of the issue, we have a field statethat work with local immigration reform organizations to, and effect, be advocates for the adoption of measures at the state and local level that will curtail the legal immigration -- curtail illegal immigration. we were in involved in fighting

, lawsuits against arizona's immigration reform legislation that they adopted. we have a branch of our organization that is called the immigration reform law institute that works specifically on legal .ssues related to immigration and they have been involved in a number of lawsuits across the country. not only advocate for the local activist who become very much involved in their state and local policymaking process, but they also try to influence the votes of the legislators here in washington. that is the way that we try to keep the pressure on win it looks like there is a possibility that legislation

might come up that we think would be harmful to the national interest. effect, in earlier reform in 2007,hat came up for example, we were basically credited with one other organization that we work with in tying uprs usa the switchboards of congress with telephone calls from around the country by people that were very upset with the prospect that some form of amnesty legislation might be adopted. another question? >> in a love of the conventional wisdom -- a lot of the conventional wisdom is that for the republican party to win the presidency again, they will need

to improve their latino vote. given the political reality and the national republican strengthen their hand in 2016, how will you push back against that? >> there are two argument on that issue. after the last election, you are correct, there was a lot of instant analysis that indicated enormous latino support indicateds reelection that the republicans were in a very difficult position in the future if they were not able to attract more of the latino vote and that latinos were going to be very much influenced by the position of candidates on the issue of immigration. public opinion polling basically

documents the fact that is a very far down on the list of priorities of the latino population, that the of interest of the latino population have to do and education and jobs government services. and that is one issue that we have certainly pointed out to that it is not opposingly true that comprehensive immigration reform is going to cost latino votes. that is one argument. but the other argument that has been raised and probably gets the attention of policymakers in the republican party more is the , because of the

majority of latinos in the past election voted for the democratic candidate, that if you legalize 12 million illegal immigrants and put them on a path to becoming u.s. citizens in which they then would be able to vote, that you are adding an enormous voting potential, voting block, in favor of democratic candidates. and i cannot estimate how much that perception may have influenced votes on the republican side, but it certainly won -- if it were given any credibility, it would counteract the argument on the other side. yes? >>