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>> and now a discussion on local initiatives for immigration and community needs hosted by the american enterprise institute. it's about an hour. i am a senior fellow here delighted to host the event. good afternoon as well to our online and c-span viewership. the immigration policy remains quite contentious at the federal level. in response, two recent proposals let local communities

opt into a new visa program. the american academy of arts and sciences have proposed a program that could revitalize local economies with declining populations, helping them attract the immigrants they want. the economic innovation group's proposal focuses on stimulating growth and investment by letting them bring in particularly high skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants. both of these proposals may become law in reality in the near future but i believe it's important to think about their design and implementation now so policymakers can have options to turn to when the moment comes.

with that, christine, take the stage. >> well, thank you very much to aei and stan veuger for having us here. it is my pleasure to present this report from the american academy of arts and sciences working group on community partnership visas, how immigration can boost local economies. the american academy of arts and sciences is a nonpartisan think tank. in 2023, the academy issued a final report which included 15 different recommendations for improving economic prospects and security of all americans. among those proposals was the idea for community partnership

visas. though it wa suggesteds only. in the summer of 2024 the academy convened a working group to flesh out the idea. i had the fortune of cochairing that group, stan was a member of that group. and our task was to develop the proposal and think about how it might actually work in practice. what with the criteria be for participation and how might we think about its implementation? as we'll hear the idea of place-based immigration programs allows specifically -- to sponsor immigrants with the goal of revitalizing local economies. the idea has been around since at least the early 2000's. in recent years it has been developed into proposals including the one from the economic innovation group dartm. and a member of our working group. it became a part of that

commission's overall strategy for revitalizing economies and communities around the country. and was our primary task to develop. so, why community partnership visas? these leases, the idea aims to channel emigrants to places that would benefit greatly.there is a robust economic literature that immigration is a source of economic growth. but immigrants, even though they have spread out increasingly around the country, still tend to concentrate in a handful of places, primarily along the coast and primarily in cities that are already thriving economically.

this would create a new visa stream that would allow communities themselves that might have an interest in immigration as a source of economic revitalization to apply to the federal government to bring in immigrants from various occupations and skill levels. on work visas. the goal would be to reverse population decline and's for economic growth. the way we have designed a program is for to be flexible and responsive, both for the communities themselves and also for the visa recipients. crucially, communities would opt in. ensuring the participants are places that themselves identify the need for new workers and new residents. also important to our conception of the proposal is that given the diversity of community needs, the diversity of needs of the communities that are often described as having been left behind, we thought that both high skilled and non-high skilled workers should be

eligible in the program. the communities themselves, they would decide what kind of workers they felt that they needed. so, as i said, the goal of the report was to outline the details. a one page summary that also contains a qr code that send you to the final report. let me highlight a few of the features of the program. perhaps most important of which is the one that led to most significant part of deliberation and work on the part of the commission itself or the working group itself and the members of the staff of the academy was to determine who would be eligible as a community to apply. so, the guiding principle here is that this program would be aimed for communities in the middle. some places across the country are doing well enough economically that they do not require a special visa or not in need of any immigration more than they have. and some are struggling so much it is unfair for the recipients

themselves to send them to a place where they would not have a realistic chance of economic opportunity, where immigration might end up being a burden as opposed to an economic benefit. the way that the group identified those communities in the middle was through four criteria. through population growth, labor participation, through medium income growth and the local cost of living. the first of these three criteria are proxies for economic performance. medium income growth and primary labor force participation would be aggregated into a single number and we build a distribution of geographical units based on this aggregation and population growth. so, based on these metrics and their combination, we determined that communities that were above the 80th percentile or below the 20th percentile would be ineligible as community partnership visas. they would be visas for the

middle. also importantly we excluded communities above the 20th percentile on local cost of living even if there might be other measures that would align with the criteria on the view that the decline in population and some of these places was a result of the cost of living and not because of economic stagnation. in addition to the finding of these criteria, -- we also had to determine whether did your -- geographic unit would be to apply the criteria. and they chose -- a map that divides the country up into commuting zones. there are 583 in the u.s. and i will explain them in a moment. on this map you see the commuting zones in blue and not eligible in orange. so, a commuting zone, and this is an innovation of this proposal, contains a number of different units of counties

and cities. and it's a designation first developed by the federal government in the 1980's based on census data concerning individuals traveling to and from their jobs. it's intended to capture an integrated economic geographic entity. and the commuting zones that were built by geographer in 2020 and ultimately as i said, divide the country into 583 zones. the idea was to capture where you have economic integration as opposed to arbitrary county and city lines. so, we defined eligibility based on the way the criteria -- and you can see that the eligible commuting zones, those that are within the 60th percentile or the distribution are dotted throughout the country. now, commuting zones are not

political units. they are geographic entities created through the federal government, and then through academic study. so, the applications themselves in our proposal will not come from the commuting zones, they would have to come from the unit inside the commuting zone, that might be a county or city. we suggest, therefore, that there might be more than one entity that would apply because they would qualify. that is among the things that would have to be worked out through an implementation proposal. but you will see, if you then look at the distribution according to county, this is the united states divided into counties and you see how many counties would be eligible. 30% of counties in the united states would be eligible for the community partnership visa, which accounts for 90% of the u.s. population. and they would be eligible

counties and 39 of the 50 states -- in 39 of the 50 states. these are the key details and the key innovations of this particular approach to place-based visas. there were a number of other details that we work through in the proposal itself. i'll mention just a few, but in the interest of time and the opportunity for people to ask questions, we can talk about those that are of interest during the question and answer. we did talk about the eligibility of the recipients themselves, not just the eligibility of the communities that would apply and determined that only those between the ages of 18 and 49 should be eligible because the point is to produce economic revitalization and growth. we included in the eligible population of visa recipients individuals who are already in the united states on a temporary visa, not just people coming from outside the country, including people on temporary protected status, daca and other parole statuses. we also determined that it was

important because the goal was to revitalize particular communities that visa holders be required to live within the county or locale that applied for the visa in the first place, and that they should be required to find employment within the commuting zones. we do not suggest or propose that there be a requirement of a job offer. instead, the overseeing federal agency would engage in the process of matching communities where there was need an opportunity with, eligible visa applicants and then organizations like resettlement organizations and other workforce boards might assist in the process of those resettlement and relocation of jobs. we thought it important, also, the visa holders unable to immediately find employment or within a reasonable time able to find employment, be able to then petition to move to another commuting zone.

this underscores that we had a couple of values. this is also behind our conception that these visas should be portable and that recipients should be allowed to petition to move between eligible communities at certain stages of the process, and those values were agency, and flexibility. that the program should respect the agency of the recipients and the agency of the communities seeking to bring immigrants for the purposes of growth and revitalization, but also flexibility. that a program like this will only work if the criteria are flexible. if they don't result in people being trapped without jobs, or easily losing their visas. so, both of those principles, regardless of what the design details might include, important to ensure that this is a dynamic program that actually serves to

promote its goals, such as the revitalization of communities in the middle where that sort of economic growth and dynamism comes from immigration is likely to make a big difference. among the other elements -- there are many other elements of the proposal but i will leave it at that. and welcome a compliment your proposal to ours. then to talk through where the divergences might be and how we can work together to make this something that is not just an idea but something that comes to fruition. >> thank you. excuse me. thank you and thank you for that proposal. it is great to have multiple organizations working in this space thinking about how can immigration help places that

have been left behind. this is our version of the proposal. i'll start by running through the big picture and then talk about a legislative version that has been introduced. so, demographic decline is widespread. this is the fundamental problem here. this is a problem that has been growing over time. you have a higher share of counties experiencing outright population loss. and demographic decline comes with a lot of economic problems. mistakes that economists often make where they see a population loss as being a neutral or you equilibrium factor. i think when populations fall, you have the -- depressed housing markets, and the negative effects that come along with that, vacancy, blight, and then in turn, negative impact

on municipal finances, so the tax base shrinks. a lot of these demographically -- places are losing their individuals, people that would have the highest impact on the tax base. so, you got housing market declining, municipal finance declining, entrepreneurship reliably follows when you have fewer people, fewer customers and fewer workers, they are less likely to start businesses, and human capital -- the urban wage premium is part of the story, pulling the people out of depressed areas that make more money from cities. as research has shown. so, you think about all these impacts of population loss. it is very narrow to say, well, but, labor, supply has gone down so wage will go up. it's really not going to be the case on average.

so, what can we do about this? our core theory is that high skilled immigration can have a very big impact. so, what does high skilled immigration do? it can catalyze growth in community suffering from deindustrialization. there is a lot of outside literature that is very informative. if you look at the places that survived the china shock, if you look at the places that suffered from deindustrialization but bounced back, one of the characteristics of those places, they have a lot of highly educated people. high human capital is a huge part of resilience. they are able to find next best opportunities for those places. put assets and people to work. through this, they boost wages for native workers and -reduce- more on the partnership in they bring in and sodden -- outside investment, increased tax base and another interesting angle which is not true when we

started writing about a place-based visas, over a decade ago, is the potential for remote work, to be something that would allow high skilled people to live in these communities. the last part obviously as we have a more concern today about industrial policy trying to -- advanced manufacturing throughout the country and a lot of heartland communities and obviously if you're putting capital in a compliment to that is human capital. so that is the big picture of how high skilled immigration helps. how would the policy actually work? so, we start very similarly, economic and demographic decline, that is the big focus, the county and decline could we do not rule out any counties as being, having too much to climb counties have to opt in. this is dual opt in. counties have to opt in an immigrant test opt in. we're presuming a fixed number of visas. once you start with the

presumption that you cannot have open borders have to find a way to allocate. our perception is that we would allocate according to something like an auction but mostly based on wages. if someone comes to have a job offer, whoever has the highest wages for a job offer and that community, they get access to the program. we provide no restrictions by occupation or industry. what's useful here is that this is in contrast to the h1b where you come here -- and you have to prove you that every job, don't worry i am only doing level 1 actuary worker you can move more freely between companies as long as you are hitting that wage target you came in. we think this is essential, a dedicated green card pathway for those on the higher wages. it is a pathway not based on employer sponsorship, not based on a stack of paperwork this high. it is based on how much did you earn while you were here? are you in the top 15% of

earners for your area? then you are probably additive to the economy and if you follow the rules, you should know there is a green card at the end for you. uncapped. do capping on the front end, not the back end. we have far less caps on who comes in, and we end up with decades long weightless. we want to make sure this does not happen with heartland visas. who qualifies. we are focused on close to -- .5 population between 2010 and 2020 and we concerned about the housing market as well. if your median home value has to be no greater than the national, as you point out, some places are not choosy because they choose not to grow in they choose not to build new houses. it does not make sense to give them access to a special immigration program that will just crowd out other people. we also widened it a little bit in the recent momentum criteria. in the process we discovered that there are a lot of

postindustrial cities that are experiencing a little bit of bounce back. they're still way far below their historical population levels, places like cleveland and buffalo and you want to lower the standards for places like that because those seem like places subtle -- with a lot of potential. so, population peaked before 1980, then you have slightly lower -- still, median home value no greater than the national median. this is what our map looks like. 1,761 eligible counties. their green ones are the ones that we added in with the expanded criteria, for postindustrial cities. i think a key differentiator, as you can see, there are a lot of places there that are doing poorly and would not be included in the prior proposal. if you look at appalachia there's a large swath that would not be -- we didn't include them in our set up and down the mississippi. you see the greater breadth of

distress that we allow targeted here, 58 million residents as of 2020. just to give you an idea of some of these places, what they look like, you have detroit, you got pittsburgh, you have cleveland. you can see these cities. a lot of postindustrial cities could a lot of places that have problems. so, something that i hear a lot when we propose heartland visas, nobody wants to live in that part of the country but these are great cities with global competition. if you are high skilled immigrant and you're looking across the world, these are globally competitive cities. especially if there is a pathway to a green card. so, this is sort of summarizing the difference between eligible and indivisible -- in eligible places. eligible places have been declining 3.2% over the decade,

prime age population is down 11.4%. think about how drastic that is for community. the prime working age population on average in these places has fallen by 10% and a decade, that has huge impacts for tax bases, all sorts of things that matter. you can, so, one of the things we want to make sure everyone knows is that the pandemic, well it did push the more people into rural areas, these places are still on average declining post-pandemic. higher poverty, low to medium household income. across the board, they are more distressed places. so that is our big picture idea. we would propose several hundred thousand visas. you would be able to essentially move within counties within states. so sort of 50 heartland visa areas and the prices in the states would be set differently in the auction, so when you have a big program, hundreds of thousands, part of -- what you want to avoid is too many people trying to rush into buffalo or cleveland. you do not want to create

blowback that disrupts the program. you want to allow for the program that is gradual, if you are allowing in hundreds of thousands of people you run the risk of disruption. with a large program, state heartland visa clusters, we would allow states to partner together, if you only have a few counties, states can partner together. when it came time to actually drop ledges -- draw up legislation we settled on 50,000 a year. that does not include dependents and spouses. that smaller number we thought it was more manageable to have a national, you can sort of move and work in any heartland visa qualifying county. and so, when you allow this kind of mobility, whether it is within the state or within the national area, there is much less concerned about the cutting off sort of, most distressed places and saying they do not have a chance because like it is a wage based employment based program. if it is true that there is nothing in the county for an entrepreneur or remote worker to

do, that we just wont go there, they will not qualify. the design of the policy is sort of self-correcting for that kind of problem. lastly, i do think this is one of the strongest arguments for our approach other than the massively disproportional affect of high skilled immigration. this is a survey reran the end of last year, support for high skilled immigration is true across the political spectrum. even among trump voters, to 71% more heist -- support more high skilled immigration. people do not like when you talk about legal immigration -- illegal immigration and now you have a polarized outcome. a lot of people, they support them, refugee sent, they support them and that other people don't. high school immigration is a consensus issue. they support on both sides. even sometimes the president, sometimes.

those are my comments. thank you. >> thank you. hi. thanks a lot for being here. thanks so much for inviting me to discuss these two visionary proposals. they are really proposing a way to -- for immigration probably that is at -- policy that is apt for the 21st century. this is not the america i grew up in. there is a vast change that happens in the last 30 years that very few americans are even aware of. it's the shift from demographic ascent to democratic decline. what i mean by that is right here you're looking at the u.s. census bureau's projections in 1975 of what the working age population in green would look like with zero immigration, no immigrants after 1975, it's growing a lot. and it is growing much faster than the population of elderly

people, zero immigration scenario. this is what it looks like now. that turned from positive to negative. the zero immigration growth of the working age population 15 years ago turned from positive to negative, not at some distant point in the future, right now today, we are permanently losing one million workers per year to demographic change. and not just that, but the elderly population in the zero immigration snare is growing much faster now than it was in the late 20th century. this process which is acute and immediate right now today, as our speakers have been discussing, is particularly acute than this in lots of quarters of the country, specific places. so, here we are facing that new reality with tools, institutional tools, laws that were designed 60 years ago by

these people, my grandparents and great-grandparents' generation. and one of the things they did, i saw in a new light in a brilliant book called the president immigration law in which she points out under the 1965 law, congress did something remarkable which is that it delegated a whole lot of discussion of immigration regulation to the president but in a lopsided way. it delegated an enormous discretion to exclude to the president but not to include. that is, the president has -- the authority to and does often partner with local authorities to remove migrants, according to local parties. there is no authority for the president to partner with local

authorities to create lawful channels for migration according to local needs. that lopsided, institutional f eature is kind of like giving the president and eraser but not a pencil. it is something that is very asymmetrical and one way to think about these proposal is the mirror image of 287-g. what would an authority that is not so lopsided look like? i teach my students at george mason university studying economics, the policy triad. three necessary conditions for good economic policy. there has to be well, maximizing, like a good economist would think, but not just that, it has to be politically supportable. we are not designing policy for the hypothetical benevolent dictators like -- the role of an economist is to make the politically impossible politically possible. not just that, we have to think about what is administratively feasible. as he also wrote, what could a

real government, if many constraints including informational constraints, pull off? i want to go through these one by one. there is a very solid grounding in economic theory for the welfare maximizing nature of policy, the workforce model is from charles teblow. in which, which, with many complexities is about the optimal decentralization of policy. to what extent should regulations on public goods in public -- be centralized and what extent should it be federalized? in a highly simple five version of that model, there is, when there are different preferences, for example for immigration, cross districts, districts with different demographic and local and economic conditions, the benefits of decentralization go up, because people can get more of what they want her to the

extent that there are spillovers, negative spillovers, real or perceived, across districts, the costs of decentralization go up. and that naturally limits the extent to which the benefits of decentralization can be realized. it has to be to the left of that blue star where the costs, what both of these proposals are doing by limiting special mobility of migrants is attempting to decrease those real or perceived negative spillovers and therefore allow more of the capturing of the benefits of decentralization. it's really sound an old and well-established economic theory behind these. what about politically supportive and administratively feasible, high marks in both areas. there is recent legislation, bipartisan legislation, proposing more local control of

our existing employment based visa programs. this is something that is supported on both sides of the aisle extensively. there has been, there been state laws passed in utah and in georgia and in colorado, establishing the rough equivalent of state-level work visas. those have not been blue state initiatives, according to the stereotype. a lot of them have been read state initiatives, republicans in utah that passed such a law. and it was obama's department of justice that sued to block them from doing that. this is not at all -- blue state initiative. in the conference has mayors has repeatedly and by name endorsed the heartland visa. how about administration we feasible? as people mention, australia and canada right now have systems of -- sponsor. canada has a lot of authorities --not just for provincial sponsorship across the whole

country but it has a separate work visa just for, for atlantic provinces that have had acute demographic decline. australia has a regional sponsorship program, both for migrants who do not have a sponsor who just have a desirable occupation and no employer sponsor, and a separate program for people who have a job offer and employer-sponsored. and not just the ny and belgium have different systems of -- regional level autonomy in the regulation of work and humanitarian immigration. these are things which are working and are generally well- regarded in all five of those countries right now today. of course in the u.s. we have many examples of -- devolution of things that were once uniformly considered to be exclusive, uniform federal nationwide regulations to state level control, local level control. i list a few.

alcohol i mentioned -- with the end of prohibition, the clean air act was one, uniform nationwide set of standards in 1967, that was amended to allow california and 16 other states to set their own standards. the speed limit in 1995, when there was a kid, there was one nationwide speed limit. that has changed. welfare reform in 1996 allowed states to set different criteria for eligibility. all of these things were done while retaining federal supremacy and capturing more of the benefits of local control. these are things which are administratively feasible. there's supposed to be an emoji there, do we have to imagine that. that was a handshake reflecting the many points of agreement of these proposals. both of them have -- they are not just state-level proposals. they are local areas, county level in the heartland visa or even city level in the case of

the community partnership visa. they are both double opt in proposals. migrants are not being sent somewhere they do not want to live. they reflect any sector. and year-round work. one of the highly highly damaging and constraining features of our current visa system is that it is mostly seasonal and for a few sectors and large sectors that definitely need workers like the entire dairy industry. they have access to nothing. these visas are for any sector and they are for year-round work because these demographic changes are not temporary. they both have short renewable terms. three or five years. they both cover a similar, even though they cover different geographic areas when you add up the population living in those areas, it turns out to be about the same, 18% or 90% has access

to these visas -- 18% or 19% has access to these visas. those are hands clutching each other, indicating the areas of disagreement. the most fundamental one if i had to say the one sentence is the heartland visa approach is more restrictive on skills but less on the area on the country that has access. community partnership visa is less restrictive on skills but more perspective on the area of the country that has access. that is a fundamental trade-off they are taking two different positions on. this is reflecting now the specific differences between the proposals, and this is the not the manchin and young bill. this is the heartland visa proposal as it is written. on education, the heartland visa proposal is for college workers

and above. the community partnership proposal is for whatever skills the community wants. the heartland visa proposal requires a job offer. the community partnership proposal allows migrants to seek a job once in the community. the heartland visa proposal has written, not in that legislation, with a floor of 100,000 workers, the minimum of 100,000 workers. that might sound like a lot until you think about the total of all labor force growth in america right now, not at some future point on immigration. again, without immigrants we are losing one million workers permanently every year, today right now. and then the community partnership visa does not have an explicit cap or quota, but mentions the number 66,000 as a reference point the h2b visa right now. as i mentioned, the number of

areas in the heartland visa proposal is somewhat broader , 1700 countries. the committee partnership 942 counties, reflecting the pack fact that some of the most trouble counties are left out delivery of the community partnership vias as christina mentioned. another key difference is that in the heartland visa, you have to live in the sponsoring area but you can work anywhere, including may remotely for an employer across the country. in a community partnership visa you have to work in the commuting zone which is near and around the place that is sponsoring you. if i had to pick as an opinion, which of these wins, neither wins. i like, sorry, adam. i like different aspects of both of them. the community partnership approach of inviting skills as needed which strikes me as a better choice in that, remember we are having, a double opt in

proposal. if what a community says it needs his elder coworkers, while restricted them to only workers doing college works that requires a degree? no one will send in low skill workers they don't want. the number could be debated. as i said, i think any number should be set in consciousness of the magnitude of the challenge. the 66,000 was set at 35 years ago in a very different economy. and again, at a time of demographic expansion in america. i would not tend to use that as a reference point for the kind of numbers that are needed, but i know it's difficult to convince isis in a diverse group of people -- to get consensus in a diverse group of people. for the areas, i like the heartland visa approach in that, yes, it's a good idea. i like how carefully you have thought through the ability of local areas to absorb migrants,

and should we make an eligible races that are the least dynamic and the least populated but again, given that this is a double opt in proposal, no one will be sending some of the poorest and least dynamic areas of the country migrants they don't want. if they say the date they want them, why do we need to protect them from the government -- the government will not be sending them anybody they don't want. and i think there are desirable features of either of these. all of that said, either of them wholesale would be just such a drastic admission or improvement on what we have so far that it would be just tremendous for the country and for all of our futures. so thank you so much for proposing them. >> thank you, michael. and thank you, everyone. [applause] any comments about the proposals?

on what's been said? christina, maybe i can ask you, adam implicitly said -- why is t here no number in the community-based proposal? do you want to talk about that a little bit? >> i think that is a difficult question to answer. it's one of the design details that the group decided to leave ultimately up to debate in the policy process. i do, though, think we were all clear that the program cannot be so small it does not have any impact. but it cannot be so large that it swamps existing streams of immigration last week pair it with a re-imagination of our system as a whole. within those two very open-ended parameters, there is lots of space for large or small. so we decided to just compare it

to the existing stream but your point is very well taken about that being something dated in its conception. and i think in the realm of hundreds of thousands seems like it fits the criteria that we discussed within the group. so i think that is something where there is a lot of room for discussion. and, ultimately, even though our report lays out a number of design details, many can be negotiated over whether there is room for discussion about other people who were proposed similar proposals to discern which is the best approach. i do think that some of the features of the program which we share, the double opt in feature, the renewability, portability and the path to the green card, those are things that seem essential. and on the much of the rest of it, i think we can debate. >> adam, something i was wondering about. you, in the, in the bill version

of the proposal, there is a lot of freedom to move to different parts of the heartland. the population you guys are targeting is quite similar from the population. of course h1b recipients are hyper concentrated in a few places. so, are you concerned that if your proposal would become law, everyone who just moved to pittsburgh? >> that is a great question. we have graduation criteria, essentially. we would not turn the program over, to a slow-moving qualitative great. about ovulation growth. but there is graduation criteria. -- about population growth. if you've a long time of high population growth you lose access to the program. imagine if that does happen. so i think probably buffalo is a great contender, cleveland is a great contender, pittsburgh is a great contender. imagine a world in which we invite in 60,000 high skilled

immigrants and their families and we push these postindustrial cities to new population peaks and just a population growth in the country as a whole and then they graduate. that seems like a great world to be in. then they graduate in the next sort of tier of desirable are the ones who benefit. i agree that is something that, however the design of the program should account for that. it was much, when we did a 50,000 proposal it was much easier to go with the national scheme. if we had been able to self -- to sell 200,000, that is when he did state-based quotas so you don't have that. >> michael? >> two things that came up. i mean, you heard the perspective of an economist from me but also of an american who is biased to these areas, three of your counties that qualify were places where my family home has been. the idea that nobody wants to live there in cascade county,

montana, or montgomery county ohio, is ridiculous. we're migrants want to live, systematically across u.s. history and across the world's where previous migrants have gone. and this is an opportunity to plant those seeds in parts of the country that need them and that will draw migrants to very desirable places. and on the visa quota, as somebody who works on the h2b visa i got curious, 66,000, that's written in law since 1990. who chose that number and where did that number come from? a friend of mine's mom, was ted kennedy's chief of staff. i called her. where did that number come from? i don't know. talk to carl -- i emailed him, he kindly answered, i'm not sure. three networking steps later i ended up with one of the octogenarian authors of the built who told me, it's simple, we took the number of h2b visas in the ins your book of 1989 and

tripled it because, here's the punch line, we were sure that that would never be reached and the country would never want that. 35 years ago that was reasonable and now it is oversubscribed by several hundred percent in a totally different demographic. that number is not a number that deserves to be a reference point right now. we should be thinking from the ground up. >> i do think that the decentralized nature of both of these programs means that it is possible that it can start small and grow if the interest is there. if it proves to be successful and some parts of the country. the key to having legislation -- building in mechanisms so that any of them to post can be changed. our existing systems have these old limits that cannot be changed. i think we should think in terms of how you enable, without new legislation, the program to expand and you might start small and build in the possibility of

growth depending on performance. >> i'm going to say something about one of michael's comments about why not let any community opt into whatever they want? it is not quite accurate to say just dual opt in. it's triple. you butte county, you've the immigrants and you have the federal government. we need the federal government to opt into this program. i can tell you that both the political leaders and the voters are much more positive about skilled immigration.. it is a federal decision who gets to come here and who gets to become a citizen and that affects all of us in the long term. as long as they choose it, it must be unofficial. the other one is in talking about thousands of counties, 3000 counties or something like that in total. there'll places where you have small governments, very sparse populations and one big employer

and just because like the seafood manufacturing company in some 8000 person county decides that they want an unlimited supply of immigration does not guarantee that we have a positive policy happening. i think opting in is the right sort of decentralization. i think allowing local governments to sort of design their whole policy wholesale is a bit of a recipe for cronyism, especially when you're talking about small governments, low state capacity, lots of -- rural areas. >> once all the world seafood professionals have moved to that town, it will graduate. >> got to have the graduation criteria. >> we haven't really touched upon her. i think the decentralized fits in nicely with the system. as it exists come in the sense that right now the u.s. has a lot of responsibility to

families and universities. i think it makes sense to say local government, it is quite a different direction from something you said here, which is to give the federal government as much -- a much m ore important role through a point system or something like that, much more centralized than what we propose here. >> what really matters is is the centralization or decentralization, how robust is it to game? immigration policy is like water, gaming of the systems is like water. it will find a way to flow. you referenced employers and schools, as secondary immigration systems. in countries where you do not have well-designed systems, there are incentives compatible, what you find is so systems get corrupted and you have schools that are not real, jobs that are not real. employers that are not real. i think you have to consider that when you are designing systems. it is one of the nice things about a wage-based system.

it is very transparent, easy to check. it does not take a ton of paperwork to find out is that a real company, are they paying that person that real salary versus a school, is this school handing out degrees that are what they say they are to this person, in this occupation doing what they say they are doing? you have to think about incentive compatibility or you end up in a situation in canada where they are getting a lot of low back a few years later -- a lot of blowback. >> we will take a couple questions from the audience. we're in very bright lights. anyone in the room? over there in back. >> hi. i'm here in a personal capacity. there is a lot of focus on skilled workers, but let's not forget to support a skilled company you need on skilled workers as well. so, for a typical tech company of 1000 workers, you need 10% or

20% of unskilled workforce. for a construction or manufacturing company, you need 2 to 5 workers per skilled worker. let's also talk about unskilled workforce. and that has a fly will affect when you unskilled immigrants coming in and their kids become skilled workers. down the road, so i think that is something, you know, to think about. it's going to be very hard to track people -- attract people to pittsburgh. i grew up in dayton, ohio. i left dayton ohio for a reason. when california exists, when new york exists. i think you have to talk about how do we make these heartland communities more attractive to immigrants? how they would play a big role in making l.a., san francisco and new york, shows like "sex and the city" we need that kind of effort for heartland communities to attract people. >> on the skills point, your initial point is well taken. and i think that one of the

points of discussion in our group was recognizing the value of labor and work to the goal of revitalizing communities. because that was the impetus for our community partnership visa because it came out of this larger commission on how to revitalize communities that are struggling, acknowledging the importance of different kinds of work to complement high skilled immigration drove the ultimate decision to make it not a high skilled visa program. what michael points out about the need for elder care, and the changing demographics, also is one example to add to yours of forms of work that is absolute -- that are absolutely essential for flourishing communities. so, even though it might be easier to sell high skilled immigration to some people and to some law makers, the bigger picture requires i think a bigger scope for the program. >> i don't want to be too

critical about low skill immigration. i believe it is positive. i think on average the impact on the median wage is positive. look at what the literature says. you have the optimists. like giovanni perry, i'm etc. in, saying that high skilled -- low skilled immigration is great for the country, the impact are positive for percent on wages and you have people like -- who say it is terrible for the country, the impact is -4%. we are dealing with a range of this to this. in contrast, you look at the estimates of the total share of innovation in a country that comes from high skilled immigrants from 1994, like 36%. that is not the kind of change that moves wages between, from below 02 above zero. those are transformative changes. so, i do think that while we do have positive economic impact, it is of a different kind of

magnitude. the other thing i would say, one of the defining features of the u.s. economy over the last few decades has been this, the college wage premium goes higher and higher and higher. our economy is -- we're not producing enough skilled workers for relative to demand. that is a macro problem and it will be true and struggling places as well. people who are exiting the labor force are the low skilled workers. you look at china shock communities, it is not the high skilled workers, it is the low skilled workers that stopped working. one of the ways to make them better office to bring in high skilled workers and that is high spillover, you increase the ratios of high skill to low skill. that is beneficial for the community. i don't think in those communities that the ratio of high skilled to low skilled is the problem where you want to, they need to be tilted more toward low skill so that you have enough health care workers or something like that. that is not the nature of the problem. >> let's move, very quick question. i do think the children of high

skilled workers are more, are more likely to be high skilled themselves. >> but isn't that good? to the questioner's point, he says that is a good thing, but why? if we what we need is more low skilled workers, shouldn't we wish for more low skilled workers as well? >> what i did not understand and maybe my question -- what would happen if one of these plans went into effect in place like washington dc, which currently gets a lot of immigration. we would want not to have immigrants not show up here. i would not want to lose the immigrants coming to my non -heartland community because suddenly it was, suddenly they were all going to pittsburgh instead of d.c. >> i think the idea for both of these programs is that they would add to the existing

programs. so i do not think that is a concern. >> you could see how if there are political trade-offs that need to be made and there are people who believe that there is proposal that seems more -- because of who it will benefit that that will lead to reducing other streams of immigration, accordingly. and then that would present the kind of problem you are describing. but within our group, and i believe this is part of your proposal as well, the idea is ultimately to create -- create a new stream that adds to the existing and have a new green card category that adds to what we already have, that we would ultimately channel into, so it is additive. but it might mean that would have to be -- >> one final question, and online question. what happens if a county that is opting in flips politically? what happens to the immigrants? >> they could control the flow,

but they could not kick out the people who are there. they made a commitment to that person. >> it is explicit to our proposal as well. at the renewal stage, there is a question on the renewal. that is a good point. >> thank you all very much. have a nice rest of the evening. i think we have some wine and cheese outside and we can chat a little more there. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪

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