New School President Bob Kerrey and a panel of leading experts with divergent viewpoints engage in lively debate to hammer out practical, legislative approaches to immigration reform.
Speakers discuss why a legislative solution is critical and what the right legislation would look like. They also examine the McCain/Kennedy Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act and subsequent proposals and discuss which aspects of those proposed solutions are feasible and well thought-out.
Finally, the speakers assess what the new Administration has accomplished in its first 100 days and what it needs to address going forward.
Speakers include: Michael Aytes, acting deputy director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security; Tamar Jacoby, president & CEO, ImmigrationWorks USA, Inc.; Mark Krikorian, executive director, The Center for Immigration Studies; Marshall Fitz, director of advocacy, American Immigration Lawyers Association; Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer, Pew Hispanic Center; and Alec Ian Gershberg (contributing moderator), Associate Professor, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy.
Bio
Michael Aytes
Michael Aytes serves as Acting Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) within the Department of Homeland Security. Named to this position on April 18, 2008, Mr. Aytes today serves as the Agency's highest ranking official.
Marshall Fitz
Marshall Fitz is Director of Immigration Policy at American Progress. Before holding his current position he served as the director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, where he led the education and advocacy efforts on all immigration policy issues for the 11,000-member professional bar association.
He has been a leader in national and grassroots coalitions that have organized to advance progressive immigration policies.
Alec Gershberg
Alec Gershberg (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor at Milano and a specialist on school governance, education finance, and decentralization both in the developing world and the U.S. He has conducted extensive research on Latin America particularly Mexico, Nicaragua, and Ecuador focusing on the decentralization of power to schools, communities and governments.
More recently, he has worked on similar themes in Egypt, Romania, and Sub-Saharan Africa. He has been a frequent consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Urban Institute.
Tamar Jacoby
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes extensively on immigration and citizenship. She is a leading conservative voice in the media and elsewhere in favor of immigration reform, and works to organize the center-right behind reform proposals taking shape in Washington.
Her 1998 book, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books), tells the story of race relations in three American cities—New York, Detroit and Atlanta. The Economist magazine called it "arguably the most important study of race relations in America since Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was published in 1944."
A more recent book, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American, was published by Basic Books in February 2004. A collection of essays by a diverse group of authors—academics, journalists and fiction-writers on both the right and the left—it argues that we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage immigrant absorption in American society.
In addition to her published writings and media commentary, in the past few years she has been working behind the scenes in Washington to help develop immigration policy, writing policy papers, testifying in Congress and working with a range of congressional offices.
Before joining the Manhattan Institute, from 1987 to 1989, she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek, where she wrote weekly articles on criminal justice, the Supreme Court and other law-related topics. Between 1981 and 1987, she was the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page. Before that, she was assistant to the editor of The New York Review of Books.
In 2004, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Yale, Cooper Union and the New School University. She lives in Washington, DC.
Bob Kerrey
Bob Kerrey is president of The New School in New York City.
For twelve years prior to becoming president of The New School, Bob Kerrey represented the State of Nebraska in the United States Senate. Before that, he served as Nebraska's governor for four years.
Bob Kerrey is the author of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir, published by Harcourt Books (May 2002). He served as a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, currently leads a five year writing challenge sponsored by The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, and is co-chair with Newt Gingrich of The National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care.
Jeffrey Passel
Jeffrey Passel is senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. A nationally known expert on immigration to the United States and the demography racial and ethnic groups, Passel formerly served as principal research associate at the Urban Institute's Labor, Human Services and Population Center.
Passel has authored numerous studies on immigrant populations in America, focusing on such topics as undocumented immigration, the economic and fiscal impact of the foreign born, and the impact of welfare reform on immigrant populations.
The age-old pesky U.S.-Mexico border problem has taxed the resources of both countries, led to long lists of injustices, and appears to be heading only for worse troubles in the future. Guess what? The border problem can never be solved. Why? Because the border IS the problem! It's time for a paradigm change.
Never fear, a satisfying, comprehensive solution is within reach: the Megamerge Dissolution Solution. Simply dissolve the border along with the failed Mexican government, and megamerge the two countries under U.S. law, with mass free 2-way migration eventually equalizing the development and opportunities permanently, with justice and without racism, and without threatening U.S. sovereignty or basic principles.
What a bogus argument about immigration that it complements the American workforce. Tamar Jacoby is just plain wrong. There are people who are looking for the jobs that cheap immigrant takes - there are Americans looking for jobs as gardners, cooks, etc etc and these people are even further disadvantages by low skilled immigrantion such that a lot end up on welfare. She should look at some of the research on immigration - Rockafella commision report, etc that show there is no gain in GDP/per person from immigration - it is a myth that people like Tamar just don't want to accept
The need for the immigration reform is urgent - no doubt about that. Supportive of the Tamar Jacoby's general position on immigration, I'm a bit surprised with her classification of the immigrants as under- and over-educated. According to her logic, some of the jobs, such as busboy or dishwasher, Americans are simply unwilling to take on, but illegal immigrants will happily accept these jobs because of being less educated and/or qualified. But isn't the whole idea of granting immigrants a citizenship is about equality in rights and opportunity? The truth is that most of the time immigrants take on this jobs is because of the language barrier and more importantly because of their illegal status.
Unfortunately, Tamar Jacoby also forgets about thousands of refuges, not necessarily under- or over-qualified who are forced to leave their home countries in search of better future; US has always been "a beacon of opportunities" according to Bob Kerrey's reference.
Immigrants will compliment American economy because of their diverse skills, talents and ideas. While implementing immigration reform we shouldn't reserve certain types of jobs, let's say in the restaurant for under-educated and at the IT-sector for over-qualified immigrants, but rather focus on fairness and equality.
member. 
