about the policy roundtable

The Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable is a joint undertaking of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University (KIE) and the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. The Roundtable recently issued a report, "Breaking the Immigration Stalemate: From Deep Disagreements to Constructive Proposals." The backround section of that report and the executive summary are reprinted here with permission.

Noak Pickus, Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University was a convenor of the Roundtable. Other convenors were

William Galston, senior fellow and Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Peter Skerry, professor of political science, Boston College as well as nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. The full report, along with full membership of the Roundtable, is available on the Web at http://www.duke.edu/web/kenanethics/immigration/BreakingtheImmigrationStalemate.pdf.

The Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable

For several years now, the national debate over immigration has been deadlocked. On one side, anxious and often angry citizens want to punish or even deport millions of illegal immigrants and then secure the borders against further intruders. Other Americans want to regularize the status of the undocumented and find ways for subsequent newcomers to arrive through more orderly channels.

In the meantime, the need for critical reforms of the system by which legal immigrants are admitted here has gone unaddressed. And since 9/11, a new and compelling dimension -- national security -- has heightened the stakes in immigration policy-making.

A new administration has now committed itself to immigration reform, but it already has a full agenda of other urgent issues to address. It remains unclear how much political capital President Obama will either have or be willing to expend on immigration. Despite the problems associated with our broken immigration system--the threat to the rule of law, exploitation of vulnerable newcomers, real and perceived competition with Americans for jobs and public resources, and so on--reform is likely to be preceived as more of a threat than settling for the status quo. The present context of immigration policy is, therefore, rigid but unstable--like the tectonic plates of the earth's crust before an earthquake.

None of this should be a surprise. Immigration has been difficult and contentious throughout the history of this quintessential "nation of immigrants." As an issue, immigration combines enormous technical complexity with emotionally charged concerns about ethnicity and race. Well-organized interests have much at stake in the formulation of immigration policy and have a legitimate role to play in the debate. So do ordinary Americans, who are not well organized but for whom immigration not only involves their interests, but also stirs powerful and symbolic sentiments about values and national identity. On these issues, opportunities for demagogues abound at all points along the political spectrum. It should be no surprise that immigration does not play out along the usual interest-group and partisan lines.

More than a year ago, the conveners of the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable decided that it was time to attempt to tackle immigration in a new way. Because of the intensity and complexity of the national debate, there has been a tendency for participants to narrow the range of interlocutors within more manageable limits. Broad groupings of those who agree on general approaches but have specific disagreements or differences of emphasis have tended to talk to one another. Their adversaries have done the same. Disagreements within the two overarching "pro-immigration" and "restrictionist" camps have been intense enough. Serious engagement across that major divide has been less direct, and has transpired in those venues least likely to resolve anything--newspaper headlines, the blogosphere, and cable television.

We sought to create a new venue for serious and thoughtful debate across a wider spectrum of immigration views by assembling twenty individuals with divergent perspectives and orientations toward immigration policy. There are no representatives of national advocacy groups among us, nor are we all immigration specialists. But we all brought a commitment to honestly and thoroughly discuss our differences in light of the best available evidence--with a constant eye to identifying where we might agree on policy proposals that would address current problems. This report is the product of our deliberations. The broad recommendations we agreed upon are summarized here.