JENNA OUTCALT
Staff Writer
When it comes to immigration, Marcela Escobari and Charles Lane can agree that the narrative heard from politicians and media is not the full story.
“I think on issues of immigration in particular, we have ended up with very simplistic narratives around a complex issue,” Escobari said.
Lane pointed out how it’s easy to argue by anecdote in the immigration discussion.
“There’s a role for emotion in politics. It’s unavoidable, but we get served a lot of that kind of coverage,” he said. “And I think it’s not representative of the actual big-picture trends that are really going on that if we focus on more, it might be easier to have a level-headed conversation about.”
Escobari and Lane will come together for a dialogue on immigration at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater. This is the first of five lectures this week in partnership with Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, in which scholars from each organization will discuss their areas of expertise.
Escobari is a senior fellow in Brookings’ Global Economy and Development program. She previously served as assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean and in the White House National Security Council as special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. She has authored studies on the economic fallout of immigration enforcement surges and lessons learned from the Biden administration’s immigration approach.
“One of the claims of the [Trump] administration has been that mass enforcement or mass deportation is valuable because it’ll open up jobs for Americans by reducing competition from undocumented immigrants,” Escobari said. “Our research is actually the first causal empirical evidence that the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) surges are harming employment in the areas where it’s most active, and it actually has meant very dramatic job loss.”
Escobari explained how convenient narratives encourage misconceptions about migration.
“I often say that immigration is one of those topics where data and evidence is furthest apart from the policy,” she said. “And that in part is because of the politics of immigration and how easy it is to weaponize migrants, often for political gain.”
According to Escobari, immigration reform should include the expansion of lawful pathways to citizenship, humane and effective enforcement, avenues for legal status for those that have been in the country for a long time and regional efforts instead of trying to apply one solution everywhere.
“There’s been bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform, and yet, for political reasons, it’s often very hard to see it through,” she said.
Escobari emphasized how important it is to be informed about immigration policy, especially now when there is a massive increase in enforcement and decrease in legal avenues for immigration.
“That’s going to have a bunch of repercussions about who we are as a country, about our growth, our economic well-being, about whether we’re going to be able to pay for social security and whether these policies are aligned with our values,” she said.
Lane is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a political journalist and analyst who has been covering immigration since 1985. He said he wants to speak “very concretely” about public opinion on immigration and how the public can move in a more constructive direction.
“I want to talk about it from a pretty high altitude, like long-term trends in public opinion, consistent themes about what the public wants that go across not just this year, but longer periods and how they might project out into the future,” Lane said.
He explained how public opinion can be shaped by “crises of the moment,” which is inevitable. Immigration conversations, however, can be plagued by inaccuracies and surface-level analyses because of the vivid imagery of disorder and a lack of clear and available data, he said.
“There’s just a lot of imprecision, and I think [the media] could do a better job of demanding better data and maybe even coming up with it ourselves,” Lane said.
Lane pointed out that immigration policy is “swinging between extremes” as presidential administrations have changed.
“They’re responding to narrower and narrower primary electorates in political bases in the respective parties,” he said. “And what’s interesting is neither one of them is actually succeeding.”
Lane said this phenomenon means administrations will “inevitably have to dial back [their] policy anyways.” Although he suggested the country might be past the point of “grand bargains,” Lane said the problem could still be broken up into smaller parts and handled with a
bipartisan lens.
“I still hold out the hope that if people sit down and talk things over, they will find out that they can solve problems, or at least not start fighting,” Lane said.
Escobari also emphasized the importance of dialogue.
“These conversations are needed and the answers are out there, but only if we engage in an open way, put the questions on the table and in our case, bring evidence where it exists,” she said.
