Newt Gingrich: Thank you, Karlyn, and it’s a delight to have a chance to be here at the American Enterprise Institute to talk about these kind of ideas. One of the purposes of having a “think tank” is to, in fact, have people who think about public policy and who present those ideas and who hopefully start dialogues and debates about them. And I look out at this particular audience and I have to say that it’s slightly intimidating to look at this certain murderers’ row, sitting right over here, of intellectuals who are … I’m confident I’m not going to quite reach their level, but I will nonetheless strive at least for clarity in talking about these things. And I want to start, because this is a chance to really talk about ideas in a framework different than normal politics or nine-second sound bites. So I want to start by telling you where I think we are as a country, and then putting immigration into that context. I believe we are at a crossroads that is more open than any crossroads since April of 1861 when Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for ninety days. Now, the United States Army at that point had 16,000 people – 3,000 officers and 13,000 enlisted – so 75,000 volunteers, almost five times the size of the established army, sounded like a big effort. Nobody would have understood at that point that you are talking about a system which would, over a four-year period, mobilize the nation, launch the transcontinental railroads, create the Homestead Act, send 10,000 Union troops to New York City to suppress three days of riots, and ultimately have 660,000 Americans killed in our most difficult war. And it is inconceivable how big the changes would be in the next few years.

Now I do not think we are necessarily faced with that scale of apocalyptic experience, but I think when you look at the totality of the world we are entering into and the degree to which we are living off of the successes of the World War II generation, that it is the World War II generation that creates the framework of the Cold War, that sustains a worldwide establishment, that isolates the Soviet Union, and in some ways, it is perfectly fitting that it was Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as the last two World War II presidencies who saw the end of the Soviet Union.

And out of that generation, we created the most powerful, most successful nation in the history world. We integrated more people from more backgrounds and a system that generates more wealth, and in the process, we projected more power than any country in history. And the problem for us is, to borrow from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that our generation has a “rendezvous with destiny.” And it is that on every one of these fronts we have to re-think the institutions and the assumptions of the systems that got us here. That’s the agony of General Motors. That’s what you are seeing happening in the airline industry. Well, why do we think government is any different? And so I want to start with that framework and you can see a lot more of this if you go to the American Enterprise Institute website, and we have a paper called “21st Century Entrepreneurial Public Management,” and the core of our argument is simple — the model we have inherited is essentially obsolete. It is described in that paper as a box, which is characterized by a mail clerk on a high stool with a quill pen, dipped into an open inkwell. Those in the Civil Service Act in the 1880s would still dominate us 125 years later, modernized by a New Deal Bureaucracy in which manual typewriters typed on carbon paper. Now that system can’t work. That is what I briefed key leaders of the Bush administration [indiscernible] in August of 2005 before Katrina, and I said, “This system can’t function. The reason you can’t do better in Baghdad is you can’t get the Agency for International Development to function. You cannot get the Justice Department to function.” This is a huge underlying problem, and you saw it come home vividly clear with Katrina. In Katrina, the city of New Orleans failed, the state of Louisiana failed, and the government of the United States failed.

The word “failure” is really important to understand at this point. You got an American body laying on an American street on television for three days because the government could not figure out how to pick up the dead. You had 34 senior citizens abandoned in a nursing home dying, drowning, having been left alone, because no one knew where they were. You had 22,000 people trapped in the Superdome with no water, when the private sector had water out front in trucks and the government couldn’t figure how to get it into the Superdome. And the failure continues.

We just had a report two weeks ago, that in order to get 10 cents of blue tarp for temporary roofing, the government pays $1.75 to a prime contractor, who pays 75 cents to a contractor, who pays 35 cents to a subcontractor, who pays 10 cents to the person putting on the tarp. Now no society can afford that level of incompetence. And mark my words, when we visit in September, the amount not yet done in New Orleans, it will be seen as a national scandal. They rebuilt San Francisco, Galveston, and Chicago after a hurricane, an earthquake, and a fire faster than the planning process for the federal government for New Orleans. They completed it because they did not stop to plan. They just went out and worked.

Now I am giving you this framework because I now want to talk about immigration, because the number one characteristic of immigration debate in America is how dishonest it is. And let me say — this may surprise some of you — I am very sympathetic with the illegal immigrants who were protesting. I mean, they came here because they had a clear social contract. American employers would hire them illegally. The United States government would wink and nod. And so they uprooted themselves from back home to pursue a better future, earning a bigger income. And now we’re trying to change the social contract. And we are trying to change it in a way which pretends, just as we pretend the Colombian drug dealers are at the heart of the drug problem, as opposed to American drug purchasers, we want to pretend that it is illegal workers who are at the heart of the problem rather than the illegal businesses who are hiring them and an incompetent government which is tolerating it.

So I want to set a standard of talking about the notion that we should end the dishonesty. And frankly, the process going on in the Congress just fits the dishonesty. I mean, nobody up there is honest about what the McCain-Kennedy Bill is all about because they know that they couldn’t go anywhere in America if they told the truth. And we have documented data in here on the number of people who would become American citizens over the next decade under various bills. Nobody is honestly talking about that.

So let me start and describe what I think we need to do and just say dismissively, we need to quit lying about who is hiring illegals. It’s Americans. We need to quit lying about how incompetent the government is. Both its domestic enforcement provisions and its border control provisions are pathetic. In 2004, the United States government assessed zero fines for illegal employers in the country that had 11 million plus people working illegally. That is clearly a deliberate collusion. We need to be honest about the fact that the elite does not want to teach English and does not want to teach American history, or certainly would not want to teach American history which resembled America. And therefore, what you’re getting from the vast overwhelming majority of Americans, and by the way the numbers are staggering, Eighty-eight percent of the country would cut off all federal aid to any city which refuses to enforce immigration law, which means Los Angeles would have a real identity crisis. Say to the Los Angeles City Council, you want to pass a rule that says police can’t ask if you are illegal? Fine. No more US money. Good luck with your budget. I mean, it’s that serious, 88 percent of the country. Ninety percent of the country believes that you should be able to read and write English in order to be an American citizen and that you should say the pledge of allegiance, and forswear voting in any other election. These are numbers on a scale that is amazing, numbers larger, by the way, than the Panama Canal in the 1970s.

And what are they telling us about where the American people are? The American people are fed up with being lied to by their elites. They are fed up with being told they shouldn’t worry about the border, but by the way, every American should go through the Transportation Security Agency on the grounds that there are no terrorists who are going to drive across the border. They are all going to buy airline tickets. Just think about this conundrum. Let’s spend $9 billion a year on a ballistic missile defense and hope the Iranians forget how to rent a truck. And the American public intuitively understands this. I mean, the numbers are breathtaking. That there’s a dialogue going on in America, and there’s a dialogue going on in Washington, and they are two different conversations.

In Washington, the so-called power structure gets together to figure out the next con, and that is what the Senate compromise is. It’s a con; it’s not real. And it’s not what the American people want. So what do the American people want? And by the way, the American people are not anti-immigrant. This is the other thing. The elite answer is to say, “If you raise any questions, you are a racist.” And I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger did a pretty good job in the Los Angeles Times the other day of writing very aggressively about immigration from the standpoint of a first-generation immigrant, although a European immigrant, and therefore, clearly suspect at Berkeley. But he pointed out, I mean, he said, “Amnesty is anarchy.” That’s Schwarzenegger’s line. He said, you can be for immigration and for legality simultaneously.

So let me start with what do the American people want, and it is pretty clear. First, they want control of the border. They want control of the border because they think it is a national security issue. They want control of the border because they think it is a national identity issue. And they want control of the border because they believe that you if you simply pass another amnesty bill like 1986 without control of the border, you will, in fact, in five or eight years be passing another amnesty bill. And they are right. There is nothing complicated about what’s going on. The richest society on the planet is within geographic reach now in the age of modern transportation of much poorer societies. So relatively smart people wake up in the morning and say, “Gee, I could earn $1 an hour here or $14 an hour in Kansas City. I wonder where I would like to be next week.” This isn’t complicated, and it’s not indecent, and it’s not wrong. But a society which fails to control its own borders, is asking for the level of trouble we now have.

So first of all, I would urge the House and Senate, to pass a Border Control Bill that is real. And when I say real, let me explain, I recommend all of you, if you’ve never read Rudy Giuliani’s Leadership and Bill Bratton’s Turnaround, they are both worth your reading to understand what I mean by real. Bratton is the police chief who actually enforced Giuliani’s determination to control crime. They set up a system called CompStat for computer statistics. They were very aggressive and very direct. They replaced three-fourths of the precinct captains in New York the first year. Out of 76 precincts, three-fourths had their precinct captain replaced. They reduced crime 14 percent the first year. Mayor Bloomberg has maintained the same system.

Crime in New York today is down 70 percent. New York is statistically the safest large city in the United States. Our estimate is there are 16,000 people alive today who would have been killed in New York over the last 15 years. Staggering. I mean nobody studies it because it’s a success. I mean, how could you possibly do a Time Magazine cover about success, that would imply things in America could work? But if you apply the Giuliani model, it started with the squeegee men, who were people some of you will remember, who, when you crossed over into the borough of Manhattan, the first thing that happened was, you pull up to a red light and somebody would wander out and rub the front of your windshield with a dirty cloth or a squeegee and then demand money. And it was the symbol of the collapse of respect and order in New York City. And Giuliani was very clear about this. He said it as soon as he was elected mayor, they realized they had to have a quick win. They had to prove they were serious. And so he said, “Get them off the street.” And the city lawyers said, “You can’t. You know, it’s First Amendment rights, I mean what are you doing?”  He said it was the only time in his eight years it was good to be a lawyer. He said, “No,” he said, “they’re jaywalking.” He said, “The minute they jaywalk, arrest them, take them to the precinct, fingerprint them.” It turned out 35 percent of them had outstanding arrest warrants. Well, all of a sudden, what was an interesting hobby became a really risky problem.

By the way, one other thing, because this was the first great use of metrics in running modern government, which is a key part of what I think we have to do to get to a 21st century system. When they did the analysis, it turned out that there were 80 people. This entire symbolic problem became 80 people. So that stopped them. So the first ground rule would be, if you’re serious about controlling the border, pick some easy wins. For example, people say you can’t do fences. We have a fence. It’s in San Diego. It works for 21 miles. Then the fence ends. It doesn’t work anymore because there’s no fence. So unless you’re really stupid, you have to go east 21 miles to get into the US, but it does work. So, how many places are really high-traffic places? Those are the only places you need fences. What is your capacity to put predators up over empty spaces to be watching for people coming on empty spaces because they are by definition “empty”? This stuff is all manageable once you are serious. There is a member of Congress who did this at one point. Sylvester Reyes, who is a democratic member of Congress from El Paso, was the most effective border patrol agent in the United States and was almost fired because he was so effective. He was breaking all the norms. He actually had the border under control. It was unheard of. And he did it without violence. He did it by calmly and methodically doing the right things, which is exactly what Giuliani did. Making New York safer meant less violence, not more; less repression, not more; because you got into an orderly system where people knew the rules. So one, the Congress ought to pass an immediate bill to make the border controlled by the end of the year or certainly by the middle of next year. We fought the entire Second World War, the United States’ share of the Second World War, in less time than it has been since 9/11. We mobilized the nation, put 15 million people in uniform, built a two-ocean Navy, built the B-29, built the atomic bomb, liberated North Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and liberated all the Pacific in less time than it has been since 9/11. We were a serious country. So we should pass a serious Border Control Bill, we should really mean it, and overnight, you would see things start to change.

The second thing we should do is we should announce tomorrow morning that we are going to genuinely enforce the current law for any employer. And this comes in three parts. The first is very simple. Tell the IRS the first thing they audit for is anybody who is not legal, and just automatically start auditing. Now, let me give you an example of how far we are from that. This is this morning’s Wall Street Journal, “Illegal Immigrants’ New Ally on Katrina Pay: The Government.” The government of the United States is currently insisting that everybody in the Katrina recovery make sure they pay all of their illegal workers.

Now again, I am not for cheating anybody who came here, but I just want to suggest to you, this is so out of touch with reality, that it’s baroque. It makes no sense at all. In a country which wants to crack down on illegality, the United States government is helping it. In a country, which wants to control the border, the Washington Times reported last week that homeland security has made a request for proposals to help with cameras for a five-year project. Now if you have a five-year project, you do not have a serious project. And that is where we are. So we are going to just pour more money into it. One of our ground rules, which we described, if you looked at our paper, is — it comes from an Einstein quote — that “Insanity is when you think that by doing more of what you are already doing, you will get a different result.” So what are the politicians going to do? They are going to take the systems we know do not work and double the amount of money that is not working, and then expect us to be grateful.

And so one, I think they ought to pass a serious Border Control Bill; two, they ought to move immediately to serious enforcement. Because what would happen? You would immediately discover that there were a lot of fewer jobs for people who were illegally here, very rapidly. And you do not need to go out and round people up. You do not need to go out and track down individuals. You need to say, “We are not going to have illegal working … We are not going to have illegal businesses in the United States.” That will have an effect on illegal workers but you focus on the businesses. And you say to the business community, because business community is very divided about this, I mean the people in the business community would say, “Well, do not pick on us. It is not our fault.”

I want to divide it into two classes. There are people in the business community knowingly hiring people who are not legally here, and you can tell because they do not pay taxes. That is a clear violation. If you got somebody who is not collecting social security tax, and they are not collecting income tax, they know the person they hired is illegal. That business should get hammered.

Then there are a large number of businesses that will tell you upfront, “They brought me paperwork, it is not my job to tell it is fraudulent. I collected the taxes. I sent it in.” Social security last year got $6.4 billion in social security payments from people who do not exist. Now in terms of metrics, can you imagine that UPS or FedEx or virtually any major corporation having a meeting and saying, “Well, gee, we are getting $6 billion from people who do not exist,” and not having a discussion.

So this is the ground rule I want to set. If the government cannot run an identity system accurate enough to tell you in real time that that person is illegal, and you are withholding taxes in good faith, and you are doing everything in good faith, the burden is on the government, not on the employer. But if you know they are illegal and you are not withholding taxes, the burden is on you. That is an easy dividing line for the short run, and that would, overnight, start to transform it. The other thing you have to do is anybody who runs one of these fly-by-night operations, designed to be a cutout. “Oh, I heard so and so… and I did not realize he hired 32 people who are illegal.” The person doing that has to be stunningly at risk.

But that is all doable. This is all enforceable without any great radical break. It requires seriousness of purpose. It requires you change some of the rules but we can do that. The third thing we have to do on my judgment is we have to insist on a return to patriotic immigration, to use, in Lamar Alexander’s language, and the work with John Fonte, he has done so much from his terrific work at Hudson. This is very straightforward. The American people are very much for having people come to America to become American. There is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt that I think captures this. Theodore Roosevelt said in 1907, “In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outraged to discriminate against such men because of creed or birthplace origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also is not an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is the loyalty of the American people.”

I think Theodore Roosevelt captured the heart of probably 85 percent of the American people. What that would mean is very strong effort to teach English, a very strong effort to help people assimilate, very strong focus on learning about American history, learning what it means to be an American. In that same process, I would suggest to you, it means that anybody who wanted to participate in our election system as an American citizen could, with an English ballot. I mean why would you say on the one hand everybody has to learn English but, by the way, we are going to print 220 languages?

And again, this is one of the mid-1960s great society models of the new non-integrated America, which would somehow be a collection of groups, and I think it is profoundly wrong. I think it is a debate worth having, because if the American people come to the conclusion that you are going to control the border, you are going to enforce the law and you are going to insist on American citizenship, then the American people are prepared to talk about a temporary worker program, or what I would prefer to call a Worker Visa Program, because they may or may not be temporary. I think this idea we are going to have … this is part of the dishonesty of the current dialogue. In addition to the 11 million people we are amnestying, which is what the McCain-Kennedy bill does, we are also going to have, by the way, an additional 400,000 temporary workers. Well, first of all, the scale is absurd. You need the number of temporary workers. You need the number of people who are being hired, who are going to be hired because otherwise you just create the new black market. So how do you regulate and make legal the process of being allowed to work in the United States, how do you track it, and how do you start it? Let me express my bias. How do you start it with people who graduate from American colleges and universities? So you start with a bias that says we’d like to make absolutely sure, first of all, we are going to have X number of people who will get a work visa program, that the smartest best-educated people get the first shot, which we do not do today. We today make it difficult for a PhD in chemical engineering to be allowed to stay, having graduated from MIT, unless of course they want to become illegal and work as a day laborer, in which case they’re in good shape. But that is a stunningly destructive system.

So at least the two other components, I think there should be a Worker Visa Program, and it should be designed to say that you have to sign a contract to obey the law and pay taxes. You have to give us a biometric, which will probably end up being a retinal scan. The country you come from has to turn over records every month on who their convicted felons are so we can verify you are not a convicted criminal. And I would outsource the entire program to Visa or American Express or Mastercard, because they actually understand how to run a program like this. There is zero reason to believe the federal government could run this program. This is a transition. I mean we are in the mess we are in because we spent 30 years getting here. You are not going to get all of it done in a year. But within two or three years, you could have a program where when somebody showed up, if they did not have absolute proof of being an American citizen, they had a card. The card could be verified 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you would know then that the burden was on the government to make sure the card was accurate, and you can design cards that are very hard to counterfeit if you have retinal scans.

Now if you do that, all you have done is replicate what every one of you does routinely with your credit cards. I mean this idea that recently the Government Accountability Office brought a truck carrying uranium into the United States with papers that were phony. They did not disguise they had uranium. They just had papers that gave them permission to move it and the customs computer system is so inadequate that at the border, they did not realize the company the papers were issued to did not exist. Now you could have Googled whether or not the company existed. But it just gives you this flavor of the gap between the world of everything that government and the world of government and why it is so difficult.

So I would argue strongly, I would be prepared to defend any one in the country, that if you are serious about controlling the border, and you are serious about getting the legality, you have to have a Worker Visa Program that is real, that has background checks, that is enforceable. Having done that, you are then in the position to say two other things.

I believe that the requirement for everybody who is currently here illegally is very simple. You go home and you get the new card at home, and I’ll give you the card when you go home, but I want to insist that you start your real experience of America by obeying the law. And this is a Giuliani model. I mean he may not endorse this. I’m not saying he will endorse it, but if you look at what Giuliani did to fight crime in New York, he was very tough on crime. He said, “We are not going to let you stand in the middle of the street and break the law. We are not going to let you have graffiti on the wall. We are not going to put up with the things people put up with.”

Now people say, “Well, how can you ask them to do that?” Notice this little thing, and I do want to thank, by the way, for just doing an extraordinary job, Vince Haley is our research director here at AEI. Vince is putting all this together and points out to me on the way over --  because we are still unpeeling this and trying to understand it. All of our friends in the establishment who will tell you it is too great a burden to require somebody who is here illegally to actually go home are telling you that they do not have amnesty because they have a fine. So what they are saying is the amount of money I would ask somebody to pay to go home and obey the law, they would take for the government in the form of a fine. But somehow they think they will find the money to pay the fine but they will not find the money to go home. It is actually very cheap to go home.

But here is my further point. We are talking about people who managed to enter the US illegally, so we know that they are able to travel. We are not uprooting somebody who was born in Kansas City and never left town and is now frightened of the idea of finding themselves in Guatemala City. And we are saying to them, “You can go home legally. We are going to let you go right through TSA. You need to get a cheap airplane. You can take a bus. There are a number of ways that people do this. You and five of your friends can pile in a car.” But we are going to set the principle, people do not start their life in the United States by breaking the law and then establish some kind of totally phony game, and that is what is in this bill.

Last point, because you need to look carefully at these bills in the Senate which are, I think, a disaster. They dramatically expand who gets to be considered eligible. If you look at their definition of family, it has been substantially expanded, and I think it is very important to raise this because it is part of the continuing dishonesty. Politicians will get up and say to you, “Well, what about the person who has been here 10 years and they have three children and they are totally committed and they are part of America?” Fine. But that is not what the bill says. The bill goes way beyond that. The bill, in fact, redefines the nature of family to broaden it dramatically. We have in the appendix that we have here, and I’m just trying to find the exact title because I want to say to you the numbers, that the number of people who would be made eligible under the McCain-Kennedy Bill, one estimate would be something on the order of 25.5 million. The Spector Bill is 30.6 million. It so dramatically expands the number of people who are eligible. It includes your parents. So people who have never been to the US, your parents, your brothers and sisters, who by the way when they get here now and establish bringing in the next wave, and it brings in the entire extended family and redefines it.

So it is interesting that either the staff or the members – now, this could easily have been done at the staff level – but somebody, in writing this bill, could not find a way to restrict it to people who are already in the US but saw it instead as a vehicle to broaden it dramatically. Basically, they would increase the population of the United States by about 10 percent in the name of taking care of somebody … the perfect example is the person who has already been here 15 years and has three children and is married. Well, I think you can find ways to deal with that issue.

So I do believe that we are at a real crossroads. I am very, very concerned because I think this city continues to kid itself. I think that is why when you look at the polling numbers, you see such massive indicators of people who are saying that they are not happy with the way things are going, that they do not think we are on the right track, and I do not think anything that’s been done on immigration this Spring strengthens that capability. On the other hand, I’m an optimist and part of the reason I wanted to outline this today is, this is a country which has, for 225 years, had a remarkable ability to have a dialogue with itself and leapfrog its elites. If you go back and look at American history, the British lost to the Revolutionaries. The Revolutionaries organized the Federalists who basically pulled off a coup d’etat and an open public coup d’etat, winning in every single state an endorsement of the constitution. The Federalists then suddenly found themselves confronted with the Jeffersonians, who pulled off what is really, I think, most accurately seen in 1800 as a revolution. And it was truly a revolution. The Jeffersonians then governed as a new emerging establishment until the Jacksonians emerged, and anybody who was part of the establishment of 1824 will tell you Jackson represented an eruption of public popular will that just blew apart the establishment. Then the system sort of bounced along in equilibrium until Lincoln came along and said the meaning of the Supreme Court overreaching in Dred Scott is that slavery has now been made legal in the whole country, and therefore we have no choice except to define the future of the country. And in Lincoln’s case, he was prepared if necessary to fight a civil war to define that future.

In another period of stability and along come the progressives and the progressives caused, by the way, much like Katrina was such a vivid example of our failure, the failure of the government we have inherited, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which destroyed the largest city in Texas, was a startling beginning of the progressive movement. You then get a relatively stable period up until the Great Depression leads to the New Deal and Roosevelt, and you then get a relatively stable period until Ronald Reagan emerges. In not a single one of these cases does Washington voluntarily change.

In every one of these cases, the establishment babbles to itself, talks to itself, explains itself to the country, feels quite assured until it is wiped out and is then stunningly shocked. I mean I remember when Reagan won the degree to which the left could not believe the size of the victory and the meaning of the victory. When we won in 1994, there was almost nobody who thought on election eve we were going to win.

And so I just outlined this. I wanted to say partly because he is here and partly because I quote him all the time, but in 1976, Irving Kristol wrote two essays in the Wall Street Journal. One was called The Future of the Republican Party and the other was called The Stupid Party, and he made the point in The Stupid Party that it is good for conservative parties to be a little bit slow because they should not chase fads but they should not be too slow, because then they are stupid. And I ask, if you have never read those two, they are very short, they were just essays in the Wall Street Journal, if you have never read them you should read them because he helped reinforce for me this simple-minded idealistic belief.

First come the ideas. The political process comes later. And what we need right now in America, I have given you today three big ideas. One, we are at an enormous crossroads, bigger than any since 1861, and we will decide in the next 20 years who we are as a people. Two, the bureaucratic mechanisms we have inherited from the past are gone. The fact that they are expensive, and they are ponderous and they issue press releases has no meaning. They are an encumbrance to our ability to deal with the future. And three, one of the key fights is going to be the nature of American citizenship, the requirement to obey the law, the absolute necessity to control the border and the willingness to be honest and tough-minded about having an economically fair system that leads to the appropriate steps to citizenship that require people to truly become American.

And I think around those you can only build an amazingly big majority of Americans. So I have given you a fair amount to think about.

Karlyn H. Bowman: Now we can turn to your questions, and if you could wait for the mic and please identify yourself.

Male Voice 1: What would you do about the question of the Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship?

Newt Gingrich: Well, I personally believe … again, I’m not suggesting we expel anyone. I want to start with that. I personally believe that the Fourteenth Amendment, there is nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment that relates to geography. The Fourteenth Amendment relates to legality, and I suspect any of the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment would have said, and I believe in fact – Vince, correct me if I’m wrong - but I think it actually did say that this does not relate specifically to people who show up outside the law. And so again, I’m against our running around trying to deport people. I think that that is not a sustainable policy. I think it is an anti-human policy, and I do agree with the Pope’s vision that we seek justice in a hemisphere of hope and a climate of hope, and he talked of North and South America as being bound in many ways. So I do not want to get into fights where you say, “We are going to pick up somebody in the middle of labor and try to deport them.”

But I think the absurdity of making the case, willful law-breaking can lead to lawful outcome. It strikes me as in the long run not sustainable. But it is not a place I would start the fight. I think that it is part of what will evolve, and frankly, if you have an honest program of being able to come here honestly and you are operating within the law, you are not going to have those kinds of problems.

Deborah Meyers: Thank you. That was a very thought-provoking presentation. I’m Deborah Meyers from the Migration Policy Institute, and I’m curious, you mentioned the idea that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and yet with regard to our immigration enforcement efforts over the last 10 to 20 years, all we have done is add more border patrol, virtually tripled the border patrol, we have increased our enforcement resources by 400 or 500 percent on that. And the first item that you mentioned was to get real control of the border and pass, you said, a real Border Control Bill. What specific elements do you think would be necessary to get that control that you are talking about at the border?

Newt Gingrich: I think where there are large concentrations of people, you have fences. Where there are not large concentrations of people, you have electronic devices. I think you apply the amount of manpower you need to do the job. I think you have rules that immediately deport people and do not allow them to play games. We are at one point allowing people in the United States, releasing them on their own recognizance, with zero prospect they would show back up. And if you just think about the games we were playing, I’m against playing games, and if the country wants an open border, have an open border, and then you are going to have a lot of people that come across the border that have children, fine, if that is the game you want to play.

If the country wants to be serious about controlling its border, which by the way eliminates a lot of the problem of people coming in illegally, then you ought to control it. That would have a huge positive effect on drugs. It would have a huge positive effect on trafficking in human beings. There are 800,000 slaves a year who move across national borders, and the US is a major recipient, most of them are women and most of them are sold into forced prostitution. And I just think it is a scandal that we pretend that we cannot control the border. People control and have controlled borders historically on a regular basis. It does mean you got to be serious about it. But if you both control the border and have a legal program so that you are not creating this huge stream of economic pressure. I think you can probably regularize relationships and behaviors pretty dramatically.

And that was the lesson that Giuliani had in New York. Nobody in New York City in 1992 … in fact, actually somebody associated with AEI is, the intellectual start of this is James Q. Wilson, who is the co-author of the paper on Broken Windows, and at that time that Bratton was brought in by Giuliani, Giuliani asked every potential police chief, “Can you reduce crime?” Bratton is the only person who said yes. He said, “How much?” He said, “Ten percent the first year.” It was 14 percent. Nobody believed that. So if you said to Bratton and Giuliani tomorrow morning, what would real border control look like? And they went and did it. My guess is a year from now, you would be startled at how relatively quiet the border would be.

Now the second part of that is you really have to clamp down on illegal employers, so that there is no constant attraction of jobs. I do not blame somebody who leaves poverty to seek prosperity. If every signal they have been given by America for 20 years is that breaking the law is okay. This is a big game we are all engaged in. I blame America for not having had a serious effort to have a legal system.

Female Voice: Mr. Speaker, if you could comment on the recent announcements by both DHS and the White House for a clamp down at the border, is this just window dressing or do you take it seriously?

Newt Gingrich: I believe it fully as much as I believe there are Katrina preparations, and that is my view. Tell me one thing that has changed in the last six months that would lead you to believe that the bureaucracy that failed totally in New Orleans is any better today. Just tell me one thing. So why would you think they are going to be better?
Female Voice: Thank you.

Karlyn Bowman: Please identify yourself.

Male Voice 2: [States name], Progressive Policy Institute. My question is, it seems that some of the differences you have with the congressional leaders now is less about philosophy and more about in honest difference of opinion and how to practically do something, so for instance with the… you are saying, you know, “Enforcement first,” and they will say, “Well, you have to deal with the market force at the same time.” You say, “Send 11 million people home first and they can come right back.” And they say, “Actually we want the symbolic, the symbolic thing is important, but let’s do it in a way that is going to actually encourage people to sign up and get it done.” So is it a philosophical difference or is it just practical difference?

Newt Gingrich: Well, I think the two are totally tied together. I believe the law is the heart of the American system. I think that one of the reasons we have been able to survive as a country that immigrates people from across the planet is that we actually have been very serious about the concept of the law. And so I think when you suddenly say, “Oh, have them legalized.” Remember, we did this once before, in ’86, and we said in ’86, “No more amnesties.” And we said in ’86, by the way, “We are going to really enforce the border and we are going to really enforce employers.”

It was all a lie, a bipartisan lie. It did not happen. I voted for the ’86 Act. It sounded terrific. So when you say to me, “Oh, what we are going to set up is this new thing. We do not want to inconvenience people who, after all, have only been breaking the law for 5 or 10 years.”

And again, if you look at the McCain-Kennedy Bill, it basically says we are going to reward the people who have broken the law the longest. So in trying to reach a political compromise, there is a difference between a principle compromise and a political compromise. In trying to reach a political compromise, they established the worst possible principle, which is only the most consistent law breaker gets to stay.

Now first of all, nobody believes it, because if you know what is going to happen overnight? We are going to invent a forgery industry. And what is the purpose of the forgery industry? To prove I broke the law longer than I did. Now I mean, think about what a bizarre upside down signal that is. And does anybody here not believe that there will be a forgery industry?

So again, I’m trying to … let’s just have an honest dialogue. I think we can solve this with dignity for the people who have come here illegally because I do not hold them accountable. I think we can solve this in a way which is effective for the American economy. I think we can solve this in a way which dramatically increases our national security and homeland security. And I think we can solve this in a way which dramatically strengthens our commitment to American civilization and to the principles of being American. But to do that, you have got to have an honest conversation and not have people who are floating stuff out here. That is baloney.

Ben Wattenberg: Ben Wattenberg, AEI. Excuse me for being late, but I think I got the gist of it. First, we cannot keep out drugs. You cannot keep out immigrants, in my judgment. Secondly, it is the fact that America will be growing at a time when all other nations, major nations in the world, are going to be shrinking is due entirely long term because of immigration population, all things being equal, yields power and influence, and I’m in favor of that.

Newt Gingrich: Well, Ben, based on your own book, which I recommend constantly around the world. If you have not read Fewer, you should read it. Let me say first of all, we also have the highest reproduction rate among native-born Americans of any industrial population in the world.

Ben Wattenberg: We are below replacement.

Newt Gingrich: Below replacement, but we are like at 2.14, so we are much closer, okay? Second, I’m for legal immigration. You may have missed that part of the speech. I’m for legal immigration. We have the most open legal border in the world. We accept more legal immigrants than in any other country in the worlds, that I’m willing to add a legal work visa program in addition to having a pretty open border for legal immigrants. So you would have a legal work visa program, and you have a legal application to become an American citizen program.

So it is not, again, I want to make this very clear. I’m not anti-immigrant and I’m not particularly interested in getting into some fight where the establishment gets to say, “You are xenophobic and racist because all you want to do is have a couple of million people coming legally annually.” As opposed to the assertion you just made, which I do not agree with at all, which is if you are going to live on a planet-wide system with a drop in the cost of information and a drop in the cost of transportation, and you are going to say, “We cannot control immigration.” I think you should expect out of the 45 or 50 million surplus Chinese males, you should expect at least six million of them to figure out how to get here.

Karlyn Bowman: We are going to go back here then right up here, and then, time will conclude with Irving Kristol in the back.

Karl Carter: Karl Carter with the Universal Human Rights Network. I only have one question and that is, why has not anybody, Conservative or Liberal, made a proposal to give a front seat to the legal people who are waiting in line to come here? They have done everything and they are still on a huge waiting list, and there has been no suggestion that in any bill passed that they would see or become a priority status.

Newt Gingrich: Well, under the proposal that I was making, they could apply immediately for a work or visa program to come here and I think you have just made one of the most profound arguments against any form of amnesty for people who have been breaking the law. If you say that the 11 million people who have been consistently breaking the law were going to find an excuse, a fig leaf, for you to stay here, you just basically said that every person around the planet has been waiting patiently to obey the law that they were fools. That for $1,000 or $2,000 they too could have been here all these years because we did not really mean it was illegal, we just meant it was not quite legal.

And I think that is a very powerful reason why amnesty is morally wrong and I think a worker visa program, in fact, would solve part of the problem you are describing.

Sarah Baxter: Thank you. Sarah Baxter, Sunday Times of London. You have been working on a bipartisan basis with Democrats on issues such as healthcare with Senator Clinton. Are there any Democrats that you can see yourself working with on this or is that a hopeless cause?

Newt Gingrich: Well, part of why I think it will be interesting for the House and Senate to move a Border Control Bill is in the last few days you have both Senator Clinton and Howard Dean say that they want to control the border. I think we should give them a chance to vote for it and I think that they are going to bring up a free … you know that the Immigration Bill is going to be tied up for months if it ever gets out of anything. So it will be tied up in conference for a long, long time.
So why not pass a very simple, straightforward control the border now and get it out of the House, which they could do by next week, because that is the way the House rules work, and then gives Senator Clinton the chance to either vote for it or filibuster, and see if she really meant what she said last week.

But the Democrats are reading the same data that I gave you. The Democrats understand if they become the parties for illegal immigration and anti-border control, there will be a minority for two generations. And so I think they are trying to find a way to now suddenly rush over, and I thought having both Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton the same week come out for border control, should be an opportunity which Republicans ought to be able to give them a chance to actually create a Bipartisan Border Control Now Bill, and then see what they do with that, if it becomes a reality and not rhetoric.

Karlyn Bowman: Irving Kristol.

Irving Kristol: I find your analysis and recommendations utterly persuasive. I wonder, why do the White House and Republican Leadership in Congress not also find it equally persuasive?

Newt Gingrich: Well, I have two explanations to that which I want to offer at some risk here. The first is movement politicians understand that you either do the right thing or you do nothing. Normal politicians believe you do the least bad thing you can do because if you do not do anything, you will not be in charge, and since the only way people know who you are is because you are in charge, you need to do something even if it is dumb because, at least, you are doing something. And that is why you end up with stuff that gets passed regularly where you say, “How could you have done this?” Well, you need to understand where we work and I was [indiscernible] said that Edward Banfield once said to him, “Do not just stand there, sit down.”

So I do think there is an argument that what happens to people is in the absence of a constant reminder of what it is you came here to do, you drift into the city defining the conversation, and this is still inherently a city of the left. And so you end up with Republicans who think that they have to do something and the only menu that is — I was told this my whole career — “You would only do what is realistic.” Right?

And realistic means, of course, one or five really dumb things. And so you say with great pride, “I did the least dumb thing,” which is not the same as doing a smart thing. But to do a smart thing, you have to start a new debate.

Deaver told me one time that they had a rule in the Reagan governorship. That when somebody used the word “we” and meant the government of California, they had to leave, because “we” meant the people of California. And there is a profound underlying insight about the nature of reality. Who do you think you represent, or what do you think you are trying to do? The country, on a number of these topics, on social security where the countries about 57/38 in favor of young people being allowed to just have their own personal social security savings account, the country has made the decision on knowing price and quality and health care where 93 percent of the country thinks it has the right to know. The country has made a decision on English as a language, the country somewhere between 86 and 90 percent. Why, that is a big-enough number.

On controlling the border, the country is at around a 90 percent rate. I mean, if the country is firm enough in controlling the border that Howard Dean gets it. The numbers are just unavoidable. And so I think the country is actually, probably a decade ahead of Washington right now. It is very much where the Jacksonians were about 1824, or very much where, I think, Reagan was in the mid 70s; where the country clearly was moving towards a much more decisive engagement than the establishment could bring itself to do. And that is why I’m an optimist. I mean, I get very frustrated some mornings reading the media but I’m an optimist that it is strategically possible to arouse the American people to communicate with their elected representatives and if necessary, replace them. And that is an honorable part of the American tradition, and I appreciate this chance to share ideas with you.