Engaging with Public Policy: An Immigration Scholar in Three Presidential Campaigns

Forthcoming in The Chronicles, newsletter of the UC San Diego Emeriti Faculty Association, Winter 2021  Engaging with Public Policy: An Immigration Scholar in Three Presidential Campaigns Wayne A. Cornelius   My first dip into policy-relevant research came in 1975, and it was entirely serendipitous. I had been trained as a political scientist at Stanford to do survey research.

My dissertation project had been a survey study of political attitudes and behavior among residents of low-income neighborhoods of Mexico City, most of whom had originated in small rural communities. Five years later, I decided to study the rural-to-urban migration process from the front end, doing a survey study of high-emigration towns in the northeastern region of Mexico’s Jalisco state. When I got there I discovered that most the people leaving the region were not going to Mexican destinations but rather to the United States. Instantly, I became a student of international migration, and that became the focus of my research and teaching career. Shortly after I began publishing the results of my Jalisco field study, I was asked to write a policy memo for the Latin America staff of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council, which had just begun to get interested in international migration issues. Based on that memo, I wrote an op-ed that was published by The New York Times. The article argued that Mexican migrants were more likely to be a net economic benefit to the country than a burden on taxpayers, drawing upon survey data that I had collected on migrants’ public benefits utilization and their contributions to tax revenues. Substantively, the focus of my policy-relevant research has been on how various kinds of immigration control policies influence individual-level decisions to migrate or to stay at home, with special attention to the efficacy and unintended consequences of tougher border enforcement. This was one of the perennial subjects of the field studies that my UCSD students and I conducted in rural Mexico from 2005-2015. We accumulated quite a large body of survey and qualitative data on this question – evidence that dovetailed nicely with what sociologist Douglas Massey and his Princeton-based field research teams were finding. Border management thus became my professional comfort zone.

I have advised three presidential campaigns on immigration and refugee issues. My first experience, in 2007-08 with Barack Obama, was disappointing. The chair of Obama’s immigration task force had reached out to me. We had many conference calls but there were no specific writing assignments. Most of the “asks” were intended to involve us in routine campaign tasks, like fund-raising and making cold calls to Iowa farmers. My ignorance of agricultural policy was profound and doubtless was revealed to each and every farmer with whom I awkwardly chatted. In hindsight, the Obama immigration advisory team was window dressing.

I sat out the 2016 election cycle, feeling no affinity with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, and having convinced myself that Hillary would coast to victory. But in January 2019, when 37-year-old South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg began his improbable presidential bid, I jumped at the chance to be part of his historic candidacy. I had no contacts with Pete’s campaign staff, who at that time consisted of four full-time employees.  I sent an over-the-transom email to the campaign’s general mailbox, offering my services and CV.  Fortunately, an alert college student intern fished the email out and routed it to the policy issues staffer.

I soon discovered Rule #1 of campaign policy advising: “You never know enough, about enough subjects, to do this kind of work.” It was humbling to discover that, despite being a full-time immigration scholar for more than four decades, I knew so little about so many immigration-related issues that the campaign was concerned about.  You need to be prepared to do a whole lot of new research, usually under considerable time pressure.  I spent more time ploughing through on-line research sources during the Mayor Pete and Joe Biden campaigns than I had ever done before.  I was constantly reaching out to other scholars who had done much more work than me on certain topics. One example:  Before these campaigns I had always told anyone who asked, “I don’t do refugees!” But these campaigns were happening in the aftermath of the 2018 “migration crisis” at the border, which mostly involved asylum-seekers, not economic migrants.  The Trump administration had taken aim at caravans, at asylum-seekers who were allegedly “gaming the system,” and it had implemented policies like “metering” and “Remain in Mexico” aimed at blocking access to the asylum process and making it more difficult to gain legal representation – not to mention the horrendous family separation policy, which was designed to deter would-be asylum-seekers. So, refugees were the elephant in the room, and I had to get up to speed quickly. I reached out to one of my former UCSD Ph.D. students, Idean Salehyan, who has become a national authority on refugee movements. I also sought advice from local-level NGO leaders, who were more likely than scholars to know what was happening on the ground. During the Buttigieg and Biden campaigns I was tasked to write or contribute to a total of two dozen full-length policy memos, each on a different topic – everything from options for modernizing our border ports of entry to combating human trafficking and creating a new culture of accountability in our immigration enforcement agencies. About which of these two dozen topics did I know enough, from the get-go, to write a decent policy memo? Perhaps one or two of them.  I feel that I became a truly broad-gauge immigration scholar through my work in these campaigns. The bottom line is that you need to be willing to stretch yourself well beyond your usual bounds of professional competence. That’s often scary, but it can also be very rewarding. I mentioned the need for extensive Internet-based research. That was important not just to put data and ideas into my head but also to report that knowledge. Each policy memo was deeply sourced, and all sources had to be accessible on-line.  Each memo included dozens of embedded URLs. Footnotes were definitely out—they take up too much space, and we were working within severe length constraints. The longest policy memo was supposed to be just 10-11 pages — even for huge, complex subjects like border management strategy. Issue briefs were typically three pages.  There were many requests for one-pagers, consisting of talking points to be inserted in the candidate’s daily briefing book, input for public statements, and tweets to decry various anti-immigrant actions by the Trump administration. We were also asked to write op-eds, under our own name, to be published in major newspapers of battleground states. The one-pagers and 750-word op-eds illustrate another benefit of policy advising: It teaches you write with great parsimony. Strunk and White’s memorable advice – “Omit unnecessary words!” – was my mantra.  Another important learning experience from the campaigns was deep-into-the-weeds “policy-wonkery.”  I have never considered myself a policy wonk, but I came closer to becoming one during these campaigns. My previous forays into policy analysis had always involved evaluating existing policies – what had worked, what didn’t, and why. But designing new policies, trying to anticipate unintended consequences and potential obstacles to implementation – that was an entirely different kettle of fish. For each policy change that we proposed, a detailed timeline for implementation had to be laid out. What would President Biden need to do about this on Day 1? In the first 100 or 200 days? The first year?  Making these finely calibrated distinctions required a lot of guesswork. For example, it’s fine to call for rolling back the odious “Remain in Mexico” policy. But how do you do that without provoking a new surge of asylum-seekers, before the capacity to control such a surge is fully in place?  Still another key takeaway: Teamwork is essential in this kind of work. Most academic production is solitary, but policy advising is usually a team effort, requiring an elaborate division of labor. There were about fifty people contributing regularly to Biden’s working group on immigration. Only three of us were academics. The team was dominated by very smart people who had extensive, senior-level experience in the federal government during the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Homeland Security and in Department of Justice-related positions. Most had been trained as lawyers. For rapid response to Trump’s latest immigration outrage, we had a “legal swat team” to give us instant analysis of the legal issues raised by each policy development.

I quickly learned that to be effective, I needed to draw upon the skill sets and experience of the ex-government people on our team. Working with these folks was not always easy. One had to navigate around some very big egos. But there was real synergy, and the final product was always much better than it would have been if only academics had been involved.   What happens when you disagree with the candidate on some issue?  That did not happen during the Biden campaign, but it did occur once with Mayor Pete.  The issue came up in one of the early primary debates, when the moderator asked a “Raise-your-hand-if-you-agree” question. The subject was decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, which Julián Castro had been pushing most aggressively.  All but two of the candidates raised their hands to support this idea (Joe Biden was not among them).  When Pete’s hand went up, my at-home response was “Oh no!” I knew that the polling data showed that decriminalization was a non-starter with most Democrats and independents, and it would be a four-alarm fire in the general election — Trump would have attacked it non-stop as an “open borders” policy. But Pete had already taken the position, in a highly public forum.

So, how to get him to walk it back?   First, I consulted with the legal eagles on Pete’s immigration advisory team. Their advice was: “Don’t try to change the statute – just change how it’s enforced.” That led me to think of an obvious walk-back strategy:  Talk about changing prosecution priorities:  Target serious felons and national security risks, rather than routine immigration offenses like unlawful entry or repeat entry by economic migrants and asylum-seekers.  I wrote a memo entitled “Contextualizing Decriminalization,” which went through the legal arguments concerning Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act – the one that defines unauthorized entry as a crime.  I summarized the relevant polling data and suggested several talking points for the walk-back. That was enough for Pete. He is super-smart and politically agile. He never again mentioned “decriminalization” as a policy prescription.

One final question: How much difference does policy advising make?  What really happens to the products?  Much of the time, the memos and talking points seemed to disappear Into a black hole. Feedback was rare. All of it had been requested by campaign staff, but, more often than not, It was hard to tell what specific use was being made of all this material. For whom were we writing? My position was that everything should be potentially useful to both the campaign staff (for speeches, debate preparation, tweets, etc.) and to the transition team – the people who would translate our ideas into policies once victory had been secured. As immigration receded into non-issue status in the contest with Trump, I concluded that I was writing mainly for the transition team.

One major exception to the pattern of limited feedback was a proposal that I developed for Mayor Pete — something that I dubbed a “Community Renewal visa.” In a nutshell, this was a new, place-based visa that would steer new refugees and other immigrants to specific counties that had been losing working-age population and whose public finances had been depleted by that population decline.  The idea fit neatly into the “rural revitalization” plan that was being put together for Pete’s campaign.  I developed a fairly elaborate implementation plan to go with the basic idea: What kinds of places would be eligible to receive CR visa-holders, what requirements would visa holders have to meet, the mechanics of matching visa-holders with destination communities, and so forth.

I sent the proposal up the campaign food chain, and less than three weeks later, I heard Mayor Pete advocate for it during a nationally televised primary debate.  I nearly fell off my sofa!  This idea was later folded into Biden’s plans for legal immigration reform and refugee resettlement. It was definitely my greatest hit of the 2019-20 election cycle.  Wayne Cornelius is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations, emeritus, at UC San Diego. This article is adapted from a presentation to the graduate students of the Department of Sociology, UCLA, October 23, 2020.

Posted in on October 13, 2021.