GPPR Podcast Editor Brian Marroquín (MPM ’22) speaks with Cecilia Muñoz, former Director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama administration – the first Latina to serve in that role. In this podcast, Muñoz shares lessons from her decades of experience in immigration policy and her current work in public interest technology.
“Kindness is underrated as a leadership quality. And I think of it as a superpower. It is a big part of why I was successful as the president’s domestic policy advisor. And it wasn’t just my policy chops that made me successful. It was the fact that I could read a room and I could understand what people needed…”
Cecilia Muñoz, former Director of the Domestic Policy Council
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[Episode Starts/ C-SPAN Senate Session Audio]
Senate President: The Senate will come to order.
Senator Ted Kennedy: Mr. President.
Senate President: The Senator from Massachusetts.
Senator Ted Kennedy: Mr. President, this has been a long journey to try and bring our broken immigration system and our broken borders to the place where this Senate can take action. And today’s action is going to be absolutely key to whether we will be able to continue and finalize this legislation at the end of the week.
Brian Marroquin (Narrator): June 28, 2007. The United States Senate is set to hold a cloture vote, a vote to limit debate and overcome a filibuster on Senate Bill 1639. This bill is a final attempt at comprehensive immigration reform during the Bush administration. Leading the charge is Senator Ted Kennedy. Kennedy had first worked on immigration as a senator when he helped pass the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Notably that legislation did away with the discriminatory practice of immigration on the basis of national origin and instead emphasized family reunification. 42 years after that, what started as a generational opportunity to reform immigration and secure a pathway to citizenship for 12 million people was likely slipping away, and Kennedy knew it. This was his last attempt at salvaging it.
Senator Ted Kennedy: Mr. President, we are called today by the Ancients. The founders of the republic. Are we really going to form a more perfect union? It was in this chamber a number of years ago that we knocked down the great walls of discrimination on the basis of race. That we knocked down the walls of discrimination on the basis of religion. We knocked them down with regards to national origin. We knocked them down with regards to gender. We’ve knocked them down with regards to disability here in the Senate. We were part of the March for Progress and today we are called on again. In that exact same way. And this issue is of the historical and momentous importance that those judgments and those decisions were. Year after year, we’ve had the broken borders. Year after year, we have the exploitation of workers. Year after year, we see the people that live in fear within our own borders of the United States of America. This is the opportunity to change it. Now is the time.
Marroquin: Watching the vote closely was Cecilia Muñoz, a civil rights advocate and – at the time – a vice president at NCLR, the largest Hispanic civil rights organization in the US, now known as UnidosUS. Muñoz had been in this battle for comprehensive immigration reform for 20 plus years at that point, and had worked closely with Senator Kennedy, McCain and others on this bill. Much of the battle leading up to this 2007 vote is chronicled in the documentary series How Democracy Works Now. The Senate holds the cloture vote.
Senate President: On this vote. The ayes are 46, the nays are 53. 3/5ths of the senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative. The motion is not agreed to.
Marroquin: The bill fails. This was not the first, nor would it be the last close vote for Cecilia Muñoz. She built a reputation as an effective advocate on the Hill. And two years after this, the new president elect, Barack Obama, would ask her to serve as the director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House where she was the Administration’s liaison to local, county, tribal and state governments. Years later, President Obama would then promote her to serve as the director of the Domestic Policy Council, becoming the first Latina in the role. Muñoz served all eight years of the Obama administration. Recently, she advised the Biden-Harris presidential transition team, and she now serves as the vice president for public interest technology and local initiatives and New America. I’m Brian Marroquín, an editor for the Georgetown Public Policy Review. And today we speak with Cecilia Muñoz. Muñoz’s 2020 book is titled “More than Ready. Be Strong and Be You. And Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise.” She joined us to discuss immigration, public interest technology and policy and leadership lessons from a life in public service. Let’s go.
[Music Interlude]
Marroquín: Cecilia, it’s so great to have you join us today.
Cecilia Muñoz: Thanks for having me.
Marroquin: So our goal today is to discuss leadership lessons and policy. And to do that, I actually want to try something a little bit different and go in reverse chronological order in your career. So, we’ll start with your most recent work at New America, and hopefully we’ll have time to make it back to maybe the eighties and put our legwarmers on, you know? If that’s all right with you. So, this past spring, you received an honorary degree from Georgetown University. And were the commencement speaker for the McCourt School of Public Policy. You grounded your advice to graduates around three key points. One was, know your North Star. The other was use data to design for people. And the last one is to lead with kindness. So, the first piece of advice I want to discuss with you is the one on using data to design for people. What’s the focus of your work at New America in Public Interest Technology, and how does that principle of “using data to design for people” guide that work?
Muñoz: What a great question. When I left government, I took with me some very big lessons that I learned from the process of trying to implement policy. Right. As policymakers, we tend to celebrate when a law passes, and we don’t think as hard about making sure that the law delivers what it intends to deliver. Right. The classic example of that is working for years and years, arguably a century, to pass health reform, getting the Affordable Care Act passed, and then having the website not work for the first three weeks when people were supposed to enroll to get health care. I still, you know, like my stomach still hurts when I talk about that to think about it.
Muñoz: But what one of the things we learned from that process is, is one, we fixed the website and tens of millions of people got health care, but we learned that government – we didn’t have an engineering problem. What we have is a management problem. Government isn’t good at kind of managing the things that the Silicon Valley does every day before breakfast. And we ended up creating something called the US Digital Service, which meant that we recruited technologists to come in and work in the federal government to help deliver the stuff that government is trying to deliver. And because of where I worked in government, I got a chance to help place those teams and see what they could do. And I came out of that experience with a much deeper understanding that we need to deploy the skill sets in order to make sure policy reaches people. So, what do I mean by that?
Muñoz: Data is obviously one of those skill sets making sure that as policymakers, we are actually going where the data tells us, rather than making educated guesses about what’s going to be effective. It also means actually design thinking and what I think of as delivery focused thinking, right? It means making policies that are informed by what is the experience of the people that you’re aiming at. How are they going to access the thing that you’re trying to get to them? Give you an example: Congress recently expanded the Child Tax Credit. Right. It’s a tax credit that is designed to put money in the pockets of families with children because that, you know, that money is useful in making sure that they are well-fed, well-educated and have what they need to be successful and to thrive. We also know that some number of families don’t access those funds. We don’t necessarily make it easy and use the tax process to deliver those funds. We can use data to better understand who is and who isn’t accessing what the policy intends and use these techniques to fix it. And that is tremendously important because we are leaving money on the table and more importantly, we’re not serving everybody we need to serve. And the work that I do, the reason I came to New America was to help develop this field of public interest technology so that there are more people using these skill sets in public service.
Marroquín: Yes. Well, I was pleased to read that anecdote about the U.S. Digital Service in your book, More Than Ready. I actually was working at a community center in D.C. and had the opportunity to interact with the U.S. Digital Service. They reached out to us because they wanted input from community members on their experience with the IRS in order to improve services and actually have people be more informed about how to access particular tax credits. So based on what you’re saying, I think back and appreciate how otherwise it would have been hard for the IRS, which sounds kind of scary contacting somebody to get that information. And instead, this enabled a way for people to provide that input. So, I think that’s a great example of building something from the ground up.
Muñoz: Right? It’s user research. And in this case, the users are the people that a policy is aimed at.
Marroquín: So along those same lines, I want to ask you about how public interest technology can be applied to the social safety net. So as much as public interest tech aims to improve the experience for consumers and maybe the efficiency and effectiveness of government, this assumes that a particular government or agency wants to make it easier for people to access a benefit. And that doesn’t always seem to be the case when policymakers make a distinction between the poor and the “deserving poor.” So, in a benign example, that might be limiting a benefit to someone with a disability and excluding everyone else. This idea of a deserving poor, as you know, has deep roots in the U.S., often ugly, racist roots. The most prominent example, in my mind is the crafting of a welfare queen stereotype, particularly in the seventies and eighties, that has harmed people of color accessing a benefit ever since. So how have you seen this narrative of the “deserving poor” show up in your work? And what’s the role of public interest technology given in that context?
Muñoz: It’s a very, very deep phenomenon and problem. I think one recent example, coming back from the out of the pandemic is the use of unemployment insurance. Right. So, Congress, in a bipartisan way, that rarest of things. Right. Bipartisan law gets passed where everybody in Congress agrees. And this happened in the Trump administration. Right. So serious bipartisan action to try to put dollars in the pockets of people in the middle of this crisis, right where we have a health crisis, and we have an economic crisis. And the system Congress chooses is the unemployment system, which is run by states, many of which have revised their unemployment systems to try to do what they think of as rooting out fraud. And what they mean by that is we’re going to make it as hard to get unemployment as possible because we think people are trying to game the system, like our system is not oriented towards quickly getting dollars into the pockets of people in need. It’s oriented towards detecting fraud.
Muñoz: So as a result, we saw unemployment systems break down, right? We had this national consensus. We got to get dollars into the pockets of people who’ve lost their jobs because of COVID. And the unemployment system in many, many states is not equal to the task because it’s focused on the wrong thing. It’s more concerned with preventing fraud than it is concerned with helping the people that it is intended to help. And so, as a result, there were just enormous, enormous problems, even when Congress would pass the policy to try to help people. Many, many people couldn’t access that help or they couldn’t get it for months or even years after it was intended, after the dollars were intended to reach their pockets, which if you’ve lost your job and you got a landlord waiting for the rent, that didn’t help you very much. So that is both an implementation problem but also a policy problem. Right. You can’t fix you know, it’s not a tech problem.
Muñoz: When the legislature in the state of Florida has revamped the unemployment system so that nobody can get unemployment insurance, you can’t fix that with implementation tweaks. That’s a policy problem. But at the same time, we also know that many of these states systems rest on technology that is outdated. I mean, when I was in the federal government on multiple systems where literally there was like a guy in the basement of the department station who still knew the programing language that was necessary in order to fix the thing when it broke. So, some of this is a modernization problem, but some of this is the fact that policy, especially safety net policy, gets designed to be stingy. And in parts of the world where they basically said we’re going to ignore the possibility of fraud because all we really want to do is get dollars back out into people’s pockets and into the economy, they were much more successful in recovering from the economic downturn.
Marroquín: Absolutely. You know, I saw something similar where I was working at the community center. We connected with D.C. government. They tried to get their message out to service providers to help people apply for unemployment insurance during the pandemic. But the guidance was that people should apply, expect to be denied and that they would figure something out on the back end. And that was really disappointing to me. They were doing the best they could, but it was disappointing to me because I could try and pass that message along that my team could. But how many people were not going to get it? Were going to apply, be denied and then just never try again. Not be on the lookout. Miss the message that they were actually eligible for benefits and really struggle because of that. So, it’s a real problem in the way that it’s designed and executed.
Muñoz: Right. And what a public interest technologist does is follow the process from end to end to better understand where are people getting stuck, like how many people applied, but then what happened at the other end? How many people succeeded, who didn’t succeed, and why? Because that’s how you identify the sticky spots in a process in order to make sure that it functions correctly. And obviously, if the process is designed to deny you before you have a chance to actually get to yes, of course you’re going to lose people. And in a crisis, which is what the safety net is for 100% of the time, not just during a pandemic, but that’s what safety net programs are to help people when they’re in crisis. That’s the wrong approach.
Marroquín: Yeah. The idea of a deserving poor has also crossed my mind as I’ve read and seen the images of asylum seekers being bused from Texas and Florida to other places across the U.S. And here in D.C., they were being dropped off at Union Station and at the residence of the Vice President. So, it seems to me that somebody has to think pretty lowly of a person’s deservedness or frankly, their humanity, to take them somewhere without their knowledge, with just whatever they can carry. What’s going through your mind as you’ve seen the situation evolve with asylum seekers and where are we headed next?
Muñoz: Yeah, it’s you know, the first thing that’s gone through my mind really went to my heart, which is just rage that people could be used as political props in this way. People who are in a really a crisis moment in their lives, who have had the wherewithal to get themselves here from Venezuela, which is a country which is falling apart. But to be told what we know from the case of people who were sent to Martha’s Vineyard, for example, is that they were lied to. They were told they were going to Boston. They were told there were jobs waiting for them. Actually, we learned that whatever officials, you know, rounded them up to put them on those busses or planes, actually filled out forms for them with incorrect, deliberately incorrect addresses so that they would never get the notice of their asylum hearing, so that they would be denied in absentia and never have a chance to access permanent status, which is, I don’t even have words for the cruelty of that and for my outrage over that.
Muñoz: So, I mean, you know, in my optimistic moments and I am an optimist, I am hopeful that the fact that what the people in Martha’s Vineyard did, the people in Chicago, people in DC have done is rally to welcome the migrants and to instead of doing what I think the governor of Texas and the governor of Florida hoped that we would do, which is scream crisis. Instead, what people did was organize food and shelter and, you know, next steps for the for the migrants in question. All of that, this is all political stuntery, right? We’re in an election year. There’s a reason this is happening and it’s 100% political.
Muñoz: Well, it does not, however, move us any closer towards what we actually need, which is reforms of the law, which is something that, you know, we have not succeeded in getting through Congress since the early 1990s, which is the last major immigration reform, which I was involved with. But the Biden administration is actually taking important steps towards reforming how asylum cases are processed. But all of that would go much more smoothly if we actually had a Congress which was prepared to do its job. And that requires, frankly, Republicans who are willing to do more than stunts. And, you know, the way the politics of this issue were set up, it has proved to be better for Republicans to keep the system broken and complain about it and do stuff like this that has been more politically fruitful than actually engaging in the conversation to fix it. And as long as that continues to be true, we will have a broken system.
Marroquín: Absolutely. You know, it does seem like immigrants have for a long time been used as political props. This is just the newest iteration of that. And you can contrast that with what’s actually happened on the other side when they’re dropped off in these cities and how people respond in those cities. You know, we’ve actually here in the McCourt School, we’ve had the Migration and Refugee Policy Initiative work with other organizations in D.C. in that front line at Union Station and providing other resources like clothes and legal services to the migrants. And it really gives you hope that something positive can come of this despite what’s really an unnecessary political crisis.
Muñoz: Yeah. What if instead of calling crisis, we said welcome. And that’s in fact, what’s been happening. Although it’s a small dose of what really needs to happen around the country. I mean, we have to I’ve been working on this in the form I’ve helped start an organization called Welcome.US, which has been focusing particularly on evacuees from Afghanistan and refugees from Ukraine in particular, as we develop systems to then hopefully expand further beyond those populations. But the theory behind all of that is we in the United States, we have to get better at welcoming migrants and because the world needs to get better at welcoming migrants.
Muñoz: You know, much of what we’re seeing at our border is climate migration already. We don’t really have the system set up for that. And, you know, this is part of our history in the United States. It’s something that we are proud of. It’s in our understanding of who we are. But we do have to get better at it. And the good news is we are getting better at it. You know, despite all of the political yelling that goes on, all kinds of Americans all across the country are quietly helping, opening their doors, understanding it, as I’m sure the Georgetown students did, as like, this is a service we provide to people who are, you know, in the most fundamental way, our neighbors.
Marroquín: So I’d like to move to your role in the Obama White House and another piece of leadership advice that you shared, which was to know your North Star. You’re the first Latina director of the Domestic Policy Council and served in the Obama White House for all eight years, which is quite a feat. But it’s clear from your book that achieving that title was not your North Star. Instead, you drew this contrast between your Midwestern roots. You know, growing up in Detroit, living in Chicago for a time, going so far as saying that you liked the cold weather, which I don’t fully understand. And you contrasted that with insider Washington life. So, during your time in the White House, how would you describe your North Star and what are examples of times where that North Star led you to push for something within the administration that you knew might be an uphill battle?
Muñoz: Yeah, so I think of it in terms of two North Stars. One was sort of the internal North Star, which was to hang on to my integrity during the experience of working in government, you know, make sure that I was kind of square with my conscience at the end of every day. And fortunately, I worked for a president who I knew wasn’t going to ask me to do stuff I didn’t believe in, and I was rewarded in that view. That turned out to be true over eight years. So, I had an internal North Star, but the, you know, the external one, the policy North Star, the “what am I here to accomplish?” North Star. It was tremendously important not to lose sight of. When we started we were in an economic crisis and making sure the recovery was both effective and that it reached everybody was pretty clear to me that that was essential and that we needed to do that at the same time that we were setting up a range of other things that were that were beyond the economic recovery, health care reform, which was part of the recovery.
Muñoz: And the right approach to immigration, which is something I have a lot of expertise in, which is a super challenging area of policy because that policymaking process itself is broken. I knew I had a kind of a special responsibility just because that’s my area of expertise. And it’s the reason the president – I believe it’s the reason – the president asked me to serve. And then I also felt very strongly because, you know, my history is in the civil rights movement, I worked at a Latino civil rights organization for 20 years before going into government. I know what it’s like to be the folks who were, you know, who somebody forgot to invite to the table or didn’t know to invite to the table. So, I also felt part of my NorthStar was very much about thinking about which are the communities I know less about who you know, you I have my radar constantly going for who needs to be at this table that we’re missing. I worked for a president who was very, very amenable to that. That’s what he expected us to do.
Muñoz: And it turns out in both of my jobs, both of my White House jobs, I was responsible in one way or another for policy affecting Native Americans, and which was a constituency I didn’t know very much about. I was in my first job also the first three years I was the Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. I was responsible for our relationship with tribes, but also with the territories, five U.S. territories as well as Puerto Rico. And I took that responsibility really seriously. And it turns out, you know, when Congress is drafting legislation, if they say, you know, X is going to be available to the states, if they don’t also add the words “and territories,” you leave out millions of Americans and there were plenty of folks who didn’t know that. And, you know, part of what I did was remind them.
Marroquín: Thank you. Well, earlier I heard you referenced this outrage that you felt, as you’ve seen this issue of migrants being bussed to different cities evolve. And in your book, More Than Ready, you talk about the role of anger, including a funny anecdote about how you sometimes could be spotted sitting in a stoplight in your car, in a lively conversation with yourself as you work through maybe some anger. You thought what you wanted to say and how you would say it. And that’s a very relatable image for people, I think, as they practice their lines for an important meeting.
Marroquín: But I want to read from the book you write: “Chances are I am refining an argument and practicing my lines in the hope of becoming more effective and more persuasive. Maybe I’m working out some anger so that I don’t express that anger during conversation. Not that anger isn’t appropriate, but I’ve learned that it’s only rarely an effective tool for persuasion.”
Marroquín: Advocates have directed anger at you and at President Obama for the administration’s record on deportations. You’ve spoken extensively about this and described how you and the administration worked to create an enforcement strategy that for the first time ever got away from treating all immigrants in the same way and instead focused on removing only those who had committed the most serious crimes. So, how do you go about working through the emotions you had, anger or otherwise, to reconcile that human toll of deportations with the administration’s goals to reform a broken system?
Muñoz: Yeah. Well, it’s something I knew I was going to confront when I went into government in the first place. I knew I would be, I would have a role in immigration policy because it’s my expertise and I knew for sure that we were not going to be able to get it 100% right because 100% right is kind of not available. And so, I actually knew that that by the time I came out of government that some of the relationships I went into government with would be frayed and maybe broken. And that turned out to be true. And I decided that I was okay with that as long as my North Star was clear and I was doing, you know, we were moving the policy needle in the right direction as hard and as far as we could, which is which is what we did.
Muñoz: So, the immigration enforcement piece, which is sort of the most controversial and the most difficult piece, is enormously challenging. And what the Obama administration did was, for the first time ever, say that that that you could apply priorities to immigration enforcement. Before the Obama era, there were 11 million people who Congress rendered deportable, which is something I would like to change, but I need Congress to change that so that the executive branch’s job is to remove all 11 million people, which is obviously not going to happen. And so, what the Obama administration did for the first time was say, we’re not going to treat all 11 million people as if they were the same.
Muñoz: Any law enforcement agency worth its salt makes decisions about how it’s going to expend its resources. And if you’re a police force in a city, hopefully you’re spending more resources on rapists than you are on jaywalkers. And we’re going to do the same thing, the immigration equivalent of the same thing. So rather than, you know, I used to think of it as asking the immigration authorities to be more than the guys who sit in the Wal-Mart parking lot waiting for the shift to change, but rather folks who were focused on true law enforcement principles and to focus their resources on folks who were convicted of serious crimes and the first time those kinds of priorities were put in force. It took a long time for the agency to work it through and really begin to behave that way. I think it’s an absolutely fair criticism to say took us way too long that it is an enormous institution to try to shift.
Muñoz: But ultimately, President Obama put forward clear enforcement priorities and they were ultimately actually implemented. And the argument that people made, which is that a lot of people got deported, which is true, fails to note that the vast majority of those removals were people, recent arrivals. Right, so the enforcement priorities that the president’s team put forward is folks convicted of serious crimes and folks who have recently arrived assuming that they’re not asylees. Right. And ultimately, I believe that’s the most humane way to enforce our immigration laws. And, you know, even that has been challenged now in the in the current era, the Biden administration put forward similar enforcement priorities. They’ve been challenged in court. And we’re not winning. So, we’re now back to everybody’s the same. And the immigration authorities have free reign to do whatever they want, which I believe is an enormous setback. And it’s not good – not only not good for migrants, it’s not good for the U.S.
Marroquín: Thank you. In past interviews, I’ve heard you reference the “zig and zag” of immigration policy. This idea of a policy proposal predicated on enforcement in exchange for some form of legalization. You said it was a term coined by former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Was the Obama strategy predicated on this “zig and zag”, i.e., enforcement in exchange for legalization?
Muñoz: So Secretary Napolitano certainly thought of it as a zig and zag. That is in fact, her term. And I think that’s true. I mean, I think it is true that in order to build a coalition in Congress that can ultimately pass a bill, any bill, not just an immigration bill, like everybody has to be able to point to what it is that they’re getting. And certainly, in the time that I’ve been in this business, which goes back to the early eighties, every immigration law that has passed the Congress combined elements of enforcement and elements of, you know, sort of on the generous side of the ledger. And everybody who is part of those coalitions could point to what it was that they were getting. So that has been true for a long time.
Muñoz: But that is not why the Obama administration focused on enforcement the way that it did. We focused on enforcement the way that we did in order to make the changes that I just described. Right. Which is figuring out a way to actually implement the law that was as humane as it could possibly be, understanding that we were working with a legal regime which was pretty fundamentally broken. So, I think a number of people – they are attached to the analysis of Obama decided to be tough in the hope of luring people into passing an immigration reform, and that failed. That’s not how we saw it. We were, in fact, trying to change how immigration enforcement happens. And we succeeded for a time.
Marroquín: Thank you. Well, I want to go back in time a little bit further. I want to bring you back to the early 2000s during your time with NCLR, which is now known as Unidos US. And you may recall that you were part of a documentary series called How Democracy Works Now…
Muñoz: I was!
Marroquín: …by filmmakers Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini. It’s a remarkable documentary series, in my opinion. It’s a must watch for any student of public policy. So, to me, it provides a real kind of fly in the room experience on how Washington works, because the interview itself is not sort of formal interviews, kind of stuffy interviews. Instead, it’s embedded day to day in negotiations on the Hill with advocates and with legislators and their aides. So, I bring it up now because it illustrates to me that immigration reform perhaps isn’t as elusive as it can feel sometimes. And let me explain what I mean by that, because that might be a controversial point.
Marroquín: The documentary starts with what at one point felt almost inevitable, which was comprehensive immigration reform at the start of the Bush administration in that summer of 2001. That, of course, was derailed by the attacks of September 11th. And the world changed, including the apparatus of national and homeland security. We then fast forward to close vote in 2006 and 2007, when you worked closely with Senators Kennedy and McCain and others. And fast forward to your time in the White House: there was a 2010 vote on the DREAM Act that fell short by just five votes, including some Democrats and the 2013 Gang of Eight bill that passed the Senate but was never considered in the Republican-led House.
Marroquín: So, in reflecting on all of this, I can’t help but think like, wow, we’ve been close to immigration reform in my lifetime several times. And I think it can be easy for the outsider looking in to view immigration reform as this intractable issue where the sides will never agree. And yet, looking closely at these policy debates and close votes over the years, there has been hope sometimes right up until the finish line. So, my question to you is what, if anything, gives you hope that we can get to comprehensive immigration reform in our lifetime? Or do you think we’re so divided that these near deals that I’ve described are a product of a bygone era?
Muñoz: It’s such a great question, and I’m not sure I definitively know the answer. I mean, you’re right that we’ve been able to see the finish line multiple times over the last 25 years. And what’s so frustrating is that the policy consensus is actually not very hard to get to. Right. There are more sensible ways to enforce our immigration laws that regular Americans agree on. And most of the Congress used to agree on and most of the country is absolutely for providing a pathway to legal status for undocumented people, especially if they’ve been here a long time.
Muñoz: So, the national consensus I am squarely convinced still holds. The problem is a political problem, but it’s a political problem that I don’t know how to fix. And that is that there is a segment of the Republican Party in particular which will not allow a reform to proceed. That’s why, as you know, in 2013, you had a bipartisan bill passed the Senate more than the requisite 60 votes, and we knew we had 218 votes in the House, but we couldn’t get the Speaker to bring it to the floor. And the reason he wouldn’t bring it to the floor is because, you know, what we now know of as the Trump faction in the Republican Party would not allow it and would have been willing to overturn the speaker as a result. And until we break that problem, we won’t have congressional action on immigration reform, despite the fact that the country actually largely agrees on what needs to happen.
Muñoz: So, the traditional pathways to getting something like this done, which is a combination of sort of building power in the communities and constituencies which were affected, building bipartisan consensus in coalition, which we’ve demonstrated over and over again is possible, is not enough. Because, you know, there’s a faction that sees the political value of setting everyone’s hair on fire about immigration. And as long as they’re able to do that, I don’t see a pathway for legislation. So, we’re in an era where we have a different set of challenges, and we have to figure that out.
Muñoz: The big divisive stuff, which it doesn’t just divide us on immigration, it divides us on a whole lot of other things. It’s threatening our very democracy and our ability to address our biggest challenges, including immigration and including climate. Although I’m grateful that we’ve made progress in Congress and under the leadership of this president, but we have a whole lot more to do. And our inability to have a policy conversation with some rationality in the Congress of the United States is an enormous obstacle, not just to immigration reform, but to other things as well.
Marroquín: Thank you. Yes, hearing you talk about that makes me think of what you wrote. You say that you’ve experienced the highs of getting big things done for people in your career and many devastating lows when the finish line was in sight, but we seemed to be unable to cross it. I think you’re familiar with that feeling. And it’s reason for thinking about what the future holds. And to me it seems like it won’t just be with the way our system is set up now that we will just kind of break through one day. We actually have to change the way in which we shape these choices, and actually have the political system better reflect what people actually want, the consensus of Americans.
Muñoz: Yeah, I agree with that. I think we are now in an era where it’s where it’s becoming clearer that we have to take a hard look at the institutions of our democracy and the way that they function, because right now we’re in a pretty anti-democratic moment and that is hindering our ability to do ultimately what the people want. And that I think we have to take a hard look at whether the way this is set up is working and how it might change. And look, we’ve changed the parameters of how our democracy works over time. That’s why the Constitution was designed with some flexibility, and so it’s time to take a hard look at that because, you know, there is an awful lot at risk, including democracy itself in this moment.
Marroquín: Yes. I both hear the sense of urgency in your voice. And I recall what you wrote in your book about the value of taking the long view, you know, this long arc. You know, that resonates for me because my family waited 14 years for our asylum application to be approved after we immigrated from Guatemala. You know, the application still wasn’t approved when I was a senior in high school, so I almost didn’t go to college because Virginia at the time was a much more anti-immigrant place, you know, in the early 2000s. And we had an attorney general of Virginia that at that time wanted to bar undocumented students from even being admitted to colleges in Virginia. Thankfully, my community rallied around me and other students, and with the help of amazing pro-bono attorneys, we brought forth a federal lawsuit that opened some doors for undocumented Dreamer students, including myself.
Marroquín: But immigration law is so complex, as you know better than anyone. You know, there’s no one line where you can just line up as if you were at the DMV. And me and my family were in limbo for those 14 years during the asylum claim. You know, all in all, it took 22 years for me to get my citizenship. That long view you could say worked for me. I have a good outcome in my story, but I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone else. You know, my experience isn’t validated by this “Get in the back of the line” argument or by asking anyone else to go through that same long and often broken process. You know, I would want it to be better for everyone. And most importantly, I would say there’s this human toll to all of this that has to motivate us to make reform possible and get over that finish line.
Muñoz: Well, it’s absolutely true. And what an amazing story. And, I mean, if you think about the counterargument, right? Think of what we would lose if, I mean, you had to do some kicking for the door to swing open. But it’s not just what you would have lost if you hadn’t succeeded, but what we would lose if you hadn’t succeeded as a society. We are harming ourselves greatly through the kind of ugliness of our policies. And not just because we are treating fellow humans badly, but because we are frankly wasting their potential. And the “they” here is really an “us” right? And there should really be no difference between you and the success that you’re on your way to having and the children of some of those Venezuelans who got sent to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s all potential and realizing that potential is kind of up to us and we keep insisting on undercutting ourselves and by treating people the way we do.
Marroquín: That leads me to my final question. I want to end with your third key piece of advice: to lead with kindness. What I enjoy most about More Than Ready is that you weave in the stories of many women of color so that the perspectives aren’t only your own. I think that is valuable because it recognizes the commonalities that women share, but also the unique circumstances brought by intersectionality. So, one section header reads: “Kindness can work at work, but maybe not for everyone.” Can you share more of what you mean by that?
Muñoz: Yeah. So, I’m a person who tries to walk through the world with kindness, but throughout my career it’s been mistaken for weakness. And part of the reason I wrote that chapter is to demonstrate that that’s a mistake. And so, some of us struggle with that. But also, some of the women that I spoke to, particularly the African American women, felt like they had to be internally and externally tough in order to survive. And so, I learned something from them in having the conversation about kindness and how it shows up for them in their lives and how open and vulnerable they feel they are [and] they have the space to be, which is not very much just by virtue of who they are.
Muñoz: So, it’s a complicated question. And I have a friend and colleague, Alicia Menendez, who you can find on MSNBC who wrote a book about likeability – The Likeability Trap, which is examining some of the same issues: this notion that sometimes women feel like we have to be on the likable side and sometimes we undercut our own abilities in order to do that. So, it’s a very challenging question. But the case that I’m making in the book is that kindness, empathy in particular, is underrated as a leadership quality. And I think of it actually as a superpower. It is a big, big part of why I was successful as the president’s domestic policy advisor. And it wasn’t just my policy chops that made me successful. It was the fact that I could read a room and I could understand what people needed in order to successfully have a policy argument where the answer was not clear and make sure that they felt treated fairly in having that policy argument so that the president got the best possible advice he could get from his team. So, it’s worth thinking about, and it’s absolutely worth lifting up as a quality to be invested in.
Marroquín: Cecilia, thank you for spending time with us today.
Muñoz: Thank you so much for having me. And I wish you the very best.
Marroquín: Thank you for listening to today’s episode. A special thank you to the Dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy, Dean Maria Cancian, and to Georgetown Public Policy Review senior editors Kharl Reynado and Eleazar Weissman. To learn more about the Georgetown Public Policy Review, including to see a library of previous episodes, please visit GPPReview.com.
This is Brian Marroquín, signing off.
[Episode Ends]
Credits:
Music by Ashot Danielyan and Chillmore from Pixabay
C-SPAN Senate Session on June 28, 2007.
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.
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