So what are you seeing in cities right now?

First of all, it's really wonderful to be here.

Thank you to CASBIS and thank you to you for organizing us around this intersection of immigration and democracy.

I think, you know, the narrative, there is a deliberate narrative that's being painted about cities and the experience of migration, that it's something chaotic and out of control and that very much feeds into the narrative that's being peddled in ways that try to undo our democracy right now.

And that's one of the things that has been motivating me to try to draw this connection between immigration and democracy so that we understand that many of the things that are in the public discourse around immigration are really about walking back the core protections that democracy offers for all of us.

Maybe we can come back to that a little bit later.

I think what we've seen over the last year in cities has been a real split screen, I would say, of the worst of what humans can do to one another in the way that... indiscriminate sweeps of communities, people being picked up just based on their race or their job or where they happen to live, things that are fundamentally un-American.

How is this happening? And why do we need it to happen?