U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar during a press conference in Washington, D.C. in November 2019. (Photo by Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Last week, President Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to run point on handling the influx of immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border—an issue that has long been a political hot rod but has become especially contentious over the last several weeks.
At its core, immigration reform is a humanitarian issue. But it’s also a subject that has myriad consequences on American business and the entrepreneurial ecosystem: Immigrants make up roughly 15% of workers in the U.S., yet they are 80% more likely than U.S.-born workers to become entrepreneurs, according to a recent Wharton/NBER paper. Separate research shows that these immigrant-founded businesses drive more than $1 trillion in sales and employ some 8 million people in the U.S.
Even the Business Roundtable—a collection of America’s top CEOs—has advocated for the need for better immigration policies. A 2018 study by the BRT found that scaling back a program that encourages the employment of highly skilled immigrants would result in the loss of 443,000 jobs over the next decade, a number that includes some 25o,000 jobs held by American-born workers.
The voices of these CEOs are important, but some of the most effective advocates on behalf of a better approach to immigration, however, happen to be women—women who are over the age of 50. And so, as part of our regular segment on ‘Morning Joe’ highlighting women over the age of 50 who are changing the world, Forbes and “Know Your Value” want to shine a light on the women who have raised their voices in support of immigration reform. They are:
Veronica Escobar, 51: A third-generation El Pasoan, Escobar was sworn in as her city’s first female Congressperson—and the first of two Latinas from Texas to serve in Congress—in January 2019.
She’s moved quickly over her last two years in office, becoming the co-chair of Congress’ Women’s Working Group on Immigration Reform and cofounding the Congressional Moms Task Force on Family Separation. It’s an issue that’s close to home: “In 2017, the Trump administration quietly used El Paso as a testing ground for the shameful family separation policy which ripped thousands of children from their parents’ arms at our southern border,” Escobar says.
In 2020, Escobar delivered the Spanish-language Democratic response to President Trump’s State of the Union address, and used part of her time to focus on immigration. More recently, she’s focusing on how she can use her position—as the representative for a border community—to “reshape a system that has focused on border militarization.” As she wrote in the New York Times last week: “I’m not asking for open borders. I’m simply asking for open minds.”
Cecilia Munoz, 58: The daughter of Bolivian immigrants, Munoz has dedicated her career to advocating on behalf of people like her parents. While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Munoz tutored Hispanic inmates at the state prison near her school. When she was just 24 years old, she took a job with Catholic Charities in Chicago—and eventually asked her boss so many questions about how the organization was going to help immigrants get legal status under the 1986 immigration reform law that she was put in charge of the organization’s legal program.
In 2000, Munoz was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work around immigration and civil rights, and in 2009 joined the Obama administration as the head of Intergovernmental Affairs; in 2012, she became the first Hispanic person to serve as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council—and as such, received criticism for supporting Obama’s deportation policy but was ultimately a crucial figure in helping DACA come to be.
“DACA is not a permanent solution to our nation’s immigration problems. Far from it. We still need Congress to do its job and fix our immigration system,” she wrote in 2018. It’s a position she maintains to this day, and one of the reasons Biden tapped her to serve on his transition team. “The fundamental questions of American immigration—who should be admitted legally, and who deserves protection when fleeing danger—are matters for Congress to answer,” she wrote in the Atlantic this week.
Penny Pritzker, 61: Pritzker bridges the private and public sectors as a billionaire heir of the Pritzker family—and the founder and chairman of PSP Partners, a private investment firm—and the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, a position she held from 2013 until 2017. She is also the descendant of two immigrants who fled political oppression in czarist Russia in search of a better life in the United States, and so she sees immigration reform as a part of her family’s history.
Her private sector experience means she both understands the business case for immigration reform and has a powerful voice on the matter. When she speaks, she grounds her advocacy in economic arguments.
“Paradoxically, creating an environment in the name of security that makes foreigners less welcome and less likely to visit will make our country less prosperous and, eventually, less secure,” she has said. “We need to fix the legal visa process more broadly, use technology to further secure our borders and establish a pathway for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the shadows. We should make smart changes to the H1B visa process to ensure that we still welcome highly talented people who create jobs here in America, while simultaneously protecting against anyone trying to game the system on the margins to undercut our domestic workforce.”
Shifra Rubin, 71: Judge Shifra Rubin doesn’t have a national profile like the other women on this list, and as such is the unsung hero—but she represents what it means to be over 50, breaking boundaries and using her voice to help the voiceless.
Rubin was born in Israel and grew up on three different continents, gaining fluency in six different languages along the way. She was a promising student but left college early, marrying and starting a family. By her mid-40s, Rubin was a single mother supporting her kids on a series of dead-end jobs, and she realized she wanted more for herself. At the age of 48, after pulling all-nighters to pass the LSAT, she enrolled in Rutgers Law School. Rubin attended school at night while working full time and caring for her family during the day.
After graduating in her early 50’s, Rubin dedicated the next 14 years defending immigrant rights, representing asylum seekers and others facing deportation. In 2016, then-attorney general Loretta Lynch elected Rubin to serve as a judge on the Newark Immigration Court.
“She is an anomaly in many ways,” Rubin’s daughter, Noa Yachot, told Forbes. “An immigrant herself who became a federal judge, a judge whose background is in human rights, a late-career attorney who managed to reach the top of her field, and—despite a life of financial hardship—chose a career in public service.”
