Claude Does The Burgess's Common Ground Exercise on Climate, DEI, and Immigration

Common Ground Exercise

A Cross-Spectrum Analysis of Three Contested Topics

Climate Change  ·  DEI  ·  Immigration

Background

One key to moving beyond destructive politics is developing an ability to work with people who have different views to both recognize the things that they have in common, and to find ways of more constructively addressing the differences that remain. About ten years ago, Guy Burgess developed an exercise and discussion guide which was designed to help groups do that for any complex and controversial issue. The details of the exercise can be found here.

In brief, small groups, ideally with different, even opposing, views on a chosen topic work through a set of six questions. (The detailed write up explains what to do in settings where everyone holds similar political views.)

Once the diverse small groups are formed, they work through these questions:

1. On what issues, sub-issues, and facts do you think there is broad agreement among members of contending groups?
2. On what issues, sub-issues, and facts do you think there is clear and strong disagreement among members of contending groups?
3. To what extent is each disagreement attributable to different images of objective facts? And, to what is extent is each disagreement attributable to differing values or moral beliefs?
4. For differences attributable to differing images of objective facts, can participants imagine some sort of joint fact-finding process that would resolve each disagreement in ways in which all could have confidence?
5. ​​For differences attributable to differing values or moral beliefs, which differences fall within the limits of socially acceptable differences of opinion — differences that can be accepted in the spirit of mutual tolerance and respect, coexistence, and a general willingness to "live and let live"? And which are so morally reprehensible that they need to be actively and vigorously opposed?
6. For beliefs that people feel need to be actively opposed, how do people think that that can be most constructively done? 

Using AI to Explore These Questions

As our frequent readers know, we've been exploring how AI can be a useful tool in the peacebuilding. democracy building. and conflict resolution fields, as it can help us really understand what the "whole of society" is thinking far better than any one person can do on their own. AI "reads" so much, from so many different perspectives that it can sort through all the biased media to see what the general public "thinks." So we thought it would certainly be interesting, and perhaps useful to ask AI to do the common ground exercise on a variety of topics.  We started with three that seem highly contested: climate change, DEI, and Immigration, and gave the inquiry to Claude.  

What follows is Claude's full response:

Claude's response to the Common Ground Exercise Query

This document applies a six-question Common Ground framework to three of the most contested topics in American public life. For each topic, the exercise asks: 

1. Where do people across the political spectrum actually agree? 
2. Where do they genuinely disagree — and why? 
3. Which disagreements are factual and potentially resolvable through shared inquiry? 
4. What how might factual disagreements be resolved to the satisfaction of all sides?
5. Which disagreements are rooted in values?
6. And how should people handle disagreements that some participants consider not merely wrong, but morally intolerable?

The exercise imagines a room containing Americans from across the full political spectrum — far right, right, center, left, far left — attempting an honest, structured conversation. It does not pretend that all positions are equally well-supported by evidence. But it does attempt to represent each position fairly, to understand the genuine moral seriousness behind disagreements, and to find whatever real common ground exists.

A note on method: The answers below are synthetic — they represent what a careful observer familiar with the full range of American political opinion believes each camp actually holds, not what any single individual or organization has said. The goal is honest representation, not flattery or false equivalence.

Jump to: Part One: Climate Change  ·  Part Two: DEI  ·  Part Three: Immigration

Part One: Climate Change

Question 1: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there broad agreement?

Climate change is one of the most politically polarized topics in American life, and the polarization is real. But it obscures a more substantial area of shared ground than most partisan debate acknowledges.

Areas of genuine cross-spectrum agreement:

• The climate has always changed, and the recent decades have brought measurably more extreme and costly weather events. Even those who dispute the dominant account of human causation generally acknowledge that floods, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes are more frequent and more damaging. The costs are visible and undeniable.
• Clean air and clean water are almost universally valued. Whether the frame is environmental stewardship, Christian dominion theology that emphasizes care for creation, public health, or progressive environmentalism, virtually everyone agrees that polluted air and water are bad and worth preventing.
• Energy security and independence are national priorities. Across the spectrum, Americans broadly agree that dependence on foreign energy sources — particularly from adversarial nations — creates strategic vulnerability. This point connects energy policy to national security in ways that generate cross-partisan support.
• Energy costs matter enormously for working families, rural communities, and American industry. No political faction wants expensive, unreliable energy. Disagreements are about how to achieve affordable and reliable energy, not about whether those goals matter.
• Technology and innovation will play a central role in any energy future. From conservatives who favor market-driven technological development to progressives who support public investment in clean energy R&D, there is broad consensus that the energy challenges ahead require technological solutions.
• The costs of inaction are real. Even among those skeptical of the worst-case projections, there is wide acknowledgment that extreme weather events impose enormous economic costs — on property, insurance, agriculture, and infrastructure — and that some level of adaptation investment is prudent regardless of the debate about causes.
• Future generations have a legitimate claim on current decisions. Even the most economically focused conservatives generally acknowledge that decisions with long-term environmental consequences should take some account of the world we leave to our children and grandchildren.
• Energy transition communities deserve support. There is broad agreement, though disagreement about specifics, that workers and communities economically dependent on fossil fuels should not simply be left behind if the energy economy shifts. This commitment is shared across party lines, even when the policies proposed to fulfill it differ sharply.

Question 2: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there clear and strong disagreement?

The disagreements are substantial and involve both facts and values — which makes them harder to resolve than a simple evidence dispute would be.

The sharpest disagreements:

• Human causation and its centrality. The scientific consensus is clear that human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels — is the primary driver of current warming. This consensus is accepted across the center, left, and far left. Among the right, it is contested to varying degrees: some fully accept it, many accept a human contribution but dispute its magnitude or urgency, and some on the far right reject it substantially. This is both the most factually contested and the most consequential disagreement in this topic.
• Urgency and catastrophism. Even among those who accept human causation, disagreement is sharp about how quickly and severely climate impacts will materialize. The far left and many climate scientists emphasize near-term tipping points and civilizational risk. The center and right tend toward more moderate projections and longer timelines, with more confidence in human adaptability.
• The pace of transition away from fossil fuels. The far left generally supports rapid and aggressive decarbonization within a decade or two; the center favors a managed, multi-decade transition; the right prefers a much more gradual transition driven by market economics rather than policy mandates; the far right is largely opposed to policy-driven transition at all.
• Nuclear energy. This is a cross-cutting issue that scrambles conventional left-right alignments. Much of the right and a growing faction of the center-left have become more favorable to nuclear power as a low-carbon baseload source. Much of the traditional environmental left remains deeply opposed.
• Government regulation versus market mechanisms. Should decarbonization be driven by technology mandates, regulatory limits on emissions, carbon pricing, public investment in renewables, or primarily by market forces? These generate sharp disagreements about the appropriate role of government.
• Distribution of costs and benefits. Climate policy has distributional consequences that are deeply contested. Who pays? Working-class families who depend on affordable gasoline and home heating? Rural communities dependent on agriculture and resource extraction? Developing nations that bear a disproportionate share of climate impacts while having contributed little to the problem?
• International obligations and competitiveness. Does aggressive domestic climate action simply export emissions to countries with weaker regulations while disadvantaging American industry and workers? Or does American leadership on climate create economic advantages and moral obligations?
• Fossil fuel company culpability. Should fossil fuel companies face legal and financial liability for climate damages? The left and far left increasingly say yes; the right generally says no, citing both the legality of the conduct and the importance of energy to the economy.

Question 3: Which disagreements are about facts, and which are about values?

Most of the sharp disagreements in climate politics combine both factual and moral dimensions. Separating them is analytically useful but artificially clean — in practice, they are deeply entangled.

Disagreements that are primarily factual (in principle resolvable through evidence):

• The degree of human causation and the sensitivity of the climate system to CO₂ concentrations. The scientific community has a strong consensus, but communicating uncertainty ranges honestly — and distinguishing between the core finding and the more speculative projections — is genuinely possible and important.
• The reliability and cost trajectory of renewable energy technologies and battery storage. How quickly costs are falling, how reliably wind and solar can power a modern grid, and what grid management innovations are needed are empirical questions with answers that are improving rapidly.
• The economic impacts of specific climate policies. How many jobs are gained and lost by specific regulatory changes? What are the distributional effects of a carbon tax at different price points? These are answerable, at least approximately, with good economic modeling.
• Whether carbon capture at scale is technically and economically feasible. This is a genuine empirical question with significant policy implications.
• The actual trajectory of extreme weather events and their economic costs. Better attribution science is increasingly able to say with some precision how much specific events were influenced by climate change.

Disagreements that are primarily about values:

• How much present sacrifice and economic cost is owed to future generations. Even if we agree on the facts of what is at stake, the question of how much the present generation should sacrifice for those not yet born is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
• What obligations wealthy nations bear toward poorer nations that contributed little to climate change but face its worst consequences. This is a question of global justice that cannot be settled by data.
• Whether individual liberty — to drive the car you choose, heat your home as you prefer — can legitimately be constrained by collective environmental goals. This is a core values conflict between different conceptions of freedom and the common good.
• How to weigh certain present economic harm against uncertain future environmental benefit. Even with agreed-upon facts, people with different risk tolerances and different moral frameworks will reach different conclusions.
• Whether economic growth and ecological preservation are in fundamental tension, or whether they can be reconciled through green innovation. This reflects deeper worldviews about the relationship between human civilization and the natural world.

Question 4: For factual disagreements — what joint fact-finding process might help?

Several areas of factual disagreement are potentially resolvable through better shared inquiry — if the process is designed to earn cross-ideological confidence rather than simply to validate pre-existing conclusions.

Productive areas for joint fact-finding:

• Energy grid reliability modeling. A cross-ideological commission — including grid engineers, economists, and stakeholders from different regions and industries — could produce shared assessments of what different energy mixes mean for reliability, cost, and emissions. The key design requirement: modeling assumptions must be agreed upon in advance, and results must be published with dissenting interpretations preserved.
• Economic impact assessment of specific climate policies. Rather than competing studies funded by advocates on different sides, a jointly designed and jointly credentialed economic analysis of major proposed climate policies — what they cost, who bears the costs, what jobs are created and lost, and over what timeframe — would be enormously valuable.
• Climate attribution science for extreme weather events. A shared investment in this research, with transparent methodology and genuine uncertainty acknowledgment, could reduce factual disputes about the actual costs of inaction.
• Comparative policy effectiveness. What policies in what jurisdictions have most cost-effectively reduced emissions? Cross-national comparisons offer valuable natural experiments that are relatively ideologically neutral.
• Technology cost and trajectory assessments. Independent, rigorous tracking of renewable energy costs, storage costs, and deployment rates — without advocacy framing in either direction — would help ground the debate about transition timelines in shared data.

A note on process: The history of climate science communication has left many on the right deeply skeptical of any process dominated by institutions they distrust. Joint fact-finding in this area will only work if it genuinely includes voices from across the political spectrum in the design of the inquiry, not just in the audience for the results.

Question 5: For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?

This is where the honest difficulty of the climate debate lives. The field must distinguish between disagreements that are legitimate expressions of different values in a pluralist society, and positions that cross into the morally intolerable.

Differences that fall within the limits of mutual tolerance:

• Disagreements about the pace of energy transition. Whether decarbonization should happen over fifteen years or fifty years involves genuine trade-offs between environmental risk and economic disruption. Reasonable people with shared values can hold different views.
• Debates over the mix of policies — carbon pricing, regulation, subsidies, technology mandates, or market-led solutions. These are instrumental debates about means, not ends.
• The role of nuclear energy. Given that this debate scrambles conventional left-right alignments and involves genuine technical and safety trade-offs, it sits squarely within the range of tolerable disagreement.
• How to weigh present economic costs against future environmental benefit. Different discount rates and different risk tolerances lead to different but defensible conclusions.
• The appropriate role of international agreements and how to protect American workers and industries from competitive disadvantage. These involve genuine trade-offs that do not resolve themselves simply because one cares about the climate.

Positions that need to be actively opposed:

• Deliberate suppression or distortion of scientific findings. When government agencies or private companies actively suppress, alter, or misrepresent scientific research about climate risks — as has happened on several documented occasions — this constitutes a threat to the epistemic foundations of democratic deliberation, not merely a policy disagreement.
• Blocking communities from taking adaptation measures they have chosen for themselves. When state or federal action prevents municipalities from implementing flood controls, building codes, or other adaptation measures their communities have chosen, this crosses from policy disagreement into interference with democratic self-governance.
• Active campaigns to prevent public access to accurate information about climate risks. Whether conducted by fossil fuel companies, political actors, or media organizations, deliberate public disinformation campaigns about climate science warrant active opposition.

Important distinction: Many people who are skeptical of aggressive climate policy hold their views in good faith, based on genuine concerns about economic harm and distrust of expert institutions. Opposing certain practices does not require treating everyone who has expressed climate skepticism as acting in bad faith.

Question 6: For beliefs that need to be actively opposed — how can opposition be most constructive?

The challenge of constructive opposition is that aggressive pushback can backfire — hardening resistance, creating martyrs, and driving skeptics further from engagement. The goal is not to win an argument but to change conditions.

• Legal accountability for documented suppression of scientific findings. Civil litigation, shareholder actions, and regulatory enforcement offer mechanisms that operate through established institutions rather than through public shaming alone. These are slower but more durable.
• Support for independent scientific institutions. Investing in the credibility, transparency, and genuine independence of scientific institutions — including through reforms that address the legitimate concerns that have eroded public trust — is more effective than simply defending existing institutional authority.
• Connecting climate action to values that resonate across the spectrum. In communities where climate concern is framed as a liberal or coastal elite project, connecting adaptation and resilience investments to values of local stewardship, energy independence, and protecting the land for future generations has proven more effective than conventional environmental messaging.
• Meeting economic concerns with concrete answers. The most effective counter to climate opposition rooted in economic anxiety is not to dismiss the anxiety but to offer credible, specific, community-tailored answers to questions about jobs, energy costs, and community futures.
• Elevating conservative and religious voices for climate action. The most persuasive voices for climate concern in skeptical communities are often fellow community members — farmers, hunters, ranchers, faith leaders, military veterans — who speak from shared experience and values.
• Transparent, real-time tracking of climate costs. Making the economic costs of extreme weather events visible and locally specific — what did this flood cost this county? what did this drought cost these farmers? — is more persuasive than abstract global statistics.

Part Two: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Question 1: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there broad agreement?

DEI is perhaps the most semantically and emotionally loaded topic in contemporary American life, in part because the same words mean very different things to different people. Beneath the terminological conflict, there is more shared ground than the loudest voices suggest — though it is sometimes expressed in very different language.

Areas of genuine cross-spectrum agreement:

• Discrimination based on race, religion, gender, or national origin is wrong and should be illegal. This is close to a universal commitment across the American political spectrum, though disagreements about what constitutes discrimination are sharp.
• Equal opportunity — the idea that people should be judged on their abilities, character, and effort rather than on inherited characteristics — is almost universally endorsed as an aspiration. The left and right differ profoundly on whether current institutions actually deliver equal opportunity; they disagree much less on whether equal opportunity is the right goal.
• Historical discrimination in the United States was serious and real. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, exclusion from the GI Bill, redlining, employment discrimination — these are historical facts that are not seriously contested across the political spectrum. What is contested is their relevance to present-day policy.
• Historical discrimination had lasting effects that did not simply vanish with civil rights legislation. Even on the right, there is general acknowledgment that generations of exclusion from wealth-building opportunities, quality education, and full civic participation have had lasting consequences. The disagreements are about magnitude and policy implication, not about whether any lasting effects exist.
• Every person deserves basic dignity and respect regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or background. This commitment is stated across all political camps.
• Diversity of perspective and experience can add value in institutions and teams. Even among critics of formal DEI programs, there is general acknowledgment that diverse teams often think better and avoid the blind spots that homogeneous groups can develop.
• Discrimination on the basis of race remains legally prohibited and should remain so. This commitment is broadly shared even among those who argue that some DEI programs themselves constitute impermissible racial discrimination.
• There are still real barriers that disadvantage some groups. Even among those who reject the framing of systemic racism, there is acknowledgment that discrimination — individual, institutional, and cultural — has not been eliminated, and that specific instances of unfair treatment deserve redress.

Question 2: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there clear and strong disagreement?

The DEI debate contains some of the sharpest and most emotionally charged disagreements in American public life. Many of these disagreements run all the way down to fundamentally different understandings of what justice means.

The sharpest disagreements:

• Whether systemic or structural racism is currently a primary ongoing driver of racial disparities. The left and far left hold that current institutions — housing markets, school funding systems, criminal justice, hiring practices, health care access — produce racially disparate outcomes through mechanisms that operate largely independently of individual intent. The right and far right hold that current disparities are primarily explained by factors like class, culture, family structure, geographic differences, and individual choices, and that attributing them to ongoing systemic racism is empirically unsupported and politically inflammatory.
• Whether race-conscious policies are legitimate or constitute discrimination. Affirmative action, diversity hiring targets, minority business set-asides, and similar policies are seen by their supporters as appropriate remedies for documented inequality. They are seen by critics as forms of racial discrimination that violate the principle of equal treatment, potentially harm their intended beneficiaries, and are unfair to individuals from non-preferred groups.
• Whether “equity” (equal outcomes at a group level) is a legitimate policy goal, or whether “equality” (equal treatment of individuals) is the only appropriate standard. This is one of the deepest value conflicts in the debate, underlying most specific disagreements.
• Whether DEI training programs and diversity initiatives actually reduce discrimination and improve outcomes, or whether they are largely ineffective or counterproductive. This is partly an empirical question, but it is also shaped by deep disagreements about what “effective” means.
• Whether extensive focus on race, identity, and group difference helps or hinders progress toward a more equal society. Some argue that naming racial disparities and their causes is the prerequisite for addressing them. Others argue that constantly emphasizing racial identity reinforces the very categories it claims to want to transcend.
• Whether class-based approaches to addressing inequality would be more fair and more effective than race-based approaches. A significant number of people across the center and left, not just the right, have argued that programs targeted at economic disadvantage rather than racial identity would address more of the underlying inequality while generating less political resistance.
• Whether concepts like “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “intersectionality” are accurate analytical tools or harmful oversimplifications that unfairly assign collective guilt. The semantic and conceptual battles here reflect genuine underlying disagreements about how society works.
• Whether DEI as currently practiced has gone too far, not far enough, or is largely misconceived. Critics from the right see it as ideological overreach; critics from the left often see it as superficial corporate branding that substitutes symbolic representation for substantive change; defenders see it as imperfect but necessary progress.

Question 3: Which disagreements are about facts, and which are about values?

DEI debates are unusual in how thoroughly factual and value claims are intertwined. Separating them requires care and honesty from all sides.

Disagreements with significant factual content:

• The causes of racial wage gaps. There is genuine scholarly disagreement about how much of the racial wage gap, after controlling for education, field, geography, and experience, reflects ongoing discrimination versus other factors. The answer matters enormously for policy.
• The effectiveness of specific DEI interventions. Does implicit bias training reduce discriminatory behavior? Does it backfire? Do diverse hiring processes actually identify better candidates? These are empirical questions, and the evidence is more mixed than advocates on either side typically acknowledge.
• The actual patterns of disparate treatment in specific systems. Audit studies, analysis of lending data, medical record reviews, and criminal justice data can reveal patterns of disparate treatment with meaningful objectivity.
• What actually improves workplace morale, cohesion, and productivity in diverse organizations. This is a management and organizational behavior question with an empirical dimension, even though it is hard to study rigorously.

Disagreements that are fundamentally about values:

• What fairness means: equal treatment of individuals, or correction of group-level inequities. This is a philosophical question about the nature of justice, and data cannot settle it. Both positions reflect genuine moral commitments that have deep roots in American political thought.
• How much weight present generations owe to historical injustice. Even people who fully agree on the history disagree, for reasons rooted in moral philosophy, about what obligations the present generation has to redress wrongs committed by previous generations.
• Whether group identity — race, gender, ethnicity — should ever be a factor in institutional decisions. For those committed to a strictly individualist conception of justice, the answer is no, as a matter of principle. For those who understand justice in more group-relational terms, the answer may be yes under appropriate circumstances.
• Whether colorblindness or color-consciousness is the better path to racial equality. The colorblind position holds that the way to get beyond race is to stop making decisions on the basis of race. The color-conscious position holds that pretending not to see race when it still shapes outcomes is itself a form of evasion. Both reflect genuine moral arguments.

A note on language: People often talk past each other in DEI debates because they are using the same words to mean different things. “Systemic racism” means something quite specific in academic sociology but is heard very differently by many ordinary people. “Equity” means something technical in policy discussions that differs from its everyday meaning. Honest cross-partisan conversation requires attending carefully to these definitional differences.

Question 4: For factual disagreements — what joint fact-finding process might help?

The DEI debate suffers from a particular credibility problem: most of the research is conducted in academic institutions that critics on the right regard as ideologically captured, and most policy advocacy comes from organizations with a stake in the answer. Joint fact-finding would need to address this credibility gap directly.

Productive areas for joint fact-finding:

• Rigorous, pre-registered evaluation of specific DEI interventions. Rather than debating DEI in the abstract, cross-ideological research collaboratives could conduct — with methodology agreed upon in advance — evaluations of specific programs. Pre-registration prevents fishing for desired results.
• Audit studies of discrimination in hiring, lending, and housing. The methodology of audit studies — sending matched pairs of applications that differ only in race-associated names or other characteristics — is methodologically rigorous and produces results that are relatively hard to dismiss. Expanding and systematizing this kind of research, with transparent methodology, could provide shared factual ground on where discrimination is and is not occurring.
• Longitudinal outcome tracking for different policy approaches. Some states and institutions have moved toward race-neutral approaches while others maintain race-conscious policies. The natural experiments that result offer genuine opportunities to learn what actually happens under different approaches — if the research is designed with intellectual honesty about what findings would count as evidence against one’s preferred conclusion.
• Independent economic analysis of the causes of racial wage gaps, by sector and geography. More transparent and rigorous analysis that explicitly tests competing explanations — discrimination, skill differences, field sorting, geography, hiring networks — would ground the debate more firmly in shared evidence.

A fundamental challenge: The question of what counts as discrimination, and therefore what counts as evidence of it, is itself contested. Any agreed-upon research framework will need to grapple explicitly with these definitional disputes rather than assuming them away.

Question 5: For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?

This question is especially fraught in the DEI context, because people on both sides sincerely believe that the other side is engaged in discriminatory behavior — not merely advocating for a different policy. That mutual accusation makes drawing these lines exceptionally difficult.

Differences that fall within the limits of mutual tolerance:

• The debate over race-conscious versus race-neutral approaches to addressing inequality. Both positions reflect genuine moral commitments — one to corrective justice, one to individual equality — that have deep roots in American constitutional thought. People can hold either position with moral seriousness and good faith.
• Whether equity (equal outcomes) or equality (equal treatment) should guide policy. This is a classic and deep disagreement in political philosophy. It does not require bad faith on either side.
• Whether class-based remedies are preferable to race-based remedies. This is a genuine policy debate among people who share the goal of reducing inequality and expanding opportunity.
• How much emphasis institutions should place on demographic representation in hiring, admissions, and programming.
• Whether specific DEI training programs as currently practiced are effective or counterproductive. Given the mixed evidence, this is a legitimate empirical and policy debate.

Positions that need to be actively opposed:

• Racial harassment, intimidation, and violence. These are not policy disagreements — they are violations of persons that require active resistance through legal, social, and cultural means.
• Active discrimination against any person on the basis of race, whether against racial minorities or against others. The commitment to non-discrimination is a genuine common ground value, and violations of it — in either direction — warrant active opposition.
• Denial of the basic humanity and dignity of any person based on race or ethnicity. This is different from disagreement about policy — it is a denial of the common ground on which the whole conversation rests.

The hardest cases: Many critics of DEI programs argue, with genuine moral conviction, that those programs themselves constitute racial discrimination — and that opposing them is therefore not a policy preference but a civil rights commitment. Many defenders of DEI argue, with equal moral conviction, that opposing race-conscious remedies amounts to defending a status quo of ongoing racial inequality. Both camps believe the other is engaged in discrimination, not merely advocating for a different policy. Recognizing that the other side may be acting from genuine moral conviction — even when you believe they are deeply wrong — is a prerequisite for constructive engagement.

Question 6: For beliefs that need to be actively opposed — how can opposition be most constructive?

• Legal enforcement of anti-discrimination law. The civil rights legal framework provides the most legitimate and widely credible mechanism for opposing racial discrimination. Civil rights litigation, EEOC enforcement, and fair housing investigations are institutionally established and relatively politically neutral mechanisms.
• Documenting and publicizing specific instances with care and precision. The most persuasive counter to discriminatory conduct is specific, well-documented evidence — not general claims about systemic patterns that can be disputed, but specific cases that are hard to deny.
• Building cross-racial economic coalitions around shared interests. In many contexts, the most effective counter to racial scapegoating and division is the demonstration, through shared work, that people of different races share more economic and community interests than they have been told.
• Calling out dehumanization clearly and immediately, without escalation. When specific individuals or institutions engage in racial dehumanization — not merely disagreement about policy but denial of basic personhood — naming it clearly, specifically, and without hyperbole is more effective than categorical condemnation that can be dismissed as partisan overreach.
• Maintaining a distinction between opposing conduct and demonizing persons. The most durable opposition to discriminatory conduct comes from communities that maintain clear standards of behavior while keeping the door open to the individuals who violate those standards.
• Supporting institutions that have genuine cross-racial credibility. Organizations and leaders who have demonstrated their commitment to fair treatment for everyone — not just for preferred groups — are more credible opponents of racial discrimination than those who appear to apply the principle selectively.

Part Three: Immigration

Question 1: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there broad agreement?

Immigration is among the most emotionally charged issues in American politics. But when people across the political spectrum are asked what they actually believe — rather than which side they are on — a surprising amount of common ground emerges.

Areas of genuine cross-spectrum agreement:

• The current immigration system is broken and needs reform. This may be the single most widely shared statement in American immigration politics. From the far right to the far left, there is broad consensus that the current system — characterized by enormous backlogs, inadequate legal pathways, inconsistent enforcement, and a broken asylum process — does not serve anyone well. The disagreements are about what reform should look like, not about whether reform is needed.
• The United States has historically been a nation of immigrants and has benefited enormously from immigration. This is acknowledged across the political spectrum, including by those who favor sharp reductions in current immigration levels.
• People who immigrate legally and follow the rules deserve respect, welcome, and full civic participation. The commitment to lawful immigration as a legitimate and valued path is broadly shared.
• Border security is a legitimate function of government. There is broad agreement that the federal government has both the right and the responsibility to maintain some control over who enters the country. Disagreements are about methods, priorities, and the appropriate relationship between enforcement and humanitarian obligations.
• Human trafficking and drug smuggling are serious problems that deserve vigorous response. Across the spectrum, there is strong condemnation of the criminal networks that profit from illegal immigration and engage in exploitation, trafficking, and violence.
• Employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers and exploit them should face meaningful consequences. The argument that unscrupulous employers undermine both the rule of law and the labor market cuts across conventional left-right lines.
• Children brought to the United States at a young age deserve special consideration. The situation of DREAMers generates sympathy across party lines. Polling consistently shows majority support for some form of legal protection for this population even among those who favor overall restriction.
• Refugees fleeing genuine persecution deserve humanitarian consideration. The principle of non-refoulement has broad, if not universal, support. Disagreements are about scope and administrative capacity, not about whether the underlying humanitarian obligation exists.
• Immigration enforcement should be conducted with basic human dignity. Even among strong supporters of vigorous enforcement, there is broad acknowledgment that enforcement operations should be conducted humanely and that immigration detainees retain basic rights.

Question 2: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there clear and strong disagreement?

Immigration disagreements are both factual and deep, touching fundamental questions about national identity, sovereignty, economic justice, and humanitarian obligation.

The sharpest disagreements:

• What the right level of legal immigration should be. The far right favors sharp reductions; much of the right favors some reductions and a shift in composition; the center generally favors maintaining or modestly adjusting current levels; the left and far left often favor expansion. These reflect fundamentally different views of what immigration policy should accomplish.
• How to prioritize among immigration categories: family reunification, skills- and employment-based immigration, diversity visas, and humanitarian admissions. Each reflects different values — family loyalty, economic self-interest, pluralism, and humanitarian obligation.
• What to do with the estimated ten to twelve million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Options range from mass deportation to a path to citizenship, with various intermediate positions. This is probably the most consequential specific policy disagreement in the immigration debate.
• Whether sanctuary city and county policies are appropriate or represent dangerous defiance of federal law. This disagreement reflects both different views on federalism and different empirical assessments of whether cooperation between local police and immigration enforcement makes communities safer or less safe.
• The role of physical barriers at the southern border. Whether border walls and barriers are effective, worth their cost, and the right symbolic statement about American values is deeply contested.
• How to reform the asylum system. Nearly everyone agrees the current system is badly broken. But the proposed reforms differ sharply: some emphasize adding resources and legal pathways; others emphasize raising the evidentiary bar for claims and accelerating removal.
• The actual economic impacts of immigration. Does immigration at current levels raise or lower wages for low-skill native-born workers? What are the net fiscal impacts of undocumented immigration? These are empirical questions with contested answers in the economics literature.
• Whether current levels of immigration are changing American culture in ways that warrant policy response. This is the most culturally sensitive disagreement: whether concerns about the pace of cultural change and the preservation of national identity are legitimate policy considerations or thinly veiled ethnic prejudice.
• What obligations the US has to address root causes of migration — poverty, violence, climate disruption, and failed governance in sending countries. The left tends to see this as essential to a humane immigration policy; the right generally prefers to focus on border enforcement and legal pathway management.

Question 3: Which disagreements are about facts, and which are about values?

Immigration debates combine empirical disputes — about economic impacts, crime rates, and integration outcomes — with deeply held value conflicts about national identity, sovereignty, and humanitarian obligation. Both dimensions are real, and conflating them makes the conversation worse.

Disagreements with significant factual content:

• The net fiscal impact of different categories of immigration. The fiscal calculus differs significantly depending on whether immigrants are high-skilled or low-skilled, legal or undocumented, and how long the time horizon used. This is resolvable through better and more transparent economic modeling.
• The effect of low-skill immigration on wages of native-born low-skill workers. This is genuinely contested in labor economics. Some studies find modest wage suppression in affected occupations; others find minimal effects or even complementarities. The answer matters a great deal for evaluating the fairness of current immigration levels to low-income Americans.
• Crime rates among immigrant populations. The preponderance of evidence shows that immigrants — both documented and undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. But specific high-profile cases generate intense political attention, and the question of whether specific enforcement gaps have allowed specific crimes is partly answerable with data.
• The administrative capacity of immigration courts and border processing facilities. How much capacity is required to manage the current volume of asylum claims fairly and promptly is an operational question with empirical answers.
• Whether specific border security measures actually reduce illegal crossings. What effect did various enforcement measures in various periods have on crossing rates? This is an empirical question that can be studied.

Disagreements that are fundamentally about values:

• What obligations the United States owes to non-citizens seeking entry. Some believe national citizenship creates near-exclusive moral priority; others believe shared humanity creates significant obligations regardless of national boundaries. Data cannot settle this.
• Whether national sovereignty gives the government essentially unlimited discretion in who it admits. Some hold that a nation’s right to control its borders is nearly absolute. Others hold that this right is constrained by humanitarian obligations under international law and basic moral requirements.
• How much weight to give to cultural continuity and national cohesion as immigration policy considerations. Is it legitimate to consider the pace of cultural change in setting immigration levels? Reasonable people deeply disagree about this as a matter of values.
• Whether people who violated immigration law by entering illegally should be treated differently from those who followed legal processes. This involves genuine questions about the moral significance of legal status when people have built lives and raised children in the US.
• What balance to strike between the interests of potential immigrants and the interests of current low-wage American workers. When these interests conflict, whose interests should take priority is a question of distributive justice, not economics.

Question 4: For factual disagreements — what joint fact-finding process might help?

Several of the most consequential immigration disagreements have significant factual dimensions that better shared inquiry could address — if the process is designed to be genuinely credible across the political spectrum.

Productive areas for joint fact-finding:

• Comprehensive, transparent economic modeling of immigration’s fiscal and labor market impacts. A cross-ideological economic commission — including economists with different priors about immigration’s effects — could agree on shared methods for calculating costs and benefits of different immigrant categories, with explicit assumptions stated and results broken out by category, time horizon, and geography. The goal would be not a single definitive number but a shared framework for evaluating competing claims.
• Systematic evaluation of what border security measures actually work. A rigorous, cross-partisan review of the evidence on the effectiveness of various border security investments — physical barriers, technology, personnel, legal pathway expansion — in different geographic and policy contexts would help move beyond symbolic debates about walls to evidence-based discussion.
• Transparent data on asylum claim outcomes by nationality, claim type, and adjudicator. More systematic and publicly available data on what happens to asylum claims — how long they take, what the approval rates are, and what happens to people whose claims are denied — would inform both reform proposals and public debate.
• Longitudinal research on integration outcomes for different immigrant populations. How do immigrants and their children fare economically, civically, and socially over time? What factors predict successful integration? This is empirically researchable and policy-relevant.
• Crime data disaggregated by immigration status, collected with consistent methodology across jurisdictions. This would reduce the ability of specific high-profile cases to distort the broader picture in either direction.

A note on credibility: Immigration research faces a credibility problem on the right: many of the institutions that produce it are seen as having a stake in the answers. Joint fact-finding processes in this area will need to explicitly include researchers and institutions credible to skeptics of current immigration levels, not just advocates for them.

Question 5: For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?

Immigration is an area where genuine value disagreements — about sovereignty, obligation, national identity, and fairness — coexist with rhetoric and conduct that crosses clear moral lines. Distinguishing between them is essential.

Differences that fall within the limits of mutual tolerance:

• Disagreements about the appropriate level of legal immigration — more, less, or the same. This is a legitimate policy debate in which good-faith people with genuine values reach different conclusions. Wanting fewer immigrants does not make someone a bigot; wanting more does not make someone naïve about national interest.
• Debates over whether family reunification or skills-based criteria should receive priority. Both positions reflect genuine values — family loyalty and social capital versus economic dynamism and labor market needs — and neither is morally disqualifying.
• Disagreements about what to do with long-established undocumented residents, including whether and what kind of path to legal status is appropriate. The moral considerations on multiple sides are genuine.
• The appropriate level of border enforcement and what enforcement measures are cost-effective and appropriate.
• Sanctuary city policies. Reasonable people disagree, in good faith, about both the empirical effects and the appropriate relationship between local and federal authority in immigration enforcement.
• The weight to give to cultural cohesion and pace of demographic change in setting immigration levels — as long as the concern is genuinely about social cohesion and not a proxy for ethnic exclusion.

Positions that need to be actively opposed:

• Dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants — describing them collectively as animals, vermin, an infestation, or invaders. This is not a policy position but a denial of the basic humanity of a category of people, and it has historically been a precursor to violence.
• Policies designed to cause cruelty as a deterrent. The deliberate separation of children from parents without adequate systems for reunification crossed a line that most Americans — including many supporters of strict enforcement — recognized as morally unacceptable. Using human suffering instrumentally as a tool of policy warrants active opposition.
• Violence or intimidation targeting immigrant communities. Whether by individuals or institutions, conduct that uses fear and physical threat to enforce immigration preferences is not political speech but a violation of persons.
• Ethnic scapegoating — attributing crime, economic problems, or cultural decline to immigrants as a group without evidentiary support. This is distinct from a policy argument about specific enforcement gaps; it is a collective attribution of blame that assigns guilt by national origin or ethnicity.
• Exploitation of undocumented workers by employers. Knowingly employing people in conditions that exploit their legal vulnerability — wage theft, dangerous conditions, intimidation using immigration status — is a serious violation of persons that warrants active opposition regardless of one’s overall immigration views.

Question 6: For beliefs that need to be actively opposed — how can opposition be most constructive?

• Legal challenges to policies that violate constitutional rights, statutory law, or international obligations. Immigration enforcement operates within a legal framework, and policies that violate that framework can be challenged in court. Legal defense organizations, civil liberties groups, and international human rights mechanisms all provide legitimate avenues for opposing specific unlawful practices.
• Consistent, specific, and carefully documented reporting. Dehumanizing rhetoric and inhumane policy are most effectively opposed not through counter-rhetoric but through specific, humanizing, carefully reported accounts of what is actually happening to actual people. Journalism that puts faces and stories to the abstract debate has historically been among the most effective tools for changing public opinion.
• Cross-partisan coalition building around enforcement of labor law. The exploitation of undocumented workers is an issue on which immigration advocates and labor rights advocates — including those who favor more restrictive immigration levels — can find genuine common cause.
• Elevating voices from within conservative and religious communities that oppose dehumanization. The most effective opposition to dehumanizing rhetoric within communities that are receptive to restriction arguments is not from outside those communities but from within them — from faith leaders, veterans, farmers, and others who share cultural identity with their audiences but draw a firm moral line at treating human beings as less than human.
• Political and electoral engagement. Immigration policy is ultimately set through democratic processes, and political advocacy, voter registration, and electoral engagement by affected communities and their allies are fundamental democratic tools.
• Community accompaniment and direct support. Whatever the legal and political battles, people currently navigating a broken system without legal help benefit from direct community support — legal representation, community accompaniment programs, know-your-rights training — that is not contingent on winning the larger political argument.
• Addressing the economic anxieties that make scapegoating effective. The most durable counter to ethnic scapegoating of immigrants is not moral instruction but economic conditions: when working-class Americans feel their economic situation is secure and improving, they are less susceptible to arguments that attribute their struggles to immigrants. Economic policies that genuinely address wage and economic security concerns reduce the audience for scapegoating arguments more effectively than direct counter-messaging.

A closing observation: Across all three of these topics, a pattern emerges. The deepest common ground is not in the policy conclusions people reach but in the values they start from: a belief that the current situation is not working well, that people deserve to be treated with dignity, that future generations have claims on present decisions, and that honest engagement with evidence matters. The sharpest divisions — on causation, on what fairness requires, on who belongs and who decides — reflect genuine moral disagreements that will not be dissolved by data or dialogue. But recognizing where the real disagreements are, and distinguishing them from the shared ground that most people actually occupy, is the beginning of more productive public life.