Close the Borders? Close Your Opportunities | Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed on Immigration and Diversity

Close the Borders? Close Your Opportunities

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The city of Atlanta, GA is one of the biggest hubs of jobs and prosperity in the southeastern United States. It's grown considerably over the last 30 years, and the local economy has exploded incrementally if you go back 50 to 60 years. This is largely because Atlanta is a welcoming place to all people—and the Mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, will be the first to tell you that. He points to other southern cities that could have been a central hub for business but instead turned people away and kept things segregated. Since America is at somewhat of a crossroads, he says, we only have to look to the past to see the stark differences between being closed off and being open minded.

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KASIM REED:

Kasim Reed is the 59th Mayor of the City of Atlanta. He was elected to a second term on November 5, 2013 and took the oath of office on January 6, 2014. Elected with a clear mandate for fiscal reform, Mayor Reed has increased core city services and reduced the City’s spending during the worst recession in 80 years.

Since taking office, he has hired more than 900 police officers and created the largest police force in the city’s history, re-opened all of the city’s recreation centers as safe havens for young people and improved fire-rescue response times. Working with the Atlanta City Council and the city’s employee unions, he successfully initiated a series of sweeping reforms to address the city’s $1.5 billion unfunded pension liability. Mayor Reed began his term facing a $48 million budget shortfall; under his leadership, the city has had four years of balanced budgets with no property tax increases, and its cash reserves have grown from $7.4 million to more than $175 million.

In 2013, he was ranked among the top ten most influential African-Americans in the nation by The Root, a publication of the Washington Post Company. He received the Distinguished Leadership Award from the National Forum for Black Public Administrators. In his book “We Can All Do Better,” former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley cited Reed’s straightforward approach in successfully reforming the city’s pension plan and wrote: “We need more of that kind of candor.”

Mayor Reed is a graduate of Howard University in Washington D.C., where he received his Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctor degrees and an honorary Doctor of Laws. As an undergraduate member of Howard University's Board of Trustees, he created a fundraising program that has contributed more than $10 million to the school’s endowment since its inception. Mayor Reed was appointed as Howard University's youngest General Trustee in June 2002 and remains a dedicated member of the Board of Trustees.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kassim Reed: I think that there are few other cities in America that present such a striking example of what happens when a city and a people have a big, bold, and inclusive vision of what they want to become.

If you go back just a few years and look at Birmingham Alabama around the early 1960s and Atlanta, Georgia... Birmingham actually had a bigger, more dynamic economy and really should have gone on to be the center of the economy and the business center in the Southeast because of the steel industry.

But they also had a governor named George Wallace and they have a police chief named Bull Connor.

At about the exact same time, Atlanta had a mayor named Ivan Allen, who testified in favor of the Civil Rights Act, a governor named Carl Sanders, and then later a governor named Jimmy Carter that had a different view of what our city could be and what the South could be.

Without disparaging the City of Birmingham in any way, if you fast forward 40, 50 years later to where we are today, the City of Atlanta and the metropolitan region’s economy is about three times the size of the economy of the City of Birmingham and their metro. And I believe that that is because we had a bigger, bolder, more inclusive vision of what we wanted our city to be.

We had men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and women like Mrs. Juanita Abernathy and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, men like Reverend Joseph Lowery, men like Ambassador Andrew Young, Congressman John Lewis, people that set our city on a different path. Men like Robert Woodruff, the CEO of Coca-Cola, who hosted the first integrated dinner in the City of Atlanta to honor Dr. Martin Luther King.

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