When I was born at the end of World War II, more than half The New Republic's life ago—alas, way more than half—my native state's income was 56 percent, I think, of the national average, the second poorest state in the country. But if you could put clothes on your back and food on the table and feed a neighbor who walked up unannounced, nobody really thought they were poor. And it was relatively rare to see somebody who had nothing to do and no way to earn any money.

When I was in law school, I had six jobs, never more than three at once. I never felt burdened or put upon, because I always knew that I could do something. I became a lawyer because I wanted a job where nobody could ever force me to retire. I wanted to die with my boots on, so I'm a little—I still have boots on—I'm atypical, I guess, for—now that I'm a certified senior citizen.

But the point is there was this sense of possibility in our country. So we had to do the civil rights revolution, because we were cutting too many people out of it, but once we did that, there was a sense of possibility. We have got to recover that. And we have to understand, in my opinion, that immigration reform is a part of that.

Having lost it, I can tell you: Youth matters. The youth of a workforce matters. One of the problems is, according to Fareed Zakaria's show last Sunday, Americans think 31 percent of our population are immigrants. And in fact, it's about 12 percent or 13 percent.

But I really was almost physically ill at the—what some people say when all those Central American immigrants showed up at the border. I don't even know if everybody here knows this, but there had been zero net in-migration from Mexico in the last four years. Zero net in-migration from Mexico, partly because the previous president, Mr. Calderon, established 140 tuition-free universities. And last year, Mexico, barely a third our population, graduated 113,000 engineers, the United States 120,000. They're in the innovation business. All you got to do is go to Mexico City now and look around.

But people from Central America came up, because the narcotraffickers and the gangs that back them went into the three poorest countries in Central America with no capacity. The fourth of the very poor countries, Nicaragua, whether we agree with the politics of Mr. Ortega or not, they got a tough army and a tough police force, and they can protect their people from those forces.

George W. Bush signed a bipartisan bill saying that if somebody showed up on our border and they felt they were at risk, they had a right to a hearing. It was a good and decent thing. It's fine if the administration is trying to protect people where they live so they can process there and they're not all lined up on the border, but to think that this means, oh, the border's out of control, the world's coming to an end, we don't need immigration reform, it's wrong. Those people will make America's future.

Do we have to have fair rules? Do we have to make people wait in line, do you not want people jumping? Yeah, all of that's true. But the more prosperous our neighbors get, the less illegal immigration we'll have and the more we'll want people to come here and, if they get an education, to stay here, particularly, and contribute to us. So I'm looking forward to what will be said tomorrow.

Same thing about health care. Several of the criticisms of health care have been valid, but they never start with this statement: "Whatever happens, it can't be as bad as what we had before the law passed." We had 17.8 percent of our income going to health care before the law passed. The next big rich country was France at 11.8 percent. That's $1 trillion a year. A trillion dollars explains a lot of no pay raises, stagnant wages, people stuck, less social mobility. It's now down to 17.2 percent and dropping.

In my native state, Arkansas, we finally rank first in something good. We had the largest reduction in uninsured in the country because my governor took the Medicaid expansion and convinced the Republican legislature to take it and flip it into a private policy that Blue Cross wrote for basically the administrative fees. As a result, 100 percent of the people have been helped, because with no uncompensated care, insurance rates are going down there. They're going up in the states around.

But nobody understands it or believes it, so everything he tried to say in the last election, people said, "I just don't believe you. The federal law could not have had anything to do with this. I have been told too many times how lousy it is." So they voted against the governor with his 72 percent approval rating for people who said they'd get rid of it.

The New Republic can affect that, not by pretending there's only one side of the story, but making sure people at least know what's going on. We've got—if you want to have inclusive governance, there has to be a conversation that has some rough relationship to the facts. And I don't mean just the facts that are useful in a political debate. Everybody in a busy life has to be careful not to become vulnerable to the storyline and have it then turn out to be inconsistent with the story.

But I'm just telling you, you should not be pessimistic about America. And you should not be pessimistic about the world. These guys are not going to win over the long run in the Middle East with the strategy of decapitating everybody that disagrees with them. The local people (inaudible) now, the Kurds are fighting back. It may be a long, hard fight, so nobody wants to live that way. They are recruiting by and large who are looking for a quick trip to Heaven because they think all those tomorrows on Earth are going to be just like yesterday.

The most important thing we can do in America is to return to a spirit of innovation and idealism and optimism and possibility. It's not about material gain. It's about making sure people have enough. And you should feel hopeful the objective circumstances within our grasp to shape the future are there. Our big problem is we don't have inclusive economics, we don't have inclusive politics, and we don't have enough networks of cooperation around the world to make a lot of good things happen and keep the big, bad things from happening.

What we have to do is fairly simple, fairly straightforward, but the details are complex. That's where The New Republic comes in. That's why you'll be needed for another 100 years. That's because developments being what they are, half of what I just said tonight will probably be out of order in 20 years, maybe in 20 minutes, for all I know, but I think more like 20 years. The next 20 years look good to me if we can develop inclusive economics with inclusive politics and we can get back to working together to make good things happen around the world.

It's still a pretty great country or we wouldn't still be here after all this time. It's still the longest-lasting continuous democracy in human history. The New Republic has chronicled 100 years of it, from two world wars, a Great Depression, this financial crash, and every other calamity that could be thought.

I just finished reading a book about the modern decisions about interrogation and torture and everything that George Washington had to make in the Revolutionary War. And I was reminded that he didn't win many battles in the beginning and he was often derided as a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of false teeth.

Everybody that's bet against America has lost money so far. But if we forget who we are, and if we forget we all need to be judged by the same set of rules—not one set for one group and another for another—we will be in trouble.

The New Republic can help us, not free of criticism for the progressives, but to fill our heads with something worth remembering. I remember I was criticized by someone in that first term of President Bush, who said that—he criticized me and, ironically, Colin Powell, and to (inaudible) he said that our big problem was that we were trapped in a reality-based world and that in a world where we were the only superpower, we could make reality. And I was asked to comment. I said, "Man, I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent my whole childhood trying to get into the reality-based world. I like it here, and I would like to stay."

I have people—you know, I had people laughing about it, but you can keep us in the reality-based world, without undermining innovation, without undermining idealism, without undermining hope. And that's pretty well what this magazine's mission has been for 100 years. I wish you 100 more. We need you now maybe more than ever. Thank you very much.