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Tag Archives: Immigration

You Are Not the Only One Who Feels This Way

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Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to assume you have this feeling. I sure do. So does David Roberts, as he explains: 

Contemplating the latest [Orange Menace] revelations, the chaos in the US House, the bullshit hearings, the servicing of Putin … it just makes me feel genuinely crazy that anyone is voting for a Republican for anything. I barely even know how to argue. I just wanna say: LOOK AROUND.

Look at this motley collection of dimwits, apparatchiks, back-biters, liars, grifters, and narcissists. You want to be on their side? You want them in charge? I’ll never understand it. It’s crazy-making trying to pretend there’s some normal political dispute happening here.

To be a normie, news-following Democrat is basically to feel gaslit all the time, all day every day. I know pundits are supposed to affect this world-weary, seen-it-all attitude — actually having feelings is unforgivably naive — but some days it just all gets to me.

Like, we find out that [the Menace] is repulsed at the sight of a wounded soldier and instructs a general to hide the soldier away. That … should be it, right? Discussion over. Horrible person. No place in public life. Obviously. Wait. What? You say we’re just gonna roll on?!

You say House Republicans are mounting an impeachment based on nothing, purely out of revenge? OK, well, that’s that. Clearly wildly irresponsible people with no business being near the levers of power. Surely will be universally denounced. Wait. What? We’re just rolling on?

Hearings full of demonstrable lies, slandering longstanding public servants? Hostage-taking that could destroy the economy, with no coherent demands? Open corruption on the Supreme Court? Senators voting against impeachment out of fear for their safety? Just roll on.

It does something to a person, being forced to pretend that this is normal, just something else to scratch our chins about and debate on the morning shows. Just one more thing to slipstream into a both-sides template. The cognitive dissonance is corrosive.

Unquote.

While I’m here, amid all the right-wing anti-immigrant hysteria, this news might have been widely reported, but wasn’t (I wasn’t able to find the actual Census report it’s based on, but I doubt the libertarian Cato Institute made up the numbers).

  • the number of immigrants in 2022 was nearly 2 million immigrants lower than the Census Bureau’s 2017 projection for 2022;
  • over the last decade, the United States has seen the slowest growth in the immigrant share of the U.S. population since the 1960s;
  • the immigrant share is growing slowly, even while the United States faces the lowest total population growth in its history.

Truth vs. Fantasy in Today’s Politics

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A recent poll showed that most Americans think they’re doing okay economically speaking, but think the national economy is in terrible shape. This chart is from a recent Federal Reserve report on the economic well-being of U.S. households.

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The top line shows that around 75% of us have been relatively satisfied with our own finances since 2017, despite the pandemic. That 75% includes people who thought their own finances were “okay” or better. The bottom two lines, however, show that people’s opinion of their local economies and the national economy went down quite a bit during the pandemic, with lots of people thinking the country’s economy is even worse than where they live.

What’s very odd is that those negative sentiments from 2020 have lingered, or even gotten worse, even though the percentage of us who think our own finances are okay or better hasn’t changed much at all.

Another oddity is that, although people aren’t thrilled about their local economy — only 38% saying it’s good or excellent — hardly anybody likes the national economy — only 18% saying it’s good or excellent.

Why would so many of us think we ourselves aren’t suffering economically although people who live near us are and the nation as a whole is even worse off? The obvious answer is that the national media have convinced people that the country is in deep economic trouble, much worse than where they live and work, and despite the fact that they themselves are in pretty good shape. (It shouldn’t be a surprise that Republicans have the worst opinion of other people’s economic situation, given where they get their news and what their favorite politicians tell them.

This brings me to an article in The Washington Monthly: “Republicans Say Inflation, Crime, and Immigration Are Out of Control. The Numbers Disagree”.

The Republican presidential candidates are on the same page regarding Joe Biden: He’s a disaster on inflation, immigration, and crime.

“We have no borders. We have inflation. We have everything going wrong,” said [their leading candidate] … in his apocalyptic fashion…. “Everybody is being murdered.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence … began a CNN-hosted town hall event with a pithy critique: “Literally, we have a crisis at our border. We have inflation at a 40-year high. We have a crime wave in our cities.” Pence suggested Biden’s border policies are to blame for “a flood of fentanyl coming into every city.” 

There’s one problem with this Republican portrayal of a Democratic president presiding over chaos: None of it is true.  

Inflation was at a 40-year high. During 2022, the inflation rate started at 7.5 percent, peaked in June at 9.1 percent, and ended the year at 6.5 percent, a mark that hadn’t been cleared since June 1982.  

But 2023 is a different story. The inflation rate for May is down to 4 percent, less than half of the June 2022 peak. But even back in March, when it fell to 5 percent, the “40-year high” talking point was obsolete. In July 2008, during the George W. Bush administration, inflation was 5.6 percent. And in October and November 1990, during the George H. W. Bush administration, it was 6.3 percent.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

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As we get further away from the pandemic and the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates, the rate of inflation should continue to fall (despite the fact that corporations have used inflation as an excuse to increase their prices and profits even more than they needed to, as reported by The New York Times). Back to the article:

Has southern border security collapsed? Hardly. Unlawful entries have dropped by 70 percent in the last few weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security, after Biden implemented a new border management policy.  

… Border crossings spiked just before Biden ended “Title 42,” the public health emergency rules that Txxxx enacted in 2020, using the COVID-19 pandemic to expedite the removal of asylum-seekers…. Many skeptics … assumed that the end of Title 42 would prompt a surge of migrants. The opposite happened. 

If the current pace of border crossings—about 3,700 per day—remains stable throughout June, the monthly total would be 111,000, … somewhat higher than the 93,000 in the last full month of Txxxx’s presidency.  

When assessing those numbers, remember that while Title 42 made it easier for the Border Patrol to send back asylum seekers, it did nothing to prevent those removed from trying again. In turn, many of the illegal crossings in Biden’s first two and a half years—under policies designed by Txxxx—were made by repeat offenders. Between 2019 and 2022, the recidivism rate jumped from 20 to 49 percent.

In Biden’s new system, those illegally crossing the border can be banned from applying for asylum for five years and risk jail time if they violate the ban. We saw a spike in crossings just before the administration implemented the smart new policy because migrants hoped to avoid the Biden ban.To tame an unruly border, Biden is steering asylum seekers away from treacherous desert treks and towards a more orderly online application process.

What about fentanyl coming over the southern border? … Biden’s administration has intercepted more fentanyl than Txxxx’s ever did…. According to PolitiFact, Biden deserves partial credit for the higher seizure numbers because his administration is employing more and better detection technology at the border. Besides, immigration across the southern border has little to do with the fentanyl crisis. Eighty-six percent of people arrested for trafficking fentanyl are American citizens, as “the vast majority of fentanyl being smuggled in comes through ports of entry, not people trying to sneak into the country.”  

Republicans may talk up crime, and there are no shortages of alarming anecdotes, but there is no Biden crime wave. “Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022,” according to …The Atlantic, a trend that could lead to “one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.” … In fact, over the past five years, the worst month for homicides was July 2020—when Txxxx  was president.  

Another set of promising data comes from the Violent Crime Survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which looked at data from 70 cities. During the first quarter of 2023, homicides, rapes, and robberies dropped about 8 percent from the first quarter of 2022….  

Where Republicans have the best argument is in the category of stolen cars: up 21 percent from 2021 and a whopping 59 percent from 2019. But they haven’t argued that we’re only suffering from a wave of car thefts. They assert America is suffering a collapse of law and order, on every front, solely on Biden’s watch. That’s not true. A mixed picture is not a crime wave.  

Republicans are not updating their talking points to reflect this new data, preferring to insist that America is falling apart. They’re betting that either the data trajectories will reverse course, belatedly validating Republican attack lines, or Americans will be so convinced everything is terrible that additional positive data won’t “feel” true, and voters will disregard it. At least, that is the Republican hope….

We can’t know what these metrics will be in the run-up to Election Day. But in the meantime, reporters and voters should not allow Republican candidates to paint a dystopian picture of America without being forced to address the numbers that don’t fit their narrative. 

November 5, 2024, is more than 500 days away. Let’s hope more of the good news sinks in by then.

Back to the Jungle?

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Maybe you had to read The Jungle in school. We did. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel describes the dangerous lives of poor immigrants struggling to survive in Chicago. It evokes an era when the government mostly ignored abusive working conditions, including working conditions for children.

Today, some businesses are having trouble finding workers, because they don’t pay enough and/or the jobs stink. Republicans around the country have an idea: weaken child labor laws.

In 2023. From The New York Times:

In February, the Department of Labor announced that it had discovered 102 teenagers working in hazardous conditions for a company that cleans meatpacking equipment at factories around the country, a violation of federal standards. The minors, ages 13 to 17, were working with dangerous chemicals and cleaning brisket saws and head splitters; three of them suffered injuries, including one with caustic burns.

Ten of those children worked in Arkansas, including six at a factory owned by the state’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods. Rather than taking immediate action to tighten standards and prevent further exploitation of children, Arkansas went the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that would actually make it easier for companies to put children to work. The bill eliminated a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed, a process that required them to verify their age and get the permission of a parent or guardian.

Arkansas is at the vanguard of a concerted effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations that have been in place for decades to protect children from abuse. Echoing that philosophy, bills are moving through at least nine other state legislatures that would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors. The Labor Department says there has been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in the illegal employment of children.

The response in these states is not to protect those children from exploitation, but instead to make it legal. Voters in these states may support deregulation, but they may not know that businesses can use these bills to work children harder, cut their wages and put them in danger….

Lawmakers in these states have been vigorously lobbied by industry groups who like the flexibility of teenage employees and say that more children are needed in the work force to make up for labor shortages. One of the principal lobbying organizations pushing these bills in several states is the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group that supports Republican candidates and has long opposed most forms of regulation, as well as the Affordable Care Act. It has issued news releases praising lawmakers for passing bills that let businesses hire more minors for longer hours, and taking credit for supporting these efforts….

Many child workers don’t have parents or guardians to look after their interests. In the cleaning company case, several of the child workers were unaccompanied minors who recently came over the southern border, according to their lawyers. Soon, they won’t even have the state to approve their employment or working conditions.

The target of these rollbacks is not after-school jobs at the corner hardware store; they will have a much bigger effect on a labor force that includes many unaccompanied migrant children who work long hours to make or package products sold by big companies like General Mills, J. Crew, Target, Whole Foods and PepsiCo. As a recent New York Times investigation documented, children are being widely employed across the country in exhausting and often dangerous jobs working for some of the biggest names in American retailing and manufacturing….

Many of the minors crossed unaccompanied from Latin American countries and may not know when their employment violates the law. A 13-year-old who was burned with caustic chemicals while working for Packers Sanitation Services in Nebraska told investigators the accident occurred during a shift that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 or 7 a.m., a direct violation of multiple federal laws. The Labor Department imposed a $1.5 million fine on the cleaning company, which is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms.

Despite the evidence that more children are being exploited and hurt in this way, state lawmakers are passing bills that defy the federal standards. They are inviting a court challenge, and, in effect, daring the Labor Department to come after them, knowing the department often lacks the manpower to prevent violations of federal law…..

One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.

If states will not perform a role that has been fundamental for a century — protecting workers from abuse — the federal government will have to increase its efforts to do so. After the Times investigation was published, the Biden administration announced a series of new efforts to crack down on illegal child labor, many of which hold promise as possible deterrents….

The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right, however. Because its budget has been held flat by Congress, the Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2019, and Ms. Nanda’s office lost more than 100 lawyers, so the Labor Department doesn’t have enough investigators to effectively pursue illegal child labor practices. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.

Comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need. If families can stay together, minors will be less vulnerable to abuse and better able to seek legal protection.

The administration has asked Congress for more enforcement money in its current budget, and for higher penalties. Neither request is likely to be granted, and immigration reform seems far in the distance.

Greg Sargent of The Washington Post discusses the immigration aspect of this story:

In the wake of shocking revelations about migrant kids working exploitative jobs linked to some of America’s biggest companies, Republicans and right-wing media figures have debuted a new claim: These horrors are the fault of President Biden’s “open border”.

The argument is deceptive and wrongheaded…. The right’s case is that Biden’s 2021 decision to allow unaccompanied migrant children to enter the country — reversing [the former president’s] policy — has led directly to those kids being exploited by unscrupulous employers….

But here the right’s argument veers into deception. For instance, [the] claim that Health and Human Services [HHS] doesn’t care that nearly 90,000 kids have been “lost” to “slavery” is wildly absurd….

HHS does a follow-up call to sponsors to check on kids, and in the past two years, 85,000 such calls went unanswered. But an HHS spokesperson says sponsors and kids are not required to answer checkup calls; we only know sponsors didn’t pick up the phone, nothing more. (Hundreds of thousands of minors have crossed the border, and HHS says 81 percent of follow-ups are answered, so unanswered calls are not representative of the situation.)

Nor is there any basis to conclude that those unreached kids correlate with those who end up in exploitative situations….

The alternative to admission is not letting these kids into the country at all. Many of the parents and relatives who make the wrenching decision to send them unaccompanied into this country do so while knowing their fate in the United States will be uncertain, and weigh this against what they deem the worse alternative: Keeping kids in horrible situations at home.

Republicans … want that worse option to be the only one available. They want a restoration of the [policy] that largely banned asylum seeking for children as well as adults.

If Republicans actually care about the plight of migrant children in the United States, they might argue that HHS must do more to track them with, say, more follow-up calls or visits. They might argue that the Labor Department — which recently expanded enforcement against child labor law violations — must crack down even harder. Those are reasonable grounds for pressuring the administration to do better.

But Republicans don’t make those arguments. After all, this would entail calling for government to function better at settling migrant kids and policing unscrupulous employers — not things Republicans want to see happen.

This gets to the core of the deeper differences between the left and right: Each side defines the underlying problem differently. Most liberals believe barring migrant kids from entering is far more cruel than admitting them, even if admission in some cases leads to bad outcomes. For liberals, the problem is that more must be done to assure humane settlement of kids and crack down on their exploiters.

To some of these Republicans, by contrast, the problem is that unaccompanied kids are allowed in to begin with. Admitting them and settling them more humanely isn’t a solution; “solving” the child labor problem must inherently entail shutting that migration down.

On one hand, Republicans are loosening child labor laws. On the other, they’re against letting unaccompanied minors into the country, supposedly to protect them from abusive working conditions. But those are the very conditions child labor laws address.

Connecting Global Dots

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Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looks at the big picture: 

It’s interesting to step back sometimes and consider … our times. Today we have our ongoing battle over democracy and authoritarianism in the U.S. The UK is in its latest stage of its ongoing national self-immolation. Italy has just elected its first far-right government since Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s. Russia, which has made itself into the international clarion of rightist nationalism, is stumbling through a succession of largely self-inflicted catastrophes in its war of choice in Ukraine.

Let’s go back to the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring unsettles or topples governments across the Arab Middle East. But it triggers long-running civil wars in Syria and Libya. The first especially, but also the second, are the main drivers of the European Union migrant crisis of 2015, in which some 1.3 million refugees/migrants requested asylum in the EU, the most in any single year since World War II. Given the closeness of the vote and the great focus on the migrant crisis in 2015 and 2016, it’s very hard to imagine the UK leaves the European Union without this chain of events … beginning in December 2010.

Less obvious is that you can make a looser but I think still fairly persuasive argument that these events play a key role in the rise of [MAGA-ism] in the United States….The rise of [MAGA-ism] is part of a long progression within the United States. [However, their leader’s] particular platform — to the extent you can call it that — focused on “the wall” and immigrants from Mexico and Central America….

But there’s a somewhat different commonality I am focusing on.

The [reactionary] right is, paradoxically, highly internationalized if not internationalist. There’s a deep confluence and sharing of ideas, imagery and programs between the U.S. and Europe. The narratives of “our out of control migration” and white Christian cultures under threat was a common, interwoven and reinforcing pattern on both sides of the Atlantic….

These are of course only the barest thumbnail outlines of recent history and its relationship to the present…. Why this interests me is that migration flows and their intensity are going to increase over time. The most basic reason is climate. Our potential climate futures range from really bad to truly catastrophic. But anywhere on that spectrum you have lots of people trying to move from places that are less habitable than they used to be or are in the throes of political and economic instability for those same reasons. Telecommunications and transport technology greatly accelerate that process.

A century ago a poor peasant in India or Ecuador may have known in a general way that there were vastly richer societies in Europe and North America. But they couldn’t really know the details and it was close to impossible to get there anyway. Today, almost everyone in the world can see through electronic media how people live in Europe, North America, and other parts of the affluent world and — though it’s hard and often dangerous — it is possible to get there.

What we can draw from this is that the accelerating patterns of global migration which are so central to the politics of the last decade and have helped reshape politics in Europe and North America will almost certainly continue to intensify.

One More Comment from Prof. Zimmer on the Pathetic Circus We Call American Politics

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Untitled

That’s Florida’s thuggish Republican governor Ronald DeSantis using his own state’s funds to gather up immigrants in Texas and put them on a plane to Massachusetts (where the arrivals were greeted warmly by local residents). History professor Thomas Zimmer had a reaction:

Leading Republican elected officials: “Let’s round up human beings under false pretenses and treat them like cargo in order to use them as props in an illegal stunt to trigger the Libs and rile up the base!”   New York Times: “Here’s a new political tactic we haven’t seen…”

Untitled

There is almost nothing so vile, so inhumane, so outrageous that the mainstream media can’t press it into the established politics-as-horse-race framework, thereby sanitizing it and presenting it as just the latest development in the struggle between Team Red and Team Blue.

Since mainstream journalism is predicated on the idea that politics is a game between two teams that are essentially the same and journalists aspire to “neutrality,” which they define as equidistance from either side, whatever comes from the [Republican Party] has to be elevated to credibility.

Sometimes that happens by presenting bad-faith nonsense as serious policy proposals – that’s what we get after every mass shooting, when Republicans claim the answer to gun violence is more guns or maybe school buildings with just one entry point, remember that one?

If that doesn’t work, then the sanitizing effect is achieved by simply ignoring the actual substance of what Republicans have done and focusing solely on the “playing politics” part, the horse race and how it may or may not be affected by these actions.

It’s one of the most bizarre features of the American political discourse that it demands we pretend these are serious political actions, coming from serious political actors, instead of denouncing them as the extremist culture warriors they so clearly are.

In a healthy political culture, anyone involved in such a deranged scheme would be shunned and ostracized, the party that elevated them would have to pay a hefty political price. In the U.S., that’s evidently not the case. And until that changes, nothing changes.

Unquote. 

There’s more to this story coming out. According to a lawyer representing the immigrants, officials from the Department of Homeland Security participated in this fiasco and falsified government documents, filling in random addresses around the US as the immigrants’ mailing addresses. If this actually happened, there needs to be serious jailtime.