Kris Kobach – Page 3 – immigrationcourtside.com

COLBERT I. KING @ WASHPOST: The Ugly Endurance Of Racism In America: “I used to think America would age out of racism. What was I thinking?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-america-would-age-out-of-racism-what-was-i-thinking/2019/05/10/32e89c8a-7274-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html

King writes:

There was a time when I believed, almost as an article of faith, that with the passage of time, America would age out of racism. What in the world was I thinking?

But that is what I told myself in the fall of 1954 — five months after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision — when I learned that students attending then-all-white Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Technical high schools, and several white junior high schools in the District, had staged walkouts to protest the assignment of black kids to their schools. I was enrolled at then-all-black Dunbar High School at the time.

I really believed that racial integration was a step toward the goal of full equality and that, as the months wore on, those who walked out would shed their fear and anger. Instead, they and their families devoted the time remaining before the black students arrived to finding a means to flee the city.

Still I dreamed.

When, in 1956, students and adults shouted racial epithets and threw rotten eggs and rocks at a young black woman named Autherine Lucy who tried to enter the University of Alabama to obtain a degree in library science, I consoled myself with the thought that the hurlers of eggs and epithets would age out of the picture. Even when the University of Alabama expelled Lucy, under the guise of ensuring her personal safety, I thought those elders would one day be off the scene.

The same thought was in my head in the fall of 1957, when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called the National Guard to surround Central High School in Little Rock to prevent nine African American students from attending the all-white school, declaring “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter.

One day, oh one fine day, I believed, it’s gonna be over because one day, folks such as Orval Faubus are gonna be dead and gone.

But they were still around years later when, in the summer of 1964, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississippian, were in Mississippi helping to register voters. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. Their bodies were later discovered buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

Through it all, I clung firmly to the belief that because those white men and women hellbent on making life miserable for people unlike themselves were getting up in age, they would soon die out and be replaced by a younger, more broad-minded, racially tolerant generation of white Americans. Unlike many of their elders, these young people would be unencumbered by ingrained racist ideas, I said to myself.

What a fool was I. Bigotry doesn’t age out.

Evidence of that smacks us in the face.

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator, was 21 at the time.

Holden Matthews, charged with burning three historically black churches in Louisiana a week before Easter, was 21 .

John Earnest, accused of a shooting that killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., a few weeks after launching an arson attack at a San Diego County mosque, was 19 .

The man charged with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead was no septuagenarian; Robert Bowers was 46 .

Then there are the two ninth-grade students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda who posted an image of themselves in blackface on social media and used the n-word as they described the photo. They were driven by the same racial animus that caused students to walk out of Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Tech high schools 65 years ago.

Bigotry is a disease of the mind — a poisonous infection unbounded by age, time or space. It is transmissible, capable of being passed down from elders to child, from community to community, from racial and religious kin to racial and religious kin.

The newly appointed archbishop of Washington, Wilton Daniel Gregory, has called racism “a grave moral disease whose recurrence, aggressiveness and persistence should frighten every one of us.”

What’s striking about today’s disease, Gregory wrote in a December 2016 article carried by the Catholic News Service, is that it “may seem to have been brought under control”; that it was on the wane.

Presciently, Gregory wrote, “We have returned to a moment in our nation’s history when racist feelings and sentiments have been condoned as acceptable to express publicly and publish openly.”

The response he called for would reflect the sentiment of my youth: to “disavow any vestige of racism and hatred of other people because of race, religion, legal status or gender.”

Eradicating and inoculating us from this disease is our hope and never-ending challenge — for each of us. For certain, hate won’t outgrow itself.

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I have noticed before the similarity between the faces and expressions of the overwhelmingly white, mindlessly cheering crowds, behind Trump at his rallies as he rattles off his “normal litany” of lies, insults, and racist provocations and the absurd, yet ugly and dangerous, faces of white racists in the 1950’s and 1960’s South —- captured in black and white photos as they bullied and taunted African Americans at lunch counters or African American kids attempting to attend school. Really, I also wanted to believe that those days were gone, and the white folks pictured were either gone or would be embarrassed and humiliated by the cowardice, ignorance, and inhumanity of their past actions.

King is right: “hate won’t outgrow itself.” And Trump and his followers are are nurturing, growing, and harvesting that hate on a daily basis. The majority of us who don’t believe in Trump’s vile messages and unacceptable methods must take our country back before hate and bigotry consume it!

PWS

056-11-19

COURTSIDE HISTORY: BEYOND TRUMP’S MYTHICAL “WHITE NATIONALIST NATION” LET’S SEE WHO BESIDES ENSLAVED AFRICAN AMERICAN FORCED MIGRANTS DID THE WORK THAT MADE AMERICA GREAT — The Essential Role Of Despised Chinese Immigrants! — “Chinese workers were often left out of the official story because their alienage and suffering did not fit well with celebration. . . .Without them, Leland Stanford would probably be at best a footnote in history — and the West and the United States would not exist as we know it today.”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=258d1f6b-0c42-4c29-925d-a144ec4f47b1

Professor Gordon Chang of Stanford University writes in the LA Times:

Immigrants got the job done

History finally has its eyes on Chinese laborers who built transcontinental railroad’s western leg

By Gordon H. Chang

The nation’s first transcontinental railroad, completed 150 years ago today at Promontory Summit in Utah, connected the vast United States and brought America into the modern age. Chinese immigrants contributed mightily to this feat, but the historical accounts that first transcontinental followed often marginalized their role.

Between 1863 and 1869, as many as 20,000 Chinese workers helped build the treacherous western portion of the railroad, a winding ribbon of track known as the Central Pacific that began in Sacramento.

At first, the Central Pacific Railroad’s directors wanted a whites-only workforce. Leland Stanford, the railroad’s president, had advocated for keeping Asians out of the state in his 1862 inaugural address as governor of California. When not enough white men signed up, the railroad began hiring Chinese men for the backbreaking labor. No women worked on the line.

Company leaders were skeptical of the new recruits’ ability to do the work, but the Chinese laborers proved themselves more than capable — and the railroad barons came to consider them superior to the other workers.

My colleagues and I initiated an international research project — based, appropriately, at Stanford University — to investigate the enormous contribution Chinese workers made to the transcontinental project. It proved to be a formidable task, not least because no written record produced by what were called “railroad Chinese” is known to exist. Without letters, diaries and other primary sources that are historians’ stock in trade, we amassed a sizable collection of evidence that included archaeological findings, ship manifests, payroll records, photographs and observers’ accounts.

The material allowed us to recover a sense of the lived experiences of the thousands of Chinese migrants Leland Stanford came to greatly admire. He told President Andrew Johnson that the Chinese were indispensable to building the railroad: They were “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.” In a stockholder report, Stanford described construction as a “herculean task” and said it had been accomplished thanks to the Chinese, who made up 90% of the Central Pacific Railroad’s labor force.

These workers showed their mettle, and sealed their legacy, on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Many observers at the time had assumed that Stanford and the railroad were daft for thinking they could link California with the East because an immense mountain range separated the state from Nevada and beyond. The Sierra Nevada is a rugged, formidable range, its inhospitableness encapsulated by the gruesome tragedy of the Donner party in 1847 and 1848. Trapped by winter storms in the mountains, they resorted to cannibalism.

To get to the High Sierra, Chinese workers cut through dense forests, filled deep ravines, constructed long trestles and built enormous retaining walls — some of which remain intact today. All work was done by hand using carts, shovels and picks but no machinery.

The greatest challenge was to push the line through the Sierra summit. Solid granite peaks soared to 14,000 feet in elevation. The railroad bed snaked through passes at more than 7,000 feet. The men who came from humid south China labored through two of the worst winters on record, surviving in caverns dug beneath the snow.

They blasted out 15 tunnels, the longest nearly 1,700 feet. To speed up the carving of the tunnels, the Chinese laborers worked from several directions. After opening portals along the rock face on either side of the mountain, they dug an 80-foot shaft down to the estimated midway point. From there, they carved out toward the portals, doubling the rate of progress by tunneling from both sides. It still took two years to accomplish the task.

The Chinese workers were paid 30% to 50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work. In June 1867, they protested. Three-thousand workers along the railroad route went on strike, demanding wage parity, better working conditions and shorter hours. At the time it was the largest worker action in American history. The railroad refused to negotiate but eventually raised the Chinese workers’ pay, though not to parity.

After the Sierra, the Chinese workers faced the blistering heat of the Nevada and Utah deserts, yet they drove ahead at an astonishing rate.

As they approached the meeting point with the Union Pacific, thousands of them laid down a phenomenal 10 miles of track in less than 24 hours, a record that has never been equaled. A Civil War officer who witnessed the drama declared that the Chinese were “just like an army marching over the ground and leaving the track behind.”

Progress came at great cost: Many Chinese laborers died along the Central Pacific route. The company kept no records of deaths. But soon after the line was completed, Chinese civic organizations retrieved an estimated 1,200 bodies along the route and sent them home to China for burial.

The transcontinental railroad’s completion allowed travelers to journey across the country in a week — a trip that had previously taken more than a month. Politicians pointed to the achievement as they declared the United States the leading nation of the world.

The transcontinental railroad has been viewed in a similarly nationalistic way ever since. Chinese workers were often left out of the official story because their alienage and suffering did not fit well with celebration. And attitudes toward them soon soured, with anti-Chinese riots sweeping the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and placed restrictions on those already here.

Federal immigration law prohibited Chinese citizens from becoming Americans until 1943.

As a faculty member of the university that bears his name, I am painfully aware that Leland Stanford became one of the world’s richest men by using Chinese labor. But I also try to remember that Stanford University exists because of those Chinese workers. Without them, Leland Stanford would probably be at best a footnote in history — and the West and the United States would not exist as we know it today.

Gordon H. Chang is a professor of history at Stanford University.

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Sometimes, it takes too long. Often, the “real heroes” die unrecognized (like the more than 1,200 Chinese workers mentioned in this article or the many anonymous enslaved African-Americans whose uncompensated labor and ingenuity “propped up” at least five of our first seven Presdients) long before justice comes. And, frequently, the flawed folks who were wrongly acclaimed “popular heroes” of their day escape judgement within their lifetimes.

But, history has a way of eventually “getting it right.” Trump and his misguided followers eventually will be in for a reckoning.

It won’t be pretty. Once the subpoenas can’t be ignored, the testimony perjured, the innumerable lies, intentional misrepresentations, and squalid distortions presented as “business as normal,” and the full historical record becomes available for study and analysis, free from the political hoopla of the present, it will be much, much worse than we can possibly imagine. The true unpalatable nature of Trump and his enablers will be revealed for some future generations. And, those who stood against them and their racism, greed, dishonesty, and cruelty will be vindicated.

PWS

05-10-19

COURTSIDE HISTORY: Trump’s American White Nationalist Antecedents Were The Racist Pols & Pseudo-Scientists Of A Century Ago! — The Lies & Ugliness Of The Past Are Being Repeated — Only This Time It’s People Of Color Rather Than Italians, Irish, Slavs, Catholics, & Jews Who Are Targeted For “Dehumanization” (Although It Would Be Wrong To Underestimate Trump’s Responsibility For The Revival Of Anti-Semitism)!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/sunday/anti-immigrant-hatred-1920s.html

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.

Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

Image

Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Keeping people out of the country because of their nationality was hardly a novel idea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was avowedly racist. In 1923 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that immigrants from India could be barred from citizenship strictly on racial grounds.

What was different about the new, putatively scientific campaign was that even whiteness was no ticket to entry.

Writing about Slavic immigrants, the sociologist Edward A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin — later the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union — declared, they “are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man.” The president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.”

The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians coming to the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.” A Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, his city’s leading supporter of progressive causes, explained to friends why he became the single largest financial backer of the anti-immigrant campaign: His concern, he wrote, was that without a restriction law, Europe would be “drained of Jews — to its benefit no doubt but not to ours.”

The “biological” justifications for this nativism were first developed in Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, in laboratories financed by the widow of the railroad baron E.H. Harriman. (One of her goals, Mary Harriman said, was preventing “the decay of the American race.”) The laboratory’s head, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, took the ideas of the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of human breeding. One of the first steps, he believed, was to impose new controls on open immigration.

At first, Davenport wished to bar the immigration only of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

First published in 1916 and reissued in a series of revisions over the next eight years — all of them brought into print by Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway — “The Passing of the Great Race” savagely denigrated the peoples of eastern and southern Europe while exalting the “Nordics” of northwestern Europe. With the presumed authority of scholarship, he summarized the essential argument of racial eugenics.

“Whether we like to admit it or not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting” to the “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the questionable “Alpines.” Lower than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.” And, he concluded, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

Grant was not an actual scientist. But Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-famous paleontologist and his closest friend, definitely was. Osborn, who once expressed his opposition to the extension of the Westchester Parkway near his country estate because it would bring thousands of “East Side Jews” to the area, presided over the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, and made that institution the beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement. “I am convinced,” said Osborn, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and intellectual structure” of individuals is “based on racial characteristics.” It wasn’t a matter of ethnic bias, he said — it was “cold-blooded” science.

Other scholars rallied to the cause. Robert M. Yerkes — his name immortalized today at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta — conducted a severely flawed series of tests of American servicemen purporting to establish the intellectual inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans. Charles W. Gould, a lawyer in New York, sponsored “A Study of American Intelligence,” by Carl C. Brigham, a young Princeton psychologist (and later the inventor of the SAT). Brigham’s conclusion: “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”

At the same time, Perkins and his colleagues at Charles Scribner’s Sons published a raft of books promoting racialized eugenics. Scribner publicists wrote in one promotion piece: “The inrush of lower races is threatening the very blood of our country.” Perkins’s authors were echoed in the country’s leading magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. “Race character is as fixed a fact as race color,” the Post declared. “Thirty years ago,” the magazine insisted in another article, “science had not perhaps sufficiently advanced to make us fully aware” of the danger of open immigration. Now it had.

Read more

Opinion articles about immigration.

Opinion | Janet Murguía

The American Family Makes This Country Great, and It’s in Danger

May 2, 2019

Opinion | Alan Cross

Alabama Is More Pro-Immigrant Than You Think

April 30, 2019

When the 1924 Immigration Act reached the floor of Congress, passage was assured. Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, declared that “the fundamental reason” for immigration restriction was “biological.” During the floor debate, one congressman said the law was provoked by “the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.” Given the arguments presented by so many of the nation’s leading scientific figures, who could disagree?

The resulting law established quotas by nation; they cut like a scythe. In the last year before their introduction, more than 220,000 Italians entered the United States. The quota slashed that number to less than 4,000. Reductions nearly as harsh were imposed on other eastern and southern European groups, while tens of thousands of slots reserved for Britons, Scandinavians and other “Nordics” went unfilled.

The 1924 quotas remained in force for more than 40 years — while the economic devastation of a worldwide depression hit southern Europe especially hard; while a 1939 measure that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States died in Congress, and the savagery of the Holocaust began; while the Nazis and their allies starved 350,000 Greeks and slaughtered 200,000 Serbs; and while displaced-persons camps stretched across the ruins of postwar Europe.

In 1920, Charles Davenport had asked Madison Grant, “Can we build a wall high enough around this country” to keep out the unwanted? They could, and they did.

Daniel Okrent is the author of “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.”

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The race-based ”Aryan Nationalism” of 1920’s America helped pave the way for the Nazi atrocities of World War II.

Out of the failure of the West to save lives when it was possible before the start of World War II and the horrible human exterminations that followed came the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees. It is that Convention which Trump and other nationalist leaders throughout the Western World are committed to destroying.

At the recent Louisiana State Bar Immigration Conference, held on April 26, 2019, Attorney R. Andrew Free of Nashville, TN, who had been to the border and observed firsthand the lawless, counterproductive, and inhumane behavior of both the Mexican and U.S. authorities toward asylum seekers, particularly women and children, made an excellent “historical perspective” presentation.

Free traced the origins of today’s xenophobic and racist-inspired restrictionist immigration policies policies to two historic events: 1) the Eisenhower Administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” directed against Mexicans which resulted in some Mexican-American citizens and lawful residents being swept up in the indiscriminate “dragnet,” without any hint of due process, directed against Hispanic appearing and Spanish speaking individuals along the Southern Border; and 2) the highly racist Immigration Act of 1924, praised by such “modern day Jim Crows” as Jeff Sessions and his acolyte White House Advisor Stephen Miller.

Do we as a people REALLY want to be remembered the way Coolidge, Albert Johnson, and the host of racist “pseudo-scientists” are described in this article? Or, are we willing to take a stand against the White Nationalist restrictionist agenda being pushed by Trump and his many enablers?

How can we forget our own immigrant heritages and the nasty racist stereotypes thrown at almost every group of new immigrants, including of course enslaved African Americans and other “involuntary forced migrants,” who built America into a great nation!

Due Process Forever — White Nationalism Never!

PWS

05-09-19

WASHINGTON POST/ABC POLL: TRUMP’S “CRUEL, MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” APPROACH TO ASYLUM HIGHLY UNPOPULAR & INEFFECTIVE: Dems Can Build Support By Strengthening Current Asylum System & Making It Work! — The “Real Face” Of “Border Security” Has Little Or Nothing To Do With Trump’s White Nationalist Rants & Barrage Of Lies!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/30/trumps-asylum-changes-are-even-less-desired-than-his-border-wall/

Aaron’s Blake reports for the Washington Post:

President Trump has made immigration crackdown a central focus of his presidency, and a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows a growing number of Republicans and Democrats agree that the worsening situation on the border is a “crisis.”

But Trump is offering a solution that relatively few Americans like. In fact, his newly announced decision to make it harder to seek asylum is even less popular than his border wall national emergency, according to the same poll.

The Post-ABC poll shows that 30 percent of Americans favor making it more difficult for those seeking asylum in the United States to obtain it. About as many — 27 percent — favor making it easier, while 34 percent want to leave the process as-is.

Even among Republicans, just 46 percent favor making it more difficult. Among the few groups where a majority support the idea are conservative Republicans (51 percent) and those who approve of Trump (53 percent). Even in the latter group, though, 29 percent say leave the system as-is, and 11 percent want to make it easier to seek asylum.

Late Monday, the White House announced that it was proposing a new fee for asylum seekers. It is also seeking to prevent those who cross the border illegally from obtaining work permits, and it set the ambitious goal of requiring asylum cases to be decided within 180 days.

The fee would put the United States out of step with most of the world, as the vast majority of countries do not require asylum seekers to pay any fee. Given the dire circumstances many asylum seekers come from, including economically, critics worry the fee would prove a barrier to those with legitimate claims.

There has been a huge uptick in the number of asylum seekers in recent months. More than 103,000 immigrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border last month, and 60 percent of them were Central American families who have requested asylum. The system has become overburdened, and even critics of Trump’s immigration approach acknowledge the situation must be addressed.

[The surge in migrants seeking asylum, explained]

But saying there’s a problem and saying this is the solution are two different things. Trump has repeatedly argued that asylum seekers are exploiting weak U.S. immigration and asylum laws and that many of them are criminals and gang members who are told to claim asylum even though they don’t need it. He has called the concept of asylum “a big con job.” Yet, even as the situation at the border is exacerbated by a growing number of asylum seekers, Americans are still clearly uncomfortable with increasing the burdens on them.

The proposed changes will likely take some time to implement, if they ever are. Attorney General William P. Barr has 90 days to come up with a plan, and the move will undoubtedly be challenged in court.

Because the poll was conducted before Trump’s announcement, it didn’t test the specific details of his proposal. A fresh debate about the specific proposals could feasibly change the levels of public support. But Trump has been pushing the idea that asylum seekers are exploiting the system for months, and it doesn’t seem to have led to a chorus of support within his base for tightening the rules.

The level of support is even less than the backing for his national emergency to build a border wall. The Post-ABC poll shows just 34 percent of Americans favor that, while 64 percent oppose it. But at least on that proposal, Trump’s base is strongly onboard. Seventy percent of Republicans back the border wall national emergency.

Trump’s overall approval on immigration stands at 39 percent, with 57 percent disapproving, according to The Post-ABC poll.

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Bottom line: On asylum, the public essentially is split in thirds among 1) more generous; 2) less generous; and 3) current system. That means that neither radical retractions nor radical expansions of the current system are likely to be achievable at present. That opens the door for the Dems to put together a powerful coalition to strengthen and fairly and efficiently administer the current asylum system.

It’s not rocket science — more like basic governing competence. Here are the elements:

Establish an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court;
Invest in representation of asylum seekers;
Add more Asylum Officers, Immigration Judges, and Port of Entry Inspectors;
Provide comprehensive basic and continuing training for all asylum adjudicators from experts in asylum law;
Use prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) to reduce Immigration Court backlogs to allow Immigration Judges to concentrate on timely hearings for recently arrived asylum cases;
Reduce immigration detention;
Hire more anti-smuggling, undercover, and anti-fraud agents for DHS;
Invest in improving conditions in “sending” countries in Central America.

It would 1) cost less than the money Trump is now squandering on “designed to fail” enforcement and detention efforts; 2) create a political constituency for funding and future improvements; 3) protect human rights; and 4) give the U.S the substantial benefits of integrating asylees and their talents into our society and economy through the legal system. Those found ineligible could also be removed in a humane and timely manner after receiving due process.

Not surprisingly, we just learned today that Trump’s “Malicious Incompetence Program” at the border has run out of money and is requesting another $4.5 billion from Congress. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/white-house-asks-congress-for-45-billion-in-emergency-spending-for-border/2019/05/01/725e2864-6c23-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html

Now is the time for House Dems to hang tough on demanding some real border security for the money — in plain terms, require the money to be spent in exactly the ways described above, not on more of Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist, anti-asylum schemes and gimmicks.

Additionally, there should be specific prohibitions on: 1) wall and barrier building beyond what Congress has already authorized; 2) any additional spending for detention of non-criminal asylum applicants beyond the time needed to give them credible fear interviews; 3) family detention; 4) “tent cities;’ 5) “Remain in Mexico,” 6) “metering” of asylum applicants at Ports of Entry; 6) charging fees for asylum applications; 7) denial of work authorization for non-frivolous asylum applicants; 8) denial of reasonable bond to asylum applicants unless individually determined to be “threats to the community;” and 9) use of the military except to assist in providing humanitarian aid. There should also be a specific mechanism for accounting and constant Congressional oversight on how the Administration spends the extra funding.

PWS

05-01-19

TAL @ SF CHRON: Dems Start Talking Specifics On Immigration For 2020

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/2020-Democrats-grapple-with-immigration-message-13746205.php

2020 Democrats grapple with immigration message as border crossings surge

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — Democrats credit their 2018 midterm success to focusing on pocketbook issues and avoiding engaging with President Trump on immigration They may not have that luxury in 2020.

The U.S. is on pace to receive more migrants at the southern border — many of whom are seeking asylum — in fiscal year 2019 than in any year in over a decade. At current rates, more than 750,000 migrants would either be caught trying to cross the border illegally or show up at a valid crossing without authorization to enter. The Trump administration says it is unable to handle the influx, and photos of migrants held in pens under a bridge in El Paso last month made national headlines.

But aside from condemning Trump’s immigration policies as cruel contributors to the problem, Democrats have largely avoided talking about border-security ideas. Most of the party’s presidential candidates have focused on expanding access to health care and other economic measures intended to boost the middle class, and have touched on immigration only in broad strokes.

But that could change very soon — and should, some experts say.

“Trump wants to turn the 2020 election into a debate between GOP border hawks and Democratic open borders-types,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice. “Democrats would be wise to turn the debate into Trump’s cruelty and incompetence versus Democrats’ practical solutions. … I think it’s a time for serious people to step up with serious ideas.”

Trump threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico before backing away from the idea last week. But he’s made clear that just as they were in 2016, immigration issues will be at the center of his 2020 campaign. On Friday, the Trump campaign released a video consisting of comments from Democratic presidential contenders downplaying the situation at the border, with text declaring, “Democrats do not want to keep Americans safe.”

Democrats consistently attack Trump’s immigration comments and agenda, but tend to limit discussion of their own policies to promoting paths to citizenship for sympathetic populations of undocumented migrants. Some worry that if they don’t have a clear plan to address the increasing numbers of asylum seekers at the border, Trump could ride the issue to victory again.

“This is going to be the cannon fodder for the Trump campaign and for Republicans in general,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., a senior member of Congress’ Progressive Caucus and Hispanic Caucus. “I think that we need to be proactive. … The hard edge is going to want nothing but Trump’s policy, of which there is none. I think the vast middle are looking for somebody taking the lead to try to solve the issue, as opposed to continuing to use it” politically.

Two of former President Barack Obama’s top communications strategists agreed.

“We need to go on offense as soon as humanly possible,” former Obama national security spokesman Tommy Vietor said last week on the “Pod Save America” podcast. “We can’t sit back and say just, ‘No wall, no fence,’ and let him hammer us until (the) election.”

Former Obama chief speechwriter Jon Favreau added, “The point that Democrats don’t make enough is, we always say that his immigration policy is cruel, which it is, but it’s also dumb. It just doesn’t work.”

Although Grijalva has not endorsed any of the Democratic candidates for president, he praised former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro for releasing a formal immigration policy last week, making him the first candidate to do so.

Castro’s proposal includes the Democratic staples of offering a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” — young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors — as well as the broader undocumented population. It would rescind many Trump administration policies, including the ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries and other nations, and pour money and diplomatic resources into the Central American nations that many of the migrants are fleeing.

Castro also proposes progressive positions like breaking up Immigration and Customs Enforcement and redistributing its functions. He also would make it no longer a crime to cross the border illegally, leaving it up to immigration courts to handle the civil offenses related to being in the country without authorization.

Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke comes from the border city of El Paso, but when he served in the House, he played no leadership role in immigration debates. O’Rourke wrote a Medium post last week on the issue and offered a set of 10 proposals that included expanding legal immigration and investing in border infrastructure and Central America.

Other candidates have also spoken up about immigration, without making it a central theme of their campaigns. The Chronicle reached out to the major declared candidates for their policies, and all the ones who responded supported a pathway to citizenship for at least some undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. But none offered many specifics about what they would do at the southern border, other than encouraging aid to Central America.

California’s Kamala Harris has engaged on the issue as a senator, questioning the Department of Homeland Security on its policies and being an outspoken advocate of Dreamers. Last week, she introduced a bill that would allow Dreamers who are temporarily protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act to be paid for work in congressional offices. She frequently cites her own life story as the child of two immigrants. But as a candidate, Harris has said little about her border policy proposals and has made economic issues her signature.

A spokeswoman for New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he would reform the immigration system while “enforcing our laws and securing our borders in ways consistent with our values.”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders wants a “humane and secure” system that “dismantles inhumane deportation programs,” restructures ICE and puts “the sanctity of families at the forefront,” according to his campaign.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren supports comprehensive immigration reform, reversing cuts in aid to Central America and “making sure we provide the support needed so mamas don’t have to flee with their babies for their lives,” according to an aide.

The lack of engagement by the presidential field is indicative of broader soul-searching within the party, including in the House. Progressive Caucus co-chairwoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said she is part of a group working on “principles” for the party. O’Rourke’s successor in his House seat, Rep. Veronica Escobar, said she spoke to the Democratic caucus during a recent closed-door meeting about the need to come up with a plan.

“The Trump administration does everything it can to fuel the flames of fear and discord and xenophobia, and we have to demonstrate an alternative to that,” Escobar said. “So I do think presidential candidates need to lean in.”

But not every Democrat thinks going on offense on immigration would be wise. Swing district Democrats largely avoided the issue in the 2018 midterms — they were “queasy” at the idea of getting near it, Grijalva said — and some Democrats hope to repeat their success by side-stepping it again, at least for now.

“We had a 35-day national conversation about border security, and it ended with Donald Trump engaging in an unconditional surrender,” said New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a member of party leadership, referring to the partial government shutdown over border wall funding. “The 116th Congress, from the perspective of House Democrats, will continue to be about lowering health care costs and enacting a real infrastructure plan, and trying to do those two things in a bipartisan fashion.”

He said Democrats’ focus in the presidential race should be distinguishing themselves in the primary. “It’s not necessarily clear to me that in that context there’s a lot of daylight on immigration,” Jeffries said. “Once somebody emerges as a Democratic nominee, then there will be an opportunity to lay out a contrasting vision with the xenophobe-in-chief Donald Trump.”

Hillary Clinton’s former campaign press secretary, Brian Fallon, who now runs the left-aligned advocacy group Demand Justice, argued that Democrats should avoid debating on Trump’s terms.

“In 2020, Donald Trump can be expected to do the same thing that he did leading up to the 2018 midterms, which is try to manufacture political controversies on his issues,” Fallon said. “Getting wrapped around the axle on the terrain that he wants to fight on is a losing strategy, and he would love the first, second, and third issue in October of 2020 to be immigration. And if we are trying to choose our preferred issue, it should be health care.”

A senior aide for Trump’s re-election campaign confirmed that Trump would again be running on a border security message.

“He’s made that a cornerstone of his campaign since Day One — that’s not going to change,” said the aide, who requested anonymity to speak more freely. “Democrats are denying the crisis at the border. They want to see who can go the furthest left as they try and not address the issue at hand. They want to abolish ICE, they want to tear down existing barriers, they want to decriminalize border crossings. At what point are we addressing what is a true crisis at the southern border?”

One risk for Democrats is letting the loudest and most progressive voices define the issue for the party, said Ali Noorani, executive director of the moderate immigration advocacy group the National Immigration Forum. Many progressives, for example, want to abolish ICE, a proposal that could be unpopular with swing voters.

“I think the challenge for the party writ large, whether it’s the presidential candidates or Congress, is the perception that Democrats are just against whatever Trump is for on immigration, and a lot of the political conversation is sucked up by the progressive element in the House,” Noorani said.

The 2020 candidates should quickly articulate their own vision on the issue, he added. “Otherwise, Trump will define the Democrats’ position for them.”

Some Republicans join Democrats in believing Trump has left room in the middle with his aggressive immigration agenda. GOP strategist Kevin Madden, a veteran of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, said Trump’s immigration message hurt Republicans with suburban swing voters in the midterms, and that “pragmatism” would sell.

“It can’t just be reflexive opposition,” Madden said. “If you know this debate is going to take place, why would you wait until the president starts attacking you to come up with your plan and your message? You have to have an anticipatory self-defense on this so you have a greater opportunity to win the middle.”

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan

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A rational, humane, generous immigration policy that benefits the economy while rejecting the politics of bombast, hate, racism, and ignorance should be a winner in 2022 just like it was in 2018. That’s particularly true because Trump and the GOP have self destructed on health care, another winning issue for the Dems.

As I mentioned last week, I think the immigration policy agenda offered by Julian Castro is where America must go sooner or later to survive and prosper. He might not be the candidate, but his common-sense, fact-based proposal could be the “winning ticket.”

PWS

04-07-19

RADLEY BALKO @ WASHPOST EXPOSES THE RESTRICTIONISTS’ RACIALLY-DRIVEN BOGUS NARRATIVES: The thing to remember here is the only consistent principle behind immigration restrictionism is opposition to immigrants.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/13/immigration-opponents-any-old-argument-will-do/

Balko writes:

Opinions

For immigration opponents, any old argument will do

By Radley Balko

Opinion writer

March 13 at 2:03 PM

David Frum’s cover essay in the latest issue of the Atlantic calling for immigration restrictions is generating some well-deserved scorn. Even his central premise — that if liberals don’t enforce immigration laws, the nation will turn to fascists — is bedeviled by reality. President Trump, Fox News and the Republican Party tried with all their might to demagogue immigration before the midterm elections. The GOP got clobbered. Democrats did especially well in elections in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and California, the states that border Mexico. In fact, all nine members of Congress who represent the districts along the Mexico border oppose funding for Trump’s border wall.

According to Gallup, 67 percent of Americans think immigration levels should either stay the same or increase, and 75 percent think immigration is a “good thing,” an all-time high. Over the past two years, the percentage who want to restrict immigration from current levels has averaged 30 percent, the lowest figure since Gallup began asking this question in 1965. An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that 61 percent of Americans think immigration helps the country more than it hurts, also an all-time high, and an incredible 49-point swing from 2005. There’s virtually no evidence that support for more immigration is a political liability, other than in Frum’s mind. At worst, an immigration supporter will lose the 30 percent of voters he or she would have lost anyway.

Frum’s essay also includes some bizarre, anti-historical observations. This one might be the strangest: “America was built on the revolutionary idea, never fully realized, that those who labor might also govern—that every worker should be a voter.” The United States was, of course, actually founded on the still-revolutionary — but not nearly as revolutionary — idea that every white, male landowner should be a voter. We weren’t even ready to admit that the people doing the most work at the time were full human beings. Not only was slavery thriving at the American founding, not only was it acknowledged and enshrined in the Constitution, but the effort to preserve the institution also formalized the bond between race, second-class citizenship and servitude. Even the Declaration of Independence, the founding document, was altered from Thomas Jefferson’s first draft to omit the word inherent as a descriptor of our rights, a nod to the fact that even the Enlightenment thinkers weren’t quite ready to recognize the existence of inalienable rights outside their immediate social status, much less to slaves.

In another fit of historical ineptitude, Frum pines for the years 1915 to 1975, a period of immigration restrictionism, which he bizarrely describes as the “years in which the United States became a more cohesive nation.” (Frum also conveniently leaves out how those policies were grounded in racism.) The economist Noah Smith obliterated this argument in a pretty devastating Twitter thread. This was a period of Jim Crow, lynching, red scares, the Depression, race riots, labor rights, mass incarceration, racial assassinations, internment camps and domestic terrorism. Under no circumstances would you describe it as an era of broad social cohesion.

If we wanted to look at the single metric most indicative of social cohesion, we’d probably look at murder rates. The U.S. homicide rate began to increase in the mid-1960s, then generally rose until it peaked with the crack epidemic in the early 1990s. Immigration began to increase in the early 1970s, but really began to soar in the 1990s. From about 1994 to about 2014, undocumented immigration soared while violent crime spiraled.

In fact, from about the late 1990s on, nearly every social indicator in the United States began to move in an encouraging direction — dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates, divorce rates, juvenile crime, rape, property crimes, you name it. Meanwhile, immigration boomed. I don’t think immigration caused all of those good things to happen. But Frum’s argument, that immigration unravels social cohesion, is simply contradicted by the data.

Frum goes on to list of a number of consequences of modern immigration, most of which Frum thinks bode ill for the sort of society to which Frum believes we should be aspiring. But most of the negative consequences Frum lists aren’t the result of immigrants themselves, but of people who share Frum’s view that we have too many immigrants. The line I quoted above, for example, is part of a broader argument Frum makes — because undocumented immigrants operated outside of the law, they aren’t afforded the same legal protection, social status and political representation as citizens and legal residents. But undocumented people live outside the law largely because (a) there is demand here for low-skilled workers, (b) it is virtually impossible for low-skilled workers to come here legally and (c) people who share Frum’s policy preferences have made it politically difficult to grant those who do come any sort of legal protection or political representation.

Frum also cherry-picks his data. He argues, for example, that employers in immigrant-heavy industries are shirking their safety obligations because immigrants lack the political power to demand or enforce regulations. He writes:

Forestry, fishing, and farming are three of the most dangerous industries in the United States. They are 46 percent reliant on immigrant laborers, half of them undocumented. (Documented and undocumented immigrants together make up only 17 percent of the U.S. workforce as a whole.) Building and grounds maintenance is surprisingly dangerous work: 326 people died in 2017. Some 35 percent of grounds workers are immigrants. About 25 percent of construction workers are immigrants, but immigrants supply almost half the workers in the most dangerous areas, notably roofing and drywalling. When so many workers in a job category toil outside the law, the law won’t offer much protection.

Note that Frum moves freely between percentages and raw numbers. Building and grounds maintenance may be “surprisingly dangerous work,” but without some other figures for context, 326 deaths is a meaningless statistic. How does that compare to other professions? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most dangerous class of occupations falls under the heading “transportation and moving materials.” This group of jobs accounted for nearly a quarter of worker deaths in 2017 — over four times as many workers died in that field as in maintenance. Within that field, the most dangerous sub-field is called “heavy tractor and trailer truck drivers.” And according to a 2012 American Community survey, immigrants make up less than 16 percent of truck drivers. If we look at rates, Frum’s argument also falls flat. The highest fatality rate is comparatively immigrant-spare transportation, at 15.9 deaths per 100,000 workers. Immigration heavy maintenance comes in at 6.6 deaths per 100,000.

There is some evidence that immigrant representation in even these fields is growing, as native-born Americans move out of blue-collar jobs and into more lucrative occupations. But Frum’s policy prescriptions will only exacerbate the very problems that allegedly worry him. Remember, Frum also suggests curbing legal immigration. Contrary to the claims of restrictionists, people don’t come to the United States to get free welfare and health care. Undocumented immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take out, and are less reliant on social welfare than native-born Americans. People come to the United States — legally and illegally — when there is demand for their labor. When the jobs dry up, immigrants stop coming. If demand persists, and the number of legal avenues for immigration continue to dwindle, the immigrants won’t stop coming, they will just increasingly stop coming legally. That means more — not fewer — people in the shadows, unrepresented, unprotected and un-franchised.

But I think my favorite bit of Frum-ian logic comes when discussing the opioid epidemic:

Without the immigrant workers less prone to abuse drugs than the native-born, American elites might have noticed the opioid epidemic before it killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam, Korean, and Iraq Wars and the 9/11 attacks combined.

This is nonsense, on a number of levels. First, there’s little evidence that American elites “missed” the opioid epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been dutifully publishing overdose statistics each year, as it always has. I’ve talked to several medical examiners in recent years who believe the epidemic may even be overstated. Overdose isn’t always easy to diagnose, and because there’s a nationwide shortage of medical examiners, cause of death isn’t always the product of careful medical analysis so much as a rough guess by an elected coroner with little or no medical training. This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to worry about, but ask any pain patient who is struggling to find treatment — the opioid crisis has certainly not gone unnoticed.

More to the point, Frum’s argument here is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu. The nativist line has long been that immigrants — particularly those who are unskilled and undocumented — are diseased, crime-ridden and drug-addicted. Faced with evidence that immigrants are lesslikely to be addicted to opioids, Frum flips an asset into a liability. Now, the fact that immigrants don’t abuse drugs unfairly distracts elite attention from the native-borns who do.

It reminds me of one of my favorite-ever anti-immigration arguments, from longtime nativist Mark Krikorian. Back in 2004, Krikorian lamented over a Boston Globe story about how dedicated, hardworking immigrants were robbing native-born American teenagers a rite of passage — the privilege of slacking off at their first job. He wrote:

One economist said employers “like the fact that immigrants can work more hours and more shifts than teenagers.” A job counselor said “Typically when kids apply for a summer job they might want a week off to go to camp or do something else. I tell them, ‘You can’t do that. You are up against someone who is going to be there every day and you need to deal with that.’” As a result, the percentage of teenagers holding jobs is the lowest it’s been since statistics started being compiled in the 1940s.

Is it healthy for the future of our society to freeze our children out of low-wage, rite-of-passage jobs? When I was younger, I washed dishes in restaurants, packed tomatoes, did lawn work — this kind of thing is essential if we are to preserve a middle-class society that values work, rather than the Old World model that mass immigration is pushing us toward, where only inferiors ever get their hands dirty.

Of course, Krikorian also regularly argues that the same immigrants employers prefer because of their dedication and work ethic are simultaneously a drain on the welfare system.

The thing to remember here is the only consistent principle behind immigration restrictionism is opposition to immigrants. As a nativist, you’re free to argue that immigrants are both lazy and hardworking. They’re both assimilating too quickly and refusing to assimilate. They’re both violent drug pushers who are crowding our prisons, and they’re teetotaling law-abiders whose good citizenship is unfairly diverting attention from overdose deaths and mass incarceration among the native-born. Pick and chose these points as you need them. Any old argument will do.

*****************************************

Balko “outs” the kind of racist garbage that dangerous disingenuous dudes like Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach, Steve King, and their many apologists and enablers in the GOP have been spewing forth for years. Only now it’s been elevated to national policy, repeated by Trump, Administration dunderheads like Kristjen Nielsen, Sarah Sanders, L. Francis Cissna, E. Scott Lloyd, and even some supposedly brighter career officials at DHS who should know better. A very sad state of affairs, indeed!

The good news: The “high approval rate” for immigrants shows that the bogus White Nationalist narrative that appears to have helped Trump get elected might be failing this time around. On the other hand, Trump’s approval rate remains high among Republicans. That’s pretty disturbing!

PWS

03-15-19

COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-black-men-of-the-civil-war-were-americas-original-dreamers/2019/02/15/8c00088e-30a8-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html

Colby King writes in WashPost:

Today, a wall looms large in my thoughts. It isn’t the structure President Trump has in mind for our southern border. I’m thinking of the Wall of Honor at the African American Civil War Memorial, located at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.

Listed on the wall are the names of 209,145 U.S. Colored Troops who fought during the Civil War. One of those names is that of Isaiah King, my great-grandfather.

I think of those courageous black men as America’s original “dreamers.”

Today’s dreamers are in their teens and 20s, having arrived in this country as children. King’s generation of dreamers were former slaves or descendants of slaves brought to these shores against their will.

However, the black men who fought in the Civil War had the same status as today’s dreamers: noncitizens without a discernable path to citizenship.

Like dreamers of today, those black soldiers and sailors also had families and attended churches; some were enrolled in schools. They could dream of a future, anchored in the rights and privileges that come with democracy. But they had no legal claim to an existence within America’s borders.

My great-grandfather was born in the slave-holding city of Washington in 1848, but his mother was a freed woman. She moved the family to New Bedford, Mass., when he was 4. Around the time of his 17th birthday, Isaiah King enlistedin the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), thinking, “I would have it easier riding than walking,” he told the New Bedford Evening Standard in an interview on the eve of Memorial Day services in 1932.

Black men such as my great-grandfather signed on to fight for a Union in which the right to citizenship was reserved for white people. The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that black people were not citizens of the United States. Putting it bluntly, the high court said black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

And even then, they started their service to the United States one step behind.

In his book “The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War,” Steven M. LaBarre cited the first disparity: It was enshrined in the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized recruitment of black men into the Union army. The law stated that a “person of African descent [of any rank] . . . shall receive ten dollars per month . . . three dollars of which monthly pay may be in clothing.” White privates at the time received $13 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. It wasn’t until July 15, 1864, that Congress granted equal pay to black soldiers.

Yet, serve they did.

As evidence of the regard in which they were held, LaBarre quoted Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew’s commendation of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry when it was launched: “In this hour of hope for our common country and for themselves; at a time when they hold the destiny of their race in their own grasp; and when its certain emancipation from prejudice, as well as slavery, is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, let no brave and strong man hesitate. One cannot exaggerate the call sounding in the ears of all men, in whose veins flows the blood of Africa, and whose color has been the badge of slavery. It offers the opportunity of years, crowded into an hour.”

Volunteering was a start. They still had something to prove.

According to National Archives, by the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men were serving as soldiers — 10 percent of the Union army — and 19,000 served in the Union navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor .

King came back to the capital in May 1864 as a private with the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry to defend the city against attack by Confederate troops. His unit participated in the Siege of Petersburg. They guarded Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Md. And his unit was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond, capital of the dying Confederacy, on April 3, 1865.

The Civil War ended, but not his service. Three months later, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry was sent to Texas to defend against threats from Mexico. (Sound familiar?) He was mustered out of service on Oct. 31, 1865, at Clarksville, Tex. — still not a citizen of the United States.

It wasn’t until 1868 that the threat of removal from the United States was lifted by the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in this country, including former slaves.

The men with names on the African American Civil War Memorial’s Wall of Honor fought and died to end two centuries of slavery, without being able to count democracy as their own.

For their descendants, the fight for full rights, for full participation in every part of our democracy, goes on.

That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

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Thanks, Colby, for putting the current plight of “Dreamers” (and I might add refugees and other migrants who are serving, contributing, and building our society despite their disenfranchisement and the government-sponsored dehumanization being inflicted upon them) in the historical context of the fight for civil rights and human dignity in America.

That’s why the “21st Century Jim Crows” like Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rep. Steve King, and others (largely associated with the GOP) are so pernicious. Like the “Jim Crows of the past,” these guys use degrading racial stereotypes, intentionally false narratives, and bogus “rule of law” arguments to generate hate and bias, sow division, and use the law to suppress and violate rights rather than advancing them.

While sycophant DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen does not appear to be an “ideological racist,” her mindless and disingenuous parroting of the Trump White Nationalist “party lies” and “enforcement” (read “de-humanization”) agenda certainly makes her a “functional racist.”

It’s quite outrageous and dangerous that individuals with these types of views have been elevated to powerful public offices in the modern era, after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

PWS

02-16-19

PAUL WALDMAN @ WASHPOST: Why True Bipartisan Immigration Reform In Our National Interest Will Require “Regime Change:” “[I]t’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/31/never-mind-wall-theres-more-important-question-we-need-answer/

Waldman writes:

As immigration policy hangs over the ongoing conflict over whether the government is going to remain open, there’s something missing from this discussion, something so fundamental that it’s quite remarkable that we all seem to have forgotten to even ask about it. The president is demanding his border wall, Democrats are fighting against him, and occasionally we bring up issues like the fate of the Dreamers and those here under Temporary Protected Status.

But what nobody asks is this: What kind of immigration system do we actually want?

Not what might happen in the next negotiation or what each side would be willing to give up, but what does each side see as the ultimate goal they’re working toward? If they could look forward ten or twenty years and say “This is where we should get to,” what would that look like?

It’s a vital question, because whatever we’re doing at the moment should be guided by our long-term goals. Once we understand what those goals are, we can think more clearly about where we should go after we get this whole shutdown ridiculousness behind us. And we all ought to be able to agree that there is some future we’re trying to arrive at, a point at which we have a system that works to our satisfaction and immigration isn’t something we’re constantly at each other’s throats about.

That may not be possible, but I’ll start with what liberals would like to see. There are certainly disagreements not just on the left generally but among immigration advocates as well, but there is a basic vision one can identify.

The first thing they want, of course, is to take the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who are in the country now and give them a path to citizenship. That’s something even some Republicans agree with, and if you put requirements like learning English and paying back taxes on it, support becomes nearly universal.

Second, liberals would like to see an expansion of the legal immigration system, which is a consistent source of frustration and a driver of illegal immigration. When it can take decades to get approved to move to the United States, of course many people are going to opt for the illegal route, even if it can be dangerous and uncertain. If the legal immigration works, people will go through it and not around it.

And if you have a well-functioning legal system, you can make illegal immigration less attractive, with things like an E-Verify process that makes it harder to find work if you’re undocumented. There may always be some kind of black market for workers, but if you’re simultaneously offering people a legal path — both toward permanent residency and with temporary work visas for people who are looking only to make some money and then return to their home countries — it will be much smaller problem.

So in the liberal vision, we might end up with about the same number of immigrants coming into the country as we have now, it’s just that the overwhelming majority would be coming legally. We’d have security at the border, but we wouldn’t need ICE breaking down doors and tearing parents from their children’s arms. We’d have a robust system to evaluate asylum claims so we wouldn’t have to be throwing people in cages. We certainly wouldn’t pretend that one day there will be no more demand in the labor market for immigrant workers.

There are many Republicans who could be okay with that future, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted. But the conservative vision is complicated. For years, we heard Republican politicians say, “I’m for legal immigration. I’m against illegal immigration.” They may not usually have been advocating significant increases in legal immigration, but it’s important to remember that the current venomous hostility toward immigrants was not always the standard Republican position. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both far friendlier toward immigrants than Donald Trump is.

Conservatives might disagree with this characterization, but as I see it, their ultimate goal is a system in which coming into the country illegally is utterly impossible, but levels of legal immigration don’t change much. In other words, we still have immigration, but the flow slows to a trickle. And the Trump administration is making attempts to drastically reduce legal immigration. With the president’s enthusiastic support, domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller is driving a nationalist agenda that seeks to drastically reduce the inflow of immigrants to the country and even looks for every possible means to deport both legal and undocumented immigrants, even if they’ve been living here for years or decades.

That’s a somewhat extreme position even within the Republican Party, but it does reflect a discomfort with immigration that is common on the right. It’s the cultural problem, the fact that many people just don’t like having contact with people who don’t look like them or don’t speak the same language they do or eat the same foods they do. Trump very skillfully played to that discomfort by essentially telling voters he could wind back the clock to the time when they were young, before all this disconcerting change happened. His targets were the people who say “I don’t recognize my country anymore,” and when he said he would make America great again, “great again” meant “like things were when you were young.”

That’s a demand that can never be satisfied, even if it’s only a portion of the Republican electorate that really dreams of an America where there are almost no new immigrants and most of those who are already here just disappear. Unfortunately, that portion currently not only controls the White House but exercises a veto over any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, because the rest of the GOP is so terrified of them.

Which is why it’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.

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Right on, Paul! You “nailed” it! Pretty much what I’ve been saying on “Courtside” all along!

However, the unlikelihood of achieving “comprehensive immigration reform” in the “Age of Trump” shouldn’t prevent the parties from working together in a bipartisan manner on “smaller fixes” such as that relating to child marriage suggested by Nolan Rappaport, posted earlier this week. See https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3Hu

Progress is progress, even by “small steps.”

PWS

02-01-19

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION POLICY: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE!” — Also, ICE Intentionally Falsifies Court Hearing Dates — Where Is The Accountability?

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/incompetence-plus-malice-add-up-to-trumps-losing-formula-on-immigration/

Bill Boyarsky writes for Truthdig:

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the immigration issue has defined his political profile. More than anything else, it has opened a window on his authoritarian mind, his disdain for the truth and for democratic institutions. Such contempt has revealed the dangers of Trumpism to much of a nation governed, often imperfectly, by the law. The way immigrants are locked up in detention centers without trial warns us of the possibility of a police state.

Last week, the president’s braggadocio crumbled in the face of facts and the strategic opposition of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She clearly saw beyond the façade as she took the measure of her opponent.

Trump’s signature combination of untruthfulness, ignorance and arrogance became evident to the country on Friday when maps appeared on cable television showing planes stacking up at airports, sending passengers into a state of exasperation that transcends partisan politics. Those deficiencies were further exposed when he, while putting an end to the protracted government shutdown, used his concession speech in the White House Rose Garden on Friday to rehash his lying attacks on immigrants.

Trump repeated his call for a wall, arguing that only a wall would stop the drug dealers and other criminals from coming across the southern border. But he pulled back from the “Build the Wall” promises that stirred nationalistic crowds at his rallies. “We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shiny [sic] sea—we never did,” he said, insisting that he had never proposed one.

On the contrary, as Linda Qiu and Michael Tackett wrote in The New York Times:

Dozens of times during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump promised to build a wall along the southwestern border, usually saying it would be 1,000 miles at varying heights and costs. At times the building materials changed. He mentioned concrete, steel and, at one point, even a wall that would have solar panels. But a wall and the unsupported pledge that Mexico would pay for it were foundational elements of his campaign, and Mr. Trump has continued to make similar assertions throughout his presidency.

Except on Friday. Qiu and Tackett also picked up that detail: “ … notable was something Mr. Trump did not say, namely that Mexico would pay for the wall. …”

As he had from the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump trafficked in falsehoods Friday in the Rose Garden when he described the immigrants trying to cross the border into the United States as dangerous criminals.

Figures from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Clearinghouse(TRAC), a respected compiler of immigration statistics, refute his claim.

As of June 30, 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had 44,435 immigrants in custody. Of these, four out of five had no criminal record or had committed only a minor offense, such as a traffic violation. Of the remainder, only 16 percent had committed crimes considered serious, which includes selling marijuana, now legal in many states. Of those eventually convicted of a crime, most were for illegal entry into the United States, a misdemeanor.

Another factor to consider is the incompetence of the way Trump administers his anti-immigrant policy. His former Attorney General Jeff Sessions drastically reduced the grounds for immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. Under his plan, dangers posed to immigrants by criminal gangs or domestic violence were no longer accepted as reasons for granting asylum—a devastating legislative blow to those fleeing gang-ridden Central American countries.

Other restrictions on asylum were also imposed. When immigrants present themselves to border officers and ask for sanctuary, they are arrested for illegal entry. They are then placed in detention, awaiting a hearing in immigration court, or are deported, although courts have ordered some released.

Sessions also ordered judges in immigration courts to speed up their hearings and decision-making protocols. He claimed this directive was aimed at reducing the backlog of cases awaiting hearing in immigration court that involve immigrants either in detention or freed through the legal intervention of immigrant advocates.

The backlog, TRAC said, totals 1,098,468—more than double the waiting list in January 2017 when Trump took office. It would take immigration courts more than five years to work their way through the backlog. This explains why so many immigrants are held in detention for years without a trial in onerous conditions, and why those freed from detention are in legal limbo, subject to being stopped, questioned and improperly arrested.

When Trump shut down the government, most immigration hearings were cancelled. That gave the president a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Rather than carry out his intent—hustling the immigrants out of the country—he has done the opposite and has increased the logjam.

In short, incompetence plus evil intentions have brought the country to this point.

Trump has been able to paper over his incompetence with bluster. The mass media has served as an accomplice. Too many stories focus on his performance. Sometimes, even his critics offer grudging admiration.

The shutdown ripped away the mask. Immigration was the central issue behind Trump’s closure of the federal government. His lies about immigration were exposed, as was his bungling execution of a cruel policy.

Bill Boyarsky

Political Correspondent

Bill Boyarsky is a political correspondent for Truthdig. He is a former lecturer in journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Southern California. Boyarsky was city editor of….

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Meanwhile, over at CBS News, Kate Smith continues her great coverage of the illegal and unethical behavior that has become the norm at DHS and which is enable and tolerated by an enfeebled politically dominated EOIR.

ICE agents told hundreds of immigrants to show up to court on Thursday or risk being deported. But lawyers say many of those hearings won’t happen because the dates ICE provided are fake.

Immigration attorneys in Chicago, Miami, Texas, and Virginia told CBS News their clients or their colleagues’ clients were issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) for hearings scheduled Jan. 31. The attorneys learned the dates weren’t real when they called the courts to confirm. ICE is required to include court dates with court notices, per a Supreme Court decision last summer, but most don’t actually reflect scheduled hearings.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association issued a “practice alert” on Tuesday evening, warning members “the next upcoming date on NTAs that appears to be fake is this Thursday.”

On Wednesday evening, the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the body that oversees all the immigration courts, instructed all attorneys with a January 31 NTA “to confirm the time and date of any hearing.”

“There will be another episode of mass confusion in the immigration courts [Thursday] as a result of the DHS’s decision to issue Notice to Appear with fake immigration court dates,” Brian Casson, a Virginia-based immigration attorney, said in an email to CBS News.

In a statement Thursday morning, an ICE spokesperson said the agency was working with the Department of Justice “regarding the proper issuance of Notices to Appear.” The spokesperson said the government shutdown “delayed” that process, “resulting in an expected overflow of individuals appearing for immigration proceedings today/January 31.”

The fake notices stem from a Supreme Court ruling last summer. Prior to the decision, ICE officials used to send immigrants NTAs with date listed as “TBD” – or “to be determined.” The immigration court would issue the migrant an official hearing notice later, said Casson.

One effect of this: The NTAs could block an immigrant’s eligibility for “cancellation of removal,” a legal residency status granted to some undocumented immigrants after 10 uninterrupted years of living in the U.S. A NTA, even without a hearing date, would interrupt the 10-year “clock,” said Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based immigration attorney, in a telephone interview with CBS News.

A Supreme Court ruling last summer — Pereira v. Sessions — banned the practice, requiring all appearance notices to use actual dates.

However, systems weren’t in place for ICE to see the court’s schedule, so ICE issued fake dates instead. Immigrants were instructed to appear on weekends, midnight, and dates that just didn’t exist, like Sept. 31, multiple attorneys told CBS News.

On October 31, hundreds of immigrants received phony NTAs. They showed up to court for non-existent hearings to find “extraordinarily long lines,” according the recent alert from the immigration lawyers’ organization.

“It was complete dysfunction and confusion,” said McKinney.

The problem became so pervasive that on Dec. 21, the Executive Office of Immigration Review issued a rare policy memo telling ICE agents and DHS that courts would “reject any NTA in which the date or time of the scheduled hearing is facially incorrect.”

Matthew Kriezelman, a Chicago-based immigration attorney, has four clients with hearings scheduled for tomorrow. After checking with the court earlier this week, he found out that two of those appearances weren’t real: administrators had no record of the hearings and told Kriezelman his clients would have to wait until the court itself sent them a hearing date.

Kriezelman’s clients are among the lucky ones; experts estimate less than half of immigrants have legal representation. That means hundreds won’t realize their Jan. 31 hearing date was phony and will show up anyway, said Kriezelman.

The court in Chicago handles all the immigration cases in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, meaning many immigrants could be traveling for hours on Thursday morning for a hearing that doesn’t actually exist, Kriezelman said.

When they show up, nobody will be able to assist — because of the extreme cold weather, the Chicago immigration court is scheduled to be closed on Thursday, Kriezelman said.

Failure to show up to an immigration hearing can result in immediate removal proceeding, making immigrant especially wary when they hear they don’t need to come into court after all, said Kriezelman.

“They feel like someone is screwing with them or playing a terrible joke,” Kriezelman said. “It’s really confusing for a lot of people, especially ones that are unrepresented.”

Read more CBS News immigration coverage: The country’s busiest border crossing will allow 20 people to claim asylum a day. They used to take up to 100

These Central Americans have a second chance at asylum after being “unlawfully” deported. First ICE needs to bring them back

Every congressperson along southern border opposes border wall funding

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Bill and Kate must be “reading my mind.” Keep on exposing the truth about this cruel, dishonest, and incompetent Administration and all of the “ethics-free minions” who carry out often illegal orders! What goes around, comes around, folks.

Anybody and I mean anybody, could need a fair, impartial, and honest justice system at some point in life. Why are so many folks standing by and letting Trump and his toadies destroy it? Piece by piece, the most important foundations of our democracy are being destroyed right in plain daylight!

Also congrats to my good friend and long-time fellow member of the Beverley Hills Community United Methodist Church family Mike Tackett of the NY Times and his colleague Linda Qiu for their continuing outstanding coverage of the truth about Trump’s disingenuous, wasteful, and cruel immigration policies. You’re making a difference, Mike and Linda! Keep at it!

There was a time when dishonesty and falsely filling out official government documents (known as fraud or willful misrepresentation in some criminal law circles) would get a Government employee fired, prosecuted, or disciplined. Not any more. With our country headed by a grifter “Liar-in-Chief” “anything goes” unless you are a migrant, a minority, or a member of the LGBTQ community. In that case, expect “no mercy.”

Also remember that White Nationalist former AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions disingenuously pontificated about “the rule of law,” called DHS “a partner of EOIR,” and referred to immigration attorneys as “dirty lawyers.” He tried to cover up his gross mismanagement and political manipulation of the Immigration Courts by falsely blaming migrants, their attorneys, and the Immigration Judges themselves for the mess he himself, and also to a large extent DHS, caused.

He also spread false narratives about “widespread asylum fraud” and made the demonstrably false claim that asylum applicants were somehow a “major cause” of 11 million (mostly hard-working and law-abiding) “illegals” as he liked to contemptuously call them in his racist lingo. I doubt that there have even been 11 million asylum applicants total since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980.

Certainly, the causes for our “extra-legal” immigration system go far beyond alleged asylum fraud (which, in fact, does exist on a much smaller scale and in my experience is generally effectively uncovered, investigated, and aggressively prosecuted by DHS). They are a direct result of outdated and misguided policies that failed to recognize legitimate market forces in creating legal immigration categories and a failure to fully carry out in a good faith manner our humanitarian obligations under the refugee laws and international conventions.

Fact is, even if restrictionists like Sessions won’t admit it, the vast majority of the 11 million undocumented individuals should have been screened and admitted under our legal immigration system. The U.S. Government created the problem; so far, they have lacked the honesty, leadership, and courage to fix it in a fair and humane way that will benefit both our country and the migrants, current and future. Immigrants are America. And, except for our Native American brothers and sisters, we are all immigrants!

That’s why we have the “New Due Process Army!” Enlist today, and help fight the forces of “malicious incompetence” everywhere and for as long as it takes to win the battle and vindicate the Constitutional right of everyone in American to enjoy the benefits of Due Process of law.

PWS

01-31-19

INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”

http://time.com/longform/migrants/

Haley Sweetland Edwards writes in Time Magazine:

But they were willing to do whatever it took. Going back to Guatemala was simply not an option, they said. Monterroso explained that in October, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder the children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe, five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day and a half in their house and then sneaked away before dawn. “There is nobody that can protect us there,” Monterroso said. “We have seen in the other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Her voice caught. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids, “that nothing bad happens to them.”

All told, more than 159,000 migrants filed for asylum in the U.S. in fiscal year 2018, a 274% increase over 2008. Meanwhile, the total number of apprehensions along the southern border has decreased substantially—nearly 70% since fiscal year 2000. President Donald Trump has labeled the southern border a national crisis. He refused to sign any bill funding the federal government that did not include money for construction of a wall along the frontier, triggering the longest shutdown in American history, and when Democrats refused to budge, he threatened to formally invoke emergency powers. The President says the barrier, which was the centerpiece of his election campaign, is needed to thwart a dangerous “invasion” of undocumented foreigners.

But the situation on the southern border, however the political battle in Washington plays out, will continue to frustrate this U.S. President, and likely his successors too, and not just because of continuing caravans making their way to the desert southwest. Months of reporting by TIME correspondents around the world reveal a stubborn reality: we are living today in a global society increasingly roiled by challenges that can be neither defined nor contained by physical barriers. That goes for climate change, terrorism, pandemics, nascent technologies and cyber-attacks. It also applies to one of the most significant global developments of the past quarter-century: the unprecedented explosion of global migration.

. . . .

They abandoned their homes for different reasons: tens of millions went in search of better jobs or better education or medical care, and tens of millions more had no choice. More than 5.6 million fled the war in Syria, and a million more were Rohingya, chased from their villages in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands fled their neighborhoods in Central America and villages in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by poverty and violence. Others were displaced by catastrophic weather linked to climate change.

Taken one at a time, each is an individual, a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, hope and despair. But collectively, they represent something greater than the sum of their parts. The forces that pushed them from their homes have combined with a series of global factors that pulled them abroad: the long peace that followed the Cold War in the developed world, the accompanying expansion of international travel, liberalized policies for refugees and the relative wealth of developed countries, especially in Europe and the U.S., the No. 1 destination for migrants. The force is tidal and has not been reversed by walls, by separating children from their parents or by deploying troops. Were the world’s total population of international migrants in 2018 gathered from the places where they have sought new lives and placed under one flag, they would be its fifth largest country.

The mass movement of people has changed the world both for better and for worse. Migrants tend to be productive. Though worldwide they make up about 3% of the population, in 2015 they generated about 9% of global GDP, according to the U.N. Much of that money is wired home—$480 billion in 2017, also according to the U.N.—where the cash has immense impact. Some will pay for the passage of the next migrant, and the smartphone he or she will keep close at hand. The technology not only makes the journey more efficient and safer—smugglers identify their clients by photos on instant-messaging—but, upon arrival, allows those who left to keep in constant contact with those who remain behind, across oceans and time zones.

Yet attention of late is mostly focused on the impact on host countries. There, national leaders have grappled with a powerful irony: the ways in which they react to new migrants—tactically, politically, culturally—shape them as much as the migrants themselves do. In some countries, migrants have been welcomed by crowds at train stations. In others, images of migrants moving in miles-long caravans through Central America or spilling out of boats on Mediterranean shores were wielded to persuade native-born citizens to lock down borders, narrow social safety nets and jettison long-standing humanitarian commitments to those in need.

. . . .

The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.

These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.

. . . .

But protocols and treaties can, at best, hope to respond to the human emotions and hard realities that drive migration. No wall, sheriff or headscarf law would have prevented Monterroso and Calderón, or Yaquelin and Albertina Contreras, or Sami Baladi and Mirey Darwich from leaving their homes. Migrants will continue to flee bombs, look for better-paying jobs and accept extraordinary risks as the price of providing a better life for their children.

The question now is whether the world can come to define the enormous population of international migrants as an opportunity. No matter when that happens, Eman Albadawi, a teacher from Syria who arrived in Anröchte, Germany, in 2015, will continue to make a habit of reading German-language children’s books to her three Syrian-born kids at night. Their German is better than hers, and they make fun of her pronunciation, but she doesn’t mind. She is proud of them. At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, she tells them, “We must be brave, but we must also be successful and strong.” —With reporting by Aryn Baker/Anröchte, Germany; Melissa Chan, Julia Lull, Gina Martinez, Thea Traff/New York; Ioan Grillo/Tijuana; Abby Vesoulis/Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Vivienne Walt/Paris •

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I strongly encourage everyone to read Haley’s outstanding article at the link. It is one of the best and most easily understandable explanations of a complex phenomenon that I have seen recently. As I always say, “lots of moving parts.” But Haley and her colleagues have distilled the fundamental truths concealed by this complexity. Congrats and appreciation to Haley and everyone who worked on this masterpiece!

Haley debunks and eviscerates the restrictionist, racist “fear and loathing” baloney that Trump and his White Nationalist gang peddle. The simple truth always has been and continues to be that America needs more immigration.

The only real question is whether we are going to be smart and funnel it into expanded legal and humanitarian channels or dumb like Trump and push the inevitable migration into an extra-legal system. The latter best serves neither our country nor the humans pushed into an underground existence where they can be exploited and are artificially prevented from achieving their full potential for themselves and for us. Right now, we have a mix skewed toward forcing far, far too many good folks to use the extra-legal system.

We’ll only be able to improve the situation by pushing the mix toward the legal and the humanitarian, rather than the extra-legal. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to have a rational immigration debate with folks like Trump who start with the racist-inspired fiction that migrants are a “threat” who can be deterred, punished, and diminished.

Contrary to Trump and the White Nationalists, the real immigration problems facing America are 1) how can we best integrate the millions of law-abiding and productive undocumented individuals already residing here into our society, and 2) how can we most fairly and efficiently insure that in the future individuals like them can be properly screened and come to our country through expanded humanitarian and legal channels. Until we resolve these, American will continue to founder with immigration and fail to maximize its many benefits. That’s bad for us, for migrants, and for the future of our nation.

As a reminder, in the context of Congressional negotiations on border security, I recently put together a list of “practical fixes” to the immigration system which would address border security, humanitarian relief, and improved compliance with Constitutional Due process without major legislative changes — mostly “tweaks” and other common sense amendments that would make outsized improvements and certainly would be an improvement on squandering $5.7 billion and getting nothing but a largely symbolic “instant white elephant” border wall in return. So, here it is again in all its hypothetical glory: “THE SMARTS ACT OF 2019:

https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3E3

SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019

Federal Employees

Restart the Government

Retroactive pay raise

Enhanced Border Security

Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”

Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers

Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff

Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors

Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs

Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS

Anything else that both parties agree upon

Humanitarian Assistance

Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers

Prohibit family separation

Funding for alternatives to detention

Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues

Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle

Asylum Process

Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”

Immigration Court Improvements

Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants

Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs

Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications

Vacate Matter of Castro-Tum and reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases

Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”

Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances

Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts

Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings

Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal

Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days

Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members

Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction

Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year

Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”

Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied

Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB

International Cooperation

Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.

Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle

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No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!

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PWS

01-27-19

GEORGE WILL @ WASHPOST: AMERICA’S “CLOWN PRINCE” 🤡

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-a-misery-it-must-be-to-be-donald-trump/2019/01/18/d0e05eea-1a82-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html

George Will writes:

Half or a quarter of the way through this interesting experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation has become accustomed to daily mortifications. Or has lost its capacity for embarrassment, which is even worse.

If the country’s condition is calibrated simply by economic data — if, that is, the United States is nothing but an economy — then the state of the union is good. Except that after two years of unified government under the party that formerly claimed to care about fiscal facts and rectitude, the nation faces a $1 trillion deficit during brisk growth and full employment. Unless the president has forever banished business cycles — if he has, his modesty would not have prevented him from mentioning it — the next recession will begin with gargantuan deficits, which will be instructive.

The president has kept his promise not to address the unsustainable trajectory of the entitlement state (about the coming unpleasant reckoning, he said: “Yeah, but I won’t be here”), and his party’s congressional caucuses have elevated subservience to him into a political philosophy. The Republican-controlled Senate — the world’s most overrated deliberative body — will not deliberate about, much less pass, legislation the president does not favor. The evident theory is that it would be lèse-majesté for the Senate to express independent judgments.

And that senatorial dignity is too brittle to survive the disapproval of a president not famous for familiarity with actual policies. Congressional Republicans have their ears to the ground — never mind Winston Churchill’s observation that it is difficult to look up to anyone in that position.

The president’s most consequential exercise of power has been the abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, opening the way for China to fill the void of U.S. involvement. His protectionism — government telling Americans what they can consume, in what quantities and at what prices — completes his extinguishing of the limited-government pretenses of the GOP, which needs an entirely new vocabulary. Pending that, the party is resorting to crybaby conservatism: We are being victimized by “elites,” markets, Wall Street, foreigners, etc.

After 30 years of U.S. diplomatic futility regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the artist of the deal spent a few hours in Singapore with Kim Jong Un, then tweeted: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” What price will the president pay — easing sanctions? ending joint military exercises with South Korea? — in attempts to make his tweet seem less dotty?

Opinion | Trump owns the Republican Party, and there’s no going back

President Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history. (Adriana Usero, Danielle Kunitz, Robert Gebelhoff/The Washington Post)

By his comportment, the president benefits his media detractors with serial vindications of their disparagements. They, however, have sunk to his level of insufferable self-satisfaction by preening about their superiority to someone they consider morally horrifying and intellectually cretinous. For most Americans, President Trump’s expostulations are audible wallpaper, always there but not really noticed. Still, the ubiquity of his outpourings in the media’s outpourings gives American life its current claustrophobic feel. This results from many journalists considering him an excuse for a four-year sabbatical from thinking about anything other than the shiny thing that mesmerizes them by dangling himself in front of them.

Dislike of him should be tempered by this consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad specimen. It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump. He seems to have as many friends as his pluperfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in an entirely transactional life. His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a house where much magnificent history has been made. His childlike ignorance — preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion — concerning governance and economics guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartener at a seminar on string theory.

Which is why this fountain of self-refuting boasts (“I have a very good brain”) lies so much. He does so less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself. And as balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his likely contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters’ loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.

Either the electorate, bored with a menu of faintly variant servings of boorishness, or the 22nd Amendment will end this, our shabbiest but not our first shabby presidency. As Mark Twain and fellow novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside together one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked, “Do you think it will stop?” Twain replied, “It always has.”

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Stripped of its detracting “jabs at the opposition” and the “obligatory swat” at the essential safety net that actually keeps America functioning, even in tough political times like these, Will largely has Trump “pegged.” As others and I have said, the Trump Administration is “Kakistocracy in action.”

But, what took you so long, George, to “get religion?” For years, the GOP has been pushing a “soulless,” intentionally divisive, program of “beggar thy neighbor” and promoting the “worst in America.”

It’s not like equally sad and unfit GOP politicos such as Steve King, Tom Trancedo, Roy Moore, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach, Corey Stewart, and Stephen Miller just “hatched” during the Trump regime. Trump is the logical outcome of a “valueless conservatism” that has embraced some of the vilest individuals and ideas in modern American political history in a (somewhat successful) minority attempt to seize power from the majority of Americans and to govern against the overall public interest.

No surprise that a party bankrupt of both constructive conservative ideas and morality should end up installing a sad an unqualified character like Trump as its “Supreme Leader.” Trumpism is deeply rooted in modern American conservatism, not the “compassionate” kind of Bush I (which unfortunately was “DOA” within the party) but the vile brand that glosses over its racial and class overtones and its erroneous conception that the rich have every right to loot America and leave the crumbs to everyone else.

Yes, I think that America needs and deserves a credible “conservative movement” to engage in an honest governing dialogue with the Democrats. What might that conservative movement look like:

Constructive concern about runaway deficits and borrowing from the PRC;
Recognition of the threat that Russia and the PRC are to America’s future;
Commitment to secular governing principles (perhaps embodying, but not improperly favoring, some religious values) and support of the rights of all covered by our Constitution regardless of status;
Encouraging and enabling all qualified Americans to vote;
Congress retaking the authority to declare war and pass budgets and restricting Executive overreach (by both parties) in these areas;
Prudence in entering into future “foreign military adventures;”
A robust, effective, and efficient national defense that is held accountable for expenditures, strategies, and results;
Maintenance, funding, improvements, and accountability mechanisms for adequate safety net programs including social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare;
An end to unnecessary tax breaks for the rich that strip the U.S. Treasury of necessary revenues without advancing any national agenda;
An end to “Government shutdown” forever and a pledge to respect the contributions of “America’s Crown Jewel:” our nonpartisan, professional, honest Civil Service;
Return of some authority to states, not as a device for “bogus” budget savings and to screw the poor and minorities, but to recognize and take advantage of areas where states are committed to actually funding and carrying out programs that produce better (not just cheaper) results than the Feds can;
Much more robust legal immigration and refugee acceptance programs;
A sharp reduction in wasteful funding for Federal detention of all kinds (including immigration detention) and the mandated use of alternatives that will work and benefit society;
Encouraging educational and economic development initiatives by the private sector in economically depressed areas (such as the Midwest and Appalachia) ;
Encouraging a robust trade agenda that provides mutual benefits to both the U.S. and our trading partners.

That would involve not only ditching Trump, but also abandoning the racially charged, fiscally wasteful, White Nationalist agendas that drive both him and his base and committing to governing in the public interest — in and of itself a key conservative principle.

We need an end to the “Clown Kakistocracy.” And, that will require some honest conservative support by a “new conservative” movement. I doubt that it can be headed by Trump sycophant, xenophobic enabler, and far right religious bigot Veep Mike Pence. Perhaps, however, folks like George have a constructive role to play in fashioning, inspiring, and leading it!

PWS

01-21-19

JIM WALLIS @ SOJOURNERS: Things Will Get Worse Under Trump; Moral Resistance Is Essential: “[Trump] almost perfectly exemplifies the worst of America — the ugliest things in our history and the greatest dangers to our future.“

https://sojo.net/articles/its-going-get-worse-america-it-gets-better-2019-opportunity

Jim Wallis writes:

Most people have consistently underestimated Donald Trump. When he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy by attacking and demonizing non-white immigrants, people should have understood that Trump would likely win the Republican nomination and possibly the election.

Why? Because Donald Trump appeals to the worst of America. His promotion of fear, division, hate, racism, xenophobia, rallying of white nationalism, mistreatment of women, purposeful denial of truth, and consummate love of money, power, and fame are, of course, nothing new in America. Neither are his desire to destroy democracy, love for authoritarian rulers or desire to be one. Indeed, there is nothing new about Donald Trump, but he almost perfectly exemplifies the worst of America — the ugliest things in our history and the greatest dangers to our future.

Now let’s move from the political and moral to the theological and spiritual: These traits and actions also represent the worst of humanity. To seek money and power over all else, to consistently put yourself over all others, to make private self-interest the only the goal of life and overturn any sense of the common good, to create conflict to win and make all others into losers, to constantly lie and try to kill the truth, to make exploitation and abuse the definition of sexuality, to be as violent in word and deed as you can get away with, to never answer to God or seek forgiveness — there are examples of these sins throughout the Bible and human history. They are also, unfortunately, what our country’s leader seems to stand for, what he promotes in our culture, and what he models for our children.

Given all of this, we are in great danger. Strongmen are rising all over the world, and Donald Trump supports them — and even wants to be one of them. Trump started out the New Year tweeting the country’s support to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new right-wing nationalist leader. Just this week, he articulated an ahistorical understanding of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that seemed to condone or even endorse the Soviet action. His version of that chapter in world history is one that sounds much closer to what Moscow propaganda might say rather than what an American president or relatively neutral historians would describe. Among the current global strongmen, Trump is certainly not the most intelligent, but he may be the most dangerous because of his political position.

READ: #EleNão Movement Confronts ‘Brazilian Trump’

Strongmen, autocrats, and dictators don’t all do the same things. They do whatever they can to maximize their own wealth, power, and fame. The only thing that prevents them from going as far as they can is the resiliency of a society’s institutions and social sectors — like the media, the judiciary, political parties, law enforcement, civil society, and places of vocational or historical moral authority like faith communities.

So how are we faring on those fronts?

Press: In our current political situation, a new generation of young reporters are showing great resiliency in the new Trump era, revealing the facts that undermine official lies and offering analysis that seeks to hold power accountable.

Judiciary: Trump appointments at the Supreme Court and Circuit Court levels are gradually politicizing the judiciary to rule in favor of his interests, white interests, and corporate interests.

Political Parties: After winning the midterm elections, the Democratic Party has retaken the House of Representatives. For the first time, we have 100 women in the Congress and the most diverse House in our history. With Speaker Nancy Pelosi retaking the gavel, we will now see what kind of checks and balances to the executive branch that can provide. But the Republican Party has been taken over by the president’s base and retained a Senate majority that has been unwilling to oppose him — or ever vote to remove him from office, which only the Senate can do with a 2/3 majority vote, even if the House were to impeach him.

Law Enforcement: Trump has continued to attack the Justice Department and relentlessly seeks to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation into his campaign’s involvement with Russia. Trump’s behavior in response to the investigation of him and his campaign puts the rule of law into jeopardy, depending on how his administration reacts to the results and reports of the Robert Mueller-led investigation.

Civil Society: Will the civil society seek to hold the government responsible for civility in the way that it governs? So far, nonprofit organizations focused on good government, exposing corruption, and protecting the vulnerable have done important work in galvanizing massive protests at key moments of danger or significance, as well as leading or joining key court cases that have sought to rein in some of the worst travesties of the administration, like the monstrous policy of family separation at the border.

Faith Communities: On the religion side, white evangelicals have been the most supportive of Trump as their Religious Right has entered a transactional, Faustian bargain with his administration, agreeing to look away from Trump’s immoral behavior and brutal treatment of those Jesus called “the least of these” in exchange for the judicial appointments and conservative economic policies they support. Others, like the Reclaiming Jesus movement, with Sojourners involvement, have proclaimed that the gospel itself is at stake in the faith community’s response to Trump. This year will be “an hour of decision,” to use Billy Graham’s old language, for the faith community’s testimony in the face of Donald Trump’s corrupt and cruel practices and policies, which are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

WATCH: Reclaiming Jesus in a Time of Crisis

In 2019, I believe things are going to get worse in America before they get better. We now face grave dangers to democracy itself, and to societal moral decency. But that danger also provides us an opportunity: to go deeper into our faith and into our relationships to each other, especially across racial lines, and into relationship with the most vulnerable people in our society — a practice our faith says will change us. If we do go deeper, this moment could become a movement for all the things that many of us have consistently lived and fought for all our lives. If we don’t go deeper, but just continue to react or ultimately retreat into frustration and cynicism, we will indeed be in great danger.

Many of us faith leaders believe a constitutional crisis is coming in 2019, which will also create a crisis of faith to which we will be called to respond. A dangerous overreach of presidential power could come in response to the ultimate results of the Special Counsel’s report and potential further indictments of Trump’s associates, potentially his family members, or even himself for criminal behavior. Attempts to cover up or obscure the results could be a serious obstruction of justice that undermines the very rule of law in this country. We could also see other executive overreaches like choosing to shut down the government over vanity projects, the prosecution of dangerous wars, the censorship of the press, attacks on opponents, more assaults on migrants and the most vulnerable, and, most frighteningly, the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

If we start to see that executive overreach as distraction, there must be a moral response. And the response of faith communities could be a game changer. I believe it is time to prepare for that response from the followers of Jesus. Stay tuned and prayerfully get ready.

Jim Wallis

Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners. His new Audible spoken-word series, Jim Wallis In Conversation, is available now, as is his book, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a

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Amen! That’s why the efforts of the New Due Process Army are so important to the survival of our republic.

PWS

01-06-19

CONGRATS: Kansas Removes Racist Grifter Kris Kobach From State-Funded Welfare Rolls, Ending Years Of Abuse Of Public Funds!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/kris-kobach-loses-kansas-governors-race.html

Mark Joseph Stern write in Slate:

THE SLATEST

Notorious Vote Thief and Incompetent Gubernatorial Candidate Kris Kobach Loses in Kansas

By MARK JOSEPH STERN

Failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach speaks at a rally with President Donald Trump in Topeka, Kansas.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The nation’s most notorious vote thief has gone down in flames.

On Tuesday night, Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach lostthe governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly. Kobach built his career on voter suppression, whipping up nativist fervor by claiming that a large number of noncitizens are casting ballots. (They aren’t.) He led Donald Trump’s failed voter-fraud commission, then eked out a victory in the Republican gubernatorial primary against current GOP Gov. Jeff Colyer. But even in deep-red Kansas, voters appear to have rebelled against his brand of paranoid, xenophobic conservatism.

Although Kobach built up a national profile as a formidable politician, he is, in fact, deeply incompetent. He spent years promoting Crosscheck, a program that ostensibly detected double voting but actually had an error rate of 99.5 percent. He pushed a law that compelled Kansans to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, then defended it himself at trial—at which point it became clear that he doesn’t understand basic rules of civil procedure. A federal judge repeatedly reprimanded him during the hearings, then ruled against him and held him in contempt of court.

As Kobach struggled to defend his signature law, he led Trump’s voter-fraud commission right off a cliff. His own co-commissioners openly criticized him for lying about the existence of fraud. One sued him for concealing key documents from him; after a federal judge demanded that Kobach turn over the documents, he disbanded the commission instead. To save face, Kobach claimed he would take his work to the Department of Homeland Security—a claim that the DHS swiftly rebuked.

Then there was the 2018 Republican primary in Kansas. From an administrative standpoint, the election was an absolute disaster. Officials failed to predict major turnout, leading to endless lines and delays. A number of new voting machines, on which the state spent millions of dollars, also failed. The blame fell upon Kobach, who spent his tenure as secretary of state pursuing phantom voter fraud instead of doing his job and ensuring that elections ran smoothly.

Now Kobach has faced the biggest humiliation of them all: He lost to a Democrat, in Kansas. All his voter suppression schemes—his proof-of-citizenship measure, his poll closures—could not pull him over the finish line. Kobach alienated much of the Republican establishment during his brawl with Colyer, and his flagrant maladministration of the voter fraud commission seems to have hurt his relationship with Trump. There is simply no clear path forward for his political career after Tuesday’s defeat. Kobach has always been a loser. Now he is a loser out of a job.

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For years, Kobach has been misusing his (largely ministerial) position as Kansas’s Secretary of State as a cover for his nationwide effort to implement a bogus White Nationalist agenda that encourages voter suppression and invidious discrimination against Latinos and other individuals of color in various states and localities.

Judges throughout the country have largely slammed his efforts, leaving taxpayers holding the bag with huge legal bills. As noted by Stern, Kobach, a congenital liar who operates in an “ethics free zone,” has been held in contempt of court. Also as noted by Stern, he has royally screwed up his minor, yet potentially significant, job as Kansas Secretary of State. That’s the kind of “expertise” and “leadership” that has spawned the Trump-Sessions racist White Nationalist takeover of the GOP.

Thanks and congratulations to Kansas voters for having the wisdom and decency to “just say no” to this toxic dude, and force him to go out an earn an honest living. Something for which to date he has shown little aptitude. All goes to show that a Yale Law Degree isn’t proof against being a biased incompetent idiot.

PWS

11-09-18

MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/jeff-sessions-donald-trump-resign-disgrace.html

Stern writes:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned on Wednesday at the request of Donald Trump. He served a little less than two years as the head of the Department of Justice. During that time, Sessions used his immense power to make America a crueler, more brutal place. He was one of the most sadistic and unscrupulous attorneys general in American history.

At the Department of Justice, Sessions enforced the law in a manner that harmed racial minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. He rolled backObama-era drug sentencing reforms in an effort to keep nonviolent offenders locked away for longer. He reversed a policy that limited the DOJ’s use of private prisons. He undermined consent decrees with law enforcement agencies that had a history of misconduct and killed a program that helped local agencies bring their policing in line with constitutional requirements. And he lobbied against bipartisan sentencing reform, falsely claiming that such legislation would benefit “a highly dangerous cohort of criminals.”

Sessions’ attack on immigrants was equally ruthless. He compelled immigration judges to order the deportation of more unauthorized immigrants and punished them when they did not. He barred most victims of domestic violence from seeking asylum in the United States, deporting survivors back to their persecutors. He attempted to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, subjecting hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to deportation but was too inept to do so lawfully. He tried to prevent states and cities from protecting immigrants within their borders. And he implemented the “zero tolerance” family separation policy, imprisoning thousands of individuals at the border for the misdemeanor of unlawful entry, then seizing their children and locking them in cages. (Hundreds of these kids are still separatedfrom their parents.)

Meanwhile, Sessions mobilized the DOJ’s attorneys to torture immigrant minors in other ways. He fought in court to keep undocumented teenagers pregnant against their will, defending the Trump administration’s decision to block their access to abortion. His Justice Department made the astonishing claim that the federal government could decide that forced birth was in the “best interest” of children. It also revealed these minors’ pregnancies to family members who threatened to abuse them. And when the American Civil Liberties Union defeated this position in court, his DOJ launched a failed legal assault on individual ACLU lawyers for daring to defend their clients.

As he oversaw family separation, forced birth, and mass incarceration, Sessions found time to degrade LGBTQ Americans and their families. He issued a memo alleging that federal civil rights laws do not protect transgender employees, a position the Justice Department recently reiterated to the Supreme Court. He also argued that these civil rights laws do not protect gay people. His DOJ defended Trump’s ban on open transgender military service by claiming that trans people are disordered deviants. Under his leadership, the DOJ also asked the Supreme Court to rule that many businesses have a First Amendment right to turn away same-sex couples. (Sessions gave a speech to the anti-LGBTQ group that brought that case to SCOTUS, thanking them for their “important work” on behalf of religious liberty.)

The guiding principle of Sessions’ career is animus toward people who are unlike him. While serving in the Senate, he voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it expressly protected LGBTQ women. He opposed immigration reform, including relief for young people brought to America by their parents as children. He voted against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He voted against a federal hate crime bill protecting gay people. Before that, as Alabama attorney general, he tried to prevent LGBTQ students from meeting at a public university. But as U.S. attorney general, he positioned himself as an impassioned defender of campus free speech.

While Sessions doesn’t identify as a white nationalist, his agenda as attorney general abetted the cause of white nationalism. His policies were designed to make the country more white by keeping out Hispanics and locking up blacks. His tenure will remain a permanent stain on the Department of Justice. Thousands of people were brutalized by his bigotry, and our country will not soon recover from the malice he unleashed.

His successor could be even worse.

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Can’t overstate the intentional damage that this immoral, intellectually dishonest, and bigoted man has done to millions of human lives and the moral and legal fabric of our country. “The Father of the New American Gulag,” America’s most notorious unpunished child abuser, and the destroyer of Due Process in our U.S. Immigration Courts are among a few of his many unsavory legacies!

The scary thing: Stern is right — “His successor could be even worse.” If so, the survival of our Constitution and our nation will be at risk!

PWS

11-06-18

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S CRUEL ANTI-REFUGEE POLICIES CREATE HEARTACHE FOR APPLETON MAN SEPARATED FROM FAMILY!

https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/2018/11/05/appleton-refugee-struggles-reunite-family-amid-trump-policies/1811031002/

Chris Mueller reports for the Appleton Post Crescent:

As Trump administration slashes refugee limits, Appleton refugee tries to reunite family

Chris Mueller, Appleton Post-CrescentPublished 8:46 a.m. CT Nov. 5, 2018 | Updated 12:49 p.m. CT Nov. 5, 2018

(Photo: Wm. Glasheen/USA TODAY NETWORK-W)

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APPLETON – Heritier Muhorana talks to his wife and daughter every day.

He can hear their voices on the phone. He can look at their faces on a screen. But for more than three years, he hasn’t seen them in person.

In 2000, Muhorana fled horrific violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the relative safety of crowded refugee camps in Burundi, a neighboring country in central Africa.

Muhorana met his wife, Chantal, in one of those refugee camps. That’s where they got married. But in late 2014, Muhorana was approved for resettlement in the U.S. — a process that took nearly two years and began before he was married.

He came alone to the U.S. in 2015, expecting his wife would be able to join him soon after. That didn’t happen. His daughter, Deborah, will be 3 years old in December. He has never met her in person.

His wife and daughter left the refugee camps and now live in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. They’re working with World Relief Fox Valley in an effort to get to the U.S., but so far haven’t been successful.

DONATE: Help Stock the Shelves fight hunger in your community

Muhorana tries to stay positive, but it’s difficult not to be frustrated. He doesn’t know when his family will be back together.

“This experience will never happen to me again,” he said. “It’s a very bad experience, not to be with your family.”

RELATED: ‘A biblical issue’: World Relief official offers different perspective on immigration

RELATED:Refugees find ‘place to call home’ in Appleton

The situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. The number of refugees being allowed to settle in the U.S. has sharply fallen in the last two years.

In September, the Trump administration announced a plan to limit the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S. this fiscal year to 30,000, down from a limit of 45,000 set last fiscal year — already the lowest since Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980. The limit during the final year of the Obama administration was 110,000.

Despite the limit of 45,000 last fiscal year, the U.S. only admitted 22,491 refugees, which is the lowest number in decades, according to State Department records.

About 25.4 million refugees exist worldwide, according the U.N. refugee agency.

The number of refugees arriving in northeast Wisconsin has also significantly declined in the last two years. World Relief Fox Valley, which has offices in Appleton and Oshkosh, had 209 arrivals in fiscal year 2016. That fell to 70 in fiscal year 2017 and 57 in fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30.

World Relief Fox Valley immigration specialist Ashley Hill and immigration manager Phil Stoffel work in their office in Appleton. (Photo: Wm. Glasheen/USA TODAY NETWORK-W)

Phil Stoffel, immigration manager for World Relief Fox Valley, said the situation for refugees trying to bring close relatives to the U.S. has gotten more difficult recently.

“People all across the nation in networks and affiliates that we work with are telling me they’re not getting any answers for any of these cases right now,” he said.

Many refugees have started to lose trust in the system they’re relying on to help them, Stoffel said. World Relief Fox Valley has at least 50 cases of refugees trying to bring close relatives to the U.S., but it doesn’t appear anything is going to change in the near future, he said.

“There’s no other way to explain what’s going on,” he said. “The politics in this are really bad right now.”

Stoffel has one piece of advice to anyone unsure whether the U.S. should welcome refugees at all: meet one.

“Once you meet one, it changes,” he said.

‘A very tough moment’

In 1998, Muhorana fled with his family from their village in Katanga, a former province in the southern part of Congo. The country was descending into war. He was just 12 years old.

He still remembers the night they left. It was about 6 p.m. That’s when they started walking. They didn’t stop until about 2 p.m. the next day. And his family wasn’t alone.

“Thousands of people moving at one time, just walking,” he said. “It was very painful.”

Muhorana didn’t bring much with him, other than what he could carry. He remembers a cousin asking him to hold a bottle for her baby, to help her as they were walking.

They walked for weeks without enough food to eat and in constant danger of being caught up in the violence unfolding around them.

“At that time, what mattered was just to save our lives,” he said.

But they couldn’t always avoid the fighting. The exposure to violence left many people traumatized — or worse, Muhorana said.

“I saw some people who were hurt or shot, some other people were killed on the way,” he said. “It was a very tough moment.”

Muhorana, though, safely found his way to Kalemie, a town on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, where a relief organization provided food to the crowd of refugees. He stayed there for more than a month, but safety was still a concern.

““At that time, what mattered was just to save our lives.””

Heritier Muhorana

He eventually continued north to South Kivu, a province near the border with Burundi, and stayed there for almost two years, despite treacherous living conditions. He stayed in churches or schools, often in close quarters with thousands of other people.

“We didn’t have enough food to eat. We didn’t have medical assistance,” he said. “So, everything was just a little bit. It wasn’t enough.”

Disease was a problem, too. Many people got sick. Some died. But safety from the violence remained the primary concern, Muhorana said.

“People were still being killed there,” he said.

He couldn’t think about his plans for the future. The situation didn’t allow it. So, in an effort to find peace and a place he could think about his goals in life, he and his family decided to flee for Burundi.

‘We were limited’

Muhorana was a teenager by the time his family crossed the border into Burundi and arrived at their first refugee camp. They stayed for more than a year, then were forced to move to another camp in the northeast part of country.

The violence unfolding in Congo was behind them. But in the camps, his family encountered other problems. Sickness, mostly.

“I would see people dying every month, every year,” Muhorana said. “You bury a lot of people.”

Their camp was packed with about 10,000 people, he said. And it wasn’t the only camp around. Burundi had multiple refugee camps set up for those fleeing across the border.

The camp was not a good place to live, Muhorana said. He felt trapped, unable to go anywhere without asking permission first.

“When you are young, you have dreams. You have goals. You have ambition. You have something in your heart you desire to achieve,” he said. “In the camp, we were limited.”

Still, despite the limitations, Muhorana found a way to work toward a better life. He left the camp after a few years and made his way to Rwanda, a country to the north of Burundi. There, he was able to finish high school and get a college scholarship, which he used to earn a bachelor’s degree in business.

Then, in 2013, Muhorana returned to the camp, where his family still lived. That’s when he met the woman who later became his wife. She had fled a similar situation in Congo and was already living in the camp when he returned.

““I would see people dying every month, every year. You bury a lot of people.””

Heritier Muhorana

He found a lot to like about her, Muhorana said, but her generosity stood out to him. The prospect of getting married in the camp wasn’t ideal, he said. But, in 2015, without other options, that’s exactly what he did.

He hadn’t specifically planned on coming to the U.S. — he simply wanted to find a country where he could live a normal life. But when he was approved for resettlement in the U.S., the prospect excited him.

“We were thinking that maybe life was going to be different than what we have here,” he said.

The process of getting approved for resettlement took nearly two years. And when it was over, Muhorana didn’t get to choose where he was sent. His wife, who hadn’t yet been approved, wouldn’t be able to join him.

“We couldn’t travel together because I was already at the final step,” he said. “I was already ready to come.”

So, with no other choice, he left on his own.

‘Change will come’

Muhorana didn’t speak English — not much, at least — when he arrived in the U.S. in 2015. And that was far from the only challenge he faced.

He was thrilled to arrive, but those first few years weren’t easy at all, he said. The culture was entirely new to him and it took time to adjust.

“I couldn’t imagine that I would have friends and I would get familiar with people here,” he said.

World Relief Fox Valley has services meant to help refugees acclimate to life in the U.S., said Tami McLaughlin, the organization’s executive director.

The organization recruits volunteers who spend time with refugees and serve as companions and valuable sources of information, McLaughlin said.

“Those friendships make the difference in how well somebody transitions into a completely new culture and community,” she said.

To do basic things, such as apply for a job, enroll a child in school, or get health care, can be overwhelming at first for refugees who are often simply relieved to be safe, McLaughlin said.

“You celebrate the little wins and take the little steps,” she said.

RELATED: They help refugees find Wisconsin homes despite political battles

RELATED:Refugee family marks 5 years in Oshkosh

As much as Muhorana tries to remain optimistic about his future, it’s difficult not to be upset with his wife and daughter living thousands of miles away, he said.

The conversations he has with them tend to focus, almost inevitably, on when they might see each other again.They’re still working hard to have a life together, despite the distance between them.

“I try to share my life, my experience here, so I can tell them the difference,” he said.

Muhorana has been working with Stoffel, the immigration manager, for about two years to get his wife and daughter to the U.S., but it’s unclear how much progress they’ve made.

“I can’t begin to tell you how much paperwork we’ve had to file and go through,” Stoffel said. “It’s just a constant back-and-forth with no clear answers from the government.”

Any refugee trying to enter the U.S. has to go through exhaustive background checks, according to U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. Muhorana’s wife and daughter both have passed those checks, but attempts to get updates on the status of their case have gone unanswered, Stoffel said.

But despite the frustration and the length of time the couple has spent apart, his wife is still excited by the idea of coming to the U.S., Muhorana said.

“She can dream of a bright future too,” he said.

For now, Muhorana will wait. It’s all he can do.

“In life, nothing is permanent,” he said. “Everything is subject to change. So, change will come.”

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FROM THE USA TODAY NETWORK

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