Category: Immigration

DeSantis Dickitude

The Daily Escape:

Cathedral Valley, Capitol Reef NP – September 2022 photo by Mary Warner

Pretty sure everyone saw the news about planes landing on Martha’s Vineyard full of Venezuelan immigrants. From the NYT:

“The migrant group, which included children, arrived on two planes around 3 p.m. without any warning, said State Senator Julian Cyr, a Massachusetts Democrat representing Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. Officials and volunteers from the island’s six towns “really moved heaven and earth to essentially set up the response that we would do in the event of a hurricane,”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) took credit for sending the planes with migrants. This is frat-boy behavior from a dick Republican governor. Not to be outdone in showing his big dickitude, Texas governor Greg Abbott (R) sent two busloads of migrants to the home of VP Kamala Harris in Washington DC.

DeSantis isn’t the first to do this. The JFK Library twitter account reminds us that in 1962:

“To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called “Reverse Freedom Rides,” giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.”

Maybe DeSantis and Abbott should have read a few history books before deciding to ban books.

DeSantis knows that Florida is home to 60% of the Cubans living in the US. These immigrants fled to the US to escape poverty, violence, and a Communist dictatorship. Many didn’t follow immigration laws at the time. More still try to reach Florida every week. Is DeSantis saying that he doesn’t want Venezuelan migrants but sure, more Cuban migrants are ok?

MA State Rep. Dylan Fernandes, whose district includes Martha’s Vineyard, tweeted: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The Governor of one of the biggest states in the nation has been spending time hatching a secret plot to round up & ship people—children, families-lying to them about where [they’re] going just to gain cheap political points on Tucker [Carlson] and MAGA twitter….These immigrants were not met with chaos, they were met with compassion. We are a community & nation that is stronger because of immigrants.”

Another thing: Have these plane/bus operators committed crimes? Airlines usually file manifests about who is onboard and where they’re going. Why would they, most likely private/charter operators, agree to be part of a political stunt?

The companies that transported the migrants should be told that while Abbot or DeSantis can hire them, the transport companies also have legal obligations to their passengers. If the charter companies are MAGA and won’t comply, they could have their permission to operate revoked.

And one more thing: Why are people who may not qualify for asylum being sent to other parts of the US rather than being sent back to their country of origin? And by self-professed law-and-order type governors?

DeSantis says he’s a Christian, but he’s not clothing the naked or feeding the hungry. He’s doing the opposite: Driving them from his state, not because it’s required legally, but because he can use them to advance his political ambitions. He’s using vulnerable human beings for his personal advancement. That’s evil personified.

Are we now a country of political gotcha? Should Chicago and NYC send their gang bangers to Florida and Texas? What do any of these stunts solve? From Digby about DeSantis:

“…his despicably cruel, racist worldview has been embraced by conservative Christians [for] as long as I can remember. Certainly in the years after 9/11 it was on display everywhere you looked. Their view of Christianity is that Jesus loves white people like them, period. Everyone else can literally go to hell.”

There is nothing Christian or Conservative about what DeSantis did. The folks in Martha’s Vineyard, who welcomed the immigrants, were the ones who acted as Christians. DeSantis is surely aware of the passage in Matthew:

“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.”

The requirement of that passage is what a Christian church on Martha’s Vineyard did to help these migrants. All that DeSantis and his friends do is complain that they can’t have their preferred prayers said in public schools.

Christian nationalism as it is practiced today in the US is becoming the worst and most destructive heresies to afflict American Christians. More about this tomorrow.

This incident on Martha’s Vineyard is another reminder that a central conceit of Republican politics is that everyone is secretly as cruel as they are. And because of that, no one would be genuinely willing to help the people Republicans pack into planes and buses and ship off to liberal land.

They’re wrong.

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Saturday Soother – October 23, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Ryder Beach, Truro, Cape Cod, MA – October 2021 iPhone photo by Wrongo.

A few words about the failure of the Protect the Vote Act to get to the Senate floor: Wrongo doesn’t understand why people are so worried about this. We all understood that Manchin and Sinema needed time to go through their attempt at bipartisanship, to find 10 Republicans who believed in voting. These Senators tried, but it didn’t work out. That’s not surprising, and it’s not like we lost a lot of time – once summer comes and we get to August, we’ll…wait – what? Nobody told me it’s October! OMG, Dems fail again.

On to an underreported story. From Military.com:

“More than 9,000 Afghan refugees who had been living in temporary housing on military bases in the US since the fall of Kabul…have been resettled in local communities, many with the aid of a makeshift army of veterans groups, military family organizations and immigration agencies.”

A US official told Military.com that 5,800 of the 9,000 Afghans were resettled nationwide with the support of these non-governmental groups. Another 3,200 Afghans resettled are mostly US citizens, lawful permanent residents and Special Immigrant Visa holders who aided the American military in Afghanistan, or who already had close ties in the US and did not need outside support.

All of the 9,000 Afghans who left the bases went through security vetting by the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center and other intelligence government agencies, and were required to receive COVID-19 and other vaccinations before being resettled.

That’s a decent start, but the total population of Afghan refugees on military bases inside the US is still around 55,000. The US Transportation Command has resumed flying refugees that were being held at transit points in the Middle East and Europe to America after measles infections ran through the population.

That means around 64,000 Afghan refugees of the estimated 124,000 that were originally evacuated from Afghanistan are on our shores. CNN reported that in a letter by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Sen. James Inhofe, (R-OK) about 44% of the Afghan refugees housed at US military bases are children. He also reported that 7% were US citizens, 5% were lawful permanent residents, and 3% “held some sort of US visa.” Apparently, 85% were “Afghans eligible for a SIV or P1 or P2 refugee status and their family members,” the letter states, referring to Special Immigrant visas and refugee programs.

The military, and particularly veterans who served in Afghanistan, have largely been supportive of the resettling of refugees. A survey, called Pulse Check: Supporting Afghanistan Allies, conducted by Blue Star Families from Sept. 3 to Sept. 7 showed that about 78% of veterans who served in Afghanistan agreed that the US has a duty to help those fleeing the Taliban. In addition, 46% of the veterans who shared that belief had already participated in some form of assistance effort.

A nonprofit called Welcome.US was formed to coordinate with the government and fund the efforts of veterans groups and private immigration agencies, state and local governments, and business organizations to provide resettlement support. Former Presidents Obama, GW Bush, and Clinton – along with their former first ladies, are serving as honorary co-chairs for Welcome.US. Some 25 other veterans service organizations have joined with Welcome.US, including Blue Star Families, Team Rubicon, the Independence Fund, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, and the Wounded Warrior Project.

Despite the anti-immigrant strain in our country, it seems that this is a rare moment of unity. A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 72% of Americans say they favor the US granting refugee status to people who worked with the US or Afghan governments during the war in Afghanistan if they pass security checks.

Even with all of our political divisions, only about 9% of Americans say they are opposed.

Let’s hope that if the government can find homes for these 125,000 Afghans, they will also find homes for homeless vets and other Americans.

Time for our Saturday Soother, where we forget about Krysten Sinema playing eleventy-deminsion political chess and think about a fall season without pumpkin spice. In other words, it’s time to grab a seat by a window and watch the leaves fall while we listen to a reborn jazz version of “Autumn Leaves” played by Breeze, a Korean group with violin, cello, piano and drums. The original song is by Yves Montand:

Very nice performance.

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Are We Having a Border Crisis?

The Daily Escape:

Dead Horse State Park, Moab, UT – 2020 photo by Schmats1

From Pew Research:

“The US Border Patrol apprehended nearly 100,000 migrants at the US-Mexico border in February, the tenth consecutive month of increased apprehensions and a return to levels last seen in mid-2019.”

Is this a self-inflicted wound by Biden, another Republican effort to drive a wedge into Biden’s political support, or both? Since the next 20 months will be a battle royal for control of the last two years of Biden’s term, how Biden handles the immigration issue has huge political consequences.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) flipped his seat in November 2020, but he must face voters again in 2022. Immigration could easily be a powerful wedge issue against him, threatening the Democrats’ control of the Senate.

Texas elects a governor in 2022, and while Texas isn’t really in play, last November we saw Latino voters in Texas edging away from the Democrats, toward the Republicans. Residents of these border states experience unauthorized immigration directly; and it’s clear that many Texas Latinos embrace enforcement-minded views on immigration, even while empathizing with the reasons migrants want to come to America.

Republicans assume that they’ve hit on a strategy to beat Democrats in 2022 by saying that the President’s immigration policies have led to a surge of migrants crossing our southern border. But here’s a chart from the Pew Research article showing that’s not the whole story:

Apprehensions peaked in May 2019, then dropped precipitously through April 2020, and have risen ever since, including under Trump in 2020. Today they are at about 73% of the high point that occurred under Trump, but way above that of prior years.

It’s important to remember that migration is seasonal. Border apprehensions have typically peaked in the spring, before declining during the hot summer months that make migration more dangerous. That pattern started to change in 2013, when the mix of new arrivals shifted from being predominantly from Mexico to being from the countries of the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). The migrants also changed to predominantly families and unaccompanied children.

But now, according to Pew Research, those patterns are starting to reverse:

  • Around 42% of those apprehended at the southwestern border in February were of Mexican origin, up from 13% in May 2019, the most recent peak month for monthly apprehensions.
  • People from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras accounted for 46% of apprehensions in February, down from 78% in May 2019.
  • The number and share of single adults being apprehended at the border has also increased dramatically.

It isn’t clear whether these trends will continue, but it’s possible that February’s spike in apprehensions could also be a return to the seasonal nature of migration.

Republicans are saying that the current spike in border apprehensions is entirely a result of policy changes by the Biden administration. Here’s what Biden has changed according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas:

  • The majority of those apprehended at the southwest border (71%) are single adults who are being expelled under the CDC’s authority to manage the public health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Families apprehended at the southwest border make up 20%. They are also currently being expelled.
  • Unaccompanied children make up 10% of the current spike. They are not expelled but are brought to a Border Patrol facility and processed for transfer to HHS while they await placement with a sponsor. These children go through immigration proceedings if they are able to present a claim for relief under the law.

What this says is that when Republicans and some in the media throw around scary numbers about a surge of more than  100,000 “illegal crossings” in February, what they’re not telling you is that approximately 90,000 of those migrants (single adults and families) were apprehended and expelled.

Still, 10,000 kids are a giant task to house, feed, and process. That’s why as a group, they are overwhelming current shelter capacity. On Wednesday, Ambassador Roberta Jacobson, the White House coordinator for the southern border, said in Spanish: “The border is not open.”

The Biden administration has struggled to find the right message but hasn’t abandoned enforcement. It removed almost 1,000 Haitian nationals in February.

Politicians criticizing what’s happening with Biden’s policy need to show us what specific change Biden implemented that they think is causing the current spike. They need to explain what should be done instead.

But, of course, they won’t do that. It is much easier to simply claim that Biden is implementing an “open border” policy, something that is complete nonsense.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 27, 2019

Wrongo and Ms. Right will be heading back to the US on Monday morning, so this is the last post from London. The news from America was both typical and troubling again this week. But let’s start with a UK-based cartoon from the Financial Times that drives home the point about how long it’s taking to negotiate a Brexit deal:

Meanwhile, back in the USA, the GOP Congress Critters who broke into the hearing were simply following orders:

What happens when you have the best lawyers:

New White House Ukraine strategy:

Let’s send healing thoughts to Jimmy Carter, who broke his pelvis this week:

Nice message from London:

October 2019 iPhone photo by Wrongo

It occurred to Wrongo that the diversity in England is due at least in part to being the headquarters of the British Empire, followed by being a part of the EU for what is now 47 years. With Brexit, those who voted “Leave” wish for a country that is less diverse.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 13, 2019

Trump suffered another legal setback in the federal courts on Friday over his plan to declare refugees and poor immigrants as “public charges”. The plan was to justify refusing them public services like heath care, and use that as a basis for deporting them.

“Judge George B. Daniels, of the US District Court in Manhattan, ordered preliminary injunctions Friday afternoon in two related cases against the administration’s new “public charge” rule that could have denied legal permanent residency and other forms of legal status to many immigrants in the country who are deemed likely to use public assistance.”

Daniels wrote that he found cause to grant the motion because the plaintiffs had sufficiently demonstrated that they would suffer irreparable harm if the rule went into effect:

“Overnight, the Rule will expose individuals to economic insecurity, health instability, denial of their path to citizenship, and potential deportation….It is a rule that will punish individuals for their receipt of benefits provided by our government, and discourages them from lawfully receiving available assistance intended to aid them in becoming contributing members of our society…”

Separately, the fourth Homeland Security Director resigned on Saturday. The entire DHS needs to be rethought and reformed from the ground up. On to cartoons.

This was the DHS’s “public charge” argument:

How did Rudy fall so far?

Trump’s brain trust circles the wagons:

Both sides try using platitudes to help make decisions:

His strategery rarely works out:

Another of this week’s best decisions was facilitated by Erdogan:

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – Immigration Judges Edition, September 30, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Monsoon season, AZ – September 2019 photo by FHatcher

The immigration crisis has many threads, but one that hasn’t gotten the focus that it needs is the ongoing problem with the immigration courts. From the NYRB: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Trump’s attempts to close possible paths to immigration have meant ramping up activity in [Immigration] court. Some immigration judges operate out of courthouses, others work out of detention centers, and some have been transferred—both in person and virtually—to courts along the border. Over the course of a week in the Rio Grande Valley….It was common to see people be forced to leave the US after hearings lasting minutes.”

According to the AP, the Trump administration has hired nearly 200 new judges and plans to add at least 100 more. Nearly half of currently sitting immigration judges were appointed by Trump, and about half of these new judges had previously been attorneys for ICE.

Immigration judges are employed by the Justice Department, not the judiciary. They make the decisions about who gets to stay in the US, and who has to return to their home countries.

We’ve all heard about the immigration court backlog. It’s becoming so large that the government may have to suspend asylum hearings until it can be brought under control.  The Hill reports about the backlog:

“It was 542,411 cases in January 2017, when President Donald Trump took office, and it increased to 1,007,155 cases by the end of August 2019, with an average wait for a hearing of 696 days. In addition, there are 322,535 pending cases that have not been placed on the active caseload rolls yet. When they are added, the backlog will be more than 1.3 million cases.”

The three largest immigration courts are so under-resourced that hearing dates were being scheduled as far out as August 2023 in New York City, October 2022 in Los Angeles, and April 2022 in San Francisco.

One result is that judges have been taking a harder line under Trump than in the Obama administration, denying 65% of asylum cases during the 2018 fiscal year, compared with 55% two years earlier.

Trump’s transformation of immigration law started under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Now, under William Barr, the DOJ has taken legislation passed over the years and used it to drive large-scale changes to immigrant rights.

Unlike the judges in federal or state courts, immigration judges can be fired or reassigned by the AG, and they face sanctions if they don’t process cases rapidly.

Currently, the AG can override decisions issued by immigration judges once they are appealed to Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). An interim rule, issued by the DOJ that took effect Monday, delegates that responsibility to the EOIR director. The director, who is not confirmed by the Senate, can now decide cases pending before the appeals board.

The new rule has caused an uproar among career employees who said their independence has been usurped by a political appointee. In fact, the NYT reports that the union representing the nation’s immigration judges filed two labor complaints against the Justice Department last week. The National Association of Immigration Judges, representing the 420 judges, filed one of the complaints after the Justice Department moved to decertify the union.

DOJ claims that the judges were management officials and therefore ineligible for collective bargaining, an argument they pursued unsuccessfully in 2000. The judges and the Trump administration have frequently clashed, and the union has for years pushed for independence from the Justice Department altogether.

The simple fact is that as more and more cases are placed on a single judge’s docket, immigrants assigned to that judge are inevitably required to wait longer and longer before an available time slot opens up for their hearing. And the asylum seeker isn’t represented by a lawyer, and the case is usually decided in less than five minutes.

The entire immigration problem needs to be addressed, and Democrats must go further than just talking about the humanitarian crisis at the border. Taking a hard look at the immigration judges’ backlog, and funding at least on a temporary basis, many more can partially alleviate the humanitarian problems.

We have to act to prevent a catastrophic collapse of our immigration court system, a collapse that could force America to stop accepting asylum applications until the backlog can be brought under control.

Wake up America! That just may be what Barr and Trump are angling for.

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Saturday Soother – September 14, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Denali NP, Alaska – 2019 photo by Alaskaty

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the Democratic debate on Thursday night. Winning a debate comes down to connecting with voters, seeing who is the most likeable, the most sincere, who had the best delivery. Oh, and a few good ideas.

Wrongo thought the winners were Warren and Booker. The losers were Harris and Castro, for totally different reasons. Harris’s tactic was to attack Trump, while avoiding direct answers to direct questions. She has not lived up to the promise she showed in the first debate. Castro attacked Biden successfully, but it becomes more and more difficult to see him as a top-tier candidate.

Klobachar and Yang didn’t hurt themselves, but gained no ground. Biden, Bernie, Buttigieg and Beto had moments, but didn’t truly differentiate themselves from the pack. Bernie’s voice failed him, and his hoarseness gave him a difficult time connecting. As the debate wore on, he became a caricature of himself.

Biden got off to a strong start, but around the 2-hour mark, he became barely intelligible. His biggest applause line of the night was when he praised O’Rourke’s response to the El Paso shooting. He shouldn’t think that big applause for Beto was a good sign for Biden. Beto had a good night, mostly because he just said out loud about AR-15s what a whole lot of people believe on this issue.

There is a major problem with allowing TV network news types to conduct these debates. And who needed to hear a third hour where the media tried to dissect the health insurance policy differences between the ten Democrats?  Generally, their positions fall into either expanding Obamacare, or moving quickly to implementing Medicare for All.

Yes, some policy positions are different and consequential, but why did George Stephanopoulos try to gotcha Bernie and Warren about whether taxes would go up if MFA was initiated? Everyone knows that taxes would go up, while annual family health insurance costs would go away.

Amanda Marcotte, on twitter:

Maybe it’s simple: These Spinnerati work for the media, and the media is part of corporate America. Their charge is to bend things so that the choice you’re presented with isn’t a choice at all.

And, in three hours, the moderators asked no questions about the economy. They didn’t manage talk time well; Sanders was shorted. Here’s a breakdown of the candidates’ shares of talk time:

Looking ahead, Wrongo thinks the class of this field is Elizabeth Warren, and here’s why: Harvard professor Marshall Ganz teaches what he calls “the art of public narrative”. According to Ganz, successful and persuasive public narrative is the ability to tell, and to link together, “the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now”.

That seems to be a major part of Warren’s success to date. She’s done a good job creating a public narrative that connects with Democratic primary voters. She has leaned into her Oklahoma “ragged edge of the middle class” childhood, and her struggles as a young adult. She weaves that into a story of who we are as Americans, and she talks about the challenges we face today and how she (and we) can address them.

Her closest current challengers (Bernie and Biden) have noticeably weaker public narratives: Sanders is reticent about his own story, and how it made him the man that he is. He hits his policies, and vaguely links his policies to us and now. Biden has a great “story of self”, but his “story of now” is out of sync with today’s Democrats. He seems particularly bad on the story of now, and that is likely to torpedo his presidential chances.

We’ll see. The candidates have until next spring to hone their “public narratives”.

Let’s forget debates, John Bolton’s mustache, and Trump’s gutting of clean water regulations so that we can focus on starting our Saturday with a Soother. Start by brewing up a yuuge mug of Kayon Mountain Ethiopian ($21/12oz.) coffee from Lexington Coffee, an award-winning artisan roasting company based in Virginia. The roaster says it is richly sweet with a crisp, syrupy mouthfeel.

Sit back with your hot brew, and think about how fall is coming, and how you have no plans to prepare for it. Now watch Yo Yo Ma and James Taylor have fun while performing in August at Tanglewood Music Festival:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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What the Dem Debates Are Telling Us

The Daily Escape:

Yosemite Falls from floor of Yosemite Valley – June 2019 iPhone8 photo by Believeland313

Wrongo, Ms. Right and a few friends saw the play “Ink” on Broadway this week. It’s the story of Rupert Murdoch, and how he disrupted the newspaper business in England in the early 1970s. Everyone knows the story’s outline: A tradition-bound business is revolutionized by an outsider who uses tactics that the industry won’t consider using.

When the Newspaper old guard finally understand that failure is staring them in the face, they try half-heartedly to change, and fail.

Flash forward to America in 2019: The Murdoch-owned FOX network has disrupted our news organizations, assisted mightily by the internet and by little people like Wrongo. Trump disrupted our politics in 2016, and now it’s the Democrats’ time to decide to disrupt, or stay the course. Their Party is dominated by Biden, Schumer and Pelosi. Schumer is 68, while the others are in their 70s. All represent the old guard.

After two Democratic debates involving 20 would-be candidates, it’s clear that the Party is on the horns of a dilemma: Embrace disruption? Or, stay the course? One of the fringe candidates, Marianne Williamson said it’s not about policies, it’s about playing Donald Trump’s game and beating him.

The MSM says Dems should get down in the weeds, talk policies and how to pay for them. But we should really talk about the direction the country should be taking in a post-Trump America.

Democrats face a conundrum. The Democratic disruptors may be out in front of the public. Those candidates are Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, and a few others. Republicans will attack them as radical socialists, but their message, that the average person has gotten screwed for at least 40 years and only systemic change can solve that, resonates.

For the disruptors, Incremental change hasn’t worked. That’s something Trump realized, and these few Democrats have as well. You have to be playing the long game. It’s not about one debate. You stick to your message, and make sure it resonates.

Then there are the traditional politicians like Biden, Beto and Klobuchar who are playing the old style game. Biden in particular says, “look at what I’ve done in the past. Give me the reins again“.

But it’s unclear whether voters want to play it safe. Wrongo had a good conversation with his Trump-supporting friend Dave C., who says he’s fiscally conservative, but may be flexible on some social issues. He knows that Trump won’t fulfill all of his promises. And no one should think that Sanders, Warren or any Democrat will be able to fulfill theirs either.

DC doesn’t work that way. But many things count bigly, like the appointment of Supreme Court Justices.

And regarding the “socialism” epithet, Bernie had a piece this week in the WSJ entitled “Trump Is The Worst Kind of Socialist.” If you read it, you’ll be sold. Bernie is not just saying Trump must go, he’s going at the Right’s main attack on him, while doubling-down on his position.

Bernie may not be your cup of tea; he isn’t Wrongo’s. But, he delivers his position with passion. This isn’t Hillary taking a poll, and trying to cover all bases. Bernie’s willing to drop a few bombs, and then deal with the fallout.

Biden can only go downhill from here. He’s rusty. The Biden we saw may not be around for Iowa if he doesn’t sharpen his game. Here’s Wrongo’s view of Biden and Bernie: (hat tip: Sean O.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kamala Harris showed passion, and her prosecutorial skills to viewers. But will that convince voters? Particularly those in the suburbs? Warren won night one. Let’s see how she does when she’s on stage with night two’s survivors. She’s certainly got the vision thing down, but Kamala seems to have more fight.

Ultimately, the next 18 months are going to be about who can win the suburbs. In 2018, Dems reversed their 2016 losses in the ‘burbs, while again losing rural areas, just like in 2016. The difference was that in 2018, they won control of the House.

Trump’s 2016 formula worked. He traded suburban votes for small-town and rural votes and it got him an Electoral College win. Democrats can win in 2020 if they continue their 2018 success in the suburbs.

If the Democratic presidential candidate focuses exclusively on climate change, he/she will lose a lot of rural votes. A candidate who berates everyone who works in financial services will lose suburban support. But, a candidate that offers solutions on health costs, a fairer, less monopolized economy, more affordable education, a serious approach to the opioid crisis can probably win urban and suburban America.

It’s a long slog from here. And the winning candidate’s job is to keep voters engaged about how important 2020 will be to our kids and grandkids.

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Does Calling Them “Internment” or “Concentration” Camps Matter?

The Daily Escape:

Grand Tetons Sunset – June 2019 photo by Shaun Peterson

A protracted discussion started when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) used the term “concentration camps” to describe the places on the US-Mexico border where “illegal migrants” are being held, and where some of them have died.

This got started when AOC was sharing an article from Esquire, which quoted journalist and concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer:

“There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and— with Japanese internment— the United States. In fact, we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.”

Immediately, right-wing individuals and organizations lashed out at AOC, not Esquire Magazine, calling her “silly”, and launching a debate about definitions while drawing attention away from the actual story— the conditions under which child refugees are being kept on the US border.

Others defended AOC as technically accurate. They lauded her for drawing attention to conditions in today’s migrant camps. The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General has warned of dangerous overcrowding and unsanitary conditions at processing facilities for migrants at the border. The military has been asked to construct tented camps for thousands of migrants at military bases surrounded by chain link fence and topped by barbed wire. CNN, in discussing AOC’s remarks, reported that:

“The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of concentration camp (which was their top trending term Wednesday) is: a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.”

Liz Cheney and others who have denounced Ocasio-Cortez’s word choice claim they are concerned for the “real victims” of history’s abominable acts, those who suffered under the Nazis.

As bad as the Holocaust was, no one should have the exclusive right to use the term “concentration camp”. Could AOC have done better by using “internment camps”? Maybe, but she was going for the shock effect, and we shouldn’t be normalizing what is happening at our Southern border.

Five migrant children have died since December in detention facilities described by politicians, legal advocates and human rights organizations as overcrowded and unsanitary. The “inmates” experience meager food and extreme temperatures. Some in the administration have suggested that they don’t need soap or toothpaste. A Justice Department attorney argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that withholding basic amenities, like soap and toothbrushes, from detained migrants does not violate the government’s responsibility to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions to detained children.

Those who spend time parsing whether conditions in these camps (which are, for civil, not criminal custody) are bad enough to qualify as concentration camps and who berate anyone who dares to describe them accurately, are more concerned with protecting those directing the acts than they seem to be with the acts themselves.

This is another effort by the Right to rebrand something for their propaganda. We’re the country where “Kentucky Fried Chicken” became “KFC” to make us forget that our chicken is fried. Where “torture” was called “enhanced interrogation,” by GW Bush. Where some Congressmen are now calling natural gas “freedom gas”.

Of course Republicans will happily rebrand them “immigrant children internment camps”. They’ll call them anything but “concentration camps”.

The argument about these two words is not an argument about definitions. Ocasio-Cortez and her opponents agree that the term “concentration camp” refers to something so horrible as to be unimaginable. AOC is choosing the term to show that what’s happening is by definition, fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves, and is therefore, unimaginable.

What America needs today are more young people like AOC. We need fewer Bidens, Trumps and Pelosis. America needs our young people to speak up, because the old guard will never take the risk to do what AOC has done.

AOC’s focus is different from our older generations, but you shouldn’t hold that against her. She’s not trying to insult WWII victims, or their legacies.

She’s trying to wake America up to the moral issue on our Southern border.

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Immigration

The Daily Escape:

Great Sand Dunes, Colorado – 2019 photo by VincentLedvina

Whomever the Democrats nominate for President must share their vision on immigration. Democrats need to have clear answers about how we got here, and how Trump is making it worse. And they have to say what we should do about it.

The American voter barely pays attention, but they are persuadable by big ideas that are communicated clearly.

The UN reports that a quarter of a billion people worldwide are immigrating. Moral considerations aside, the developed world needs to deal with migration on an epic scale over the next 20 years. This is partly due to climate change in the global South, and is partly due to mass destabilization caused by tribal warfare throughout the third world.

These factors create two kinds of migrants: economic migrants seeking a better life, and refugees fleeing personal danger. The WaPo reports that we’re seeing huge numbers of migrants: (brackets by Wrongo)

US Customs and Border Protection statistics …show more than 144,000 migrants were taken into custody [in May], a 32% jump from April. It was…the largest one-month arrest total since…Trump took office, and it was the highest monthly figure in 13 years….May was the third month in a row that border detentions topped 100,000, led by record-breaking levels of illegal crossings by Guatemalan and Honduran parents bringing children.

Some 45 million foreign-born people now make their home in the US. About 12 million live here illegally. Globally, immigration is remaking nations on a world-altering scale.

Politicians throughout the developed world are aware of these trends, and either deny their existence, or are calling for draconian policies to protect their borders and keep migrants out. In America, we see some people who want open borders and many who want the borders closed.

Wrongo witnessed how open borders work in Eastern Europe last year. The EU has the Schengen policy that allows cross-border migration throughout Europe. Poland and Hungary continually lose educated, younger workers to Western Europe, because pay and working conditions are better. Open borders have caused Poland’s and Hungary’s populations to skew older, and less skilled.

America needs a comprehensive policy that deals humanely with all types of migrants, but we must secure our borders. We can’t have open borders.

How should we secure our borders? We need physical border control in all high traffic areas, and we have to add border enforcement wherever it is easy to cross unimpeded.

  • Democrats should take Trump’s wall off the table for 2020. Its cost is a rounding error in the annual budget, and more security is better than less.
  • We need a hard annual cap of immigrants to the US. It could be high, say 1 million, or lower. The level is worth a serious debate.
  • Once the cap is exceeded, anyone trying to enter will be returned to their home country.
  • We should give preference to those immigrants who have demonstrable skills or educational preparation. American economic growth relies on the skill and productivity of our people. When an immigrant joins the American economy, that person is asking us to honor a multi-generational commitment to him/her and to each of his/her descendants. We should be selective.
  • We should continue having geographic quotas that apply against the overall hard cap.
  • We should expand work, temporary work and student visa quotas.
  • We should deport any immigrant convicted of a serious crime either in the US, or in their home country.
  • We should provide amnesty to all law-abiding illegal immigrants now resident in the US.
  • Any illegal migrant who is physically in the country must be treated humanely and with respect until their case is adjudicated. Cages must go.
  • To accomplish this will require a substantial financial investment to support migrants who the border patrol is apprehending. We’ll need more case workers, immigration judges, medical staff, and substantially increased, and humanely built and operated facilities.
  • This will cost billions, but eventually, the bulge of migrants attempting to enter may decline, and we will then be able to cut back on the level of services.

Pushing our border control back on Mexico is a partial solution. Trump is correct about that. His gratuitous brutalities shock our conscience, and fail even on their own terms. Intended as deterrents, they are not deterring.

If Mexico can cut off a portion of the illegal immigration before migrants try to enter the US, we are better off, but Mexico is worse off. It would be easier to get Mexico’s support via cooperation, rather than by coercion via tariffs.

Democrats want to restore development funding for Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. That’s a fine idea, but we should not expect that it will achieve much of a decrease in economic migration. Most of the funding will be siphoned off by the governments and by local criminals. Little will reach the target.

America needs a bipartisan immigration solution. If we weren’t paralyzed by partisan rancor, we would already have one. Controlling immigration, and selecting the immigrants more carefully, enables us to quickly and successfully absorb those who come here, and to ensure equality of opportunity to both the newly arrived, and the rest of us.

Our goal must be to make everyone feel that they belong to one nation.

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