This is what Trump's immigration policies look like

 

By way of @leighcreates.bsky.social. Is this real? I see no reason to disbelieve it. Even if the various flavors of immigration cops largely mean to follow legalities, there are plenty of individuals among them who equate dark skin and accents with candidates for deportation. Just like their bosses, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

UPDATE: Just have to add this by way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

“The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

Why am I skeptical?

The MAGA wish list is BS

They want us to be afraid as the dreaded MAGA inauguration comes. "Us" here means newcomers to the USofA, Brown people, and their friends who can be confident about our citizenship status; we're all in this together. They will give us plenty of reasons to fear, some of those reasons genuine. They can do bad things.

But not all that is threatened is possible. But they can't do everything they want without friction. Our job is to enhance that friction.

Perhaps most people shouldn't focus on the cruel possibilities the Trump immigration threats make possible. After all, inciting the fears is part of their playbook of forced deportations. But those of us who can bear knowing the possibilities can recognize the gamut these threats run.

David J. Bier [@davidjbier.bsky.social], Director of Immigration Studies at the pro-immigration, libertarian Cato Institute summarizes what Trump's immigration agenda might look like in the approximate order we might see it. In addition to what Trump has been saying about his plans, this list largely derives from Project 2025.

1) cancel the 2023 Biden-initiated Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) parole processes for refugees which have channeled 30,000 people/month into legal channels 

2) ban scheduling appointments for lawful entry from Mexico using the 2023 Biden-initiated CBP One app

3) suspend the refugee program for 100+ days & cut cap from 125K to 20K 

4) impose a visa/travel ban on a dozen countries 

5) impose new "extreme vetting" requirements on all countries 

6) possibly suspend all visas globally for 30 days

7) declare a national emergency at the border 

8) deploy the national guard to the border

9) redirect military funds to build detention camps

10) restart border wall construction 

11) invoke Title 42 health authority to expel migrants [legal ruse used during COVID]

12) restart family detention

13) declare an invasion 

14) invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport without due process 

15) use the military to enforce Alien Enemies Act 

16) revoke prioritization of criminals & security threats for deportation

17) let state/local police conduct immigration arrests & deportation

18) restrict federal funding for sanctuary cities 

19) conduct public raid in a sanctuary city 

20) instruct review of birthright citizenship 

21) review of public charge rule reinstatement 

22) review of TPS and DACA

For all MAGA's anti-migrant hysteria, this list of cruelty and stupidity is not going to happen in a day. In fact, most of it will never happen at all, because it is either illegal, impossible to implement, or they are too inept to mobilize a whole country around their hateful plans.

For all Donald's posturing, as recently as last July, Gallup found that most Americans appreciate the contributions of newcomers to the country.

Click to enlarge

Yet hard-pressed individuals and families who are very much part of our lives at going to be at risk under the Trump regime. Republicans have made promises of prosperity and stability they cannot and will not keep, especially while implementing an anti-immigrant panic. Who is going to harvest our food and wash the pans in the local fast food chain? For that matter, who is going to write computer code for the Musks and Zucks?

The first six months will be the worst; I still believe our fellow citizens will recoil as excesses pile up. Most of us like our neighbors and appreciate them. The job for those of us not currently at risk is to support vulnerable people and throw whatever sand we can conjure up into the gears of the deportation machine. Let's support the lawyers who care for the people. We know how to do this.

A national directory of non-profit, low cost immigration legal services.

Immigration law is rat's next of mysterious byways and dead ends. Several articles which communicate some of the horror which our politicians have made of immigration:

Dara Lind explains What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means

Aaron Reichin-Melnick interviewed at Radly Balko's The Watch

Adrian Carrasquillo writes a column called Huddled Masses at The Bulwark. He has wide sources.

Nuff said

Sometimes the simplest statement of fact is the most accurate:

Can we just admit that we NEED immigrants for our economy to run, from agriculture to high tech? We’re a goddamn nation of immigrants, aren’t we? Let’s be proud of our immigrant heritage!

— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 4:28 PM

Elon, Vivek, Laura Loomer, Donald Trump -- just shut up!

A cheer for sand in the gears

Especially on the left, it's popular this year to dump on the response to Donald Trump's first ascension to the presidency in 2016.

In the Guardian, someone named Dustin Guastella condemns that "resistance" was "big on spectacle and short on substance." Watch out -- when someone says something lacked substance, you can be pretty sure they wanted that something to mean what they preferred, rather than being content to observe what it meant on its own terms. I kinda think getting millions marching for women, for science, against corruption was inherently a good thing, even if the on-the-ground consequences are not immediately apparent. 

And by the way, ignorance of the magnitude of the obstacles ahead sometimes enables progress in overcoming them.

Or take Michael Schaffer in Politico. He regrets that...

The bulk of those great public protest moments, for instance, were organized around issues of identity: The Women’s March, the mobilization against the Muslim ban, the fury about the Charlottesville protests, the 2020 racial-justice protests. ...

True -- but should insults from Trump and the MAGAs to civilized decency have been unmarked? 

Note also, he misses the vital category of efforts to protect immigrants.

Schaffer goes on to complain that "the resistance" launched mainstream press on a kind of sugar high but failed to save the legacy media, which seems to be true. Aside from the New York Times, legacy media is not longer where information is widely found. And even the Times kowtows to power often.

All this seems ridiculously short sighted to me. Present circumstances are different than 2016. Trump and the GOP actually won a tiny, but real, presidential victory; lots of Americans demonstrated their discontent with what Joe Biden had on offer. That matters.

Lawyers and other professionals will carry on a fight for rule of law. Democrats with any power (and guts) will stick up for a more benign version of both federal and state action on behalf of a better society. But for sure it is going to be a shit show.

But at some point, large groups of people are going to be moved to collective action on behalf of better values. That's what we do. 

Opinion columnist Charles Blow (gift article) who was very vocal during the last round makes some interesting observations:

It may not be clear what issue or person or group will galvanize opposition to Trump’s second term. But any assumption that an opposition won’t rise or any revisionist history that casts resistance as something unique to Democrats would be a misreading of contemporary movements...

... As Democrats look for a way forward, it should not be a surprise if what emerges as Trump’s opposition is ... hostile to the Democratic Party as presently constituted.

... when Trump takes office again, the response of the public to his policies will have sway, and if that response is disapproval, and if it becomes organized and focused, it could be a formidable obstacle to Trump fully realizing his aims.

Note that Tolkien opined this while looking at fascist Europe.

Meanwhile, millions of us are not going to take the repeat of the sociopath's ascendancy lying down. We're going to do the little things that make society more humane. We already are; see #strikeseason.

As events develop, we'll be looking for stress points, for where ordinary people can throw sand in the gears of theft, hatred, and cruelty. We won't know where we'll find them; but these MAGA frauds and blowhards are not some coherent, unstoppable force.

Getting better all the time

I really didn't know this. I thought Republican anti-immigrant agitation was just racist bigotry.

I still think that is what's going on, but I didn't know how large an influx the country has enjoyed in the last decade.

All these willing workers and entrepreneurial strivers are making us a smarter, better country.

As throughout our history, it will take awhile for American society to digest the newcomers. But, even in the age of Republican stupidity, we're still big and rich and spacious and adaptable and we'll be fine.

Source: NYT gift article. It might be possible to have some quibbles about the numbers, because a lot of the people in these figures are keeping their heads down. David Kurtz has summarized:

    The pace of immigration from 2021-23 was faster than at any previous period in U.S. history, including the peak of Ellis Island.

    As a share of total U.S. population, the average annual change in the foreign-born population went up faster than any period since at least the 1850s.

    The percentage of the U.S. population born in another country reached a new high of 15.2 percent in 2023. The previous high was 14.8 percent in 1890.

For Californians, there's a local angle to stay aware of: according to CalMatters: 

Roughly 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, including 1 in 5 children under 18.

Migrant lives are on the line in November

Mexican journalist and TV news anchor Leon Krauze is asking what I think is the right question: What would Donald Trump (and his evil sidekick Stephen Miller) deporting 15 million undocumented immigrants look like?

Trump’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history are no secret — he refers to them frequently in stump speeches. And the outlines of the plan have been amply documented. ...These vulnerable millions know no other country but this one. If they are forced to leave everything they have behind overnight, their anguish will make the hideous stories of family separations we heard during the first Trump term pale in comparison.

I struggle to fully understand some Hispanic voters’ enduring support for Trump today, given his racist rhetoric and terrifying policy proposals. While Latinos are generally more moderate on immigration policy than the average American, a considerable number appear to favor punitive measures. In a recent poll, 53 percent of Hispanic voters said they would support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, with 50 percent supporting “large detention centers” for those awaiting possible deportation.

One possibility is that the sheer scale of Trump’s proposed immigration policies is making it hard for people to comprehend the human toll.

... If carried out, Trump’s planned mass deportation would leave nearly 4½ million children in the United States partially or wholly orphaned. The impact of mass deportation on families would be profound. In Florida, nearly 2 million U.S. citizens or non-undocumented residents live in households with at least one undocumented person; in California, it’s more than 4 million.

The sudden disappearance of a parent or a main provider will be devastating: It is estimated that more than 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen will fall below the poverty line if the undocumented breadwinners in these families are deported. ...

For years I have tried to explain to Anglos that the absurdities of U.S. immigration law mean, at least here in California, that most immigrant families live in what's called "mixed status." Because of history, because the border has at times been close to fictional, because there is often no way to migrate "the right way, the legal way," ordinary people often live "out of status." 

If it is not the two parents, it's Auntie Isabel who is undocumented, but looks after the kids while the parents work. For a long time, it was a friend of mine whose immigrant family came "legally"; but they had a lot of kids and somehow they never got around to doing the paper work for him. There are hundreds of variations of immigration anomalies, so as there are millions of long term US residents, our neighbors, who live in legal limbo.

Since 1986 (!) Congress has not been able to pass and a president sign any major reform to our convoluted immigration laws. Republicans have largely decided that inciting hostility to migrants serves their interests. Democrats too have sometimes been hostile to immigration law reform. Presidents have attempted adjustments by way of executive orders, but those create precarious situations for people, as did President Obama's creation of the "Dreamer" category of quasi-legalization.

The most recent effort to enact major immigration reform was attempted by a coalition spearheaded by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma in February 2024. Democratic Senators signaled they'd vote for it, however reluctantly. But Donald Trump preferred to keep immigration alive as a complaint against Dems, so that reform died.

If Trump is elected, he bellows that mass deportations will follow; if we elect Kamala Harris (and a cooperative House and Senate), perhaps there might be a genuine immigration reform law thirty years after the last one. The world has changed; human displacement only increases. It's time to bring a broken system up to date as humanely as we are able.

Conventional wisdom for a crisis

It would be hard to find someone whose view of Western economic systems was more Olympian than Martin Wolf. The son of cultured eastern European Jews who escaped the Nazis in London, he's the longtime chief economics commentator for Britain's Financial Times. Senior world financial decision makers rate the newspaper as their most credible source. It seems fair to say the FT talks to capitalists about capitalism and Martin Wolf speaks to the better angels of capitalists in its pages.

In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism Wolf comes off as an intelligent classical liberal, "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal." He's profoundly troubled by anti-democratic authoritarian populism. He argues for an humane interpretation of societies that he believes arose from the marriage of Anglo-European capitalism and democracy.

This book is a response to a new and troubling era. Its central argument is simple: when we look closely at what is happening in our economies and our polities, we must recognize the need for substantial change if core Western values of freedom, democracy, and the Enlightenment are to survive. But in doing so, we must also remember that reform is not revolution, but its opposite. It is not just impossible, but wrong, to try to re-create a society from scratch, as if its history counted for nothing. ... one cannot start anywhere else.

I'm not going to try to survey Wolf's appraisal of the wonders of capitalism. So much of what "the system" looks like derives from where we sit within it. My friends who are gig workers, baristas, and hotel cleaners see a different world than Wolf. 

But I do want discuss a little the question of citizenship in a democracy. Wolf insists that "the left" fails to appreciate that for most people, citizenship is a source of pride in a cold capitalist world.

A big mistake of the Brahmin left has been its contempt for patriotism, particularly working class patriotism. For the vast majority of ordinary people, citizenship is a source of pride, security, and identity.

Wolf's observation is true to my experience. For a lot of us, citizenship is the extent of what we can trust we possess. All of us need to honor that. Those of us repelled by patriotism tend to be people who have been privileged live in a wider world, who have been repelled by America's successive imperial wars, who are sick and tired of being lied to -- and who can only be proud of our country insofar as it strives to do better. And the very word -- patriotism -- undercuts itself. Many of us just aren't into living into the land of the fathers. But we all have to understand that citizenship matters; there I can go along with Wolf.

The successful capitalist countries attract the world; people want to move here. And our economies need people. So we live with the question of how insistent migration meshes with citizenship. And nobody cares more about and often has more pride in citizenship than newcomers who successfully jump through the hoops we erect.

The big question about migration is how to control it, not whether it should be controlled. The democratic state belongs to its citizens, who are bound by ties of loyalty and trust in one another. It is inevitable that who becomes as member of this community and on what terms is at least as much a political as an economic question.

We struggle over how immigration should be organized. Because of our American history, because Europeans settled this land by expropriating its inhabitants and also imported Black Africans striped of all human rights to do much of the work, we have a different history about citizenship and newcomers than old Europe. 

The defeat of slavery resulted in the 14th amendment to the US Constitution which promised that, if you are born here, you are a citizen. That's among the most important contributions of the Black struggle for freedom in this country. And it is very novel in the history of nation states.

What is also novel about migration to this country, something Wolf is conscious of, is that in the United States, citizenship is not connected to participation in a welfare state. We've neglected to build such a structure to manage our capitalism even for existing citizens, despite incomplete, tentative approaches like Obamacare and Social Security. And much of our hotly contested immigration non-system denies even that to legally-arrived newcomers.

... citizenship must matter a great deal if one believes in funding a specific national welfare state, as people of the left do, since it is a system of solidarity with people who live in one's own country.

Controlled migration that leads to citizenship is a different struggle here than in much of the rest of the capitalist world, for worse and for better. I found Wolf at best incomplete on this conundrum which is central to our current discontents. 

Wolf diagnoses the present ascendancy of dictator-in-waiting Donald Trump in the Republican party as a widespread character defect.

... the subservience of Republican elites is the product not so much of fear, as it was for many in the Germany of the 1930s, as of personal ambition and moral collapse.

I find this refreshing. Too many earnest Never-Trump Republicans aren't willing to go there about their former friends, but moral weakness should be impossible to overlook.

Wolf's diagnosis of our ills seems alarming and sound, his prescriptions perhaps too modest:

... liberal democracy is vulnerable to the selfishness of elites and ambitions of would-be despots. Historically, democratic republics have been exceptions. The normal human patterns have been plutocracy or tyranny. ... the combination of new technology with laissez-faire ideology has accelerated the emergence of a plutocracy dedicated to increasing its wealth and power and of new technologies with extraordinarily destructive potential. 

We do indeed need to build on the foundations we have. But we cannot go back to the past. ... Removing harms, not universal happiness is the objective.

I kept hoping somehow such an intelligent, wide ranging observer of our ills would have more to offer than what reads to me as humane conventional wisdom. Wolf is clearly one of the good -- but hope for a decent future, if we find any, is likely to come from less establishment and younger voices. I read Wold as knowing that.

Morsels for a quiet Saturday morning

An awful lot of commentators seem to want to chip away at New York County D.A. Alvin Bragg's case for indicting Donald Trump for multiple felonies. That's a game I can't play.

Bragg is a guy with a hell of a pedigree: Harvard College, Harvard Law, corporate practice, State Attorney General's office, assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, winner of a contested election for his current job. He likely knows something, both of law and of politics.

Seems to me there are obvious reasons -- adjacent to possibly substantive commentary that informs the legal doubters' views -- he's Black and he's fat. Both mean in American society, he's a lesser light, demanding a full place in the sun. Dude undoubtedly knows this.

• • •

A deep article by Jason DeParle  [gift NYT article] describes the living conditions of new immigrants, documented and not, who have landed in urban Tennessee. It is very much worth a read. He dissects the multiple intricacies of a hodgepodge social-welfare system, while profiling a Salvadoran pastor whose church provides a landing place for newcomers:

Luz Canales and her husband, undocumented immigrants from Honduras, were living in a garage with five young children when they first came to church. Her husband fell ill and could not work. Ineligible for food stamps, though they received free school meals, the children arrived at services so hungry that Mr. Acevedo took them home to eat.

“Look, there’s one thing I want you to understand,” Mr. Acevedo said, referring to the limits on immigrant aid. “The fact that I’m not complaining doesn’t mean I don’t have my opinion that it’s unjust.”

Citing scriptural commands to seek justice, he said he was speaking out despite the risks to encourage compassion. “Sometimes we see each other’s struggles but feel indifference — there’s no love,” he said.

DeParle describes Nashville as a "a growing immigration hub." Might the bad behavior of Republican good old boys in the state legislature who have kicked out a couple of young Black members be colored by their terror about a population of new citizens who are already in town? Seems likely. White Tennessee is going to be mighty nasty for awhile.

Vindicating constitutional rights, case by case ...

Immigration law enforcement seems to encourage legal bad actions and legal bad actors. Or so it seems. A couple of current cases:

At the Supreme Court last week, justices listened skeptically to a case which turns on the verb to "encourage." Apparently there's federal stature that makes it a crime to "encourage" undocumented persons to come or stay in the United States.

As is so often the case at the high court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor put the issue in an everyday context.

Supreme Court Hears a Free Speech Challenge to an Immigration Law
... several justices suggested, the law would chill constitutionally protected speech.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked about a grandmother living in the United States without authorization. “The grandmother tells her son she’s worried about the burden she’s putting on the family,” the justice said. “And the son says: ‘Abuelita, you are never a burden to us. If you want to continue living here with us, your grandchildren love having you.’”

Justice Sotomayor asked whether the government could prosecute the son.

Brian H. Fletcher, a lawyer for the federal government defending the law, did not give a definitive answer. “I think not,” he said.

That frustrated Justice Sotomayor. “Stop qualifying with ‘think,’ because the minute you start qualifying with ‘think,’ then you’re rendering asunder the First Amendment,” she said. “People have to know what they can talk about.

It's hard to have much hope that anything the Supremes do will uphold common sense or freedom these days, but just maybe they won't want to further sully their record on this one.

Clergy stand with migrants in San Mateo County, CA in 2018

It took four years, but a federal court has ruled that Department of Homeland Security operatives wrongly cancelled a pastor's visa and surveilled her -- all because she participated in a "Sanctuary Caravan," meeting asylum-seekers gathered in Mexico. It's not like she tried to sneak people across the border; she ministered to people in trouble.

Judge rules immigration officials violated pastor’s religious freedom rights

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Todd W. Robinson said the Rev. Kaji Douša had established that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection had “unlawfully retaliated against her for her protected First Amendment activity, violated her Free Exercise right to minister to migrants in Mexico, and violated” the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Douša, the senior pastor of Park Avenue Christian Church, celebrated the ruling in a statement to Religion News Service on Monday (March 27).

“I am overwhelmed with gratitude for Judge Robinson’s sound, fair and just ruling,” Douša said. “The government’s approach — stalling, gaslighting, even lying — was entirely unconvincing to the court, and I am thrilled for the vindication. Judge Robinson cleared my name, and I thank God for it.”

This one reminds me of our long ago No Fly List case. Those people that run the border think they can get away with anything and it is vital to chip away when they unlawfully assume non-existent authority.

Hooray for brain drain

Insights by Stanford Business rightly touts the enormous contributions of immigrants to U.S. prosperity. 

 

I guess we knew that smart people want to come to this country. But the sheer magnitude of immigrant contributions to invention and entrepreneurial success are enormous.

The United States has long touted itself as a nation built by immigrants. Yet there has never been a precise measure of immigrants’ contribution to the country’s economic and technological progress. Around the time that President Donald Trump was moving to curb employment visas for skilled foreigners, economist Rebecca Diamond and a team of researchers set out to examine this unresolved question.

To find the answer, the researchers looked at the output of nearly 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016. They found that immigrants made an outsize contribution to innovation in the U.S. While they comprised 16% of inventors, immigrants were behind 23% of the patents issued over these years.

It wasn’t just a matter of quantity: The share of patents immigrants produced was slightly higher when weighted by the number of citations each patent received over the next three years, a key measure of their quality and utility. Moreover, immigrants were responsible for a quarter of the total economic value of patents granted in that period, as measured by the stock market’s reaction to new patents.

Obviously, Stanford and Silicon Valley focus on the large number of skilled inventors attracted here -- but despite everything -- despite Trump, Biden, and whatever other exclusionists rule the roost -- this country remains the desired destination for people with "get up and go" from across the planet. Even newcomer unskilled laborers are often the most capable of their families, off to seek a better life, however hard that may be. And we get the benefit.

For all our problems, a goodly quantity of people manage to bring their drive and their hopes to this country. You see some of this in Europe, but you sure don't see the global best and brightest trying to immigrate to China ... this is what we do here.

Yes, this is brain drain from across the globe. The only way to stop it -- short of walls and violence and cutting off our noses to spite our faces -- is to help other countries become equally attractive. That seems a long shot.

Cruelty is repellent

Alejandra Molina, writing for Religion News Service, reports an intriguing development: In Florida, Latino evangelicals mobilize against DeSantis’ crackdown on immigrants.

(RNS) — After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered state regulators to deny licenses or renewals to those sheltering unaccompanied migrant children, more than 200 faith leaders and evangelical pastors of Spanish-speaking churches made their way to downtown Tallahassee last year in February to protest the governor for preventing them from doing the “work that God has called us do.”

Many of those shelters were housed in local Latino evangelical churches, according to the faith leaders who also demonstrated against a law that now forbids state and local governments from contracting with transportation companies that knowingly bring undocumented immigrants.

Now, as DeSantis prepares for a possible 2024 presidential bid and as he’s unveiled an immigration package that seeks to impose stiffer penalties for Floridians who “knowingly transport, conceal, or harbor” unauthorized immigrants, some Latino evangelical leaders say they’re willing to break the law if it’s enacted and are mobilizing their flocks — this time in larger numbers — to “fight against DeSantis.”

Much is made of DeSantis' success in winning Florida's Latino voters from the Democrats in his recent re-election. And the churches whose leaders have been riled by his anti-immigrant policies are very conservative -- happy enough with DeSantis' anti-LGBTQ initiatives and encouragement of a broad abortion ban. But there is such a thing as going too far ...

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who serves as president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said “there is angst in the Latino evangelical community” over DeSantis’ immigration proposal.

“Every Latino pastor in the state of Florida, every Latino pastor who pastors a Spanish-speaking ministry, if I were a betting man, we have undocumented individuals in each of these churches, bar none,” he said. ”So are you saying that the same Latino pastors that are pro-life, pro-religious liberty, biblical justice, no to socialism and communism and yes to parental rights —  that this leadership, that we are criminals?”

The pastor lauded DeSantis’ “outreach to the Hispanic evangelical community,” but said he is concerned about the third degree felony penalties for harboring someone who is undocumented as well as hospitals collecting immigration information. This doesn’t mean that Latino evangelicals favor President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration issues, he added.

One reason these doubts about DeSantis may be unlikely to have much immediate electoral impact in Florida is that even these pastors' church members who are citizens and could vote, very likely don't vote. Latinos notoriously participate at low rates. If they are also new citizens and thus newly eligible, it often takes people many years in their new country to get into the election habit.

But performative cruelty to the Spanish-speaking migrants can be felt as viscerally morally offensive. DeSantis is attacking deep communal values that are strongly held. The community gets by through communal care; they expect their politicians to have the same values.

In California thirty years ago, a majority of the Spanish-speaking community was turned for life against Republicans by Governor Pete Wilson's cruel anti-immigrant measures. A generation of Latino political leaders grew up determined to participate fully in the governance of the state. They became some of recent decades most notable politicians (for better and less good) -- Kevin de León, Xavier Becerra, Alex Padilla ...

In Philip Bump's new book The Aftermath, he quotes Lisa García Bedolla, a UC Berkeley political scientist, about the generally stand-offish posture of many (most?) potential Latino voters toward elections and the Democratic party:

“There’s growing independent identification in the United States, and especially among the immigrant-origin communities, so Asian Americans and Latinos are much more likely to be independent,” García Bedolla told me. “In a weird way, you know, the support for the Democratic Party is more, well, they [Republicans] hate us. So I guess we have to go over here.”

This dynamic seems to be what DeSantis is setting up. Florida is not California, but cruelty is cruelty and repellent everywhere. Inflicting moral injury has not ended well for Republicans.

Ukraine might be an electoral liability for Republicans

Some Republicans seem to want to make U.S. support for Ukraine's resistance to Russian invasion a campaign issue.

Daniel Donner writing at Daily Kos Elections investigates which voters this move might offend. It's a question which came to my mind early on in this war, having grown up in Buffalo where there was and is a significant Ukrainian-American population. 

Here's part of Donner's answer. 

Click to enlarge

The map is a way to represent all 435 Congressional Districts; the blues indicate significant concentrations of people of Ukrainian origin. The Ukrainians I know are proud supporters of Ukrainian independence from Russia; they aren't likely to take kindly to GOPers who like them some Putin.

Donner points out:

Six districts are home to more than than 10,000 residents of Ukrainian extraction: California’s 6th, New York’s 8th and 11th, Ohio’s 7th, Pennsylvania’s 1st, and Washington’s 9th. Notably, these are not all solid blue [Democratic] districts, as half of them are currently represented by Republicans—New York’s 11th, Ohio’s 7th, and Pennsylvania’s 1st. And plenty more Republicans represent districts in the next tier, which each have thousands of residents with Ukrainian heritage.

And which European states are most supportive of a free Ukraine? Why it's eastern European lands which have had the most experience of Russian domination. 

So Daily Kos offers another map:

Click to enlarge

The darkest colors show the most residents of Eastern European extraction. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are obvious locations where supporting the Russian invasion may not make for popularity.

Of course the cause of Ukrainian freedom isn't about U.S. politics. The war is about Ukraine. But this is a moment when our domestic cleavages matter.

A proud American

House Republicans thought to crush Michigan Representative Ihlan Omar. They voted, unanimously, to throw her off the Foreign Relations Committee. She had plenty to say about their bigotry, speaking on the floor of Congress.

"Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted? Is anyone surprised that I am somehow deemed unworthy to speak about American foreign policy? Or that they see me as a powerful voice that needs to be silenced? Frankly, it is expected because when you push power, power pushes back...

"Representation matters. Continuing to expand our ideas of who is American, and who can partake in the American experiment is a good thing. I am an American, an American ... I didn't come to Congress to be silent. ... my leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term. My voice will get louder and stronger and my leadership will be celebrated around the world ... Take your votes or not; I am here to stay and I am here to be a voice against harms around the world and to advocate for a better world."

It was interesting to hear on a podcast what "Never Trump" Republicans Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller had to say about Omar's statement. They assume she is some kind of anti-American radical and anti-Semite; like the Republicans who used to be their comrades, they can't imagine that she simply emerges from a worldwide culture where the United States is a known bully empire and the Jewish state of Israel is simply the oppressor of native Palestinians. (She's had to learn explain her understanding in a more nuanced way in office.) But the two Never Trumpers could hear Omar in this clip. Do listen up!

For anyone who needs or wants to understand US immigration

Our historical understanding of immigration to the United States is cloudy, full of misconceptions, and hard to make sense of. The legal rules which govern immigration in 2023 are tough to decipher -- and, aside from past eras when nativism successfully outlawed most migrant arrivals, always have been a tortuous maze.

In 1994 I was plunged into considerable responsibility for fighting against a state initiative campaign (Prop. 187) which aimed, unfortunately successfully, to make life hell ford California immigrants. I needed to learn about immigration, fast. It proved surprisingly difficult to find clear, authoritative information about migrants and the system they lived within as well as their true impact on existing California society -- not to mention what their individual lives and prospects were like.

Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by academic economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan provides an up-to-date primer on precisely these issues, as well as a history of immigration since 1850. I sure could have used something like it back in the day.

Our aim in this book is to rebuild the story of immigration to America from the ground up, uncovering the patterns that the patterns that emerge from data on millions of immigrants' lives. ... The data gives us clues about why immigrants chose to come to the United States, and tells us when they left school, how well they spoke English, the occupations they held over their work lives, their earnings, whom they married, the names they chose for their children, and their children's outcomes as they became adults.

Some of the myths and issues they examine include:

• the reality, and the difficulties, of economic mobility for newcomers
• whether current immigrants learn English rapidly (not in the first generation)
• whether current immigrants assimilate to US customs as quickly as previous migrant generations (yes)
• do new successful arrivals hurt the US born (no)
• does global diversity benefit all of us, culturally and economically (yes, emphatically)

What Abramitzky and Boustan bring to the subject is a database of immigrant history of which they are almost inordinately proud. They began their efforts by sucking information uploaded by amateur family historians out of the Ancestry.com service. When the company noticed their work, it "worried that some computer bot was downloading their data to package and resell." The company sent a "cease and desist" letter. After conversations, the site welcomed their project. They then added in everything they could find from historical census files, Social Security records, tax records and birth certificate files. They were both able to follow the life histories of individuals and put those histories in the context of the picture drawn by the entire data set.

Individually, each record reflects a life quietly lived -- perhaps as a beloved teacher, or a hopeful parent, or a kindly neighbor -- achieving no fame as a result of their strivings. Together, these stories paint a portrait of the immigrant experience that largely overturns conventional wisdom.

For anyone needing to learn the basics about US immigration history and policy, I would recommend this book unhesitatingly. People will keep on coming; that's not easy for them or simple for those of us already here. But when you steal a continent from its native inhabitants and make the resulting polity unimaginably prosperous and relatively safe and secure, expecting to keep the world out is criminal folly and impossible. And the newcomers benefit us all.

A wall against the world is suicidal

Wherever I go in Reno, there are signs like this in store windows. From what I hear, that's true most everywhere. Employers can't find the workers they want; some are even raising wages to try to attract applicants. Yet in this full employment economy, nobody -- or maybe not enough somebodies -- seem to want the jobs on offer.

What's going on? Actually, the problem may be pretty simple: a combination of Donald Trump and the MAGA xenophobes, plus the pandemic, have dried up the stream of immigrants whose continuing arrival is what gives the US economy its dynamism.

Econofact:

Due to increased restrictions on immigration and travel, which began with the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020, the net inflow of immigrants into the United States has essentially halted for almost 2 years. By the end of 2021 there were about 2 million fewer working-age immigrants living in the United States than there would have been if the pre-2020 immigration trend had continued unchanged.

... [the] decline in immigrant and nonimmigrant visa arrivals resulted in zero growth in working-age foreign-born people in the United States. Prior to 2019, the foreign born population of working age (18 to 65) grew by about 660,000 people per year, as reported in data from the monthly Current Population survey (see the first chart). This trend came to a stop already in 2019 before the pandemic, due to a combination of stricter immigration enforcement and a drop in the inflow of Mexican immigrants. The halt to international travel in 2020 added a significant drop in the working-age immigrant population.

Interestingly, this article makes the point that only half the shortfall of new immigrant workers was in the low wage sector we associate with newcomers. The US economy is also hurting because of the disappearance of a large cohort of people I think of as "brain drain" immigrants -- educated scientists and professionals. And that's before mentioning that much of the risk-taking entrepreneurship in our economy is the work of new immigrants. 

We're hurting because our way of life depends on new Americans. This is what building a wall against the world gets us.

Remember the newcomers ...

Jay Caspian Kang, a very thoughtful New York Times opinion writer, included the following paragraphs in an announcement that he is ending his subscriber-only newsletter. It brought me up short; he catches something I knew, but seldom see articulated in political commentary.

Almost all of today’s politics, whether the actual policies enacted by local, state and federal government or the intensely polarized culture wars, come out of four events. The first three — the 2008 financial crash, the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the near-decade-long Black Lives Matter movement, which culminated in the mass George Floyd protests in 2020 — shouldn’t be particularly controversial or novel. 

But the fourth — the 1965 Immigration Act — being a bit older and obscure, does not get discussed all that much outside of xenophobic right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, who called it “the worst attack on our democracy in 160 years.” Carlson’s fixation on this moment is not unwarranted: The multiethnic country we live in today would not be possible without the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened up the country to millions of people from all over the world, including my parents, who moved to the United States in the late 1970s.

My emphasis. Being a Californian whose life in politics has been deeply enmeshed in the stresses and strains of demographic transition, I know this is true in my bones. But Kang is right -- for comfortable-class white people, especially on the East Coast which still sets the media narrative, the breadth and implications of our multiethnic evolution seems something of a sideshow. I'm with Kang. How we shape the exciting but difficult community we have made is the central arena of struggle.

Which brings me to Joe Biden's pro-democracy barn burner of a speech yesterday at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The President came out swinging and I'm delighted with nuggets such as these, cribbed from Heather Cox Richardson's summary.

"Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic."


"There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country."
 

"MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election, and they’re working right now as I speak in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself."
 

"MAGA forces...promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country."

You go, Joe! This country needs a brave leader speaking harsh truths. We may very well need a Lincoln whose political savvy and vision combined to hold a divided country together in another moment of crisis. At terrible cost.

Yet I also understand why, in some parts of this country, a speech like Biden's doesn't break through. I fear he's not speaking some of the aspirational vision that is most important to the new citizens whose lives are a consequence of the 1965 Immigration Act.

Here's how I attempted to explain this at Dan Pfeiffer's Message Box this morning:

Watching this from Nevada -- I thought this a terrific speech. He said what needed to be said. 

And, working in a massive voter turnout out operation in Nevada, I'm aware he's largely inaudible here. It's not just the media; it's cultural. (Addendum: the Republican challenger to Nevada's Democratic governor thinks the way to win is to put up pictures of Gov. Sisolak with Biden.)  

Biden simply doesn't read as a leader in this western, heavily Latino, state. He doesn't resonate culturally in the West -- and he probably doesn't understand the West. The tropes he appeals to are foreign to this state. Not that folks don't want democracy and honest government, but the messages need to be a little different. On the coast -- CA, OR, WA -- this doesn't matter as Democratic-led government has, at present, established itself as a "good thing." But the Southwest is different territory, needing to build new visions of freedom. 

We're a sprawling country. But at least Joe believes in us.

Independence Hall and the promise of the rule of law aren't enough. People desperately want to be told that their government respects them and that it honors the sacrifices they are willing to live for their children. They want to believe in the fairness of the system -- and too often they can't. Yes, they want to believe no one is going to take away their votes, but they want to hear other themes even more.

And they don't want anyone interfering with their bodies or their families. A polling insight that I keep returning to:

About 81% of Latino voters in Nevada believe abortion should remain legal, no matter what their own personal beliefs on abortion are.

Opinion research says ...

Here's some interesting polling relevant to the crisis created by Vladimir Putin's apparent intent to subjugate most or all of Ukraine. 

Economist data maven G. Elliott Morris contends that Republicans may have veered into feeling favorably toward Putin and Russia during fan boy Donald Trump's administration, but they have largely fallen back to earth. 

He cites Pew research.

But Morris discovered that more recent polling told a different story:

The Trump effect on Americans' attitudes towards Vladimir Putin has mostly worn off

Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign raised GOP favorability of Putin. But nearly 80% of Republicans, up from 50%, now say Russia is our enemy.

... opinions among Republicans have shifted dramatically towards those of the Democrats, and the population as a whole. Three in every four Americans who align themselves with the GOP now say Russia is our enemy, with only 10% saying they are our friend. ...

... After looking at updated polling data, Republicans and Democrats actually look to be pretty close to lock-step on Russia, at least at the mass level. And even while there are some differences between them, a majority of members in both parties favors the same general approach to dealing with Putin.

Apparently nobody told Fox News gabber Tucker Carlson, who The Bulwark's William Saletan likens to the 1930's American Hitler lover radio sermonizer Charles Coughlin.

Eighty years ago, when a dictator rose to power in Europe and invaded his neighbors, he found an ally in the United States. The dictator was Adolf Hitler, and his ally was Charles Coughlin, a popular radio host. Coughlin belittled democracy, defended the Nazis, and opposed America’s entry into the war, arguing that the movement to enlist the United States was a conspiracy on behalf of a sinister minority: Jews.

All too familiar. The old pattern was that, when push came to shove, these demagogues lost their appeal. Does the declining pseudo-democracy in the USofA still have the internal strength to slough off yet another round of homegrown fascists? To the horror of our right wing, I suspect this is a struggle in which newer immigrant citizens may play a wise role. Many recognize these charlatans all too clearly.

UPDATE: as the rockets strike Kviv and other Ukrainian cities, Colonel Alexander Vindman, immigrant American, makes the case against fascist sympathizers like Carlson in this tweet:

No one wants war. I’ve seen war & can envision the human toll & the geopolitical catastrophe that will ensue. The way we prevent war is by defending U.S. interests & values. What you don’t appreciate is that this country is wonderful, it’s the greatest country in the World.

Beyond shameful

A US federal agency is denying humanitarian parole to Afghan refugees ... and apparently running up a tidy profit on their applications.

A press release on December 7 from Jewish Family and Community Services-East Bay, an agency which has helped hundreds of Afghans resettle in the United States over the last decade, tells the sad story:

This week, the U.S. government began denying humanitarian parole applications and dashing the hopes of thousands of Afghans awaiting rescue.

Since [August], thousands of Afghans in communities across the U.S. have been desperate to rescue their loved ones who were left behind. The only legal channel available to most has been the dim hope of humanitarian parole. After months of inaction on these urgent petitions, this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began denying them and extinguishing any chance of rescue.

... USCIS finally [has] began processing these cases – only to deny them.

The wave of denial letters received by immigration advocates across the U.S. this week articulate—for the first time—a set of stringent new criteria that will exclude the vast majority of Afghan humanitarian parole applicants from eligibility. According to JFCS East Bay Director of Immigration Legal Services, Kyra S. Lilien, “Redacted copies of these denial letters began popping up on listservs from immigration attorneys across the U.S. this week. No one has reported receiving a ‘request for evidence,’ as is the norm before USCIS denies a case. Instead, we all got these flat denials.”

... USCIS reports that it has received more than 30,000 such applications. At $575 per person, USCIS has likely taken in about $17,250,000 in application fees from these filings, making this process look like a classic “bait and switch” scam.

What does USCIS ask of applicants? “Documentation from a credible third-party source specifically naming the beneficiary and outlining the serious harm they face and the imminence of the harm in the location where the beneficiary is located.”

JFCS likens this to asking for "a notarized statement from their persecutor."

We know the Biden administration is running scared about immigration. They are terrified of taking political hits for admitting brown people to the country. And the Know-Nothing MAGA faction won't let up on the scare stories.

But show a little guts, Joe! 

Biden did demonstrate some courage by pulling out of Afghanistan. The politically easy play would have been to do what both Obama and Trump did: bluster a bit and try to sweep the failed two-decade war out of view.

But there remain human beings, many of whom thought they might have U.S. protection, who've been left behind to be raped, tortured, and slaughtered. And now some bureaucrats will be allowed to deny them for improper paperwork? This is shameful if not criminal.

Who gets to be an American?

I think of mass post-Civil War immigration to the United States as founded in a radical definition of citizenship and then divisible into three periods.

The 14th Amendment (1868), passed to ensure the rights of formerly enslaved persons freed by the Civil War, established the basis for "birthright citizenship" -- if you are born in this country, you are a citizen. Our right wingers still don't like that. And this definition meant the children born to migrants here had unchallengeable citizenship.

In the later 19th century, there were the great southern and eastern European waves of desperate former peasants looking for a better life who were welcomed by the robber barons of industrialization as cheap labor. Think Ellis Island and large sections of East Coast and Midwestern U.S. cities where Italian, or Polish, or German served as the everyday languages for a time. This wave also brought many Jews escaping pograms in czarist Russia and imperial Austrian territories.

That migrant flow ran into a slammed door in 1924 when Congress imposed "national origin quotas" favoring northern Europeans and barring Asian migrants altogether. The aim was to radically reduce immigration and this more or less worked for forty years. Nobody in power was even thinking about Spanish speakers from south of the border -- many of whom came and went without regard for the system in this era.

Finally, in 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act once again opened the doors to migrants. The multi-racial, multi-cultural fabric of the contemporary United States is the result.

In each of these periods -- including the present one -- there were the formal rules and also continuing pressure for changes, whether toward more restriction or more openness. There were loopholes which sometimes worked for some individuals. Or didn't. Congress occasionally made exceptions to its own rules. Quite often who got in and who didn't was a matter of luck, sometimes abetted by lighter skin color. Organized immigrants and their supporters agitated for changes. And the "system" began to look more and more like an incomprehensible crazy-quilt mess -- just as immigration policy does today.

Jia Lynn Yang, the national editor of the New York Times, chronicles that middle time, the era of restrictive national quotas, in One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.

She's a story teller whose history is studded with villains. Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada) saw pretty much all immigrants as spies bringing godless Communism to the country. McCarran partnered with the racist Mississippian Senator James Eastland to stymie post-World War II liberalization to assist the masses of refugees -- "displaced persons," many of them Jews -- in the wake of the conflict and the camps. Yet in one of those oddments which legislative sausage-making can throw up, their anti-communist immigration bill removed the explicit racial exclusions that had been in previous laws and offered a 2000 person Asian quota. For this reason, the Japanese-American Citizens League threw their weight behind what was otherwise a viciously regressive measure. Yes -- immigration reform is tangled, difficult, and full of ugly compromises.

Yang also has her heroes. Presidents Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson come off well in her telling. But her real heroes are the legislators -- New York's Emmanuel Celler in the House and Senator Herbert Lehman in the Senate -- who pushed relentlessly for a more open immigration policy. Their lot was a series of defeats, and finally a breakthrough, culminating the overthrow of the restrictive national quota system in 1965.

Her commentary on the reform finally passed is interesting:

The law's transformative impact would take years to reveal itself. Initially, as reform advocates had intended, the number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe increased and surpassed the number of arrivals from the rest of the continent. But though writers of the law were committed to ending racial immigration quotas in principle, they had not anticipated that many more immigrants would soon be arriving from Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America -- or that the law's own mechanics would encourage their numbers. ... 

... It was not merely the types of immigrants entering the country that changed. The 1965 law also ushered in a return to mass immigration that had not been seen since the turn of the twentieth century. ... 

... The people who fought for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act knew what it was like to live in a country that embraced a race-based definition of itself. They watched the grisly consequences during and after World War II, and they recognized that a nation with an immigration system built on racism could not be defended in an ideological war. But they also could not imagine living in a country as thoroughly multiracial as the United States is today. That means for those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundational value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants -- like those who came before -- must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. ...

Perhaps inevitably, Yang's history of mid-twentieth century immigration struggles elides what any of this meant to those even further down the country's oppressive ladder than the new immigrants -- native people and the descendants of the enslaved people for whom the foundational 14th amendment was written. They too are here.

The tone Yang has embraced in writing this history struck me as unusual on such a fraught subject. The adjectives that came to mind while reading were two: immigration policy often evokes judgmental assessments, but Yang seems always judicious. And throughout she is generous to her subjects, some of whom were simply corrupt and repulsive. 

Amid political cacophony, her approach feels novel -- and perhaps wise. We'll all find out what her generation makes of our perennial American identity crisis.

The best quit, but there is no alternative but to struggle on

Throughout the Trump travesty, some of us wondered over and over, why didn't people working in the administration just quit when ordered to enforce bad, illegal, and cruel policies? If the federal bureaucracy and the political appointee-management ranks included many individuals of courage and conscience, we sure didn't hear from them. Mostly those who quit (or were used up and forced out) slunk shamefacedly away -- at most to follow up with self-justifying tell-all books.

Unhappily, Biden immigration policies have not changed much since the Trump era. Using the excuse of the pandemic, the administration continues to violate international and U.S. law guaranteeing migrants the right to make asylum claims. Under the law, the U.S. doesn't have to accept them all, but it has to listen to their claims, usually in the person of an immigration judge. Instead, enforcers bar international bridges. As anyone who scans newspapers or twitter knows, the Border Patrol still herds migrants like rogue cattle.

And within our borders, Martha E. Menendez, a scrappy Nevada immigration lawyer, summarizes what she is seeing:

Almost nine months into the Biden presidency, we can all see that very little has changed as far as immigration enforcement. The southern border (the Brown one, as I’ve taken to calling it) remains a humanitarian crisis of our own perpetuation; there have been no significant changes in the number of people in ICE custody, nor has there been any significant change in what their enforcement priorities even are. The enforcement guidelines that were finally released last week are so vague that our next tyrant wannabe dictator will have no problem releasing the ICE dogs on the immigrant community in full force once again. And you can trust that that tyrant is sure to come; they’re already lining up to prove who’s the most terrible, and thus the most deserving of the Republican nomination.

Sure, we'd still take Biden over Trump if that's the choice, but, as the Atlantic put it, Democrats’ Free Pass on Immigration Is Over.

Apparently some of the sort of people that Biden administration has placed in important roles dealing with immigrants and asylum seekers are made of sterner stuff than were the Trump toadies. In only nine months, there have been a couple of loud resignations:

• Daniel Foote, U.S. special envoy to Haiti, wasn't about to be the face of justifying mass deportations of desperate people to the broken country where he served.

“I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life,” Foote wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

• And now Harold Koh, an Obama-era State Department lawyer who had returned to government to serve as the top political appointee in the Office of the Legal Adviser, has quit with a blast denouncing Biden's continuation of the Trump policy of claiming under "Title 42" that the coronavirus emergency gives the government the right to ignore migrants' claims under law.

“I believe this administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return . . . individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” he wrote in the memo. ... “Nearly 700,000 people have been expelled under Title 42 since February of this year, and . . . this past August alone, 91,147 were forcibly removed,” he said, citing U.S. government statistics. 

... “I ask you to do everything in your power to revise this policy, especially as it affects Haitians, into one that is worthy of this Nation we love,” Koh wrote to his colleagues.

If we elect Republicans, at this point we're accepting that our experiment in rule of law by democratic majorities is over. The rabid racist know-nothings win. 

If we elect Democrats, we still get political timidity and cruelty, but the democracy -- "we the people" in the historic constitutional phrase -- gets to fight another day.